By Army Capt. Bart "Buddy" Love
Best Defense guest film reviewer

I recently purchased the Blu-Ray version of the classic World War II film Bridge on the River Kwai.

I've watched the film enough times over the years that many of the quotes are burned into my mind. As I settled in on Saturday to watch the film I was struck by the distortion of one of the movies most memorable lines. In the scene Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, is informing his officers of his intent to build the bridge. He states: "We can teach these barbarians a lesson in Western methods and efficiency that will put them to shame. We'll show them what the British soldier is capable of doing."

It's one of my favorite lines since many years later those "barbarians" taught us a thing or two about efficiency. As the movie reached the scene COL Nicholson begins to speak the line and I suddenly noticed something missing; I couldn't make out the word "barbarians." I replayed the scene twice and sure enough no barbarians. I then turned on the subtitles and played the scene again. In the subtitles the word "them" was placed where "barbarians" should have been.

I'm not sure why anyone would edit this line out. My knee-jerk reaction is to assume that it is some sort of conspiracy since the movie was released by Sony. Of course the explanation could come down to simple human error in editing the film.  

One of the things that has struck me repeatedly in reading accounts of minor figures in the My Lai case is how the moral question that will define a person's life can come upon us at any time.

You're an aviation company commander minding your own business on your base in Vietnam one warm morning in March 1968, and one of your helicopter pilots, Hugh Thompson, lands his aircraft clearly upset, and comes over to tell you that an American infantry unit a few miles away is killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Vietnamese civilians. What do you do, major?

So when I particularly impressed by these comments about the massacre made decades later by William Eckhardt, the Army lawyer who was lead prosecutor:

Evil doesn't come like Darth Vader dressed in black, hissing. Evil comes as a little bird whispering in your ear: 'Think about your career. I'm not sure what's going on. We'll muddle through for the next couple of hours. We'll get over the hill, and we'll go on. I mean, after all, I can't call people in and admit that I can't control, I can't do some other thing.' In my judgment, the evil comes from that point of view.

(From p. 43, David Anderson, ed. Facing My Lai: Moving Beyond the Massacre)

My bedtime reading as of last night is Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, which touches on this theme. Little known fact: O'Brien served in the Americal Division about a year after one of its battalions committed the My Lai massacre. Probably the only guy in history to go directly from the Americal to the Washington Post.

I think there is a lot to fault the media for in the Vietnam War. But I was surprised to see this in the oral history that Gen. Paul Harkins, Gen. Westmoreland's predecessor in Vietnam, gave to the LBJ Library: "Halberstam was a Jew, and he didn't like Diem." (Part 1, p. 26) The implication was that Halberstam was driven by an anti-Catholic bias. Novel theory of why we lost the Vietnam War, to say the least.  

Like his original mentor, George Patton, Harkins was an equal opportunity hata. For example, he also says: "the Buddhists -- they just blow everything way out of importance, as far as I'm concerned." (Part 1, p. 27)

If eccentric, Patton at least was bright and insightful in his own maddening way. I am not sure the same was true of Harkins. He may have just been a big wanker.

I finally got around to reading Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken, an interesting revisionist take on the first 10 years of our involvement in the Vietnam War. (His response will follow tomorrow.)

I think his book is more right than wrong. For example, my bet is that he is correct in concluding that the American reporters in Vietnam, especially early in the war, probably were off base, especially in their coverage of the Diem government. He also does a good job on the Ap Bac battle.

Scorecard report: His villains are John Paul Vann, American journalists, Henry Cabot Lodge, the State Department and, eventually, Lyndon Johnson.

Where he goes wrong, I think, generally is when he tends to rely more on documents stating what policies were intended to be rather than assessments from the field about how those policies were translated into reality. Overall, the book has a tendentious edge to it, making me worry that he is being selective in his representation of what happened.

There were passages where I suspected that he was searching for facts to support his theory, rather than finding all the facts and then developing a theory to explain them. For example, in one passage he discusses how the U.S. Navy interdicted enemy vessels bringing supplies into the South. After March 1965, he notes, "the North Vietnamese Navy would attempt only eighty voyages to the South, and of these only fourteen would reach their destination, resulting in total delivered cargo of less than 800 tons." (p. 358) The implication of this in the author's eyes seems to be that if only the U.S. had moved on the ground to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, then the Communist forces in the south would have withered and the war would have been over.

Read on

Just when you think there is not much new to say about a subject, along comes a book that overhauls your understanding of that subject.

I say this because I just finished Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam, by George Lepre. I've been reading about Vietnam full-time now since early last summer and so wasn't surprised to see how the Army fell apart in Vietnam, for example going from 47 drug "apprehensions" of soldiers there in 1965 to 11,058 in 1970 (p. 113). Or that one U.S. Army division, the ill-fated Americal, in 1970 had 5,567 NJPs and courts-martial.

What did surprise me in this illuminating book was the basic profile of soldiers who fragged NCOs and officers (that is, tried to kill them with hand grenades). In this carefully researched study, Lepre reports that:

--Most fragging occurred in the noncombat support units in the rear, not in front-line combat units. (p. 31)

--The attacks often killed the wrong person: "of all the army officers who are known to have died in fragging incidents during the Vietnam War, only one was the intended target of the assault." (p. 44)

--Four would-be fraggers were killed in their own attempts to assault others. (p. 47)

--The last Vietnam fragger to get out of jail was William Sutton, who was released in 1999, his time extended by a parole violation. (p. 200)

--Not all fraggers left the military. Staff Sgt. Alan G. Cornett Jr., who was in Special Forces, fragged his unit's executive officer, Lt. Col. Donald F. Bongers, who was wounded but not killed by the grenade blast. Cornett was convicted, did a year's confinement, some of it at Fort Leavenworth's disciplinary barracks -- and then served another 17 years in the Army, retiring in 1989 as a master sergeant. (p. 82)

--Most fraggers already had had a brush with the military justice system before committing their fragging offenses (pp. 76-77). More typical of fraggers than Cornett was PFC Richard Buckingham, a cook in the 538th Transportation Company. Lepre goes on:

The government eventually withdrew its charge against Buckingham, which who would have faced his second court-martial in the space of a year: in June 1970 he had been tried in West Germany on charges of rape and sodomy, and was acquitted. Buckingham left the Army in 1972 but couldn't stay out of trouble: only weeks after his discharge, he strangled a seven-year-old girl to death and was sentenced to life imprisonment. A judge released him in 1999 in the belief that he "would not pose an unacceptable risk to society" but Buckingham was quick to prove him wrong: in 2002, he was sentenced to serve several more years in his native Ohio for assaulting yet another female.

(p. 118)

I find Gen. Matthew Ridgway, who commanded the 82nd Airborne in World War II and turned around the Korean War in early 1951 after MacArthur screwed it up, endlessly interesting. When I was up at the Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, doing book research last month, I spent a day reading his oral history interviews, some of them corrected in his own hand, and signed by him at the end in the same ink.

Here are some of my favorite passages:

On the strains of combat: "The best of troops will fail if the strain is big enough...I have commanded in World War II the finest troops the U.S. had...I have seen individuals break in battle, and I have seen units perform miserably. The latter was always because of poor leadership. But sometimes, failure of the individual was not due to leadership. It just gets to the point where a man can't take it anymore -- that's all...I saw men in Normandy in a few cases where the strain was too damn much for them. Casualties were very, very heavy, men were falling all around them, and they just walked off crying. Always be easy on a man like that. Help him get back to the rear. Nine times out of 10 he will come out of it all right. Sometimes he can be ruined for life, though."

What a chief of staff should be: "I always picked my chief of staff very carefully. A commander and his chief of staff should be a dual personality. There must be no secrets between them. Each one has to know the soul of the other and have confidence in the other. He knew my policies and everything else. He was completely authorized to act in my name."

Read on

So in my research on the Vietnam War I was paging through H.R. Haldeman's diaries to see what he says about General Creighton Abrams and was surprised to come across his comment about a former defense secretary we all know: "typical Rumsfeld, rather slimy maneuver." (657)

Pot calling the kettle, I know. It did make me ponder, for a moment, why it was that Rumsfeld was the senior member of the Nixon administration to enjoy the longest public career.

Meanwhile, I see where Mr. Rumsfeld just told an interviewer that he never read the books by Bob Woodward or me about the Iraq war. "Neither one of them were involved at all," Rumsfeld said. "They were all on the outside listening to people two or three levels down. No, I've not read their books."

Rumsfeld is indeed correct about whom I was listening to -- and I am glad I was. In retrospect, I have come to see my book Fiasco as reflective of the views of many brigade and battalion commanders, and a couple of thoughtful division commanders, who indeed were several echelons below Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. I think they also had a much better understanding of what was going on in Iraq than he did, and they were angry and frustrated, which is why Fiasco amounted to an indictment of the top generals and the civilian overseers of the military in the Pentagon, the White House, and the Congress. How often did Rumsfeld's undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith, go to Iraq? Anyone know? I can't remember him going more than once or twice.

Yep. Gather round, little grasshoppers, and I will tell the strange tale.

I know it sounds like the reverse of a Quentin Taratino movie, but it is true: During World War II, the Army intentionally formed a unit chockablock with fascisti and their suspected sympathizers. What a sensible idea -- much better than kicking them out into society and losing track of them.

This is all discussed in the new issue of Army Lawyer , where Fred "Three Sticks" Borch has a fascinating article about PFC Dale Maple, a brilliant young man who was born in San Diego in 1920 and who graduated from Harvard with honors but then, because he was bad, was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.

Young Maple spoke many languages. But his favorite, alas, was German. At Harvard he got kicked out of ROTC for being vocally pro-German when that just wasn't cool, according to a separate article on him that I just read. Stymied in his hopes to do post-graduate work in Berlin, which was busy with other things at the time, he enlisted in the Army in 1942. The Army had just the place for him: the 620th Engineer General Service Company, which despite its innocuous name was actually a holding unit for about 200 GIs of suspect loyalty, many of them German-born. The unit, which was not given weapons, was located in Camp Hale, Colorado, which is far from any port, but happened to next to an detachment of German PoWs on a work party.

And thereby hangs this tale. In February 1944 Private Maple decided it would be a good idea to help some hard-boiled eggs from the Afrika Korps escape to Mexico. Southward he drove them though New Mexico-a lovely drive, I've done much of it. Just across the international border, Mexican authorities caught them all and tossed them back. (Is there a derogatory term for people who illegally cross from the U.S. into Mexico, besides "stupid gringos"?) Maple was tried and found guilty and secretly sentenced to death. President Roosevelt clemently commuted his sentence to life, and he was released in 1951. Maple's claim to notoriety is that he was the first American-born GI ever found to have committed treason. 

As best as I can tell from an internet search, Maple then moved back to San Diego and, like a Tom Waits song, went into the insurance business. He apparently died 10 years ago.

(HT to Dwight Sullivan at the CAAFLOG -- don't give up the ship, Dwight!)

What an interesting, thoughtful book.

I've had this memoir, The Lost Battalion of Tet, on my shelf for a couple of years but had waited to read it in order of my research for the book I am working on. I am now, finally, studying the Vietnam War in 1968, so I turned to it. It is mainly about a 1^st Air Cavalry infantry battalion that suffered 311 casualties in a few weeks, most of them after being surrounded outside Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive, cut off with dwindling ammunition but without artillery support.

First, it strikes me as unusually honest in its relation of events and its depiction of people. This is a characteristic that it shares of one of my all-time favorite books, E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Another similarity: Both books were written several decades after the events described, yet remained vivid.

In one passage, set in Quang Tri, Charles Krohn's battalion commander recommends to another battalion commander who is just arriving not to store any ammunition near a building with a shiny tin roof that was being used as an enemy aiming point. "You command your battalion and I'll command mine," responded Lt. Col. Herlihy Long. And then, writes Krohn, "A few hours later, Long was killed when an NVA rocket scored a direct hit on the ammunition." (78)

Then there is the rattled chaplain, Capt. Dan Klem, who asks to offer a prayer for a group of men about to undertake a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. "Instead of saying something inspirational . . . he asked God to be with the boys who were going to die," recalls the company commander, Capt. Robert Helvey, who was leading the reconnaissance mission. (210)

Krohn meditates well on the systemic failure and command failures at the brigade and division level that led to his battalion being cut off without much support. Near the end he offers this wise advice to commanders:

Try training for failure-system failure. Train under the assumption that one or more systems supporting you won't work knowing beforehand it reduces your probability of success. (281)

What prevents combat trauma? In the same July 1944 article from the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry that I cited the other day, Dr. Herbert X. Spiegel, a psychiatrist assigned to an Army infantry battalion in North Africa in World War II, made these observations:

"Good leadership meant good morale, and this, in turn, meant a low psychiatric casualty rate and good performance...The company commander or platoon leader...saw to it that his men got the best possible food under the circumstances; sent blankets up to them at night if it were at all possible; made every effort to keep them well supplied with water and ammunition; saw to it that promotions were fair; made certain that good work and gallantry were properly recognized; he got mail, news and information to them when possible; and he made sure that violations of rules were treated quickly and fairly. But above all, by these actions, he made his men feel they were not alone, that he was backing them up with everything humanly possible. That, plus technical ability, constitutes a good leader."

Tom again: I think that is about as good a summary I've seen. I'd like to see it quoted in our military manuals on small unit leadership. And I can't think of a more important subject for this blog.

Yet even with good leadership, there clearly are limits. Another reader, Mike F., sent along a link to an Army study of "the old sergeant syndrome" in late World War II-experienced and trusted combat leaders simply falling apart after too much. "When they were evacuated for psychiatric disturbances the matter became of real interest to all from the company commander to the commanding general of the division, for these men were among the best and most effective of the trained and disciplined combat infantry soldiers. These soldiers eventually developed abnormal tremulousness, sweating, and a tendency to be the first to get in and the last to leave a foxhole. They became useless to their unit."

Here's a sample:

Read on

I'm always amazed at how refined field craft can become. Here are a couple of things that struck me in that essay by Col. Hoang Ngoc Lung, a former senior South Vietnamese intelligence officer, from Sorley's The Vietnam War: An Assessment by South Vietnam's Generals:

Floors, too, were good candidates for caches. The most effective way to detect them was to pour water over the dirt floor. Places that had been excavated would absorb more water at a faster rate than those that hadn't...

"The sapper threat was recognized and given high priority by security units. Small outposts took inexpensive measures for detecting infiltration which were nevertheless effective, such as raising dogs, geese and ducks on the outer perimeter of their positions...To deal with geese and ducks, they [the sappers] attached a stalk of blackened water potato plant to the end of a walking stick and dangled it upwind in front of the birds. Thinking they saw snakes, the birds did not dare make a sound. Another way they distracted the ducks and geese was to run green onion leaves on the sappers' bodies. The smell frightened the birds because they thought they smelled vipers." (pp. 118-119) 

So on my day off over the weekend I paging through the July 1944 issue of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry and this passage, about the experiences of a psychiatrist serving with an infantry battalion in North Africa in 1943, jumped out at me (italics are his, not mine):

It soon became apparent that a tense, tremulous soldier was not necessarily a psychiatric casualty. He was if we made him one and sent him back, but often he was not a casualty simply because he was not permitted to be one. A state of tension and anxiety is so prevalent in the front lines that it must be regarded as a normal reaction in this grossly abnormal situation.

The second sentence made me think of General Patton slapping two soldiers in the August 1943 in Sicily, and made me wonder if he thought he could "not permit" them to become casualties. (Of course, the first soldier he assaulted, Pvt. Charles Kuhl, was suffering from dysentery and malaria, and those afflictions were not going to be knocked out of him, no matter how hard Patton swung or kicked-and he did both.)

And the third sentence seems to me to be a great summary of the message of Joseph Heller's wonderful Catch-22.   

I've rarely seen as thorough a demolition job as the one done by Williams College political scientist James McAllister on an article by Jonathan Caverley, "The Myth of Military Myopia," that ran last year in International Security. McAllister's article, "Who Lost Vietnam?: Soldiers, Civilians, and U.S. Military Strategy," is in the new (Winter 2010/11) issue of the same magazine, but I can't find it online for free.

Caverley, who now teaches at Northwestern University, argues that Gen. Westmoreland would have pursued a counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam if only his civilian overseers had permitted him to do so. This would be an amazing revelation if it were true, of course. But Caverley, a former submariner, makes this case, McAllister charges, by confecting an argument out of a few bits of theories and misquoted documents, while ignoring a mountain of contrary evidence. (Hey, prof, that worked for the Bush administration in making a case for invading Iraq.…)

McAllister's bottom line:

Ultimately, Caverley delivers a theoretical and historical synthesis that does not explain why the United States fought the way it did in Vietnam. The source of the problem is not hard to discern; his theoretical framework leads him to simplify and distort the history of the war. There is nothing inherently wrong in approaching the history of the Vietnam War armed with a simple and elegant theory. There is something wrong, however, in making the complex history of the war conform to that simple and elegant theory.

Tom again: One thing I learned by toiling as a reporter for 26 years is that there is always another side to the story, so I will invite Professor Caverley to respond to this, if he likes.

Update:
Here is a quick comment from Prof. Caverely:

I welcome the opportunity to respond to the charge of shoddy scholarship, defend my argument, and present elements of the historical record that back it up.  But for now, allow me to note that I have a response to Prof. McAllister in the same issue of International Security that does this at considerable length.

And he also generously has passed along a link to his original article. 

I just got in the mail, but haven't yet read, a new book by George Lepre titled Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam (Texas Tech University Press).

It is interesting that university presses in "flyover country" seem to be producing the best books on Vietnam nowadays. Here are the state universities producing good histories books I've read lately: Texas, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas. How about it, university presses of California, Massachusetts, Virginia and so on? Step up, fellas.