Michael Walsh, author of Last Stands, draws on his father's experience as a Marine at the Chosin Reservoir to explain why men fight when defeat seems certain. The key is not courage but duty and loyalty to the man next to you. Walsh uses battles from Thermopylae to Little Bighorn to show that survival depends on training, discipline, and unit cohesion, not heroics.
Original minds of our time, Michael Walsh. We share a lot, we really do, because it includes classical music. That's a big part of your background, isn't it?
It is. I was a classical music critic for 25 years, first in Rochester, New York, where I went to college. I attended the Eastman School of Music, one of the great American conservatories, then in San Francisco for a few years, and then mostly at Time magazine during the last of its great glory years, starting in 1981. And it was exhilarating, it was fun, I loved it. I still love music, but I no longer write about it because I pretty much have said everything I had to say, and obviously I wanted to move on.
Yes, I'm suppressing the desire to talk to you about classical music because I want to talk to you about your book. The book, Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost. So what are the lessons that you derived from this courage and the battle after battle that you describe?
Well, this book is framed, Dennis, to pick up just a thread of our previous conversation about Ireland, with my father's experiences in the Korean War, where he was a young first lieutenant in the Marine Corps in 1950 and was at the battle not only of the Inchon landing in Seoul, but the famous Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, which was itself a Last Stand for the Marine Corps, one that they survived, and obviously he did too. I think it's never give up is really it. It's to engage the enemy as you are engaged. With last stands, they generally, well, they always come as a surprise to the team on the short end of the stick, and the Marines were surprised by the sudden attack of the Chinese Communists in late November of 1950. Obviously, Custer was surprised by the size of the Indian village when he attacked it at the Little Bighorn, et cetera. But the most important lesson that I derived, and this came directly from my father who is still alive, he's 94 now and living peacefully in Florida, was that you don't react in fear. The instinct that keeps you alive is you, as he put it, You go to work. And that's how many soldiers will describe it. You follow your training. You don't panic. You don't break a line. When you break the line, you're dead, as the Romans discovered at the Teutoburg Forest, for example. You just put your head down. Battlefield deaths are whimsical. You can see why the Greeks believed in multiple gods. You have no idea whether you're going to get hit and killed by a lucky shot or you're going to survive a barrage. Grant, for example, At Shiloh was hit a couple of times. One of them hit his scabbard and sent his sword flying, but he was fine. Other men were killed instantly just as they approached the battle line. You don't know, so you can't care is the point. And you just go ahead and follow your training, because if you do that, you might survive. If you don't do that, you will die. And, and that's the simplest explanation of why men fight. There's others, of course, but that's, that's how they lived through these things.
The human tendency, which I personally try to guard against, is the belief that it was better in the past, it was better in the past about any or many given things, certainly not health-wise, but in many arenas. So even acknowledging that danger, would you say that there was more courage in past generations?
I would say there was more duty. You know, courage is a funny thing. You don't know you have it until it's tested, and even if it's tested, you still don't know you have it. You only know it in retrospect. You don't want the man in your unit— and I say man, not woman, for reasons we could possibly go into later— you don't want the guy who wants to die on the battlefield. You don't want the showboat, the show-off, the quarterback of the team. You want somebody who wants to live through this. But the notion is about courage, is you do your duty, you do your job. And, and the other thing I would add to why men fight is you fight for the man next to you. If we go back to the Greeks and Romans, the Greeks and the phalanxes, the Romans and the maniples, the idea was that you defended the man to your right. That is, your sword hand was generally your right hand, and if it wasn't, they made it your right hand, and your shield was on your left. So the whole giant hedgehog assembly was designed to protect the man to your right. This left the guys on the edges, of course, in some trouble, so you protected your flanks with cavalry. But that was it. You fight for the guy next to you, and the guy next to you is fighting for you. And it's that simple.
You write about battle after battle, so I'll pose a challenging question here. Do they differ? And if they don't, why didn't you just write about one battle?
Do they— I'm sorry, I missed that.
Do they differ?
Do they differ?
Yes.
Yes, they do differ in many ways. I mean, in some of them the men all get killed, and some of them some of the men survive. They differ from historical epoch to historical epoch. However, in one sense they are all the same battle. I think the Greeks, for example, who really kind of are the archetypal examples of this. On the third day of Thermopylae— most classical battles lasted for one day, then they were decided and that was it. But the Greeks put up a stand, led by the Spartans but with other Greek city-states involved, at the Hot Gates, at this very narrow pass between the sea and the mountains. On the third day of the battle, The Persians sent spies to see what the Greeks were up to, and they were exercising and combing out their long hair. This is how they reacted to this massive army that was coming down the pike to exterminate them. And I think that insouciance, in a way, does mark with battlefield humor, gallows humor, many of the conflicts that I outline in Last Stance.
I, uh, talked with my wife about these issues, and we were wondering the other day, if America were invaded, have we produced a generation that would fight? And, and I— when we come back, I'd like you to answer that. I, I almost find it incredible that either of us would even ask the question. Because I'm saying literally, if this country, if the Chinese invaded this country, just to throw out a possible, I mean, it's completely improbable, but have we raised a generation that would fight? Back in a moment.
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