I read �Unrepentant Sinner� and came away with the same impression as dogzapper.

Askins, Jr. sure did like to kill people by bushwhacking them. IIRC he wrote a lot about hiding in the bushes along the Rio Grande and killing folks from ambush. I believe I�ve heard from some others, may be Ken Howell but I can�t recall for sure, that one of the colonel�s favorite things to do was kill people.

One anecdote he related really got to me. He was in a tank recovery unit during the war. Anyway, one time he went up to the front lines in a sector that was relatively quiet. The Americans were on one side of a river and the Germans on the other. This one German soldier would go down to the water�s edge to do his business every day (take a dump, to be blunt) in full view of the American lines. Nobody bothered him. Col. Askins finds out about this and decides to kill this guy, so waited about three hundred yards away in a building with an M1 Garand. When the guy appeared and was occupied with his �toilet�, the Col. shot and killed him. The Germans responded with a mortar barrage on the American positions.

What an a**hole! Okay, the guy was an enemy soldier and ostensibly the job in war is to kill the enemy. But for guys who have to live in close contact with the enemy one of the first rules of �real life� in a front line unit is � never stir up trouble if you don�t have to. Here the Col. kills a guy just for the fun of killing him, then he goes away and leaves the poor front line doggies to face the retribution. Who knows how many GI�s were killed or maimed because of the Colonel�s �fun�.

In retrospect, butthead is much too mild.

Gunnery, gunnery, gunnery.
Hit the target, all else is twaddle!