Weak link (Brian Mitchell)

A reviewer wrote, "In Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military, army veteran Brian Mitchell argues that women have had a profoundly disruptive and negative effect on the fighting capabilities of the American armed forces. Mitchell shows how the service academies have had their morale, traditions, and standards shattered by the enrollment of women. "

We read in The Weak Link: "Despite proud boasts that women can easily do Ranger school, no woman presently in service has done anything like it. Not one of them has ever walked day and night through freezing rain, up and down the Tennessee Valley Divide with a 70-pound ruck on her back and a 23-pound machine gun in her arms. Not one of them has gone nine days without sleep, with a single cold meal a day and nothing over her head but a canvas cap."


"Such are the discomforts of not combat but training. Combat -- the business of barbarians, Byron's 'brain-spattering windpipe-slitting art ' -- is many times worse. Of his time as a Marine Platoon commander in Vietnam, James Webb wrote: 'We would go months without bathing, except when we could stand naked among each other next to a village well or in a stream or in the muddy water of a bomb crater. It was nothing to begin walking at midnight, laden with packs and weapons and ammunition and supplies, seventy pounds or more of gear, and still be walking when the sun broke over mud-slick paddies that had sucked our boots all night. We carried our own gear and when we took casualties we carried the weapons of those who had been hit. "


"When we stopped moving we started digging, furiously throwing out the heavy soil until we had made chest-deep fighting holes.... We slept in makeshift hooches made out of ponchos, or simply wrapped up in a poncho, sometimes so exhausted that we did not feel the rain fall on our own faces. Most of us caught hookworm, dysentery, malaria, or yaws, and some of us had all of them."

"We became vicious and aggressive and debased, and reveled in it, because combat is all of those things and we were surviving. I once woke up in the middle of the night to sounds of one of my machine gunners stabbing an already dead enemy soldier, emptying his fear and frustrations into the corpse 's chest. . . . ' "