Tag Archives: Fighting

I’m descended from James

03 Thursday Aug 2017

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“Like a lot of boys I played war when I was young, and like a lot of men I retained an intense and abiding curiosity about it. And like a lot of people, my family was deeply affected by war and probably wouldn’t have existed without it. One of my mother’s ancestors emigrated from Germany in order to fight in the American Revolution and was given a land grant in Ohio in return. His last name was Grimm; he was related to the great folklorists who recorded German fairy tales. One of Grimm’s descendants married into another frontier family, the Carrolls, who were almost wiped out by Indians during a raid on their remote Pennsylvania homestead in 1781. The Carroll wife managed to hide in a cornfield with her four-year-old son, James, while the Indians killed her two teenage sons and her dog. The husband was off in town that day. I’m descended from James.

My father was half Jewish and grew up in Europe. He was thirteen when his family fled the Spanish Civil War and settled in Paris, and seventeen when they left Paris ahead of the German army and emigrated to the United States. He tried to sign up for military service but was turned down due to asthma, so he eventually helped the war effort by working on jet engines in Paterson, New Jersey. Later he got a degree in fluid mechanics and worked on submarine design. When I turned eighteen I received my selective service card in the mail, in case the United States needed to draft me, and I declared that I wasn’t going to sign it. The Vietnam War had just ended and every adult I knew had been against it. I had no problem, personally, with fighting a war; I just didn’t trust my government to send me to one that was completely necessary.

My father’s reaction surprised me. Vietnam had made him vehemently antiwar, so I expected him to applaud my decision, but instead he told me that American soldiers had saved the world from fascism during World War II and that thousands of young Americans were buried in his homeland of France. ‘You don’t owe your country nothing,’ I remember him telling me. ‘You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life.’

The way my father put it completely turned the issue around for me: suddenly the draft card wasn’t so much an obligation as a chance to be part of something bigger than myself. And he’d made it clear that if the United States embarked on a war that I felt was wrong, I could always refuse to go; in his opinion, protesting an immoral war was just as honorable as fighting a moral one. Either way, he made it clear that my country needed help protecting the principles and ideals that I’d benefited from my entire life.”

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Pulled from Sebastian Junger’s Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. I’m descended from James.

That sentence, its ordering in the paragraph and use of the informal contraction where a self-serious “I am” would be tempting, is a reason Junger is a great writer.

Image: AARP

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The Problem with Fighting Angry

17 Monday Apr 2017

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“Anger provides the number one difference between a fist-fight and a boxing bout.

Anger is an unwelcome guest in any department of boxing. From the first time a chap draws on gloves as a beginner, he is taught to ‘keep his temper’ — never to ‘lose his head.’ When a boxer gives way to anger, he becomes a ‘natural’ fighter who tosses science into the bucket. When that occurs in the amateur or professional ring, the lost-head fighter leaves himself open and becomes an easy target for a sharpshooting opponent. Because an angry fighter usually is a helpless fighter in the ring, many prominent professionals — like Abe Attell and the late Kid McCoy — tried to taunt fiery opponents into losing their heads and ‘opening up.’ Anger rarely flares in a boxing match.

Different, indeed, is the mental condition governing a fist-fight. In that brand of combat, anger invariably is the fuel propelling one or both contestants. And when an angry, berserk chap is whaling away in a fist-fight, he usually forgets all about rules — if he ever knew any…

Let me suggest that any time you are about to be drawn into a fight, keep your head and make a split-second survey of your surroundings… In 99 out of 100 cases you can force the other guy to move to an open spot by challenging his courage to do so. Don’t let the action start in a crowded subway car, in a theater aisle, in a restaurant, office, saloon or the like. Keep your head and arrange the shift, so that you’ll be able to knock his head off when you get him where you can fight without footing handicaps…

In connection with that danger, never forget: The longer the fight lasts, the longer you are exposed to danger… When you square off, you hope to beat your opponent into submission in a hurry… it is imperative that you end the brawl as quickly as possible; and the best way to do that is by a knockout.”

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Some advice for boxing, and life, pulled from Jack Dempsey’s 1950 book Championship Fighting.

As my trainer tells me, be more composed than your opponent; “if you can make him miss, you can make him pay.”

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Lose Your Fear in the Ring

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Memoir, Sports

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Anthony Joshua 2

“Fighters are the most exposed athletes in the world. During a fight, the crowd observes every twitch and movement. Still, spectators rarely see fear in a quality fighter. ‘That,’ says [boxing trainer Cus] D’Amato, ‘is because the fighter has mastered his emotions to the extent that he can conceal and control them.’ But whatever a fighter says, the fear is there. It never goes away. He just learns to live with it. ‘And the truth is,’ D’Amato continues, ‘fear is an aspect to a fighter. It makes him move faster, be quicker and more alert. Heroes and cowards feel exactly the same fear. Heroes just react to it differently. On the morning of a fight, a boxer wakes up and says, “How can I fight? I didn’t sleep at all last night.” What he has to realize is, the other guy didn’t sleep either. Later, as the fighter walks toward the ring, his feet want to walk in the opposite direction. He’s asking himself how he got into this mess. He climbs the stairs into the ring, and it’s like going to the guillotine. Maybe he looks at the other fighter, and sees by the way he’s loosening up that his opponent is experienced, strong, very confident. Then when the opponent takes off his robe, he’s got big bulging muscles. What the fighter has to realize,’ concludes D’Amato, ‘is that he’s got exactly the same effect on his opponent, only he doesn’t know it. And when the bell rings, instead of facing a monster built up by the imagination, he’s simply up against another fighter.'”

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Pulled from a section on Cus D’Amato in Thomas Hauser’s The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing.

D’Amato was the trainer behind legends like Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson, who he adopted at sixteen when Tyson’s mother died. When D’Amato passed away, Tyson discussed his old trainer:

[D’Amato] didn’t know me. He told me with no hesitation that I was going to be the youngest heavyweight champion of all time… If it weren’t for that old, Italian white guy, I would’ve been a bum. Cus D’Amato was a physical person like I am. He was impulsive and impetuous like me. If somebody upset him, he would just go after them — even at 75… the psychologists would’ve had a field day with him.

He’s simply up against another fighter… It applies to a lot of life.

Move along:

Photo courtesy of Irish Mirror

Squaring off against Japanese Soldiers

09 Monday May 2016

Posted by in War

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Japanese Soldiers

“Unleashing unrestricted mayhem against fellow humans was contrary to everything I had been taught by my parents and Sunday school teachers, but I was forced to justify the decision to be a Marine and learn to kill Japs.

My rationale… was simple. I felt it was my first duty to protect my country and family from Japanese aggression. I would trust God to deal with the religious part of my internal conflicts… I also adopted a fatalistic approach. If the training we endured didn’t kill us, the enemy would.

During a marching break one hot afternoon, a Marine remarked, ‘Screw all the training. I’m sick and tired of all this pussy-footing around. I want to get overseas and slap me a Jap!’

This remark was made in the presence of Sergeant George Lutchkus, who immediately cut him off, saying: ‘Hold on, Sonny! Let me tell all of you a thing or two about the Japanese soldier! Number one, he is not the caricature you see in newspapers with bombsight glasses and buckteeth. The average Japanese soldier has five or more years of combat experience. Their Army doesn’t have a ‘boot division’ like ours. Don’t forget, the Japs have already conquered half the nations in Asia. Remember Pearl Harbor? Not only are they better trained than you are right now, many are old hands at combat fighting and have a strict military code they live and die by called Bushido. Literally translated it means ‘way of the warrior.’ With their code, combined with their pledge to die for Emperor Hirohito, who they consider God, they will die before surrendering.

‘Jap soldiers are well equipped and are experts with their weapons. They are trained to endure hardships, which would have most of you guys writing your congressman. I don’t like Japs, but I respect them as fellow soldiers. I learned my respect the hard way on Guadalcanal.

‘Japs are the world’s best snipers, experts at the art of camouflage, and get by on a diet of fish heads and rice. They will never surrender and will commit hari-kari rather than be taken prisoner.

‘Heck, they don’t have corpsmen; if they are wounded, they are considered damaged goods. So, sonny, mull that over, and don’t ever let me hear you complain about your training again. There will be a time when your life will depend on what you learn in the days ahead.’”

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Pulled from the section “Know Your Enemy” in Chuck Tatum’s memoir Red Blood, Black Sand: Fighting Alongside John Basilone from Boot Camp to Iwo Jima.

Remember this excerpt the next time someone debates the ethics of The Bomb. There will be a time when your life will depend on what you learn.

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Courage Can Be Misunderstood

26 Saturday Mar 2016

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Marines

“Courage can be misunderstood. It is more than the ability to overcome the jitters, to quell fear, to conquer the desire to run. It is the ability to know what is, or is not, to be feared. An infantryman charging a bunker is not hampered by the fear that he may be struck down a few paces from his fighting hole. A pilot is not afraid of losing all hydraulic power in his aircraft. They are prepared for those outcomes. A Marine in battle fears disgracing himself by running. He fears not losing his life, but losing his honor. He may not be able to preserve his life, but he can always preserve his honor. That much is within his power… To fear disgrace but not death, to fear not duty but dereliction from duty — this is courage. The truly courageous do not live in anxiety from morning to night. They are calm because they know who they are.

We overcome our natural fear and fight for three chief reasons: First, we are well-trained and well-led. Second, we have convictions that will sustain us to the last sacrifice. Third, we fight for one another…

There is another kind of physical courage — a quiet courage that affects those all around. It is the kind of calm, physical courage that a leader has when all around is chaos and noise…

Many times, decisions will have to be made in the rain, under the partial protection of a poncho, in the drizzle of an uncertain dawn, and without all the facts. At times like that, it will not always be possible to identify all the components of the problem, and use a lengthy and logical problem-solving process to reach a decision. In combat, the decision often must be immediate, and it might have to be instinctive.”

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Pulled from the section “Individual Courage” in chapter two of the Marine Corps handbook Leading Marines.

They are calm because they know who they are. I’ve recently gotten into Jocko Willink’s podcast, after hearing his interviews with Tim Ferriss and Sam Harris. Jocko is a former SEAL who led the reconquest of Ramadi and a nationally ranked jiu jitsu player. His podcast focuses on applying military leadership strategy to business and personal decision-making, and he discusses Leading Marines in his Podcast #8.

Image credit: BlackFive.

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Glory’s Moonshine

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in History, War

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William Tecumseh Sherman 2

“No one can deny I have done the State some service in the field, but I have always desired that strife should cease at the earliest possible moment.

I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers. You, too, have seen these things, and I know you also are tired of the war, and are willing to let the civil tribunals resume their place. And, so far as I know, all the fighting men of our army want peace; and it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded and lacerated (friend or foe), that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. I know the rebels are whipped to death, and I declare before God, as a man and a soldier, I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed and submissive before me, but would rather say—”‘Go, and sin no more.'”

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William Tecumseh Sherman, writing in a letter to James E. Yeatman, May 21, 1865.

William Tecumseh Sherman and staff

What Would Lawrence of Arabia Do about the Middle East?

09 Tuesday Sep 2014

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T. E. Lawrence

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”

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Rule #15 in T. E. Lawrence’s “Twenty Seven Rules” which summarized for the British army his approach to Arab warfare. It was published in 1917.

Credit to TheDish.

There’s Only One Way to Get Good at Fighting

06 Thursday Sep 2012

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Martin Amis

“There is only one way to get good at fighting: you have to do it a lot.

The reason why most people are no good at fighting is that they do it so seldom, and, in these days of high specialization, no one really expects to be good at anything unless they work out at it and put in some time. With violence, you have to keep your hand in, you have to have a repertoire. When I was a kid, growing up in Trenton, New Jersey, and later on the streets of Pimlico, I learned these routines one by one. For instance, can you butt people (i.e. hit them in the face with your face — a very intimate form of fighting, with tremendous power to appall and astonish)? I took up butting when I was ten. After a while, after butting a few people (you try to hit them with your rugline, hit them in the nose, mouth, cheekbone — it doesn’t much matter), I thought, ‘Yeah: I can butt people now.’ From then on, butting people was suddenly an option. Ditto with ball-kneeing, shin-kicking and eye-forking; they were all new ways of expressing frustration, fury and fear, and of settling arguments in my favour. You have to work at it, though. You learn over the years, by trial and error. You can’t get the knack by watching TV. You have to use live ammunition. So, for example, if you ever tangled with me, and a rumble developed, and you tried to butt me, to hit my head with your head, you probably wouldn’t be very good at it. It wouldn’t hurt. It wouldn’t do any damage. All it would do is make me angry. Then I’d hit your head with my head extra hard, and there would be plenty of pain and maybe some damage too.

Besides, I’d probably butt you long before it ever occurred to you to butt me. There’s only one rule in street and bar fights: maximum violence, instantly. Don’t pussyfoot, don’t wait for the war to escalate. Nuke them, right off. Hit them with everything, milk bottle, car tool, clenched keys or coins. The first blow has to give everything. If he takes it, and you go down, then you get all he has to mete out anyway. The worst, the most extreme violence — at once. Extremity is the only element of surprise. Hit them with everything. No quarter.”

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From the novel Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis.

I love this quote for the same reason I relish the novel from which it comes: it expresses a brutish bravado in beboping, musical English. That special synthesis of brash tone with light and vibrant language is what makes Amis the master stylist that he is.