Summer, early 1950s. Three companies of bootcamp draftees are on a firing range to live-fire for the first time an Army Colt .45 caliber pistol. Instructors patrol their charges, giving instructions as a bullhorn in a tower snaps commands. Everything is done “by the numbers”: each step clearly defined to be exactly performed. After hours of sighting, aiming and dry-firing, young men aim their weapons at targets that seem far away. As the noncoms repeat the tower’s commands, they aim the heavy pistols. Precisely on command, they fire their first .45 round down range. All except one who, also precisely on command, shoots himself in the temple, spattering two recruits on his left with blood, barely missing them with the bullet. The Korean War is raging. Some of the training cadre are back from seeing hastily called-up reservists get slaughtered because they’re out of shape, poorly trained. New draftees find hard Korea-era basic training dismaying.
One doesn’t have to go to a VFW or American Legion bar to get into an argument over Vietnam, just as a newsman was quoted as saying in this space last week. Among comments on that column two were especially piquant: 1) It was a vilification of staff officers, and 2) the concept of a “military intellectual” is an oxymoron.
Any fresh recruit during the Korean period (June 25, 1950-July 27, 1953), would agree with the second comment – for he had no breadth of experience. He was running into many officers, first lieutenants on up, who were lazy, incompetent, insecure enough to be cruel, unobservant and therefore stupid, too filled with pride and ambition to be trusted – plus there’s always a crowd of mere martinets. The military is often a home for all those. “If you can’t measure danger, how the hell can you outmaneuver it,” a good officer has said. But then one runs into such a bright, pragmatic, humane officer – often captains and under, sometimes a major, a rare Lieutenant Colonel. Unfortunately, cynicism is often born there, as such people are forced to salute, do an about-face, and carry out warped orders, though sometimes modifying them, if possible. These are officers that grunts pray for.
George Catlett Marshall, later to practically single-handedly recreate a Congressionally demoralized, miniaturized U.S. Army, was a colonel teaching at Fort Benning’s Infantry School in 1927-30. He became legendary for the astuteness, calmness, analytical ability in formulating new military concepts that restored the morale of many men in the continually downgraded military service. At Benning, many students considered him a genius. Marshall, a singularly modest man, who also knew his worth, considered that ridiculous. Once he asked an officer student to summarize a strategical problem. The student meandered, then said, “With the Colonel’s permission, the subject is too complex to cover adequately in the allotted time.” Marshall gave his class a curious glance, and said, “Captain, there is no military subject that cannot be covered adequately in five minutes, let alone twenty. It’s a matter of concision and a knowledge of what’s important, what’s extraneous.” The Captain smirked. Marshall asked him to propose any military subject he wished. He told another student to time his response. The subject chosen: the Civil War. An oft-told story charts Marshall’s summary: The early southern victories, inadequacies of command and discipline in the Army of the Potomac, then Shiloh, and the Grant/Sherman Mississippi strategy, the turning points at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the breakthrough in Georgia and the Carolinas and the threatened encirclement of Lee’s Army of Virginia. The entire war. When he called for the time, it was four minutes, fifty-two seconds. During this period, Marshall kept a list of promising men he encountered. In rebuilding the Army under Franklin Roosevelt in the late 1930s, he pulled up the name of an officer with a long record, but no combat experience, and recommended him for advancement: Dwight D. Eisenhower. But even on his list were officers who proved to be incompetent, unimaginative in war. The skeletonized peacetime army had leached away their aggressiveness, their skills.
The same thing happened in the years before Vietnam. It was exemplified by General Paul Harkins, the predecessor of William Westmoreland, the subject of Lewis Sorley’s excellent book, “Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (Reporter November 5). Harkins, who had made his reputation as staff aide to the battlefield genius of World War II, George S. Patton, had every opportunity to become an outstanding leader. It didn’t happen. When John F. Kennedy created the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) in Saigon, February 1962, he chose Harkins to command it.
After the shameful defeat of U.S.-advised South Vietnamese (ARVN) forces at Ap Bac January 2, 1963, Harkins did not go see what happened – “not because he was a physical coward,” one reporter said; “He never walked though rice paddies.” “When German photographer for the Associated Press, Horst Faas, asked to take pictures of him in the field with ARVN troops, Harkins said: ‘I’m not that kind of a general.’” He didn’t like getting down in the muck to find out what was happening to his command. His preference for observing Vietnam from the air was “symptomatic” of his aversion to bad news, U.S. journalists said. But it wasn’t his repellent staff-officer laziness and complacency that infected other generals in the war. Many of those were actual fighting officers of great energy and courage, going into the field to shoot guerrillas and get shot at, and sometimes killed. It was something more. Harkins had great contempt for Vietnam guerrillas and for the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) that had defeated the French. Most subsequent commanders tended to share this point of view. “They always saw what they thought they would see before ever getting near a Vietnam battlefield.”
As one historian has said: “By the second decade afer WWII, the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the U.S. armed forces had become professional arrogance, lack of imagination and moral and intellectual insensitivity.” Such characteristics, he said, “caused otherwise intelligent men like Harkins to behave stupidly.” This “disease of victory” issued from America’s triumph over what much of the world had viewed as the invincibility of Nazi Germany and Japan.
A hubristic habit of thought also infected American civilian society: The business leadership, politicians of both parties, certainly the government bureaucracy, and the CIA, which should have known better. Said one analyst: “The elite of America became stupefied by too much money, too many material resources, too much power ...” Sound familiar to anyone today?