Our Year of War Page 7

  Since its foundation on June 14, 1775, even before independence, the U.S. Army has traditionally been a volunteer force. The United States drafted soldiers for the Civil War (both North and South did it) and World War I. Established in 1940, before the United States entered World War II, the Selective Service System endeavored to strike the right balance between military requirements, wartime industrial and agricultural needs, and longtime social order. Required numbers were set in Washington. The actual picking, the selective part, occurred in local draft boards, committees of prominent local worthies. In 1967, there were about 3,700 such boards across the country. The one in Platte County contacted the Hagel brothers.

  Then the selecting started. Although the United States committed wholeheartedly to both world wars, draft American-style never approached the relentless dragnets established by the French Revolution’s draconic levée en masse of 1793–1814 or the drastic measures of the Soviet Union’s Red Army in World War II. Even so, in the United States during World War II, conscription reached far and wide. In 1940–45, if a man met the right age category (eighteen to forty-five), proved mentally and physically qualified for service, and did not have some critical farm or factory job, he went.32 As that had been the experience of most adult Americans in 1967, they thought the Vietnam draft ran the same way. If it had, draft resistance in the 1960s would likely have been a footnote to history. And win, lose, or draw, the Vietnam War would have been settled in a few years. When you send them all, the folks back home demand results.

  But in Vietnam, we did not send them all. Even at the height of the war, the army didn’t need them all. Some went. Most didn’t. And that very arbitrariness created its own rack of tensions.

  From 1964 to 1972, the U.S. draft pool of young males aged eighteen to twenty-six numbered 27 million. About a third of that amount (8.7 million) served in uniform over those years. And just above a third of them (3.3 million) served in or around Vietnam, to include men on naval vessels offshore, in Thailand and in Guam, a U.S. territory. Draftees supplied a third of all men in uniform during the war, and that number included the 10 percent of those, like the Hagel brothers, who requested to be drafted. The other two-thirds, the nonconscripts, were volunteers.33

  Crunching the numbers, the arithmetic for the unwilling suggested that Uncle Sam only compulsorily enrolled one of nine young men eligible to put on a uniform. Two more joined on their own. And the other six? They never got asked. Or if they did, they found a preferred alternative.

  Confronted with a summons from the draft board, American males faced a spectrum of possibilities. Indicative of the way things tended to go, only three of eighteen Selective Service categories (I-A, available; I-A-O, conscientious objector willing to serve as a noncombatant; and I-C, already serving) earned you a trip to Fort Bliss and maybe Vietnam.34 The paths out were many.

  At the far end of the range stood outright resistance. You could simply refuse to play and go to jail. Despite the impression that millions refused to go, the actual numbers fall far short. Todd Gitlin, a prominent student activist and historian of the period, estimated that from 1967 to 1972, about 200,000 faced accusations of draft-related misbehavior, to include up to 5,000 who burned or publicly repudiated their draft cards. Of these, 25,000 faced indictments. Courts convicted 8,750 and 4,000 of those men went to prison. Most earned parole in six to twelve months. A handful served four to five years.35 While a few prominent figures went all the way—boxer Muhammad Ali comes to mind—not many chose this unpleasant course.

  Those lacking the stomach for outright law-breaking sought avenues of avoidance. You could qualify as a nondeployable conscientious objector, a religious minister, or a divinity student. Belief in God took quite a jump in the 1960s, not all of it fueled by LSD or marijuana. A doctor might square you away for physical or mental reasons. A few hundred fled overseas. More headed north to Canada. Some 10,000 just went “underground,” off the grid, easier to do in that pre-Internet age.36

  The student deferment (category II-S) formed the most common way out. In some ways, it resembled the Civil War practice of paying a substitute. But in this case, if you could get into college and stay there, you were good. And the local draft board picked the next guy in line. The number of those who studied and studied, year after year, ran to around 750,000 annually.37 Famous deferred students included President Bill Clinton, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President Donald Trump. “Everybody” did it, as long as the everybody you knew were middle class and clever.

  For those willing to wear a uniform on their own terms, the National Guard and service reserves offered a useful option. While this did entail the initial entry regimen—Basic Combat Training and the like—it typically resulted in a weekend of duty a month and two weeks every summer, all near your home. By 1967, Guard and reserve units found their rosters full. Some even had waiting lists. Vice President Dan Quayle in Indiana and President George W. Bush in Texas met their obligations in this manner. Of course, at any time, these reserve component elements might be called up for federal service. Fortunately for those who tried this route, LBJ refused to call up the Guard and reserves for duty in Vietnam.38 But in an irony typical of 1960s America, more than one war-averse army guardsman or reservist found himself in the street face to face with unruly peace protestors.

  Another way to meet your military obligation and avoid slogging through a rice paddy involved joining the other armed services. This enabled the navy, air force, and coast guard to keep their forces full. The marines, heavily committed to the ground war in the northern part of South Vietnam, did not benefit too much from this type of voluntary enlistment. But they were smaller in strength and recruited hard among the adventurous types, to include poaching restless draftees awaiting call-up. In addition, the navy and air force flight units were fully engaged in combat, and damned dangerous work at that, with 3,720 fixed-wing aircraft and all too many flight crewmen, some 2,100, lost in the war. As for the rest of the navy, air force, and coast guard, they all kept substantial contingents active in and around Vietnam. In addition, some of those who joined the navy found themselves, M16 rifle in hand, on small, dangerous patrol boats plying Vietnam’s coasts and rivers.39 Senator John Kerry served in this capacity. Air force air security police also fought on the ground in country. So even if you became a sailor or an airman, depending on your assignment, things sometimes got quite interesting. It wasn’t army 11B duty, but it wasn’t safe, either.

  It was also possible to sign up for the active-duty army and stay out of the line of fire. Enlistees had a lot of say over their MOS and some sway over their posting. But as you had to sign up for at least three years, sometimes four, the Vietnam option often played out anyway. Still, if you had to go to Vietnam, going as a clerk-typist or a headquarters intelligence analyst sure seemed less risky than humping a machine gun through the bush.

  That said, many Americans embraced the opportunity to go to war. It’s noteworthy that every uniformed woman assigned to Vietnam volunteered to be there. Plus, some young men wanted to fight. Airborne, ranger, special forces, infantry, armor/cavalry, aviation (helicopters), artillery, and engineer units all had their share of willing soldiers. Two-thirds who entered the theater arrived as voluntary enlistees.

  As for draftees, if they volunteered, as did the Hagels, or just complied with the “Greetings” message, they almost always got the full-meal deal. They didn’t have a contract, so they found themselves assigned in accord with the “needs of the service.” And the army had many needs, but mostly in combat units and mostly in Vietnam. Branches like infantry, armor, and artillery featured relatively short stretches of Advanced Individual Training as compared to some yearlong course in esoteric satellite signal work or the Chinese language. The best use of a draftee’s two years amounted to basic, advanced, and then off to Southeast Asia. In the combat arms, 70 percent of the junior enlisted men units came via the draft. Even so, 77 percent of those killed were volunteers, either by enlistment or, like Chuc
k and Tom Hagel, by asking to be conscripted.40

  Of course, along with the draftees and short-term volunteers, long-service officers and NCOs also went to Vietnam. General Colin Powell went twice, once as a captain, then again as a major, a pretty typical pattern for army professionals.41 Men like Sergeant First Class William Joyce might be disparaged as “lifers,” or even loafers, by their younger troops in country. Some of the senior people found staff jobs on safe bases. But a lot of them did their duty. For these officers and NCOs, the draft amounted to a source of troops, not a personal matter.

  So that’s how the draft played out. Who actually served? The conventional wisdom suggests the most gifted Americans did not go. Thus the war devolved on the young, the destitute, the ill educated, and the nonwhite. As Myra McPherson acidly put it: “The ‘best and the brightest’ started the Vietnam War but they did not send their sons.”42 It adds one more twist of the knife, one more evil associated with this foul war.

  Except it ain’t exactly so.

  With the war long over, we have pretty good demographics on who fought. We often hear that while the average age of a World War II conscript was twenty-seven, the typical Vietnam draftee was only nineteen. That’s true, as far as it goes. But only a third of the men in country came through the draft. Casualty records tell a less told tale. Men killed in Vietnam averaged 22.8 years in age. In the entire war, 101 eighteen-year-olds died. Eleven percent of the dead were more than thirty years old, usually field-grade officers and senior NCOs.43 The soldiers in Vietnam were younger than those who fought in Europe and the Pacific in 1941–45. But they weren’t all fuzz-cheeked teenagers.

  Matters of economic class also deserve scrutiny. In a 1992 study sponsored by faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and West Point, the authors examined the hometowns of the 58,307 Americans killed in Vietnam. They found that, considering local affluence, 30 percent of the dead came from neighborhoods in the bottom third of society, 44 percent from the middle third, and 26 percent from the upper third. Three particularly well-off communities—Belmont, Massachusetts; Great Neck, New York; Chevy Chase, Maryland—sacrificed more men proportionately than the average losses in the rest of U.S. towns and counties. Yale University lost thirty-five graduates in the war, four of them from the Class of 1968, a rate right in line with the computed national average.44 Many of the more fortunate Americans didn’t go. But a lot did.

  They weren’t stupid, either. In the 1960s, 65 percent of American young men had completed high school. But nearly 80 percent of those in uniform finished high school first. That compared to 45 percent high school graduates in World War II. Proportionately, three times more college graduates served in Vietnam than in World War II. Some college men who served competed to be officers, but most didn’t want the extra time in the army, so took their chances as draftees. If the latter, they, like the Hagels, tended to end up in the combat arms.45 It made for a very literate, perceptive fighting force.

  The military in Vietnam looked like America, too. Official roll-ups reflected a military 80 to 85 percent white, 10 to 12 percent black, and the remainder Hispanic or other groups. Casualties followed the same pattern: 86 percent white, 12.5 percent black, and the rest from other ethnicities. Some of the evidence for perceived higher rates of African American casualties came from the well-publicized 1965 actions. In that opening year of the major U.S. campaign in country, 23.5 percent of the enlisted dead were black.46 In an America where de facto and de jure segregation still held sway, that solemn toll rightly raised flags. Over time, as the sad numbers mounted, the proportions settled into a much closer correlation with U.S. society. Yet the underlying disquiet never went away. It still hasn’t. The numbers don’t lie. But enough others did, sometimes for years. As a result, perceptions long ago eclipsed reality.

  Thus the U.S. Army manned its battalions for the great war in Vietnam. Unlike Chuck and Tom Hagel, the vast majority of American young men didn’t go anywhere near Vietnam. A lot of those who stayed home told themselves over and over they did not only the expedient thing, but the moral thing, the ethical thing, the righteous thing. “The unspeakable and inconfessible goal of the New Left on the campuses,” observed shrewd social critic Tom Wolfe, “had been to transform the shame of the fearful into the guilt of the courageous.”47 By and large, the nonservers succeeded.

  Of course, the earnest peace advocates turned out to be only too right about the war. It descended into a complete cock-up, an utter flop, with the long-suffering Vietnamese people battered and then abandoned to the pitiless communists as the final iniquity in an endless sequence of unredeemed betrayals. Mention that grim outcome, and the peaceniks bent their shaggy heads and mumbled into their tie-dyed T-shirts. But in the end, the smug had their day. The protestors got it right for the wrong reasons.

  Those who served found themselves bogged in a bloody mess, a war gone wrong even if attempted for the right reasons. Decades later, all of that looks only too clear, as preordained as the plot of a Greek tragedy. But neither Chuck nor Tom Hagel, nor their fellow troops, nor Westmoreland, nor Johnson, nor the still-hopeful American citizenry knew any of that in the darkening autumn of 1967. A ravenous Moloch few saw coming would soon enough devour hearts and minds over there and back here. The terrible year 1968 loomed.

  CHAPTER 3

  Widows Village

  Crack the sky. Shake the earth.

  PRE-ATTACK MESSAGE FROM HANOI1

  The flashes came from right behind, like lightning on the ground, erasing the night. Then the thunder boomed, close, really close, 122mm rockets and 82mm mortars and God knew what else. The explosions crumped and cracked, one right after the other, banging into the heart of the big U.S. Long Binh base complex. Nothing good was happening inside the fence back there. The place contained so many juicy targets: field force headquarters, three brigade command posts, the replacement barracks, the stockade (Long Binh Jail, Vietnam’s own LBJ), multiple supply warehouses, fuel storage tanks, two field hospitals, a post exchange—a damn military department store, of all things, chock-full of color TVs, lawn chairs, and coffeemakers—plus 60,000 rear-echelon troops, and the entire conglomerate snuggled up next to a gigantic ammunition dump, like putting your house on the slope of Mount Vesuvius.2 From outside the long fence line, you couldn’t hear the sound of running boots and the frantic shouting as the Long Binh faithful ran for their lives like startled cockroaches in a suddenly lit kitchen. But you knew.

  PFC Chuck Hagel sure did. In the strobing half-light of the successive impacts, he looked at his wristwatch, the one Private Jerry Duvall gave to him back at Fort Dix, when the Nebraskan volunteered for this good deal. Duvall said his brother wore the timepiece for a year in Vietnam and never got a scratch.3 It looked like the watch’s juju would get a workout this time. Three a.m. “Oh-three-hundred” in army lingo. The witching hour, all right. In Vietnam, nothing positive ever happened at 3 a.m.

  It didn’t do any good to look over your shoulder at the sound and light show. That problem cooking off back there belonged to the poor bastards inside Long Binh Post. Hagel and the rest of Company B had their orders. They had been told to watch the dark jungle right in front of them, to scan the trees and underbrush fronting either side of the black gap in the vegetation that marked Highway 15.4 The bombardment of Long Binh base sure seemed like preparatory fire. Any minute, an enemy infantry assault wave might come boiling out of the tree line, like some crazy banzai charge from a World War II movie. Sweaty hands tense on their plastic and metal M16 rifles, Hagel and the other riflemen stood by.

  Unlike most Americans in country, Hagel and his fellow troops were awake, ready, and almost in the right position. To their backs, the Tet Offensive had just kicked off. At Long Binh, and across the country, the onslaught didn’t come out of the jungle, but from the inside, right from the guts of South Vietnam’s towns and cities—and there was a message in that, for sure. Tet was massive. It was desperate. It was decisive. And in the end, it cost Am
erica the war. But at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, January 31, 1968, nobody knew that yet.

  WELL, ACTUALLY VO NGUYEN GIAP and the rest of the North Vietnamese army general staff knew it. So did Ho Chi Minh and his politburo. They called the plan Tong Cong Kich-Tong Khai Nghia (General Offensive–General Uprising). By simultaneously going after 120-plus key urban sites during the annual weeklong truce marking the Tet Lunar New Year holiday period, akin to hitting America during the stretch from Christmas to New Year’s Day, the North expected to set off a countrywide rebellion in favor of the communists. The Hanoi leadership thought they’d win the war in a single stroke.5

  The Tet operation arose because the NVA needed very much to change the war’s trajectory. Political rhetoric aside, the North was getting pounded, and attrition, dead Vietnamese, did matter. The U.S. aerial bombing of the North might be randomly turned on and off, inconsistent in its choice of targets, and baffling in its focus. Just what in hell were these capitalist war mongers up to? But where the bombs struck, they struck hard. And in the south, the unstoppable flail of U.S. firepower took an immense toll. The NVA and VC ran and hid, but not all the time, and not well enough. If this continued, maybe the terrible arithmetic would eventually add up for Westmoreland and MACV. Ho Chi Minh dare not go there. So this situation must change. The communists had to recast the battlefield. That required taking the initiative, an attack on the grandest possible scale. In the spring of 1967, probably around May, the decision makers in Hanoi directed plans for what would become the Tet Offensive.