Every war is different. Each is fought in different ways and does different things to the people who fought in it. One way of learning about a war is through the music and writing that comes out of it. In these things we show our feelings very clearly.
There were only three songs about the war in Vietnam that became popular, even though most record buyers were the same young people most affected by the war.
The first song was about serving in the Green Berets, a special group of troops whose training was thought to make them very good anti-guerrilla forces. The second song was an antiwar song, which placed the blame for all war on the fact that soldiers did not refuse to fight. The third song that was popular. long after the war was over, leaves a picture of young Americans eager to fight, who are faced with an enemy as good as they are in war that is very hard to understand. In the end, the young soldiers lie in fear at night or seek escape from the fear in drugs or music.
Compare these songs with the patriotic songs of every other American war. The hopefulness is gone after the Green Berets prove to be no magic solution to jungle warfare. It is replaced with a feeling of dislike for all war, and finally by a song that tells about the changes this strange war made in the lives of individual solders.
It is this last idea that may remain the longest. While other wars have led to great novels and many histories, most of the few books written about Vietnam have been the stories of ordinary soldiers, histories telling the sad and funny tales of war; showing the courage and cruelty of men in combat. Much of what these books say is horrible. Cruelty is probably always a part of war. The difference between Vietnam and other wars is that the soldiers were willing to tell what they did, both good and bad, and the effects that the war had on them.
The books and the music show, from the American side, a very personal war. While many Americans felt that they were fighting a war that had some good purpose. Many others came to hate it and its purposes. There was no cheering in the barracks (or on the homefront) when an important battle was won. There was no feeling of brotherhood.
Some people feel that all of this says something about Americans of the 1960s and 1970s. They say that they were somehow softer than their parents, not hardened by the cruel economic Depression during which most of their parents had grown up. They say that the war was strange because the soldiers were strange.
Others believe that the war itself was strange and that its strangeness caused changes in those who fought in it. If you look at the time starting from the inauguration of Richard Nixon, you can see their point.
Nixon was elected president in part because of a campaign promise to “Vietnamize” the war. That is, he intended to replace American troops with Vietnamese troops. It became clear, though. that Nixon saw this as a slow process. Americans would start pulling out in large numbers only after the North Vietnamese had starred to do some pulling out of their own.
To the newest private in the American army this meant that he was going into combat only to wear down the North Vietnamese until they were ready to agree to a settlement. It is not surprising to find out that no one was looking for the honor of being the last American to die in Vietnam.
This fact and other facts about the Vietnam “War” are important to understand. The average soldier served for twelve months with one month’s vacation. In every twelve-month period a whole new American army came in and learned the lessons that the earlier army had learned and then moved out again to be replaced by a new group of fresh troops. These were short-term troops committed to a short-term war. Their lives were not protected by winning battles that would weaken their enemy. Their lives were protected by keeping low for a year.
Only a small part of these forces (ten percent) were combat troops. The other ninety percent were troops in charge of supplies, bookkeeping, plane and tank mechanics and a thousand other housekeeping chores.
A very large percent were officers (fifteen percent). In World War II, only about eight percent of troops were officers. These officers served even shorter periods than the regular soldiers, and so the leaders often had less experience in war than the men who were supposed to follow them. And the followers were young, very young. In World War II the average age of a soldier was twenty-six. In Vietnam the average age was nineteen. In part, the young age can be explained by the draft system.
The draft was the way in which most of these young men found their way into the army. (The other branches of the armed forces had a higher percentage of volunteers.) At the age of eighteen, every American male was required to go to his local draft board (located in his town or in a neighboring community) and to register for the draft. Once a month the Selective Service System in Washington would tell each local draft board how many men they had to call in for the month. The local boards were made up of private citizens volunteering their services. These boards would then go through their list of men with a classification of I-A and tell them to take a medical exam. Those who were classified as I-A and passed the medical would be taken into the armed services until the month’s quota had been reached.
The classification of I-A meant that one had no “deferment” (excuse). Deferments were available at first on a number of grounds: working in a defense industry, having a family and going to college. During the war one guess is that fifteen million young men got out of the draft through the deferment system. Most of these had student deferments.
The student deferment system was so widely used that a young man who had finished high school, reached the age of eighteen, had not entered college and had no serious medical problems was sure to be drafted right away. Thus, a large number of eighteen-year-olds were drafted every month, keeping the average age of a soldier low. The short term of service in Vietnam also kept the age down, since the new troops brought in would be picked from among the new draftees. The system was deeply disliked for two very different reasons.
First, many people felt that the system was unfair to poor families, who were often minorities. Their sons lacked the money or education to attend college, so instead they would fight the nation’s war while the sons of the wealthier Americans stayed safe at school.
Of course, college ends one way or another, but college graduates could get into officer-training programs or had the typing and bookkeeping skills needed to get a safe office job.
The result was that twenty-eight percent of all the combat troops in Vietnam were black. That is nearly three times the number one would expect since, at the time, blacks were only about ten percent of the population. Thus this system favored the rich over the poor and the white more the black.
But many white college students also disliked the draft system. Their reason was very different. The draft was the living symbol of the war. It was a part of the war that was in every community, and could be opposed by individuals opposed to the war.
Hundreds of thousands of young men decided not to register for the draft. Nor all of these disagreed with the war. Many did though, and twenty-five thousand faced criminal charges during this period. Of these, more than three thousand two hundred went to prison. Tens of thousands of others moved to Canada or to Sweden to avoid being drafted into the armed services.
Some part of the resistance to the draft was caused by religious beliefs. Such cases were very difficult. Any person could say that their religious beliefs stopped them from fighting in the war. The local draft board had to decide whether that claim was sincere or was based instead on something else: politics or a simple desire not to fight.
Those who the boards found to have real religious beliefs against military action were made to either serve in the army in a position such as a medic, or to perform other service as a civilian. These other jobs often were in hospitals or other public agencies.
Much of the unfairness of the draft ended in 1969 when President Nixon announced the end of college deferments. The local board selection systems were also replaced with a lottery in which a number was drawn for each date in the year. Those whose birthdate had the lowest number would be called first.
The end of the college deferments brought about a wider opposition to the war on college campuses, for now all students had a real interest in the war. This is not to say that the students were afraid of fighting. Rather, the fact that they, too, stood a chance of having their lives changed led to more interest in the thing that would cause the change.
The start of 1969 saw several things come together to make the Vietnam experience even more tragic than it had already been. There were half a million very young Americans in uniform in a foreign land. They were there to fight in a war that their nation’s leader had decided should not be fought by Americans. They were hearing from all sides that the war was a waste, that no one should be fighting it. They also heard that the military was being held back and, if left alone, could end the war in a few months. There were no great rallies. There were no parades sending them off or greeting them when they returned. The nation had become turned off by the war that they were going off to fight.
The American troops did not feel very much like fighting.
Before 1969, the number of American troops who ran away from the army had been lower than in World War II or the Korean War. By 1971, the rate had jumped four hundred percent. Out of everyone thousand troops, seventy-five deserted. But desertion means an unexcused absence beyond thirty days. Shorter absences went under the initials A.W.O.L. (absent without official leave). The AWOL rate was one hundred and seventy-five out of one thousand. When the numbers are combined, they reach two hundred and fifty out of one thousand. One-fourth of the troops walked away from their jobs for some period of time.
Desertion was not the only problem that low spirits brought with it. Drugs were easily available in Southeast Asia at much lower prices than in the United States. To the frightened, the confused, or the bored, drugs provided one means of getting away. One study says that drug use among American troops climbed from twenty-nine percent in 1969 to fifty-eight percent in 1971. Heroin use in that time climbed from an estimated two percent to twenty-two percent. In 1971, four times as many American troops were treated for drug problems than were treated for war wounds.
As we have seen, no one wanted to be the last American to die in Southeast Asia. Officers who ordered troops into dangerous combat areas or were otherwise seen as ‘gung holt found themselves in danger from their own troops. The term “fragging” was derived from the use of fragmentation grenades (hand grenades that broke up into small pieces when exploded) to kill officers in their sleep. Such things were widely reported. No one will ever know how many officers were killed by their own troops in the field. There, the death could easily be blamed on enemy action. It is known, though, that between 1969 and 1971 more than seven hundred grenade attempts were made on officers’ lives and that more than eighty deaths took place.
This was an army that could not possibly fight a war. Young and inexperienced troops, many of whom were using drugs at least some of the time, were led by inexperienced officers who could not command their troops for fear of being killed. Together, their mission was to keep the heat on long enough so that the president could get some concession from the North Vietnamese and then withdraw them with “honor.”
They came home bitter and confused. Many of them formed antiwar groups of their own. But these were not based on the political ideas that the college students relied on. Their opposition was based on their own experiences; on what they saw as a waste of their lives and the lives of their friends.
And they were coming home to small towns all over America. There in Middle America they did not form committees or march on the Capital. But they talked and few were happy about what they had been through. In those days, when Middle America gave up on the war, the nation wrote off Vietnam as a bad experience, something that we probably should not have gotten into and certainly should be out of.
In doing so, though, there was risk of writing off those who had chosen or been chosen to fight and die in Vietnam. They had been to a place that no one wanted to talk about, so no one wanted to talk to them. Vietnam was something that America wanted to forget about, and in doing so, it forgot hundreds of thousands of its own children, grown to manhood in a foreign land filled with violence and pain.