You have to take into account a lot of things about the surrounding milieu; Fehrenbach was writing this book during the run-up to Vietnam, and during the early Kennedy administration. If you read between the lines, there’s a lot of cautionary “Hey, we don’t know what we think we do…” sort of stuff about guerrilla warfare and so forth embedded in the book.

Fehrenbach was a WWII enlisted man who became an officer, and then went to Princeton. His perspective on the what happened and what went wrong with the Army during the Korean War are informed by that experience, much as his own commissioned service in that war did.

WWII was a national war which was perceived as being justified and a matter of national survival. Korea? Not so much–The men who’d fought in WWII were older, more mature, and had a sense of rectitude and purpose about them that the draftee children of the Korean War era did not. And, the Doolittle Board had stripped the Army culture of the tools to deal with that in any way they knew how.

What Isegoria really needs to do is focus on Chapter 25 of the book, which is what I feel really gets at the meat and value of what Fehrenbach had to say, which was that the military culture was deeply damaged by the post-WWII reforms, which were made will he, nil he by people who simply did not understand the way military culture works and how small units are formed and bonded together.

Which is something we still don’t get, and still manage to completely fuck up.

Frankly, there’s more to this book than you first comprehend on the surface, and I’m not even sure that Fehrenbach fully comprehended what the deeper layers signify. I met the man, spoke very briefly with him back in the ’90s, and I came away impressed, but I got the sense that he was a leaf floating on a sea of meaning that he wasn’t consciously aware of.

Most of what went wrong with the Korean War stemmed from things that were wrong with US statesmanship and the military–Fehrenbach noticed a bunch of it, but as he was a serving officer, I think that he only went so far into it, and never really questioned a lot about the water he was swimming in.

This book is worth reading, if only for the meta-messages in it. Fehrenbach rightly observes an awful lot of the issues, but he’s a bit short on addressing solutions for it all, which is why this work comes off as a polemic, more than anything else.

What the hell is he talking about? American politics was famously vicious for about 30 years after the end of the Revolution. The Federalists and the Republicans (Jeffersonians) were at each other’s throats until the Federalists finally disappeared. There was an “era of good feeling” under Monroe, and then vicious partisanship got started again and never went away.

He’s right about the treatment of the Tories (the Revolution was in part a civil war), but the notion that there was no “organized dissent” in the early republic is 100% wrong.

The manner in which communists understand peasants and Americans do not illustrates the important distinction between empathy and mentalization. Better to understand and despise than to esteem without comprehension.

It doesn’t pay to be a peasant. All your friends are either traitors or fools. Also, your lifestyle is wretched even if everyone leaves you alone. Don’t romanticize poverty.