The infantry as peltast in Vietnam

One of my faithful readers (perhaps the only faithful reader of this blog) asked me the other day why I devote so much more energy to my other blog, www.mokurendojo.blogspot.com. I have a couple of what i consider to be pretty good reasons. First, it's a matter of personal preference. I simply enjoy thinking and writing about about martial arts more than I enjoy reading books and writing about what I think of them. That doesn't mean that this blog is worse or anything - Mokuren Dojo is just what I do. Secondly, and this is really a better reason, it takes me much longer to read a book and come up with something thoughtful to write about - especially when I get to read for about 15 minutes before bedtime each night.

Anyway, I've been reading Ebert's A Life in a Year and something interesting occurred to me. Ebert says that a commonly used tactic was to run swarms of little patrols through the jungle until they encountered the enemy. Then the patrols, who were unequiped to apply necessary force to destroy the enemy, would fall back and hold while they called in air support to blow up the enemy. Basically the infantry was used as bait to draw the enemy out so the air support could kill them.

Interestingly, the same tactic was used in ancient Greece. The ancients had two classes of soldiers - essentially lightand heavy infantry. The heavy infantry were well armored and well armed and were known as Hoplites. The light infantry were called peltasts and were virtually naked but for wicker shields and several javelins each. Xenophon mentions peltasts throughout the Anabasis, such as...

So, too, Xenias arrived at Sardis with the contingent from the cities, four thousand hoplites; Proxenus,also, with fifteen hundred hoplites and five hundred light-armed troops; Sophaenetus the Stymphalian, with one thousand hoplites; Socrates the Achaean, with five hundred hoplites; while the Megarion, Pasion came with three hundred hoplites and three hundred peltasts.

And, though I can't come up with a concrete example from the literature right now, the peltasts were pretty much used in the same way as the infantry in Vietnam. They were there to engage and delay and steer the enemy such that the hoplites could smite them properly.

And who got the glory? Sure wasn't the dudes with the paper shields. Hoplites like Achiles, Agamemnon, and Hector (though Hector was actually cavalry not hoplite).