Page 2 of 2 All together now, US troops stand firm
By Brian M Downing
Vietnam presents a wholly different model - one assiduously avoided today.
Early in the war, not much later than 1967, units left together from US posts
and did their 12-month tours (13 for marines). As casualties rose and tours
ended, units seemed to have revolving doors and continuity suffered. Every
month, 8.5% of soldiers finished their tours and headed home. (Short-timers
were usually cut some slack and allowed to finish their last month or so on a
base or at least a relatively secure firebase.) Furthermore, every month
another 10%, if not more, left because of transfer to another company, rest and
recreation, compassionate leave,
being deemed unfit for combat, illness, and of course wounds and death. It all
added up to high and problematic turnovers - 50% in three months or so.
Eager to increase the numbers of young infantry officers, the army rotated
platoon and company commanders every six months or so, exacerbating continuity
problems at the company level.
On arriving in Vietnam and being assigned to a platoon, new soldiers faced
iciness and hostility. It was partly from the coarseness and xenophobia of
combat units, partly the functionalism of preparing inexperienced guys for what
was to come, and partly resentment of the destruction of much of their pre-war
identities, reminders of which are written on the affable and sanguine faces of
new guys. Integration came only after a very tough initiation period, which
further weakened continuity.
Stable force levels
During World War II, the army expanded over thirty-fold and the marines
sixteen-fold, necessitating rapid promotions of tens of thousands into the NCO
and officer ranks. The military churned out young buck sergeants and
lieutenants almost as rapidly as assembly lines produced Garands, but not
always with the same quality control. A PFC in 1941 might easily have become a
platoon sergeant in two years. A lieutenant before the war might have risen to
lieutenant colonel in the same period. A captain in a lackadaisical reserve
unit might have soon commanded a regiment. Many performed exceptionally well;
others rose to positions for which they had little qualification - as those who
had to serve under them would readily attest. Postwar literature, film, and
television teemed with bitter or comedic accounts of what became known in the
business world as the Peter Principle.
Similarly, though not to the same degree, the military expanded rapidly between
1965 and 1970 as it deployed over a half million troops to Southeast Asia while
maintaining North Atlantic Treaty Organization commitments and reserve levels.
Again, there was a cost to promoting unqualified personnel, most notably
Lieutenant William Calley, who had dropped out of junior college before
enlisting, going through Officer Candidate School, and leading his platoon into
My Lai.
Thus far in the wars in the Middle East, force levels have remained relatively
constant, with reserve units and contractors alleviating some of the strain on
active duty components. Increases have been recently authorized, though nothing
near the proportions of World War II or even Vietnam. A modest increase in
promotion rates has begun, mainly in order to help retain sorely needed NCOs
and officers with combat experience.
The experience of war
The ties among men in war have been romanticized into a mysterious all but
preternatural phenomenon, but the bases of those ties can be understood,
unedifying though many are. Military training seeks to undermine an individual,
civilian identity and build a group, military one. War greatly accelerates the
process. Looking about amid an operation, soldiers feel part of an immense
apparatus operating far outside the norms of ordinary society and taking part
in events of extraordinary significance. Far away, exposed to hostile fire and
sensing mortality for the first time, soldiers feel various degrees of
dissociation from civilian experience and come to rely on one another far more
than their upbringings and training could suggest. Wishing a guy good luck as
he goes out on a patrol might contain more meaning than anything one will ever
utter again.
In battle, soldiers face fears and dangers together and most of them survive.
Soldiers share observations to hone their unit's efficacy and better their
chances of survival. Combat, when not accompanied by devastating casualties,
builds senses of pride and accomplishment, though not in the uplifting way the
cinema conveys. After the firing halts, a sense of elation sweeps over soldiers
- likely a chemical response to the sudden end of intense danger. Joking and
boasting abound, even among previously reticent and disliked soldiers.
Reluctance to talk about war experiences stems from several reasons. Battle
reinforces coarseness and violence, which are present to various extents in
previous civilian life and brought out in basic training. In war, they
strengthen to an extent that no society could tolerate and become the combat
unit's lingua franca and identity. Musicians build cohesion through
song, soldiers do so through violence. Combat can lead to pride in collective
venting of anger, wreaking destruction, and killing. Some seek trophies and
souvenirs - strange fruit of victory guaranteed them, they believe, by an
unwritten law dating back to Achilles. It can be a culminating point for darker
aspects of personalities and upbringings that found resonance in a subculture
of putatively controlled violence and that sensed endorsement in a place where
laws and morals barely exist. Reactions vary from revulsion to a sense of
totemic kinship.
Support from home
Most of the public believes that support for soldiers in the field is crucial.
And so today they display tokens of support on their cars, regardless of their
views on the war. This only underscores the divide between soldiers and those
whose understanding of war is based on the products of Hollywood, not events
like Belleau Wood. Many studies have found little connection between support
from home and unit cohesion. War is usually too dissociating.
There is an immediacy and enormity to the experience of war that renders "home"
either into a utopia in which everything in life will be grand again or into a
nebulous idea that becomes less and less distinguishable from an evocative
passage out of a dimly remembered book. Preoccupation with surrounding death
and destructiveness makes expressions of support from home seem an incongruous
voice from far away, attached to irrelevant things like eschewing swear words
and sitting up straight, and amounting to nothing more than trite words on a
subject they are ignorant of.
Indifference and even opposition from home are unlikely to have the seriously
harmful effects that politicians, most of whom remained a-bed when war beckoned
in their youths, like to proclaim. Indeed, opposition from back home commingles
with and reinforces the grim outlooks of combat units. A sense of being
overworked, unappreciated, mistreated, of doing far more than peers, is simply
part of combat culture. GIs are almost always certain that their platoon or
company gets the toughest assignments and never receives proper recognition.
During World War II, members of the 1st Infantry Division, which fought from
North Africa to Germany and took very high casualties along the way, liked to
say that the army was composed of the Big Red One and a few million
replacements. In that war's other theater, many marines believed that after the
war they were to be quarantined offshore until their bloodlust abated and they
were deemed fit (by Eleanor Roosevelt, in some versions) to re-enter society.
It's unlikely that soldiers in any war think they are appreciated back home -
or even back at battalion. An oft-heard credo in Vietnam proclaimed: "We are
the unwilling, led by the unqualified, to do the impossible, on behalf of the
ungrateful." (It probably predates as well as postdates Vietnam.) Lack of
public support, paradoxically enough to most in the civilian world, can be a
source of pride and identity, one that resonates with and reinforces the bleak
almost paranoid ethos of combat units and the sense that they are the Evil in
the Valley - another Vietnam-era moniker infused with mordant gratification
that remains opaque to outsiders.
There was a piece of folklore floating about Vietnam - a jungle legend, one
might say - that told of a package from a "commune" at a Midwestern university,
sent not to an individual GI but to an entire company. The package contained
Gaines Burgers (a dog food shaped like hamburger patties) with a note reading,
"You live like dogs, now eat like dogs - we hope you die like dogs."
Charming sentiment from the home front. But was it hard on the guys? They are
said to have had a ball chowing down on Gaines Burgers that night, which were
probably no worse than C Rations.
The nature of the wars in the Middle East today and the technological
developments of the past few decades offer a different situation for soldiers
today. Cell phones, call cards and Internet telephony allow them to talk to
loved ones back in the US on a more or less routine basis. (A cashier recently
apologized to me for being on the phone: her husband had just called her from
Iraq.)
Most soldiers have regular Internet access, which makes e-mail and even
video-conferences routine experiences during deployments. Technology and
relatively short tours (though the latter are lengthening) make the emotional
detachment from home less problematic than it was for soldiers in previous
conflicts, who had no comparable communication and served longer tours.
Accordingly, unit cohesion rests on shared hope and duty rather than on shared
resignation and duty. It is noteworthy that soldiers in the Middle East do not
typically refer to home, far away though it is, abstractly and maybe even
despairingly as "the world" - a revealing piece of Vietnam slang.
The individual
The military does not prize individualism - few organizations do. But personal
gifts of war leadership have been identified from George Washington back to
Charlemagne, Alexander and Joshua. From Antiquity onward, countless legends and
histories, paintings and films, have shown us the charismatic leader inspiring
his men and winning the day. Of course, speeches like that of King Harry before
Agincourt are rare, if not fictitious, parts of the sentimentalization of war
reaching back millennia, but the human element in unit cohesion is
unmistakable. It can be more important than most of the other elements
presented here combined, though its basis in personal charisma makes it
difficult to delineate.
Post-war studies found great importance in the platoon sergeants of the German
army of World War II. Soldiers looked to their NCO for sound judgment in
combat, fairness in administration and encouragement in bad times. His presence
was critical to cohesion, his demise the same to disintegration. One naval
intelligence officer who served with marines at Peleliu and Okinawa reports
that Japanese soldiers, on the deaths of or separation from their unit leaders,
were willing to surrender, foregoing the famed but caricatured warrior code,
which was more binding to elites than to the rank and file.
It is part of the job description of the NCO and officer to intermingle command
with banter, authority with wit. So expected is this, that every newly-minted
buck sergeant and second lieutenant makes a point of asking soldiers their
hometowns then inquiring if they roll up the sidewalks at night. Such
ordinariness and lack of imagination are everywhere in any large organization.
The weary lines don't work, but they help soldiers to appreciate the ease and
spontaneity from the genuinely charismatic figure, whose words and earnestness
convey control and understanding. Many veterans will readily recall the numbers
of imitators and frauds, then appreciate an Anderson or a Sabatini.
The individual's effect on cohesion is not limited to NCOs and officers, though
the military, quasi-feudal institution that it is, might think differently. Wit
from the ranks is at least as important as that from above, breaking the terror
of a mortar attack with a quick line. In the Legend of the Gaines Burgers, it
is a PFC or so who ritualistically breaks open one of the cellophaned patties,
pointedly takes a bite, and then passes around the rest to his appreciative
brethren.
Early in the Vietnam War, NCOs and junior officers could rely on strong
cultural patterns to establish and retain their prestige vis-a-vis their
troops. The legacy of World War II bestowed on them an aura of charisma that
conveyed to young soldiers legitimacy and continuities to the men and
institutions that had served at Normandy and Iwo Jima. These cultural patterns
were quite powerful in the mid-sixties, however, they decayed rather rapidly in
the next few years amid broader social changes in American life. Many NCOs and
junior officers had relied heavily on those patterns, but by 1968 or so no
longer could.
They were left with only personal leadership skills, which were by no means
evenly distributed, and a purely rational-legal basis of legitimate authority,
which would prove unsound after months of combat and years of social change.
NCOs and junior officers who felt that legitimacy and leadership skill stemmed
from the devices on their lapels and shoulders became commonplace and served,
inter alia, to weaken unit cohesion.
The cohesion of America's military is remarkable. It will likely be the subject
of inquiry by sociologists and general staffs around the world for quite some
time. It has belied predictions of disintegrative effects in a protracted and
unpopular war. Cohesion is important for matters related to the war outside of
combat. It shapes the way soldiers perceive the unfolding of the war. As long
as cohesion is intact, soldiers will perceive their unit's operations,
repetitious and costly though they often are, in a confident and optimistic
light. Operations are unit achievements that form a basis for their
understanding of the war. Soldiers continue to see patrols and skirmishes as
small but important steps in getting the job done and earning the right to
return home, as tactical successes that must entail strategic ones as well.
Turning to final causes, continued strong cohesion amid an unpopular war might
contribute to the weakening of constitutional principles. By obviating the need
for conscription, cohesion keeps public opposition to the war at the tepid and
politically manageable levels of talk radio and folk festivals. It also allows
Congress to avoid its constitutional responsibilities in foreign policy. And it
allows a president to continue a war with low public support. Regardless of
one's position on the present war, anyone willing to think beyond the issues
and passions of the day might look at these trends and feel concern over the
weakening or circumvention of constitutional processes regarding a matter as
crucial as war and peace.
Cohesion has remained strong despite four years of war, but only the imprudent
politician or general can ignore the strains, many of which have been reported
for eighteen months or so now. There has been an unexpected rise in the numbers
of West Pointers who elect to leave the service upon completing their
stipulated terms of service. Polling data show that disaffection is on the rise
even in formerly staunchly supportive military families. Wives, children, and
other relations are far less buoyant than in the months following the toppling
of Saddam Hussein's statue. They increasingly ask why their loved ones must
continue to face dangers, especially while most Americans do not.
Related here is the sentiment that the burdens are insufficiently shouldered by
privileged strata - a view heard in almost every lengthy conflict since the
Civil War and deeply ingrained in American political culture since Vietnam.
Memories of Vietnam in the redoubts of traditional America are not confined to
the "see it through" credo and so cannot be relied upon to be entirely
supportive of the ongoing war in Iraq.
A third or fourth tour almost certainly raises the idea in many soldiers' minds
that their number will come up this time. Cycles of deployment, home,
deployment, home are probably unprecedented in military history and hence their
effects are unknown. Upon return from overseas, soldiers must tell themselves
to stop looking for improvised explosive devices as they drive to the
commissary and for snipers as they walk around Fayetteville. Just when they are
able to allay those anxieties (they don't go away; veterans of earlier wars
report similar habits to this day), they receive orders to go back. The mind
has no reliable on/off switch for such things. The psychological effects of
this cycle will strike many veterans and psychologists as likely to be serious
and long lasting.
Cohesive dynamics continue to prevail over disintegrative ones, but caution is
warranted. Some statistics to watch include AWOL/desertion rates, psychological
treatment rates, company-level punishments, courts martial, and reenlistment
figures. It is unclear if generals today, most of whom oddly enough have little
combat experience, will recognize strains and their implications in a timely
manner. It is also unclear if political leaders, most of whom have no military
experience, will either. It merits mention, however, that the allegory of the
straw and the weakening back has a Middle Eastern setting.
Brian M Downing, a veteran of the Vietnam War, is the author of several
works of political and military history, including The Military
Revolution and Political Change and
The Paths of Glory. He can be reached at
brianmdowning@gmail.com. (The author would like to
thank the many veterans he has interviewed and
especially Daniel Karasik (navy, World War II),
Peter Sweda (army, World War II), John A Mele
(marines, Vietnam), and an anonymous colleague
(army, Afghanistan and Iraq) for helpful comments
in the development of this essay. Je vous
salue.
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