{"id":209001,"date":"2020-06-19T06:46:14","date_gmt":"2020-06-19T06:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=209001"},"modified":"2020-06-21T08:04:33","modified_gmt":"2020-06-21T08:04:33","slug":"the-real-reason-the-us-lost-in-vietnam-us-troops-were-in-open-revolt-killing-over-300-officers-in-1971","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=209001","title":{"rendered":"The Real Reason the US Lost in Vietnam"},"content":{"rendered":"

US Troops Were in Open Revolt, Killing Over 300 Officers in 1971<\/h3>\n

Joel Geier \u2013 via Russia Insider June 17, 2020<\/a><\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

\u201cOf the 543,000 American troops in Vietnam in 1968, only 14 percent (or 80,000) were combat troops. These 80,000 men took the brunt of the war. \u2026In 1968, 14,592 men\u201318 percent of combat troops\u2013were killed. An additional 35,000 had serious wounds that required hospitalization.\u201d. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

The hidden war<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse,<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous. Conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by\u2026the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Armed Forces Journal,<\/em>\u00a0June 1971<\/strong>1<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

THE MOST neglected aspect of the Vietnam War is the soldiers\u2019 revolt\u2013the mass upheaval from below that unraveled the American army. It is a great reality check in an era when the U.S. touts itself as an invincible nation. For this reason, the soldiers\u2019 revolt\u00a0has been written out of official history. Yet it was a crucial part of the massive antiwar movement<\/strong>\u00a0whose activity helped the Vietnamese people in their struggle to free Vietnam\u2013described once by President Johnson as a \u201craggedy-ass little fourth-rate country\u201d\u2013from U.S. domination.\u00a0The legacy<\/strong>\u00a0of the soldiers\u2019 revolt and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam\u2013despite more recent U.S. victories over Iraq and Serbia\u2013casts a pall on the Pentagon.<\/strong>\u00a0They still fear the political backlash that might come if U.S. ground forces sustain heavy casualties in a future war.<\/span><\/p>\n

The army revolt was a class struggle that pitted working-class soldiers against officers who viewed them as expendable. The fashionable attempt to revise Vietnam War history, to airbrush its horrors, to create a climate supportive of future military interventions, cannot acknowledge that American soldiers violently opposed that war, or that American capitalism casually tolerated the massacre of working-class troops.\u00a0Liberal academics have added to the historical distortion by reducing the radicalism of the 1960s to middle-class concerns and activities, while ignoring working-class rebellion.<\/strong>\u00a0But the militancy of the 1960s began with the Black working class as the motor force of the Black liberation struggle, and it reached its climax\u00a0with the unity of white and Black working-class soldiers whose upsurge shook U.S. imperialism.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In Vietnam, the rebellion did not take the same form as the mass stateside GI antiwar movement, which consisted of protests, marches, demonstrations and underground newspapers.\u00a0In Vietnam, the aim of the soldiers was more modest, but also more subversive<\/strong>: survival, to \u201cCYA\u201d (cover your ass), to protect \u201cthe only body you have\u201d by fighting the military\u2019s attempt to continue the war.\u00a0The survival conflict became a war within the war that ripped the armed forces apart.<\/strong>\u00a0In 1965, the Green Machine was the best army the U.S. ever put into the field; a few years later, it was useless as a fighting force.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSurvival politics,\u201d as it was then called, expressed itself through the destruction of the search-and-destroy strategy, through mutinies, through the killing of officers, and through fraternization and making peace from below with the National Liberation Front (NLF)<\/strong>. It was highly effective in destroying everything that military hierarchy and discipline stand for.\u00a0It was the proudest moment in the U.S. army\u2019s history.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Like most of the revolutionary traditions of the American working class, the soldiers\u2019 revolt has been hidden from history. The aim of this essay is to reclaim the record of that struggle.<\/span><\/p>\n

A working-class army<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war by themselves or govern themselves.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Vice President Richard M. Nixon, April 16, 19542<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

From 1964 to 1973, from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 27 million men came of draft age. A majority of them were not drafted due to college, professional, medical or National Guard deferments.\u00a0Only 40 percent were drafted and saw military service. A small minority, 2.5 million men<\/strong>\u00a0(about 10 percent of those eligible for the draft), were sent to Vietnam.<\/strong>3<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

This small minority was almost entirely working-class or rural youth. Their average age was 19.<\/strong>\u00a0Eighty-five percent of the troops were enlisted men; 15 percent were officers. The enlisted men were drawn from the 80 percent of the armed forces with a high school education or less. At this time, college education was universal in the middle class and making strong inroads in the better-off sections of the working class. Yet, in 1965 and 1966, college graduates were only 2 percent of the hundreds of thousands of draftees.4<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

In the elite colleges, the class discrepancy was even more glaring. The upper class did none of the fighting.\u00a0Of the 1,200 Harvard graduates in 1970, only 2 went to Vietnam, while working-class high schools routinely sent 20 percent, 30 percent of their graduates and more to Vietnam.<\/strong>5<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

College students who were not made officers were usually assigned to noncombat support and service units.\u00a0High school dropouts were three times more likely to be sent to combat units that did the fighting and took the casualties. Combat infantry soldiers, \u201cthe grunts,\u201d were entirely working class.<\/strong>\u00a0They included a disproportionate number of Black working-class troops. Blacks, who formed 12 percent of the troops, were often 25 percent or more of the combat units.6<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

When college deferments expired, joining the National Guard was a favorite way to get out of serving in Vietnam.<\/strong>\u00a0During the war, 80 percent of the Guard\u2019s members described themselves as joining to avoid the draft.\u00a0You needed connections to get in<\/strong>\u2013which was no problem for Dan Quayle, George W. Bush and other ruling-class draft evaders.\u00a0In 1968, the Guard had a waiting list of more than 100,000. It had triple the percentage of college graduates that the army did. Blacks made up less than 1.5 percent of the National Guard.<\/strong>\u00a0In Mississippi, Blacks were 42 percent of the population, but only one Black man served in a Guard of more than 10,000.7<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1965, the troops came from a working class that had moved in a conservative direction during the Cold War, due to the long postwar boom and McCarthyite repression. Yet, in the five years before the war, the civil rights movement had shaped Black political views. The troops had more class and trade-union consciousness than exists today. The stateside Movement for a Democratic Military, organized by former members of the Black Panther Party, had as the first points of its program, \u201cWe demand the right to collective bargaining,\u201d and \u201cWe demand wages equal to the federal minimum wage.\u201d8<\/sup>\u00a0When the Defense Department attempted to break a farm workers\u2019 strike by increasing orders for scab lettuce, soldiers boycotted mess halls, picketed and plastered bases with stickers proclaiming \u201cLifers Eat Lettuce.\u201d9<\/sup>\u00a0When the army used troops to break the national postal wildcat strike in 1970,\u00a0Vietnam GI<\/em>\u00a0called out, \u201cTo hell with breaking strikes, let\u2019s break the government.\u201d10<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Shortly after the war began, radicalism started to get a hearing among young workers. As the Black liberation struggle moved northward from 1965 to 1968, 200 cities had ghetto uprisings\u2013spreading revolutionary consciousness among young, working-class Blacks. In the factories, those same years saw a strong upturn in working-class militancy, with days lost to strikes and wildcats doubling.11<\/sup>\u00a0Left-wing ideas from the student movement were reaching working-class youth through the antiwar movement.\u00a0In 1967 and 1968, many of the troops had been radicalized before their entry into the army. Still others were radicalized prior to being shipped to Vietnam by the GI antiwar movement on stateside bases.<\/strong>\u00a0Radicalizing soldiers soon came up against the harsh reality that the officers viewed working-class troops as expendable.<\/span><\/p>\n

The middle-class officers corps<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Let the military run the show.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Senator Barry Goldwater12<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The officer corps was drawn from the 7 percent of troops who were college graduates, or the 13 percent who had one to three years of college.<\/strong>\u00a0College was to officer as high school was to enlisted man.\u00a0The officer corps was middle class in composition and managerial in outlook.<\/strong>\u00a0Ruling-class military families were heavily represented in its higher ranks.13<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Second World War, officers were 7 percent of the armed forces, an amount normal for most armies. The officer corps used the postwar permanent arms economy, with its bloated arms budget, as its vehicle for self-expansion. By the time of the Vietnam War, the officer corps was 15 percent of the armed forces, which meant one officer for every six plus men.14<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

After the end of the Korean War in 1953, there was no opportunity for combat commands. As the old army song goes, \u201cThere\u2019s no promotion\/this side of the ocean.\u201d In 1960, it took an excruciating 33 years to move from second lieutenant to colonel.\u00a0Many of the \u201clifers,\u201d professional officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), welcomed the Vietnam War as the opportunity to reinvigorate their careers. They were not disappointed.<\/strong>\u00a0By 1970, the agonizing wait to move up the career ladder from second lieutenant to colonel had been reduced to 13 years.15<\/sup>\u00a0Over 99 percent of second lieutenants became first lieutenants, 95 percent of first lieutenants were promoted to captain, 93 percent of qualified captains became majors, 77 percent of qualified majors became lieutenant colonels and half of the lieutenant colonels became colonels.16<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The surest road to military advancement is a combat command. But\u00a0there were too many active duty officers of high rank, which produced intense competition for combat commands.<\/strong>\u00a0There were 2,500 lieutenant colonels jostling for command of only 100 to 130 battalions; 6,000 colonels, 2,000 of whom were in serious competition for 75 brigade commands; and 200 major generals competing for the 13 division commands in the army.17<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

General Westmoreland, the commander of the armed forces in Vietnam, accommodated the officers by creating excessive support units and rapidly rotating combat command.<\/strong>\u00a0In Vietnam, support and service units grew to an incredible 86 percent of military manpower.\u00a0Only 14 percent of the troops were actually assigned to combat.\u00a0<\/strong>Extravagant support services were the basis for the military bureaucracy. The armed forces created \u201cnumerous logistical commands, each to be headed by a general or two who would have to have high-ranking staffs to aid each of them.\u201d Thus it became possible for 64 army generals to serve simultaneously in Vietnam, with the requisite compliment of colonels, majors etc.18<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

These superfluous support officers lived far removed from danger, lounging in rear base camps in luxurious conditions. A few miles away, combat soldiers were experiencing a nightmarish hell.<\/strong>\u00a0The contrast was too great to allow for confidence\u2013in both the officers and the war\u2013to survive unscathed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Westmoreland\u2019s solution to the competition for combat command poured gasoline on the fire. He ordered a one-year tour of duty for enlisted men in Vietnam, but only six months for officers.<\/strong>The combat troops hated the class discrimination that put them at twice the risk of their commanders.\u00a0They grew contemptuous of the officers, whom they saw as raw and dangerously inexperienced in battle.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Even a majority of officers considered Westmoreland\u2019s tour inequality as unethical. Yet they were forced to use short tours to prove themselves for promotion. They were put in situations in which their whole careers depended on what they could accomplish in a brief period<\/strong>, even if it meant taking shortcuts and risks at the expense of the safety of their men\u2013a temptation many could not resist.<\/span><\/p>\n

The outer limit of six-month commands was often shortened due to promotion, relief, injury or other reasons. The outcome was \u201crevolving-door\u201d commands.<\/strong>\u00a0As an enlisted man recalled, \u201cDuring my year in-country I had five second-lieutenant platoon leaders and four company commanders. One CO was pretty good\u2026All the rest were stupid.\u201d19<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Aggravating this was the contradiction that guaranteed opposition between officers and men in combat.\u00a0Officer promotions depended on quotas of enemy dead from search-and-destroy missions. Battalion commanders who did not furnish immediate high body counts were threatened with replacement.<\/strong>\u00a0This was no idle threat\u2013battalion commanders had a 30 to 50 percent chance of being relieved of command.\u00a0But search-and-destroy missions produced enormous casualties for the infantry soldiers.<\/strong>\u00a0Officers corrupted by career ambitions would cynically ignore this<\/strong>\u00a0and draw on the never-ending supply of replacements from the monthly draft quota.20<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Officer corruption was rife. A Pentagon official writes, \u201c[the] stench of corruption rose to unprecedented levels during William C. Westmoreland\u2019s command of the American effort in Vietnam.\u201d The CIA protected the poppy fields of Vietnamese officials and flew their heroin out of the country on Air America planes. Officers took notice and followed suit. The major who flew the U.S. ambassador\u2019s private jet was caught smuggling $8 million of heroin on the plane.21<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Army stores (PXs) were importing French perfumes and other luxury goods for the officers to sell on the black market for personal gain. But the black market extended far beyond luxury goods: \u201cThe Viet Cong received a large percentage of their supplies from the United States via the underground routes of the black market: kerosene, sheet metal, oil, gasoline engines, claymore mines, hand grenades, rifles, bags of cement,\u201d which were publicly sold at open, outdoor black markets.22<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The troops were quickly disillusioned with a war in which American-made military mat\u00e9riel was being used against them. And then there were endless scandals: PX scandals, NCO-club scandals, sergeant-major scandals, M-16 jamming scandals. In interviews, when Vietnam veterans were asked what stood out about their experience, a repeated answer was \u201cthe corruption.\u201d23<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The ethics of the officer corps imitated those of the business elite they served. They were corrupted by six-month command tours while their men served a year, by career advancement at the expense of troop welfare, by black market profiteering, and by living in luxury in the midst of combat troop slaughter. The corruption of the officers, combined with the combat plan that avoided officer casualties while guaranteeing the slaughter of their men, produced explosive results.<\/span><\/p>\n

A ruling-class strategy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

We know we can\u2019t win a ground war in Asia.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on \u201cFace the Nation\u201d (CBS-TV), May 3, 197024<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The political and military position of the U.S. was hopeless from the moment it entered the war. The U.S. was fighting to protect capitalism and empire. The Vietnamese were fighting to reunify their country and break free of foreign control.\u00a0The American-controlled government of South Vietnam was the political representative of the landlord class, which took 40 to 60 percent of the peasants\u2019 crop as rent.<\/strong>\u00a0In National Liberation Front (NLF)-controlled territory, rents were lowered to 10 percent, creating enormous peasant support for the Communist insurgency.25<\/span><\/p>\n

As the NLF expanded their areas of control, it became increasingly difficult for the landlords to collect rents. They therefore struck a fateful bargain with their government: the army would collect the peasants\u2019 rent in return for a 30 percent cut, which was to be split three ways between the government, the officers and the troops.\u00a0Rent collection became more important to the army than fighting. The corrupt South Vietnamese government and its army were little more than tax collectors for the landlords<\/strong>. The enormous economic and military power of U.S. imperialism was no stronger than the social relations of its most corrupt and reactionary colonial clients.26<\/span><\/p>\n

The war was fought by NLF troops and peasant auxiliaries who worked the land during the day and fought as soldiers at night. They would attack ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and American troops and bases or set mines at night, and then disappear back into the countryside during the day. In this form of guerrilla war, there were no fixed targets, no set battlegrounds, and there was no territory to take. With that in mind, the Pentagon designed a counterinsurgency strategy called \u201csearch and destroy.\u201d\u00a0Without fixed battlegrounds, combat success was judged by the number of NLF troops killed\u2013the body count.<\/strong>\u00a0A somewhat more sophisticated variant was the \u201ckill ratio\u201d<\/strong>\u2013the number of enemy troops killed compared to the number of Americans dead. This \u201cwar of attrition\u201d strategy was the basic military plan of the American ruling class in Vietnam.27<\/span><\/p>\n

For each enemy killed, for every body counted, soldiers got three-day passes and officers received medals and promotions.\u00a0This reduced the war from fighting for \u201cthe hearts and minds of the Vietnamese\u201d to no larger purpose than killing.<\/strong>\u00a0Any Vietnamese killed was put in the body count<\/strong>\u00a0as a dead enemy soldier, or as the GIs put it, \u201cif it\u2019s dead, it\u2019s Charlie\u201d (\u201cCharlie\u201d was GI slang for the NLF). This was an inevitable outcome of a war against a whole people. Everyone in Vietnam became the enemy\u2013and this encouraged random slaughter. Officers further ordered their men to \u201ckill them even if they try to surrender\u2013we need the body count.\u201d It was an invitation to kill indiscriminately to swell a tally sheet.28<\/span><\/p>\n

Some enlisted men followed their officers into barbarism. The most infamous incident was the genocidal slaughter of the village of My Lai, where officers demanded that their men kill all inhabitants\u2013more than 400 women, children, infants and old people. Only one minor officer, Lt. Calley, received a sentence for this Nazi-like war crime. President Nixon quickly pardoned him.29 At that point, 32 percent of the American people thought high government and military officials should be tried for war crimes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rather than following their officers, many more soldiers had the courage to revolt against barbarism.<\/strong>30<\/span><\/p>\n

Ninety-five percent of combat units were search-and-destroy units. Their mission was to go out into the jungle, hit bases and supply areas, flush out NLF troops and engage them in battle. If the NLF fought back, helicopters would fly in to prevent retreat and unleash massive firepower\u2013bullets, bombs, missiles.\u00a0The NLF would attempt to avoid this, and battle generally only occurred if the search-and-destroy missions were ambushed<\/strong>.\u00a0Ground troops became the live bait for the ambush and firefight. GIs referred to search and destroy as \u201chumping the boonies by dangling the bait.\u201d<\/strong>31<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Without helicopters, search and destroy would not have been possible\u2013and the helicopters were the terrain of the officers. \u201cOn board the command and control chopper rode the battalion commander, his aviation-support commander, the artillery-liaison officer, the battalion S-3 and the battalion sergeant major. They circled\u2026high enough to escape random small-arms fire.\u201d The officers directed their firepower on the NLF down below, but while indiscriminately spewing out bombs and napalm, they could not avoid \u201ccollateral damage\u201d\u2013hitting their own troops. One-quarter of the American dead in Vietnam was killed by \u201cfriendly fire\u201d from the choppers.\u00a0The officers were out of danger, the \u201ceye in the sky,\u201d while the troops had their \u201casses in the grass,\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0open to fire from both the NLF and the choppers.32<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

When the battle was over, the officers and their choppers would fly off to base camps removed from danger while their troops remained out in the field.<\/strong>\u00a0The class relations of any army copy those of the society it serves, but in more extreme form. Search and destroy brought the class relations of American capitalism to their ultimate pitch.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of the 543,000 American troops in Vietnam in 1968, only 14 percent (or 80,000) were combat troops. These 80,000 men took the brunt of the war.<\/strong>\u00a0They were the weak link, and their disaffection crippled the ability of the world\u2019s largest military to fight.\u00a0In 1968, 14,592 men\u201318 percent of combat troops\u2013were killed.<\/strong>\u00a0An additional 35,000 had serious wounds that required hospitalization.<\/strong>\u00a0Although not all of the dead and wounded were from combat units, the overwhelming majority were.\u00a0The majority of combat troops in 1968 were either seriously injured or killed.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>The number of American casualties in Vietnam was not extreme, but as it was concentrated among the combat troops, it was a virtual massacre.\u00a0Not to revolt amounted to suicide.<\/strong>33<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Officers, high in the sky, had few deaths or casualties. The deaths of officers occurred mostly in the lower ranks among lieutenants or captains who led combat platoons or companies. The higher-ranking officers went unharmed. During a decade of war,\u00a0only one general and eight full colonels died from enemy fire.<\/strong>34\u00a0As one study commissioned by the military concluded,\u00a0\u201cIn Vietnam\u2026the officer corps simply did not die in sufficient numbers or in the presence of their men often enough.\u201d<\/strong>35<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The slaughter of grunts went on because the officers never found it unacceptable. There was no outcry from the military or political elite, the media or their ruling-class patrons about this aspect of the war, nor is it commented on in almost any history of the war. It is ignored or accepted as a normal part of an unequal world, because the middle and upper class were not in combat in Vietnam and suffered no pain from its butchery. It never would have been tolerated had their class done the fighting. Their premeditated murder of combat troops\u00a0unleashed class war in the armed forces.<\/strong>\u00a0The revolt focused on ending search and destroy through all of the means the army had provided as training<\/strong>\u00a0for these young workers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tet\u2013the revolt begins<\/strong><\/h2>\n

We have known for some time that this offensive was planned by the enemy\u2026The ability to do what they have done has been anticipated, prepared for, and met\u2026The stated purposes of the general uprising have failed\u2026I do not believe that they will achieve a psychological victory.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

President Lyndon B. Johnson, February 2, 196836<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The Tet Offensive was the turning point of the Vietnam War and the start of open, active soldiers\u2019 rebellion. At the end of January 1968, on\u00a0Tet<\/em>, the Vietnamese New Year, the NLF sent 100,000 troops into Saigon and 36 provincial capitals to lead a struggle for the cities. The Tet Offensive was not militarily successful, because of the savagery of the U.S. counterattack.\u00a0In Saigon alone, American bombs killed 14,000 civilians. The city of Ben Tre became emblematic of the U.S. effort when the major who retook it announced that \u201cto save the city, we had to destroy it.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Westmoreland and his generals claimed that they were the victors of Tet because they had inflicted so many casualties on the NLF. But to the world, it was clear that U.S. imperialism had politically lost the war in Vietnam.\u00a0Tet showed that the NLF had the overwhelming support of the Vietnamese population\u2013millions knew of and collaborated with the NLF entry into the cities and no one warned the Americans.<\/strong>\u00a0The ARVN had turned over whole cities without firing a shot.<\/strong>\u00a0In some cases, ARVN troops had welcomed the NLF and turned over large weapons supplies. The official rationale for the war, that U.S. troops were there to help the Vietnamese fend off Communist aggression from the North, was no longer believed by anybody. The South Vietnamese government and military were clearly hated by the people.37<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Westmoreland\u2019s constant claim that there was \u201clight at the end of the tunnel,\u201d that victory was imminent, was shown to be a lie. Search and destroy was a pipe dream.\u00a0The NLF did not have to be flushed out of the jungle\u2013it operated everywhere.<\/strong>\u00a0No place in Vietnam was a safe base for American soldiers when the NLF so decided.<\/span><\/p>\n

What, then, was the point of this war? Why should American troops fight to defend a regime its own people despised?<\/strong>\u00a0Soldiers became furious at a government and an officer corps who risked their lives for lies. Throughout the world, Tet and the confidence that American imperialism was weak and would be defeated produced a massive, radical upsurge that makes 1968 famous as the year of revolutionary hope. In the U.S. army, it became the start of the showdown with the officers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Within three years, more than one-quarter of the armed forces was absent without leave (AWOL), had deserted or was in military prisons. Countless others had received \u201cHo Chi Minh discharges\u201d for being disruptive and troublemaking. But the most dangerous forces were those still active in combat units, whose fury over being slaughtered in useless search-and-destroy missions\u00a0erupted in the greatest rebellion the U.S. army has ever encountered.<\/strong>38<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Mutiny<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

If an officer attempted to impose disciplinary punishment upon a soldier, the power did not exist to get it executed. In that you have one of the sure signs of a genuine popular revolution. With the falling away of their disciplinary power, the political bankruptcy of the staff of officers was laid bare.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Leon Trotsky,\u00a0History<\/em>\u00a0of the Russian Revolution<\/em>39<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The refusal of an order to advance into combat is an act of mutiny. In time of war, it is the gravest crime in the military code, punishable by death. In Vietnam, mutiny was rampant,\u00a0<\/strong>the power to punish withered and discipline collapsed\u00a0as search and destroy was revoked from below.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Until 1967, open defiance of orders was rare and harshly repressed<\/strong>, with sentences of two to ten years for minor infractions. Hostility to search-and-destroy missions took the form of covert combat avoidance, called \u201csandbagging\u201d by the grunts.\u00a0A platoon sent out to \u201chump the boonies\u201d might look for a safe cover from which to file fabricated reports of imaginary activity<\/strong>.40<\/span><\/p>\n

But after Tet, there was a massive shift from combat avoidance to mutiny.<\/strong>\u00a0One Pentagon official reflected that \u201cmutiny became so common that the army was forced to disguise its frequency by talking instead of \u2018combat refusal.’\u201d\u00a0Combat refusal, one commentator observed, \u201cresembled a strike and occurred when GIs refused, disobeyed, or negotiated an order into combat.\u201d<\/strong>41<\/span><\/p>\n

Acts of mutiny took place on a scale previously only encountered in revolutions.<\/strong>\u00a0The first mutinies in 1968 were unit and platoon-level rejections of the order to fight. The army recorded 68 such mutinies that year. By 1970, in the 1st Air Cavalry Division alone, there were 35 acts of combat refusal.42<\/sup>\u00a0One military study concluded that combat refusal was \u201cunlike mutinous outbreaks of the past, which were usually sporadic, short-lived events. The progressive unwillingness of American soldiers to fight to the point of open disobedience took place over a four-year period between 1968-71.\u201d43<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The 1968 combat refusals of individual units expanded to involve whole companies by the next year.<\/strong>\u00a0The first reported mass mutiny was in the 196th Light Brigade in August 1969. Company A of the 3rd Battalion, down to 60 men from its original 150, had been pushing through Songchang Valley under heavy fire for five days when it refused an order to advance down a perilous mountain slope. Word of the mutiny spread rapidly. The\u00a0New York Daily News<\/em>\u00a0ran a banner headline, \u201cSir, My Men Refuse To Go.\u201d44<\/sup>\u00a0The GI paper,\u00a0The Bond<\/em>, accurately noted, \u201cIt was an organized strike\u2026A shaken brass relieved the company commander\u2026but they did not charge the guys with anything. The Brass surrendered to the strength of the organized men.\u201d45<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

This precedent\u2013no court-martial for refusing to obey the order to fight, but the line officer relieved of his command\u2013was the pattern for the rest of the war.<\/strong>\u00a0Mass insubordination was not punished by an officer corps that lived in fear of its own men. Even the threat of punishment often backfired. In one famous incident, B Company of the 1st Battalion of the 12th Infantry refused an order to proceed into NLF-held territory. When they were threatened with court-martials, other platoons rallied to their support and refused orders to advance until the army backed down.46<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

As the fear of punishment faded, mutinies mushroomed.<\/strong>\u00a0There were at least ten reported major mutinies, and hundreds of smaller ones. Hanoi\u2019s\u00a0Vietnam Courier<\/em>\u00a0documented 15 important GI rebellions in 1969.47<\/sup>\u00a0At Cu Chi, troops from the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry refused battle orders. The \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d broadcast live a patrol from the 7th Cavalry telling their captain that his order for direct advance against the NLF was nonsense, that it would threaten casualties, and that they would not obey it. Another CBS broadcast televised the mutiny of a rifle company of the 1st Air Cavalry Division.48<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

When Cambodia was invaded in 1970, soldiers from Fire Base Washington conducted a sit-in. They told\u00a0Up Against the Bulkhead,<\/em>\u00a0\u201cWe have no business there\u2026we just sat down. Then they promised us we wouldn\u2019t have to go to Cambodia.\u201d Within a week, there were two additional mutinies, as men from the 4th and 8th Infantry refused to board helicopters to Cambodia.49<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

In the invasion of Laos in March 1971, two platoons refused to advance. To prevent the mutiny from spreading, the entire squadron was pulled out of the Laos operation. The captain was relieved of his command, but there was no discipline against the men. When a lieutenant from the 501st Infantry refused his battalion commander\u2019s order to advance his troops, he merely received a suspended sentence.50<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The decision not to punish men defying the most sacrosanct article of the military code,<\/strong>\u00a0the disobedience of the order for combat,\u00a0indicated how much the deterioration of discipline had eroded the power of the officers. The only punishment for most mutinies was to relieve the commanding officer of his duties.\u00a0<\/strong>Consequently, many commanders would not report that they had lost control of their men. They swept news of mutiny, which would jeopardize their careers, under the rug.\u00a0As they became quietly complicit, the officer corps lost any remaining moral authority to impose discipline.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

For every defiance in combat, there were hundreds of minor acts of insubordination in rear base camps. As one infantry officer reported, \u201cYou can\u2019t give orders and expect them to be obeyed.\u201d51<\/sup>\u00a0This democratic upsurge from below was so extensive that discipline was replaced by a new command technique called \u201dworking it out.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0Working it out was a form of collective bargaining in which negotiations went on between officers and men to determine orders. Working it out destroyed the authority of the officer corps and gutted the ability of the army to carry out search-and-destroy missions. But the army had no alternative strategy for a guerrilla war against a national liberation movement.52<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The political impact of the mutiny was felt far beyond Vietnam. As H.R. Haldeman, Nixon\u2019s chief of staff, reflected, \u201cIf troops are going to mutiny, you can\u2019t pursue an aggressive policy.\u201d The soldiers\u2019 revolt tied down the global reach of U.S. imperialism.53<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Fragging<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The moral condition of the army was hopeless. You might describe it by saying the army as an army no longer existed. Defeats, retreats, and the rottenness of the ruling group had utterly undermined the troops.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Leon Trotsky,History of the Russian Revolution<\/em>54<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The murder of American officers by their troops was an openly proclaimed goal in Vietnam. As one GI newspaper demanded, \u201cDon\u2019t desert. Go to Vietnam, and kill your commanding officer.\u201d55 And they did.\u00a0A new slang term arose to celebrate the execution of officers: fragging.<\/strong>\u00a0The word came from the fragmentation grenade, which was the weapon of choice because the evidence was destroyed in the act.56<\/span><\/p>\n

In every war, troops kill officers whose incompetence or recklessness threatens the lives of their men. But only in Vietnam did this become pervasive in combat situations and widespread in rear base camps. It was the most well-known aspect of the class struggle inside the army,\u00a0directed not just at intolerable officers, but at \u201clifers\u201d as a class.<\/strong>\u00a0In the soldiers\u2019 revolt, it became accepted practice to paint political slogans on helmets.\u00a0A popular helmet slogan summed up this mood: \u201cKill a non-com for Christ.\u201d Fragging was the ransom the ground troops extracted for being used as live bait.57<\/sup><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

No one knows how many officers were fragged, but after Tet it became epidemic<\/strong>. At least 800 to 1,000 fragging attempts using explosive devices were made.\u00a0The army reported 126 fraggings in 1969, 271 in 1970 and 333 in 1971, when they stopped keeping count.<\/strong>\u00a0But in that year, just in the Americal Division (of My Lai fame), one fragging per week took place. Some military estimates are that fraggings occurred at five times the official rate, while officers of the Judge Advocate General Corps believed that only 10 percent of fraggings were reported. These figures do not include officers who were shot in the back by their men and listed as wounded or killed in action.58<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Most fraggings resulted in injuries<\/strong>, although \u201cword of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.\u201d59<\/sup>\u00a0The army admitted that it could not account for how 1,400 officers and noncommissioned officers died.<\/strong>\u00a0This number, plus the official list of fragging deaths, has been accepted as the unacknowledged army estimate for officers killed by their men. It suggests that 20 to 25 percent\u2013if not more\u2013of all officers killed during the war were killed by enlisted men, not the \u201cenemy.\u201d This figure has no precedent in the history of war.60<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Soldiers put bounties on officers targeted for fragging. The money, usually between $100 and $1,000, was collected by subscription from among the enlisted men. It was a reward for the soldier who executed the collective decision.\u00a0The highest bounty for an officer was $10,000, publicly offered by\u00a0GI Says,\u00a0<\/em>a mimeographed bulletin put out in the 101st Airborne Division, for Col. W. Honeycutt<\/strong>, who had ordered the May 1969 attack on Hill 937. The hill had no strategic significance and was immediately abandoned when the battle ended. It became enshrined in GI folklore as Hamburger Hill, because of the 56 men killed and 420 wounded taking it. Despite several fragging attempts, Honeycutt escaped uninjured.61<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

As\u00a0Vietnam GI<\/em>\u00a0argued after Hamburger Hill,\u00a0\u201c<\/strong>Brass are calling this a tremendous victory. We call it a goddam butcher shop...If you want to die so some lifer can get a promotion, go right ahead.<\/strong>\u00a0But if you think your life is worth something, you better get yourselves together.\u00a0If you don\u2019t take care of the lifers, they might damn well take care of you.\u201d<\/strong>62<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Fraggings were occasionally called off. One lieutenant refused to obey an order to storm a hill during an operation in the Mekong Delta. \u201cHis first sergeant later told him that when his men heard him refuse that order, they removed a $350 bounty earlier placed on his head because they thought he was a \u2018hard-liner.’\u201d63<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The motive for most fraggings was not revenge, but to change battle conduct. For this reason, officers were usually warned<\/strong>\u00a0prior to fraggings. First, a smoke grenade would be left near their beds. Those who did not respond would find a tear-gas grenade or a grenade pin on their bed as a gentle reminder. Finally, the lethal grenade was tossed into the bed of sleeping, inflexible officers.\u00a0Officers understood the warnings and usually complied<\/strong>, becoming captive to the demands of their men. It was the most practical means of cracking army discipline. The units whose officers responded opted out of search-and-destroy missions.64<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

An Army judge who presided over fragging trials called fragging \u201cthe troops\u2019 way of controlling officers,\u201d and added that it was \u201cdeadly effective.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0He explained, \u201cCaptain Steinberg argues that\u00a0once an officer is intimidated by even the threat of fragging he is useless to the military<\/strong>\u00a0because he can no longer carry out orders essential to the functioning of the Army. Through intimidation by threats\u2013verbal and written\u2026virtually all officers and NCOs have to take into account the possibility of fragging before giving an order to the men under them.\u201d\u00a0The fear of fragging affected officers and NCOs far beyond those who were actually involved in fragging incidents.<\/strong>65<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Officers who survived fragging attempts could not tell which of their men had tried to murder them, or when the men might strike again. They lived in constant fear<\/strong>\u00a0of future attempts at fragging by unknown soldiers.\u00a0In Vietnam it was a truism that \u201ceveryone was the enemy\u201d: for the lifers, every enlisted man was the enemy.<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cIn parts of Vietnam [fragging] stirs more fear among officers and NCOs than does the war with \u2018Charlie.’\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Counter-fragging by retaliating officers contributed to a war within the war. While 80 percent of fraggings were of officers and NCOs, 20 percent were of enlisted men<\/strong>, as officers sought to kill potential troublemakers or those whom they suspected of planning to frag them. In this civil war within the army, the military police were used to reinstate order.\u00a0In October 1971, military police air assaulted the Praline mountain signal site to protect an officer who had been the target of repeated fragging attempts. The base was occupied for a week before command was restored.<\/strong>66<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Fragging undermined the ability of the Green Machine to function as a fighting force. By 1970, \u201cmany commanders no longer trusted Blacks or radical whites with weapons except on guard duty or in combat.\u201d In the Americal Division, fragmentation grenades were not given to troops.<\/strong>\u00a0In the 440 Signal Battalion, the colonel refused to distribute all arms.67<\/sup>\u00a0As a soldier at Cu Chi told the\u00a0New York Times,\u00a0<\/em>\u201cThe American garrisons on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken the weapons from us and put them under lock and key.\u201d68<\/sup>\u00a0The U.S. army was slowly disarming its own men to prevent the weapons from being aimed at the main enemy: the lifers. It is hard to think of another army so afraid of its own soldiers.69<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Peace from below\u2013search and avoid<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The army was incurably sick\u2026so far as making war was concerned, it did not exist. Nobody believed in the success of the war, the officers as little as the soldiers. Nobody wanted to fight any more, neither the army nor the people.<\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Leon Trotsky,\u00a0History of the Russian Revolution\u00a0<\/em>70<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Mutiny and fraggings expressed the anger and bitterness that combat soldiers felt at being used as bait to kill Communists. It forced the troops to reassess who was the real enemy. Many began to conclude that the enemy was the lifers or the rulers in the U.S.\u2013that it was the capitalist class and not, as they had once believed, the NLF.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a remarkable letter, 40 combat officers wrote to President Nixon in July 1970 to advise him that \u201cthe military, the leadership of this country\u2013are perceived by many soldiers to be almost as much our enemy as the VC [Viet Cong] and the NVA [North Vietnamese Army].\u201d71<\/sup>\u00a0Extraordinary as this officer admission was, it was too little, too late. Fort Ord\u2019s\u00a0Right-On-Post<\/em>\u00a0proclaimed that GIs had to free themselves and all exploited people from the oppression of the military, that \u201cwe recognize our true enemy\u2026It is the capitalists who see only profit\u2026They control the military which sends us off to die. They control the police who occupy the black and brown ghettoes.\u201d72<\/sup>\u00a0For others, the enemy was more immediate. As the GI paper, the\u00a0Ft. Lewis-McChord<\/em>\u00a0Free Press,<\/em>\u00a0stated, \u201cIn Vietnam, the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy.\u201d73<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

From there it was a short leap to the idea that \u201cthe other war, the war with Charlie,\u201d had to be ended. After the 1970 invasion of Cambodia enlarged the war, fury and the demoralizing realization that nothing could stop the warmongers swept both the antiwar movement and the troops.74<\/sup>\u00a0The most popular helmet logo became \u201cUUUU,\u201d which meant \u201cthe unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful.\u201d Peace, if it were to come, would have to be made by the troops themselves, instituted by an unofficial troop withdrawal ending search-and-destroy missions.75<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The form this peace from below took came to be called \u201csearch and avoid,\u201d or \u201csearch and evade.\u201d It became so extensive that \u201csearch and evade (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, \u2018CYA\u2019 (cover your ass) and get home!\u201d It was not just a replay of early combat avoidance, of individual units hiding from the war\u2013it was more open, more political, and more clearly focused as a strategy to bring peace.76<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

In search and avoid, patrols sent out into the field deliberately eluded potential clashes with the NLF. Night patrols, the most dangerous, would halt and take up positions a few yards beyond the defense perimeter, where the NLF would never come. By skirting potential conflicts, they hoped to make it clear to the NLF that their unit had established its own peace treaty.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another frequent search-and-avoid tactic was to leave base camp, secure a safe area in the jungle and set up a perimeter-defense system in which to hole up for the time allotted for the mission. \u201cSome units even took enemy weapons with them when they went out on such search-and-avoid missions so that upon return they could report a firefight and demonstrate evidence of enemy casualties for the body-count figures required by higher headquarters.\u201d77<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The army was forced to accommodate what began to be called \u201cthe grunts\u2019 cease-fire.\u201d An American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, said, \u201cThey have set up separate companies for men who refuse to go out into the field. It is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place, he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp.\u201d78<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

An observer at Pace, near the Cambodian front where a unilateral truce was widely enforced, reported, \u201cThe men agreed and passed the word to other platoons: nobody fires unless fired upon. As of about 1100 hours on October 10,1971, the men of Bravo Company, 11\/12 First Cav Division, declared their own private cease-fire with the North Vietnamese.\u201d79<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The NLF responded to the new situation. People\u2019s Press,<\/em>\u00a0a GI paper, in its June 1971 issue claimed that NLF and NVA units were ordered not to open hostilities against U.S. troops wearing red bandanas or peace signs, unless first fired upon.80<\/sup>\u00a0Two months later, the first Vietnam veteran to visit Hanoi was given a copy of \u201can order to North Vietnamese troops not to shoot U.S. soldiers wearing antiwar symbols or carrying their rifles pointed down.\u201d He reports its impact on \u201cconvincing me that I was on the side of the Vietnamese\u00a0now.<\/em>\u201c81<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Colonel Heinl reported this:<\/span><\/p>\n

That \u2018search-and-evade\u2019 has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation\u2019s recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that\u00a0Communist units in Indochina have been ordered not to engage American units which do not molest them.<\/strong>\u00a0The same statement boasted\u2013not without foundation in fact\u2013that American defectors are in the VC ranks.82<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Some officers joined, or led their men, in the unofficial cease-fire from below. A U.S. army colonel claimed:<\/span><\/p>\n

I had influence over an entire province. I put my men to work helping with the harvest. They put up buildings.\u00a0Once the NVA understood what I was doing, they eased up. I\u2019m talking to you about a de facto truce, you understand. The war stopped in most of the province.<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s the kind of history that doesn\u2019t get recorded. Few people even know it happened, and no one will ever admit that it happened.83<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Search and avoid, mutiny and fraggings were a brilliant success. Two years into the soldiers\u2019 upsurge, in 1970, the number of U.S. combat deaths were down by more than 70 percent<\/strong>\u00a0(to 3,946) from the 1968 high of more than 14,000.\u00a0The revolt of the soldiers in order to survive and not to allow themselves to be victims<\/strong>\u00a0could only succeed by a struggle prepared to use any means necessary to achieve peace from below.84<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The revolt was not just against body bags, it was the \u201cRevolt of the Body Bags,\u201d of men who refused to allow themselves to be shoved into body bags, to become American capitalism\u2019s road kill.\u00a0The soldiers\u2019 revolt won the internal war within the army. Ground troops were removed from Vietnam. The armed forces are still afraid to use them elsewhere.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Revolution and the army<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It is a manifest fact that the disorganization of armies and a total relaxation of discipline has been both precondition and consequence of all successful revolutions hitherto.<\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Engels to Marx, September 26, 185185<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

It is a maxim of revolutionary politics that for revolution to be successful, some part of the army must go over to the revolutionary forces. For that to occur, the revolutionary movement must be strong enough to give confidence to soldiers that it can protect them from the consequences of breaking military discipline.<\/span><\/p>\n

The army revolted in Vietnam\u2013but it lacked revolutionary organization. There was no revolution for it to go over to. The revolt was successful in ending the use of ground troops, but left intact the structures of the army, which allowed imperialism to slowly rebuild out of the wreckage.<\/span><\/p>\n

The army revolt had all of the strengths and weaknesses of the 1960s radicalization of which it was a part.\u00a0It was a courageous mass struggle from below, creatively improvising the necessary tactical means to accomplish its goals as it went along. It relied upon no one but itself to win its battles.<\/strong>\u00a0It was revolutionary in temper and tactics, but it lacked the prerequisites for revolutionary success: organization, program, cadre and leadership. It is possible to name dozens of heroic acts of the soldiers\u2019 revolt in Vietnam, but impossible to record any organization or leader. They are nameless.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was brilliant but brief.\u00a0The only organizing tools were the underground GI newspapers. A newspaper, as any revolutionary can tell you, is an organizer, the scaffolding for the building of organization.<\/strong>\u00a0But newspapers became a substitute for organization. There was scaffolding, but no building. Had revolutionary organization coordinated, centralized, politicized, made conscious and generalized the striving of the soldiers\u2019 revolt, the potential for change would have been enormously greater, and the outcome unimaginable.<\/span><\/p>\n

A contradiction of modern imperialist armies is that they serve ruling-class wars of conquest, while they rely on working-class troops,<\/strong>\u00a0who\u2013whatever their initial ideological confusion\u2013have no material interest in conquest. This contradiction has the potential to destroy armies. In the 20th century, it did so to the Russian and German armies at the end of the First World War, the Portuguese army in the African colonial wars in the 1970s and the American army in Vietnam. But armies have also been used for counterrevolution, of which the defeat of the Chilean revolution is a still living reminder.<\/span><\/p>\n

The hidden history of the 1960s proves that the American army can be split and won to the revolutionary movement. But that requires the long, slow patient work of explanation, of propaganda, of education, of organization, and of agitation and action. The Vietnam revolt shows how rank-and-file soldiers can rise to the task. The unfinished job is for revolutionary organization to also rise to that level. When it does, the troops of the American army can become the troops of the American revolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

1 Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., \u201cThe Collapse of the Armed Forces,\u201d\u00a0Armed Forces Journal<\/em>, June 7, 1971, reprinted in Marvin Gettleman, et al.,\u00a0Vietnam and America: A Documented History\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 327.2 Quoted in William G. Effros,\u00a0Quotations: Vietnam, 1945-70\u00a0<\/em>)New York: Random House, 1970), p. 172.<\/span><\/p>\n

3 Christian G. Appy,\u00a0Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam<\/em>\u00a0(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 18.<\/span><\/p>\n

4 Appy, pp. 24-27 and James William Gibson,\u00a0The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam<\/em>\u00a0(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), pp. 214-15.<\/span><\/p>\n

5 James Fallows, \u201cWhat Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?\u201d\u00a0Vietnam: Anthology and Guide to a Television History,\u00a0<\/em>Steven Cohen, ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 384.<\/span><\/p>\n

6 Appy, p. 26. The rate of Black deaths in Vietnam in 1965 was double their army participation rate, but was brought down to normal proportions within three years because of Black soldiers\u2019 struggle against racism. The struggle for Black liberation within the army in these years deserves another article of its own. For more information, see David Cortright,\u00a0Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today\u00a0<\/em>(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), pp. 201-16.<\/span><\/p>\n

7 Appy, pp. 36-37.<\/span><\/p>\n

8 Larry G. Waterhouse and Mariann G. Wizard,\u00a0Turning the Guns Around: Notes on the GI Movement<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 136-38.<\/span><\/p>\n

9\u00a0Camp News,<\/em>\u00a0January 15, 1971, and March 15, 1971.<\/span><\/p>\n

10\u00a0Vietnam GI,\u00a0<\/em>May 1970. Of the hundreds of underground GI newspapers, only a handful appeared regularly over time and had readership beyond a particular base or army division. Of these, the most important were\u00a0Camp News, The Bond\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Vietnam GI.<\/em>\u00a0Vietnam GI\u00a0<\/em>had the largest following in Vietnam due to its ability to put a clear, radical political analysis in language that connected with the experiences of the grunts. It was put out by Vietnam vets and by former members of the left wing of the Young People\u2019s Socialist League, who were loosely associated with, although organizationally independent from, the current that became the American International Socialists.<\/span><\/p>\n

11 Kim Moody, \u201cThe American Working Class in Transition,\u201d\u00a0International Socialism<\/em>, No. 40 (Old Series), Oct\/Nov 1969, p. 19.<\/span><\/p>\n

12 Effros, p. 209.<\/span><\/p>\n

13 Appy, pp. 25-26.<\/span><\/p>\n

14 Cincinnatus,\u00a0Self-Destruction, The Disintegration and Decay of the<\/em>\u00a0United States Army During the Vietnam Era,\u00a0<\/em>(New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), p. 155.<\/span><\/p>\n

15 Cincinnatus, p. 139.<\/span><\/p>\n

16 Cincinnatus, p. 145.<\/span><\/p>\n

17 Cincinnatus, p. 146.<\/span><\/p>\n

18 Cincinnatus, pp. 147-48.<\/span><\/p>\n

19 Cincinnatus, pp. 157-59.<\/span><\/p>\n

20 Gibson, p. 116.<\/span><\/p>\n

21 Cincinnatus, p. 54-56.<\/span><\/p>\n

22 Cincinnatus, p. 55.<\/span><\/p>\n

23 Cincinnatus, p. 53.<\/span><\/p>\n

24 Effros, p. 217.<\/span><\/p>\n

25 Gibson, p. 71.<\/span><\/p>\n

26 Gibson, pp. 74-75.<\/span><\/p>\n

27 Gibson, pp. 101-15 and Cincinnatus, pp. 75-82.<\/span><\/p>\n

28 Appy, pp. 155-56, and Cincinnatus, pp. 84-85.<\/span><\/p>\n

29 Seymour M. Hersh, \u201cWhat Happened at My Lai?\u201d in Gettleman, pp. 410-24.<\/span><\/p>\n

30 Cohen, p. 378.<\/span><\/p>\n

31 Appy, pp. 152-58, 182-84.<\/span><\/p>\n

32 Cincinnatus, pp. 62-63, 70.<\/span><\/p>\n

33 Cincinnatus, p. 147, 161.<\/span><\/p>\n

34 Cincinnatus, p. 155.<\/span><\/p>\n

35 Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage,\u00a0Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 16.<\/span><\/p>\n

36 Effros, p. 89.<\/span><\/p>\n

37 Gibson. See Chapter 6, \u201cThe Tet Offensive and the Production of a Double Reality.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

38 Robert Musil, \u201cThe Truth About Deserters,\u201d\u00a0The Nation<\/em>, April 16, 1973 and for \u201cHo Chi Minh\u201d discharges, Steve Rees, \u201cA Questioning Spirit: GIs Against the War\u201d in Dick Custer, ed.,\u00a0They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee\u00a0<\/em>(Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 171.<\/span><\/p>\n

39 Leon Trotsky,\u00a0The History of the Russian Revolution\u00a0<\/em>(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1957), Vol. 1, p. 256.<\/span><\/p>\n

40 Appy, p. 244-45.<\/span><\/p>\n

41 Cincinnatus, p. 156 and Richard Moser,\u00a0The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (Perspectives in the Sixties)\u00a0<\/em>(New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1996), p. 44.<\/span><\/p>\n

42 Matthew Rinaldi, \u201cThe Olive-Drab Rebels: Military Organizing during the Vietnam Era,\u201d\u00a0Radical America,\u00a0<\/em>Vol.8 No. 3, May-June 1974, p. 29.<\/span><\/p>\n

43 Gabriel and Savage, quoted in Appy, p. 254.<\/span><\/p>\n

44 Cortright, p. 35-36.<\/span><\/p>\n

45\u00a0The Bond,\u00a0<\/em>September 22, 1969.<\/span><\/p>\n

46 Cortright, p. 38.<\/span><\/p>\n

47 Moser, p. 45.<\/span><\/p>\n

48 Cortright, p. 36 and Heinl, p. 329.<\/span><\/p>\n

49 Moser, p. 47 and Cortright, p. 37.<\/span><\/p>\n

50 Rees, p. 152 and Cortright, p. 37-38.<\/span><\/p>\n

51 Tom Wells,\u00a0The War Within: America\u2019s Battle Over Vietnam\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 474.<\/span><\/p>\n

52 Moser, p. 133 and Cortright, p. 35.<\/span><\/p>\n

53 Wells, p. 475.<\/span><\/p>\n

54 Trotsky, Vol.1, p. 260.<\/span><\/p>\n

55 Quoted in Heinl, p. 330.<\/span><\/p>\n

56 Eugene Linden, \u201cFragging and Other Withdrawal Symptoms,\u201d\u00a0Saturday Review,\u00a0<\/em>January 8, 1972, p. 12.<\/span><\/p>\n

57 Cincinnatus, pp. 51-52.<\/span><\/p>\n

58 Moser, p. 48 and Appy, p. 246.<\/span><\/p>\n

59 Heinl, p. 328.<\/span><\/p>\n

60 Terry Anderson, \u201cThe GI Movement and the Response from the Brass,\u201d in Melvin Small and William Hoover, eds.,\u00a0Give Peace A Chance<\/em>\u00a0(Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1992), p. 105.<\/span><\/p>\n

61 Andy Stapp,\u00a0Up Against The Brass<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. 182 and Heinl, p. 328-29 and Appy, p. 230-31.<\/span><\/p>\n

62\u00a0Vietnam GI,\u00a0<\/em>June 1969.<\/span><\/p>\n

63 Linden, p. 14.<\/span><\/p>\n

64 Wells, p. 474.<\/span><\/p>\n

65 Linden, p. 12-13.<\/span><\/p>\n

66 Cortright, p. 44 and Moser, p. 50.<\/span><\/p>\n

67 Cortright, p. 47 and Moser, p. 50.<\/span><\/p>\n

68 Quoted in Heinl, p. 328.<\/span><\/p>\n

69 Linden, p. 15.<\/span><\/p>\n

70 Trotsky, Vol. 1, p. 261.<\/span><\/p>\n

71 Cortright, p. 28.<\/span><\/p>\n

72 Quoted in Moser, p. 98.<\/span><\/p>\n

73 Quoted in Heinl, p. 330.<\/span><\/p>\n

74 Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor, recalled \u201ca grave heroin epidemic\u2026surfaced right after the Cambodian invasion.\u201d Interviewed in Wells, p. 456. Heroin addiction thereafter affected between 10-30 percent of the troops.<\/span><\/p>\n

75 Appy, p. 43 and Cincinnatus, p. 27.<\/span><\/p>\n

76 Heinl, p. 329.<\/span><\/p>\n

77 Cincinnatus, p. 155.<\/span><\/p>\n

78 Quoted in Heinl, p. 328.<\/span><\/p>\n

79 Richard Boyle,\u00a0GI Revolts: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam\u00a0<\/em>(San Francisco: United Front Press, 1972) p. 28.<\/span><\/p>\n

80 Moser, p. 132.<\/span><\/p>\n

81 Wells, p. 526.<\/span><\/p>\n

82 Heinl, p. 329.<\/span><\/p>\n

83 Moser, p. 132.<\/span><\/p>\n

84 Cincinnatus, p. 161.<\/span><\/p>\n

—<\/span><\/p>\n

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Originally posted isreview.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The army reported 126 fraggings (execution of officers) in 1969, 271 in 1970 and 333 in 1971, when they stopped keeping count”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Hidden_and_Revisionist_History"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=209001"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209032,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209001\/revisions\/209032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=209001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=209001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=209001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}