Volunteers!!

[Dayuhan]

Similarly next time you are in Manila, imagine the scene, the proud garrison of Spanish regulars in their fine dress uniforms, humiliated beyond words when a rag-tag bunch of Oregon country boys came into the fort and accepted their surrender. Story says the wives of the Spanish officers cried in outrage that their husbands would have to surrender to such commoners.

Actually that "proud garrison of Spanish regulars" was in desperate straits, surrounded by an army of Filipino insurgents who had driven them out of the surrounding provinces and short of food and water. They requested (some would say begged) the privilege of being allowed to surrender to Americans (after a brief staged "battle" to assuage pride) to avoid the impending ignominy of having to surrender to Filipinos. They may have feared more than ignominy, though in fact the Filipino insurgents generally treated Spanish prisoners far better than the Spanish treated captured Filipinos. Also far better than American volunteers treated captured Filipinos a bit down the line, when they even bothered capturing any: many of the American volunteers had received their early martial experience during the Native American genocide, and brought the associated tactics with them.

If you went out tomorrow and called for volunteers to go fight in Afghanistan, providing their own officers and equipment (as was the habit in the days of your nostalgia), who do you think you'd come up with, and how do you think they'd fare if deployed?