Thirteen Soldiers

A Personal History of Americans at War

John McCain,Mark Salter

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476759678
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

A personal history of war from bestselling authors John McCain and Mark Salter, told through the stories of thirteen remarkable American soldiers who fought in the nation's major military conflicts, from the Revolution of 1776 through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a veteran himself, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a long-time student of history, John McCain brings a distinctive perspective to the experience of war. With Mark Salter, Thirteen Soldiers tells the stories of real soldiers who personify valor, obedience, enterprise, and love. You'll meet Joseph Plumb Martin, who at the tender age of fifteen fought in the Revolutionary War; Charles Black, a freeborn African American sailor in the War of 1812; and Sam Chamberlain, of the Mexican American War, whose life inspired novelist Cormac McCarthy. Then there's Oliver Wendell Holmes, an aristocratic idealist disillusioned by the Civil War, and Littleton "Tony" Waller, court-martialed for refusing to massacre Filipino civilians.Each story illustrates a particular aspect of war, such as Mary Rhoads, an Army reservist forever changed by an Iraqi scud missile attack during the Persian Gulf War; Monica Lin Brown, a frontline medic in rural Afghanistan who saved several lives in a convoy ambush; and Michael Monsoor, a Navy SEAL, who smothered a grenade before it could detonate on his men in Iraq. From their acts of self-sacrifice to their astonishing valor in the face of unimaginable danger, these "inspirational accounts of thirteen Americans who fought in various wars…aptly reveal humanizing moments in such theaters of cruelty" ( Publishers Weekly ).

“Soldiers of the Revolution and their Commander-in-Chief at Valley Forge.”

CHAPTER ONE

Soldier of the Revolution

Joseph Plumb Martin joined the Revolutionary War at fifteen and fought from Long Island to Yorktown.

TWO DAYS AFTER JOHN HANCOCK affixed his extravagant signature to the Declaration of Independence, an intelligent, spirited boy of fifteen pretended to write his name on an order for a six-month enlistment in the Connecticut militia: “I took up the pen, loaded it with the fatal charge, made several mimic imitations of writing my name but took especial care not to touch the paper.”

Someone standing behind him, probably a recruiting officer, reached over his shoulder and forced his hand. The pen scratched the paper. The helpful agent declared, “The boy has made his mark.” “Well, thought I, I may as well go through with the business now as not. So I wrote my name fairly upon the indentures. And now I was a soldier, in name at least, if not in practice.”

Joseph Plumb Martin would remain a soldier for the duration of the revolution. He first saw action as part of Washington’s outnumbered army on Long Island. Five years and many hardships later he witnessed the British surrender at Yorktown. He lived the remainder of his life in obscurity and poverty. He received little compensation for his service, not even, at least in his lifetime, the reverence of his countrymen that was his due as one of the patriots to whom they owed their liberty.

MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON’S self-control, maintained in its severest trials by a supreme exertion of will, seldom failed conspicuously. But in the instances when it did, the effect was spectacular. Those who witnessed Washington’s temper were stunned by its ferocity and left accounts of the experience that imagination need hardly embellish.

Around noon on September 15, 1776, after galloping the four miles from his command post at New York’s Harlem Heights, General Washington beheld five hundred or so shell-shocked Connecticut militia fleeing from hastily constructed defensive works on the East River at Kip’s Bay. As they ran from British and Hessian bayonets, he urged them to turn and retake the ground they had surrendered without a fight. They flooded past him.

Washington’s physical bearing appeared no less striking, and perhaps more so, for his loss of composure. He wheeled his white charger amid the noise and confusion, his powerful legs gripped the animal firmly, his broad-shouldered, six-foot-two-inch frame sat erect in the saddle. Enraged, he cursed and threatened officers and men alike and struck at a few with his riding crop. Then he drew his sword and pistol and charged toward the enemy within range of their muskets, seeking to impart courage by his example.

It was all to no avail, as the terrified farmers and shopkeepers, boys and men, some having lost or abandoned their muskets, others armed only with pikes, found more to fear from the glittering bayonets of the enemy than the violent anger of their commander in chief. He threw his hat to the ground and groaned, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?” At last the great man’s frantic aides convinced him to ride to safety.

Private Joseph Martin must have made his escape that day by a route that avoided proximity to the raging Washington. Had he witnessed the unforgettable sight, he would surely have recounted it in his remarkable memoir, which includes a characteristically candid and ironic account of “the famous Kip’s Bay affair, which has been criticized so much by the historians of the Revolution.”

The British commander in chief, General William Howe, had waited more than two weeks to pursue the rebel army after Washington ordered its evacuation from Long Island to Manhattan on August 29. In the interim Washington and his officers had decided to abandon New York City, recognizing it was indefensible while the British fleet commanded its rivers and harbor. The American forces were widely scattered: four thousand men under General Israel Putnam garrisoned the city in lower Manhattan; nine thousand men under Major General William Heath protected the army’s escape route in the north from Harlem to Westchester County; dispersed widely across the center of Manhattan were General Nathanael Greene’s several thousand men, including the Connecticut militia under the command of the experienced Colonel William Douglas.

Washington was unsure where the British invasion would make landfall. He feared they would try to block his outnumbered army’s escape by attacking at Harlem, where he made his headquarters and where his largest force was deployed. On September 13 four large warships (by Martin’s account, although most historical accounts put the number at five) sailed into Kip’s Bay, a small cove that offered a deep-water anchorage on the East River’s west bank.

Half of Private Martin’s regiment was deployed to Kip’s Bay that night to, in his words, “man something that were called ‘lines,’ although they were nothing more than a ditch dug along the bank of the river with the dirt thrown out toward the water.” They returned to camp in the morning, and the following night the other half of the regiment, including Martin, were ordered to take their place in the lines. Sentinels were posted along the river for several miles and passed the watchword “All is well” on the half hour. “We will alter your tune before tomorrow night,” Martin remembered the British on their warships retorting. “They were as good as their word for once.”

He awoke that Sunday morning tired—and, as he would be throughout most of the war, starving—and saw the warships anchored within musket range of his regiment’s crude defensive line. Although the ships’ crews appeared to be busy with preparations, nothing happened until midmorning. “We lay very quiet in our ditch waiting their motions,” he recalled. By ten o’clock he could see scores of flatboats embark from Newton’s Creek on the Long Island shore, ferrying four thousand British and Hessian soldiers across the river. They formed their boats into a line and continued “to augment their forces . . . until they appeared like a large clover field in full bloom.” By late afternoon another nine thousand would join them.

Martin was idly investigating an old warehouse near their lines when, at eleven o’clock, he heard the first roar of ships’ cannon, which, by his account, constituted over a hundred guns. He dove into the ditch and “lay as still as I possibly could” until British guns leveled the militia’s breastworks, burying men in blasted earth. At that point, realizing they were completely exposed to enemy fire, their officers neither possessing nor issuing orders to continue their futile resistance, to the dismay of their commander in chief, the Connecticut men ran for their lives.

“In retreating we had to cross a level clear spot of ground 40 or 50 rods wide,” Martin wrote, “exposed to the whole of the enemy’s fire; and they gave it to us in prime order. The grapeshot and lagrange flew merrily, which served to quicken our motions.”

Martin was separated from his regiment in the melee. He spent the long, dangerous, oppressively hot day searching for them with a neighbor from home. They made their way to the American lines in Harlem while trying to avoid, not always successfully, encounters with the enemy. Their progress was slow. His Connecticut neighbor became ill and dispirited, and Martin had considerable trouble convincing him to continue. At one point, after nearly stumbling into contact with a company of British soldiers, he quit the road they were traveling on and hid in a bog. When the enemy passed by after coming so close to him that he “could see the buttons on their coats,” Martin emerged from his hiding place and discovered that his sick friend had vanished. He found him later, resting with a group of rebels in the shade of a tree. Martin pleaded with him to continue the march north but was rebuffed. “No, I must die here,” his friend despaired. “At length with more persuasion and some force I succeeded in getting him on his feet again and moving on.”

Martin and his companion had not eaten anything in more than a day. They had slept hardly at all the previous night. They were thinly clothed, starving, and exhausted. Twice they spotted American forces in the distance only to watch them be overtaken by British or Hessians and flee in terror. “Our people were all militia,” he explained, “and the demons of fear and disorder seemed to take full possession of all and everything on that day.”

It began to rain, and as sundown approached, the hot day turned cool. “We were as wet as water could make us,” Martin remembered, and he began to fear his sick friend would succumb to the chill. They came upon a large body of Americans preparing to make a stand with a few artillery fieldpieces. An officer ordered them to remain there. Martin argued that they were trying to rejoin their regiment, which he believed was located a short distance ahead. The officer didn’t believe him and again ordered them to take a place in the line. Martin pleaded for his sick comrade, who would die of exposure if he spent the night in the cold air.

“Well, if he dies the country will be rid of one who can do it no good,” the officer coolly replied.

“When a man has got his bane in his country’s cause,” wrote Martin, who was still appalled by the cruel remark a half century later, “let him die like an old horse or dog, because he can do no more.”

A drunk and distracted sentinel guarding the road north gave Martin and his friend an opportunity to escape. Not long afterward they found their regiment, which had joined Washington’s lines at Harlem Heights, “resting themselves on the cold ground after the fatigues of the day.” They were warmly received by their fellows, who had assumed they had been captured, as many others had, including the regiment’s major, or killed.

Martin closed his reminiscence of the “Kip’s Bay affair” by mocking the much publicized story of a soldier who claimed to have been sitting by the highway when Washington rode by and asked him why he sat there. “I would rather be killed than trodden to death by cowards,” the soldier was purported to reply. Martin doubted whether the soldier had taken part in the fighting on September 15 and attributed the day’s humiliation to the conspicuous absence of officers to lead them. “Every man that I saw was endeavoring by all sober means to escape death or captivity,” he recalled. “The men were confused being without officers to command them. I do not recollect of seeing a commissioned officer from the time I left the lines on the banks of the East River in the morning until met with the gentlemanly one [the artillery officer who had insulted his ailing friend] in the evening.”

What luck Washington’s army had that day appeared in the cautiousness of the dilatory General Howe. After the British made quick work of the American defenders at Kip’s Bay, Howe halted their advance to wait for reinforcements when they reached a small rise, now known as Murray Hill, less than a half mile from the landing. General Putnam, fearing his four thousand men would be cut off and trapped in lower Manhattan, rode to Kip’s Bay to consult with Washington, who was futilely exhorting his soldiers to fight. Washington agreed that Putnam’s position was hopeless and authorized his retreat to Harlem, which Putnam managed with astonishing speed, leaving his supplies and more than fifty cannon behind.

Had Howe ordered his troops to continue their advance west they would have encountered little resistance and reached the Hudson shoreline long before Putnam could escape, dooming a third of Washington’s army and possibly ending the war. But he didn’t. He held his forces at Murray Hill until five o’clock, and halted them again at nightfall. Putnam’s rapid march north reached Harlem that night, with only the last of his line having been inconvenienced by the musket fire of the late-arriving British.

American casualties, while not light, with nearly fifty killed and four hundred captured, were not determinative either. Washington’s army, tired, bedraggled, and outnumbered though it was, remained intact. The next morning, in the Battle of Harlem Heights, the Americans proved themselves capable of more than a retreat. Martin’s regiment gave a good account of themselves that, if it didn’t erase the memory of their disgrace at Kip’s Bay, certainly improved their morale.

Just after daybreak a British force was spotted advancing north, and Washington dispatched a reconnaissance party under the command of Colonel Thomas Knowlton from Connecticut. They were soon skirmishing with advance elements of British light infantry, with little advantage gained by either. The Americans retreated in good order when superior British numbers began to press them. As the British followed, their buglers played “Gone Away,” a tune familiar to fox hunt enthusiasts like Washington, signaling the fox was in flight from the hounds. The insult enraged the Americans, except for Washington, who ignored it while he conceived a plan for a counterattack.

When Knowlton’s rangers reached the American lines, Washington reinforced them and ordered them to flank the British right while another party of volunteers staged a diversionary attack. The British escaped the trap and retreated some distance before turning to fight. Knowlton was killed early in the ensuing battle, as was his second-in-command, Major Andrew Leitch of Virginia. Martin had known Knowlton in Connecticut and regarded him as “a brave man and excellent citizen.” But his loss didn’t dispirit the Americans, who pushed the British back repeatedly.

Martin’s regiment was ordered to take the field after Knowlton fell and the British were retreating into nearby woods. They remained in the battle until Washington called off the chase that afternoon, when the retreating British had reached the protection of their ships’ cannon. Both sides had suffered heavy casualties, though British losses were greater. Martin recollected his regiment had lost eight to ten men, and their commander, Colonel James Arnold, had been wounded and would not return to the army. But the British had left the field. For the first time in the young war, Washington had stopped a British advance and won a battle. And the men of the 5th Connecticut, including young Joseph Martin, had played their part in the victory bravely.

During the battle a sergeant from one of the Connecticut regiments had been sent to find ammunition. An officer, a general’s aide, stopped him and accused him of desertion. The sergeant explained his purpose, but the officer ordered him to return to his regiment. The sergeant refused, protesting that his mission was urgent. The officer drew his sword and threatened to kill him on the spot if he didn’t obey. The sergeant drew and cocked his musket in response and was arrested, tried for mutiny, convicted, and, with Washington’s approval, sentenced to death.

The Connecticut troops were ordered to witness his execution, and Martin’s account of the incident claims they were on the verge of mutiny over the injustice. At the last moment the sergeant was granted a reprieve. “It was well that he was,” Martin remembered, “for his blood would have not been the only blood that would have been spilt.”

Martin’s regiment also took part in the Battle of White Plains in late October, where they “lost in killed and wounded a considerable number.” After the British left White Plains, many of the Connecticut men, including Martin, having had little or nothing to eat for days and being poorly clad for the wet autumn weather, became ill. They were sent to convalesce in Norwalk, Connecticut, quartering with local, mostly Tory residents, and returned to camp in New York a few weeks later. He remained in the militia until Christmas, when his enlistment expired. “I had learned something of a soldier’s life,” he wrote, “enough I thought to keep me at home for the future.” The sixteen-year-old veteran bid his comrades farewell and walked home to his grandparents’ farm in Milford, Connecticut.

He did not remain there long. By spring he would again take up arms, this time as a regular soldier, a private in the new Continental Army.

FIFTY YEARS AFTER HE helped America win its independence, Joseph Martin, at the age of seventy, anonymously published a memoir of his service in the war. A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Danger and Suffering of a Revolutionary Soldier, Interspersed with Anecdotes of Incident that Occurred Within His Own Observation did not sell well in the author’s lifetime, and the aged veteran died a pauper at ninety. Many who did happen to read it were offended by its tone and content. Rediscovered a century later, it has become a highly valued primary source for historians of the revolution, and Martin has finally received the acclaim he never received in his lifetime.

Martin’s is not a story of glorious triumph over adversity but a chronicle of privation, misery, confusion, blunder, near mutiny, endurance, humiliation, and resentment. He warns his readers not to expect an account of “great transactions,” of martial conquests won by great men daring to change the course of history. “No Alpine wonders thunder through my tale,” he wrote in the book’s preface, quoting a British poem written at the turn of the nineteenth century. His was merely an anecdotal account of the “common transactions of one of the lowest in station in an army, a private soldier.”

His narrative is outspoken, acerbic, self-deprecating, irreverent, humorous—often darkly so—sarcastic, ironic, poignant, and at times embittered. He doesn’t trumpet his or anyone’s heroism. He doesn’t expound eloquently on the meaning of the revolution and the ideals of the glorious cause. His patriotism sprang from a simpler understanding of the purposes for which the founding fathers pledged their lives and sacred honor. He shows rather than professes his love of country and her cause by his endurance in a terrible trial of body and mind. And his claim is made more powerful by the honesty and humility of his testimony.

He admired Washington and other celebrated heroes of the revolution. Some officers he served under received his praise and others his contempt. He reserved his greatest respect for the men like him, the mostly poor and young regulars of Washington’s army, the weary, hungry, aggrieved survivors of shell, shot, ball, and bayonet, of deadly winters and lost battles, of harsh discipline and their countrymen’s indifference.

His father was an itinerant and impoverished preacher, who sent young Martin to be raised by his maternal grandparents on their farm near Milford. They were exacting guardians, who put him to work on the farm at an early age. They were caring and generous as well. He remembers his childhood with fondness and parting from his grandparents with sadness.

Martin rarely interrupts the account of his life with a discourse on the ideals of the revolution. Patriotic sentiments are scarce and written matter-of-factly. “I collected pretty correct ideas of the contest between this country and the mother country,” he wrote about his decision to enlist in the militia. “I thought I was as warm a patriot as the best of them.”

His grandparents opposed his enlistment. Even he didn’t warm to the idea until his friends and neighbors began enlisting. He recalled the passions aroused by the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party and confessed they had not stirred him to militancy. His grandfather described to him the hardships and savagery of the French and Indian War, and Martin felt then that “nothing should induce me to get caught in the toils of an army. ‘I am well, so I’ll keep,’ was my motto then, and it would have been well for [me] if I had ever retained it.”

His attitude changed when war came. Enthused by the spectacle of neighbors marching off to Boston, excited b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1. Soldier of the Revolution
• 2. Brothers-in-Arms
• 3. Adventure
• 4. Touched with Fire
• 5. Fog
• 6. A Howling Wilderness
• 7. Lost, Scared Kids a Long Way from Home
• 8. Lone Wolf
• 9. Duty
• 10. Valor
• 11. Wounds
• 12. The Job
• 13. Above and Beyond
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright