Ernie & Me—A Soldier Falls In, and Falls Out, with Hemingway: "We were there for fifteen long, strange months, part of the fabled surge that “won” the war. Looking back on that time and place, the thing I’m most proud of is a very un-Hemingway thing, I think, and certainly an unmanly man-at-war thing: none of my soldiers ever shot their weapons. We took fire, we dodged real and fake roadside bombs, we saw silhouettes running around with rocket launchers, which turned out to be kids playing with plastic toys given to them by insurgents. Only one of my men was wounded—in a freakish, noncombat incident—and he’s living a full life now. We were gentle far more often than we were forceful.
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