Those Who Have Borne the Battle (30 page)

The question is: who were the young men drafted during the Vietnam War? One scholar, Michael Shafer, concludes that “white, middle-class, better-educated, young men managed to avoid military service or to avoid combat in Vietnam if they did serve, while non-white, working-class, less-well-educated men were far more likely to serve and to see combat.”
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During the war some 15 million Americans had exemptions or deferrals from the draft. A major source of this was the student deferment. In May 1965 there were 1,695,696 student deferrals. By December of that year there were 1,834,240. The actual draft pool, that is, single men, draft eligible, with no deferments, in January 1966 was 642,000. So some draft boards actually had to call married men. This caused officials to consider a review of college deferments—with some proposing a return to the Korean War practice of not having these granted categorically but to be dependent upon local boards assessing test scores and class rankings. When some colleges began to balk at releasing such data, President Johnson opted to maintain the status quo on student deferments.

College deferments did provide an advantage to young men from more privileged backgrounds. Even though American higher education was becoming more democratic and egalitarian in the 1960s, it still had a lot of ground to cover. Young men from families earning between seventy-five hundred and ten thousand dollars a year were two and a half times more likely to go to college than were those whose families earned less than five thousand dollars a year. Moreover, working-class students were more likely to enroll part-time—and student deferments went only to full-time students.
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Local draft boards had the authority to defer or exempt anyone who had a medical disability. There was some unevenness in the definition and diagnosis of these disabilities. Potential draftees who were able to bring in
a letter from a family doctor affirming a disability condition were likely to be exempted; few draft boards had the means or even the disposition to challenge such claims. On the other hand, “Poor and working class men ordinarily allowed military doctors to determine their physical fitness.” These physicians generally issued fewer medical deferments.
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In the first years of the war, many were struck to see data demonstrating that African American troops were suffering casualties at a level nearly twice their proportion of the population (11 percent of the population and 20 percent of combat deaths through 1966). Studies determined that this clearly had resulted from some racist assumptions and assignments, but more relevant was that blacks tended to volunteer and reenlist disproportionately in the integrated armed forces. And they tended to volunteer for the most hazardous assignments, partially due to the higher compensation but also finally to dispose of the old racist canard that they would not fight. As one black sergeant told a interviewer, “I'm given every opportunity to prove beyond a doubt in anybody's mind that I'm a man.”
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Many of the television snippets from Vietnam showed integrated units working together and displayed black soldiers, as one critic noted, as “exemplars of patriotism, masculinity, and professionalism.”
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Some black GIs even criticized Muhammad Ali for refusing to serve in the military, and they distanced themselves from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s criticism of the war. But there were limits to this integrated brotherhood—at the end of the Vietnam War, only 3 percent of army officers were black.
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In 1962 200 draft board members out of 12,000 nationally were black. By 1966 this number had increased only to 278, at which time Lyndon Johnson pressed hard to remedy this so that by 1970 about 7 percent of board members were black. Black draftees were nearly 16 percent of the total in that year.

Blacks received fewer educational deferments because they were not attending college at the same level as nonblacks. On the other hand, black inductees were rejected at a higher percentage than whites due to physical, medical, educational, and intelligence testing. Race was deeply embedded in any effort to understand these variations. As early as 1964, Lyndon Johnson determined that he would try to remedy the situation.
He pressed the Pentagon to lower some of its standards so as to provide military service opportunities to more Americans—and also to expand the draft pool. This cynical course of action resulted in predictably inequitable consequences.

When President Johnson first proposed the effort to expand the draft pool by lowering standards, he was opposed by many southerners who were worried about the armed forces becoming too black. In a confidential meeting with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Johnson described how to get Senator Richard Russell on board with this plan by assuring him it would move young blacks out of rural Georgia, such as Russell's hometown of Winder:

When the president asked Secretary McNamara how many of these “second-class fellows” the military would take, McNamara said that the Pentagon had balked and wanted no more than 20,000 a year. He said that they did not “want to be in the business of dealing with ‘morons.' They call these ‘moron camps' now,” in the Pentagon, the secretary reported. McNamara insisted that the army wished to avoid becoming a “rehabilitation agency.”
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Nevertheless, the president was persuasive, and the program, Project 100,000, operated from 1966 to 1970. Johnson supported it as part of the War on Poverty, to provide training and experience for the poor. One
study concluded, “Its result, however, was to send many poor, terribly confused, and woefully uneducated boys to risk death in Vietnam.” There were 240,000 young men drafted under this program. Only 6 percent of them received specialized training. Forty percent of them went into combat units—as compared with 25 percent for all enlisted men. Blacks were 40 percent of the Project 100,000 inductees. All of the inductees in this program had a death rate twice that of US forces as a whole.
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College graduates were 5.8 percent of Vietnam veterans who were discharged from the military in 1969. The number had increased to 10.5 percent in 1971 due to the increase in draft calls and the end of most graduate-student deferments. The percentage who served in Vietnam who had at least some college education was 21.7 percent in 1969 and 29.9 percent in 1971. In 1970 50 percent of their age group had attended college. “Among soldiers in Vietnam, high school dropouts were three times more likely to experience heavy combat than were college graduates.”
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In the prologue to his Vietnam War novel
Fields of Fire
, Jim Webb, who served as a marine officer in Vietnam, quoted from an anonymous general's comment to journalist Arthur Hadley: “And who are the young men we are asking to go into action against such solid odds? You've met them. You know. They are the best we have. But they are not McNamara's sons, or Bundy's. I doubt they're yours. And they know they're at the end of the pipeline. That no one cares. They know.”
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The class-driven casualty gap first evident during the Korean War became even more pronounced in Vietnam. By one recent study, socioeconomic status was more important than race in describing casualty patterns.
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Michael Shafer reported a study comparing Harvard and MIT graduates with those of the same age from South Boston: “Coming from South Boston meant being 20 times more likely to die in Vietnam than going to Harvard or M.I.T.”
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Draftees were 28 percent of the servicemen killed in 1965, and by 1969 they were 62 percent. They were the youngest troops to fight in any American war. By one calculation the average age of those who saw combat in Vietnam was nineteen—and in World War II it had been twenty-seven.
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The June 27, 1969, issue of
Life
was powerful in its simplicity—and its capacity to personalize the American sacrifice. It published the pictures of
242 young men who had died in combat in Vietnam in one week, May 28–June 3, 1969. Even more than forty years later, these simple black-and-white photos are just as moving. The men pictured are identified only by name, branch of the service, rank, and hometown—and their ages. Many of them were eighteen to twenty years old.

The magazine described a few of these young men, including one who died on his twenty-first birthday. Another had sent flowers to his mother that arrived the day before he died. One, who was about to return to the United States, had just written his family that “I could be standing on the doorstep” in two weeks. He apologized for his “shakey” writing but said he was just so excited at the prospect of getting home. There was a Korean War veteran with seven children, a church organist, and one who had been sending his pay home so his brother could stay in college. One soldier wrote to his parents from Hamburger Hill, “You may not be able to read this. I am writing it in a hurry. I see death coming up the hill.”
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The draft did have consequences beyond the individuals who were inducted under its implementation. Studies suggest that in 1964, about 40 percent of all volunteer enlistees were induced to join by the pending draft. This increased so that in 1966 it was 43 percent of army enlistees. The army was more dependent upon the draft than were the other services, but the navy and Marine Corps acknowledged that the threat of the draft was necessary to maintain their enlistment goals.

In 1966 33 percent of navy enlistees and 40 percent of new naval officers were draft induced. For the marines the respective figures were 30 percent and 27 percent, and for the air force they were 43 percent and 39 percent. Most officials agreed the draft kept Reserve Officers' Training Corps, or ROTC, numbers up. The threat of the draft also contributed significantly to meeting reserve and National Guard goals. In 1970 some 90 percent of National Guard enlistment was estimated to be draft induced.
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In December 1969 the Selective Service had moved to a draft lottery. This was controversial, but by this time the numbers of inductees were down and President Nixon was pushing for an all-volunteer force.

Despite all of the controversy over the draft, as one scholar concluded, “The active forces of the late 1960's were the highest paid and best educated ever to fight in an American war; and numerous reports testify that
they were also the best trained, the most professional.”
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Subsequent studies have agreed with that judgment. Nonetheless, it was harder to hold on to this professional military. In 1962 some 26 percent of first timers reenlisted; in 1970 the figure was 12 percent, and among draftees it was less than 4 percent.

The professional force was not always wisely deployed or well used. The basic military policy during the war was to deal with individual rather than unit rotations. This meant that after the original deployments, there were fewer and fewer of the cohesive, commonly trained, veteran-infused units that provided stronger, more disciplined combat forces. The army had a twelve-month and the marines a thirteen-month tour in Vietnam. Individuals typically flew into one of the Vietnam air bases and were processed and sent out to a unit in the field. They likely knew no one there, and the other members of the command were at various points on their own twelve-month tour.

Inevitably due to rotations, injuries, deaths, and other withdrawals from duty, units, particularly out in the bush, were understrength, sometimes significantly so. This put an even greater burden on inexperienced soldiers. A Pentagon study indicated that twice as many soldiers were killed during the first six months of their tour than during the last six months—indeed, further analysis of these same data reveals that six times as many men were killed during the first three months of the tour as during the last three months.
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There was particular pressure on young officers. The army rotated them out of field commands after six months so as to provide combat-command experience to more men. The nature of the war, with mobile small units, platoon or company size, moving into areas to engage the enemy, often followed by withdrawal, meant that young lieutenants and second lieutenants, almost by definition inexperienced, were the “muddy boots” officers. By 1967 96 percent of the US engagements with enemy units were at or below company level.
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There were 5,069 junior officers killed in Vietnam, a rate nearly double that which might have been predicted based on their proportion of the total force. Unlike previous wars, senior officers were typically not out on the front. The smaller units in the field did not have field-grade officers or general officers. These senior
men followed and commanded operations from base camps or from helicopters.

Even though Vietnam service was relatively short—lasting one year compared to most World War II inductees who were in “for the duration,” and even though Vietnam did not have the same large-scale determinative battles that World War II had—the intensity of the combat experience was often greater in Vietnam. Many World War II infantry units saw a few weeks or months of combat during a campaign—or during the war. Some army units engaged in combat extending for several months in western Europe in 1944–1945. On the other hand, a typical marine division fighting in the intensive island campaigns averaged six weeks of combat in World War II. In Vietnam marines were out in combat for 80 days at a time before they would rotate back to base camps for some downtime. The typical marine would be out for 240 days or more during a thirteen-month tour. One Defense Department study in 1967 determined that US forces had the initiative in just 14.3 percent of their engagements. Michael Shafer concluded, “Vietnam offered few instances of the prolonged, total exposure of the landings at Normandy or Iwo Jima. But while the objective danger may have been lower, the subjective danger was exaggerated by the nature of the war. Combat involved constant patrolling, days and days of suspense waiting for an ambush or a booby trap, and then short, intense firefights followed by more suspense.” With no clear front lines, for many troops, “the war was all the time and everywhere.”
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