Reply #17: Slip-of-the-keyboard error in footnote: should have written "Ottoman"...

[newswolf56]

rather than "Byzantine": Johnny Turk (not Count Belisarius' superb and indomitable mounted archers).

Saw a film called "the Lost Battalion" but don't remember if it was made for TV. In the version I watched -- story of an American unit surrounded in the Argonne Forest -- some of the British troops (the relief column? I frankly don't remember) were armed not with the historically correct S.M.L.E. #1 Mk III but with the much later Rifle #4 Mks I and II, which produced a predictable chorus of jeers and guffaws from my gun-savvy companions and me. I remember one of the actors had played a Gulf War vet on NYPD Blue.

You're right about a conservative middle-class element that staffs the U.S. military, but I think they are almost exclusively in the officer corps: they often enter via enlistment (as I did) but then quickly opt for Officer Candidate School (which despite my high test scores even in the Vietnam Era I could never have done: middle class I wasn't, and what's more my family was not only not conservative but politically suspect).