Reading the American Past: Printed Page 281
DOCUMENT 29–3
Military Discipline in an Unpopular War
Soldiers in Vietnam knew that they were fighting in a controversial war — one that did not have overwhelming public support at home, that seemed confusing and deadly in the field, and that seemed to be poorly supported by the Vietnamese army, government, and general population. The perceptions and experiences of American soldiers had important consequences for military discipline. In 1971, Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr., a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Marine Corps, cataloged in an army publication the state of military discipline among troops in Vietnam. Heinl's article, excerpted here, illustrates the demoralization within the armed forces while peace negotiators huddled with representatives of North Vietnam and the fighting continued.
Robert D. Heinl Jr.
The Collapse of the Armed Forces, June 7, 1971
The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous. ...
Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professionals who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat. ...
While no senior officer (especially one on active duty) can openly voice any such assessment, the foregoing conclusions find virtually unanimous support in numerous non-attributable interviews with responsible senior and midlevel officers, as well as career noncommissioned officers and petty officers in all services.
Historical precedents do exist for some of the services' problems, such as desertion, mutiny, unpopularity, seditious attacks, and racial troubles. Others, such as drugs, pose difficulties that are wholly new. Nowhere, however, in the history of the Armed Forces have comparable past troubles presented themselves in such general magnitude, acuteness, or concentrated focus as today. ...
To understand the military consequences of what is happening to the U.S. Armed Forces, Vietnam is a good place to start. It is in Vietnam that the rear-guard of a 500,000-man army, in its day (and in the observation of the writer) the best army the United States ever put into the field, is numbly extricating itself from a nightmare war the Armed Forces feel they had foisted on them by bright civilians who are now back on campus writing books about the folly of it all.
“They have set up separate companies,” writes an American soldier from Cu Chi, ... “for men who refuse to go out into the field. It is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don't even put on their uniforms any more. ... The American garrisons on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key. ... There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion.”
Can all this really be typical or even truthful? Unfortunately the answer is yes.
“Frag incidents” or just “fragging” is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs [noncommissioned officers]. With extreme reluctance (after a young West Pointer from Senator Mike Mansfield's Montana was fragged in his sleep) the Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970 (209) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96).
Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units. In one such division ... fraggings during 1971 have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week. ...
Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders whom the privates ... want to rub out.
Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969, the GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, GI Says, publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on LCol Weldon Honeycutt, the officer who ordered (and led) the attack. Despite several attempts, however, Honeycutt managed to live out his tour and return Stateside.
“Another Hamburger Hill” (i.e., toughly contested assault), conceded a veteran major, “is definitely out.”
The issue of “combat refusal,” an official euphemism for disobedience of orders to fight — the soldier's gravest crime — has only recently been again precipitated on the frontier of Laos. ...
“Search and evade” (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, “CYA (cover your ass) and get home!”
That “search-and-evade” has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation's recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that communist units in Indochina have been ordered not to engage American units which do not molest them. The same statement boasted — not without foundation in fact — that American defectors are in the VC ranks.
Symbolic antiwar fasts (such as the one at Pleiku where an entire medical unit, led by its officers, refused Thanksgiving turkey), peace symbols, “V”-signs not for victory but for peace, booing and cursing of officers and even of hapless entertainers such as Bob Hope, are unhappily commonplace.
As for drugs and race, Vietnam's problems today not only reflect but reinforce those of the Armed Forces as a whole. In April, for example, members of a Congressional investigating subcommittee reported that 10 to 15% of our troops in Vietnam are now using high-grade heroin, and that drug addiction there is “of epidemic proportions.”
Only last year an Air Force major and command pilot for Ambassador Bunker was apprehended at Tan Son Nhut air base outside Saigon with $8-million worth of heroin in his aircraft. This major is now in Leavenworth. ...
It is a truism that national armies closely reflect societies from which they have been raised. It would be strange indeed if the Armed Forces did not today mirror the agonizing divisions and social traumas of American society, and of course they do.
For this very reason, our Armed Forces outside Vietnam not only reflect these conditions but disclose the depths of their troubles in an awful litany of sedition, disaffection, desertion, race, drugs, breakdowns of authority, abandonment of discipline, and, as a cumulative result, the lowest state of military morale in the history of the country.
Sedition — coupled with disaffection within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable — infests the Armed Services:
At best count, there appear to be some 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas. Since 1970 the number of such sheets has increased 40% (up from 103 last fall). These journals are not mere gripe-sheets that poke soldier fun ... at the brass and the sergeants. “In Vietnam,” writes the Ft Lewis-McChord Free Press, “the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy.” Another West Coast sheet advises readers: “Don't desert. Go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer.”
At least 14 GI dissent organizations (including two made up exclusively of officers) now operate more or less openly. Ancillary to these are at least six antiwar veterans' groups which strive to influence GIs. ...
By present count at least 11 (some go as high as 26) off-base antiwar “coffee houses” ply GIs with rock music, lukewarm coffee, antiwar literature, how-to-do-it tips on desertion, and similar disruptive counsels. ...
Internally speaking, racial conflicts and drugs — also previously insignificant — are tearing the services apart today. ...
Racial conflicts (most but not all sparked by young black enlisted men) are erupting murderously in all services.
At a recent high commanders' conference, General Westmoreland and other senior generals heard the report from Germany that in many units white soldiers are now afraid to enter barracks alone at night for fear of “head-hunting” ambushes by blacks. ... All services are today striving energetically to cool and control this ugly violence which in the words of one noncommissioned officer, has made his once taut unit divide up “like two street gangs.” ...
The drug problem — like the civilian situation from which it directly derives — is running away with the services. In March, Navy Secretary John H. Chafee, speaking for the two sea services, said bluntly that drug abuse in both the Navy and Marines is out of control.
In 1966, the Navy discharged 170 drug offenders. Three years later (1969), 3,800 were discharged. Last year in 1970, the total jumped to over 5,000.
Drug abuse in the Pacific Fleet — with Asia on one side, and kinky California on the other — gives the Navy its worst headaches. To cite one example, a destroyer due to sail from the West Coast last year for the Far East nearly had to postpone deployment when, five days before departure, a ring of some 30 drug users (over 10 percent of the crew) was uncovered. ...
What those statistics say is that the Armed Forces (like their parent society) are in the grip of a drug pandemic — a conclusion underscored by the one fact that, just since 1968, the total number of verified drug addiction cases throughout the Armed Forces has nearly doubled. One other yardstick: according to military medical sources, needle hepatitis now poses as great a problem among young soldiers as VD. ...
With conditions what they are in the Armed Forces, and with intense efforts on the part of elements in our society to disrupt discipline and destroy morale the consequences can be clearly measured in two ultimate indicators: manpower retention (reenlistments and their antithesis, desertions); and the state of discipline.
In both respects the picture is anything but encouraging. ... Desertion rates are going straight up. ...
In 1970, the Army had 65,643 deserters, or roughly the equivalent of four infantry divisions. This desertion rate (52.3 soldiers per thousand) is well over twice the peak rate for Korea (22.5 per thousand). It is more than quadruple the 1966 desertion-rate (14.7 per thousand) of the then well-trained, high-spirited professional Army. ...
Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., Chief of Naval Operations, minces no words. “We have a personnel crisis,” he recently said, “that borders on disaster.” ...
The trouble of the services — produced by and also in turn producing the dismaying conditions described in this article — is above all a crisis of soul and backbone. It entails — the word is not too strong — something very near a collapse of the command authority and leadership George Washington saw as the soul of military forces. This collapse results, at least in part, from a concurrent collapse of public confidence in the military establishment.
From Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr., “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,” Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 1971; reprinted in Vietnam and America: A Documentary History, ed. Marvin E. Gettleman (New York: Grove Atlantic, 1995), 323–31.
Questions for Reading and Discussion