Read Online MATT HELM: The War Years by Keith Wease - Free Book Online Page A

minimum of bloodshed, being the nice movie heroes they are.  That's dream stuff.  The basic principle of escaping is that there is no problem in escaping, none whatever, if everyone who's in a position to prevent you from escaping has been killed.  To turn a phrase, you go for the throats, not the boats.  Never mind that Gustav's been reasonably polite, to date.  Never mind that Max's attitude is understandable or that Heinrich may have something to be said in his favor also.  You just forget all that.  If you get a chance to use a knife, it must go in all the way, low, edge up, and rip upward until it hits bone.  Then you step back fast and let the guts spill out, filling the air with that nasty stench you get when you dress out a deer or an elk carelessly and damage the intestines, letting the contents of the digestive tract spill out.  If you get chance to swing some kind of blunt instrument, there should be brains on it when you stop swinging.  Forget all about trying to escape.  Escape will take care of itself, later.  As long as there's one of them standing, moving, even twitching slightly, you keep after him and to hell with escape.  Too damned many people, thinking about getting away instead of concentrating on the job at hand, have been killed at the last moment by somebody they chivalrously refrained from finishing off when they had the chance, movie fashion.  You don't want to die because you were too sensitive to give somebody who was still wiggling another bash on the head, and he managed to reach a gun before he died."
     
    To me, that is the sound of experience.  In college, most of my professors had only been teachers, not doers.  When they taught a class it was with a certain amount of abstraction; theory, not practice, if you know what I mean.  But my photojournalism professor had spent twenty-five years on the job before retiring to teach.  His class came alive and when he explained how to frame a subject you knew he had done it, and not just once.  This training had the same flavor.  Every one of our instructors had been there and done it.  I think because of that, I listened with just a little more attention than I might have otherwise - which is probably why I survived the war.
     
    Take this example from Rassmussen.  I think we caught him in an off moment, because he left a definite impression of prior experience and a wider knowledge of his fellow instructors than we had.  I'm not even sure how the discussion got started.  I think someone asked him about getting out after a job was finished.  He looked at the recruit - I believe it was Karl, a dark-haired, wiry man of German descent, who spoke flawless German and, as I remember, gave me a run for my money with the sabers - and hesitated for an instant before answering.  "It comes down to learning to play the odds, assuming you have a choice.  For example, if you're being chased in a car by a guy behind who is definitely trying to kill you, and there's probably some other guys at a roadblock not too far ahead who'd also like to kill you, you've got to get away fast.  You can't be bothered with the minor statistical possibility of meeting a stranger on a blind curve with you on the wrong side of the road.  It's one of the lesser risks, let's say.
     
    "On the other hand, when you've got your back to the wall you don't waste time figuring the odds.  If your life is at stake, you just blow away the guy in front of you and grab his weapon if yours is going dry and start walking and keep firing.  Eventually you're either out of there or dead.  And if you're dead, they'll remember you, those who're left standing.  They'll remember how hard you were to put down, and how many you took down with you; and maybe they won't be quite so eager to tackle the next guy from your outfit who comes along.  We call it public relations.  We're a bunch of screwballs.  Certain things were left out of us, or trained out of us, or beaten out of