Nearly 3,000 years ago, a nation few remember today swept through the Middle-East. They laid cities to waste, tortured the survivors, and spread terror everywhere they went. This was Assyria—the first nation to make its military might its central policy and the first nation to torment its enemies with psychological warfare.

Life behind a city’s walls when the Assyrian army drew close was terrifying. Assyria made sure of it. They pioneered the use of terror as a weapon—and they made the lives of their enemies a living horror story.

10An Enemy That Lived At War

Every Assyrian man, from the poorest to the richest, was required to serve in the army. This was the first country to make military service mandatory for every male citizen, no matter who he was.

The men worked in a three-year cycle. In the first year, they would build roads, bridges, and great projects to build up their strength and the strength of the empire. In the second year, they would go out to war. Then, in the third year, they would be allowed to live with their families—before starting the cycle again.

The result was one of the strongest armies in the world. When they came to your town, the men at the gates were vicious and battle-hardened . . . and there were a lot of them.

9Psychological Terror

The Assyrians created tablets that showed them torturing their enemies to let the next city know what was coming. These showed them skinning their victims alive, blinding them, and impaling them on stakes.

One Assyrian King, named Ashurnasirpal II, has left a whole series of these tablets behind, and the descriptions are positively terrifying. “I flayed many right through my land and draped their skins over the walls,” he boasts in one. “I burned their adolescent boys and girls . . . A pillar of heads I erected in front of the city.”

By the time their armies reached your walls, these stories would have spread. Every person watching their chariots approach would know that, compared to the fate the Assyrian army brought, death would be a relief.

8A Chance To Surrender

Before the battle began, people would often be given a chance to surrender. An envoy would ride up to the city walls, knowing the fear the people there already felt, and would promise them that if they bowed down and paid tribute to Assyria, they would be allowed to live.

“Make peace with me and come out to me!” the envoy called out. “Then each of you will eat fruit from your own vine and fig tree and drink water from your own cistern.” Those who did not, he warned, “will have to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine.”

Many countries surrendered. Others went further. The king of Urartu, upon hearing the Assyrian army approach, stabbed himself in the chest rather than face them. And some sent tributes to Assyria before they ever looked their way, surrendering before they’d even approached to keep them away.

7Advanced Siege Weapons

Siege weapons barely existed at this time. At best, an army could hope to break through a city’s gates by rushing at it with a log, often while archers fired down on them from below. The Assyrians, though, had some of the first siege weapons in the world. They invented the battering ram, a device that would have seemed completely unstoppable in their time.

This was a whole engine on wheels. It had an iron-capped ram that swung from chains, letting it crush its way through enemy walls like never before. Overhead, the men inside the engine were protected by wooden plates covered in damp animal skins that put out the flaming arrows the defenders fired from above.

6The Complete Obliteration Of Cities

Sometimes, the Assyrian army didn’t stop at killing their enemies. When the Assyrian king Seenacherib invaded Babylon, he wiped them off the map. All he left behind was a message, boasting of how far he’d gone to decimate them.

“The city and its houses, from its foundations to its top, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire,” Seenacherib declared. “Through the midst of that city I dug canals, I flooded its site with water, and the very foundations thereof I destroyed. I made its destruction more complete than that by a flood. That in days to come the site of that city, and its temples and gods, might not be remembered, I completely blotted it out with floods of water and made it like a meadow.”

5The Torture Of The Survivors

One Assyrian king recorded sparing some of the people he invaded but only after they shamelessly humbled themselves before him. “The nobles and elders of the city came out to me to save their lives,” he declared. “They seized my feet and said: ‘If it pleases you, kill! If it pleases you, spare! If it pleases you, do what you will!’ ”

More often than not, though, the surviving men would be put through the hells they used to psychologically terrify the world. That meant being skinned alive, having noses and ears chopped off, and whatever torments they could imagine.

Sometimes, they got creative. One king, Esarhaddon, made noblemen wear necklaces with their kings’ heads on them. He wrote, “I hung the heads of the kings upon the shoulders of their nobles, and with singing and music I paraded.”

4Lives Of Slavery

Assyrian art shows a parade of their slaves chained to large stones, being forced to drag massive rocks like mules. The rocks were to be used to build palaces and wonders for the kings, and the slaves couldn’t stop for a moment. Behind them, slave masters were always watching, ready to beat anyone who slacked.

The women had it even worse. After the hell that women of all eras have suffered after wars, they and their children would be led off into slavery. Sometimes, they would stripped naked to humiliate them and leave them feeling weak and vulnerable. In at least one case, an Assyrian king made the women lift their skirts over their heads and march blindly after their captors.

3The Resettlement Policy

All of Assyria was subject to their resettlement policy, which uprooted whole families and moved them across the country. It was one of the ideas that made Assyria so strong. Experts from conquered countries would be sent into the heart of the nation, where they would be put to work building palaces, temples, and wonders. These people were usually lucky enough to bring their families.

The dangerous men who fought against Assyria were sometimes given a chance to redeem themselves. If the king was merciful, they would be sent to a ruined kingdom on the outskirts of the nation that would be forced to rebuild.

Then the rest would be scattered about the country. The people of a conquered nation would be spread about the kingdom, living alongside of people from foreign lands instead of their own countrymen to keep them packing together and staging a revolt.

2A Brutal Code Of Law

Many crimes in Assyria were punished by dismemberment or death. If you kissed another man’s wife, they would cut off your lower lip with an axe. If a man was caught with another man, the law said, “they shall turn him into a eunuch.” Adultery was punishable by death.

Some crimes were dealt with in savage ways. Men had to right to murder adulterous wives. Murderers were handed over to the victim’s family, who were free to do with them as they willed.

The people seem to have been a bit squeamish about enacting these laws—but they made sure they did it. “In the case of very crime for which there is penalty of the cutting-off of ear or nose,” the law said, “as it is written it shall be carried out.”

1Post-Traumatic Stress

Life under the threat of Assyrian was horrifying—for the Assyrians as well as their victims. The men of Assyrian army reported experiences that modern psychologists say show wide-spread symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

“They described hearing and seeing ghosts talking to them, who would be the ghosts of people they’d killed in battle,” says Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes. “That’s exactly the experience of modern-day soldiers who’ve been involved in close hand-to-hand combat.”

The Assyrians were so brutal that their military campaigns even put themselves through hell. The horrors and the guilt of murdering and torturing innocent people wreaked havoc on their psyches. When their year at war ended and they were allowed to return home to their families, they lived lives haunted by ghosts of the people they’d inflicted all these torments upon.

Roughly 150,000 men of Jewish descent fought in Hitler’s army. While their families back home were being corralled into ghettos and sent off to death camps, these men were in Poland, France, or Russia, spreading the fascist system that was killing their people across Europe.

It’s hard to understand, but many Jewish Germans signed up for military service. Each man had his own reason to do it—often one of necessity. Told together, their stories give an incredible insight into life for a German Jew at the break of World War II.

10 Werner Goldberg

There was a face you could find plastered on the walls of Nazi Germany: a swastika at his chest, standing proud over a proclamation that this was “The Ideal German Soldier.” But the ideal German soldier wasn’t a member of Hitler’s master race. He was half-Jewish.

Werner Goldberg had joined the army after years of struggling with his own identity. His father never told him he was Jewish; instead, Werner found out when he was 14 in the most humiliating way possible. His principal declared that their school would be Jew-free—and then publicly singled Goldberg out as the school’s Jewish problem.

In an instant, Goldberg found himself on the outside, and he was desperate to fit back in. He signed up for the army the first chance he could, getting in early enough to fight in the first invasion of Poland.

But back at home, his father struggled through the horrors of the Holocaust, and Goldberg was forced to use his influence to save his father more than once. At one point, after learning that his father was going to be sent to Auschwitz, Werner snuck into the building they were using as his prison and broke his father out.^[1]

It worked. At the end of the war, all but one member of his family had died. The only one left to greet Werner was the Jewish father he had saved from the death camps.

9 Nachemia Wurman

It has long been debated just how well the soldiers of the Nazi army understood what was happening behind the concentration camp walls, but among the Nazis’ 72nd Infantry, there was one man who definitely knew it firsthand: Nachemia Wurman.^[2]

Wurman was a Holocaust survivor. He was a Polish Jew who had been sent to labor camps in 1944, where he’d endured every horror imaginable. He’d seen his own father executed, and he’d even been forced to bathe using soap made from the bodies of his campmates.

In time, he managed to escape. He fled west, hoping to find the Soviet army—but instead, he ran directly into a Nazi battalion. Wurman knew he wouldn’t be able to sneak past them, so instead, he walked straight up to them, shook their hands, and introduced himself as “Marion Schmidt,” German-born chef.

Soon, Wurman was a part of the Nazi battalion. From then on, he spent the war with a swastika on his arm, feeding the soldiers and praying that nobody would realize who he really was. “The best hiding place,” Wurman said, “was in the mouth of the wolf.”

8 Arno Spitz

One of the more decorated men in the Nazi army was Arno Spitz. By the end of the war, he’d won three Iron Crosses, the highest award a Nazi could earn for bravery.

He was a paratrooper, one beloved by the Nazi army—even if they absolutely loathed his father. Spitz’s father was Jewish, and he’d suffered from such fierce persecution back home that, early on during the rise of Nazi Germany, he fled the country for the United States.

Spitz, however, stayed and made such an impression on his superiors that he didn’t even have to hide his parentage. In 1940, under Himmler’s orders, the Nazis kicked every half-Jewish soldier out of the army, but Spitz was such an effective soldier that he was allowed to stay.

To the end, he insisted that, by fighting with the Nazis, he did nothing wrong. He fought for Germany, not for Hitler, he told Dateline NBC in 2002, declaring: “There is a difference.”^[3]

Not everyone in his family, however, sees it the same way. Spitz said that his daughter has accused him of participating in the Nazis’ crimes against his own people. But despite her rebukes, Spitz refused to hide or apologize for his time fighting in Hitler’s military. “I don’t have to,” he said. “I didn’t do anything that is a crime.”

7 Hans-Geert Falkenberg

“I did not want to join the army,” Hans-Geert Falkenberg said. “I had to join the army.”

He joined the German army as soon as war was declared. Jews were already starting to see their shops destroyed and being harassed in the streets, and Falkenberg felt a need to connect himself to the German side of his identity to stay alive.

He’d heard his teachers tell his classes that the Jewish race was inferior, and, desperate to prove his equality, he’d spent his teenage years trying to be the best at everything the Nazis valued. Joining the army was just a natural next step for him.

But as he fought in France, his grandmother was sending him letters, letting him watch the Holocaust slowly unfold back home.^[4] Then, one day, the letters stopped. His grandmother, he would soon learn, had been sent to a concentration camp.

It was a shock—not just for him but for those who cared about him, as well. One friend of his wrote to him, with dismay: “I believe that the Jews are Germany’s misfortune, but that has nothing to do with grandmother!”

The rest of his family had already fled to England, and Falkenberg considered joining them. Trapped in the middle of Europe, surrounded by the Nazi army, however, he just didn’t know how it could be done. “The safest thing was to stay in the army,” Falkenberg would later say. “No question.”

6 Helmut Kopp

Helmut Kopp was the son of a German man and Jewish woman, but it was the Jewish side of his family that left him feeling persecuted.

As a boy, Kopp said, his maternal grandfather would openly disrespect him, refusing to view him as a part of his family. When he was chided by his wife and reminded that this was their daughter’s son, his grandfather snapped back that, no, this wasn’t his grandson—this was their son-in-law’s goy. “After how my grandfather had treated me,” Kopp said, “I didn’t want to own up to my Jewish past.”

When the war started, he signed up for the Wehrmacht, and when they handed him his papers, he marked himself down as “full Aryan.” For years, he fought with a Nazi artillery unit. Kopp was aware of the concentration camps, but he justified what he was doing by simply not thinking about it. “You didn’t think about the Fuhrer or the nation,” he said.^[5] “I thought only about myself—that either my tank or something will be hit and then I’ll be gone anyway, or I’ll make it through.”

5 Friedemann Lichtwitz

“In the German army, I was in a pretty good situation,” Friedemann Licthwitz said. “It was a good bunch of guys. I felt comfortable there.”

Litchwitz claimed that, when he joined up with the Nazi army, he had no idea how bad the persecution against the Jews in Germany was becoming.^[6] He only knew that, in the army, he was accepted and treated as an equal and that, when he was home in Germany, he was not.

After he was kicked out in the 1940 military purge, however, Litchwitz found out exactly how bad it was. He was sent to a forced labor camp and then, after a failed attempt to escape, into Dachau: one of Germany’s deadliest concentration camps.

An NBC reporter asked him how he felt, having gone from the inside of the Nazi army to a death camp. “I can’t say,” was all Lichtwitz could reply. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

4 Major Leo Skurnik

Major Leo Skurnik was working as a doctor in the Finnish 53rd Infantry. He was a Jew, but he was also a Finn—and that meant that, in the Soviet Union, he and the Nazis had a common enemy. That put him side by side with a German SS division, fighting against a Russian invasion and trying to help every man who was injured by the Russian shells, whether he was a Finnish soldier or a member of the SS.

“He had taken the Hippocratic oath,” Skrunik’s son told the National Post.^[7] “He wouldn’t turn away an injured man, whatever his nationality.” Skurnik, however, took it further than that. He helped clear paths for the German army to attack and, when a German soldier was in need, would rush into no man’s land, risking his own life to save wounded Nazis.

He saved the lives of more than 600 men, many of them members of the SS, by organizing an evacuation of a field hospital that was being bombarded by Russian shells. Skrunik led the wounded Germans across 8.9 kilometers (5.5 mi) of bogland and, when it was all over, was awarded with an Iron Cross.

Skurnik turned it down. He claimed that as soon as he got word that the Germans wanted to present him with their highest honor, he told his commanding officer: “Tell your German colleagues that I wipe my arse with it!”

3 Harry Matso

“We’ve been called ‘fascist,’ ” Harry Matso said, “which is a lie.”^[8]

He was a member of the Finnish army, a man who fought for a force allied with the Nazis. If the war had ended in their favor, his race—the Jewish race—would have been exterminated. Still, Matso insists that he was no fascist.

“Finnish Jews fought for Finland’s independence,” he said. “Not for Germany’s war aims.”

He’d joined the war after being conscripted by his nation. He answered their call—even though he knew that his nation was allied with the Nazis and though, by 1942, he’d started hearing rumors of the systematic extermination of Jews in Germany.

But Matso feared life under Soviet rule every bit as much. Caught between two tyrants, he sided with the one nation he believed would take care of him: his homeland of Finland. Still, Matso fought, rebelling in his own small, quiet way. When he saw a German soldier, he said, he would staunchly refuse to salute.

2 Emil Maurice

One of the founders of the SS was, by Heinrich Himmler’s standards, a Jew. His name was Emil Maurice, and he was classified as SS Member #2—second only to Adolf Hitler himself.

Maurice had been a part of the National Socialist Party from the start. He joined up with Hitler in 1919 and soon rose up to be the supreme leader of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung. He joined in the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed coup d’etat in 1923, and sat with him in prison, where he even helped Hitler write Mein Kampf.^[9]

Maurice couldn’t have been closer to Hitler. The two even shared a lover: Geli Raubal, Hitler’s niece, had affairs with both men, a fact that would create the only split between them. Still, the bond between Hitler and his SS Member #2 was so strong that when Heinrich Himmler publicly exposed Maurice’s Jewish ancestry and demanded that he be expelled from the SS, Hitler had Maurice declared an “honorary Aryan” and saved his life.

1 Erhard Milch

There are Jews who fought for Hitler even though they knew the horrors of the Holocaust, but Erhard Milch went even further. He didn’t just fight for Germany despite the atrocities—he joined in. He was a member of the German War Cabinet and the Nazi Air Force’s chief of staff. Few were higher up in the Nazi party than he was, even though it was public knowledge that his father was Jewish.

Milch, however, had friends in powerful places. Hermann Goering saw him as his protege, and to keep his friend safe, he had Milch’s mother sign a statement saying that Erhard wasn’t truly his father’s son so that Goering could have him registered as “full Aryan.”

No part of Milch ever seems to have felt sympathy for his father’s people. During the Nuremberg trials, he was charged with experimenting on Jewish prisoners in Dachau. They accused him of playing a role in human experiments that sent Jewish prisoners into dangerous altitudes to see how high they could go before they died, as well as others that tested how cold water had to be before the temperature would kill someone.

Milch never apologized. When the trials came, he stayed true to his mentor, speaking out in Goering’s defense. In the end, he was prosecuted as a Nazi war criminal.^[10]

The American Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865, and it holds the distinction of being the first modern war, but there’s more to it than that. The conflict saw more American casualties than any other in the nation’s history, and it tore the country apart.

When the Democratic southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, a large number of military officers followed, and they formed the CSA’s military command.

More than 150 years after the conflict came to an end, ten bases throughout the American south still bear the names of some of the Confederacy’s greatest military leaders.

10 Monuments More Controversial Than The Confederate Statues

10 Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia – Ambrose Powell Hill Jr.

Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia, was founded in 1941 outside the town of Bowling Green, Virginia. The post was established as an Army training facility, and it remains one to this day. The Fort is primarily used as an arms training center, and it is used by all branches of the military, as well as members of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, federal, state, and local law enforcement for weapons training.

The Fort was named in honor of Ambrose Powell Hill, a Confederate General from Virginia, who fought for the United States Army in the Mexican-American and Seminole Wars. He joined the Confederacy when the Civil War began and went on to serve in some of the war’s greatest conflicts. Hill was the commander of the “Light Division,” and one of Stonewall Jackson’s most proficient subordinates.

When Jackson died at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Hill was promoted to Lieutenant General to take command of General Lee’s Third Corps, which he led during the Gettysburg Campaign. He was killed in combat during the Union Army’s push during the Third Battle of Petersburg in 1865, shortly before the war came to a close.^[1]

9 Fort Benning, Georgia – Henry Benning

Fort Benning, Georgia, is the home of the U.S. Army Infantry School, the Maneuver Center of Excellence, Armor School, and more. Ft. Benning supports more than 120,000 personnel, their family members, veterans, and support staff, making it a significant Georgian base. The Fort was established to provide Basic Training to Soldiers in 1918.

Fort Benning was named in honor of Henry Benning, the commander of “Benning’s Brigade” during the Civil War. Benning was an opponent of abolition and the emancipation of slaves, which put him strongly in favor of secession following the election of 1860. He served in the U.S. Congress for the Democratic Party in 1851 and remained in politics up to succession, but opted not to serve as a cabinet member in the Confederacy. He instead joined the Confederate Army as a Colonel of the 17th Georgia Infantry in 1861.

Benning attained the rank of Brigadier General, and he led his forces against General Grant during the Overland Campaign. He remained in the fight up to the bitter end. Benning was heartbroken when Confederacy was defeated, and he was one of the last officers to lead his men to the surrender ceremony in April 1865.^[2]

8 Fort Bragg, North Carolina – Braxton Bragg

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is known as being the largest military installation in the world by population, as it supports 50,000 active-duty personnel at any given time. The Fort is located outside Fayetteville and is the home of the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps, US Special Operation Command, and many more units.

The Fort was established in 1918 to train artillery personnel, and it was named in honor of North Carolina native Braxton Bragg. Bragg served as an officer in the U.S. Army during the Second Seminole and Mexican-American Wars before joining the Confederacy despite being opposed to secession. He was serving as a Colonel in the Louisiana Militia in 1860, and the following year, he was commissioned as a Brigadier General of the Confederate States Army and given command of forces in Pensacola, Florida.

He served in numerous campaigns throughout the war, including the Battles for Chattanooga, the Battle of Chickamauga, and many more. He became an advisor to President Davis and was one of the people credited with finally convincing him that the Confederacy’s cause was lost, which ultimately led to the surrender of the CSA and the end of the war.^[3]

7 Fort Gordon, Georgia – John Brown Gordon

Fort Gordon, Georgia, was established as Camp Gordon in 1917 as the training grounds for the 82nd Division. It was upgraded to a Fort in 1941 and has since become home of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the Cyber Corps, and more.

Camp Gordon was named in honor of John Brown Gordon, a Confederate officer who joined the CSA without any prior military experience. Though he lacked the knowledge of many of his peers, he was elected Captain of the 6th Alamaba Infantry Regiment. By 1862, he was serving as a Colonel, having seen combat at Seven Pines. Gordon had a knack for being wounded, and during the Battle of Antietam, he was hit multiple times in his arm and leg, but he continued to fight while refusing to go to the read. General Lee was impressed by his fortitude, and after he recovered, he was promoted to Brigadier General.

Gordon continued to lead his men up to the end of the war, having charged the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House. He officially surrendered his troops soon after, on April 12, 1865. Following the war, he entered politics in strict opposition to Reconstruction. He served as a U.S. Senator for the Democratic Party and served as the 53rd Governor of Georgia.^[4]

6 Fort Hood, Texas – John Bell Hood

Fort Hood, Texas, was founded in January 1942, so the Army could take advantage of the open terrain to test tank destroyers during World War II. Fort Hood is the most populous military base in the world, and it’s also one of the largest by area, as it encompasses 214,000 acres of land. It’s primarily used as an HQ for the III Corps, the 1st Cavalry Division, and other cavalry units.

Fort Hood gets its name from John Bell Hood, a notoriously brave and aggressive officer who was trained at the United States Military Academy. He served only briefly in the U.S. Army before resigning his commission immediately following the Battle of Fort Sumpter, which kicked off the Civil War. The native Kentuckian’s home state was neutral at the time, so he opted to serve in Texas.

Hood was promoted to Colonel in September 1860 and was given command of the 4th Texas Infantry Regiment. He served in numerous battles, including the Battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Chicamauga, and many more. He was promoted to General temporarily in July 1864 and eventually returned to the rank of Lieutenant General for the duration of the conflict.^[5]

Top 10 Surprising Confederates

5 Fort Pickett, Virginia – George Pickett

Fort Pickett, Virginia, is a Virginia Army National Guard post situated outside the town of Blackstone. It is the home of the Army National Guard Maneuver Training Center, and it was established in 1941 for the purpose of simultaneously training more than one Infantry Division at a time.

Fort Pickett was named in honor of George Pickett, a career U.S. Army officer who served during the Mexican-American War. He continued to serve until he was compelled to resign his commission following the Battle of Fort Sumter. Within a month, he was a Colonel in the Confederate States Army, and by 1862, he was a Brigadier General.

Pickett served in numerous campaigns but is likely best known for the ill-fated “Pickett’s Charge” during the Battle of Gettysburg. He stepped across the line to charge nearly a mile to Cemetery Ridge, shouting, “Up, Men, and to your posts! Let no man forget today that you are from Old Virginia!”^[6] The assault was a bloodbath, and Pickett was all but inconsolable. His division was mostly lost, as well as his subordinate commanders. He remained active in the war and was a member of General Lee’s party during the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.^[7]

4 Fort Rucker, Alabama – Edmund Winchester Rucker

Fort Rucker, Alabama, was opened during World War II to train aviators. These days, it’s home to Army Aviation and is the post where all Army Warrant Officers (Including the writer of this article) train at Warrant Officer Candidate School. The base was named in honor of Confederate General Edmund Rucker when it was officially opened in 1942.^[8]

Edmund Rucker enlisted in the Confederate States Army as a Private soon after the Civil War broke out in 1861. He belonged to Pickett’s Tennessee Company of Sappers and Miners, and he was promoted to Lieutenant by 1862. As he progressed through the ranks, he moved to the Cavalry Batallion and was given command of the 1st East Tennessee Legion, known as Rucker’s Legion,^[9] with the rank of Colonel in 1863.

He eventually gained the rank of Brigadier General, though it was never confirmed by the Confederate Congress. Rucker was wounded in action on several occasions and lost his left arm soon after he was captured. His release was secured through an exchange managed by General Nathon Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

3 Fort Polk, Louisiana – Leonidas Polk

Fort Polk, Louisiana, was originally established as a Camp in 1941 for the Louisiana Maneuvers in anticipation of the U.S. joining World War II. Today, it is home to the Joint Readiness Training Center and various combat units, including the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division.

The Camp was named in honor of the Right Reverend Leonidas Polk, the first Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana. He resigned his position with the church to become a Major General in the Confederate Army after personally offering his services to Jefferson Davis, a classmate of his from his time at West Point. Polk committed a significant blunder early in the conflict when he sent troops to Columbus, Kentucky. The state had attempted to remain neutral but ended up requesting federal aid to deal with the occupation. This resulted in Kentucky being effectively ceded to the United States.

Polk commanded troops in the Army of Mississippi and Tennessee, managing to fight in numerous battles. He brought 20,000 men to Georgia while serving as the confederate States Army’s second in command. While scouting outside of Marietta, Georgia, in June 1864, he was spotted by Union Troops, who directed artillery fire at the General, killing him with the third shot.^[0]

2 Camp Beauregard, Louisiana – Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard

Camp Beauregard, Louisiana, was established in 1918 as a training base for the 17th Division in preparation for the United States’ entry into World War I. The Camp is currently operated by the Louisiana Army National Guard, which uses it primarily as one of its main training areas.

Camp Beauregard was named after Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, a United States Military Academy graduate who served during the Mexican-American War. General Beauregard was the first Brigadier General in the Confederate States Army, and one of the most prominent to arise early in the conflict. He was given the rank of General five months after joining the Confederacy, making him the fifth highest-ranking officer in the CSA. Beauregard commanded his troops to fire the first shots of the Civil War, after his demand that the command at Ft. Sumter surrender to the CSA. For his action, he was known as “The Hero of Fort Sumter,” and he remained popular throughout the war.

General Beauregard survived the war and even though he remained a member of the Democratic Party for the rest of his life, he paradoxically went on to become an advocate for black civil rights and suffrage by supporting the Republican Party. He worked as a railroad executive and was an early promoter of the Louisiana Lottery, which, at the time, was the only legal lottery in the United States.^[11]

1 Fort Lee, Virginia – Robert Edward Lee

Fort Lee, Virginia, was established early in the Civil War as a training camp west of Richmond. It was originally known as Camp Lee, and it grew into a Fort as World War I began intensifying. Today, it is the home of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command, the Army Quartermaster, Ordnance, and Transportation schools.

The Camp was named in honor of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Lee was a prominent U.S. military officer who served during the Mexican-American War. He also worked as the superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point, and though he was initially reluctant, as he opposed secession (despite remaining a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party), he resigned his commission to join the Confederate States Army.

General Lee was one of the first to be given the rank of full General, and he was given command of the forces in Western Virginia.

Lee invaded Maryland and was primarily responsible for the push into Gettysburg, which resulted in one of the most significant CSA defeats of the war. From that point, he commanded forces up to the end of the American Civil War, having lost the vast majority of his Army by April 1865.^[12]

10 Ways Things Would Be Different If The Confederate States Had Won

It is a massive life decision to join the military. Even though a marriage can kill you, signing up for the Army means you may be in a conflict-zone months after signing your life, your rights, and your freedoms away. In the United States Army, which is the specific branch discussed today, once your signature is on that enlistment document, you become property of the U.S. government.

So you passed your ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery), medical exam, and piss test (a hard one for all those stoners out there), what happens next? Recruiters are paid very decent bonuses for each recruit enlisted and some will say all kinds of things to get you in. But what’s the truth?

10 Fascinating Facts About The Ancient Roman Army

10 Processing

Let’s use some practical knowledge here, you aren’t showing up to basic training with your favorite skateboard shoes and Gameboy color. Recruiters demand that you pack light and all non-regulation items are temporarily confiscated. Kind of like when you check into jail or prison. So no, you will not be able to bring your granddaddy’s WW2 revolver with you. You aren’t even allowed non-religious literature and the army even demands you use their letterhead and stationary for one of the only forms of correspondence you will have with the outside world (more on that later). So it’s pretty much underwear, socks, running shoes and the clothes on your back.

The army processes hundreds of people a day in a single fort and it typically takes a week of being bumped around temporary lodging, eating horrible prison-like cheese sandwiches with cafeteria cartons of milk, and what seems like days of signing your life away even further. Then, once all the paperwork is completed, they shave your head, fit you with camos (or A.C.U. for Advanced Combat Uniform) and boots, and then mercilessly stab you on your buttocks with about a dozen needles containing practically every inoculation known to mankind. You are their property and they make sure you are properly vaccinated. Processing is the most sleep-deprived, mundane, and in my opinion, worst part of basic training. Two days in and you will literally be begging to be assigned to a company, drill sergeant, and platoon. Processing is basically limbo where you are manhandled until you at least look like a soldier . . . but that doesn’t mean you are one.^[1]

9 Welcome to Basic

Once settled into your platoon you will get a proper welcome from your assigned drill sergeants. From the moment you meet them, they let you know exactly what you signed up for. Push-ups and laps, literally non-stop. But after bouncing from temporary bed to temporary bed during processing, it will be bittersweet to finally have a bed to call your own for the duration of basic training. Once introduced to your barracks, you scrub it clean and most recruits fail miserably the first few weeks trying to wax the floors with a buffer from the Korean War-era. Those first few days you get “smoked” (verb for punishment from a drill sergeant) for every little infraction as they are training you how to speak, think, and act like a “private”. They also start off with problem-solving obstacle courses and constant review and testing of ranks and weapon stats from the Basic Training Soldier’s Handbook. And the drill sergeants are watching, seeing who’s competent and who’s a buffoon.^[2]

8 Squad-Leaders, Weaklings, and Recyclables

Although the D.S.’s (Drill Sergeants) already know who is strong and who is weak, this is America and it is your own fellow members of your squad, a further breakdown of a platoon consisting of about a dozen soldiers, who decide who leads them. Squad-leaders don’t have direct power, but act as the intermediary between the D.S.’s and the rest of the squad and platoon. This is necessary because every single basic training cycle has at least one idiot who is going to be a “Gomer Pyle”. There are also usually “recycles” tagged onto a platoon who have failed the previous cycle and need to go through the entirety of basic again. Yes, if you fail, you go and do it all over again!^[3]

7 Gun Day

Surprisingly, you get your gun pretty much off the bat. It’s an exciting day for any soldier, but you will not fire it for weeks. It’s a bit torturous, but necessary. Like a puppy being house-trained, you need to be programmed to never let your rifle out of your sight. Then they gradually train you how the rifle works, constantly taking it apart and reassembling it. Finally, they take you out to the range on an almost daily basis. To graduate, out of 40 shots, 23-29 hits gets you marksman, 30-35 gets you sharpshooter, and 36-40 gets you expert marksman.^[4]

6 The Grub

Honestly, the food is not bad. You are property of the U.S. government and they want you well fed and maintained. For example, if you intentionally hurt yourself, you are charged with destruction of government property. With that being said, they keep you fed.

Breakfast is a massive deal on every base I’ve ever been stationed on and almost every base does two kinds of breakfast. You have the “Yankee” breakfast of eggs, bacon, English muffins, and even an omelet station (yes, even in basic), and then you have the “Southern” breakfast consisting of biscuits and gravy and grits. America is huge, we don’t alleat the same thing in the morning.

For lunch, you are almost always out in the field on a training exercise so they either set up a tent and serve chicken fried steak or spaghetti with greasy ground beef or they simply throw (literally, you can get smacked in the face with a bag while the D.S.’s hurl them) M.R.E.’s (Meals Ready to Eat). When you are that exhausted, everything looks like a Michelin-starred meal. Plus M.R.E.’s come in random flavors so it’s fun to sit in the dirt haggling and trading the various flavors of entrees or cookies.

Dinner is always solid. Pot roast, pasta, or even steak; there really is no place for vegetarians or vegans in the military. The ringer is that although the food is good, you seriously have two minutes to scarf it down before the D.S.’s start clearing the tables for the next round of privates. And I’m not exaggerating, you better inhale your meal or you go hungry.^[5]

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5 Barrack Life

Most recruits are in their teens. They’ve never left home and some come from very insular communities; being exposed to the massive variety of personalities can come as a culture shock. There is also always a handful at the start who won’t bathe in the group shower (it’s like high school football, don’t think you get a private spa) due to insecurities and wind up stinking like crackheads covered in their own feces after only a few days of constant exercise. Usually their fellow soldiers are tasked with forcing the accused to shower, and sometimes it can be a traumatizing experience. When I went, one guy went two weeks until he was eventually covered in Pine-Sol and scrubbed clean as the D.S. looked on in approval. He never missed a single shower again.

There also may be people who have been home-schooled or just grew up sheltered in general and this is their first experience of a social environment. It can be traumatizing and either way it’s always a sociological circus. Some recruits do freak-out and have mental breakdowns. Cool kids realize they actually aren’t all that cool and thugs realize they aren’t tough at all. Basic training is as hard on the mind and soul as it is on the body. You realize humanity is bonkers insane, but there is a bonding that occurs . . . a “we’re all in this hell together” sort of thing.^[6]

4 Running

Running is essential to all aspects of military life. In basic, you’re up at 0435 Hours and on the road by 0500. Running is split into three groups. Group A are the all-stars, the ones able to do a two-mile run in under fifteen minutes. Group B are your average runners who need improvement. Group C are those who should have worked out more before signing their enlistment contract. A recruiter clearly floated them past the initial tests for the bonus. You’re placed into your group pretty much from the start.

Fun little story, when I attended Fort Leonard Wood (we called it “Lost in the Woods”), my D.S., because I ran Group A, would allow me a slice of key lime pie . . . as long as I ate it in front of the Group C runners. Looking back, hilarious but malicious.^[7]

3 Wall Lockers and Contraband

Everything you own in basic is kept in something called a “wall locker”. These wall lockers are constantly inspected, and just like your uniform, must constantly be kept up to code. A standard punishment for a whole platoon or company would be having these wall lockers thrashed beyond imagination and then have to clean the mess back up and get it to code again. This makes hiding contraband very difficult. Contraband in basic isn’t what you think. I had my mother hide candy bars in new packages of socks and underwear she sent to me. A snickers bar could go for as much as $20. It was a luxury in hell. Some morons even went as far as to drink Listerine (now banned) or hand-sanitizer to try and get a buzz. Basic can lead to some desperate times.^[8]

2 The Outside World

As soon as you begin processing, all of your civilian documentation is taken away from you and you are left with a military issued I.D. and your debit card for the post exchange for soap and stationary. So, even if you were to sneak out of the barracks you still have no I.D. and you are confined, and probably being hunted, in a fortified first-world military compound. You’ll learn really quick you aren’t Jason Bourne.

You are also stripped of all communication devices. No cell phones, no tablets . . . nothing. I cannot stress this again. Nothing! You will not get access to email, and to this day everything is still analogue. You are allowed to hand-write letters on army–approved stationary and you get three phone calls the whole time. The first call once you get assigned to your company is to let your loved one’s know you are okay and where to send their letters. The second midway as a mental-reprieve, a reset for your soul to hear a loved one’s voice on the other end. And the final call to hopefully announce your pending graduation and success.

As for local and international news, every base puts out their own highly-censored weekly paper that everyone winds up fighting for to read the comics in the back. You are intentionally cut off from the world because the world is a distraction and you should only be focusing on your training. Plain and simple.^[9]

1 Graduation

You did it! It is one of the finest feelings in the world to graduate basic training. It is akin to the birth of a child or nailing a dream job. You are no longer a civilian. Throughout all those weeks you’ve learned to be a functioning human and soldier. You’re no longer some clueless dope leaving a mess everywhere you go. You can take care of yourself, clean-up after yourself, and most importantly . . . defend yourself.

Graduation is also the final bond for those who have been through hell with you. Military jargon for a fellow soldier is called a “Battle”. I am still in contact with my Battles and ask on a regular basis how they are doing as they do me. Every once in a while a message appears in my inbox asking “What’s good, Battle?”, reminding me that I was a part of something and I did something most people could not. I’m proud every day of my service and I wanted those who did not, or could not serve, to get a little taste of the beautiful and worthwhile hell I went through for almost three months. Over and out.^[10]

If you are interested in a career in the U.S. army, check out Go Army.

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