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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sig who wrote (130180)	4/28/2004 1:34:36 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Sig; Re: "I was talking about deserters under moderm combat conditions, and left it to Bilow to drag in all wars and AWOLs from anywhere. But it was useful to research the area. Apparently about 4040 went missing fron the Viet-nam era. Of which 4000 occured within the US and 40 in Viet Nam. And very few of those 40 occurred during combat, most just did not return from leave or report to their next assignment." Go back and look again at the figures you found for Vietnam. You say that 4000 US soldiers deserted in the US, but only 40 deserted in Vietnam. Why would it be skewed in that manner??? It's in Vietnam where the fear is highest, but there the desertion rate is lowest. Those same low desertion rates you point at for US forces in Vietnam were mirrored by the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" when they were in Vietnam. Of course French troops didn't desert in Vietnam, there was nowhere to go. By contrast, when the fighting was in France in WW1, whole French units deserted in mass, and some units were, as a result, "decimated" by randomly executing every 10th soldier. And again, in 1940, French troops deserted on their own soil. These are the same soldiers from the same nation that had essentially zero desertion rates in Vietnam. And note that the French Foreign Legion, staffed as it was by non French, had relatively low desertion rates in France in 1940. Unlike the French soldiers, they were not operating on their home territory. And French soldiers fighting in Syria, both Vichy and Free, had low desertion rates, as few of them were from Syria: frenchforeignlegion.org The tendency of soldiers to desert when near their home territory is one that is quite ancient. This is why the ancient Romans arranged for men to serve in units far from their homes. The extra transportation costs were made up by the lower desertion rates, as well as the decreased likelihood of mutiny when called on to put down a local rebellion. Note that we're having difficulty in Iraq getting the Iraqis to shoot at Iraqis. This is just normal human nature. We're all just human, and our soldiers are super guys, not supermen. People who believed otherwise sent our outnumbered soldiers out to fight at hopeless odds in Iraq. -- Carl P.S. More on sort of the same subject. Hundreds of Americans not only deserted the US military in the war with Mexico, but were organized into fighting units for the other side: tsha.utexas.edu The Mexicans honor them every September 12th, as the "San Patricio Battalion": google.com