towgunner
Gene Russo
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You may all have read this once, but it is something I always remember.
The Infantryman. First in last out...
Fidelio.. the angel Gabriel in a muddy helmet,
A flame charred devil on the nineth level of Inferno..
The Infantryman. The fighters fighter.
The soldiers soldier.
He travels not along the superhighway, but along the ridges and down the defiles.
Tracing the veins and capillaries on the skin of the earth,
to thrust his bayonet personally into the incandescent heart of battle.
Exacted in war, not for him the three or ten hour a day war sheltered by a parasol of planes served by men and machines of infinite variety reassured by mortar and ships prowling the nearby meadows and seas.
He is none the less in light and darkness perpetually shadowed by death, until at last on some strange promontory, in the midst of comrades fallen, suddenly, he stands alone.
The only powers of body and spirit available to be summoned are such as he happened to bring to the battle.
To the personal battle no other man is called upon to undergo. Sooner or later, struggling in the vortex of the whirlwind, tested over and over again, with the scarred body, the bleeding fist, the indomitable heart, the blistered feet, and fighting hands, he stands alone where the danger is. The Infantryman volunteers for nothing, but ever lethal device in war volunteers for him. When they come after him, they've tried and failed with everything else, to reach the point of power, the focus of freedom, the pivot of decision and the hottest spot in war.
Sprawler during every opportunity, plodder, racer, stalker, raider, waiter, walker over mountains, glaciers, and swamps. Outwitting the machine he witted, he does what no one else can do..
He storms the prapets yet untaken, by all the machines and munitions of war.
He lays his manhood sometimes not yet reached on the line, and sometimes stays forever there. Reformed to a grotesque memorial, having given a massive transfusion to hills like home or desert sands.
If there is blood on his hands, it is a stain he carries for every man, woman, child. In friendly lands
the Infantryman lives, if he does, on what is left after lending time; The beloved people of his country live afterward on borrowed time...his. Decorated with a flower, flushed from a field bathed in deadlilness. Dressed in dirt with dusty lungs, he hardly suggests the beau ideal of every other fighting man, too numerous to be distinguished; Too full of the memory of fear to swagger; Too tired to boast; Too well aware of the luck of his own survival too pontificate; Too mindful of a platoon of missing heroes, to be a hero, too grateful to demean any other fighter...If he is unimpressed with others, it is the result of being unimpressed with himself. He is the personal fighter, the champion.
First in and last out, the irreplaceable, the ultimate weapon... The Infantryman.
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