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Soldiers Alive
When the editors of Chûô kôron, Japan's leading liberal magazine, sent the prizewinning young novelist Ishikawa Tatsuzô to war-ravaged China in early 1938, they knew the independent-minded writer would produce a work wholly different from the lyrical and sanitized war reports then in circulation. They could not predict, however, that Ishikawa would write an unsettling novella so grimly realistic it would promptly be banned and lead to the author’s conviction on charges of "disturbing peace and order." Decades later, Soldiers Alive remains a deeply disturbing and eye-opening account of the Japanese march on Nanking and its aftermath. In its unforgettable depiction of an ostensibly altruistic war’s devastating effects on the soldiers who fought it and the civilians they presumed to "liberate," Ishikawa’s work retains its power to shock, inform, and provoke.
232 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2003
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October 5, 2013
A famous sinologist once wrote:
"Japan's mission is to promote Japanese culture with the taste unique to Japan and to brighten the universe. Since Japan is located in the East and since China is its largest neighbour in the east, Japan must begin its task in China."
This "task" is exposed in Ishikawa's brutal "Soldiers Alive". "Although Ishikawa's Soldiers Alive can be read as a damning document of imperialist aggression, it was not intended as such nor is this what the Japanese authorities construed it to be" writes Cipris in his fascinating introduction. "Asked by a judge whether his writing would not damage the people's trust in the Japanese soldiers, Ishikawa replied his intention had been to shatter their trust in godlike creatures and replace it with a trust in human beings." An interesting idea ... until you read:
"The woman had rolled to the water's edge and lay on her back, her arms and legs flung out. Not far from her breast, the baby, too young even to crawl, lay face down in the dry grass, screaming with all his might. A thin line of blood flowed threadlike from the woman's temple, gathering blackly in the hollow of her ear.
Standing stock-still at the prow and gripping the pole, Hirao kept his eyes fixed on the two figures. Kondo, poling diligently at the stern, gave vent to a sarcastic chuckle.
'Hirao,' he called, 'you'd better kill that child, too. Just like yesterday. It's the merciful thing to do. If you leave it as it is, by tonight or so, dogs will devour it alive.'"
and
"It was at times like these the surviving soldiers most desired women. With bold strides they roamed the city streets, searching for women like dogs chasing rabbits. Such unbridled conduct was strictly controlled at the North China front, but here it was difficult to restrain the men.
Each of them felt as triumphant and willful as a king, a despot. When they could not achieve their aim within the city limits, they ventured to the farmhouses beyond. Enemy stragglers were still hiding in the area and many of the inhabitants had arms, but this did not make the soldiers hesitate in the least. They felt themselves the mightiest creatures alive. Needless to say, in the face of such conviction, all morality, law, reflection, and humanity were powerless. The soldiers returned from their expeditions sporting silver rings on the small fingers of their left hands.
'Where'd you get this?' their comrades asked; and each man laughingly replied, 'It's a memento of my late wife!'"
and
"On the morning of departure from Wu-hsi, the soldiers set fire to the houses in which they had been lodging. Many simply left without extinguishing the cooking fires, confident they would eventually engulf the buildings.
They did this not only to demonstrate to themselves their resolve never to retreat, but also to deny refuge to their scattered enemies. Moreover, they felt that burning this city to the ground was the surest way of consolidating its occupation."
and
"The stony ground they slept on made their heads ache, so some men pulled up Chinese corpses and used their stomachs for pillows. 'Ah, what comfort!' they remarked."
and
"Garrison troops outside the city were in charge of digging up land mines. They used Chinese labourers for the task. Trembling with fear, the Chinese dug into the earth. The soldiers watched, laughing, a safe distance away."
People were to read this and be roused to support the war in China? Was Japan really that fucking crazy? Cipris adds that "The government, however, appeared unwilling to risk the consequences of showing its soldiers as too fallibly human. Ishikawa was convicted of 'disturbing peace and order by describing massacres of noncombatants by Imperial Army soldiers, instances of plunder, and conditions of lax military discipline'. He was sentenced to four months in prison with a three-year reprieve."
They'd probably be room for Ishikawa to come out of this as something of a subversive, anti-war hero ... if he hadn't subsequently agreed to going off to China and this time coming back with an account the regime really liked. Oh dear ...
... but, of course, as So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers showed us, it's not as if there were many successful writers that had a good war. In his introduction, Cipris gives us:
"Yasunari Kawabata (1899 – 1972), the future Novel prizewinner ... spoke and wrote on behalf of the war effort, defended censorship, joined patriotic literary organizations, and used the money he accepted from the military-dominated government to buy a house in the resort town of Karuizawa. Kawabata twice traveled to occupied China, where he was impressed at witnessing the creation of a colonialist utopia. As late as August of 1941, he was able to write: 'The greatest joy of my most recent journey came from being able to meet intimately many of the good Japanese carrying out magnificent work in Manchuria and China.'"
"Japan's mission is to promote Japanese culture with the taste unique to Japan and to brighten the universe. Since Japan is located in the East and since China is its largest neighbour in the east, Japan must begin its task in China."
This "task" is exposed in Ishikawa's brutal "Soldiers Alive". "Although Ishikawa's Soldiers Alive can be read as a damning document of imperialist aggression, it was not intended as such nor is this what the Japanese authorities construed it to be" writes Cipris in his fascinating introduction. "Asked by a judge whether his writing would not damage the people's trust in the Japanese soldiers, Ishikawa replied his intention had been to shatter their trust in godlike creatures and replace it with a trust in human beings." An interesting idea ... until you read:
"The woman had rolled to the water's edge and lay on her back, her arms and legs flung out. Not far from her breast, the baby, too young even to crawl, lay face down in the dry grass, screaming with all his might. A thin line of blood flowed threadlike from the woman's temple, gathering blackly in the hollow of her ear.
Standing stock-still at the prow and gripping the pole, Hirao kept his eyes fixed on the two figures. Kondo, poling diligently at the stern, gave vent to a sarcastic chuckle.
'Hirao,' he called, 'you'd better kill that child, too. Just like yesterday. It's the merciful thing to do. If you leave it as it is, by tonight or so, dogs will devour it alive.'"
and
"It was at times like these the surviving soldiers most desired women. With bold strides they roamed the city streets, searching for women like dogs chasing rabbits. Such unbridled conduct was strictly controlled at the North China front, but here it was difficult to restrain the men.
Each of them felt as triumphant and willful as a king, a despot. When they could not achieve their aim within the city limits, they ventured to the farmhouses beyond. Enemy stragglers were still hiding in the area and many of the inhabitants had arms, but this did not make the soldiers hesitate in the least. They felt themselves the mightiest creatures alive. Needless to say, in the face of such conviction, all morality, law, reflection, and humanity were powerless. The soldiers returned from their expeditions sporting silver rings on the small fingers of their left hands.
'Where'd you get this?' their comrades asked; and each man laughingly replied, 'It's a memento of my late wife!'"
and
"On the morning of departure from Wu-hsi, the soldiers set fire to the houses in which they had been lodging. Many simply left without extinguishing the cooking fires, confident they would eventually engulf the buildings.
They did this not only to demonstrate to themselves their resolve never to retreat, but also to deny refuge to their scattered enemies. Moreover, they felt that burning this city to the ground was the surest way of consolidating its occupation."
and
"The stony ground they slept on made their heads ache, so some men pulled up Chinese corpses and used their stomachs for pillows. 'Ah, what comfort!' they remarked."
and
"Garrison troops outside the city were in charge of digging up land mines. They used Chinese labourers for the task. Trembling with fear, the Chinese dug into the earth. The soldiers watched, laughing, a safe distance away."
People were to read this and be roused to support the war in China? Was Japan really that fucking crazy? Cipris adds that "The government, however, appeared unwilling to risk the consequences of showing its soldiers as too fallibly human. Ishikawa was convicted of 'disturbing peace and order by describing massacres of noncombatants by Imperial Army soldiers, instances of plunder, and conditions of lax military discipline'. He was sentenced to four months in prison with a three-year reprieve."
They'd probably be room for Ishikawa to come out of this as something of a subversive, anti-war hero ... if he hadn't subsequently agreed to going off to China and this time coming back with an account the regime really liked. Oh dear ...
... but, of course, as So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers showed us, it's not as if there were many successful writers that had a good war. In his introduction, Cipris gives us:
"Yasunari Kawabata (1899 – 1972), the future Novel prizewinner ... spoke and wrote on behalf of the war effort, defended censorship, joined patriotic literary organizations, and used the money he accepted from the military-dominated government to buy a house in the resort town of Karuizawa. Kawabata twice traveled to occupied China, where he was impressed at witnessing the creation of a colonialist utopia. As late as August of 1941, he was able to write: 'The greatest joy of my most recent journey came from being able to meet intimately many of the good Japanese carrying out magnificent work in Manchuria and China.'"
January 12, 2019
With Eric Maria Remarque's 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front came a virtual wave of war-sorrow novels. In the same year were Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, described by Hemingway as “the finest and noblest novel to come out of World War I.” Faulkner contributed several novellas and Dalton Trumbo Johnny Got His Gun, 1939, with its soldier who has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face (including his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue); Louis-Ferdinand Céline in France wrote Journey to the End of the Night an absolutely scabrous take on the war and the fever than came with it — “…everyone queued up to go and get killed.” — Scarcely anything was written that had the old burnish of brass and bravery.
The same change of mood was taking place on the other side of the world as well. Writers whose forebears had told of the courage and skill of the samurai warriors in gunki monogatari, or war tales, began to tell other stories. One was Ishikawa Tatsuzō. At thirty-two years old, an admirer of Anatole France and Emile Zola, and having won a prestigious literary prize for his first novel, based on several years as a farm laborer in Brazil, he was sent to report on the Japanese war in China in December of 1937.
Japan had had military forces in China from the beginning of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895, and had increased them with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 when it established the over-seas territory of Manchuko. Hostilities broke out again in July of 1937 with the so called Marco Polo Bridge Incident. By August, elements of the Imperial Japanese Army had taken Shanghai. By January, as Ishikawa arrived at the Imperial Capital of Nanking, the infamous Nanking Massacre had been underway for three weeks.
Soldiers Alive (Ikite iru heitai) was written in furious haste based on observations and interviews with the soldiers involved; it was ready for publication in March, 1938. However, The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 and the earlier Press Law of 1909, were in increasing use: censorship, mass arrests, torture, and execution of some, mostly communist, activists were in increasing use. Ishikawa and his publisher were brought to trial and even after cuts had been made, the book was refused publication. It was not seen by the Japanese public until 1945...
... Ishikawa presents a small group of men we can follow by name. The narrator knows their thoughts and attitudes, their relations to other. Through dialog and internal eavesdropping he describes how each copes with the war in his own way; some coping in several, contradictory, ways.
Men struggle with the fear of dying, and the fear of the fear of dying: I must show a brave face. As Tim O’Brien put it in The Things They Carried, the Americans of 1968, as the Japanese of 1938, went to war, and killed, because not to was too great a shame before fellow soldiers and family. Remarque knew of it in WWI as well, when “even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward.”
Wherever men gather, and especially men as soldiers, women appear, as topics of conversation, as objects of lust, commerce and violence.
“All right! If it’s Tientsin, we’ll just live it up to the hilt! Hey, hey!”
A soldier solemnly chimed in: “Call the geisha, buy the whores, swill the sake!”
In their soldier slang, ‘Foraging for meat’ meant looking for ku-niang–girls.”
For complete review see http://www.allinoneboat.org/soldiers-...
The same change of mood was taking place on the other side of the world as well. Writers whose forebears had told of the courage and skill of the samurai warriors in gunki monogatari, or war tales, began to tell other stories. One was Ishikawa Tatsuzō. At thirty-two years old, an admirer of Anatole France and Emile Zola, and having won a prestigious literary prize for his first novel, based on several years as a farm laborer in Brazil, he was sent to report on the Japanese war in China in December of 1937.
Japan had had military forces in China from the beginning of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895, and had increased them with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 when it established the over-seas territory of Manchuko. Hostilities broke out again in July of 1937 with the so called Marco Polo Bridge Incident. By August, elements of the Imperial Japanese Army had taken Shanghai. By January, as Ishikawa arrived at the Imperial Capital of Nanking, the infamous Nanking Massacre had been underway for three weeks.
Soldiers Alive (Ikite iru heitai) was written in furious haste based on observations and interviews with the soldiers involved; it was ready for publication in March, 1938. However, The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 and the earlier Press Law of 1909, were in increasing use: censorship, mass arrests, torture, and execution of some, mostly communist, activists were in increasing use. Ishikawa and his publisher were brought to trial and even after cuts had been made, the book was refused publication. It was not seen by the Japanese public until 1945...
... Ishikawa presents a small group of men we can follow by name. The narrator knows their thoughts and attitudes, their relations to other. Through dialog and internal eavesdropping he describes how each copes with the war in his own way; some coping in several, contradictory, ways.
Men struggle with the fear of dying, and the fear of the fear of dying: I must show a brave face. As Tim O’Brien put it in The Things They Carried, the Americans of 1968, as the Japanese of 1938, went to war, and killed, because not to was too great a shame before fellow soldiers and family. Remarque knew of it in WWI as well, when “even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward.”
Wherever men gather, and especially men as soldiers, women appear, as topics of conversation, as objects of lust, commerce and violence.
“All right! If it’s Tientsin, we’ll just live it up to the hilt! Hey, hey!”
A soldier solemnly chimed in: “Call the geisha, buy the whores, swill the sake!”
In their soldier slang, ‘Foraging for meat’ meant looking for ku-niang–girls.”
For complete review see http://www.allinoneboat.org/soldiers-...
June 23, 2018
"The sweating, dust-covered soldiers marched, accompanied by countless swarms of circling flies."
Soldiers Alive is possibly the strangest book I've read so far in terms of the context of its writing and publishing. I'd heard of the book several years ago on lists of great anti war novels. That technically isn't true though I have a hard time believing it doesn't fit on the list after reading it. I also saw a brief blurb about this being the fictionalised account of the rape of Nanking. Thankfully that isn't true either. By that I don't mean I've bought into Japanese revisionism, that crime did happen, nor do I wish to downplay or minimise it, its just that.... well I really don't want to read a book about mass rape and massacres. The book is about a military unit on the march to Nanking though, and it ends shortly after the fall of the city, but no mass rape or beheading contests take place within the pages.
Curiously though the unit does commit multiple atrocities everywhere else in China they're stationed. And none of its hidden, on the contrary its stated that violent acts against the civilian population are pretty common experiences in the invasion of China. This is the oddity about Soldiers Alive, its treatment of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Japanese occupation of China is so negative that I don't believe a Chinese nationalist author could do better. Yet Ishikawa Tatsuzo was not only Japanese but a pretty staunch militarist whom believed in Japan's quest to dominate Asia.
When Japan renewed its expansion into China in 1937 one of the ways the government sort to stoke patriotism within its people was to encourage writers to create novels and short stories glorifying the IJA and the Emperor. They even created a special unit of approved writers who were allowed to tour the battlefields and early settlements. Ishikawa was one of those writers, but despite his political agreements with the government and its war aims he came to a dangerous conclusion the standard propaganda line the government was pushing in regards to the war on China was incorrect and potentially very dangerous.
Officially the war was being fought for the salvation of brother race, the Chinese army was being routed at every turn, IJA casualties were light and the civilians were welcoming the Japanese as liberators from the corrupt KMT leadership . Those were in short lies, well, ok, the KMT did have a serious problem with corruption and cliques but the rest of it was extremely inaccurate. The IJA won most of its engagements with the Chinese army, yes, but they were very messy victories. Often the Chinese army would give such stiff resistance that the IJA was constantly delayed and suffered far higher casualties then anticipated. If a village was supposed to be captured within a day of fighting, it would take two or three days to capture, and that was with reinforcements or use of superior artillery and airpower. And usually the Chinese army instead of being routed would withdraw tactically and move to a new defensive position a few miles away, or go to ground and fight as partisans. Instead of a series of decisive manoeuvres in the field, the IJA lurched from one battle to the next.
And as for being beloved by the Chinese civilians, well partisan attacks were a frequent danger in the rear. Indeed acts of resistance behind the lines by Chinese civilians were so common its become part of the post war right wing narrative and is used to retroactively justify the brutal repression of the Chinese population.
Ishikawa saw this was all false and attempted to correct this by publishing an accurate account of the war. And in so doing he effectively condemned the whole adventure. I cannot stress this enough, this is one of the most damning accounts of a war and the conduct of an army I've come across not written as a deliberate attack on militarism.
Consider the following passage
"Screaming shrilly like a lunatic, Hirao thrust his bayonet three times into the woman's chest. the other soldiers joined in, stabbing her at random. in little over ten seconds, the woman was dead. flat as a layer of bedding, she lay spent on the dark ground; a warm vapour, thick with the smell of fresh blood, drifted upward into the flushed faces of the frenzied soldiers."
The young woman (called ku-niang by the soldiers, it means girl but they're using it as slang more akin to prostitute only without any intention to pay) was butchered because she had the bad luck to mourn the death of her mother who had been killed by a stray bullet when the fighting moved onto her families doorstep. Hirao faces no consequences for stabbing a woman to death because her crying annoyed him and this is not the only time members of the unit engage in such behaviour.
Unsurprisingly the authorities were not pleased with this pro war propaganda. In addition to its literary merits Soldiers Alive is incredibly revealing, an accurate account of a conflict is inherently condemnatory even when penned by a militaristic author.
Soldiers Alive is possibly the strangest book I've read so far in terms of the context of its writing and publishing. I'd heard of the book several years ago on lists of great anti war novels. That technically isn't true though I have a hard time believing it doesn't fit on the list after reading it. I also saw a brief blurb about this being the fictionalised account of the rape of Nanking. Thankfully that isn't true either. By that I don't mean I've bought into Japanese revisionism, that crime did happen, nor do I wish to downplay or minimise it, its just that.... well I really don't want to read a book about mass rape and massacres. The book is about a military unit on the march to Nanking though, and it ends shortly after the fall of the city, but no mass rape or beheading contests take place within the pages.
Curiously though the unit does commit multiple atrocities everywhere else in China they're stationed. And none of its hidden, on the contrary its stated that violent acts against the civilian population are pretty common experiences in the invasion of China. This is the oddity about Soldiers Alive, its treatment of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Japanese occupation of China is so negative that I don't believe a Chinese nationalist author could do better. Yet Ishikawa Tatsuzo was not only Japanese but a pretty staunch militarist whom believed in Japan's quest to dominate Asia.
When Japan renewed its expansion into China in 1937 one of the ways the government sort to stoke patriotism within its people was to encourage writers to create novels and short stories glorifying the IJA and the Emperor. They even created a special unit of approved writers who were allowed to tour the battlefields and early settlements. Ishikawa was one of those writers, but despite his political agreements with the government and its war aims he came to a dangerous conclusion the standard propaganda line the government was pushing in regards to the war on China was incorrect and potentially very dangerous.
Officially the war was being fought for the salvation of brother race, the Chinese army was being routed at every turn, IJA casualties were light and the civilians were welcoming the Japanese as liberators from the corrupt KMT leadership . Those were in short lies, well, ok, the KMT did have a serious problem with corruption and cliques but the rest of it was extremely inaccurate. The IJA won most of its engagements with the Chinese army, yes, but they were very messy victories. Often the Chinese army would give such stiff resistance that the IJA was constantly delayed and suffered far higher casualties then anticipated. If a village was supposed to be captured within a day of fighting, it would take two or three days to capture, and that was with reinforcements or use of superior artillery and airpower. And usually the Chinese army instead of being routed would withdraw tactically and move to a new defensive position a few miles away, or go to ground and fight as partisans. Instead of a series of decisive manoeuvres in the field, the IJA lurched from one battle to the next.
And as for being beloved by the Chinese civilians, well partisan attacks were a frequent danger in the rear. Indeed acts of resistance behind the lines by Chinese civilians were so common its become part of the post war right wing narrative and is used to retroactively justify the brutal repression of the Chinese population.
Ishikawa saw this was all false and attempted to correct this by publishing an accurate account of the war. And in so doing he effectively condemned the whole adventure. I cannot stress this enough, this is one of the most damning accounts of a war and the conduct of an army I've come across not written as a deliberate attack on militarism.
Consider the following passage
"Screaming shrilly like a lunatic, Hirao thrust his bayonet three times into the woman's chest. the other soldiers joined in, stabbing her at random. in little over ten seconds, the woman was dead. flat as a layer of bedding, she lay spent on the dark ground; a warm vapour, thick with the smell of fresh blood, drifted upward into the flushed faces of the frenzied soldiers."
The young woman (called ku-niang by the soldiers, it means girl but they're using it as slang more akin to prostitute only without any intention to pay) was butchered because she had the bad luck to mourn the death of her mother who had been killed by a stray bullet when the fighting moved onto her families doorstep. Hirao faces no consequences for stabbing a woman to death because her crying annoyed him and this is not the only time members of the unit engage in such behaviour.
Unsurprisingly the authorities were not pleased with this pro war propaganda. In addition to its literary merits Soldiers Alive is incredibly revealing, an accurate account of a conflict is inherently condemnatory even when penned by a militaristic author.
March 14, 2023
A really fascinating fictional exploration of war and violence, especially since its from the perspective of the Japanese colonizing China during the second Sino Japanese War, a historical event that included the likes of the Rape of Nanking. I'll put below the quote that really summarized the book for me, but it made me think more about the toll of death on a solider's psyche and the perspective of the citizens of a nation at war:
“It was not that a soldier deliberately forced himself to consider life as being light as the proverbial feather; it was rather that in despising the enemy he came unawares to despise himself as well. Losing sight of their lives as individuals, the men lost the capacity to deem their lives and bodies precious. The symptoms resembled a form of nervous breakdown, but so long as the men were not injured, they fought on as if sleepwalking through the war, oblivious to the loss of countless comrades”
“It was not that a soldier deliberately forced himself to consider life as being light as the proverbial feather; it was rather that in despising the enemy he came unawares to despise himself as well. Losing sight of their lives as individuals, the men lost the capacity to deem their lives and bodies precious. The symptoms resembled a form of nervous breakdown, but so long as the men were not injured, they fought on as if sleepwalking through the war, oblivious to the loss of countless comrades”
December 26, 2020
Reading for class. Not my favorite of the wartime lit in Japan, but there are some interesting asides about the act of writing (diaries, letters).
February 24, 2025
The introduction written by the translator was a bit of a slog, but it’s vital to understanding the context of the novel. It follows a Japanese regiment on its way to Nanking during the second sino-Japanese war. The novella HEAVILY sanitizes what happens in Nanking (re: Rape of Nanking, Nanking Massacre) mostly because the author was hoping to get the book past censors at the time it was written (1938).
I’m surprised the author thought it had a chance to get published at all, because while Nanking’s mass murder and rape is referred to as “mopping up operations”, the rest of the novella details similar war crimes and presents the actions as common place amongst the Japanese soldiers as they swept through China.
The author was promptly jailed and coerced into writing pro war propaganda for the remainder of the war to avoid harsher punishment. I found the intro’s discussion on how writing existed within the Japanese propaganda machine and how many Japanese authors enabled the regime through their work to be quite interesting. The translator makes a good point on how writing can help connect individual resistors and build communities surrounding dissent against the government.
While writing may not have stopped the war, it can provide inspiring examples to support the struggle against injustice. It’s quite hopeful, to know words can do that.
I’m surprised the author thought it had a chance to get published at all, because while Nanking’s mass murder and rape is referred to as “mopping up operations”, the rest of the novella details similar war crimes and presents the actions as common place amongst the Japanese soldiers as they swept through China.
The author was promptly jailed and coerced into writing pro war propaganda for the remainder of the war to avoid harsher punishment. I found the intro’s discussion on how writing existed within the Japanese propaganda machine and how many Japanese authors enabled the regime through their work to be quite interesting. The translator makes a good point on how writing can help connect individual resistors and build communities surrounding dissent against the government.
While writing may not have stopped the war, it can provide inspiring examples to support the struggle against injustice. It’s quite hopeful, to know words can do that.
January 26, 2020
Japan won the land but lost the war of culture.
September 13, 2017
Creating monsters. Given a free leash, Japanese soldiers (as could all soldiers) go on a killing spree. The fact that their enemy is so unprepared leads to victory. You wonder about PTSD generated by these experiences.
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