The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Massacre at Firebase Mary Ann

  By late in the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army was a mess. In October 1970, it was losing a soldier a day to death by drug overdose. Desertions and AWOL incidents were going off the charts. Combat refusals and other forms of mutinous insubordination were becoming more common. According to a statement made by Sen. John Stennis in a hearing, there were at least sixty-eight refusals to fight among the seven divisions in Vietnam in 1970. In at least two instances, U.S. military police were used as assault forces against other American troops. On September 25, 1971, fourteen soldiers of the 35th Engineer Group barricaded themselves in a bunker behind machine guns. They surrendered after an explosion in the rear of the bunker. A month later, military police were sent into a signals outpost near Dalat after fragmentation grenades were used against the company commander two nights in a row. The MPs remained to police the outpost for a full week. Newcomers were inducted into “a bogus combat-veteran culture that was in reality no more than an accumulation of bad habits,” recalled Norman Schwarzkopf, who took command of a battalion in the Americal Division late in 1969. He saw units in which the notion of maintaining perimeter security had been all but abandoned, with collapsed bunkers, barbed-wire fences with “yawning gaps,” and Claymore antipersonnel mines whose detonating wires had rusted and separated, and even some mines that had been turned so they faced in toward the outpost.

  Even as the Army was disintegrating, officers were rewarding themselves more. Close to half the generals who served in Vietnam received an award for valor. In 1968, a year in which 14,592 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam, some 416,693 awards were bestowed. In 1970, when only 3,946 men were killed, some 522,905 awards were given. Once again, the Army seemed to be putting the interests of its officer corps first.

  The final insult to the Americal Division, and perhaps to the U.S. Army as a whole, came in March 1971. It was a particularly bitter phase of the war for both leaders and those they led. There were 120,000 Army personnel in the country, down from an American personnel peak of 543,000 in April 1969. Everyone knew the Americans were leaving, and the attention of many Americans was moving elsewhere, but small numbers of American soldiers were still engaged in combat. Rear areas were in a shambles, with racial tensions high, discipline becoming optional, and marijuana and heroin widely available at rock-bottom prices. Gayle Smith recalled working as a nurse in a U.S. military surgical hospital, in the Mekong Delta town of Binh Thuy, in which heroin usage was rampant. “These guys would work stoned all the time. My medics would shoot up my patients. . . . I caught them in the bathroom shooting each other up.” George Cantero, another medic during this phase of the war, recalled, “In my units, the majority of people were high all the time.” A rigorous series of tests and interviews concluded that almost half the Army enlisted men who departed Vietnam in one month in late 1971 had tried heroin or opium. Even more were using marijuana.

  Cantero, the medic, also noted that “fragging,” or the murder of officers with grenades, was common, but said that “the person that got fragged usually deserved it. . . . You only frag incompetent officers.” According to an official Army history, between 1969 and 1971, there were eight hundred attacks involving hand grenades that, in sum, killed forty-five officers and sergeants.

  The situation in frontline units was somewhat better but still problematic. Some saw head-spinning turnover in leadership. Keith William Nolan, in his melancholy portrait of the Army in Vietnam in 1971, offhandedly mentions one infantry company that went through five commanders in seven months. Platoon leaders felt especially squeezed between regular Army superiors who were trying to keep fighting the war and enlisted men who were just trying to survive and get home in one piece, and who sometimes were willing to maim or kill leaders they found overly aggressive in going after the enemy. “There were times I was very frightened, not just of what was in front of me, but what was behind me,” one former lieutenant, Peter Doyle, told Nolan. “Sandbagging” patrols—going only part of the way, then lolling in the bush instead of seeking signs of the enemy—became more common. Combat refusals also probably were far more frequent than reported. When one platoon refused to move out from the position in which they had “laagered” the night, Nolan wrote, their company commander reminded them that it was battalion policy to hit such sites with an artillery barrage an hour after moving out in order to kill enemy scavengers. “So you got a choice,” he informed them. “You can move out or get blown up.”

  In 1965, the Army’s rate of court-martials in Vietnam had been 2.03 per thousand. In 1970, the Americal Division, a unit of perhaps 15,000 troops, had 5,567 nonjudicial punishments and court-martials. The two figures are not equivalent, but they are indicative. More directly comparable is that in 1965 the Army in Vietnam had 47 “apprehensions” for drug violations, while in 1970 it had more than 11,000.

  • • •

  At 2:40 A.M. on March 28, 1971, the North Vietnamese called in the debts being run up by soldiers in an Americal Division outpost who routinely got “buzzed” on marijuana before going on guard duty, or fell asleep during it, or did not even bother to get out of their bunks to report for duty. About four dozen members of the Viet Cong’s 409th Sapper Battalion slipped through the perimeter defenses of Fire Support Base Mary Ann and roamed through the base, killing soldiers in their sleeping bags and tossing explosives and tear gas into the command post and other bunkers. There were extraordinary acts of heroism during the following hours, but at dawn, when the shooting and explosions were over, the fact remained that the base had been poorly defended by soldiers who had grown lax and commanders who had grown tired of pushing them or become wary of doing so for fear of retaliation. The Army as a whole seemed to be coming apart—one soldier recalled being surprised to see the crews of Cobra helicopters dispatched on the rescue mission leisurely walking to their aircraft. “They were just walking, and it made me pretty mad,” Spec. 4 James Carmen later told Army investigators. Ultimately, of the 231 American troops at the firebase, 30 were killed and 82 wounded. It was the biggest single loss for American forces in their final phase of the war. The outpost, which had been sited poorly and could be easily observed from a nearby hill, was abandoned a few weeks later.

  In the wake of the debacle, Maj. Gen. James Baldwin was relieved of command of the Americal Division by Gen. Abrams, the overall American commander in the ground war. “It was a mistake to make him a division commander,” said William Richardson, who commanded a brigade in the Americal and then became its chief of staff. Abrams also wanted to reduce Baldwin in rank but was overruled by the secretary of the Army, who instead issued a formal letter of admonition for permitting defensive laxity under his command. Baldwin was replaced by Maj. Gen. Frederick Kroesen and sent home to retire the following year. This obscure personnel action, barely remembered today, appears to have been the last combat relief of an Army division commander up to the present day.

  After My Lai, the jinxed Americal Division was far too notorious, so, in an unusual move, it effectively was fired as well. In December 1971, the Army did away with the division altogether, deactivating it and withdrawing two of its brigades from the war, leaving a third brigade as a stand-alone unit.

  The end of an Army

  By the end of the Vietnam War, the system of running the Army that had been devised decades earlier by George Marshall, a man of integrity, discipline, and objectivity, had collapsed. The new system of generalship rewarded officers without character and promoted distrust between generals and those they led, as well as the civilians to whom they reported. In the Army of 1972, “the atmosphere was somewhat poisonous, characterized by a vociferous loss of confidence in the Army leadership,” William DePuy would recall many years later. In a public opinion poll of the perceived truthfulness of twenty occupations, Army generals ranked fourteenth, behind lawyers (9), television news reporters (11), and plumbers (12) but ahead of TV repairmen (15), politicians (19), and
used-car salesmen (last).

  While addressing young officers at Fort Benning, Georgia, where Marshall had taught infantry leadership forty years earlier, Gen. Westmoreland was nearly booed off the stage, according to one account. He also received a rowdy reception from officers at Fort Leavenworth. An officer serving then recalled that “the senior officer corps was thoroughly discredited by the Vietnam War. The majors were in revolt. They didn’t give a shit about what the senior officers said.”

  Gen. Kroesen tried to explain how this had happened. He had seen the American Army through three wars. Not only had he replaced Baldwin at the Americal Division, but he had commanded troops in World War II and Korea. This is how he summarized the effect of the Vietnam War on the force:

  We reached a condition in which the chain of command was in a state of dysfunction. I have always maintained that a chain of command must function from the bottom up as well as from the top down—with every squad leader making squad leader decisions and reporting to his platoon leader, “Here’s what I found, here’s what I did, and here’s why I did it.” When squad leaders have someone telling them not only what to do but also how to do it, they stop being leaders, and so do platoon leaders and company commanders. Initiative is stymied, and decision making is replaced by waiting to be told. Combat action becomes tentative, and military action bogs down.

  In Vietnam many low-level commanders were subject to a hornet’s nest of helicopters carrying higher commanders calling for information, offering advice, making unwanted decisions and generally interfering with what squad leaders and platoon leaders and company commanders were trying to do. There is no more effective way to destroy the leadership potential of young officers and noncommissioned officers than to deny them opportunities to make decisions appropriate for their assignments.

  The Army continued to decline even after it left Vietnam. It was riven not only by the war but also by drugs and racism. “Those were the dog days of the Army in the post-Vietnam mid-seventies,” recalled Gen. Montgomery Meigs. “The Army was more than hollow; parts of it were very rotten.” Barry McCaffrey, a future general who was then the executive officer of a battalion based in West Germany, recalled gang rapes in the barracks and officers carrying loaded pistols for fear of assault. “The Army was really on the edge of falling apart,” he said.

  By the end of World War II, Marshall had built an entirely new Army—huge, mechanized, and powerful. By the end of the Vietnam War, thanks mostly to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson but also to Maxwell Taylor, Earle Wheeler, Harold K. Johnson, and William Westmoreland, Marshall’s Army was close to destruction. “An entire American army was sacrificed on the battlefield of Vietnam,” wrote historian and Vietnam veteran Shelby Stanton. “When the war was finally over, the United States military had to build a new volunteer army from the smallest shreds of its tattered remnants.”

  Col. Richard Sinnreich, who would be involved at Fort Leavenworth in the intellectual rebuilding of the Army, would say later, “As a young officer, I watched the Army come as close to dissolution, I think, as it has since the Revolution. . . . The glue that held us together was very thin.” Not only would the Army have to be rebuilt, but so would its relationship with its civilian overseers.

  PART IV

  INTERWAR

  Coming out of Vietnam, the Army was shattered. It was, said one general, “on its ass.” As in the 1950s, it faced a basic question. This time the issue was whether it could exist without a draft. Over the following twenty years, it would remake itself. It recruited a force of volunteers. It revolutionized how it trained soldiers, with far more realistic field exercises. It overhauled its doctrine of how to fight. It developed an array of new weapons. Almost everything about it changed but its concept of generalship.

  CHAPTER 22

  DePuy’s great rebuilding

  After the 1991 Gulf War, when Americans wanted to know how the U.S. Army had improved so radically in the sixteen years since the fall of Saigon, they were told about a quiet but sweeping rebuilding—of new weapons, better soldiers, and revamped thinking about how to fight. These accounts of that transformation were accurate—to a point. What was less noticed at the time was that the great rebuilding had also contained some shortcomings that would hobble the Army many years later in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  In 1973, Creighton Abrams, who had led the relief of the besieged 101st Airborne Division during the Battle of the Bulge, again would ride to the rescue of his service when he replaced Westmoreland as Army chief of staff. It was not inevitable that Abrams would be picked to lead the Army. President Nixon did not like Abrams and in fact had discussed with Henry Kissinger whether to relieve him as commander in Vietnam, according to Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and others. At one point in 1971, Nixon, upset with Abrams, had ordered Alexander Haig, then an Army brigadier general, to depart immediately for Vietnam to replace him. The ambitious, self-confident Haig knew that the idea of a one-star general stepping in was ridiculous, but, being Haig, he still was tempted: “I had no doubt that I could do the job.” However, the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, admired Abrams, and Laird had won a promise from Nixon that he could make his own personnel decisions, so Abrams stayed in place. Still, the discussions about who would succeed Westmoreland dragged on, and Abrams was nominated just twelve days before Westmoreland was to step down.

  As Abrams awaited confirmation, he had a conversation with Maj. Gen. Donn Starry, who warned him, “Your Army is on its ass.” It was—and he was determined to change that. The Grant-like Abrams—compact, solid, thoughtful, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking, slouching, and grouchy—would initiate the rebuilding of the Army. The process began with the creation of an “expeditious discharge program” to try to clean the Army’s ranks of drug addicts, gang members, and other troublemakers. Under this process, which sidestepped a court-martial, the U.S. Army in Europe ejected thirteen hundred soldiers in just four months. Barry McCaffrey, by then a battalion commander in Germany, would spend weekends with his company commanders assembling lists of “bad apple” soldiers. On Monday mornings, he would assemble the full battalion with a truck standing nearby. The names of those to be ejected would be read off, and those called out were put on the truck. When the loaded vehicle pulled out and headed to the discharge office, he said, “the full battalion would cheer to get rid of these bums.”

  In the following years, the Army also modernized its gear, made its training radically more realistic, and developed thoughtful new manuals for how to take on the Red Army in Central Europe, giving it a chance of prevailing even though it would fight the Russians outnumbered. Yet in the process of rebuilding, Abrams and his subordinates appear to have planted some of the seeds of problems that would plague the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan thirty years later. “In 1973, I was present for a lecture by General Creighton Abrams,” recalled a Marine officer who had served in Vietnam. “He declared that the Army was turning its back on counterinsurgency forever.” That year the Army War College dropped its required five-week course in unconventional warfare. This officer concluded, “That was the decision that caused the Army to stumble so badly in Iraq for the first three years.”

  Abrams’s influence over the Army’s renewal, though positive, was limited. He soon was stricken with cancer, though he remained in office. Into the vacuum stepped William DePuy, who in the mid-1970s would become, in the assessment of one Army historian, “arguably, the most important general in the U.S. Army” and, in the view of another, “likely the most important figure in the recovery of the United States Army” from its collapse after the defeat in Vietnam. “What DePuy did was take a broken Army and fix it so it could fight in Europe under the conditions that prevailed,” said Henry Gole, his biographer. For a spell, a fast-rising young officer, one Lt. Col. Colin Powell, worked for DePuy at the Pentagon. (In another sign of the extensive intergenerational connections in the Army, Powell reported in that post directly to Maj. Gen. Herbe
rt McChrystal Jr., father of the general who would command in Afghanistan four decades later.)

  On July 1, 1973, DePuy took command of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). It was a newly created headquarters, designed by him to bring together, for the first time, the Army’s efforts on training, research, and doctrine—the last of these being essentially how the service thinks about how to fight. The Army was out of Vietnam, and DePuy was focused on its future, which he saw as conventional, tank-heavy battles in Europe. When the fourth Arab-Israeli conflict (also known as the Yom Kippur War, the Ramadan War, or the October War) broke out that fall, he made the lessons and implications of the Israeli counterattack the centerpiece of his efforts to modernize and refocus the Army. The Arab forces, Soviet-trained and equipped, were a reasonable facsimile of what the U.S. Army would face on the plains of Central Europe if the superpowers ever went to war. DePuy also radically improved the Army’s training efforts, beginning by doing away with mind-numbing time-based training, in which a certain number of hours were to be spent on each basic task in a soldier’s field, and replaced it with a competence-based system. “The soldier moved to the next sequential task only after he had demonstrated competence at the basic level,” wrote Gole.

  DePuy and his subordinates, most notably Starry and another rising general, Paul Gorman, studied the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, which had been established after the Navy calculated that 40 percent of its pilots flying over North Vietnam were lost during their first three hostile engagements and that 90 percent of those who made it through that first set of fights survived their entire tours of duty. The Navy had established the school, better known as Top Gun, in 1969, to better prepare new pilots by having them fly against experienced ones using Soviet-based tactics. Graduates of this Navy school, which was made famous by a 1986 Tom Cruise film, fared far better flying over North Vietnam, while Air Force pilots, many of them operating the same sort of aircraft but lacking this new training, continued to suffer the same loss ratios.