Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (6 page)

Yet as painful as they may be, these costs represent something far more disturbing. As a remedy for all the ailments afflicting the body politic, war—at least as Americans have chosen to wage it—turns out to be a fundamentally inappropriate prescription. Rather than restoring the patient to health, war (as currently practiced pursuant to freedom as currently defined) constitutes a form of prolonged ritual suicide. Rather than building muscle, it corrupts and putrefies.

The choice Americans face today ends up being as straightforward as it is stark. If they believe war essential to preserving their freedom, it’s incumbent upon them to prosecute war with the same seriousness their forebears demonstrated in the 1940s. Washington’s war would then truly become America’s war with all that implies in terms of commitment and priorities. Should Americans decide, on the other hand, that freedom as presently defined is not worth the sacrifices entailed by real war, it becomes incumbent upon them to revise their understanding of freedom. Either choice—real war or an alternative conception of freedom—would entail a more robust definition of what it means to be a citizen.

Yet the dilemma just described may be more theoretical than real. Without the players fully understanding the stakes, the die has already been cast. Having forfeited responsibility for war’s design and conduct, the American people may find that Washington considers that grant of authority irrevocable. The state now owns war, with the country consigned to observer status. Meanwhile, the juggernaut of mainstream, commercial culture continues to promulgate the four pop Gospels of American Freedom: novelty, autonomy, celebrity, and consumption. Efforts to resist or reverse these tendencies, whether by right-leaning traditionalists (many of them religiously inclined) or left-leaning secular humanists (sometimes allied with religious radicals) have been feeble and ineffective.

Americans must therefore accept the likelihood of a future in which real if futile sacrifices exacted from the few who fight will serve chiefly to facilitate metaphorical death for the rest who do not.

PART II

WARRIOR’S PLIGHT

How America’s army after Vietnam, seeking
reconciliation and relevance, became isolated from society and mired in unwinnable wars.

4

AMERICA’S ARMY

From the founding of the Republic to the present moment, debates over U.S. military policy have turned on two enduring questions: What is the nature and purpose of the American army? Where does the ordinary soldier stand in relation to American society?

Of course, along with its army, the United States possesses a formidable navy, proudly tracing its origins back to the Revolution. Since 1947, the nation has also maintained a powerful independent air force. Then there is the U.S. Marine Corps, an adjunct of the navy that is a second army of sorts and possesses its own air force.

When it comes to stature, America’s army ranks as the least among these several services. Since World War II, no competitor has come even close to challenging U.S. naval supremacy. The same applies to airpower; the U.S. Air Force defines the gold standard and has done so since the day of its establishment. As for the marines, quite apart from their reputation as redoubtable fighters, the Corps has acquired an aura of its own. In American culture and public esteem, marines—deservedly—occupy a special niche.

If America’s army occupies a niche, it’s that of the redheaded stepchild. Rarely has that service inspired genuine warmth or affection. Its institutional persona is Olive Drab—flat, bland, and dull. In a country where appearance means everything, the army is glamour-challenged. It seldom generates buzz. It lacks pizzazz. On the sex appeal meter, it barely moves the needle. Try as it might to devise a fashionable image, it defines the inverse of hip.

Yet to a greater extent than any other national institution—more than the other armed services, more than any branch of the federal government, more perhaps than Hollywood or Wall Street—the army and the soldiers filling its ranks testify to the essence of American democracy. Who serves and on what basis? To answer those questions is to lay bare the prevailing conception of citizenship. Similarly, the uses to which policy makers put the army serve as a barometer of how the United States addresses the world beyond its borders. When it comes to foreign policy, what Washington says matters much less than where its soldiers go (or don’t go), as well as what they do (and don’t do) upon arrival. In short, the army’s organization and its functions disclose in a tangible way what Americans actually value and what the United States actually stands for.

Since its founding, the army’s character has changed dramatically, never more so than in our own time. Back in 1775, “embattled farmers”—an armed citizenry fighting for national independence—defined its essence.
1
In today’s army, “warriors” fill the ranks of a thoroughly professionalized force. During the century and a half in which the United States completed the journey from modest-sized republic to global superpower, the army had straddled two competing traditions. On the one hand was the citizen-soldier, successor to the “embattled farmer,” who in time of need rallied to the colors and won big wars. On the other was the long-service regular, precursor to today’s warrior elite, who in the intervals between big wars fought small ones while enforcing America’s writ throughout an ever-expanding imperium.

In the 1840s, citizen-volunteers invaded Mexico and seized California. Subsequently, they saved the Union and ended slavery. At the end of the nineteenth century, they put paid to Spain’s crumbling empire in the Caribbean and across the Pacific. In one world war, citizen-conscripts played a role in toppling the Kaiser; in a second, they helped defeat the Führer, Il Duce, and the god-emperor of Imperial Japan. The soldiers who claimed these achievements traced their heritage to Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. If the worth of the causes for which they fought varied, the army whose ranks they filled remained thoroughly, even raucously democratic.

Meanwhile, with much less fanfare, regulars labored to “tame” the American West. After 1898, they pacified the Philippines, helped suppress the Boxer Rebellion, and generally made themselves useful manning outposts of empire that the United States accumulated from Havana to Tientsin. The army in which they served advanced America’s purposes while winning little popular acclaim or gratitude. Rather than spreading democracy abroad, soldiers clad in blue and then in khaki enhanced the power and dominion of the United States, which over time facilitated the establishment of something approximating genuine democracy at home.

After World War II, maintaining this neat division of labor—one type of army responsible for the occasional ideologically charged crusade while a second handled the imperatives of imperial policing during the nominally peaceful intervals between—was no longer possible. After 1945, the era of really big wars came to a close (or at least entered an extended pause). With the advent of nuclear weapons,
total war
became a theoretical construct, supplanted by
limited war
, also a theoretical construct but one devised to describe actually existing events. America’s Cold War army never fought the Soviet enemy, said to pose an existential threat and therefore requiring an all-out effort. The enemies that the army did fight never even approximated existential threats. Wars of policy rather than wars of survival, these conflicts merited a less than all-out effort, and that’s what they got.

The postwar wars occurred on a scale too small to elicit a sustained, full-fledged national commitment, yet too large for a prewar-style regular army to handle. Although American soldiers in 1950 were fighting the Chinese much as they had done in 1900, there was no mistaking the Korean War for the Boxer Rebellion. The criticism heaped on President Harry S. Truman’s head when he foolishly referred to Korea as a
police action
makes the point. The intervention that suppressed the Boxers
had been
a police action of sorts. To apply that term to combat on the scale occurring in Korea seemed somehow obscene.

In short, national security requirements after 1945 made the army’s dual tradition unsustainable. With the world seemingly teetering on the precipice of nuclear cataclysm, the nation could no longer rely on a small regular army for everyday needs while mobilizing a much larger citizen-army in times of great emergency. Emergency had become an everyday condition. In an effort to amalgamate elements of both traditions, civilian and military leaders sought to create in what was nominally peacetime an army that possessed considerable fighting power, could be relied upon to do the bidding of the state, and still retained links to American society.

The result, forged in Korea and reaching maturity in the early 1960s, was a large citizen-soldier army designed for the ostensible purpose of keeping the Cold War cold, yet providing a formidable force-in-being available for commitment wherever that war showed signs of turning hot. The mechanism employed to sustain this army while retaining some semblance of a democratic gloss was the “peacetime” draft.

F. T. A.

This was the army that in 1965 deployed to Vietnam, where it met with catastrophic failure. How exactly to apportion responsibility for that failure remains the subject of dispute. With plenty of blame to go around, civilian leaders like President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara have come in for their fair share. So, too, have military leaders, some prominent like General William Westmoreland (symbolizing ineptitude), others obscure like Lieutenant William Calley (symbolizing criminality). Yet the media (said to be biased), antiwar protesters (said to be cowardly), the Congress (said to be craven), and the South Vietnamese (in American eyes, corrupt and indolent) have not escaped unscathed.

Regardless of where the fault lay, the impact of failure visited upon the American army was indisputable: under the stress of protracted, inconclusive war, it all but collapsed. By the early 1970s, the army had ceased to be an effective fighting force and resembled something akin to a demoralized, violence-prone rabble.
2

Contemplating the army that dragged itself out of Vietnam, a sympathetic observer described it as besieged “from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatism, draftee recalcitrance, barracks theft and common crime, all but abandoned by government, by Congress, and by the public it thought it was defending.” The result was an institution “battered by a crisis of discipline, lowered self-esteem, and negative morale unlike anything ever found in its past experience.”
3
In the eyes of many Americans—especially the young—that army now represented the very
antithesis
of democracy. Rather than eliciting popular empathy and support, soldiers became—or at least believed they had become—the target of obloquy.
4

As a consequence of Vietnam and the upheaval of the 1960s, the army had fallen radically out of step with American society. However much members of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” might resent the proliferation of antiwar, antimilitary, antiestablishment attitudes—a resentment that Nixon skillfully tapped to win the White House—they did not define the temper of the times. Activists, radicals, and hipsters celebrating a do-your-own-thing spontaneity drove the culture. In their eyes, the army appeared cold, impersonal, repressive, and bureaucratic—an environment where “stockade brutality and drumhead courts-martial” awaited anyone disinclined to conform.
5
That such an institution might advance the cause of anyone’s liberation anywhere was patently preposterous. By its very nature, it denied freedom, enforced conformity, and demanded submission. In short, the army was to the members of the countercultural left what abortion would soon become for the religious right: the preeminent symbol of all they despised.

The feeling was mutual. “Society’s distrust of soldiers,” wrote the journalist Ward Just in 1970, “is equaled only by the distrust of soldiers for society.” Among officers, he continued, “the sense of isolation was palpable.”
6
The regular army had always resented the lack of warmth and appreciation it received from the general public. For members of the officer corps, a sense of alienation and victimization now became acute. As one highly decorated soldier put it, “We’re the scapegoat for Vietnam.”
7

Worse still, the army proved unable to insulate itself from the turmoil engulfing the home front. Counterinsurgency abroad found its counterpart in insurgency within. Much to the distress of senior military leaders, antiwar, antimilitary, and antiestablishment attitudes infiltrated the army’s ranks.
8
At a time when everything from hair and music to sex had become intensely politicized, the army found itself a political battleground of sorts.
9
Underground newspapers staffed by self-described radicals sought to subvert what remained of the service’s internal order and discipline.
10
Antiwar GI “coffeehouses” located outside the gates of major bases sowed seeds of dissent. On the graffiti-scarred walls of barracks or latrines,
F. T. A.
(Fuck the Army) became as omnipresent as
KILROY WAS HERE
had been in an earlier day. Incidents of collective insubordination proliferated.
11
A contest to win the “hearts and minds” of the rank and file ensued, with senior officers fearing that they might achieve no more success than they had in Vietnam. The army, Ward Just wrote at the time, “does not know how to contain the revolution.”
12

Concerned members of Congress took note. South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond convened hearings to investigate “revolutionary organizations” engaged in a “systematic effort to spread disaffection in our armed forces and to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty.” One government investigator summoned to testify charged that a “cadre of civilian activists dedicated to the weakening of the military as a step toward the ultimate overthrow of the U.S. Government” was targeting enlisted members of the military. “Their goal is the violent destruction of U.S. society.” Among the organizations cited were the Center for Servicemen’s Rights, the Movement for a Democratic Military, the Black Military Resistance League, the Fort Bragg GI Union, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
13