about. Vietnam had not been his war, and he didn’t really want to know about light infantry in the jungle. He was a cavalryman, and his idea of combat was tanks and Bradleys on open ground.
“Okay, gentlemen. I’ll want to meet with all of you individually in the next few days. Then I need to come out and see your outfits. You will find that I’m a fairly easy guy to work for”—by which he meant that he wasn’t a screamer, as some general officers were; he demanded excellence as much as anyone else, but he didn’t think ripping a man’s head off in public was a good way to achieve it—“and I know you’re all pretty good. In six months or less, I want this division ready to deal with anything that might come down the road. I mean anything at all.”
Who might that be, Colonel Masterman mused to himself, the Germans? It might be a little harder to motivate the troops, given the total absence of a credible threat, but the sheer joy of soldiering was not all that much different from the kick associated with football. For the right guy, it was just plain fun to play in the mud with the big toys, and after a while, they started wondering what the real thing might be like. There was a leavening of troops in First Tanks from the 10th and 11th Cavalry Regiments who’d fought the previous year in Saudi Arabia, and like all soldiers, they told their stories. But few of the stories were unhappy ones. Mainly they expounded on how much like training it had been, and referred to their then-enemies as “poor, dumb raghead sunsabitches” who’d been, in the final analysis, unworthy of their steel. But that just made them swagger a little more. A winning war leaves only good memories for the most part, especially a short winning war. Drinks would be hoisted, and the names of the lost would be invoked with sadness and respect, but the overall experience had not been a bad one for the soldiers involved.
It wasn’t so much that soldiers lusted for combat, just that they often felt like football players who practiced hard but never actually got to play for points. Intellectually, they knew that combat was the game of death, not football, but that was too theoretical for most of them. The tankers fired their practice rounds, and if the pop-up targets were steel, there was the satisfaction of seeing sparks from the impact, but it wasn’t quite the same as seeing the turret pop off the target atop a column of flame and smoke ... and knowing that the lives of three or four people had been extinguished like a birthday-cake candle in front of a five-year-old. The veterans of the Second Persian Gulf War did occasionally talk about what it was like to see the results of their handiwork, usually with a “Jesus, it was really something awful to see, bro,” but that was as far as it went. For soldiers, killing wasn’t really murder once you stepped back from it; they’d been the enemy, and both had played the game of death on the same playing field, and one side had won, and the other side had lost, and if you weren’t willing to run that risk, well, don’t put the uniform on, y‘know? Or, “Train better, asshole, cuz we be serious out here.” And that was the other reason soldiers liked to train. It wasn’t just interesting and fairly enjoyable hard work. It was life insurance if the game ever started for real, and soldiers, like gamblers, like to hold good cards.
Diggs adjourned the meeting, waving for Colonel Masterman to stay behind.
“Well, Duke?”
“I’ve been nosing around. What I’ve seen is pretty good, sir. Giusti is especially good, and he’s always bitching about training time. I like that.”
“So do I,” Diggs agreed at once. “What else?”
“Like the man said, artillery is in very good shape, and your maneuver brigades are doing okay, considering the lack of field time. They might not like using the sims all that much, but they are making good use of them. They’re about twenty percent off where we were in the Tenth Cav down in the Negev playing with the Israelis, and that isn’t bad at all. Sir, you give me three or four months in the field, and they’ll be ready to take on the world.”
“Well, Duke, I’ll write you the check next week. Got your