13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Warrior Poet Gone to Soldiering, January 30, 2005
This review is from: The Marauders (Paperback)
This is really a haunting read. If you are interested in both heart thumping narrative and beautiful prose, this book brings it together with a flair borne in the passion and heartache of pesonal experience. Ogburn was communications officer for one of the three battalions of the original Marauders.
Ogburn covers a lot of ground in his 300 pages and this narrative brings together beautifully the macro political level intrigues and the intense strain of personal combat. I have read perhaps 2000 war books in my short 40 yrs, but there are parts of this book that I will always remember: his description of his first operations against the Japanese and the strain of patrol action and the actual realisation of battle hits a person hard. It is not death that is shocking, but the realisation that one is close to death without ever experiencing it --- that a line gets crossed somewhere, where you are conscience that you are in a completely different territory. For Ogburn that happenned on his first patrol when he noticed the first fresh footprints of Japanese patrols.
Ogburn is in fact one of the small minority of "thinking soldiers" --- ones able to philosophise on morality in time of combat, draw judgements about right and wrong, but also to act with supreme daring. His quotes about viewing Japanese dead are haunting:
"viewing these dead, one wants to conjure some kind of image that foreordained them to some mortal sin. Some act or upbringing that marked them clearly as crossing over in the land of the wicked. That leant a notion of justice to their deaths and the fact that you still lived. You searched for it. But you knew there was nothing in it."
Ogburn took part in two of the three hooking actions of the Marauders. After nearly slicing his foot off he missed most of the last operation at Myitkyina. For this operation he relies on the personal experiences of everyone in his unit and there is no flagging in the pace.
Since I have read more on the Chindits than the Marauders I really came to appreciate how much both units, formed seemingly for the same operation --- initially conceived to be under the command of Wingate --- became victims to the insidious greed of careerism that seems to be a defining mark of the US military. In no other western democratic military has there ever been such a thorough-going willingness to sacrifice grunts for the ambitions of the supreme officer class. Stilwell with his pathetic personal vanity and pathological hatred of the English, meant that he would never ask for the British to support them with one of their free divisions at a time when the Marauders had ceased to exist as a functioning unit. He pressed medical orderlies to certify everyone as fit for battle at a time when the unit only could muster about 20% effectives. People suffering wounds, ameobic dystentery, fever and chronic undernourishment were flung into the battle of Myitkyina. (One officer continually passed into and out of consciousness from undernourishment while commanding his battalion, and still he was not certified for withdrawal). Stillwell placed the blame of the British Chindits for their "slow" advance from the south and failure to block the railway -- as Ogburn points out, it was a convenient scapegoat. In a tribute to clear and fair thinking Ogburn describes that the British were at this time functioning in very similiar, if not worse conditions (since they had to be 100% supplied from the air -- the Marauders had a road). One Chindit battalion could only muster two rifle platoons! Such was the intensity as Ogburn describes, that both the British and the Marauders faced.
But the one vital element was, that there were fresh troops that the British were willing to commit -- but Stilwell refused to for the sake of his personal vanity. The British therefore came to hate Stillwell, but Slim at least said that he could "work with him." The Marauders hated Stillwell more: one soldier, that we know of, drawing a bead on him with a rifle and almost shooting him "I could have shot him right there and no one would have thought it was anything other than a sniper."
Ogburn also cites the irony of the American way of war where the number of soldiers in US uniform increases proportional to the distance from the front. At a time when Stillwell commanded 30,000 men in Burma-India he still kept rotating essentially the same combat troops and convalescences of the original 3 battalions (although in the end he eventually dragooned about 1000 construction and engineering troops to fill the void created in the Marauder ranks).
Lt-Col. Hunter, the defacto commander of the Marauders for a lions-share of the campaign (Col. Merrill suffered two heart attacks and was hors de combat for most of the campaign after Shaduzup), was also sacrificed and eventually removed by Stillwell from command with no reason -- accept to find a fall-guy for his inability to quickly capture Myitkyina. Eventually mutiny swelled in the ranks and whole sections of the front and rear areas became effective "no-go" areas for American officers.
The text of this book should serve as a tribute to the personal courage and individuality of the US combat infantryman and his rugged ability. It should also serve as a warning to those still in the US military on operations.... the tendancy of careerism in the senior officer class, right up to President, and the willingness to sacrifce the average grunt, has become noticeably worse since the times of the Marauders --- in this sense Ogburn is not merely a poet, but also a trenchent analyst of our own times as events that happened in the Burmese jungle 60 years ago...
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