On a Scale from One to Sanitary...

...is what I heard one student ask another in the hallway today. What does it all mean?!

Yesterday, in all its glorious weather, I was bombarded by a number of thoughts and happenings that I just have to share.

First off, yesterday I think I learned more about military sociology in my one class that day than the entire semester. Seriously, the entire semester has been almost a complete reiteration of everything I already know about the military. Things most people know actually. For example, we learned for a week about how the military stresses the family. No shit? Of course it does.

Yesterday we learned about troop cohesion in combat. It's truly an interesting question: Why do soldiers fight? They face nameless, often faceless opponents who are trying to kill them. Why not try to make peace or simply run away?

We'd all like to think that soldiers fight for the greater good. Truth is, soldiers almost never fight for an ideology, but for their fellow soldiers. The biggest reason they fight is because of the bond they make with those they serve with. That seems kind of obvious, but when I was younger I was convinced Allied troops fought in World War II because of the noble fight against tyranny. That may have been a reason for why they enlisted, but overwhelming evidence in every conflict (including World War II) demonstrates that ideology quickly took a backseat to camaraderie. The viewpoint I once held is nicely satirized in this clip from the Band of Brothers miniseries:

But wait, there's more! Cohesion was affected by homogeneity--that is, the more similar soldiers were to one another, the more likely they were to form strong bonds. This is exemplified in Nazi Germany's creation of military units, which at times took entire towns and villages and made them into troop divisions, and someone like the mayor would be appointed as the division commander. This meant that everyone was serving with those they grew up with: classmates, friends, employers and employees, and even family. As a result, these units continued to fight even when Germany was clearly losing the war, and they kept fighting for two reasons:
1) they wanted to support those they cared for, and 2) they did not want to be shamed as a coward in front of everyone for not wanting to fight.

As the numbers dwindled in these combat units, unfamiliar replacements, generally very young and old men,  began to break down the homogeneity, and this is when German combat units started giving up more easily. There was hardly anyone left worth fighting for. I mean, look at Fritz there, he's so old he's using his rifle as a fucking walking stick. Screw this war, I quit.

The funny thing about all this is that when the US Government researched the effectiveness of racially integrated versus segregated combat units, the integrated units did better. I didn't write down why exactly that was, but that's the truth. It is very much worth mentioning, however, that being the same race or from the same general location weren't the only factors in homogeneity. For example, in the Vietnam War, black and white soldiers bonded very strongly based on an anti-establishment, drug-based subculture in contrast to the upper class, clean cut alcohol-based officer subculture. Soldiers in Vietnam got along really well because they hated their superiors, so much in fact that there are 1,100 confirmed incidents of enlisted personnel "fragging" a superior in their chain of command. I want to emphasize the word "confirmed;" there are more than likely hundreds more incidents that went unrecorded.

That's crazy to me! Over a thousand superiors killed by their subordinates? That's pretty freaking serious. It's one thing to be insubordinate, it's another to mutiny and do temporary harm to a superior, but to kill them? And not just kill them, blow them to bits with a frag grenade or Claymore mine. That's heavy stuff man.

I wonder what my brother would have to say about this, since he's a National Guardsman who served in Afghanistan. The US military wised up after Vietnam a little bit and so I don't know how much he'd express that he bonded against superiors, but I figure he made the close ties he did for the same reasons many troops before him did. Not speaking for him, just saying.