House to House: Are You Man Enough...

[Kat]

...to love another so profoundly you would kill or be killed for them?

I'm on a roll with books this week. I just finished "Band of Sisters" and moved on to David Bellavia's "House to House". Vets for Freedom will be in town (Kansas City Missouri) at 7pm this evening at the Liberty Memorial, WWI Museum to speak and sign books. I plan on being there if nothing else than to meet the author of this book.

If you never read another book about the military or war, read this one.

Most of those who have reviewed this book tend to focus on the intensity of battle or the specific battle scenes. The heroics of the men are played out against the back drop of these battles. The nearly epic proportion that rivals the tale of the Spartans 300 against Xerxes millions can take your breath away. A movie director or producer would be hard pressed to capture the reality of this book or do their service justice. It would be nice, though, if someone would try instead of making movies about disenchanted and angry men, make a movie about these men.

What I took away from this book wasn't heroism brought on by the sheer insane necessity of battle. It would be a shame if a movie ever came out and portrayed it that way. Instead, these men did the unthinkable for the love of their brothers. These words can't describe that, the book came as close as humanly possible. It rivals for me, if not surpasses, Band of Brothers.

Bellavia wrote, "As infantrymen, our entire existence is a series of tests: Are you man enough? Are you tough enough?...Can you pull the trigger? Can you kill? Can you survive?" That prompted my question that seems to be the real point of Bellavia's book: Are you man enough love another so profoundly that you would kill or be killed for them?

In fact, Bellavia's single handed combat that culminated in his killing an insurgent with a knife starts out about Bellavia proving something to himself about not being a coward or a failure. That has been driving Bellavia since before he joined the army. It drove him to be a leader of men. It drove him to enter the house the second time after he had successfully and heroically exposed himself, fired on protected and well armed insurgents, extracting his troops and then himself.

He felt like he had failed himself and his troops by not finishing the job when he had a chance. He needed to set an example to his men so that they would not be demoralized or let overwhelming fear of what might be in the next house cause them to hesitate and be killed. He did not want to leave those insurgents in the house to possibly kill his men later or any that might come after them. Nor did he want to risk their lives in having them enter the house again because he had not finished the job when he had a chance.

But, above all that need to prove himself, was love. He did not want to fail the people that he loved, that had bled with him, struggled with him, lived with him and, in some cases, died for him. It's that fear of failure and the deep abiding love of those men that puts him in hand to hand combat with a man who was determined to kill him.

At the end of this book, you will understand why Bellavia is now on tour with the Vets for Freedom. He left the army and he left those men because he needed to come home to be with his family, but he, in truth, cannot leave those men, that love, the need to keep them safe or the need to honor them in the best way that he knows how: to make people remember them and to make their lives, their deaths, their sacrifices, worth something more than a "grim statistic".

Many people believe that war is about hate. In truth, they will never understand, when it comes down to the soldiers on the battle field, war is about love.