Little Battles, Big Effects

It doesn't feel like a small war if you are fighting it, of course. One of themes of Max Boot's "The Savage Wars of Peace" is that combat in Peking's streets, Siberia's snow and the Philippines' jungles--among many other far-off places--has called forth extraordinary valor on the part of American soldiers, and a heroic doggedness in sometimes desperate circumstances. Even so, you are unlikely to find, say, Pershing's Mexican incursion of 1916 becoming the subject of a Steven Spielberg movie anytime soon.

But small wars have arguably done as much to shape the modern world as big ones--and for the better, Mr. Boot believes, since they have helped to wrest order from anarchy and democracy from despotism in the world's many trouble spots, and at a relatively small cost in lives and treasure.

The American imperium is usually dated from the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the U.S. inherited some of Spain's colonies, including the mutinous Philippines. But fighting abroad on a limited scale--small deployments in obscure places--goes back as far as the Barbary pirates, whose rough treatment of American merchant ships led Thomas Jefferson to send Stephen Decatur to the shores of Tripoli in the early 19th century.

Mr. Boot, offers a narrative history of more than a dozen American small wars in "The Savage Wars of Peace," not excluding Vietnam, a biggish small war that was fought badly and that encouraged, in its failure, a hesitation on the part of future American statesmen and military leaders to act aggressively in the world. The outrage of Sept. 11, Mr. Boot notes, may help to overcome such misplaced doubt. Some excerpts:

A surprise attack one morning in a village in the Philippines, September 1901: "At that moment the church bells began pealing, the surrounding jungle resonated with the sound of conch shells being blown, the doors of the church flew open, and hundreds of bolomen poured into the streets of Balangiga, 'yelling like devils'. . . . In just 15 minutes, 38 [American] officers and men were killed--and of the 36 survivors, most were wounded, many severely. One private, a survivor later recalled, 'was crawling on his hands and feet like a stabbed pig, his brains falling out through the wound he had received.' Those not killed in the initial assault fought ferociously for their lives with whatever came to hand--knives and forks, picks and shovels, rocks and baseball bat. A cook threw a pot of boiling coffee in the faces of his assailants and then pelted them with canned goods. Some of the men reached the barracks where the company's rifles were stored, grabbed their .30 caliber Krag Jorgensens and 'started pumping lead into the googoos."

In Haiti, 1915: "Two days after starting out, [Smedley] Butler's [U.S. Marine] patrol was wending its way in pitch darkness and driving rain across a river when they came under rifle fire from hundreds of cacos [Haitian gangs]. With bullets whizzing through the air, Butler was right in his element. 'Isn't this great?' he exulted. Luckily for the marines, the cacos were extremely poor shots, but they still put the outnumbered Americans on the run. In their haste to escape, the marines lost their lone machine gun in the river. Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, the 47-year-old spitfire who had already won a Medal of Honor defending the Legation Quarter in Peking during the Boxer Uprising, volunteered to retrieve it. He swam the river by himself, found the machine gun strapped to a dead horse, hefted it onto his back and coolly hiked back to the rest of the patrol--all under fire."

Vietnam: "On January 20-21, 1968, [the North Vietnamese] opened fire on the Khe Sanh base with their mortars and field pieces, signaling the start of a siege that would last 77 days. [Gen. William] Westmoreland was delighted; he had his climactic battle at last. He airlifted in reinforcements--more than 6,000 U.S. Marines and 600 South Vietnamese Rangers were now defending this grimy fire base miles from anywhere. The outnumbered defenders had one advantage: virtually unlimited firepower from field artillery and airplanes, including the all-mighty B-52s, which would unleash more than 75,000 tons of explosives during the siege. Standing in Khe Sanh 'you could watch mortar bursts, orange and gray-smoking, over the tops of trees three and four kilometers away. . . . At night it was beautiful.' Less beautiful were the shells the North Vietnamese sent in return. Downright ugly, from the marines' standpoint, was the fact that no amount of U.S. shelling could drive the communists off the nearby hills."

The small-war lesson: "Many deeply held shibboleths about the American way of war--which can be summed up in the misconception that the job of the armed forces is limited to 'fighting the nation's wars' in defense of 'vital national interests'--have little historical basis. Nor, it must be added, is history kind to the warnings of post-Vietnam alarmists that America risks disaster every time it asks the armed forces to stray into other types of duties. . . . In most cases the armed forces, however ill-prepared for the job at hand, quickly adapted, figured out what they had to do, and did it with great success."