Triage unit, Vietnam (1969).
My first duty assignment after medic’s training was at the Army hospital at West Point. My few months in the emergency room (ER) at the military academy helped me a great deal when I got to Vietnam. At least by then I’d seen some dead bodies and been involved in a few intense life-and-death medical situations.
The experience also gave me a glimpse into the Army’s training of its most elite officer corps. The four-year program required the cadets to be disciplined in body and mind. I didn’t envy their rigorous program where almost every minute of their time was structured and demanding. From their academic classes to their physical training, a lot was expected of the future officers. Summer breaks from the classroom were filled with postings to Army bases where they trained with the regular Army.
Church attendance on Sunday was required. The cadet’s honor code stated: “A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate those who do.”
As a medic in the ER, I also interacted with many cadets at the daily sick call. I don’t remember a single incidence of rudeness or arrogance directed at me by these soon-to-be officers. Many have gone on to be prominent leaders not only in the Army, but in government positions after their military service. Having a glimpse of their training first-hand left me with a curiosity about their careers when some of them gained prominence.
Codes are codes, and people are people. We don’t always live up to our ideals. The graduates of West Point were a part of the officer corps in Vietnam from platoon commanders to General Westmoreland who commanded all forces in the war zone.
***
Even as privates in training we were instructed in a military code of conduct that forbade carrying out an unlawful order. In such a structured environment as the military, with its strict chain of command, that has always struck me as contradictory. It is anything but realistic. Privates were simply not allowed to challenge the authority of officers. It begged the question: Enlisted men are the arbiters of lawful orders? Don’t be ridiculous! How about the officer corps knowing and adhering to what is appropriate? They are the individuals in the military with more education, training and all of the authority to boot.
So, when I got to Vietnam and began to see the numbers of civilian war casualties, it confused me at first. Later, I began to realize it was the result of poor and corrupted leadership that went to the highest levels of government. Stated policy and the way the war was conducted on the ground were often two different things. Any complaints about the discrepancies were not only buried by the military’s bureaucracy, but sometimes backed up with threats. See Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse for documented cases found in Army records.
Child in Can Tho, Vietnam (1969)
Look at it this way. If the commanding general of the Ninth Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta, Julian Ewell, wants more dead bodies, that is what he will get. His entire chain of command pushed hard to achieve them. It is no more realistic for a lieutenant in charge of leading a platoon to challenge a general’s authority than it was for a private to buck what an officer demanded.
Before I’d even treated my first casualty in the war, I’d witnessed an incredibly stupid and malevolent act on the way to join my unit. An American soldier pushed a middle-aged Vietnamese man off his bicycle as he rode by him on the street. Nicely dressed in a tie and white shirt, the man suffered scrapes and cuts, and torn clothes. I have no idea what the Vietnamese man’s sympathies were before such an incident, but his views of Americans wouldn’t have improved. When wounded and dead civilians resulted from our pursuit of the Viet Cong in the countryside, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we created enemies among the people. Official U.S. government policy was that we were in Vietnam to help defend the Vietnamese against communist aggression. Our actions were tragically shortsighted.
The incident was indicative of how some soldiers viewed all Vietnamese as the enemy. Whether it was racist ignorance or some misplaced payback for his own hurts in the war, the attitude was pervasive. And not surprising when the commanding general of a division didn’t always bother with such basic distinctions. It didn’t even seem to matter that children were among the dead and wounded. Over the course of my tour, I became more and more disillusioned.
Nothing made sense. A twisted logic prevailed. I heard more than one soldier state: “We’re just here to help these people and look how they resent us.” From my perspective, we played into the enemy’s strategy with our impatience and own brand of ignorance and arrogance. Our own methods of technological warfare, the chemical defoliants, the napalm, Cobra gunships, B-52 bombing raids, and artillery barrages left scars on the landscape and hideous wounds. Our own casualties continued.
According to our leaders, we were always on the verge of major breakthroughs in the war. In a speech to the National Press Club in November of 1967, Westmoreland reiterated the overly optimistic refrain of the country’s leaders. “We have reached an important point where the end comes into view.”
Was he lying? Fully a year before my own tour began, one in which I never saw the end in sight from the ground, such statements were meaningless nonsense. Was Westmoreland not privy to the analysis of his boss, the Secretary of Defense? Six months prior, in a private memo to President Johnson, Robert McNamara had a less rosy outlook.
“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”
- Robert McNamara
At the highest levels, the Johnson Administration was aware of how out of control the civilian war casualties were. I believe Johnson genuinely wanted to alleviate poverty in the U.S. with his Great Society. It is a tragedy he never found the moral courage to admit to the country’s mistakes in Vietnam and alter the course of the war.
What about William Westmoreland? In a lot of ways, the general could be considered Mr. West Point. Graduating from the academy in 1936, he became its superintendent from !960-63 after distinguishing himself in WWII and Korea. He is even buried in the cemetery there. The responsibility for the war goes so much deeper than the years he commanded the troops in Vietnam (!964-68). There was such a moral vacuum in the way leadership conducted the war. The willingness of some commanders to place their careers above the lives of not only Vietnamese civilians but the lives of the soldiers they commanded.
Many codes were broken in the war, lies spoken, cover-ups pursued. The degree to which that occurred set a bad precedent for governance in the United States. So many lives were lost because of a failure of leadership at so many levels. In my view, the United States has not healed from the divisions created during the war, domestically and internationally.
It is not my intent to revere Ho Chi Minh with a quote. As I have stated before, I am not an apologist for him or the Vietnamese government that followed the war. There were excesses on their side as well. The ideologues initially gained firm control of the government in Vietnam and further harmed many of their own people. What strikes me as tragically ironic is how Robert McNamara, quoted above, was coming to the same conclusion in May of 1967 that Ho Chi Minh had already expressed about the French and the Americans.
“You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.”
- Ho Chi Minh
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