Issue Date: August 16, 2004

Uncommon sense: Real info for real life
The good ol’ days of hate

By C. Mark Brinkley
Times staff writer


Remember the good old days when it used to be OK to hate your enemy? No? Thought not. Neither do we. But we’ve heard rumors.
Ahh, the good old days, when you could call a guy a kraut and really mean it. How liberating that old-fashioned bloodlust must’ve been. Or maybe not.

I found an old Army training manual geared toward hate for a whole dollar at a roadside flea market in North Carolina.

“Psychological Preparation for Combat” came out in the 1940s as a point paper written by one Pvt. Frank B. Sargent. The paper made the rounds — even without the Internet — and so impressed important people that Army Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had it published for Allied Forces in North Africa. Gen. George C. Marshall had it distributed to the Army.

What had Pvt. Sargent hit upon that was important enough for distribution to the whole Army? Americans were wimps, Sargent said. Needed to toughen up. Needed to learn to hate.

All this from a battle-hardened private.

“American soldiers are innocent and trusting; good-hearted and confiding,” Sargent wrote. “They are not at all aggressive.”

Preach it, brother. The choir is listening.

“Subconsciously, he thinks of war as a game where the umpire’s whistle will stop it before it gets too rough,” he said. “He cannot imagine anybody wanting to kill him, and so he commits all the mistakes which have cost so many lives already.

“Until he hates the enemy with every instinct and every muscle, he will only be afraid.”

What Sargent and his leaders wanted America’s military men to know was: Killing is your business, and business is good.

We were just thinking that. Funny how the problems never change, only the solutions.

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/stor...PER-292792.php


Ellie