war, its veterans were the men who could provide answers to critical questions addressing willingness to fire. The issue was important enough to investigate rigorously. Despite Marshall’s fall from grace, there were those who had agreed with him. The question was whether there might be an existing problem in the U.S. My motivation had nothing to do with determining Americans’ willingness to use their weapons in World War II any results from Vietnam would not apply to a war fought decades before. Compelled to determine whether a problem existed, I conducted a survey of 258 1st Cavalry Division Vietnam veterans in 1987. troops failed to perform the essential act of firing on the enemy. Americans would die needlessly and wars would be much extended if U.S. The concern was fundamental to the nation’s military readiness. The question seemed inevitable: Had there been a problem with Americans’ willingness to engage the enemy in World War II? If so, had it actually been rectified during the Vietnam War as Marshall claimed, or was the research done there just as flawed as had been the case a quarter of a century before? Convincing evidence pointed to his having fabricated his World War II ratio-of-fire values, still so widely accepted at the time. Respected researchers interviewed those who had accompanied him in World War II and also pored over his personal notes during the mid-1980s. Some 20 years later, the validity of Marshall’s analysis was called into doubt. Marshall had seemingly found that the Americans’ hesitation to fire was all but gone. He concluded that much had changed since those earlier conflicts and that it was not unusual for close to 100 percent of American infantrymen to engage the adversary during firefights in Vietnam. Marshall himself visited Vietnam to conduct studies similar to those done during World War II and later emulated in Korea. He showed little hesitation to use a rifle, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, grenade launcher or whatever other weapon he carried. The American fighting man made sure that these concerns were short-lived. Largely due to his influence, noncommissioned officers and officers sent to Vietnam at the beginning of the American buildup were concerned that their soldiers and Marines would not fire at the enemy. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was more or less a living legend by the mid-1960s. Marshall continued in his role as analyst and self-proclaimed military historian before, during and after the Korean War, authoring many more books and frequently appearing as a guest lecturer at Fort Leavenworth and other installations around the United States. Marshall’s claims did not go unchallenged, but despite the disagreements they were widely accepted as truth both within the nation’s military and by those writing about the war and its American fighting force. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him.’ This is his great handicap when he enters combat. The American, he concluded, comes ‘from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable….The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply and pervadingly - practically with his mother’s milk - that it is part of the normal man’s emotional make-up. Marshall had been assigned as a military analyst for the U.S. Marshall, or ‘Slam,’ concluded in a series of military journal articles and in his book, Men Against Fire, about America’s World War II soldiers. This was what the highly regarded Brigadier General Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, better known as S.L.A. Day in, day out - it did not matter how long they had been soldiers, how many months of combat they had seen, or even that the enemy was about to overrun their position. In a squad of 10 men, on average fewer than three ever fired their weapons in combat.
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