A pale and skinny kid, trained as a typist, he's thrown into battle as the tank's forward machine-gunner.
He warned his colleagues, most of whom expected a short war, that the conflict would be decided by the last 1,000,000 men that Great Britain could throw into battle.
The biggest rebel brigade in Misrata, Halbus, is to be thrown into battle after returning to Sirte from the newly captured towns of Hun and Waddan further south.
Dogs have been treated well and treated badly, thrown into battle and laid on sofas and bred into unnatural shapes, and yet each new birth produces a litter of Edenic puppies that develop entirely unaffected by their ancestors' ambiguous past.
The sadness had many aspects: the squandered effort to dig a mine, packed with gunpowder, under enemy lines; drunken, incompetent Union officers; rookie black units thrown into battle, to be slaughtered by Confederates determined to take no black prisoners.
For Hasenhüttl, this proved a harsh induction to the Premier League, with the Austrian thrown into battle with a tenacious Cardiff side after just two training sessions with his new team.
On the docks, which are under heavy shelling, people run wildly in every direction, and the men are handed rifles and thrown into battle — forced to run directly into German fire in a wide-open city square.
The rush to raise the strength of the Afghan security forces to 352,000 resulted in training courses being curtailed and, on occasions, these forces being thrown into battle before they were fully prepared; the losses among the country's army and police have been horrendously high in the past year.
And how could Nabokov dismiss The Magic Mountain, that great 20th-century parable of political blindness, where idealists, such as Hans Castorp, cut themselves off in the rarefied milieu of a sanatorium, only to be thrown into battle, Hans Castorp, his face in the mire, a field awash with death, scattered bits of humanity and muck, having to get up, trudge on and vanish out of sight.
If such forces are thrown into battle against IS-held Sunni areas with US air support under a new al-Abadi government, the Americans might find themselves doing what they have been trying to avoid - backing one side in a sectarian civil war involving horrendous carnage and destruction.
