Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War: Military Information You're Not Supposed to Know

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

A WORD ON USAGE

ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER 1: The Enduring Myths of the Vietnam War

America Suffered a Military Defeat

The American Soldier Was Different in Vietnam

Vietnam Was a War of Communist Aggression

It Was Just Another War

The Vietnam War Was Not as Intense as World War II

Who Served and Who Got Hurt?

Those Traumatized Vietnam Vets

CHAPTER 2: The Forty-Year War

What Is Vietnam?

Where the French Came In

Uncle Ho, General Giap, the Red Menace, and Power Politics

The French Campaigns

The Viet Minh–Japanese Alliance

The Viet Minh’s Foreign Legion

Lessons Forgotten: The American Military and Insurgency

Communist Insurgencies, 1945–65

The Official American Army Campaigns in Vietnam, and the Unofficial Ones at Home

A Strategy of Uncertainty

CHAPTER 3: In The Bush (Ground Combat)

First Impressions

The Nature of Combat

Air Assault

Trashing the Battlefield

Allied Forces in Vietnam

A Plague of Radios and the Flying CP

Infantry Weapons

The Big Guns

Armor in Vietnam

Body Counts

Thunder Run

FNGs, Getting Short, and Staying Alive

LRRPs and Rangers

LRRP Rules

Creating ARVN

Republic of Vietnam Marine Corps

The ARVN Rangers

The Popular Forces

Marine Combined Action Platoons

General Monsoon

Ground Radar

Plastic on Fire

Road Warriors

Some Useful Field Expedients

Tigers, Elephants, Poisonous Reptiles, and Determined Vermin

Tunnels and Tunneling

CHAPTER 4: Slicks, Puffs, and Fast Movers (War in the Air)

The Largest Bombing Campaign in History

U.S. Combat Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia

Helicopters Everywhere

Helicopter Operations and Losses

Helicopter Sorties Are Different

Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines

Air Combat

Antiaircraft Defense

Light Airplanes in Vietnam

Puff the Magic Dragon

The B-52 and Arc Light Missions

Principal Combat Aircraft of the Vietnam War

RVN Air Force

Aces of the Vietnam War

Assault Helicopter Units

Napalm

Agent Orange and Operation RANCH HAND

The Kingbee

CHAPTER 5: Blue Water, Green Water, Brown Water (The Naval War)

Aircraft Carriers in the War

The Battleship Returns

The Green Water Navy

The Brown Water Navy

The Coast Guard

CHAPTER 6: Base Camp Follies

Uncle Sam’s Way of War

Let’s Make a Deal

Good Morning, Vietnam

Bloomin’ Good Pay

American Women at War

The Chaplaincy

The Class of ’66

VD and Vietnam

Pacific Idylls

CHAPTER 7: War in the Shadows

The Special Forces

The Secret War in Laos

SOG’s War Against the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Undercover for Uncle Ho

SOG Recon Teams

The Montagnards

The Hmong

The Cambodian Connection

The North Vietnam Counter-Recon Program

Playing on Paranoia

Sniff This, Fido

The Problem of Moles

Flight of the Phoenix

Paper Paratroopers

STRATA

The Lifeline from Above

The Religious Factor

The Ultimate Killing Machine

Bright Light

Dead Plants and Bitter Rice

The Real Rambo

CHAPTER 8: Leadership

Follow Me! Leadership Problems in Vietnam

The Mismanagement of ARVN

The ARVN Officer Corps

The First Hollow Army

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

The Communist Advantage

Fragging

The Medal of Honor and Other Decorations

The Drug Problem

Looting

The My Lai Massacre

American War Crimes Trials

Some Questionable Weapons of the Vietnam War

CHAPTER 9: Numbers and Losses

American Casualties

Casualties Compared

Allied Combat Battalions in Vietnam

Eye Injuries in Vietnam

Psychoneurotic Casualties

Prisoners of the North Vietnamese

The Garwood Case

Treating the Wounded

Blood

Hospital Ships

CHAPTER 10: The Home Front

Getting In and Getty Ready

The Media

Some Notable Blunders of the Peace Movement

Things Are Not Always As They Seem—Nor Are People

The Conspiracy of the Moment

Kent State

Jackson State

Peace with Honor

CHAPTER 11: The Other Side

Born in the North to Die in the South

A Day in the Life of Uncle Ho’s Nephews

Group Think and Mind Control

The Other Side’s Draft Dodgers

Training

Bad Medicine

The Sappers

Electronics

The Well-Clad Guerrilla

North Vietnam’s Allies in the War

The Pathet Lao

Enemy Atrocities

The Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

CHAPTER 12: Logistics

Creating the Infrastructure for War

Merchant Shipping

Revolutionary Logistics

The Ho Chi Minh Trail

The Cost of the War

CHAPTER 13: The Combat Units

The Principal American Ground Combat Units in Vietnam

ROK Forces in Vietnam

Australia and New Zealand in the War

Thai Forces

The Philippine Contingent

South Vietnamese Army and Marine Units

South Vietnamese Corps Areas

North Vietnamese and Viet Cong Combat Units

CHAPTER 14: The Aftermath

The Era of the Hollow Army and Military Reform

The MIA Problem

MIA Sightings

The Amerasians

The Reorganization of the Defense Establishment

The Vietnam War Deserters

Some Notable Americans Who Served in Vietnam

Some Notable Americans Who Didn’t Serve in Vietnam

The Sino-Vietnamese War

APPENDIX: A Vietnam War Glossary: Acronyms, Code Words, and Slang

RECOMMENDED READING

INDEX

ALSO BY JAMES F. DUNNIGAN AND ALBERT A. NOFI

COPYRIGHT

For John S. Mohr

RA 12-694-984

Wherever you are.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are in order for Bill Howell, Jr., Doug McCaskill, Richard Korn, Leonid Kondratiuck and the other fine people at Office of Historical Services of the National Guard Bureau, Kimball D. Parker, Scott Whitting, Donald Levesque, Richard M. Kirka, Vincent A. Katinas, and Mary S. Nofi, who has to put up with one of us.

INTRODUCTION

The impact of the Vietnam War is incalculable. For the United States it shattered a sense of mission and invincibility that had endured for nearly two centuries and exacerbated domestic political, cultural, and social rifts, with effects that are not yet clear. Given that studies of the war, or aspects of it, are numerous, adding yet another requires some explanation.

A war is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon, and one as politically charged as that in Vietnam was even more so. Even in the most thoughtful and profound studies of the war much has to be omitted. And when one gets to some of the more politically motivated writings—whether from a hawkish or a dovish perspective—what gets included can often be false, one-sided, or misleading. Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War tries to deal with things usually left out. Such as deep background items that influenced actions and developments many years later, things often falsified, such as the state of Vietnam veterans; the purely commonplace, which it is presumed everyone knows, such as what the troops were actually doing; and a lot of other things besides. Of course, we can’t include everything either. Our focus is on the American war, and even then we cannot tell the whole story, as it is a tale that can never be told in the compass of a single work. So veterans of the war must forgive us for omitting things like how they went about forming little spontaneous enlisted men’s clubs on isolated outposts, or the dangers of taking a pedicab ride in Saigon, and 33 beer. While those more interested in the political side must forgive us our failure to attempt to delve into the minds of the respective leaders, LBJ, Ho, and the rest.

This book also takes into account that for a great many Americans the Vietnam War is ancient history. So we included a lot of basic stuff so those who were not yet born in 1975 can make sense out of it all. At times this may seem a bit elementary, and occasionally there will be some repetition, but it seemed necessary. The veterans will know what’s there for them.

This is the third of our Dirty Little Secrets books to be published since 1990. All have used the same format and approach. All have been quite successful. So if you’ve read the other two, you’ll know what to expect here. For those who haven’t seen the earlier two books, just enjoy and illuminate yourself. These books stress an easy-to-read format (each item is self-contained and rarely over a page in length) and easy access (all the items are grouped in chapters and indexed).

The authors have tried hard to make an accurate, evenhanded presentation. We welcome legitimate comments, corrections, suggestions, and the like, which may be sent to us via the publisher or directly, via E mail, to:

jfdunugan@aol.com

anofi@aol.com

A WORD ON USAGE

There are a number of ways of rendering the names of various places and peoples in Southeast Asia. For example, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam is variously Hanoi and Ha Noi, while the tough upland people of Laos are the Hmong or the H’mong. There are various officially approved ways of spelling many of these names, but the authors have not always adhered to these guidelines, particularly if they are at variance with the spelling in common use during the war, which is likely to be more familiar.

Military units of the United States, the Republic of Vietnam, and their Allies have been rendered in normal type, while those of the People’s Army of Vietnam (the North Vietnamese Army) and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (the Viet Cong) are in italics. Thus, the 304th Division is a PAVN unit, while the 18th Division is an ARVN formation.

The notation 3/503rd Parachute indicates the 3rd Battalion of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment. In fact, with the exception of a handful of armored cavalry regiments, the army had no regiments except on paper, as a means of preserving the historic lineage of units that in some cases stretch back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In some instances the statistics we use may not tally with those we have used in another place. This is due to the varying nature of statistics. In fact, there are often differences in official figures for the same thing, such as the number of American dead in Vietnam. This is due not to a cover up or similar criminal conspiracy (indeed, the differences are usually too small to warrant tampering), but rather to figures that have been issued at different times, which are often done on differing bases of calculation. For example, the number of persons officially listed as having been killed in action or died of wounds has been slowly rising by small increments since the end of the war, as veterans occasionally succumb to the lingering effects of wartime injuries.

The form Xuan Loc (Long Khanh) indicates a location in Long Khanh Province.

ABBREVIATIONS

ARVN. Army of the Republic of Vietnam

BG. Brigadier general (one star)

CDR. Commander, in the navy

COL. Colonel

CPT. Captain (army or air force only; navy captains are written out)

GEN. General (four stars)

LG. Lieutenant general (three stars)

LT. Lieutenant in the navy; 1LT first lieutenant, 2LT second lieutenant, in the other services

LTC. Lieutenant colonel

MAAG. Military Assistance Advisory Group

MAJ. Major

MG. Major general (two stars)

NVA. North Vietnamese Army, properly, the People’s Army of Vietnam

PAVN. The NVA

ROK. Republic of Korea

SSG. Staff sergeant

VC. Viet Cong, the South Vietnamese Communists

CHAPTER 1

The Enduring Myths of the Vietnam War

All wars attain a certain mythic character as time passes, but the myth rarely invades historical treatments. Not in the case of Vietnam. Much of the writing on the war has been tainted by the political outlook of the authors, and so much common knowledge about it is so flatly wrong that we decided to group the myths together.

AMERICA SUFFERED A MILITARY DEFEAT

American troops were not defeated in combat, but the American people refused to pay the price of victory. That’s an important distinction. Several presidents got sucked into Vietnam because, first, they didn’t want to offend France, and, later, no one wanted to risk appearing reluctant to confront Communist aggression. Once President Johnson realized he could not generate enough popular opinion to get the forces he knew he needed to win the war, he simply quit politics and retired. The next president, Nixon, got elected on the promise to get America out of Vietnam, and he did just that, though it took a long time. This was not without precedent. As early as the War of 1812, the American people showed a marked reluctance to support what it would take to win the war. In 1812, it was the conquest of Canada (or at least some parts of it). In 1952, Eisenhower got elected on the promise of getting America out of Korea. It takes a lot to get Americans into a war big time, always has, and probably always will. As the casualties build up, and especially if there is no dramatic progress, public support quickly wanes. In our long wars, such as the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II, it became very difficult to keep things going on the home front toward the end. We still commemorate the harsh Winter of 1777–78, when General Washington pulled off a seeming miracle by keeping his army together during that season of discontent. Had Washington not been able to hold things together that winter, the British would have likely won the war the following spring and summer. During the American Civil War, the number of Union voters eager for a negotiated settlement grew as the 1864 elections approached. President Lincoln had to jump through a lot of political hoops to head off the peace movement. Even World War II, seen as the good war, found the American people quite war weary by 1945. Despite what many feel we should have thought then, the use of two atomic bombs was enthusiastically received by Americans quite tired of war and its sacrifices. There’s little doubt we could have defeated the Vietnam Communists, but it would have meant risking war with China and/or the Soviet Union and the application of a lot more airpower and infantry. There might have been twice as many Americans dead, and a lot more Vietnamese dead. Still, it was certainly possible. But too many of the people were not behind it. That’s how a democracy works. Sometimes you can’t win. Or don’t want to win. That doesn’t mean you were defeated, but simply that you changed your goals. In 1964, America wanted to keep the Communists out of South Vietnam. By 1968, we were well on the road to accomplishing this, but by then most Americans just wanted to keep Americans out of South Vietnam. The American people got what they wanted.

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER WAS DIFFERENT IN VIETNAM

An oft-repeated myth of the Vietnam War is that the American soldier was somehow different in that conflict than in previous ones. Some of the biggest myths about the American soldier in Vietnam are that in contrast to his predecessors in previous wars, and most notably World War II, he was:

• Young. The commonly cited figure is that the average soldier in Vietnam was only nineteen, in contrast to twenty-six during World War II.

• Poorly Educated. The conventional wisdom is that the war was fought by high school dropouts.

• Drafted. After all, who would join the army during a war?

• Black. Some commentators have placed the proportion of black troops in the front lines as high as 80 percent, most of whom didn’t come back.

In fact, although frequently encountered, and indeed a part of the popular culture of the war, none of these assertions are correct, as can be seen in the opposite table.

It’s worth looking at these myths in some depth.

1. The Young Soldier Myth. The origins of the notion that the average age of the troops in Vietnam was nineteen are difficult to determine. It may derive from the fact that the average age of recruits during the war was slightly less than twenty. The draft normally took twenty-year-olds, so those younger than that were volunteers. In any case, most recruits had several months of training before shipping out. As a result, although there were some soldiers in combat as young as seventeen (indeed, a handful were even younger), men under twenty never constituted a majority of the troops in a particular unit. Looking at the average age of American military personnel who died in the war (see here) gives a pretty good picture of the age of the average soldier.

Key: All figures are for infantrymen, who do most of the fighting. For the Civil War, figures are for the U.S. Army only, Confederate statistics differing markedly (e.g., virtually all Confederate manpower was conscripted). Race omits Hispanic as the term is a cultural designation, and persons of Hispanic heritage can be white, black, Native American, or East Asian.

Even excluding warrant officers and officers, who were on average older than enlisted personnel, the average soldier in Vietnam was rather more than twenty-two years old. If that isn’t enough evidence, consider the figures for men with the Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) 11B. Eleven Bravo is the MOS for infantry rifleman (there are also MOSs for other infantry specialties, such as mortarman or machine gunner). The ultimate grunt, 18,465 Eleven Bravos died in Vietnam, accounting for 31.76 percent of American deaths in the war. Their average age at death was 22.55, actually slightly higher than the average for all enlisted personnel.

It is true, of course, that the average member of the armed forces during the Vietnam War was younger than the average in the Civil War or World War II. But those were total wars, and enormous efforts were made to mobilize the maximum manpower. In World War II this was done by conscription, while during the Civil War it was accomplished by offering generous cash bonuses to those who enlisted, up to $1,100 in some jurisdictions, more than three years’ pay for the common workingman.

Footnote: Underage Soldiers in Vietnam. One of the true secrets of the Vietnam War—indeed of most wars—is the number of underage boys who enlisted using false identification, sometimes with the knowing consent of their parents. The number of underage soldiers who died in Vietnam is also unknown. At least five of the men killed in Vietnam are known to have been under seventeen years of age. One, a Marine, seems to have been only thirteen.

Key: Grades are standard military pay grades for enlisted personnel (E-1 through E-9), warrant officers, and officers up to major general (no higher-ranking officers died in the war). Deaths include all those from combat, accidents, disease, and other causes (e.g., murders, suicides, and so forth), occurring in the war zone. The figures omit some twenty personnel for whom both a birth date and death date—or presumed death date—cannot be determined. Age is at time of death, rendered decimally.

2. The Poorly Educated Soldier Myth. The origins of this myth are rather mystifying. The troops during the Vietnam era were, on average, the best educated in American history to that time. Fully 79 percent of them had completed high school. This was a proportion that actually declined for a while after the war, with the introduction of the All Volunteer Army in the early 1970s, before rising to the point where today you must have a high school diploma to enlist (no GEDs need apply). In all earlier wars the educational standards had been lower. Only 24 percent of the enlisted personnel in World War II were high school graduates, a figure almost matched by the 20 percent of Vietnam-era enlisted personnel who had some college. In fact, the academic preparation of the average recruit in World War II was so bad the army found itself having to institute special literacy programs for draftees, about 20 percent of whom were more or less functionally illiterate. One probable source for the notion that the average Vietnam-era soldier was poorly educated may have been the approximately 354,000 men who entered the service through Project 100,000. Instituted in 1966, partially in response to criticism that the armed forces weren’t doing enough to promote social change in America, this program involved the recruiting of up to 100,000 men a year who fell into Mental Category IV. This was the second lowest of five groupings based on test scores, personnel whom the armed forces had been reluctant to accept in the past. In essence, Project 100,000 was a large-scale remedial education program. Over the life of the project, about 157,000 New Standards men were drafted and nearly 200,000 more voluntarily enlisted, the total comprising about 10 percent of all recruits in the period from October of 1966 to December of 1971. About 37 percent of the New Standards men were members of various racial and ethnic minority groups. Like nearly everything about the Vietnam War, Project 100,000 is controversial. Left-wingers (who originally supported the program) tend to argue that it was merely a way for the Pentagon to lay its hands on more cannon fodder. Right-wingers (who opposed it) argued that it was a fuzzy-minded do-gooder program that ruined the armed forces by bringing in all sorts of mentally deficient men. Claims have simultaneously been made that these men suffered disproportionately from their experience, to the assertion that most of them benefited greatly from it. In fact, the actual effects of the program cannot be determined, as the army was never able to establish a reliable system for monitoring the success of New Standards men. It is known that about 2,100 New Standards men were killed in action, a proportion lower than their percentage of those in the service.

3. The Reluctant Draftee Myth. This one is easy to nail down. It is based on the fact that during the Vietnam era a lot of recruits entered the army through the Selective Service System (SSS). Seeing this, a good many people have assumed that all of those who served were drafted. To some extent this was correct, at least for the army, but in fact this conclusion ignores the common practice of volunteering for the draft. During the fifties and sixties it was by no means unusual for a young man fresh out of high school, with no immediate plans, to request to be drafted. It may sound a bit crazy, volunteering to be drafted in the middle of a war, an increasingly unpopular war at that, but as the proverb has it, these men were being crazy like a fox. There were a lot of benefits to volunteering to be drafted. For one thing, it got your service out of the way with only a two-year liability rather than the three (for the army) or four (for the other services) you would incur if you enlisted. Local draft boards liked the practice because it was a relatively painless way of filling their manpower quotas. The army—and the Marines, when they began taking draftees—liked it because they were getting men who were better motivated than those who waited around for their numbers to come up. As a result, a lot of guys who pushed up their number ended up in special training programs to emerge as Shake ’n Bake NCOs, helicopter crew chiefs, and the like, a fact not lost on those waiting around to get the famous letter that began Greetings…

A lot of men also genuinely volunteered to enlist, signing up for three years in the army or four in the Marines, navy, Coast Guard, or air force. The navy and air force never accepted draftees during the war, and the Marines only took about 20,000 a year, combing through each batch for men who were willing to opt for the corps. If you volunteered for the army, your chances of being sent to Vietnam were actually rather lower than if you waited to be drafted. While the war was going on in Vietnam, the armed forces still had to maintain troops in Germany and Korea, and a strategic reserve at home as well. A tour of duty in Germany was eighteen to twenty-four months, one in Korea was twelve or thirteen, depending on the service, just as for Vietnam. A draftee was only in the service for twenty-four months, which meant he had just enough time in uniform to complete basic training and some advanced training in order to be sent to Vietnam for a thirteen-month tour of duty. As a result, it was not unusual for draftees to be discharged some weeks before their enlistments expired. After several months in training, a few more with a unit stateside, and then twelve or thirteen in Vietnam, the armed forces didn’t have much they could do with these troops for the last few weeks. So volunteering was a good way to beat the draft.

Incidentally, during the Vietnam era (1960 through 1975, which was two years after draft calls ended) some 26.8 million men were legally liable for compulsory military service. About 8.7 million voluntarily entered the service and 2.2 million were drafted, some of whom later volunteered for additional hitches (and thus may have been double counted). Of the balance, 15.4 million were either disqualified or deferred. So approximately 500,000 men were technically draft dodgers, but of these only about 210,000 were charged and only 8,700 actually convicted.

4. The Black Army Myth. This is strongly felt among African Americans and generally believed by most liberals and leftists. In fact, there is some substance to the idea that the armed forces were blacker during the Vietnam War than in earlier wars, but not in the sense that is usually assumed. In fact, the notion that the war was fought by a Black Army is a myth created out of whole cloth for political purposes. Since the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, African Americans have numbered between 10 percent and 12 percent of the population. There were times when no black men were permitted to serve. And even when blacks were recruited for military service, their numbers were kept small, never more than about 8 percent of the total force, figures attained during the Civil War and the World Wars. In these three wars few African-American troops were permitted to enter combat, so that black combatants usually numbered no more than about 3 percent of total manpower committed to action. This began to change in 1947, when Pres. Harry S. Truman issued his famous order ending segregation in the armed forces. The full effects of this measure were not felt until the late 1950s, by which time the armed forces, and particularly the army, had become relatively the most integrated institution in America. With opportunities far more equal in the service than in society as a whole, a military career held distinct advantages for black Americans. As a result, by the early 1960s the percentage of career military personnel who were black had risen to more than the proportion of African Americans in the overall population. This was particularly the case among career enlisted personnel in the army, and notably so in volunteer specialties such as the airborne, which received higher pay for hazardous duty, which resulted in reports of airborne platoons composed mostly of blacks. Perhaps a fifth of the NCOs in the army were of African descent, though the number of black officers lagged in all services. This had serious consequences when American troops became engaged in the war on a large scale. During the first two years of serious American involvement (1964–66), black Americans do seem to have comprised about a fifth or a quarter of those killed in action. Casualties were particularly heavy among career NCOs, the guys leading the troops. Thereafter, as the armed forces expanded, the percentage of troops who were black fell markedly, as the draft brought in proportionately more whites.

Black Personnel in Service, 1972

As a result, the percentage of black casualties fell, so that overall about 12.5 percent of those killed in action were black (see table here). This was still somewhat higher than the proportion of blacks in society, but was about the average percentage of blacks in the army over the course of the war, and did reflect the proportion of blacks among men of military age in the population as a whole. Of course the notion that the frontline troops were mostly black had by then become pervasive, spread for political reasons by pacifists, black radicals, and the merely misinformed.

So black Americans were not disproportionately represented in the ranks in Vietnam.

There was, however, one group that was very overrepresented in Vietnam, though this is often overlooked. About 30 percent of the Americans who died in Vietnam were Roman Catholics, who constituted only about 24 percent of the population, most of whom were of Irish, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Italian, or Polish background. Like African Americans, these groups were more likely to come from lower socioeconomic levels. A young man from the lower half of the American economic spectrum seems to have been about 300 percent more likely to die in Vietnam than one from the upper half.

After Vietnam, the pattern of ethnic participation in the armed forces slowly changed. By the Gulf War, whites were a substantial majority in combat units, while nonwhite troops tended to be in jobs requiring more technical training. This switch was caused by the increasing tendency of white soldiers to stay for only one enlistment and to choose combat arms jobs for the greater, well, adventure and excitement would be the best way to explain it. Black and Hispanic troops wanted professional and technical training, either because they wanted to make a career of the military or wanted a leg up in the civilian job market when they got out. In the 1980s, the military raised the educational qualifications for enlistment. There were not a lot of poorly educated recruits of any ethnic persuasion, thus making just about everyone eligible for some kind of technical training and an interesting career. Many recruits who would have never gotten beyond high school took the opportunities, thus making a repeat of the Vietnam dying for the white man controversy remote. Or so it seemed until the Gulf War. As American troops poured into Saudi Arabia, the media picked up on the (woefully ill-informed) laments of some prominent African Americans that black soldiers would suffer disproportionate losses. The Pentagon was quick to point out that the situation had changed, but the damage was done. Bad news travels farther and faster than good news, and for over a year it became much more difficult to recruit African Americans. Some recruiters saw drops of over 50 percent.

Old myths die hard.

VIETNAM WAS A WAR OF COMMUNIST AGGRESSION

Well, partially, but mainly it was a civil war, the latest such conflict in the area that had seen such wars for many centuries. The peoples of North and South Vietnam are different in many ways, always have been, and still are. Although many of the language and cultural differences have been eroding over the centuries, there is still a strong feeling of us and them between the northerners and southerners. This was exacerbated after 1945 by religious and political differences. The unification of Vietnam was much like that of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. The North thought it was a swell idea and imposed it on the South, which wasn’t so sure. Note that in the last ten years there has been a growing movement in the north of Italy to cut the southern part loose again. Similar North-South tensions are manifest in Vietnam, even among dedicated Communists.

Among the many French imports to Vietnam over the previous century were a number of new political philosophies to compete with the ancient royalist and Buddhist ones. Communism and socialism were the most popular among the young, educated Vietnamese. But the main motivation of politically active Vietnamese was self-rule. While the various parts of Vietnam were often at odds with each other over who would rule the entire country, there was little disagreement that a unified Vietnam, ruled by Vietnamese, was a fine idea. For some sixty years up to the start of World War II, the French had been running Vietnam as a colony. There were still old-timers who remembered what it was like before the French. And many younger Vietnamese were eager to experience life after the French. The French had managed, often with considerable brutality, to prevent a unified opposition to their rule and had created a local bureaucracy to help them control the country. But in 1940 and 1941, the Japanese took over first North Vietnam, then the South. The French administrators were left in place until just before the end of the war. In early 1945, the Japanese established a Vietnamese government. It was a political ploy, but it didn’t fool the Vietnamese rebels. Japanese rule had not been gentle. So much rice was exported that some two million Vietnamese died of starvation.

The French returned in late 1945 with reinforcements, but they now had a full-scale uprising on their hands. By 1953, the French had lost. All they could salvage was a division of Vietnam so that the groups (religious, political, and ethnic) that did not get along with the Communist-led rebels could set up shop in South Vietnam. The Communist North Vietnamese went along with this because they had also taken a beating in the war and, more important, felt they could easily subvert and take over the puppet [of the French and various special interests] government in the south and unite the country. This led to the American stage of the war. Vietnam was a war of Communist aggression in the same way that the American Civil War is described by some southerners as the War of Northern Aggression.

But did this make the 1960–75 phase of the fighting a true civil war? Well, yes, sort of. It’s rather more complicated than that. North and South Vietnam have, over the centuries, been separate countries more often than not. The two Vietnams were one country because the French came in during the previous century and put an end to yet another period of violent disunity. Had Vietnam been united then, the French would not have been able to take over. The 1954 treaty creating two Vietnams did so for plenty of reasons beyond the long-standing differences between North and South Vietnam. Many Vietnamese wanted nothing to do with communism. Either for political or religious reasons, about 5 percent of North Vietnam’s population fled south in 1954 to escape the Communist government. The North Vietnamese kept escalating their effort in the South, even before American combat units entered, because they found the anti-Communist attitudes in South Vietnam were quite strong. Many South Vietnamese were willing to resist communism, both at the local level and by joining the South Vietnamese armed forces. Although the southern armed forces had a 20-percent-a-year desertion rate, this wasn’t a lot different from the rate the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops suffered from. No one really wanted to get involved in an all-out war. But, alas, this was yet another ancient Vietnamese tradition. Many times in past centuries, one faction or another had called in foreign assistance to help win a civil war. Chinese, Cambodian, Thai, French, and now American and Russian outsiders were being called in. What made this particular Vietnamese civil war so extraordinary was that both major factions were able to call in heavy hitters. The Chinese and Russians not only supplied most of the weapons, supplies, and technical assistance, but they used the fear of their nuclear weapons to keep the United States from invading North Vietnam. Lacking the option of invading North Vietnam, the United States tried to kill so many North Vietnamese troops in the South that the Communists would give up. It didn’t work, and the North Vietnamese publicly said it wouldn’t. All that firepower just got a lot of South Vietnamese killed, along with those North Vietnamese soldiers.

If the United States had backed out of Vietnam in the early 1960s, there might have been problems with Communist insurgents in Thailand. This was the Thai’s big fear. There were also ancient hostilities between the Vietnamese and China, which briefly flared into a war in 1979. Had the North Vietnamese Communists taken over South Vietnam earlier, and the Russians had more time to establish military and economic ties to Vietnam, the Chinese might have gotten even more agitated. We’ll never know. One thing that is certain, within twenty years the Communist government in Vietnam would be an economic basket case. Unless, of course, the United States treated Vietnam like an Asian Yugoslavia. This could have happened, and there was much less chance you’d have the kind of mess Yugoslavia produced after the Communist government collapsed.

We’ll never know.…

IT WAS JUST ANOTHER WAR

Vietnam was a very different war from America’s previous ones. Consider some of the specific differences from most of our other wars.

• America lacked the will to win, to see it out to the end. This had never happened before and there was a reluctance on the part of the government to admit this was where it was all going. American politicians allowed more and more U.S. troops into Vietnam because it was easier to do that than to draw the line and demand that prowar partisans consider the implications of increased involvement. No one wanted to risk a small failure in the short term because, as politicians see it, long-term problems will be someone else’s responsibility. The troops and the voters slowly came to realize the mess they had gotten into and there were bad feelings all around as a result.

• Angry and frustrated troops attacked their leaders on a large scale. This was commonly called fragging. That term came from fragmentation grenade, the weapon often used for such attacks, as it could be rolled into a tent or bunker silently. All wars have had some fragging against particularly unpopular officers or NCOs. But by 1969, the morale in American units was so low that fragging became relatively common. And was noticed by the media. Over the next three years, a number of officers and NCOs were killed in these attacks. Almost all of these incidents were in the army, which was the only branch (except the marines) where a large number of troops had easy access to weapons, especially hand grenades. The fraggings were a direct result of the breakdown in leadership and discipline. This, coupled with the rising antiwar sentiment back home, left the ground troops in a very foul mood. The officers often could not control their troops, and the threat of fragging was an attempt by the troops to control their officers. It often worked. Indeed, all the soldiers had to do was leave a safety pin for a hand grenade in an officer’s quarters, or anyplace he was sure to see it, and the officer usually got the message.

• Drugs became widely used by the troops, leading to discipline problems unique in American military history. The drug dealing became a big business and brought with it the usual corruption, murder, and criminal activity not normally seen in a military organization.

• For many, it was considered more honorable not to serve. This had been unheard of before, and was a major indicator of the degree to which the war was unwanted and unsupported among the American people.

• For the first time in American history, the sons of the well off had a way to legally avoid military service, and they took it. While the American Civil War saw the use of buying substitutes for the draft, this was so discredited that it was never used again. And even with this way out, most eligible men who could afford it refused to take it. Not so in the Vietnam War, where millions sought college (and other deferments) to avoid military service. This had a divisive effect on the nation and was a major reason for the elimination of the draft in 1975.

• Media reporting of the war was faster than in any other war, and it was the first war where the folks back home saw TV images of what was going on, often only a day or two later. Vietnam has been called the first television war. This turned out to be a major advantage for the North Vietnamese. The Communist leadership knew from the beginning that when dealing with Western democracies, whether it be France or the United States, images in the media (words or pictures) could be more useful than more troops and weapons. Although the Communists were more ruthless and murderous in their use of terror, they also controlled media access to their operations. Moreover, the Communists knew that the vast firepower used by their opponents would hit a lot of innocent civilians, and that the numerous journalists wandering around (except in Communist-controlled areas) would have splendid opportunities to get pictures, images that would turn the American voter against the American war effort. Since there was no voting, and no independent media, in Communist-controlled areas, this media advantage was pretty much one-sided. The North Vietnamese did use videos, mainly in newsreels shown throughout the country, depicting the war as one of virtuous Davids battling evil, foreign, high-tech Goliaths. It worked. Playing on nationalism usually does.

• Race became a major issue. U.S. ground forces had largely used segregated units up until the Korean War (1950–53.) The armed forces were in the midst of integrating when that war broke out, a time when civilian life was still very segregated in many parts of the country. Racial problems were minor during Korea, and this pattern continued into the first few years of the Vietnam War. But then the racial reforms back home caught up with the troops. The Vietnam War was unpopular and many racial reformers took the generals to task for real or imagined indignities suffered by black soldiers. The troops, especially the younger ones, took these accusations to heart, and race relations in the ranks took a nose dive. It got pretty ugly, right into the early 1980s.

• Territory was commonly taken, lost, and retaken repeatedly, a particularly disheartening experience for the troops who got shot up doing it. This was not unknown in any war, but became particularly common in Vietnam where U.S. units went out on search and destroy missions. Often, much blood was shed to take a hill or valley, only to abandon it so the troops could move off to pacify another area. While this practice made sense given the large area being contested and the lack of enemy bases to go after, it was bad for morale and hard to explain to the folks back home.

• The American Civil War caused a division in public opinion over the wisdom of the war, as did several other wars (Mexican, Civil, Spanish, the Philippine Insurrection, and Korea), leading to social unrest and violence. But nothing like what was seen during the Vietnam years. The nation was truly divided, and when it was clear that unified support of the war would never be achieved, the practical result was no support at all. One president refused to run for reelection because of the lack of popular support for the war, and another was elected on the promise of getting the United States out of Vietnam.

• The average age of a combat soldier in Vietnam was twenty-two, while during World War II the average age was twenty-six. In all of America’s earlier wars, the troops had been older. But in the Vietnam era, you were eligible for the draft at eighteen, and the potential older troops avoided service. Many potential draftees avoided service by staying in college or finding other deferments (parenthood, certain occupations, joining another military service like the navy or air force, or leaving the country).

• The system for giving out decorations, in recognition of battlefield performance, was corrupted. From Purple Hearts and Combat Infantry Badges, up to the highest awards, the standards fell as increased use of decorations was used to prop up falling morale and to enhance the careers of ambitious officers. This was another aspect of the breakdown in military leadership during the war.

• There was no front line. Since many of the Communist troops were guerrillas, attacks were made on American troops wherever they were. Allied combat units did tend to duke it out with Communist regular units and take most of the casualties. But all the other units that would normally be relatively safe in the rear got shot at too. While the rear-area troops did not take a lot of casualties, they were certainly uneasy about this war without a front line.

• There was no hero’s welcome for the returning soldiers. Many people did not realize how important it was to the troops to get a little respect and appreciation for their overseas service. Many people went out of their way to castigate the returning soldiers. Such was the mood of the nation that there was no public outcry over this shabby treatment, and the faithful servicemen (and women) carried the physic wounds for the rest of their lives.

• Ticket punching. This was a form of careerism unheard of in wartime. What it meant was that officers sought to get the minimum amount of time with the troops so that it would look good on their résumés. The more different positions an officer could spend a few months in, the more promotable he was. The U.S. military encouraged this sort of thing, especially the army. This was made possible by the Korean War practice of keeping soldiers overseas in the war zone for only thirteen months. This was called a tour of duty, and it was originally implemented because many World War II reservists had been mobilized for Korean War service. These troops, their families and neighbors, voters all, did not consider it fair that they should be stuck in Korea for the duration (the normal tour of duty) in a limited war that was not mobilizing America’s full strength. So the more politically acceptable thirteen-month tour was introduced. That spread the pain a bit, as more people had to go, and the combat troops knew they had a much better chance of