I'm immensely glad that these soldiers, Brit and American are prepared to go to war and to put their lives on the line on all of our behalf. But it is on our behalf and our armed forces will inevitably (and should quite rightly) reflect our societies. The differences between how Brit and US forces operate are thus interesting. The bottom line is that Brit senior officers, troops and pilots can do their jobs without all the overblown gung ho rhetoric, the whooping and hollering and when interviewed show bright, enthusiastic and intelligent competence. The thread began simply as a salute to Brimms and Burridge and their like, and though the gung ho attitudes of some of the US officers (who happen to be those pushed forward to appear on TV and who may be unrepresentative) may discomfort me, it wasn't intended as Yank bashing more generally.
At the end of the day the rhetoric, Arnie-style simplification and whooping is clearly not NECESSARY for military success. (Some would suspect quite the reverse).
Desparado
There's nothing at all wrong with excitement and 'relief at survival', and as I've said I can quite understand the desire to whoop if you kill enemy troops who've delayed your advance, killed your mates or scared you to death, or even to shoot the ba$tards if you capture them. If all troops acted the same on the battlefield, one would naturally assume that this was just an inevitable human reaction, but they do not all act the same, and this reaction does seem to be characteristically American. It sickened me when I saw it, whereas now I'm inclined to chalk it up to my inability to understand people from a very different culture.
HAL pilot
I like your grasp of history as much as I admire your spelling, and I'm sure that many will be amused by your implied characterisation of Monty (and Brit forces more generally) as a timid, gun-shy nervous fop by comparison with Patton (!) and by comparison with the man who wanted to nuke the Koreans.