Vietnam War Collection: books plus

[Old Eagle]

Yeah, I'd like to see some documentation on the burning NCO issue.

We also have to ensure that we don't hijack the thread. If there is specific fodder for the canon on the NCO issue, fire away!

[Ken White]

Yeah, I'd like to see some documentation on the burning NCO issue.

We also have to ensure that we don't hijack the thread. If there is specific fodder for the canon on the NCO issue, fire away!

I disagree with that place to the extent I won't even link to it -- but since it's you, I 'll tell you where documentation can be found.

I'll also defer to Steve Blair who's historical documentation knowledge certainly exceeds mine. My recollection is that overall VN KIA rate was about 1% while that for NCOs was 2.5% mostly SGT / SSG. That doesn't count the 1,400 or so fragging incidents, 80 some odd Officers or NCOs killed...

However, just for grins, the fact that NCOs were being burned out is amply shown by the simple existence of the NonCommissioned Officer Candidate Course -- and the fact that their KIA rate was over 5%.

For the other NCOs, the burnout came from a year in Viet Nam doing pretty much the same job (few promotions or incountry rotations for NCOs as opposed to Officers and Troops) and about 10 months in the States before returning to the SEA Follies. That was unsustainable so by 1968, third tours coming up and still shortfalls in mid and senior grade NCOs (and Officers, many of whom resigned -- the NCOs could not) led the US Army's fine Battalion Commanders by sheer necessity to lean on new LTs and SGTs and thus reinforced and enhanced micromanagement as a life style.

I know many NCOs with five tours all in combat units but I know few officers with more than two. Of course, I also know some NCOs who served in the period with no tours -- tankers and support folks, mostly -- and I know an Officer with six tours (one in Laos and one in [theoretically]Thailand). It was simply a function of the system and times. We do it a little better today, I hope...

The evidence of that burnout lies in the immediate post Viet Nam Army which suffered from a significant dearth of NCO leadership. Most were too tired to care.

[Steve Blair]

NCO burnout in Vietnam was focused heavily in the senior NCO ranks ("in the rear with the Sergeant Major, the beer, and the gear"). Remember that during this period most (if not all) of the Army's SNCOs had combat time in Korea and even World War II. It wasn't a problem initially, but by mid-1968 the Army was relying more and more on "shake and bake" NCOs (guys who were a handful of months or maybe a year older than the men they were supposed to train and lead). Older NCOs were either getting out or using their connections to get rear jobs.

Again, this trend accelerated as the war went on. It wasn't so much a factor of KIAs as it was repeat tours and (likely underestimated) a major "generation gap" between the Regular Army NCOs and a mostly draftee force fresh from the impact of the counter culture.

Within the canon, most of Kieth Nolan's books touch on the NCO issue in at least some way, since his writing focuses for the most part on the period after 1968. It's touched on to a degree in some of the SOG memoirs, but like I mentioned before the memoirs tend to come from either the junior enlisted or officer ranks. Shelby Stanton talks about it in "The Rise and Fall of an American Army" as well. "Self Destruction" also gets into it.

[Mike in Hilo]

I'd like to second Old Eagle's addition of Pike's PAVN to the list. I think it's worth mentioning that among other useful insights, the book presents a succinct and lucid explanation of what occurred in RVN during the period--1969 onward--about which less has been written.

PAVN employed a methodology to convince the populace of its implacability, and attempted to raise the level of violence (now perceived to be unending) toward an unacceptable threshold. A steady rhythm of assassination, indirect fire and sapper attacks, punctuated by "high points" of greater violence proceeded, despite great cost, even during the period of greatest US/GVN success (1970-71). The calculation was that the Vietnamese majority, who were not in the enemy camp, including those alienated by PAVN/VC overreach; the many ethnic Southerners in whom disgust at all Northerners, whether Communist or Catholic was an ingrained trait; and even the Northern Catholic denizens of the urban slums who had come South as refugees from Communism, would find submission to new, unsavory overlords preferable to endless bleeding. And in 1971 it had become clear that the Vietnamese would be bleeding alone--that the US was indeed withdrawing. Other grievances were eschewed, PAVN psyops concentrated on exploiting the war weariness.

The lesson to be drawn, Pike points out, is that in any society that is not totalitarian, there is no effective counter to the prospect of "the fifty year war."

Cheers,
Mike.

[JMA]

That doesn't count the 1,400 or so fragging incidents, 80 some odd Officers or NCOs killed...

These are horrifying stats. Do you have an idea of the breakdown of motivations behind these actions?

[Steve Blair]

These are horrifying stats. Do you have an idea of the breakdown of motivations behind these actions?

Obviously it depended on the time frame and who you asked, but a reasonable number were either race- or drug-related. Fragging became a recognized issue after mid-1968 or so, and accelerated after 1969. It's also worth nothing that fragging was quite often a rear area phenomenon...and that wasn't helped by the practice of combat units "dumping" their problem children on the rear areas (be it battalion, brigade, or some other echelon). In some cases a fragging could be traced to a reaction to a "hard-line" career NCO or officer, but there were other cases where it was drug dealer retaliation or a more random event when some stoned trooper tossed a grenade in the general direction of someone who pissed him off.

Vietnam is also complex in that such things weren't necessarily tracked in previous wars, and that combined with the fallout from social changes in the US created an interesting situation. Fragging wasn't common in front line units, though, leading to speculation that lack of mission focus and clear purpose in the rear areas accelerated the incidence of fragging.

[jmm99]

Going beyond Fragging - Wiki, one might look at:

The Hard Truth About Fragging, by Peter Brush (Vietnam Point of View, July 28, 2010):

Since most fragging incidents did not end up in the court system, it is more difficult to establish a profile of the perpetrators themselves. However, a 1976 study conducted at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) at Fort Leavenworth gleaned some general characteristics of likely individuals who committed fragging. Of 850 inmates in the USDB population at the time, 28 were identified whose actions, based on their courts-martial transcripts, matched the fragging incident profile. On average, they were 20 years old and had 28 months on active duty. About 20 percent were African American, and about 7 percent were draftees. Most had enlisted in the service and supported the war. They had attained only a low level of education and were considered "loners." Most were in support units, given jobs for which they had not been trained, and reported little job satisfaction. They felt "scapegoated" and showed little or no remorse for their crimes. Almost 90 percent of these men were intoxicated on a wide assortment of substances at the time of the fragging, which mostly occurred at night. They admitted to little planning beyond talking to others, and most did nothing to avoid capture. Consistent with the command structure at the company and battery level, captains and first sergeants were their most common targets, and 75 percent of the perpetrators had been at some time involved in a verbal or physical altercation with their victims.

In terms of motive, the victims were viewed as having somehow denied the offenders of something they desired, such as promotions or transfers. The victims were perceived as a threat to the offenders. Only two of the 28 offenders studied claimed race was a factor. According to the authors of the study, the easy access and use of drugs was an essential factor in the assaults. That conclusion was further buttressed in a 1976 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry by Thomas Bond, which claimed that illicit drug use, so much more common in Vietnam than in other wars, tended to reduce any inhibitions the offenders may have had about assaulting superiors.

More recently (January 1, 2011), Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam (by George Lepre); as reviewed at FP by Tom Ricks, Best Defense bookshelf: 'Fragging,' the Vietnam War's characteristic crime (8 Mar 2011):

What did surprise me in this illuminating book was the basic profile of soldiers who fragged NCOs and officers (that is, tried to kill them with hand grenades). In this carefully researched study, Lepre reports that:

--Most fragging occurred in the noncombat support units in the rear, not in front-line combat units. (p. 31)

--The attacks often killed the wrong person: "of all the army officers who are known to have died in fragging incidents during the Vietnam War, only one was the intended target of the assault." (p. 44)

--Four would-be fraggers were killed in their own attempts to assault others. (p. 47)

--The last Vietnam fragger to get out of jail was William Sutton, who was released in 1999, his time extended by a parole violation. (p. 200)

--Not all fraggers left the military. Staff Sgt. Alan G. Cornett Jr. [author of Gone Native: An NCO's Story], who was in Special Forces, fragged his unit's executive officer, Lt. Col. Donald F. Bongers, who was wounded but not killed by the grenade blast. Cornett was convicted, did a year's confinement, some of it at Fort Leavenworth's disciplinary barracks -- and then served another 17 years in the Army, retiring in 1989 as a master sergeant. (p. 82)

--Most fraggers already had had a brush with the military justice system before committing their fragging offenses (pp. 76-77). More typical of fraggers than Cornett was PFC Richard Buckingham, a cook in the 538th Transportation Company. Lepre goes on:

The government eventually withdrew its charge against Buckingham, which who would have faced his second court-martial in the space of a year: in June 1970 he had been tried in West Germany on charges of rape and sodomy, and was acquitted. Buckingham left the Army in 1972 but couldn't stay out of trouble: only weeks after his discharge, he strangled a seven-year-old girl to death and was sentenced to life imprisonment. A judge released him in 1999 in the belief that he "would not pose an unacceptable risk to society" but Buckingham was quick to prove him wrong: in 2002, he was sentenced to serve several more years in his native Ohio for assaulting yet another female. (p. 118)

Regards

Mike