The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  THE VIETNAM WAR has the tragic distinction of being America’s bloodiest post–World War II conflict (and, even bloodier for North and South Vietnam). Of the 58,000 American troops who died, 48,000 were killed outright in battle or died from wounds (about 6 percent of the approximately 776,000 who saw combat).1 The ARVN, the South Vietnamese loyalists—who tended to be contemptuously dismissed as cowards and shirkers—lost 224,000. The North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong paid the heaviest price, with 1.1 million killed.2 In comparison, almost 32,000 American ground troops died in Korea, while their enemy, the People’s Republic of China, lost approximately 132,000 killed; South Korea lost over a quarter of a million men killed.

  These huge disparities between American lives lost compared with their enemies became even more pronounced during the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars. In the 1991 Gulf War, for example, the coalition forces lost fewer than 150 combatants (a significant proportion to friendly fire), while the hapless Iraqis had 200,000 killed.3 In the first phase (“shock and awe”) of the Iraq War, starting in 2003, 148 US troops were killed in action, and of those a substantial number were from friendly fire; of the 24 British soldiers killed, 9 deaths were caused by US fire.4 By comparison the Iraqi army had an estimated 100,000 killed and 300,000 wounded.5 And yet, despite the emphatic disparities in American and enemy dead and the thumping defeats meted out, the Persian Gulf wars have not shone with the clear and unambiguous heroic light of World War II.

  On the political and social level, the wars of America and its allies since World War II drove great divisive wedges through their societies. A battle for what might be called the heroic spirit of these wars was waged between liberals and conservatives, with governments sometimes being forced into a little “creative rewriting” to establish a just cause and a compelling moral context (the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Vietnam War and the potential “mushroom cloud” of WMDs in Iraq being among the more egregious examples).

  These rifts had a profound effect on the soldiers sent to fight. No longer secure in the wholehearted support of the nations that had dispatched them, they did what soldiers always do—created their own inward-looking and self-referencing world. If some kind of moral ambiguity clouded the picture, and if they were denied the heroic status that had been awarded to the warriors of World War II, they would create one for themselves. They would find their own diamond in the mire.

  In the face of what they felt was either open hostility or simple neglect and indifference, soldiers often developed a fierce and angry defiance, giving the finger to a society they felt did not support them. Their war would have its own down-and-dirty integrity, as unattractive as that might be to the folks back home. It was, as a Vietnam vet puts it, “using whatever means available to beat somebody else whatever the reason, right or wrong.” Or, as another put it, “War is fucking people up.” “It was a dirty back-alley street fighting—killing the other guy before he kills you.”6 Staff Sergeant David Bellavia of the US First Infantry Division in Iraq turned the dirtiness of his killing business into a defiant statement of pride: “This is our war: we can’t shoot at every target, we can’t always tell who is a target; but we look out for one another and we don’t mind doing the nation’s dirty work.… War’s a bitch, wear a helmet.”7 If they were to be rejected, they would turn that rejection into a badge of honor.

  The messiness on the social/political level was mirrored on the strategic and tactical. The manner in which the wars were fought was irregular, the enemy combatants often indistinguishable from civilians, the tactics classic guerrilla, whether it be fighting the VC in Vietnam, the mujahideen in Iraq, or the Taliban in Afghanistan. One of the characteristics of heroic warfare is that the combatants must be clearly distinguished as such, whereas the opposite is true in insurgency warfare. In fact, one of the main ways insurgents can offset the weapons superiority of their enemy is by blurring the distinction between combatant and civilian, much to the fury, disgust, and confusion of “regular” troops. Not being able to read cultural signs—literally not being able to see the enemy—presents a huge disadvantage, as Captain Doug Beattie of the Royal Irish Regiment in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2006, recognized:

  Each day there would be a constant stream of people coming to the compound.… With my interpreter Namir I would often watch them file past. More than a few of those who turned up wore distinctive black turbans. Didn’t our enemies wear this style of headdress? One day I articulated my curiosity:

  “Talib?” I enquired warily.

  “Not Talib, Captain Doug,” came the reply.

  A little while later, “Talib?” I enquired again, nodding towards a new arrival.

  “Not Talib.” …

  A bit later Namir tapped my shoulder.… “Talib!” he said triumphantly.

  I looked at the eight men being escorted.… “How do you know?”

  “Everyone knows who they are.”8

  Dale Canter was in Cu Chi, Vietnam, in 1966 and described the unnerving ambiguity of the locals: “During the day, there was a lot of military traffic in and out, but at night, it still had a very ominous VC presence.… I honestly believe that some of these people really liked us. It was kind of a strange mixture. They were VC, some of their family and friends were VC, but when they got to know us, they had a genuine affection. But they had no qualms about reporting our activities and setting us up for ambushes, which would result in the death of many GIs.”9

  Kids and old ladies can get soldiers killed. As a Marine major in “Indian country” in Vietnam, Charles Cooper sent one of his rifle companies out on patrol. “A day or two later they had a couple more men killed. This time it was done by a small child. This kid had waved to the Marines while they were on patrol and signaled them to come over. As they closed in on him he reached down and pulled up an AK-47 and started shooting. Two guys were killed and a few more wounded and this kid capered off toward the village of Son Thang.”

  The next night a Marine “killer team” went into Son Thang and executed twenty women and children.10

  In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the same kind of combatant/civilian “camouflage” constantly caught the invaders off-guard. The initial blitzkrieg phases had been hugely successful. In Afghanistan surgical strikes by special forces and air had unseated the Taliban. But in Iraq, coalition (the U.S.–led Multi-National Force) planners had focused almost entirely on a recognizable enemy, the Republican Guard, and very quickly combat dissolved into a fight with Baathist irregulars, and coalition troops had to contend with what they considered underhanded tactics. In other words, the Iraqis, like the Vietcong, refused to recognize the rules of “heroic” combat as codified over centuries of Western warfare. “The Iraqis were not going to fight on the Americans’ terms. The enemy faced by U.S. forces would be largely amorphous, not in uniform, and rarely part of an organized military force.”11 The Iraqis used civilian vehicles, civilian houses as strongpoints, and civilians as shields. An American soldier records a bewilderment that could have come straight out of the Vietnam War: “There’s no tanks, there’s no BMPs [armored infantry carriers], there’s no uniforms. This is not anything we planned to fight. I mean, they’re running around in black pajamas.”12

  The rules of engagement that are meant to determine for regular armies the legitimate use of deadly force are critical if civilian casualties are going to be contained and thus make the country more sympathetic to occupation, but they are a constant source of frustration and danger to the occupiers in the chaotic and confusing combat environment of insurgency warfare. Sergeant First Class Anthony Broadhead was part of the American thrust during the opening phase of the Iraq War. In Samawah he discovered just how bewildering the rules of engagement could become when the insurgents did not recognize those rules: “They were using an ambulance to pull up, drop new soldiers, and pick up the dead guys and leave.… So they did this all day long. Sergeant McCollough wanted to kill the ambulance and I’m like no, we can’t do that. As long as they’re not fi
ring, even if they’re transporting new soldiers to the battlefield, they got the Red Crescent on it.”13

  In the chaos of insurgency warfare there are wrenching decisions to be made. Captain Ed Hrivnak, a member of a medevac team in Iraq, recalls that a wounded soldier “confides in me that he witnessed some Iraqi children get run over by a convoy. He was in the convoy and they had strict orders not to stop. If a vehicle stops, it is isolated and an inviting target for a rocket-propelled grenade. He tells me that some women and children have been forced out onto the road to break up the convoys so that the Iraqi irregulars can get a clear shot. But the convoys do not stop. He tells me that dealing with the image is worse than the pain of his injury.”14

  Donovan Campbell, a young Marine officer embroiled in the urban warfare of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, describes how officers at the sharp end took a Damoclean sword to the knot of the rules: “Once the firing started and once the targets had been positively identified, though, the in/out of the fight concept would get tossed out of the window. Instead, we would stop our shooting according to the dictate of the Pine Box Rule: If there’s any question about whether it’s you or the bad guy who is going home in a pine box, you make damn certain that it’s the bad guy. Of course we wanted to avoid as many innocent victims as possible, but if someone had already tried to kill us, there was no way we would risk our own lives simply to meet a vague legal condition of extremely dubious validity.”15

  Soldiers from the West, whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, found themselves enmeshed in a type of warfare utterly alien to their instincts and training. The rules had been bent, and the techniques of combat were not suited to their more formal approach—a potentially fatal combination.

  It is said that we always refight the last war, and armies steeped in a tradition of head-on “transparent” combat were caught off-kilter when it came to fighting insurgents. As US ambassador to South Vietnam, retired US Army general Maxwell Taylor advised President Johnson in February 1965: the “white-faced soldier, armed, equipped, and trained as he is, not a suitable guerrilla fighter for Asian forests and jungles. The French tried to adapt their forces to this mission and failed. I doubt that US forces could do much better.”16 Thomas Giltner, a junior infantry officer, described a training regimen that, if anything, was designed to get soldiers killed:

  I completed my training at Fort Benning Officers’ Candidate School on 13 May 1965. My training for combat in Vietnam was nonexistent. I fired one magazine of an M16 rifle; I took one helicopter ride on one afternoon counter-insurgency problem. The only thing I remember was being carried from one area to another on a simulated airmobile mission and hauling an M60 machine gun around to secure some obscure objective. Our training was conventional—it was Monte Casino, North Africa, the Battle of the Bulge. Mostly, we prepared for mass tactical deployment of large infantry and armor formations. The training of 1944 and 1964 had little apparent change, and that’s how I was prepared for my assignment as a rifle platoon leader.… We were more concerned with fighting the Red Chinese or the Soviet Union.17

  As a young officer, Lawrence Tahler recalls of his time in Vietnam: “Few officer leaders knew what they were doing. The top brass were fighting another war and most of us junior officers were trained to take Normandy, not fight insurgents. The grunts knew what was happening, but few officers listened to them. ‘What do they know? They’re just enlisted men’ was too often the prevailing attitude.”18

  IF THE OCCUPYING armies lack tactical preparedness, they invariably have the advantages of the hardware their wealth provides, and so the default response tends to be to play that ace card—weapons superiority, in particular artillery and air-delivered devastation. Given the sheer volume of firepower available to the occupying forces, insurgent soldiers will have a much greater chance of being killed by artillery and air-delivered bombs and rockets than by small arms. Ta Quang Thinh, a medic with the North Vietnamese army, remembers: “Most of the wounds I treated were caused by artillery shells. Bombing also caused many shrapnel wounds and concussions.”19 The United States dropped three times as many bombs during the Vietnam War as it had during the whole of World War II. In 1968–69 alone it delivered one and a half times as many as the total dropped on Germany.20

  A reliance on overwhelming air and artillery superiority was also the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. Captain Doug Beattie was astounded at the power of air support he could call in during his fight with Taliban insurgents in Garmsir in Helmand Province: Apache helicopter gunships (“the real battle winners”); close ground support A-10 Thunderbolts (“Warthogs”) armed with a massive seven-barrel Gatling gun capable of firing up to four thousand 30-millimeter shells per minute; F-18 fighter-bombers firing an M-61 Vulcan Gatling gun as well as delivering air-to-ground missiles and rockets; and the huge B-1 bombers with their massive GPS-guided payloads. Beattie used them all, the B-1’s in particular. “The sight was awesome. It reminded me of the old footage I had seen from Vietnam, where the US pilots tried to carpet bomb the Vietcong into submission. This was far short of what happened in the 1960s, but gave some insight into the sheer scale of the destructive firepower available to us in Afghanistan.”21

  Within minutes though, Beattie records, the insurgents had returned to the fight with renewed vigor: “The small-arms fire and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] being directed towards us had now been joined by mortar rounds … the enemy was attacking us from at least three sides.”22 The beleaguered Beattie was reliving another lesson of Vietnam (and, indeed, of so many attacks in modern warfare, be it World War I or the amphibious assaults in the Pacific during World War II)—humongous amounts of high explosive do not always have the desired suppressive effect. The enemy survives, like some backstreet brat tough enough to take his licks and come back to whack the rich kid. Vietnamese insurgent Tran Thi Gung, the only woman in her unit, believed that “the Americans lost many people because they were applying conventional tactics against our ambushes and tunnels. Their shells and bombs were extremely powerful and sometimes they killed people in the tunnels, but it didn’t happen as often as you might think.… ‘A stork can’t shit into a bottle.’ ”23 Or as S. L. A. Marshall put it, referring to Vietnam (but applicable also to Iraq and Afghanistan): “Elephant guns are used to bang away at rabbits.”24

  CONVENTIONAL TROOPS FIGHTING an insurgency war often die because they cannot adapt quickly enough. “It will never cease to amaze me,” wrote GI Tom McCabe as he recovered from wounds in a hospital in Vietnam, “how unorthodox this war seems compared to how I imagined it. There are no set lines of battle & it is usually over as fast as it starts.”25 When the unprepared and unsuspecting soldier is transposed to an alien environment, so many things can trip him into the grave. This was especially true in Vietnam, where the US Army was largely composed of draftees (the Marine Corps, in contrast, would only accept volunteers). In Iraq and Afghanistan, where the challenges, both tactical and cultural, were equally great, the troops were professionals by choice, with, one presumes, their military compass needle pointing north.

  The tour of duty for most US Army infantrymen in Vietnam was one year. As the war progressed, draftees accounted for a higher proportion of the soldiery, and not surprisingly, their risk of being killed early in their tours was significant. The Army lost 43 percent of all its killed in actions in the first three months of their service; the Marines lost 33.8 percent. American combat troops were twice as likely to be killed in the first half of their tour as in the second.26 For FNGs (fucking new guys), like FNGs in every war, the learning curve could be tragically steep.

  A vet recalls after the war trying to warn a “kid named Donald who wasn’t in-country even three months” that he should keep his head down and eyes open because snipers were active.

  Donald took his time and was laughing.… Donald sits up facing away from the outside of the perimeter. As I was telling him to keep his eyes open, all of a sudden there’s this pow!

  The bullet went through Donald’
s upper shoulder [and] came out his chest.… When it hit the kid he didn’t die right away. His guts were hanging out his mouth and his nose. He like coughed them up when he was shot.… I didn’t really have a chance to be working with him, to teach him how to stay alive, because by the time he came, we was on the run constantly. He didn’t learn how to do what you told him instantly, when he was told to do it.

  He looked at me and all I could see were the tears in his eyes. It was like he was saying, “I’m alive, but what do I do? I’m dying.”

  I debated whether I should put a bullet in his head and take him out of his misery. For some reason I couldn’t do it. I looked at him, he was a young kid. He was seventeen.27

  Some vets, however, felt anything but protective toward FNGs, as the filmmaker Oliver Stone remembers:

  I was totally anonymous, just a guy who didn’t talk too much and tried to learn things as fast as I could. They [the vets] didn’t know your fucking first name.… I tried not to get too noticed. Just did my job and shut up. Don’t get picked on. I was pretty good at that because some of the other new guys were really irritating to them and believe me, when you were a new guy they would kill you. They don’t really care about you, because you’re an FNG. They’d put you up on point all the time. If you don’t know what you’re doing you’re dead. And if they really wanted to fuck with you, they’d put you on an LP [listening post]. which is as spooky as hell because you’re only two people outside the perimeter.28

  There were so many things to learn. In themselves they seemed trivial, but the trivial could get a newbie killed. Karl Marlantes, in his fine Vietnam War novel Matterhorn (2010), which is richly informed by his own combat experience, describes the preparations for combat of a newly minted junior officer: