What makes a good soldier brothers in arms

But, try as they might, video games could only capture the surface-level brutality of war but said nothing about it. Put simply: they were era-standard shooters in WW2 skins and why, even now, I only vividly remember those beach landings and barely anything else.

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 - inspired by Band of Brothers in particular - seemed to hint at something more and, when it was released in March , I was not disappointed.

In Road to Hill 30, you play as Sergeant Matt Baker voiced by pre-fame namesake, Troy who, as the intro explains, has leadership thrust upon him shortly after landing in Normandy. During the inner monologues that head each mission, you hear from Baker how uncomfortable it makes him, how he laments having the lives of thirteen men and their families hanging on his every decision. We learn about the things that helped shape him as a leader though anecdotes of fatherly advice and other childhood memories.

We also hear Baker trying to rationalise the things that happen to these characters during their first operation, and how his mental state unravels when feeling out of control. These monologues do not merely serve as exposition but instead help Baker and his team feel like real people - real people whose relationships despite some retrospectively-hammy voice acting take centre stage as they banter and argue in rare moments of calm, and scream at each other when hell breaks loose.

Baker's first loss, for example, is his home-town best friend - a tank driver called George Risner who dies in the push to St. Squad tensions run high in the aftermath as everyone turns on sole-survivor Leggett, though Baker only blames himself for not being there to stop it. The other reason Brothers in Arms took my fancy was because, even back then, we were fast-approaching first-person shooter saturation, not only in terms of military-themed shooters, but WW2 shooters especially.

Brothers in Arms, though, put you right in the centre of it and with a gun in your hand, having you orchestrate skirmishes from eye level. And positioning your teams thoughtfully is vital because shooting an enemy yourself is intentionally difficult. Guns bob wildly when looking down iron sights, making it pointless shooting at enemies that pop out from cover though this became considerably easier as the series progressed , and your aim only gets worse when under fire yourself.

And somehow, despite action being technically slower than its WW2 stablemates - there's no sprint button in the first two games and you and your team are often in cover - Brothers in Arms creates a terrific illusion where skirmishes feel frantic and dramatic, more so than a lot of twitch shooters, as you bark orders at your teams and scream for covering fire as bullets whiz by.

Released in the same year as Road to Hill 30, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood was an incredibly quick-fire sequel that made only minimal changes to the formula, but its tweaked A. In tandem with larger battlefields, this led to combat sequences that felt more organic, ebbing and flowing in and out of your favour, and way more satisfying to overcome.

Earned in Blood also had a little more variety in locales too with urban areas, though they were mostly levelled. Earned in Blood's story is told through Hartsock. In the aftermath of Carentan, for example, while Baker was celebrated by his superiors for lone-wolfing and bringing in tanks to save the day, some of his crew feel aggrieved.

Where Baker went right to meet up with the armoured division, Red took a team left to cut off the Nazi reinforcements heading towards their last line of defence.

We gain new insights into Baker in Earned in Blood. Earned in Blood focuses less on the mental struggle of leadership and tackles the subject from a different angle — defiance.

Hartsock tells the historian how he and Baker once had the unluckiest number painted on their helmets to tempt fate - if fate wanted them, it could have them.

By extension, brothers in arms are also men who share a very close, strong relationship. Though brothers in arms originated as a means to show the unique bond between those who serve together, by at least the s it was being used for strong bonds between civilian men forged by some shared experience.

In military contexts, brothers in arms is often used of soldiers after their time of service. Men call each other brothers in arms brother in arms , in the singular in a variety of formal and informal contexts other than war, though it always suggests a resolute, unquestioned, and valorous-styled support for one another.

The expression is common in sports, with teammates sometimes calling one another brothers in arms. Brothers in arms has also notably lent itself to popular media. British rock band Dire Straits named a album and title track Brothers in Arms , which often plays at military funerals. First launched in , Brothers in Arms is also the name of a World War II-based first-person shooter video-game series.

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This is what Wayne A. Meeks has to say about Christian soldiers in his groundbreaking study First Urban Christians , which mapped the social world of the Pauline churches for example, pointing out that Philippi was a Roman colony consisting of veterans.

Why are soldiers passed over? This is the way in which scholars usually discuss the military. Nearly all scholars focusing on soldiers in early Christianity basically consider them in a modern sense, not a historical one. More precisely, this motivation springs from the needs of modern Christian ethics, in which soldiers, wars and armies represent nothing but a problem. The present situation of scholarly discussion makes me treat earlier studies with caution. In the words of David G.

Some may be right. To give an example, C. The book surveys biblical and other early Christian texts, both pro- and antimilitary, and yet it has Christian pacifism as its underlying mission.

Cadoux thought that there was an original antimilitary ethos in early Christianity, which he traced back to Jesus. Interestingly, Harnack shared this view.

Both avoid falling prey to the popular misconception that the existence of a Christian soldier would be a possibility only after the Constantinian turn in the fourth century.

Unlike Harnack, Cadoux thought that the positive attitude was a minor trend even after the Constantinian turn. He criticized Harnack and other scholars for overestimating the approval given to Christian soldiers in the early Church. In the early Church Cadoux found what he needed to provide an arguable ethical judgment against any participation in bloodshed. He was also sensitive to the fact that there were Christian soldiers in the early Church and that they were more or less tolerated.

Cadoux explains the participation of early Christians in the army as the result of a certain immaturity of reflection, noting that there was no exigent reason for such reflection: Christians could easily avoid enlistment in the army, if they liked.

But the lack of reflection also made room for various compromises. He can admit early Christian participation in the army as long as he can find an authoritative pacifistic tradition originating in Jesus and looming large enough in the early Church. After the horrors of World War I , Cadoux found a modern function for the tradition he constructed. This, however, is not my interest. What can we say about them in historical terms?

My aim is to make a shift from applied exegesis to a more historically oriented one. The earliest indisputably documented Christian soldiers served in the late second century. This is mostly the case with the recent study Soldiering for God by John F. Shean, whose viewpoint is largely historical without any overt theological or ethical program.

He engages in groundbreaking work at the crossroads of Christianity and the Roman army. Yet, even the earlier documents should undergo scrutiny from a historical standpoint. In the historical approach, one should be open to differing views instead of searching for one, in particular only one, authoritative Christian stance; it is typical for many studies to pursue the Christian view on war and soldiers. As Shean rightly notes, early Christianity was not a unanimous movement.

He continues:. This also means that there was no effective control over who could be a member of these different groups and that it is not possible to say with any assurance that soldiers could not be found among those calling themselves Christians. Nor can it be said that all Christian groups would have had the same attitude towards the use of violence. The core of my interest does not lie in the general ethics of love and nonviolence, although I will take a short look at these in the Sermon on the Mount.

There is a more direct road in our quest to discover early Christian soldiers: those passages where soldiers are mentioned.

How true these passages are in terms of the historical record is another matter, however. Fortunately, the question of the historicity of the descriptions is not of primary importance. What is important is the fact that the descriptions surely bear the values of their Christian authors. One must be careful not to conclude too much based on scanty evidence, for the values that the portrayals express are not straightforward.

In this sense there is a danger of interpreting the values anachronistically, if one does not realize that value judgments always represent opinions within a certain social situation. Focusing on the social situation brings us out of the abstract domain of values and grounds us in a more historically reliable context.

Such a position helps to anticipate with greater accuracy the actual practices within early Christianity. Brink concludes that Luke piggybacks on the negative picture of soldiers in order to let Jesus exonerate them, like tax collectors and sinners. Kyrychenko thinks that centurions represent the Empire in the narrative and that the positive picture of them proves that the Empire was a receptive mission field.

Unfortunately, both studies focus only on Luke-Acts, which is just one among many early Christian sources. As I will argue, there are commonly two stereotypes in the ancient sources. The usual picture of centurions as different from the rank-and-file men is due to certain social factors. Thus, it is not enough to read just early Christian texts in the frames of the ancient stereotypes; it is also important to read behind the stereotypical representations and ask, what was the place of soldiers in the social reality of the Empire.

This makes us conscious of why the stereotypes are what they are. Social reality also makes us see where and how early Christians factually encountered soldiers. In this way, we can take a step closer toward historical reality. My thesis is that there were Christian soldiers from the very beginning of Christianity.

This does not mean that all Christians accepted the military vocation. Some did, some did not, and some did not even consider the matter. There are three large aspects regarding this matter: 1 the dual view of soldiers in the gospels, 2 the use of military metaphors, and 3 the difference between the non-military views of the early Christian theologians and the actual reality in the ranks of Christians, which included soldiers.

First, I treat the dual view of soldiers in the gospels: centurions seem to be positive characters, while the rank-and-file soldiers are more ambiguous figures, mostly negative ones. The modern phrasing of the question on early Christianity and the military has left scholars to emphasize either the positive or the negative side, depending on their interests in either defending or resisting Christian participation in the military.

He won't ever walk again. But he can talk And you know what he said? He asked me if any of us were worth it. We've all made mistakes. We've all questioned what we're doing here. And we all feel burdened by the cost of the fight. Especially in the face of defeat. But I am not retreating. I'm standing along side all of you. I'm still standing right here. I'll walk us straight into Berlin, if it's asked of us, and it probably will be. And I know some of you don't trust me right now.

Some of you are clinging to superstition. That ends right now. I know we feel like we need something to blame. But it's just a goddamn gun! Let's bring this fight back to the Germans. Brothers in Arms Wiki Explore. Brothers in Arms Series. David Wilson Cole Wright. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Farewell is Goodbye. Edit source History Talk 0. Cancel Save.