"Krztalizer" wrote in message
...

Hold on a bit. Bravery is not a never-ending supply.

Agree, Walt. Bravery and, just as important, mental sharpness both
are
exhaustible resources.

No argument with either of those *facts*. There is a breaking point for
anyone,
it's just in different places and triggerable by different events.....

Look what happened to Guy Gibson - too many times to the well and
ended up
killing his hapless "navigator" and himself. His "bravery" (or
internal drive
to grapple with the enemy) was the primary reason both of these airmen
died.

Oh? Actually I thought the mainspar failed in the Mosquito after being
previously
overstressed in a very high G pullout elsewhere? Or am I thinking of
someone else?

snip

Expecting men to face death daily over a period of years is not a way
to find
out who is brave and who is not

No, and I wasn't implying anything of the kind. My statement about
courage seems
to have become out of context. IIRC, it was Gibson(?) who said that
there were 2
kinds of courage, the man who simply feels 'it can't/won't happen to
me', perhaps somewhat
unimaginative in that respect, and who is therefore more readily able to
do dangerous things
supposedly without being *really* afraid and the other kind, who *knows*
that it *can* happen to him,
perhaps through seeing just one too many close friends or associates
'get the chop' or just through
being more 'imaginative' BUT still 'carry on' regardless. IIRC, he
considered the second kind the bravest
of the brave. He put himself in the first category. I'm in no position
to argue with him, or indeed anyone
who's 'been there'.

- its simply a way to expend them like
cartridges, or leave many of them as broken shadows for the rest of
their
lives.

True enough. I could hypothesise that the first kind could suddenly
lose that belief in their immortality
that seems natural in those under about 30 through constant trauma.
Perhaps enough to make them
unable to carry on in the same way. (As did Art's "Captain Johnson" I
think). That he 'lost his bottle'
as the poms put it, was just one man reaching his breaking point.

The CO