Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
JMA:

When he used the term mercy killing, I didn't think of people, I thought of animals. You put down a horse or a dog when you have to. Maybe Marlantes meant people but what I got was animals and I think that viewpoint would be more helpful to some, not all.
Yes he spoke of two incidents. One where he saved an injured seagull from dogs then rung its neck and having to have his dog put down.

Let me repeat what I said earlier:

At the end of the chapter he sums it up like this:

We cannot expect normal eighteen year olds to kill someone and contain it in a healthy way. They must be helped to sort out what will be healthy grief about taking a life because it is part of the sorrow of war.
You see here we go in the direction of Grossman in the thinking that killing is somehow 'bad' and will inevitably lead to feelings of guilt and grief.

Not so. Combat killing in war is not murder, it is not a homicide, it is a justifiable killing. (I'm not talking atrocities here)

Very young officers and NCOs was perhaps the best that could be done in Vietnam. As the war progressed the NCOs got younger and younger because IIRC all the older guys who started out weren't available anymore, many because they didn't want to face the prospect of deployment after deployment. Maybe the same thing with the officers. We had a lot of people over there for years. That added to the inequities of the draft system and there just wasn't that much to choose from.
I seems to have turned into a Henry Ford type production line by the end.

Talking about the older NCOs I noted that where they had been in the service before the war (meaning they joined up in peacetime for peacetime) tended to fall out early (meaning leave the service or find less onerous posts from where to see out the war). The younger ones who joined up during the war (or for the war) seemed to last a lot better. Similar back then for the US maybe?

Marlantes was young but he was a very effective combat officer. The choice wasn't really between a Marlantes and somebody better; at that time it was between a Marlantes and a Calley.
Help me understand it. He did a year (?) tour of which how long was he a platoon commander? Raw soldiers and officers often do well but there is no substitute for experience.

I don't follow the link with Calley.