In actuality, of course, this idea is a tremendous and foolhardy simplification, and one that does not explore the extraordinary social and emotional burden that was placed on the average soldier. Indeed, even the war itself was an incredibly complex political and social conflagration- and the average American soldier was as much of an unwitting victim as (often) unwilling participant. What, then, was the environment in which American soldiers fought? What conditions existed among the American soldiers in Vietnam?
For the most part, US soldiers in Vietnam were influenced tremendously by the rapidly changing state of American society. The Vietnam war took place during (and was partially responsible for) one of the most significant social upheavals in American history, highlighted by volatility and anger: public sentiment quickly became radically anti-war, resulting in protests, deaths, numerous acts of violence, and widespread hatred and anger; distrust arose between the American people and their leaders due to revelations of seemingly illegal and immoral shadow operations; racial tensions remained extremely high during the entirety of the war- it was the first major conflict with an integrated military, and came squarely in the middle of the civil rights movement. In short, American society was fractured, volatile, and increasingly disillusioned with their leaders- and US soldiers carried the burdens and prejudices of this rapidly eroding society into a terrifying, violent, and dangerous land far from their home. These difficulties brought about the breakdown of discipline in the United States military in Vietnam, and forced Americans to fight war on two fronts: one with the Vietnamese, and the other among themselves.
Direct Disobedience
For all intents and purposes, the Vietnam war "officially" started under President Lyndon B Johnson in August, 1964- but President Kennedy had been contributing military resources (including ostensibly non-combat role forces) to South Vietnam for years. But, it was not until about 1965 that the war began to truly involve American forces fighting the Viet Cong in Vietnam. As the American war effort began to develop, and more and more troops were committed, public sentiment on the home front began to turn against further involvement. Here, it should be made clear: most people today believe that the war was fiercely and vocally protested by the majority of Americans- but these opinions have been somewhat distorted by sensationalist historical narratives popularized by today's media, and the truth is somewhat different. In fact, until about the third year of the war, the majority of Americans who responded to polls (by no means all) approved of American intervention in Vietnam. Those numbers quickly swayed the other way some time between 1968 and 1969- but not to the degree that many films and books today like to insinuate. Below is a graph from Gallup, a global polling site that collected approval ratings throughout the Vietnam war (last poll was 1973) and after:
As the numbers (which are obviously one single set of polls, and are subject to inaccuracy or misinterpretation) seem to indicate, the country was never as fiercely divided as modern narratives would have us believe. Even so, the numbers are significant and meaningful for our narrative, which is aimed at painting a picture of the soldier's environment in Vietnam. By 1968, Americans were only slightly less in favor of the war than they were in favor of it.
But, the voices of those who were against the war were far louder than those of the Americans supporting it. Protests against the war began as early as 1964, and were often covered closely by the media. As the years wore on, protests became more and more sensational as a higher and higher percentage of Americans disagreed with the war. It was impossible not to feel as though much of America was anti-war. You could find the anti-war sentiment in almost every American entertainment media at the time, from music and art to film and theater. Society as a whole resonated, "we are violently against the war." What's more, protesters of the Vietnam war often treated soldiers as criminals- as if they were responsible for the political choices that led their nation to war- as if they wanted to go to a foreign land to fight and die for an obscure political objective. Of course, the perceived war-resistance of their society left American soldiers confused, angry, and uncertain. They arrived in Vietnam to risk their lives, without any sense of national support from their fellow Americans. Any motivation they had for fighting the war was quickly quashed under a wave of civilian dissent.
In addition to this anti-war sentiment, there was also a much stronger distrust of authority that arose among the American people in response to a lack of transparency in the United States government. Only a few years before America officially became involved in Vietnam, President John Kennedy had ordered an attempted CIA coup of the communist Cuban government at the Bay of Pigs. The attempt was a catastrophic failure and, in the weeks that followed, it became obvious that it had been orchestrated by the American government. Interestingly enough, Kennedy was mostly applauded for taking action against communists, rather than criticized for his actions. But the failure was still an enormous blow to the perceived competency of both the Kennedy administration and the Presidency as a whole, and some citizens began to sense that the American government was not giving its people the full story. From there, distrust only grew: Lyndon B. Johnson, who initiated official United States involvement in Vietnam, was publicly a "man of the people", pushing forward his Great Society amidst political and social reforms. But, behind the curtain, he led a silent campaign to intentionally mislead the American people on how the Vietnam war was going. Outrage grew as the truth was uncovered, and public anger towards Johnson became so prolific that LBJ did not even consider running for a second presidential term. The man who took his place, Richard Nixon, requires no introduction. His secret invasion of Cambodia in 1970 without the approval of congress or the American people rapidly brought controversy to his tenure, and mired his excellent statesmanship in domestic troubles. Two years later, Nixon was forced to resign amidst public uproar over blatantly unconstitutional wiretapping, political espionage, and domestic policy. He remains the only US President to ever resign the office, and would have almost certainly been the only US President to ever be convicted in an impeachment trial. These incidents taught the American people one thing: their leaders were not to be trusted. The message became so deeply ingrained in American society, and political controversy so popularly discussed, that many American soldiers went to Vietnam with a deep distrust for authority- to be sure, the drive to rebel against authority had become ingrained in their national identity. It is easy to imagine how this would effect cohesion and discipline in combat.
To make matters even worse, the majority of American soldiers had not the slightest idea of why America was fighting in the first place. In reality, the war began in an effort to protect the ostensibly democratic state of South Vietnam from the communist North Vietnamese as part of America's policy of Communist-Containment. The goal was essentially to keep communism from gaining momentum- American authorities wanted no motivating ideological victory for the Russians and Chinese to use as a stepping stone for launching communism to greater heights. But, unlike the Second World War- where the political objectives of "eliminate Fascism" and "secure democracy" were easy for Allied soldier to translate into a tangible military goal of "kill Germans and Japanese to protect your nation and loved ones"- the political goal of Containment in Vietnam was shrouded in layer upon layer of ideological obfuscation that prevented American soldiers from patching together a meaningful, tangible military objective. Soldiers were told they were fighting the "dangerous enemy of communism"- but it was profoundly unclear who this enemy was, or how they were dangerous to their country, their families, or themselves. How does an ideology threaten anyone's physical security? To make matters even more unclear, the North Vietnamese were not even the primary manifestation of communism, but merely a peripheral enemy. Even to a learned man, there was little animosity to fuel combat against such a foe. But many American soldiers were not learned, and had scarcely any idea where Vietnam was, much less its cultural, political, and historical significance. They were told to travel to a hot, remote, mountainous, and rain-forested land to kill an enemy they had never heard of or laid eyes on or had a problem with. And why Americans should kill this so-called "enemy" was permanently unclear. E. E. LeMasters, a World War II veteran who protested the Vietnam war, angrily asked, “'I was in World War II and that was bad enough, but by God we at least knew what we were fighting for and who we were fighting against. But that poor kid they’re burying today—what the hell chance did he have to know why he was sent halfway around the world to fight for a goddamn country he never heard of?’”[2] David Brown, an infantryman in the U.S. Army remembered of his own experience, “The day David Brown came eyeball to eyeball with his first gook and blew half his face away with a submachine gun, he thought there must be some reason for what he was doing… But he never figured out what it was for. I was just fighting there, he thought when he was finally out. It was for nothing.”[14] The problem extended across all levels of American military command. Peter Goldman, a Newsweek correspondent, performed a post-war study of of the United States command in Vietnam: it was revealed that 69% (121 out of 173) of American commanding generals had been uncertain of why they were fighting in Vietnam. As a consequence, he claimed, “there was no one to explain it satisfactorily to the boys in the bunkers, and cynical theories flourished in the vacuum…”[13] When Vietnam veteran Lieutenant Robert J. Franco was asked what he thought his men had fought for, he responded simply, ‘They didn’t know what they were fighting for. They just knew they were there.’”
The average American soldier in Vietnam was, then, distrustful of his superiors, without purpose for which to fight, and lacking in tangible support from his fellow citizens. With this attitude in mind, he was placed into a densely forested and mountainous nation of high heat, higher humidity, and now intensely savage combat. As a result, disobedience was epidemic in the ranks. From 1968-1970 alone, there were 13,120 recorded instances of insubordination.[7] Records indicate that, throughout the course of the war, AWOL reports averaged at 10% of soldiers, an average of 3% of soldiers deserted, and there were over 300 court martial convictions for combat refusals. [43B] According to Vietnam veterans, however, those statistics are low- most cases of insubordination or combat refusal were never reported. For example, veteran Bob Bowers told Peter Goldman that he recalled one day in 1969, when he was sitting on a mound of dirt in Vietnam, wearing sunglasses, an item considered contraband in Vietnam. A major spotted him and, “called out, ‘Hey, what’s with these?’ Bowers stared silently back at him. ‘Hey,’ the major repeated, pointing to his eyes. Bowers picked up his M-16 and cocked it. The major went away.”[8] In his edited source anthology, The New Winter Soldier, Historian Richard A Moser described how fifty-three soldiers in Bravo Troop refused a direct order to fight in March 1971. Two months later, an entire platoon of the 1st Brigade made the same refusal, and only a week after that, a hundred men of Charlie Company refused a direct order to advance.[9] With all of the confusion, dissent, and distrust in the American military, it is a miracle that the United States managed to perform at all.
Race Relations
But, relations amongst soldiers were also immensely strained. When the war "began" in 1964, the African-American civil rights movement was in full bloom, and racial tensions were enormously high. At home, peaceful protests by blacks were often met with violent resistance from white authorities and citizens- riots broke out in many cities in response to police action and general discontent. The war itself was seen largely as a means to suppress American blacks- and not without justification. According to national statistics, 41% of the men drafted between 1966 and 1969 were from black, underprivileged families, despite blacks accounting for less than 10% of the American population.[43C] There were also a disproportionate number of African-American casualties. To most African-Americans, these statistics represented biased proceedings on the part of draft boards nationwide (which was, in fact, proven to be true in some southern states, where board members rigged drafts to select far more blacks). To make matters worse, over 56% of the black community disagreed with American involvement in Vietnam from the start. Muhammad Ali summarized the feelings of anti-war blacks at the time, "they want me to go to Vietnam to shoot some black folks that never lynched me, never called me nigger, never assassinated my leaders."[43C] Even at home, then, racial anger perforated the war.
But in Vietnam, things were worse than they were back home. Vietnam was the first American war to feature a "fully integrated" military, but such a term is a gross misrepresentation. Forced proximity, high stress, and brutal environment brought out the worst in both races. Upon the hearing of the assassination of MLK, some white soldiers publicly celebrated and flaunted the killing in front of black Americans. "At Cam Ranh Bay, a group of white men wore Ku Klux Klan robes and paraded around the military base." [43C] Some blacks followed suit by beating white soldiers who showed signs of discrimination, and forcing segregation in camps with signs reading: "No rabbits". In 1972, a protest organized by African-American soldiers onboard the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier turned violent, putting 60 people in the hospital, 3 of which were near fatalities. This kind of racial sparring was commonplace in the war. Veteran Frank Hickey said simply, “The race relation problem was the most serious problem I’ve ever encountered.”[2]
Normally, combat has a tendency to force men to cooperate even in the face of discontent and strife- it can bring men of radically different backgrounds and prejudices together. Simply put, you need each other to survive. There is no soldier in the history of man who has survived a war without the help of his fellow soldier (as well as a great deal of luck and cunning)- and the man who refuses to protect or help his fellow soldier will receive no protection or help himself. In essence, the desire for survival in the heat of battle boils off all extraneous considerations such as race, religion, politics, and sexual orientation- none have any value in combat. William Darryl Henderson, the former commander of the Army Research Institute, described the important relationship between cohesion and combat in his book, Cohesion: The Human Element. Henderson claimed that, in combat, the single most soothing and helpful thing to a soldier is a comrade at his side.[25] But, it would appear that the forced-cohesion of combat only soothed race relations in Vietnam for a short period of time. As one African-American soldier noted, "'threat of death changes many things, but comradeship doesn't last after you get back to the village.'" [43C]
And, in the village (or camp), all bets were off. By many accounts, a state of racial war existed in many of the American camps in Vietnam, though it is hard to say how prolific it really was. During the war, one Colonel Meerboth described “intermittent demonstrations, a couple of killings, secret meetings and threats…” to a New York Times reporter.[3] In his book, Soldiers In Revolt, historian David Cortright claimed that in early October 1971, MPs investigating an American military base, “… discovered that many GIs were carrying illegal arms and that blacks and whites had assembled secret arms caches of ammunition, grenades, and machine guns to defend themselves from further attacks.”[4] The problem was both real and deadly. In 1969, a group of about 40-50 black soldiers attacked a group of white soldiers en masse, killing one and leaving dozens injured. [43D] Another veteran, George Cantero recalled, “The blacks were moving into their black power thing and they decided to get militant about it. The first thing they did was eliminate any black who was not militant and then they moved in on the whites, and so there was a short civil war within my unit…”[5] These accounts would appear to indicate that African-Americans were more guilty of violence than whites, but this should not be considered the case- the racial conflict in Vietnam was two-sided, and each side had its fair share of violence and bigotry.
Manifest Murder
But the conflict between soldiers had an even more serious side, which threatened the entire structure of the United States military, and therefore the lives of its men. American draftee Oliver Stone, who arrived in Vietnam in September 1967, was one of many witnesses to extreme violence within American ranks. Upon enlisting in the Army, he was assigned to the 25th Infantry, and ordered to join up with his platoon near the Cambodian border. Over the next 5 months, he saw combat with North Vietnamese soldiers near the Ho-Chi Minh trail, and in January 1968, he was wounded twice and flown home.[26] Eight years later, Stone wrote the screenplay for a film he had titled Platoon. The film is now a now well-known Vietnam narrative focusing on a naive soldier, Chris Taylor, who is thrust into the chaotic and hostile atmosphere of Vietnam. Over the course of the film, his unit turns on each other due to race, home location, and overall philosophy. Taylor comments, “The morale of the men is low. A civil war in the platoon... There’s a lot of suspicion and hate. I cant’ believe we’re fighting each other, when we should be fighting them…”[28] After this statement, the unit begins to breakdown- several members of the unit are murdered in cold blood, others are beaten or threatened- nowhere is safe. Stone stated, “Platoon is based on my own experiences in the 25th Infantry in Vietnam.”[29]
And Stone was not alone in his experiences of conflict and bloodshed within units stationed in Vietnam. In fact, his film merely reflected a very real problem in Vietnam known as 'fragging', the attempted murder of an officer or comrade with a deadly weapon (normally a fragmentation grenade).[32] According to generals of the U.S. Army, any records of fragging incidents are unavailable before 1968- but the number of incidents documented and recorded as fraggings reached over 1000 by the close of the war. [33] At first glance, this does not seem like a serious issue- 1000 fraggings in the roughly 58,0000 American deaths in Vietnam is a resoundingly low 1.7%. But these numbers only include incidents that resulted in court martial (meaning that the soldier was either seen or known to be committing the crime) and involved the use of fragmentation grenades.[35] More or less, then, all the number tells us is that there were 1000 American soldiers who were stupid or unlucky enough to be caught murdering another human being with a grenade. It does not reveal the number killed with firearms, or incidents when the attacker was not identified. But, more importantly, the statistic fails to identify the number of fragging incidents that took place in combat, where murder is easy to mask in the chaos of battle, or cover up as "friendly fire". The intelligent fragger would see this as the ideal time to commit his murder- the target is entirely focused elsewhere, and the risk of discovery and punishment is minimal. The statistic for fraggings, then is almost certainy inaccurate.
Unfortunately for us, the inadequacy of these data means that we have no way to know how prolific fragging really was. We can, however, look to the personal accounts of soldiers in order to ascertain the significance of the phenomenon. Oliver Stone claimed that, “A 1971 report put the number of such incidents [fraggings] at 585. In fact there must have been four times that many.”[40] If he is to be believed, then fragging would have been a regular part of daily life in Vietnam. Indeed, almost every Vietnam veteran in source anthologies claimed to have witnessed or been the culprit behind in an attempted or successful fragging. Peter Goldman wrote, “there was, for one example, the time when Mike Fetterolf by his own account drew a bead on a captain and was starting to squeeze the trigger when something made him jerk his rifle off line; there was, for another, the day a sergeant ordered a grunt to check out an enemy bunker and the grunt gutted the sergeant with a burst of M-16 fire.”[38] Another anonymous infantry veteran claimed, “’I thought that I would probably get killed by my own men… I said to myself… what kind of a place is this? You are supposed to be fighting these people and your own men are killing you.”[30] In a letter to his wife, another soldier wrote, “It’s my own men I have to watch out for.” A week later, he was killed by his comrades. [31]
Other soldiers recalled crafting opportunities to kill their officers: one marine veteran of Vietnam recalled fragging “lifers” (career military men):
“’We started having war calls, which is like at midnight everybody in the outfit starts opening fire screaming, ‘Gooks in the wire.’… and then you try to kill any of the lifers that you didn’t like. So we tried to get the CO a couple of times with a machine gun... And in the morning when he woke up it wasn’t the CO that got it. It was the executive officer Captain J… But it was just as good to get J. ‘cause he sucked too.’”[39]
But, whether or not the military’s official numbers are off by 10 or 10,000, even their inadequate data are still enormous when compared with incidents of American officer assassination or assault in World War Two, where it accounted for only .09% of total American deaths.[41] Such a huge increase in military murders was obviously a huge problem for the U.S. military in Vietnam. Indeed, the civil war within the U.S. forces in Vietnam was a very real, and very tangible fight. Such fraggings were a manifestation of the myriad of social issues that American soldiers Vietnam war for many of the reasons listed above: opposition to war, rejection of authority, lack of tangible purpose, and racial tensions came together perfectly in order to disrupt cohesion and discipline with deadly consequences.
In the famous novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, World War One veteran Erich Remarque commented, “These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life, those voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere, they are the voices of my comrades.”[42] But Vietnam gave a new face to the “comrade”. They were a threat- yet another danger in an exceedingly hostile environment. For American soldiers in Vietnam, then, there were two enemies: the deadly foe in the jungle and the men who stood by their sides. This civil war, caused by massive social revolution in American society, resulted in the free-for-all murders of uncounted men, and suffering on an untold level. Our society seems to have placed their trust in an alternative version of reality that imagines American soldiers in Vietnam as terrible agents of a misguided political objective. But we have carefully forgotten that those soldiers suffered immensely from those politics, and were made victim to the faults and crises of a society in flux.
A note about citations: my apologies for the errors in citation-formatting, but this post was significantly reorganized during its creation. The end result is legible, however, so I've left it how it was!
[1] Philip Key, interviewed by author, Vietnam: A Television History, Boston, MA, July 15, 1981, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla:d6c3693038c92137353bba7319b2d4b71752aad2 [accessed March 30th, 2011].
[2] Frank Hickey, interviewed by author, Vietnam: A Television History, Boston, MA, May 12, 1981, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla:d6c3693038c92137353bba7319b2d4b71752aad2 [accessed March 30th, 2011].
[3] Donald Kirk, “Who wants to be the last American killed in Vietnam?,” The New York Times, September 19, 1971, 6.
[4] David Cortright, Soldiers In Revolt (1975; repr., Chicago : Haymarket Books, 2005), 43.
[5] George Cantero, interviewed by author, Vietnam: A Television History, Boston, MA, May 12, 1981, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla:d6c3693038c92137353bba7319b2d4b71752aad2 [accessed March 30th, 2011].
[6] B. Drummond Ayres Jr., “Army is Shaken by Crisis In Morale and Discipline,” The New York Times, September 5, 1971.
[7] N: Department of Defense hearing on war Appropriations, Appropriations for 1972, Part 5, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 1971, Doc. 181. http://web.lexis-nexis.com/congcomp/document?_m=d673015f48420e26f80b55f554e47432&_docnum=2&wchp=dGLbVlz-zSkSA&_md5=09093b640b67a840fa7770b39e622bc9 [Accessed March 30 2011], 964
[8] Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller, Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1983), 139-140.
[9] Richard R. Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 46.
[10] Peter Goldman, 136.
[11] PFC James W. Byrd, in “Parting Shots,” in No Shining Armor: The Marines in Vietnam, ed. Otto J. Lehrack (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 358.
[12] Richard Moser, 136.
[13] Peter Goldman, 130.
[14] Ibid., 111.
[15] George Cantero, Vietnam: A Television History.
[16] Robert J. Franco, interviewed by author, Vietnam: A Television History, Boston, MA, July 15, 1981, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla:d6c3693038c92137353bba7319b2d4b71752aad2 [accessed March 30th, 2011].
[17] Peter Goldman, 111.
[18] Bill Kenerly, in “Parting Shots,” in No Shining Armor: The Marines in Vietnam, ed. Otto J. Lehrack (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 355.
[19] Ellen Frey-Wouters and Robert S. Laufer, Legacy of A War (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), 19.
[20] Ibid,. 16.
[21] Peter Goldman, 131-132.
[22] George Cantero, Vietnam: A Television History.
[23] Richard Moser, 62.
[24] Ibid., 63.
[25] William D. Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element in Combat (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1985), 6.
[26] Oliver Stone, interviewed by Nigel Floyd, January, 1987, found in Oliver Stone Interviews, ed. Charles L. P. Silet (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 13.
[27] Oliver Stone, Platoon, DVD, Directed by Oliver Stone (Los Angeles, Ca: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, 1986).
[28] Ibid.
[29] Oliver Stone, Oliver Stone Interviews, 13.
[30] Ellen Frey-Wouters, 21.
[31] Richard Moser, 48.
[32] George Lepre, Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011), 30.
[33] Department of Defense hearing on war Appropriations, Appropriations for 1972, Part 9, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 1971, Doc. 181. http://web.lexis-nexis.com/congcomp/document?_m=ee4d461ee34f030ea888711ededa55cf&wchp=dGLbVlz-zSkSA&_md5=0db28c78180edcee25391ed976359952 [Accessed March 30 2011], 585.
[34] Richard Moser, 48.
[35] Department of Defense, Part 9, 585.
[36] Richard Moser, 48.
[37] New York Times Staff, “Pentagon Reveals Rise in ‘Fraggings’,” The New York Times, April 21, 1971.
[38] Peter Goldman, 137-138.
[39] Richard Moser, 51.
[40] Oliver Stone, interviewed by Michel Ciment, April, 1987, found in Oliver Stone Interviews, ed. Charles L. P. Silet (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 43.
[41] Richard Moser, 48.
[42] Erich M. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1929), 221.
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