Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (26 page)

3
. Robert D. Heinl Jr., “The U.S. Army in Search of Itself,”
Saturday Evening Post
, August 1974, p. 40.

4
. At Memorial Day ceremonies in 2012, marking (somewhat arbitrarily) the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Vietnam War, President Barack Obama put his official imprimatur on this remembered ill-treatment of Vietnam vets. “You came home,” Obama told the vets in the crowd, and “were denigrated when you should have been celebrated.” The treatment accorded Vietnam veterans, he continued, had been “a national shame, a disgrace that never should have happened.” “Remarks by the President at the Commemoration Ceremony of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Vietnam War,” May 28, 2012,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/28/remarks-president-commemoration-ceremony-50th-anniversary-vietnam-war
, accessed May 29, 2012.

5
. Karl H. Purnell, “The Army’s Kangaroo Courts,”
Nation
, April 7, 1969, p. 434.

6
. Ward Just,
Military Men
(New York, 1970), pp. 4–5.

7
. Colonel David H. Hackworth, “A Soldier’s Disgust,”
Harper’s
, July 1972, p. 74.

8
. “Disorder in the Ranks,”
Time
, August 19, 1971, p. 21. In an internal army report evaluating the sources of indiscipline in the army’s ranks, officers faulted American society for the problems besetting the army. “Virtually all commanders,” the report stated, according to
Time
, “place strong emphasis on permissiveness within American society as being a primary cause of disciplinary breakdown. The point is made that the draftee, the draft-induced enlistee and many of our junior officers have been influenced by permissive homes, permissive schools and permissive courts.”

9
. The literature on war resistance within the ranks of the military is both extensive and impassioned. For a succinct account, see Matthew Rinaldi, “The Olive Drab Rebels: Military Organizing During the Vietnam Era,”
Radical America
, May–June 1974, pp. 17–52.

10
. For a sample of newspapers, see “Photos and Documents, GI Underground Newspapers,”
http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/photo_gipapers.php
, accessed March 8, 2012. The Web site includes digitized copies of several newspapers, among them
Counterpoint
,
Fed Up
, and the
G. I. Voice
. Front-page headlines give a flavor of the contents: “AWOLs Soar,” “Racism Exposed,” “Riot Rocks Fort Ord,” “Nixon Desperate,” “Jane Fonda Banned From Fort,” and “How To Get Over.”

11
. Peter Barnes, “The Presidio ‘Mutiny,’”
New Republic
, July 5, 1969, pp. 21–25; John V. H. Dippel, “Going Nowhere Through Channels,”
New Republic
, May 22, 1971, pp. 13–17.

12
. Just,
Military Men
, p. 62.

13
. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws,
Organized Subversion in the U.S. Armed Forces
(Washington, D.C., 1976), part 1, pp. 2, 5, 17.

14
. Eugene Linden, “Fragging and Other Withdrawal Symptoms,”
Saturday Review
, January 8, 1972, pp. 12–17.

15
. “Black Explosions in West Germany,”
Time
, September 21, 1970, p. 36.

16
. “Forgotten Seventh Army,”
Time
, October 4, 1971, p. 18.

17
. Leonard Gross, “Our Uptight Troops in Europe,”
Look
, September 8, 1970, pp. 14–19.

18
. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws,
Organized Subversion in the U.S. Armed Forces
, part 1, appendix 2, pp. 2–3.

19
. Beth Bailey,
America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force
(Cambridge, Mass., 2009), p. xi.

20
. Quoted in Aaron Friedberg,
In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy
(Princeton, N.J., 2000), pp. 192, 195.

21
.
The Report of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force
, February 1970,
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG265/images/webS0243.pdf
, accessed March 10, 2012. The commission was more commonly known as the Gates Commission. The final monthly draft call occurred in December 1972, with those selected reporting for duty in June 1973.

22
. Heinl, “Army in Search of Itself,” p. 33.

23
. Quoted in Michael Klare, “Can the Army Survive VOLAR?”
Commonweal
, January 18, 1974, p. 387.

24
. Robert K. Griffith Jr.,
The U.S. Army’s Transition to the All-Volunteer Force
(Washington, D.C., 1997), p. 25.

25
. William C. Westmoreland, “Talking About the Army,”
Vital Speeches of the Day
(May 15, 1969), p. 451.

26
. For U.S. military pay scales going back to 1949, see “Historical Military Pay Rates,”
http://www.military.com/benefits/content/military-pay/charts/historical-military-pay-rates.html
, accessed April 10, 2012. When I received my commission in June 1969, a second lieutenant’s monthly pay was $343.

27
. “Chickenshit,” writes Fussell, “refers … to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant ‘paying off of old scores’; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.” Paul Fussell,
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War
(New York, 1989), p. 80.

28
. The definition comes from the
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,
6th ed. (New York, 2007), vol. 2, p. 2911.

29
. The 1953 motion picture
From Here to Eternity
and the 1951 novel on which the movie was based vividly illustrate this aspect of a soldier’s existence. The novel’s author, James Jones, refers to this as “Fatigue,” writing that “the knowledge of the unendingness and of the repetitious uselessness, the do it up so it can be done again” made such duty “not only fatiguing but degrading.”
From Here to Eternity
, chap. 8.

30
. “G. I. Dormitories,”
Time
, March 26, 1973, p. 98. See also Jonathan Schell, “The Enlisted Man,”
New Yorker
, March 17, 1973, p. 33.

5. COMES THE REVOLUTION

1
. Charles C. Moskos, “Success Story: Blacks in the Military,”
Atlantic Monthly
, May 1986,
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/black/moskos.htm
, accessed April 8, 2012.

2
. Even during the Vietnam era, the army officer corps was less than 3 percent black. Ibid.

3
. Frederic Ellis Davison was promoted to brigadier general in 1968, ultimately retiring as a major general in 1974.

4
. For an appreciation of the racial climate of the time, see Wallace Terry, “Black Power in Vietnam,”
Time
, September 19, 1969.

5
. Jeffrey K. Toomer, “A Corps of Many Colors: The Evolution of the Minority Recruiting Effort at the United States Military Academy,” unpublished research paper, November 14, 1997, p. 5.

6
. The cadet company to which I was assigned for four years during the latter half of the 1960s contained an equal number of blacks and Jews—one of each.

7
. James Feron, “Blacks in a Long Gray Line,”
New York Times
, June 2, 1991.

8
. I am grateful to the serving officer who provided me with this data.

9
. Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler,
All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way
(New York, 1996). The quote comes off the book’s back cover.

10
. A. C. Showers, “Rocking the Boat: Women Enter Military Academies,” unpublished paper, University of Colorado at Boulder, April 22, 2008.

11
. Jane Gross, “Sergeant Major Gets One-Step Demotion But No Time in Jail,”
New York Times
, March 17, 1998. At roughly the same time, the army charged the senior noncommissioned officer in U.S. Army Europe with “forcible sodomy, kidnapping, indecent assault and maltreatment” of a female subordinate. David Stout, “The Army’s Top NCO in Europe Is Charged with Sexual Assault,”
New York Times
, October 23, 1999.

12
. Paul Richter, “Army Demotes by 1 Rank Retired General in Sex Case,”
Los Angeles Times
, September 3, 1999.

13
. Tom Bowman, “Army Sends Message, Strip General’s Rank for Conduct,”
Baltimore Sun
, November 17, 1999.

14
. Christopher Marquis, “General Seeks to Retire as Charges Are Supported,”
New York Times
, July 8, 2000.

15
. Kennedy’s memoir
Generally Speaking
appeared in 2002. Two years later, she addressed the Democratic National Convention that nominated Senator John Kerry for the presidency.

16
. For examples of this literature, see Brian Mitchell,
Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster
(Washington, D.C., 1998), and Stephanie Gutmann,
The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America’s Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?
(New York, 2000).

17
. James Webb, “The War on the Military Culture,”
Weekly Standard
, January 20, 1997.

18
. Dennis A. Williams with Eleanor Clift, “This Woman’s Army,”
Newsweek
, October 20, 1975.

19
. The most famous female POW of the Iraq War was Private Jessica Lynch, who for a brief moment became, as the journalist Evan Wright put it, the war’s Helen of Troy. But others included Shoshana Johnson and Lori Ann Piestewa. Lynch and Johnson survived and wrote books about their experience. Piestewa died in captivity. Evan Wright,
Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War
(New York, 2004), p. 222.

20
. In 2007, Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester became the first woman since World War II to receive the Silver Star. Others followed.

21
. “Military Casualty Information,”
http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/CASUALTY/castop.htm
, accessed May 4, 2012. Of the total, eighty-nine were army soldiers, with the remainder coming from the other services.

22
. By comparison, the Korean War claimed the lives of eighteen military women and Vietnam eight, even though the total of Americans killed in those two wars vastly exceeded the number lost in Iraq. “Korean War Casualty Information,”
http://www.koreanwar-educator.org/topics/casualties/p_casualties_women_kia.htm
, and “American Women Who Died in the Vietnam War,”
http://www.countryjoe.com/nightingale/sisters.htm
, both accessed May 4, 2012.

23
. Iraq War fatalities amounted to 4,475 U.S. military personnel, with 3,517 killed in action and 958 deaths due to nonhostile causes. Another 32,225 soldiers were wounded in action. “Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) U. S. Casualty Status,”
http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf
, accessed May 4, 2012.

24
. As of mid-May 2012, 31 of 1,960 fatalities suffered by U.S. forces in Afghanistan were women.
http://icasualties.org/OEF/Fatalities.aspx
, accessed May 7, 2012.

25
. Juliette Kayyem, “The Military’s Persistent Gender Divide,”
Boston Globe
, April 23, 2012.

26
. Petula Dvorak, “Why Army Women Are Demanding the Right to Fight—and Die—in Combat,”
Washington Post
, May 28, 2012.

27
. James Dao, “Servicewomen File Suit Over Direct Combat Ban,”
New York Times
, November 27, 2012.

28
. Lolita C. Baldor, “Army Reviews Whether Women Can Go to Ranger School,” May 16, 2012,
http://www.kgwn.tv/story/18437747/army-reviews-whether-women-can-go-to-ranger-school
, accessed May 25, 2012.

29
. As the army’s institutional commitment to gender equality has grown, so too has the prevalence of sexual assault within the ranks, increasing 64 percent between 2006 and 2011, for example. With few exceptions, the victims are female. Whether expanding the number and role of women in the army fosters this epidemic or creates conditions that will lead to its elimination remains to be seen. Anna Mulrine, “Pentagon Report: Sexual Assault in the Military Up Dramatically,”
Christian Science Monitor
, January 19, 2012.

30
. Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker, “Pentagon Is Set to Lift Combat Ban for Women,”
New York Times
, January 23, 2013.

31
. Dvorak, “Why Women Are Demanding the Right to Fight—and Die—in Combat.”

32
. Joel Connelly and Scott Sunde, “Clinton Runs Hard in State,”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, July 27, 1992.

33
. Thomas L. Friedman, “Clinton to Open Military’s Ranks to Homosexuals,”
New York Times
, November 12, 1992.

34
. Eric Schmitt, “In Promising to End Ban on Homosexuals, Clinton Is Confronting a Wall of Tradition,”
New York Times
, November 11, 1992.

35
. Eric Schmitt, “Joint Chiefs Fighting Clinton Plan to Allow Homosexuals in Military,”
New York Times
, January 23, 1993.

36
. Editorial, “Who’s in Charge of the Military?”
New York Times
, January 26, 1993.