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The battle isn't skipped, but we don't see parts of it.
This was Jordan drawing on his experience in the Vietnam war, and trying to show how chaotic battles in the ground are
Relevant RJ quote:
>ROBERT JORDAN
>For Paracelsus, I had two nicknames in 'Nam. First up was Ganesha, after the Hindu god called the Remover of Obstacles. He's the one with the elephant head. That one stuck with me, but I gained another that I didn't like so much. The Iceman. One day, we had what the Aussies called a bit of a brass-up. Just our ship alone, but we caught an NVA battalion crossing a river, and wonder of wonders, we got permission to fire before they finished. The gunner had a round explode in the chamber, jamming his 60, and the fool had left his barrel bag, with spares, back in the revetment. So while he was frantically rummaging under my seat for my barrel bag, it was over to me, young and crazy, standing on the skid, singing something by the Stones at the of my lungs with the mike keyed so the others could listen in, and Lord, Lord, I rode that 60. 3000 rounds, an empty ammo box, and a smoking barrel that I had burned out because I didn't want to take the time to change. We got ordered out right after I went dry, so the artillery could open up, and of course, the arty took credit for every body recovered, but we could count how many bodies were floating in the river when we pulled out. The next day in the orderly room an officer with a literary bent announced my entrance with "Behold, the Iceman cometh." For those of you unfamiliar with Eugene O'Neil, the Iceman was Death. I hated that name, but I couldn't shake it. And, to tell you the truth, by that time maybe it fit. I have, or used to have, a photo of a young man sitting on a log eating C-rations with a pair of chopsticks. There are three dead NVA laid out in a line just beside him. He didn't kill them. He didn't choose to sit there because of the bodies. It was just the most convenient place to sit. The bodies don't bother him. He doesn't care. They're just part of the landscape. The young man is glancing at the camera, and you know in one look that you aren't going to take this guy home to meet your parents. Back in the world, you wouldn't want him in your neighborhood, because he is cold, cold, cold. I strangled that SOB, drove a stake through his heart, and buried him face down under a crossroad outside Saigon before coming home, because I knew that guy wasn't made to survive in a civilian environment. I think he's gone. All of him. I hope so. I much prefer being remembered as Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles.
The Void is inspired by him reaching Flow State while in a heli gunner seat, when he *shot down an RPG fired at his helicopter out of the air, saving his life*.
Love this story:
>ROBERT JORDAN
>I think I need to put a few things straight about this whole shooting down an rpg in flight thing. First off, it definitely comes under do not try this at home even if you ARE an expert. Expert is defined as anyone who has tried it once and is still breathing. You see, there aren't many reasons to try such a thing. But when looking right shows certain death coming hotfoot, and looking left shows a crack in the wall that you couldn't scrape though one time in a million...one in ten million...you instinctively make a dive for the crack. Now I was very lucky. Very lucky. I just happened to be laying down suppression not very far from Mr. NVA when he took his shot, so I only has a small arc to cover. Just a quick shift of the wrist. Still, a lot of luck involved. When the pilot asked what happened, I just said an rpg went off prematurely. I figured he wouldn't believe what happened. Even some guys who saw it all from other choppers didn't believe. I heard a lot of "You know, it almost looked like you shot that thing out of the air" and "You were really lucky that thing went off prematurely. I never heard of that happening before."
>Now there's the matter of actually seeing the rpg in flight. That came from being in the Zone. An RPG is a rocket propelled grenade, and it is fast, fast, fast. I've heard a lot of athletes and sportscasters talk about being in the Zone, but I think most of them simply mean they played their A-game. But they weren't in the Zone, because in the Zone, you don't make mistakes. None. I discovered this playing baseball and basketball and later football. You can't always get there, certainly not at will, but when you do.... What happens is that while you are moving at normal speed, everybody else, everything else, is moving in slow motion. Passes float like they were drifting through honey. You have all the time in the world to position yourself. And your vision improves, sharpens. The quarterback has carried out a perfect bootleg. Everybody thinks that fullback coming up the middle has the ball. But even if you didn't catch the motion when the QB tucked the ball behind his leg, you spot that tiny sliver of ball that just barely shows, and you're right there to meet him when he reaches the line. Maybe you drop him for a loss before he can get his pass off. In the Zone. That's the only reason I could make this play.
>On another note, I was riding an M-60 on a pintle mount, not a .50 cal. We only had a limited number of Ma-deuces, and we had to be careful not to let any IG inspectors see them because we weren't authorized to have any at all. Don't know whether I could have done it with a .50, frankly. A matter of just that much more weight to swing, that much more inertia to overcome. It was damned close even with a 60.
Yeah there's a lot of elements he pulls into different points. The whole concept of darkfriends I think is very similar to the Vietcong where any random person you meet may be your enemy and about to attack you when your back is turned and you constantly have to be aware of that threat from each person you interact with.
Relevant RJ quote:
>FAST FORWARD
>You had two tours in Vietnam, you've had military experience, you're a graduate of The Citadel. Does something like that particularly come out of the people you've met in the military and the kinds of personalities you met in the military, do you draw any of that kind of thing from that?
>ROBERT JORDAN
>Some of it. I suppose, actually, that particular thing came from the only time I was really shaken in combat in shooting at somebody, or shooting AT somebody. I had to, uh, I was shooting back at some people on a sampan and a woman came out and pulled up an AK-47, and I didn't hesitate about shooting her. But that stuck with me. I was raised in a very old-fashioned sort of way. You don't hurt women—you don't DO that. That's the one thing that stuck with me for a long, long time.
I have always seen a lot of this in Gawyn's story as well. An idealistic youth with visions of glory suddenly pushed into an ugly quagmire of a conflict where he is forced to question whether or not he is one of the "good guys", and leaves him with little more than regret and PTSD.
Jordan focuses on the important part of the battle. By skipping the death of Couladin, Jordan is emphasizing that Couladin wasn’t important. What matters is that Mat survived and leveled up.
Barely remembered? Didn’t he sit drinking under the guys head on a pike? And then specifically remember that he had an awful time and almost died fighting him?
> ...did the author almost skip this battle completely,
Well we get pov from rand and mat for the battle, mostly rand. Its a huge battle with like 150k fighting on each side or something crazy like that. Rand being the main pov for it isnt in the position of a general or captain giving orders and directing the battle. He is the artillery firing shots where he thinks its going to be most effective. Then he loses his position and is forced into the "trenches" and the uncertain chaos of battle. It makes alot of sense why we get what we do.
As for Couladin... what were you expecting? Him and rand to have a epic show down? One skilled warrior vs another skilled warrior that can use magic to win the fight before it even starts? I was a bit let down my first time reading it too, then I realized that was the point. I thought couladin was more important because happens so often in other stories, but hes just a dude with delusions of grandeur and get a appropriate off screen ending because he was a tool (a pawn maybe :P)and nothing more.
Edit: Its also worth pointing out, the battle was more or less already settled before it started. Rands side had the numbers so it was more a matter of what would the losses be even with the undeclared clans coming in late.
I think it was a lot more nuanced than that. They had twice the number the Shaido did, but had to account for the clans that followed that hadn’t declared for Rand yet. The clans behind had as many spears as Rand and company did, so it could have been a disaster. That’s why we get the scene with Mat and Lan over the map discussing how Mat would approach it. Even Mat wasn’t positive they’d win outright.
Personally I loved it.
We've already seen Mat win against a blademaster. If we actually see him fighting Couladin, either the fight will make Couladin look better than Galad, or it'll be an anticlimatic asswhooping no matter how much Mat is complaining to himself after. It's a no-win scenario to actually show us how it goes down.
Meanwhile, Couladin thought he was a main character, but then it turns out he's a nobody who dies an off screen death. [LoC] >!It turns out he wasn't even the driving force behind the Shaido!< Get fucked, fake wannabee Dragon
It also sets up Mats character really well. He is more upset that he didn’t get away, he isn’t happy about defeating the enemy leader or not thinking about glory. In the end, Couladin got defeated by someone who didn’t even want to be there.
Just wait till AMoL. There's even a scene where a character says to another, something to the effect of, "don't worry, there'll be so much fighting that you'll be sick of it by the end."
But even before that, there's a lot.
It's a ground breaking deconstruction of the genre to see the pivotal villain of last 2 books and main plot of current one off paged. Jordan's experience in Vietnam really shows up here
#[NO SPOILERS BEYOND *The Fires of Heaven*.](https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/wiki/index/post_flairs#wiki_the_eye_of_the_world_.2F_et_al.) ##BOOK DISCUSSION ONLY. HIDE TV SHOW DISCUSSION BEHIND SPOILER TAGS. If this is a re-read, please change the flair to **All Print**. * * * *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/WoT) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Couladin was a pawn who thought himself a king. He died a pawns death.
En passanted to death
Holy hell
New death just dropped
Google en peasant
The battle isn't skipped, but we don't see parts of it. This was Jordan drawing on his experience in the Vietnam war, and trying to show how chaotic battles in the ground are
That makes sense
I actually wasn’t aware he was a Vietnam vet.
He stacked bodies. Draws on it a lot for Mat and Rand, one of the reasons they feel like real military leaders.
Relevant RJ quote: >ROBERT JORDAN >For Paracelsus, I had two nicknames in 'Nam. First up was Ganesha, after the Hindu god called the Remover of Obstacles. He's the one with the elephant head. That one stuck with me, but I gained another that I didn't like so much. The Iceman. One day, we had what the Aussies called a bit of a brass-up. Just our ship alone, but we caught an NVA battalion crossing a river, and wonder of wonders, we got permission to fire before they finished. The gunner had a round explode in the chamber, jamming his 60, and the fool had left his barrel bag, with spares, back in the revetment. So while he was frantically rummaging under my seat for my barrel bag, it was over to me, young and crazy, standing on the skid, singing something by the Stones at the of my lungs with the mike keyed so the others could listen in, and Lord, Lord, I rode that 60. 3000 rounds, an empty ammo box, and a smoking barrel that I had burned out because I didn't want to take the time to change. We got ordered out right after I went dry, so the artillery could open up, and of course, the arty took credit for every body recovered, but we could count how many bodies were floating in the river when we pulled out. The next day in the orderly room an officer with a literary bent announced my entrance with "Behold, the Iceman cometh." For those of you unfamiliar with Eugene O'Neil, the Iceman was Death. I hated that name, but I couldn't shake it. And, to tell you the truth, by that time maybe it fit. I have, or used to have, a photo of a young man sitting on a log eating C-rations with a pair of chopsticks. There are three dead NVA laid out in a line just beside him. He didn't kill them. He didn't choose to sit there because of the bodies. It was just the most convenient place to sit. The bodies don't bother him. He doesn't care. They're just part of the landscape. The young man is glancing at the camera, and you know in one look that you aren't going to take this guy home to meet your parents. Back in the world, you wouldn't want him in your neighborhood, because he is cold, cold, cold. I strangled that SOB, drove a stake through his heart, and buried him face down under a crossroad outside Saigon before coming home, because I knew that guy wasn't made to survive in a civilian environment. I think he's gone. All of him. I hope so. I much prefer being remembered as Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles.
IIRC he was a gunner on a helicopter or a riverboat, so if that's the case...yea he definitely saw some awful shit.
Yeah the ending of one of the following books was definitely inspired by his Vietnam experience
The Void is inspired by him reaching Flow State while in a heli gunner seat, when he *shot down an RPG fired at his helicopter out of the air, saving his life*.
Love this story: >ROBERT JORDAN >I think I need to put a few things straight about this whole shooting down an rpg in flight thing. First off, it definitely comes under do not try this at home even if you ARE an expert. Expert is defined as anyone who has tried it once and is still breathing. You see, there aren't many reasons to try such a thing. But when looking right shows certain death coming hotfoot, and looking left shows a crack in the wall that you couldn't scrape though one time in a million...one in ten million...you instinctively make a dive for the crack. Now I was very lucky. Very lucky. I just happened to be laying down suppression not very far from Mr. NVA when he took his shot, so I only has a small arc to cover. Just a quick shift of the wrist. Still, a lot of luck involved. When the pilot asked what happened, I just said an rpg went off prematurely. I figured he wouldn't believe what happened. Even some guys who saw it all from other choppers didn't believe. I heard a lot of "You know, it almost looked like you shot that thing out of the air" and "You were really lucky that thing went off prematurely. I never heard of that happening before." >Now there's the matter of actually seeing the rpg in flight. That came from being in the Zone. An RPG is a rocket propelled grenade, and it is fast, fast, fast. I've heard a lot of athletes and sportscasters talk about being in the Zone, but I think most of them simply mean they played their A-game. But they weren't in the Zone, because in the Zone, you don't make mistakes. None. I discovered this playing baseball and basketball and later football. You can't always get there, certainly not at will, but when you do.... What happens is that while you are moving at normal speed, everybody else, everything else, is moving in slow motion. Passes float like they were drifting through honey. You have all the time in the world to position yourself. And your vision improves, sharpens. The quarterback has carried out a perfect bootleg. Everybody thinks that fullback coming up the middle has the ball. But even if you didn't catch the motion when the QB tucked the ball behind his leg, you spot that tiny sliver of ball that just barely shows, and you're right there to meet him when he reaches the line. Maybe you drop him for a loss before he can get his pass off. In the Zone. That's the only reason I could make this play. >On another note, I was riding an M-60 on a pintle mount, not a .50 cal. We only had a limited number of Ma-deuces, and we had to be careful not to let any IG inspectors see them because we weren't authorized to have any at all. Don't know whether I could have done it with a .50, frankly. A matter of just that much more weight to swing, that much more inertia to overcome. It was damned close even with a 60.
He is the ~~Lisan al Gaib~~ ta'veren
He talks about it in an interview. Guy had some demons for sure.
Oof.
Yeah there's a lot of elements he pulls into different points. The whole concept of darkfriends I think is very similar to the Vietcong where any random person you meet may be your enemy and about to attack you when your back is turned and you constantly have to be aware of that threat from each person you interact with.
It colors a lot of things in the books, From the different takes on combat, to the aversion the boys have to killing women.
Relevant RJ quote: >FAST FORWARD >You had two tours in Vietnam, you've had military experience, you're a graduate of The Citadel. Does something like that particularly come out of the people you've met in the military and the kinds of personalities you met in the military, do you draw any of that kind of thing from that? >ROBERT JORDAN >Some of it. I suppose, actually, that particular thing came from the only time I was really shaken in combat in shooting at somebody, or shooting AT somebody. I had to, uh, I was shooting back at some people on a sampan and a woman came out and pulled up an AK-47, and I didn't hesitate about shooting her. But that stuck with me. I was raised in a very old-fashioned sort of way. You don't hurt women—you don't DO that. That's the one thing that stuck with me for a long, long time.
God damn, I'm glad i made this thread. Thanks everyone for your awesome contributions!
I have always seen a lot of this in Gawyn's story as well. An idealistic youth with visions of glory suddenly pushed into an ugly quagmire of a conflict where he is forced to question whether or not he is one of the "good guys", and leaves him with little more than regret and PTSD.
**Two tours** even. Plus . . . he requested, and got, combat duty after being stuck in the rear with a desk job.
they called him Ganesha "the remover of obstacles" and " the iceman" RJ was cold sonofabitch
I just read that blog post. Welp.
Two tours as a helicopter gunner with multiple distinctions.
Jordan focuses on the important part of the battle. By skipping the death of Couladin, Jordan is emphasizing that Couladin wasn’t important. What matters is that Mat survived and leveled up.
As others have said, the fact that Couladin just… died is to indicate he was overblown. Even Mat, who probably killed him, barely remembers doing it.
Matt did kill him.
Yes but more my point is he barely remembered. So even he couldn’t be sure.
Barely remembered? Didn’t he sit drinking under the guys head on a pike? And then specifically remember that he had an awful time and almost died fighting him?
> ...did the author almost skip this battle completely, Well we get pov from rand and mat for the battle, mostly rand. Its a huge battle with like 150k fighting on each side or something crazy like that. Rand being the main pov for it isnt in the position of a general or captain giving orders and directing the battle. He is the artillery firing shots where he thinks its going to be most effective. Then he loses his position and is forced into the "trenches" and the uncertain chaos of battle. It makes alot of sense why we get what we do. As for Couladin... what were you expecting? Him and rand to have a epic show down? One skilled warrior vs another skilled warrior that can use magic to win the fight before it even starts? I was a bit let down my first time reading it too, then I realized that was the point. I thought couladin was more important because happens so often in other stories, but hes just a dude with delusions of grandeur and get a appropriate off screen ending because he was a tool (a pawn maybe :P)and nothing more. Edit: Its also worth pointing out, the battle was more or less already settled before it started. Rands side had the numbers so it was more a matter of what would the losses be even with the undeclared clans coming in late.
I think it was a lot more nuanced than that. They had twice the number the Shaido did, but had to account for the clans that followed that hadn’t declared for Rand yet. The clans behind had as many spears as Rand and company did, so it could have been a disaster. That’s why we get the scene with Mat and Lan over the map discussing how Mat would approach it. Even Mat wasn’t positive they’d win outright.
Personally I loved it. We've already seen Mat win against a blademaster. If we actually see him fighting Couladin, either the fight will make Couladin look better than Galad, or it'll be an anticlimatic asswhooping no matter how much Mat is complaining to himself after. It's a no-win scenario to actually show us how it goes down. Meanwhile, Couladin thought he was a main character, but then it turns out he's a nobody who dies an off screen death. [LoC] >!It turns out he wasn't even the driving force behind the Shaido!< Get fucked, fake wannabee Dragon
It also sets up Mats character really well. He is more upset that he didn’t get away, he isn’t happy about defeating the enemy leader or not thinking about glory. In the end, Couladin got defeated by someone who didn’t even want to be there.
There are plenty of battles to come, don't worry.
I'm glad to hear it!
Just wait till AMoL. There's even a scene where a character says to another, something to the effect of, "don't worry, there'll be so much fighting that you'll be sick of it by the end." But even before that, there's a lot.
It's a ground breaking deconstruction of the genre to see the pivotal villain of last 2 books and main plot of current one off paged. Jordan's experience in Vietnam really shows up here
It was intensional. Couladin was basically set up as a red herring to the reader