Although the college was meant to offer a well-rounded curriculum, with adequate independent study time and intramural sports such as basketball, running, and soccer, there was a steady regimen of testing and written exercises, much more rigorous than earlier service schools I had attended. And the faculty always stressed that we write in “clear, concise English.”
Unfortunately, the spoken and written English of my pleasant Egyptian tablemate, Lieutenant Colonel Siam, was neither clear nor concise. I realized he had not been chosen to attend the college as an Allied Officer, one of three Egyptians to do so that year, based on his command of English. Rather, he was walking, talking testimony to the fact that the United States and Egypt had mended fences since President Anwar Sadat had made peace with Israel and sent the massive Soviet military assistance mission packing. Lieutenant Colonel Siam also proved to be a popular officer at CGSC because he readily shared what he knew about the tactics involving Soviet-built T-72 main battle tanks and BMP armored personnel carriers and associated Soviet Army battle doctrine. This was an invaluable addition to class discussion, and everyone loved to hear this detailed lore, especially because many of the officers had trained for years to face such Soviet forces in the Fulda Gap in Germany. However, he had a propensity for pointing to the red-tinted portions of the map indicating East Bloc forces and saying “We.” When he did so, the class rowdies would begin to boo and hiss.
“No, Colonel Siam,” I would whisper. “You say ‘They.’”
Lieutenant Colonel Siam would often find it convenient to leave the classroom for one of his five periodic daily prayers, which he had informed us were the solemn duty of every devout Muslim. He also told us he would meet with other Muslim officers in a quiet room in the building where they would spread their prayer rugs, perform their ablutions, and face Mecca. But some in the work group began to complain to our leader, a laconic Armor major named Chuck Piker, that Lieutenant Colonel Siam's self-summoning to prayer invariably coincided with some demanding task in the classroom. “We think he's just smokin' and jokin' until it's time for lunch or the end of class,” they said.
Chuck Piker, who'd served in the Infantry in Vietnam, was not one to observe diplomatic nuance. The next time Lieutenant Colonel Siam announced he was leaving to perform one of his mandatory daily prayers, Chuck Piker stood up and pointed to the front of the classroom where a chalkboard could serve as a screen. “You knock out those prayers right here,” he ordered. Unflustered, Lieutenant Colonel Siam did not again attempt to escape class under the guise of religious devotion.
He had no escape from the inevitable classroom tests and quizzes. Early in the semester, he turned to me with a sweet, rather sheepish smile that had replaced the tangled frown through which he had regarded the test paper before him on the table.
“Claudia,” he whispered, “you give me the answers.”
I looked up in surprise. The instructors had been very clear about the inflexible honor code that was part of the long tradition of the Command and General Staff College. Our orientation had emphasized the absolute necessity of integrity as a basic principle of military discipline. And that principle was centered on trust and
self
-discipline. Professional soldiers—both officers and NCOs—had to trust each other. Their word had to be based on a core of honor. We did not have time to check up on each other in our profession. We could not tolerate those who lied or cheated.
Now this naive foreign officer was asking me to break the honor code right here in the classroom. “Colonel Siam,” I said, “that's called cheating.”
His face broke into a radiant smile because I had enriched his vocabulary. “Cheating,” he said, testing the new word. “Okay, Claudia, let me cheat from you.”
“No,” I insisted. “That would not be right.”
“Why not, Claudia?” he asked, crestfallen. “You come to my country and you need water, I give it to you. You need food, I give it to you, whatever I have. I open my house for you to sleep. I come to your country, you give me answers.”
I managed to resolve this situation with the knowledge of the faculty, who recognized Lieutenant Colonel Siam's language difficulties, and allowed me to act as his unofficial tutor during quizzes. But I always wrote that I had shared answers with him on the top of each test paper on which I had done so. And I always signed that statement, so that there could be no question that I was trying to breach the honor code. In this manner, the faculty had found a way for me to be loyal both to a foreign colleague who did not want to feel excluded from his American peers and to the Army's ethics.
As one of the course requirements later that year, we were all required to write a research paper. This certainly was not a very challenging assignment; the paper only had to be about ten pages, but we were required to follow the standard format, using several sources referenced with footnotes. The instructors made it clear that we had to place any cited verbatim material from the sources within quotation marks and so identify it with our footnotes. Any lowering of this standard, they said, would be considered plagiarism, a breach of the honor code.
The faculty also told us to read the papers on our chosen topic from those written by previous sections, which were on file, so that we could see how those students had treated the material. As the assigned topics were the same for all of us, this advice made sense. I read a number of the papers and closely reviewed the source material we were all required to use. I had picked up some good insights on how to proceed when I turned to a paper written by an officer from another service. There was something about his language that seemed unusually familiar. On a hunch, I compared his paper to the sources he had used and which I had earlier read.
There were several large sections of his paper where the language had been lifted verbatim, word-for-word, paragraph-for-paragraph, from these sources without quotation marks or attribution. Nor had he made any attempt to indicate that this material was anything other than his original ideas. This was clearly a case of plagiarism, and a clumsy one at that.
My first reaction was vexation rather than outrage.
I wish I didn't know this,
I thought. But my dilemma was that I had, in fact, discovered a glaring example of plagiarism and I had to decide what to do with this information. It would have been so much easier if the instructors who graded the papers had discovered this themselves. But for whatever reason—probably the press of work and the blurring familiarity of the often cited passages—the offense had escaped them. Now the officer who had plagiarized and I were apparently the only two people at CGSC who knew what he had done.
And it also would have been very easy for me to let the situation remain that way. In fact, I was torn. Nobody enjoys reporting a wrongdoing, especially by one of our peers. The person caught suffers professionally, and, like it or not, the person taking the moral stance is often singled out as being overly judgmental. It certainly did not help that I was one of a small handful of women in the class, and the officer who plagiarized was a man from another service. Although I did not view this as a gender issue in any way, I could see how some might see me as being too moralistic.
We women officers were already well aware that some of our classmates, and indeed some on the faculty, tolerated our presence with ill-concealed resistance. They refused to consider the hard work and dedication that had brought us to Fort Leaven-worth and felt we were “taking a man's place” at CGSC. At the Wédnesday noon guest lecturer series, almost every speaker found something negative to say about the increasing role of women in the Army even though he could look out and clearly see fifteen women officers in the audience. Sometimes afterward, we would meet in the ladies' room to discuss this situation. One of my colleagues, a tall, slender nurse, always wore her uniform with slacks rather than the skirt and kept her hair short, a conscious attempt to blend into the male-dominated environment. But most of us refused to surrender our individuality. We were both women and professional soldiers.
While some resisted our presence, others did not. Although most of our men classmates at CGSC did not consider women their peers, they in fact held a spectrum of attitudes. Some clung to the old WAC-era “separate-but-equal” mentality (which never resulted in equality), similar to the racially segregated military before the Korean War. And now, although blacks were completely integrated, many soldiers considered women almost a separate race in the Army. Other of our peers conceded that we had a limited contribution to make in a few branches, such as the Finance Corps, the Nurse Corps, and the Quartermaster Corps. By 1981, I had, however, met many other officers with a more enlightened attitude who believed that if women did well in a branch such as Military Intelligence, why shouldn't they advance in other branches such as the Signal Corps or Aviation? To me, these officers represented the best of the Army's future leaders.
But the future Army we discussed in the classroom would have to have a solid grounding of ethics. In the CGSC orientation lectures of 1980, the faculty stressed themes of professional rigor and ethical integrity. Unspoken in this message was the subtext that the Army's professional standards had fallen during the Vietnam era. After 1969, when America's stated policy was to withdraw its forces and turn the war over to our South Vietnamese allies, discipline among many U.S. units had deteriorated. Incidents of “fraggings,” in which soldiers murdered their officers or NCOs with fragmentation grenades, rose in this period, as did drug use; racial tensions and open strife became a problem. Still, American combat troops in Vietnam had to continue engaging a dangerous and dedicated enemy—Vietcong guerrillas or the North Vietnamese Army regulars often dressed in the black pajama-like garb of peasants—whom Americans could not differentiate from civilians. In some brigades strict Rules of Engagement were blurred, and the overuse of artillery and air strikes led to needless civilian casualties, an ethical nightmare that was then compounded when all the dead Vietnamese bodies found at the battle site were listed as enemy combatants, sometimes with a collusive nod and wink up the chain of command from the rifleman grunt in the jungle to the colonel in command. Many historians have indicated that, probably more than any other single factor, this reliance on body count as an indicator of success during a war of attrition—in which the traditional capture and holding of territory meant little—led to the ethical abuses and splintering of leadership that weakened the Army in Vietnam.
During my first ten years of service, I'd met enough combat veterans of that war who had provided grotesque firsthand accounts of illegal acts they had either witnessed or initiated. Some of these stories may have been warped bravado, meant to impress. But other descriptions had the anguished taste of confessional truth: a village shelled because a lone sniper had fired from a banana grove; an unarmed farmer machine-gunned in a rice paddy to avenge a helicopter crewman killed a few days before in another district. While investigations during and since the war have shown that such events were neither systematic nor universal, they were pervasive enough to negatively affect the Army's good order and discipline.
But there was no doubt that the Army was recovering from Vietnam by 1980. Major General Max Thurman took over the Army's Recruiting Command and dramatically raised the educational standards of enlistees in the All-Volunteer Force. Thurman would go on to help build the training center system, where the Army's newly equipped heavy and light units honed their fighting skills to the edge of devastating perfection revealed during the Panama operation (which he commanded) and Operation Desert Storm.
In 1980, however, the Army was still figuratively kicking the mud of Vietnam off its boots, working to form a new generation of leaders. These were my peers in the Command and General Staff College's centennial class. Most of the Army officers had seen combat in Vietnam as younger men. They had endured the unthinkable suffering of war, then been demoralized when the cause for which they and their soldiers had struggled and bled ended with the stampede off the roofs of Saigon in April 1975 as the last American helicopters fled the victorious North Vietnamese tanks. But to me, the most amazing aspect of my peers at Command and General Staff College was not that they had become disillusioned by their experiences in Vietnam and lost their moral and ethical compasses, but how few seemed to have suffered these emotional wounds. They were strong, whole, effective leaders, often mature beyond their years.
As I wrestled with the dilemma of whether to report the plagiarizing, I remembered the famous passage from the anti-Nazi German religious leader Martin Niemoller: “All it takes for evil to exist in the world is for good people to say nothing.” Obviously, it was an impossibly long stretch from the complaisant villagers of Dachau ignoring the unpleasant smoke from the chimney down the road to reporting a lazy, cheating student at CGSC.
But then I began to make some connections. Many of the ethical lapses in Vietnam had been passive rather than overt. We had asked our soldiers to fight a cruel and elusive enemy who resorted to terrorism and assassination to control the population. For example, the North Vietnamese Army massacred approximately 3,000 unarmed civilian government officials, South Vietnamese Army prisoners, intellectuals, and clergymen in Hue during the 1968 Tet offensive. Yet we required that our Army not sink to the enemy's methods but instead conduct all its operations strictly according to the Law of Land Warfare of the Geneva Convention of 1949. Nor could they officially punish the pro-Vietcong peasants who planted booby traps or laid land mines along their paddy dikes used as trails. But when individual soldiers did sometimes strike back without authorization, their superiors might abet the criminal act through their silence.
One Army unit faced with the harsh frustrations and hatred this guerrilla warfare engendered, a component of Task Force Barker—C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry (Americal) Division—broke under the stress on March 16, 1968, at a hamlet in Quang Ngai Province called My Lai. On a search-and-destroy operation, the soldiers were ordered to sweep through the multiple hamlets of Son My village and roll up the 48th Local Force Vietcong Battalion, a tough enemy guerrilla unit that had killed five and wounded fifteen of C Company's soldiers with mines, booby traps, and snipers since the Américans deployed for combat that January. The soldiers sought vengeance for their dead and wounded friends. And their officers, Task Force commander Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker and company commander Captain Ernest Medina, assured them that the only Vietnamese they would encounter in the Son My village complex on the morning of March 16 would be Vietcong from the hated 48th Local Force Battalion.