How Close is 'Close Combat'?

[Patrick R Jennings]

It seems the to be the nature of soldiers to make their war the "tough one." Their combat was somehow...closer.

I've done three GWOT tours, all in the shooting arena. I have never had to pull my knife other than to peel an apple, I had a grenade but failed to use it, and the nearest I came to my enemies during a fire fight was perhaps 20 meters (although I did spend a good portion of 556 ammo).

My father was a fighter pilot in WWII and Korea and all his work was in CAS. He always joked that the only enemy fighter he ever saw during the war was in movies. His brother was killed in Italy, an infantry officer in the 36th Division, whose body was never found.

Their father, my grandfather, lost a leg in France in 1918 about ten days before the war ended...and so the family story goes.

According to my grandfather his wound was from artillery, the same weapon that took his youngest son. My grandfather had been in France less then six months, my uncle in Italy less than four. My father was in the South Pacific for roughly 14 months but admits to plenty of liberty. He also said strafing in Korea, he was off the coast there for seven months, was scary and he came back with plenty of holes in his craft but never a scratch. I got knocked around with a few IEDs but got away with little more than a headache, oh and I once got a nasty sunburn. All told, I have spent 30 months in a combat zone (roughly the total of all my relatives combined combat experience) and expect I will have to go one more time before I retire. If we could all get together the debate over whose war was toughest would be a riot.

Still, looking across this almost 92 year spectrum of a family at war it strikes me that close combat is far more rare than we think. Surely it happens and when it does it is intense and dirty but I imagine the "time in contact" numbers aren't as intense as we want to imagine. The reality is that we, and our enemies, prefer to kill from a decent range. We like aircraft, missiles and smart bombs and they like command detonated IEDs and suicide bombers.

Thus I don't think western powers have shifted away from close combat rather they have never really embraced it. Soldiers in a democracy are expensive and the bill for close combat is too high so naturally we lean toward other means.

[Infanteer]

That was a cool post - thanks for the interesting bio my friend.