Breaking contact with the enemy

David Bellavia:

Starting out in the infantry, as with any profession or vocation, you learn basic skills. Every infantryman learns the same standardized plays-called "battle drills"-which are trained and retrained relentlessly. There are nine such drills in the infantry handbook, but battle drill number three always confused me: breaking contact. Essentially breaking contact is when you quit. You run away because the enemy fire is unrelenting and there is no hope to survive. The only way out is to retreat, or leave the terrain as quickly as possible-breaking contact. As it is with all infantry tactics, you can't just run away when being shot at. Infantrymen shoot their way out of most situations, good or bad.

I must have rehearsed the break contact drill thousands of times during my six years in the infantry. Sometimes we practiced the standard base-of-fire leapfrog and sometimes I taught the famous Australian Peel. These are just fancy ways of getting off the battlefield as quickly as possible with the least amount of causalities. We would constantly go over the fundamentals of retreating from battle, almost as much as we trained for knocking out a bunker or the other rudiments of close quarter's battle.

Those long days in the field practicing retreat were probably the only wasted training I received in my beloved Army. There must have been at least 10 times in battle during my time in Iraq when, according to doctrine, we should have broken contact; but we all knew the deal. We used every other battle drill during our time at war almost on a weekly basis....

...

When I joined Mike Company 3/3 in Northern I Corps Vietnam in the summer of 1968 the Battalion was in the middle of a fire fight. One of my classmates from Basic School who was a forward observer for the artillery had been killed trying to take an NVA prisoner with his 45 caliber pistol. the NVA soldier did the logical thing and unloaded on him with his AK-47. There wer other casualties that day and no doubt the NVA had casualties. They had managed to march right into the middle of a Marine battalion that was marching in the opposite direction.

But, as night approached, the battalion commander ordered us to march to another hill and set in for the evening rather than pursuing the remnants of the NVA platoon. It was an interesting introduction into the attrition warfare of Vietnam.

In Iraq the contact with the enemy if fleeting. Enemy forces tend to avoid contact with our forces instead focusing their attacks on non combatants and to a lesser extent Iraqi forces. Any attacks on US forces are usually a blast from and IED. Bellavia is right about our troops not backing down from a fight against this enemy. It is one reason why this enemy avoids contact with our forces whenever he can.