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The Vietnam War was in many way a platoon and company-level war. Larger units were administrative, a battalion or division smeared across miles of jungle outposts and patrols linked by helicopters. As such, 1st and 2nd Lieutenants were primary leadership of the war. Milam is a Vietnam veteran, one of those tens of thousands of lieutenants, and this book is a serious study of training and leadership in the field during the Vietnam War, an attempt to correct the impression that these officers were poorly trained and not up to the task, and a morally pointed, if logically diffuse, rejection of Lt. Calley and the My Lai massacre.
On the first part, as the United States embarked on an escalation of the Vietnam War, senior leaders knew that more infantry platoons would require more lieutenants to lead them. Officers enter the army in three ways. An influential but decided minority are graduates of West Point, 4 year specialists in the profession of arms. The Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) combined traditional 4-year college with military classes and summer training, creating citizen soldiers. And Officer Candidate School (OCS) picks up the best of the enlisted, and in six months turns them into officers.
As Milam explores, West Point contributed between 500 and 800 lieutenants per year to the Army, but only about 25% of these chose combat arms in Vietnam as their first assignment. ROTC enrollment dropped from a high of 140,000 in 1966 to 42,000 in 1972. OCS had to fill the gap, and could be rapidly scaled. While a man had to volunteer to become an officer, contemporaneous surveys revealed that most candidates choose to do so only under the pressure of being drafted otherwise. And while OCS expanded, Milam argues that quality was maintained: attrition was consistently between 25% and 30%. Personally, I find it easy to believe that the OCS candidate pool in say, 1969, included people who would not be in that pool in 1963. Yet there was not the wholesale abandonment of standards associated with the shameful Project 100000. A majority of OCS graduates had some college education, and I do believe that the system as a whole did a solid job generating competent leaders.
The latter half of the book brings this notion of competence up against the realities of Vietnam. The simple fact is the much combat was on the Viet Cong's terms, ambushes and booby traps as balanced against American firepower. The infantry's job was to locate the enemy so he could be obliterated with air and artillery, and these search-and-destroy tactics were crudely executed. Similarly, the American military comprehensively failed in its "hearts and minds" efforts. In defense of Milam and his fellow veterans, I'm not sure any military force in history could have succeeded in these missions. Jungle warfare is punishingly difficult. There is no kind or easy way to expel an entire village from its home, even if you speak the language and share a culture.
A second matter was one of maintaining discipline, the balance between grunt and gentleman. Lieutenants lead from the front, sharing the exact same conditions as their men. They suffered proportionally higher casualties. Six month combat rotations, as compared to a full year for the enlisted, was the major benefit officers assumed, though this came at the cost of combat efficiency as new lieutenants had to learn the hard lessons repeatedly. Combat leaders were never spit and polish soldiers. Milam argues that much of the breakdown that the army experienced in Vietnam: drugs, race riots, fragging, was a rear echelon problem and that combat troops could and did keep it together in the field.
My Lai and Lt. Calley loom over this book like a phantom. Milam regards Calley's murderous rampage as a personal stain on his honor. Officers are supposed to direct and unleash violence, and it is profoundly unfit to do so on women and children. Yet, as Browning's Ordinary Men demonstrates, massacres are never far away from the soldier. Calley bore ultimate responsibility for his choices, but he was primed by his superiors, thirsty for a body count, confident that My Lai was a VC village, and hungry for blood. Lieutenants were not responsible for the "meregook " (racial slur) ideology of the war, but neither did they as a group stand against it.
As a dissertation, this book has the weaknesses of junior scholarship, but it also offers a valuable systematic examination of an aspect of the war that I've usually seen treated in individual memoirs.
On the first part, as the United States embarked on an escalation of the Vietnam War, senior leaders knew that more infantry platoons would require more lieutenants to lead them. Officers enter the army in three ways. An influential but decided minority are graduates of West Point, 4 year specialists in the profession of arms. The Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) combined traditional 4-year college with military classes and summer training, creating citizen soldiers. And Officer Candidate School (OCS) picks up the best of the enlisted, and in six months turns them into officers.
As Milam explores, West Point contributed between 500 and 800 lieutenants per year to the Army, but only about 25% of these chose combat arms in Vietnam as their first assignment. ROTC enrollment dropped from a high of 140,000 in 1966 to 42,000 in 1972. OCS had to fill the gap, and could be rapidly scaled. While a man had to volunteer to become an officer, contemporaneous surveys revealed that most candidates choose to do so only under the pressure of being drafted otherwise. And while OCS expanded, Milam argues that quality was maintained: attrition was consistently between 25% and 30%. Personally, I find it easy to believe that the OCS candidate pool in say, 1969, included people who would not be in that pool in 1963. Yet there was not the wholesale abandonment of standards associated with the shameful Project 100000. A majority of OCS graduates had some college education, and I do believe that the system as a whole did a solid job generating competent leaders.
The latter half of the book brings this notion of competence up against the realities of Vietnam. The simple fact is the much combat was on the Viet Cong's terms, ambushes and booby traps as balanced against American firepower. The infantry's job was to locate the enemy so he could be obliterated with air and artillery, and these search-and-destroy tactics were crudely executed. Similarly, the American military comprehensively failed in its "hearts and minds" efforts. In defense of Milam and his fellow veterans, I'm not sure any military force in history could have succeeded in these missions. Jungle warfare is punishingly difficult. There is no kind or easy way to expel an entire village from its home, even if you speak the language and share a culture.
A second matter was one of maintaining discipline, the balance between grunt and gentleman. Lieutenants lead from the front, sharing the exact same conditions as their men. They suffered proportionally higher casualties. Six month combat rotations, as compared to a full year for the enlisted, was the major benefit officers assumed, though this came at the cost of combat efficiency as new lieutenants had to learn the hard lessons repeatedly. Combat leaders were never spit and polish soldiers. Milam argues that much of the breakdown that the army experienced in Vietnam: drugs, race riots, fragging, was a rear echelon problem and that combat troops could and did keep it together in the field.
My Lai and Lt. Calley loom over this book like a phantom. Milam regards Calley's murderous rampage as a personal stain on his honor. Officers are supposed to direct and unleash violence, and it is profoundly unfit to do so on women and children. Yet, as Browning's Ordinary Men demonstrates, massacres are never far away from the soldier. Calley bore ultimate responsibility for his choices, but he was primed by his superiors, thirsty for a body count, confident that My Lai was a VC village, and hungry for blood. Lieutenants were not responsible for the "mere
As a dissertation, this book has the weaknesses of junior scholarship, but it also offers a valuable systematic examination of an aspect of the war that I've usually seen treated in individual memoirs.