Top 10 drawing listening

Last week I listened, and sometimes watched, Generation Kill on DVD. It's a docudrama about the Marines in Iraq, and seems to be well received by those very Marines. Sometimes it makes them look like asses, or crazy, but they do their job and mostly do it heroically well. I say that from as a lifelong civilian, for whom doing 10 chin ups is an aspiration.

This week I'm listening to the audiobook by a lieutenant from those Marines, Nathaniel Fick. He includes a long quote from a novel about the famed 300 Spartans:

Captain Novack had pinned a quotation on the classroom wall from Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, about the Spartans at Thermopylae:

This, I realized now watching Dienekes rally and tend to his men, was the role of the officer: to prevent those under his command, at all stages of battle – before, during, and after – from becoming “possessed.” To fire their valor when it flagged and rein in their fury when it threatened to take them out of hand. That was Dienekes’ job. That was why he wore the transverse-crested helmet of an officer.

His was not, I could see now, the heroism of an Achilles. He was not a superman who waded invulnerably into the slaughter, singlehandedly slaying his foe by myriads. He was just a man doing his job. A job whose primary attribute was self-restraint and self-composure, not for his own sake, but for those he led by his example. A job whose objective could be boiled down to the single understatement, as he did at the Hot Gates on the morning he died, of “performing the commonplace under uncommonplace conditions.”

Novack sometimes interrupted class to point at the paper on the wall. “Gents, it’s all there. We don’t carry swords, but our job’s the same.” I wrote the quote in my notebook to take with me to the Fleet.

It was obviously a lot of hassle for Lt. Fick to put that quote in his book, so it probably meant a lot to him. An army always risks turning into a mob, and it's always worth the effort to keep order.

Oddly enough, this concept is contreversial today. In 2004, pundits thought we could win in Iraq by "taking off the gloves." Thank God we didn't.

Postscript: The audiobook is One Bullet Away. The quality of Marine officer training, and it's relevance to modern international chaos, is stunning.