Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (7 page)

Vietnam itself became the incubator of revolutionary action. From there, for example, the practice of intimidating or assassinating unpopular leaders (
fragging
) emerged.
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Yet Vietnam-induced pathologies soon permeated the entire army. In Europe, where a quarter of a million American soldiers ostensibly stood ready to fend off a Warsaw Pact attack, the rot was widespread. There, endemic race violence beset the U.S. Seventh Army.
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Drug use was commonplace.
16

In 1970,
Look
magazine dispatched a reporter and photographer to take the temperature of the crack regiment assigned to defend the famous Fulda Gap. The conditions they found were more than slightly troubling. GIs flashed peace signs as “the newest salute” and professed to find it unnecessary “to go out and point the big guns at the other side.” Throughout the unit, the racial climate was toxic. Referring to themselves as “soul brothers,” African American enlisted troopers were, according to
Look,
as “tight as fists,” the metaphor suggesting both solidarity and pent-up resentment. Small-scale disputes between blacks and whites had a way of escalating into quasi–race riots. When the befuddled white regimental commander “authorized black culture classes during duty hours” as a way of defusing anger, he was accused of appeasing malcontents. Meanwhile, rumors of a regimental KKK klavern organized by white noncoms drew official attention. Illegal drug use was rampant. “People don’t drink on duty,”
Look
quoted one unnamed officer as saying. “People damn well smoke pot on duty.” The professionals didn’t know how to handle soldiers the magazine candidly described as “militants.” Here was a leadership challenge for which army field manuals provided no ready answer. “We’re making these desperate efforts to communicate with them,” one officer remarked, referring to the soldiers in the ranks. The efforts weren’t working.
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Complicating the challenge of containing that revolution was the fact that it was so difficult to define. It was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was race, class, and gender. The revolution to which army dissidents professed loyalty offered liberation from received traditions and sources of authority, while demanding conformity with newly invented dogmas. Senior officers accustomed to being in charge intensely disliked demands for self-actualization coming from the bottom up.

Of course, venting, of which there was plenty, did not necessarily translate into programs of effective political action. The overwrought fears of Senate investigators notwithstanding, soldier-radicals posed no direct threat to the established political order. Even so, for those accustomed to receiving unquestioned obedience, GI dissidents represented a subversive presence, importing into the ranks values and attitudes to which their contemporaries “on the outside” had now sworn allegiance. Soldier-dissidents also mirrored their civilian counterparts in their tendency to strike angry poses and to lump their complaints into one massive undifferentiated indictment. So in the Seventh Army, the newsletter of a soldier organization called FighT bAck could announce its opposition to “imperialist wars such as Indochina,” to “racism and discrimination against women,” to the military “being used as scab labor to break strikes,” and to national security policies designed to suit “huge American corporations and banks, [but] not in the interest of the American people.”
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How exactly FighT bAck intended to correct these injustices was not at all clear. Yet the very existence of such organizations and the defiance they expressed induced concern bordering on panic among senior military leaders. For the brass, the challenges posed by the Vietcong and the People’s Army of Vietnam paled in comparison.

As a consequence of the Vietnam War, the army found itself face-to-face with two mutually reinforcing crises, one internal and one external. Internally, it confronted a crisis of authority, being no longer able to assert discipline and command subservience. Externally, it faced a crisis of legitimacy as an institution no longer able to elicit respect and induce popular support, especially among the young. The foremost symbol of both crises was the draft. As a first step toward restoring authority and legitimacy, eliminating conscription came to seem an imperative. Yet however essential, this negative step alone could not suffice. There could be no real restoration—no reopening of lines of “communication” with soldiers and the American people—without some degree of accommodation.

DICK’S TRICK

By the time Richard Nixon reclaimed center stage in American politics amid the serial detonations of 1968, questions regarding the army’s nature and purpose along with the ordinary soldier’s relationship to American society had acquired unusual urgency. The “issue of army service,” writes the historian Beth Bailey, served as a proxy “for some of the most important issues of the age.” When citizens and politicians directed their ire toward (or expressed support for) the army, they were actually arguing
“over who belongs in America and on what terms, over the meaning of citizenship and the rights and obligations it carries, over whether equality or liberty is the more central of American values, and over what role the military should play in the United States, not only in times of war, but in times of peace.”
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Nixon himself had no more than a peripheral interest in such lofty concerns. What mattered to him was power: gaining it, preserving it, and using it. As a presidential candidate, he had announced his own opposition to the draft, couching his argument in principled terms. “A system of compulsory service that arbitrarily selects some and not others simply cannot be squared with our whole concept of liberty, justice, and equality under law.… The only way to stop the inequities is to stop using the system.… I say it’s time we looked to our consciences. Let’s show our commitment to freedom by preparing to assure our young people theirs.”
20

Yet beneath the lofty sentiments was Nixonesque opportunism: promising to end the draft offered the prospect of peeling off some antiwar votes. Acting on that promise once elected by actually deep-sixing the draft just might induce foot soldiers in the antiwar movement to leave the streets and return to their classrooms, thereby allowing the new president greater latitude in formulating policy.

Soon after taking office, Nixon did follow through, convening a commission of wise men to evaluate the possibility of establishing an all-volunteer military. When that commission obligingly affirmed the feasibility of the president’s wishes, he wasted no time in moving to terminate conscription.
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To a considerable degree, Nixon accurately gauged the effects of doing so. The antiwar movement did not disappear, but it lost steam. Americans as a whole greeted the end of the draft, one observer noted, with “a few boos, fewer cheers, and lots of apathy.”
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So although Nixon had run for the presidency vowing to end the Vietnam War, eliminating the draft permitted him instead to prolong it. Four full years later, with the war still in progress, he easily won election to a second term. Imagine Barack Obama, running for the White House in 2008 on the promise of ending the Iraq War, expanding it instead, and winning reelection in 2012 by a landslide. This describes Nixon’s feat.

Promising to end conscription had helped Nixon win in 1968; fulfilling that promise had given him a freer hand to govern while contributing to political victory in 1972. For Nixon and his lieutenants, that’s all that really mattered. In deciding to reformulate the character of the army and revise the relationship of soldier to society, the commander in chief acted in response to near-term political calculations. Long-term implications? Those were for others to worry about. Few did at the time. Someone like Joseph Califano, former White House aide to President Lyndon Johnson, might suggest that “by removing the middle class from even the threat of conscription, we remove perhaps the greatest inhibition on a President’s decision to wage war.”
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Yet conscription hadn’t dissuaded Harry Truman from intervening in Korea in 1950 or stopped Johnson from plunging into Vietnam in 1965, facts that sapped Califano’s argument of its persuasive power.

Someone like General Westmoreland might cling to the view that “deeply embedded within the American ethos is the idea that every citizen is a soldier.” Absent “the continuous movement of citizens in and out of the Service,” the old general fretted that the army could “become a danger to our society—a danger which our forefathers so carefully tried to preclude.” But Vietnam had destroyed whatever remained of that ethos along with whatever credibility the general himself may have once possessed. According to the historian Robert Griffith, other senior officers took a different view.
“If the dissent, undiscipline, and drug and alcohol abuse were indeed imports from society, they reasoned, reduced reliance on the draft and unwilling draft-motivated volunteers might offer a way for the Army to solve some of its own social problems. In a smaller post-Vietnam Army of true volunteers, professional standards could be established and dissidents, malcontents, and misfits weeded out.”
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Westy might wax nostalgic about “an army of the people … directed by the people” through their elected representatives.
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But that army had ceased to exist. So, too, had those people. Reluctantly or not, most generals accepted that verdict.

GOOD-BYE CHICKENSHIT

Yet the termination of the draft left the army’s leadership with a mountain of worry. How to induce sufficient numbers of smart, able-bodied young Americans to volunteer for military service posed a daunting challenge, made more so by the ongoing cultural upheaval to which the 1960s had given birth and by the fact that Vietnam itself remained the freshest of memories. After some initial missteps, the army performed creditably in rising to that challenge. It accommodated (at times grudgingly) the changing cultural landscape and successfully rebranded itself, transforming army service into a potential opportunity rather than a burdensome imposition.

Making the all-volunteer army work required not only inducing would-be recruits to enlist but also persuading serving soldiers to stay on for the long haul. Selling the army as a career required better pay and benefits, which Congress obligingly provided with a series of pay hikes that began in 1971. That year, for example, the base pay of a new recruit more than doubled from $134 to $288 per month. Freshly commissioned second lieutenants saw their monthly pay jump from $450 to $611 per month, not including benefits.
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Selling the army also entailed changing the day-to-day experience of military life. It meant doing away with the make-work that had traditionally formed such a large part of a soldier’s daily routine and reducing what the literary critic Paul Fussell, recalling his own military service, had labeled
chickenshit
.
27

Traditionally, the term
soldier
, especially when used as a verb, had implied the avoidance of work.
To soldier
meant to shirk, malinger, or feign illness—an entirely rational response to tasks that were demeaning, repetitious, and lacked evident purpose.
28
Service in the draft-era army had included plenty of all three: pulling weeds, painting rocks, and performing housekeeping chores like KP (Kitchen Police).
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For unmarried soldiers, the draft-era army also implied austere living conditions, sleeping alongside others in open bays and sharing latrine facilities. Privacy was nonexistent, with personal possessions subject to inspection at the whim of anyone in authority.

In peacetime, the army had treated the draftee as an unskilled day laborer, available to perform whatever tasks might need doing. In the volunteer army, a soldier’s time acquired value. An increasingly costly commodity, it was not to be wasted on nonessentials. Although a certain amount of make-work and chickenshit persisted, training—acquiring, demonstrating, and sustaining specific military skills—now became the centerpiece of soldierly existence. Scrubbing pots and pans, grooming the parade ground, and even guarding the front gate—these routine functions the army began contracting out to civilian firms, with implications that became evident only decades later. For once begun, this policy of privatization had no self-evident limit. Here was another insurgency of sorts, for-profit enterprises taking over turf the army had previously claimed as its own. In pursuit of economy, the army forfeited self-sufficiency.

Accompanying this conversion of the common soldier from poorly paid laborer to decently compensated specialist or aspiring professional were comparable changes in lifestyle. Draftees by and large had been single. Better paid and longer serving, volunteer soldiers demonstrated a propensity to marry, obliging the army to become “family friendly.” For commanders, building and staffing child-care centers became a priority. So, too, did accommodating the aspirations of military spouses, no longer content to accept the designation of “dependent” while offering their services as volunteers, that is, unpaid auxiliaries.

Life for military families residing off-base became all but indistinguishable from the life of nonmilitary families living next door or down the street, even if Dad (or Mom) was in a somewhat unusual line of work. So, too, with those single soldiers residing on post. Rather than resembling confinement to a minimum-security prison, barracks life acquired some of the atmospherics of a college dorm. Army plans for housing the troops now touted “carpeted, air-conditioned townhouses, furnished in motel-modern plastic and veneer [and] nestled together with landscaped courtyards and lawns.”
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Both on duty and off, the army became a place that Beetle Bailey would have scarcely recognized and into which he would not have been allowed entry.