RESEARCH PAPER

American Studies

VIETNAM

Research Paper Background

We will spend time in class examining why the United States chose to fight in Vietnam, what strategies we pursued, and why American efforts ultimately ended in failure.

For the purposes of your research, this background reading focuses on the experience of American soldiers doing the actual fighting.

This reading is taken from Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974, by James T. Patterson. It was published in New York by Oxford University Press in 1996. Unless otherwise noted, I wrote the footnotes.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

Tim O’Brien in Vietnam

Image: www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/culturalcompass/tag/tim-obrien/

The failure of efforts at negotiation left the fate of Vietnam to the soldiers. In 1965 the casualties remained modest, and American morale was good in the field. Despite half-hearted fighting by many (not all) units of the South Vietnamese army, Americans usually prevailed when they could confront the en-emy in head-to-head battles. But escalation on both sides mounted in 1966, casualties increased, and fighting morale proved increasingly difficult to sustain. Roughly 80 percent of American soldiers in Vietnam were from poor or working-class backgrounds. Neither in college nor in graduate school—where most students received near-automatic deferments until mid-1968—they often found themselves drafted after they got out of high school. Indeed, American combat soldiers in Vietnam were unprecedentedly young—an average of 19, as opposed to 27 in both World War II and Korea. For men so youthful, com-bat experience in Vietnam was especially terrifying. There was most of the time no "front" or clear-cut territorial objective. The young men—boys, mainly—felt that they were always far away "in the bush." Ordered out on patrols into dense cover, they were bait to lure the enemy into battle. Many were cut

THE VIETNAM WAR❖ As you read, think about the ways in which the

historical experiences of soldiers in Vietnam compare to those related by O’Brien in his novel.

❖ How did soldiers and potential soldiers respond to their fear of the war?

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SECTION 1

The Soldiers

down by withering fire from the bush or were blown to bits by land mines.

Morale also suffered because of the way that the military organized itself. The majority of American combat soldiers in Vietnam were draftees or “volunteers” who joined the armed forces in order to serve at a time of their own choos-ing. Most were required to stay there for one of their two or three years of military duty. Unlike those who had fought in Korea or in World War II, they expected to leave the battle-ground at a clearly specified time, whereupon someone else would take their place. Unsurprisingly, some who neared the end of their terms were not eager to take chances. Most American marines in Vietnam faced thirteen-month terms there that included up to three tours in the field of eighty days each. This was an unusually heavy and frightening ex-posure to combat—one that in many cases proved exhausting both physically and mentally to the men involved.

For these and other reasons many American combat units found it hard, especially in the later years of the war, to de-velop camaraderie. In earlier wars, units had tended to stay together for the duration of the effort. Soldiers in combat grew close, sometimes dying for one another. In Vietnam, however, men often arrived in the field as individuals and were placed in whatever squads needed help. Some of the men whom they fought beside had many months of service left—these might become buddies to be protected—but oth-ers were nearing the end of their term. They remained strangers, brief acquaintances who might soon go home.

Racial antagonism increasingly accentuated these prob-lems. Many American black men at first seemed ready and eager to serve in the military: through 1966 they were three times as likely as white soldiers to re-enlist when their terms were over. But they faced the same kinds of abuse and mis-treatment on the front that they had faced at home. Often, it seemed, they were told to do the dirtiest jobs and pull the most dangerous duty. Between 1961, when the first Ameri-can "advisers" died in Vietnam, and the end of 1966, 12.6 percent of American soldiers there were black (roughly the percentage of blacks in America's draft-age population). In 1965, 24 percent of American combat deaths were black, a high for the war.

By then black leaders in the United States were becoming openly critical of American policy in the war. [Martin Lu-ther] King [Jr.] criticized escalation in August 1965, and both SNCC and CORE1 formally opposed the war in January 1966. Blacks became less eager to serve. Many who were drafted and sent abroad to fight had imbibed racial pride from the civil rights movement, and they would not put up with second-class treatment. Made aware of these feelings, American army leaders sought to lessen racial discrimination in the field. The percentage of combat deaths that was black began to fall, to 16 percent in 1966 and 13 percent in 1968.2

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1 Two leading civil rights organizations; we shall have much more to say about them in class in March and April.2 Blacks ultimately were 13.7 percent of all American casualties in Vietnam, a figure that was 30 percent higher than would have been the case in a color-blind situation. (Note in source.)

Still, sharp antagonisms persisted, reflecting not only the timeless tensions of color but also the mounting racial con-flicts that were rending American society at home.

Many Americans who served in Vietnam complained bitter-ly—again, mainly in the later years of the war—of poor mili-tary leadership. This was hardly new in the annals of war-fare, but the problem seemed especially acute in Vietnam, where "fragging" (soldiers wounding or killing their own offi-cers) became a serious matter by the 1970s. Officers who were assigned to combat normally served six-month tours. They scarcely had time to develop much rapport with men in their units. Few of those above the grade of lieutenant (the lowest officer ranks) stayed long on the front lines with the troops. They tended instead to remain in base areas, many of which were lavishly outfitted, or in the air, mainly in heli-copters. Only four American generals died in combat during the years of fighting in Vietnam, three of whom crashed to their death in helicopters. (The fourth was killed by sniper fire.) Although nearly 8,000 American dead—13.8 percent of the total—were officers, most of these were lieutenants or captains. The rest were non-commissioned officers—ser-geants, corporals, and the like—and draftees and "volun-teers."

Men in the front lines had to worry not only about the en-emy but also about the firepower from their own side. Ameri-can dead and wounded from "friendly fire" were later esti-mated to be as high as 15 or 20 percent of all casualties. Many things accounted for these unprecedentedly high esti-mates: poor leadership, inadequate training, the frequency of

close-in fighting in the bush, and the penchant of high-ranking officers to hurry in calls for the heaviest sort of fire-power—after all, it was there—to support infantrymen in trouble.

American fighting men were regularly lonely and fre-quently scared even when they were not in combat. They had little if any understanding of the history or the culture of Vietnam, and they did not know the language. The South Vietnamese, equally ethnocentric, were bewildered by the im-patient, technologically advanced, and increasingly frustrated Americans. Personal friendships across the large gap in cul-tures were rare. Worse, many apparently supportive South Vietnamese seemed to have an uncanny ability to avoid the mines and booby traps that maimed United States troops. It was hardly surprising in the circumstances that many Ameri-can fighting men came to believe that all Vietnamese were alike. Everyone in "Nam," it seemed, wore black pajamas and sneaked about treacherously in the night. "They say, 'GI number one' when we're in the village," an American soldier complained, "but at night the dirty rats are VC."3 Another wrote, "During the day they'll smile and take your money. At night they'll creep in and slit your throat.” More and more, American combat veterans thought that no South Vietnam-ese civilian deserved a second thought before being shot in the midst of a fire fight in a village. "The rule in the field," one explained, "if it's dead, it's VC."

All these problems and fears helped to account for the sav-agery of the fighting in Vietnam. To some this seemed even

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3 VC: Vietcong. These were communist guerrillas fighting in the South.

more gruesome than in other wars. NLF and North Vietnam-ese combatants, battling against alien invaders, fought tena-ciously, resorting to sabotage and stab-in-the-back assaults on American soldiers in the night. Americans, with awesome firepower at their disposal, dropped ever more napalm and Agent Orange and poured bombs on villages and enemy in-stallations. Commanders in the field often called in the planes, helicopters, and heavy artillery wherever they thought the enemy might be. As an American major explained in 1968 following the obliteration by American firepower of Ben Tre, a village in the Mekong Delta, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

The savagery of combat intensified in 1966-67, by which time it was becoming increasingly difficult for many of the soldiers to understand why the United States was fighting. [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara, [top American general William] Westmoreland, and their own commanders, after all, were measuring progress only in body counts. When soldiers returned from patrol, they were asked one thing: how many did you kill? One soldier exclaimed, "What am I doing here? We don't take any land. We don't give it back. We just mutilate bodies. What the fuck are we doing here?"

Increasing numbers of America's combat soldiers were re-vulsed by the slaughter, and many thousands suffered from serious personality disorders thereafter. Others, however, grew callous and cruel. That happens in wars. William Broy-les, a marine lieutenant, later described the experiences of his unit:

For years we disposed of the enemy dead like so much gar-bage. We stuck cigarettes in the mouths of corpses, put Playboy magazines in their hands, cut off their ears to wear around our necks. We incinerated them with na-palm, atomized them with B-52 strikes, shoved them out the doors of helicopters above the South China Sea. In the process did we take down their dog-tag numbers and catalog them? Do an accounting? Forget it.

All we did was count. Count bodies. Count dead hu-man beings. . . . That was our fundamental military strat-egy. Body count. And the count kept going up.4

-------------[I omit Mr. Patterson’s discussion of the antiwar movement.]

-------------[By] 1967, military spending was exploding in size—from

$49.6 billion in 1965 to $80.5 billion for the fiscal year of 1968—and creating ever-larger deficits. Draft calls had peaked. Some 450,000 American soldiers were in Vietnam. Most important, casualties had risen alarmingly since 1965. Nothing did more than the casualty figures, which [President Lyndon Johnson] could not conceal, to advance the tide of popular concern about the war in Vietnam. This did not yet engulf Congress or other American institutions. But it was spreading beyond the student Left. Casualty reports—and the sense of futility surrounding the fighting—had done the same during the war in Korea. By the end of 1967 the tide seemed threatening indeed to the captains of state in Wash-ington.

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4 ...[S]ome 500,000 American veterans of Vietnam suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which often lasted for decades. [Note in source.]

Some of the anti-war protestors then began to turn from a strategy of protest to one of more active resistance.... This was the radical fringe of draft resistance in the United States. More common, however, were draft avoiders. Ever-larger numbers of young people—most of them college stu-dents—sought to avoid the draft by getting married and fa-thering children, staying as long as possible in college and graduate school, joining the military reserves or the National Guard, or finding friendly family doctors (including psychia-trists) who would say that they were too sick to be inducted. A few claimed to be homosexual, grounds for avoiding mili-tary service. The effort to escape induction, which meant eluding the call of local draft boards, could be all-consuming, for men were eligible until the age of 26. “My whole life style, my whole mentality was cramped and distorted, twisted by fear of the United States government,” one high school graduate recalled. “The fear of constantly having to evade and dodge, to defend myself against people who wanted to kill me, and wanted me to kill.”

Many of those who sought to escape the draft managed to do so in the late 1960s. Some lived in areas where enlistment rates were high, thereby obviating the need for their draft boards to dig deep into their pool of eligibles. Most of the others who escaped the draft used every imaginable ploy to achieve their ends. Those with good connections—doctors, friends on the draft boards—managed much better than those who did not. Those who had deferments because they attended college or graduate school did best of all, especially if they remained on campus beyond the age of 25. For these

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A young draftee.Image: veteranshour.com

reasons the Vietnam-era army (unlike the armies that had fought in World War II or Korea) consisted disproportion-ately of the poor, minority groups, and the working classes. They were getting drafted and killed while others—many of them university students who were loudest against the war—stayed safely at home.

No one had intended selective service to work in this way. Supporters of the system, which had been created in the 1940s, argued that local draft quotas were based on reliable counts of eligible manpower and that the local boards—more than 4,000 in all—would do a better and fairer job than a far-off bureaucracy of “channeling” young men in their communities. Some young men would be drafted; oth-ers with special qualifications that made them more useful in civilian life would be spared. But the baby boom changed the situation by creating a huge available pool in the mid-1960s. Local boards, with bigger pools to choose from, called far smaller percentages of young men than had been the case during World War II and Korea. So the students and the privileged, manipulating the system, generally es-caped service. By 1967 the unfairness of the process was ob-vious to all. It was a scandalous state of affairs that increas-ingly enraged working-class young men, their parents, their relatives, and their friends.

It also upset Congress, which authorized changes in July 1967, and Johnson, who began to implement them in early 1968. He did not attempt to stop the deferment of college students. But he said that starting in the spring of 1968, graduate students (excepting those studying divinity, den-

tistry, or medicine) who had not completed two years of study would be eligible for the draft. So would college sen-iors graduating in 1968. Occupational deferments were also tightened. Johnson made it clear that he expected draft boards to focus on people who had graduated from college. “Start at age twenty-three,” he said. “If not enough, go to twenty-two, then twenty-one, then twenty, and lastly nine-teen.” As it happened, these moves did not change things dramatically, for many draft boards by mid-1968 had filled their quotas, and a lottery system was introduced in late 1969. But his directions greatly unsettled students and their parents. For the first time, it seemed, the college-educated sons of the middle classes might have to face the terrors of the bush.

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If the embedded audio file will not work, click on the link below.

Song by Phil Ochs: “Draft Dodger Rag

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFOUkipI4U