The year was 1985, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. I was tired, sweaty, and filthy. I stood in formation with a large number of my peers in a similar state, the summer sun beating down equally upon us all. We gripped rubber ducks, our derogatory term for our indestructible fake M16A1 training rifles. Our rubber ducks consisted of a real M16A1 upper receiver somehow grafted onto a cast rubber lower assembly. Mounted on the end of my dummy rifle was a very real M7 bayonet. We had our scabbards secured in place over the cold steel blades to keep us from inadvertently stabbing each other.
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Our instructor was a grizzled Vietnam veteran who had logged three combat tours as a grunt. He was the hardest man I have ever known. In quiet moments we would hit him up for war stories. One of the more compelling involved the time he killed an NVA soldier in a trench on Hamburger Hill with a Ka-Bar knife. He said that took longer than he had expected.
Training With Cold Steel
On this day this chain-smoking beast of a man stood before us and shouted, “What is the spirit of the bayonet?”
We responded in thunderous unison, “To kill, Sergeant Major!”
The Smadge just stood there and stared at us, the glint in his eye looking plenty lethal from my point of view as an impressionable young teenager. Normally leading bayonet training would be beneath a soldier of this man’s station, but he enjoyed it.
Once we had mastered the details we lost our sheaths and took out our frustrations on the bayonet dummies. The superb comedy film Stripes has a genuinely funny sequence that orbits around this fundamental aspect of infantry combat training. At the end of the day, I was exhausted but fairly good at it. I could parry, smash, and stab quickly and with authority. I was eighteen years old. It would be another three years before society would trust me to drink a beer or buy a handgun, but Uncle Sam had already taught me how to kill a man efficiently and effectively with a bayonet.
The Dark Reality of Soldiering
Soldiers have the coolest toys on the planet. Whether we admit it or not, it still really is all about the toys.
However, the nitty gritty reality of soldiering is unspeakably horrible. As we can see on the newsfeeds coming out of Ukraine, war is young men–and now women–voluntarily ripping the very lives out of each other for a cause. War is the very embodiment of inhumanity. Even in the Information Age, the most inhuman aspect of this most inhuman pursuit has got to be the bayonet.
We have all become so adroit at it. This is to be expected given our astronomical investment in the enterprise. During World War 2, the combined combatant nations produced enough small arms ammunition to shoot every human being on the planet forty times. If you took every dollar spent on national defense in America from the end of WW2 through the end of the Cold War you could raze and rebuild every manmade structure in the country. Ours is such a lamentably self-destructive species. However, despite truly extraordinary advances in killing technology, there yet remains something viscerally motivational about the prospect of having one’s entrails rearranged by cold steel affixed to the end of a combat rifle.
Old Blood and Guts Loved Cold Steel Bayonets
George Patton, arguably the most audacious general officer the United States has ever produced, had this to say about the bayonet, “Let’s keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and respect.” 
George Patton was a lifelong professional soldier. Soldiering was the only thing he had ever done; it was the only thing he was ever good at. Patton wanted so desperately to take the fight to the Russians once the Nazis were beaten. He had dispensed death many times and narrowly avoided it himself. George Patton seems a reliable source of wisdom on the subject of intimate killing.
He once opined, “Few men are killed by the bayonet; many are scared of it. Bayonets should be fixed when the firefight starts. Bayonets must be sharpened by the individual soldier. The German hates the bayonet and is inferior to our men with it. Our men should know this.”
A Hard Day in Afghanistan…
In October of 2011, British Corporal Sean Jones of the 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales’s Regiment, was second in command of a combat patrol operating in the vicinity of Kakaran Village, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Their mission was to locate and engage insurgents who had been emplacing IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). These cheap infernal contraptions are the bane of modern counterinsurgency warfare. Corporal Jones’ enemies were little more than cavemen with Kalashnikovs, but they were driven, hard, and cunning.
As Jones’ small patrol made its way across a broad open field they were engaged with heavy and effective small-arms fire from nearby concealed positions. Jones, a professional soldier with two small children at home, later said, “We were about to wrap up the operation and head back to the checkpoint. We were crossing a ditch when the shooting started. I was just coming out of the ditch and most of the fire was coming at me. I hit the deck immediately…I have been shot at quite a few times and could tell the enemy was close. Gravel and dirt were flying up all around me from the bullets.”
Dire Circumstances Require Cold Steel
Jones and his mates were caught in the open in a near-ambush, one of the most dire circumstances in which a modern grunt might find himself. Initially unable to advance into the withering fire, the Brits dropped into the water-filled ditch and began throwing bullets. However, this was Helmand Province, and these were seasoned Taliban fighters. The insurgents began to fire and maneuver to overrun their position.
With heavy fire coming in from three directions and unwashed Taliban maniacs moving ever closer, Corporal Jones executed some of that insane military leadership everybody talks about all the time. He unlimbered an M72 LAW rocket to set the tone and then directed three of his nearest mates to fix bayonets. Snapping his steel blade in place on the muzzle of his L85 bullpup assault rifle, Jones leapt to his feet and shouted those timeless words, “Follow me!”
When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going…
Jones and his motley mob of maniacs screamed across eighty meters of bullet-swept open ground, charging directly into the face of the Taliban ambush. Amidst the chaos, Jones outpaced his troops and had to pause once they reached a nearby structure to let them catch up. Once out of the immediate kill zone, Jones directed his men to put accurate fire on the Taliban positions. Jones prepped a grenade but then changed his mind when he realized there might be noncombatants in the building as well. In the face of such an audacious response, the Taliban insurgents abandoned their positions and fell back.
The Afghan people know nothing but war. The last time an invading army marched across my hometown was 1864. By contrast, every Afghan citizen in the country was born, raised, and lives amidst unfettered violence. That is adequate to make people skeptical. As a result, firm and decisive action is the only thing they respect. The locals were watching this horrible little engagement. Corporal Jones and his mates earned their respect that fateful day in Helmand.
Goodwill from Chaos
In the aftermath, the locals came to appreciate that the Brits were hard soldiers who could give just as well as they took. Corporal Jones’ restraint with his grenade and use of the bayonet proved that, unlike most of the foreign armies that had ravaged their land in years past, the British could be counted upon to respect the lives of noncombatants even at the peril of their own. For his efforts, Corporal Jones was awarded the Military Cross, the third-highest decoration for valor in British military service.
Of their subsequent interactions with the locals, Jones had this to say, “We built good relationships, chatting to them on patrols, kicking balls around with the children. They knew the Taliban could no longer enforce curfews on them and things got much better with their way of life.”
A Point of Personal Privilege —
What were we thinking when we elected this guy?
And then it was gone. Of all the egregious affronts to logic that we have seen flow forth from the White House in recent years, none is so horrific as our insane route from Afghanistan. The United States lost 2,462 lives defeating the Taliban. In the year before our chaotic flight from that accursed place, there had been precious little violence directed at coalition troops. With a stabilizing force of some 13,000 American troops in-country, the Taliban seemed to be behaving themselves.
Afghans voted in elections, girls went to school, and terrorists had to find other places to call home. And then on the 20th anniversary of our involvement in Afghanistan, Joe Biden precipitously pulled American forces out just so he could say he shut the door on a nice round number. This resulted in countless loyal allies being abandoned and desperate people falling to their deaths off of fleeing airplanes. American citizens remained trapped there some two years later. I am sickened to think of it.
