To prevent this, officers simply had to provide numbers of enemy killed that were in excess of Americans killed. Lies about American deaths could not be sustained, but lies about enemy deaths could. The enemy died in the jungle, in thick mountain forests. Some floated away down rivers. The numbers of enemy killed in a skirmish or full firefight were conveniently uncheckable. So no one checked. Why should they? Many enemy deaths resulted from artillery attacks in which the bodies were often eradicated, exploded, liquidated.
The public face of the war, General William Westmoreland, let slip that he thought the American public would accept a weekly death toll roughly equal to the number of Americans killed on the nation’s highways. This was a crude calculation that showed Westmoreland’s dim understanding of politics. If the weekly war dead were held to an acceptable number all would be well. The only danger was the chance that Americans would suddenly begin driving more safely, in which case further adjustments would be made. Westmoreland might have convinced other politicians who very much wanted to be convinced. But his announcements didn’t go very far. No one believed the announced number of enemy killed because in a larger, simplified sense no one believed anything. Platoon officers reporting the result of their firefights with the North Vietnamese were tempted, and in some cases encouraged, to add fictional casualties. Reports were turned in and went up the line. At the company level a few more enemy casualties were added, a few more at battalion, and so on. This temptation was safe because there was no way anyone could check. Dead Vietnamese in the jungle or floating down the Mekong had disappeared. And there was nothing amazing in this. People have always believed what they wanted to believe.
But after a time, the newspaper and television reporters tumbled to the fact that they were being lied to. The numbers were suspected to be fiction. Proof was demanded. By lucky coincidence the Polaroid company introduced a compact instant camera that held film for twelve instant pictures. After the shot was taken, the developed pictures came out of the front of the camera in mere seconds, in color and with decent focus. This seemed to be a solution to the problem of inaccuracy in reporting enemy dead. You had to have a picture of each reported kill. The Polaroid cameras were issued in great number to all platoon leaders, and they were taken into the jungle and the forest on patrols. The doubts would be answered.
Except that they weren’t, because while other shortages were everywhere, there was no shortage of Polaroid film. Multiple pictures could be taken of the same dead enemy soldier. Back at the officers’ club these extra shots could be traded to other platoon leaders, sort of like baseball cards. The unkind but inarguable fact was that one dead Asian boy looks pretty much like another, and besides, and this is the most important besides in the entire process, who cared? Not even General Westmoreland. Somewhere, I suppose, in the Pentagon’s records of the war there are many boxes of Polaroid pictures of the communist dead, which could be reviewed for similarities. Unless, of course, these have been declared classified and destroyed.
The fighting continued. The bombing continued. Back at Aberdeen Proving Ground my ordnance training ended. I left with the same feeling most Americans have about life in the state of Maryland — nothing. I was assigned to a security staff operation at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about twenty miles south of Washington, DC. In this job I would gain knowledge and experience of what newly commissioned officers did in a regular assignment. I would have some months of dealing with a command, implementing policy, doing staff work, writing reports, sitting in meetings, and conducting myself like an officer, whatever that meant. The army made repeated attempts to interest me in an army career. I was counseled about the advantages of being an officer: promotions, secure pay, health care, extra money for family members, and other advantages, such as very cheap movies at the base theaters. I smiled and said nothing. I had learned by this time that the way to deal with the army was to let it think it was getting what it wanted out of you. I listened to the career counseling with a practiced, quizzical look. I said I would think about it. The truth was that any attempt to interest me in an army career only proved the fact that the army was desperate for officers. The only way they could have gotten me to sign up for more time would be to guarantee no service in Vietnam. But that wasn’t possible so I didn’t even suggest it. At one point I said that I thought I wanted to go to law school, and I was immediately promised law school tuition and additional money. All I had to do was to sign up for more years — four to be exact.
The draft wasn’t working. Thousands of young men ignored letters from their draft board. The cost to find them was as high as the effort to either make them into soldiers or lock them up. This grinding labor grew until it was not worth it, and the expense was clear not only to the government but also to the young men themselves. There were other ways of becoming undraftable. Some became priests or reverends, a classification that got them a pass. Some immediately got married and had children. Some stayed in graduate programs of no value. Some discovered that they were homosexuals, some feigned insanity, some committed crimes. In all sorts of ways, it became more difficult to find replacements for the returning veterans. News stories about this burgeoning problem spread the feeling of hopelessness and revulsion at the prospect of military service. In isolated instances, at least in news accounts, some young men injured themselves or decided to establish a history of drug or alcohol dependence.
The draft rules were changed so that it operated in an even more cowardly way than before, disguised as a lottery. Your birthday was drawn out of a hat and assigned a likelihood of being drafted. These numbers were then announced. It’s hard to imagine a less intelligent method. After the numbers were announced those with low numbers fled to Canada or Sweden if they could afford to. If they couldn’t afford to, they remained in the US and took their now increased chances, obviously even more incensed at their lousy luck. No one believed that the lottery drawing was done fairly.
At any given time in the late 1960s the army had around five hundred thousand men in Vietnam. Less than half of these were combat troops, but all were in harm’s way. They were support staff, cooks, signal corps, medical staff, and so on. The risk of getting killed or wounded may have varied with the assignment or role in a normal war, but in Vietnam the only thing close to a front line was the perimeter of a firebase, a clearing in the jungle of a few acres surrounded by wire fencing and walls of sandbags. The usual firebase had three or four artillery pieces and a dozen mortars. But during the building of a firebase everyone was at equal risk, especially the engineers. It could be said that the infantry, out on patrol in the bush, were possibly safer, since no one knew exactly where they were. The firebase, like a fort, was plainly visible to everyone, detectable by its lights at night and flagpole during the day. Most American firebases made lots of noise: music, generators, and Americans yelling at one another. And the army allowed dogs, incredibly mangy mutts, to be brought in as a comforting factor, a reminder of life back home. Some of them howled all night.
But my overseas orders were delayed an additional six months. During this time, I did nothing at Fort Belvoir. Well, not completely nothing. I was forgetting whatever Vietnamese vocabulary was still in my head, but no one seemed to be bothered by that. It began to look as though my time stateside might actually outlast the war. The Paris Peace Talks had begun. Nixon talked about various aspects of his secret plan. I began to hallucinate that I would receive RIF orders — reduction in force — in short, a notice that they no longer needed me because peace had broken out. In retrospect such hallucinations are unexplainable other than being the product of a mind weakened by inaction.
Fort Belvoir, on the mouth of the Potomac, not far from George Washington’s farm Mount Vernon, was the headquarters of the Corps of Engineers. You could say that the corps was the most unwarlike part of the army, more concerned with building bridges and roads in combat areas than in actual shooting at the enemy. Of course, while they were building bridges and r
oads they were shot at daily. This called for a special bravery and the ability to concentrate on the task at hand. In the continental US the Corps of Engineers’ role included all sorts of dredging and dam building, for which they often got vicious criticism since dams fail and dredging is sometimes misunderstood. At Fort Belvoir, the Corps of Engineers took good care of themselves, especially in the construction of the officers’ club.
The Corps of Engineers Officers’ Club was a pleasure palace unequaled by any other officers’ club, maybe anywhere in the world. It was built on a gentle escarpment of the eastern United States, sloping gracefully down to the mouth of the Potomac. There were swimming facilities, boat docks, dining halls, amusement areas for children, and repair sheds for officers’ watercraft. Crowning the entire enterprise was the clubhouse, an enormous redoubt done in a mid-Atlantic architectural style with added unconvincing plantation ponderousness and the military libido for the squat.
I was expected to join and contribute to the club every month from my pay. I was not happy about this. I did not want to join or attend the endless list of functions, some expressly for young officers. I disliked the concept of command performance. For some of these I had to wear dress blues. Every service has its high dress uniforms, and the army’s version are particularly awful — a style said to have been copied from the Revolutionary War uniforms but which had in the years since taken on the flamboyance of a headwaiter at the Budapest Howard Johnson. The colors were red and a sort of homely cobalt blue with shoulder boards and braiding and all sorts of other decorations and unnecessary brass hardware. Fill a room with men in these outfits, and the result is nothing short of comical.
I tried — in the usual weak-willed way I did everything else — to get out of the monthly expense for the officers’ club and was told that this was not excusable. Joining and supporting the club was part of my commitment to being an officer, and that rank had its privileges even if they weren’t wanted. I didn’t really want to be an officer. My focus was on stalling. I would do whatever was necessary, but all this parading around in military finery, all this expense for special uniforms (which I had to rent), seemed to lose track of the reason I was ostensibly there in the first place: to beat back communist aggression in a country I had previously been unable to find on a map. Why couldn’t I just get on with it and then go home? Or more desirably, just go home.
Even though I was losing my knowledge of Vietnamese at a steady rate, I still entertained the idea that if I were sent to the war zone, I would be safely placed at a desk reading captured enemy documents for intelligence clues. News footage from the war showed fighting reminiscent of the World War II operations in the South Pacific. My father had been in New Guinea and Tarawa as an anti-aircraft artillery officer. He talked very little about it, but he said he never got used to explosions or gunfire. His brief recollections combined with the Hollywood re-creation of jungle fighting made me cling ever more strongly to my version — me, sitting at a desk reading documents.
During my time at Fort Belvoir, I quite accurately did less than nothing. There was nothing for me to do. There were no documents in Vietnamese for me to translate. I was assigned to a part of the Corps of Engineers called the Combat Development Command. This sounded like something important, but it wasn’t. Typically, the fact that it wasn’t important but sounded important was important. One project stood out for wild creativity and endless expense. I can’t remember the name of this project, but it involved methods of rapidly digging trenches so that defensive perimeters could be established in ground combat. If there was any combat foresight involved, it was the expectation that the US would be fighting the Soviet Union and the East Germans, and we would have to have trenches on the frozen East German border in a hurry to block an area known as the Fulda Gap. Soviet tanks would come streaming through, and trenches were the only defense. Then, after the Soviets were repulsed, more trenches would be needed. I sat through some briefings on the tactics to be used.
The heart of all this was the development of a vehicle that would dig trenches quickly, and in frozen tundra. This vehicle, mounted on tracks and fortified against anti-tank rockets, had a front blade-and-scoop affair with a set of heavy drilling nozzles. The nozzles would be driven into the frozen earth. Pumps forced a gasoline-and-air mixture into the earth, and some sort of spark plug ignited it. The frozen earth was exploded, casting enough material away so the vehicle could move forward and repeat this procedure. A drawback seemed to be that the vehicle itself, after a series of these powerful explosions, would begin to come apart at the seams. How long would the trench machine be operational after deployment, and how strong would it have to be? How could tests be conducted?
The money for these tests was lacking because of the great expense of the Vietnam War. Officers and Pentagon officials who had the bad luck to be assigned to development of the exploding trenching machine had little they could do but sit around writing reports in expectation that one of these days the funding would come through and careers could be continued. Meanwhile we could only hope that the Soviets and the East Germans wouldn’t attack. I was assigned to make sure that in the slack waiting period our staff did not go soft physically. I was put in charge of a physical fitness program, which involved some paperwork and some scheduling. This touched everyone in the command. They had to show up for a routine of running and climbing over walls and doing pull-ups. Of course, if they were too busy to make my schedule of exercises, they could simply provide some documentation that they had done these exertions on their own time. I was given the power to decide if the documentation was convincing or merely a ruse. I excused everyone who outranked me, the older sergeants and officers, majors and above, who probably needed the exercise, and came down hard on the younger sergeants and second lieutenants, who probably didn’t.
As my proficiency in translating Vietnamese faded, my skill at dealing with the army increased. I am not an abnormally devious person, and even if I were, the clear need for managing the people who had command over me would be obvious. I have heard this skill called back-managing, a practice in which you get those with authority over you to issue orders and policies of which you approve. In more subtle corporate situations this business is probably more difficult, but in a military venue it seemed to me to be fairly straightforward. The army and the other services claim they have a unique authority, not found in any other organization. This authority is command. Other organizations can tell you what to do, but you may or may not do it. You may decide that you will wait, or question, or ask for more guidance, or simply resign your job. You are not commanded to do some task under threat of jail or being hauled off to the nearest wall for execution. Command is simple on its face, but the definition is far more complicated. The danger is the assumption that command is something that it is not.
At least in the American army the concept of command is misunderstood because a great many people think that reality is the way it is portrayed in war movies. To make a war movie plot move along commands are issued followed by a warning, “That’s an order” — something I never heard spoken in the States or overseas. Soldiers I knew quickly figured out that the orders were only as effective as the consequence of not obeying. If the result of not obeying was preferable to obeying, the order could go to hell. For most of the enlisted men in the lower ranks the result of disobeying an order might be dismissal from the service and being sent home. This dishonor and the resulting dishonorable or general discharge might have bothered men in some wars, but it was a minor consideration during the Vietnam War. Being thrown out of a military service and a situation you never wanted to be in in the first place had no particular shame. In addition, if the civilian population, especially the population in the age range of the draftees, thought the war was evil, stupid, illegal, and criminal, anyone expelled dishonorably might find praise back home. And some did.
You may remember that I was first assigned to Fort Dix, in southern New Jersey. There I f
irst discovered how far army discipline fell short of what I had supposed it to be. I learned what being AWOL actually meant. Fort Dix was a large military installation with many thousands of trainees. And it is close to New York City, a place with innumerable holes in which to hide. A soldier who made up his mind to opt out of the war could find support in New York from friends, family, or antiwar groups. Most soldiers probably knew several of their fellow troops who just failed to return from a weekend pass, or just never showed up at an ordered transfer. Coupled with the opportunity to simply leave was the subtle reality of a draftee’s relationship to the war itself.
This relationship was as follows: Most American males of draft age would have probably found the actual war interesting, even — and this is a stretch — enjoyable. Patrolling jungle trails, listening for a clever and resourceful enemy, shooting and attacking, winning medals, and so on, was something they had all done in their imaginations as young boys. The actual war itself was simply an extension of youth, if they were only allowed to get on with it. If you wanted a young American male to get going and shoot other boys, communists or whatever they were, or anyone else who was in the way, you only had to give him a gun and some ammunition, and he’d be off and at it in no time.
It was the army itself that was loathed. It was the standing in rows, the idiotic requirements, the being yelled at in an approximation of rage and forced to run in boots, the enforced respect for ranks, the prisoner haircuts, the belittling treatment from drill sergeants — who obviously were of severely limited intelligence — the days and weeks of wasted time, wasted effort, marching, stopping, waiting, memorizing things that made no sense, things that were the demonstrably archaic practices of previous wars, the enforced stupidity and the moronic considerations. It was the combination of all these things with no understandable object ahead. And even for those draftees lacking an adequate knowledge of history and sociology there was the debilitating feeling that they were caught in a huge, ponderous, uncaring, and unstoppable grinding machine with no one driving. So when a door opened to escape, or simply leave, many took the opportunity without a second thought.
Lieutenant Dangerous Page 5