Before 1917, America relied primarily on volunteer soldiers in wartime. Upon signing the Selective Draft Act on May 18, 1917, however, President Woodrow Wilson ushered in the draft era.1 The draft, or Selective Service System as it was officially designated, would be the tool for conscripting American manpower in four wars, ending only in 1973 with the adoption of an all-volunteer force. The draft was introduced because, unlike volunteerism, it allowed for the efficient, centralized management of manpower. Men with jobs critical to the war effort, in fields such as agriculture and industry, were exempted from military service, but the rest were subject to call-up based on various categories of age, marital status, and health. What should not be forgotten, however, is that multiple avenues remained for entering military service, despite the draft. For example, though draftees constituted 72 percent of the army by the end of World War I in November 1918, voluntary enlistments outpaced draft inductions throughout 1917. These volunteers were urgently needed to bring regular army and federally activated National Guard units up to strength while the draft apparatus was still being established.2 These volunteers were the first into combat in France.
While the specifics varied, this pattern was repeated in each of the wars of the draft era. Regular army or marine units, consisting solely or mostly of volunteers, often saw action first, usually followed by federalized National Guard units containing a large proportion of volunteers. Units formed primarily from draftees followed, at least during the world wars, and in all the wars individual replacements were most often draftees. These various paths to service accommodated a wide range of motivational levels, from enthusiastic volunteer to resentful draftee.
COMMON PERCEPTIONS: ENTHUSIASTIC DOUGHBOYS, RESIGNED GIs, AND RESENTFUL GRUNTS
Historians have drawn generalized conclusions about how willingly Americans served in time of war. The perception is that young men rallied to the colors in 1917 with an enthusiasm that reflected contemporary, middle-class, Victorian mores. “The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” notes the historian Michael C. C. Adams, “created a cultural milieu in which war could be seen as an intrinsically valuable human endeavor.”3 War would cleanse and strengthen American society, which had become soft and decadent. Duty to country and wartime selfsacrifice would curb the sordid materialism of a rapidly expanding industrial society. Indeed, nothing less than a moral renaissance would occur, both in America and, thanks to American influence and intervention, in Europe as well.4
War was also considered an exciting, chivalrous pursuit that would provide young men “a liberating release from the stultifying conventions of civilized society,” according to historian David M. Kennedy.5 The Great War would allow an escape from boring, petit-bourgeois work and female-dominated home life while also providing an opportunity for a young adventurer to prove his courage and manhood.6 Many young men volunteered in 1917, or served even earlier with Allied forces, in search of excitement.
The notion that war was an adventurous and intrinsically valuable endeavor was not unique to America. European society displayed a similar attitude when war broke out in 1914.7 The war literature that Americans read from 1914 to 1917, much of it originating in Europe, reinforced the idea that war was chivalrous and uplifting. This literature, overwhelmingly pro-Allied, nurtured the growing belief that America must act to save the culture and democratic heritage of England and France from the evils of Prussianism.8
Perhaps even more influential than the literature was the stance taken by America’s opinion leaders in championing the Allied cause and condemning Teutonic barbarity. These “custodians of culture,” as the historian Henry F. May calls them, included leading men of letters, college presidents, conservative politicians, and editors.9 Kennedy notes the impact of these opinion leaders, coupled with the pro-Allied, romantic literature: “An affirmative and inspiring attitude toward war, preached by guardians of tradition like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes and [Theodore] Roosevelt, nurtured by popular war writers like [Alan] Seeger and [Arthur Guy] Empey, filled men’s imaginations in 1917.”10 The result was enthusiasm for the war and the Allied cause, especially among young idealists from the Ivy League colleges and exclusive prep schools.11
The custodians of culture and the purveyors of popular war literature proved to be wrong, however. The Great War did not cleanse and uplift society, American or European, nor did it prove to be chivalrous. Americans were thoroughly disabused of any notion of war as a positive force. Thus, when the United States was pushed into war in December 1941, the “naive idealism” and “noisy confidence” of the World War I doughboy were no longer in evidence, according to historian Lee Kennett.12 Americans donned their uniforms with “a certain grim determination,” writes literature professor William E. Matsen, “far removed from the innocent idealism displayed in 1917 by the Great War’s doughboys.”13 Romanticized, prowar literature would be notably absent during World War II.14 Marine private Robert Leckie’s farewell to his mother before heading off to the Pacific encapsulates America’s attitude toward World War II: “It was not a heartrending leave-taking, nor was it brave, resolute—any of those words that fail to describe the thing. It was like so much else in this war that was to produce unbounded heroism, yet not a single stirring song: it was resigned.”15
While the resigned GI rejected his doughboy predecessor’s lofty goal of making the world safe for democracy, he nevertheless believed that America’s involvement in World War II was necessary and just. When the specter of a North Korean takeover of South Korea by military force loomed large in 1950, a residual faith in the nation and its leadership left over from World War II came into play. Americans equated Communism with the recently defunct Nazi regime and uncritically assumed that the cause of defending South Korea was just. Robert Lekachman, a World War II veteran, commented on this residual fervor: “I think everybody still felt good about the war in ’47, ’48, ’49. One wonders: could Truman have unilaterally committed American troops to Korea unless there had been the lingering romance of the Second World War? I rather doubt it.”16
Once the Communist Chinese intervened in the Korean War, however, victory in the World War II sense of totally defeating the enemy became an impossibility. As the war dragged on, disillusionment grew, and American draftees were increasingly reluctant to fight in an unwinnable war. A few historians and journalists warned that a new type of army, a professional, Cold War “legion,” would be needed if America was to fight any more such wars. War correspondent Marguerite Higgins advised as early as 1951 that the “Third World War is on. It began in Korea.” Therefore, in the future, “American leadership is going to have to impress on every potential GI that there are strong odds that he’s going to fight some dirty battles to keep the vanilla-ice-cream kind of world he has been brought up in.”17
Historian and Korean War veteran Theodore R. Fehrenbach argued the case for a new type of army even more vehemently in 1963, pointing out that “Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions.” America must take to heart a critical lesson from the Korean War: “In Korea, Americans had to fight, not a popular, righteous war, but to send men to die on a bloody checkerboard, with hard heads and without exalted motivations, in the hope of preserving the kind of world order Americans desired.”18
Yet, except for the establishment and expansion of the Special Forces, with their famous green berets, no special legion emerged. Thus when President Lyndon B. Johnson committed major American ground forces to what proved to be the quagmire of Vietnam and failed to call the reserves to active duty, as had occurred in previous wars, manpower requirements could be met only by greatly increased draft calls. The Vietnam-era draftee was not merely resigned, as were his counterparts in World War II and Korea, but downright resentful. The perceived inequities of the Vietnam-era draft were a major source of this resentment. As Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, both of whom served on the Presidential Clemency Board established by Gerald R. Ford, observe: “The draft . . . worked as an instrument of Darwinian social policy. The ‘fittest’—those with background, wit, or money—managed to escape. Through an elaborate structure of deferments, exemptions, legal technicalities, and noncombatant military alternatives, the draft rewarded those who manipulated the system.”19 As the war dragged on and the foxholes were increasingly filled by draftees, the Vietnam War grunt’s level of resentment over having to fight while others avoided serving only increased.
THE REALITIES OF RALLYING TO THE FLAG
This overview of motivations, or lack thereof, for serving in the wars of the draft era certainly contains much truth. It is also simplistic and therefore misleading. In reality, a mix of enthusiasm, resignation, and resentment can be found among those serving in each of the wars in question. David M. Kennedy’s concept of “coercive volunteerism” provides a useful starting point for a more sophisticated examination of wartime motivations. Kennedy rejects the common perception of Victorian, middle-class American men enthusiastic for war in 1917. He concedes that many were eager to join up, but this reservoir of enthusiasts was far from bottomless. Thus, the governing bureaucracy and its elite supporters, while ostensibly championing volunteerism, increasingly resorted to social pressure and stricter regulations to keep the ranks filled. Indeed, if World War I had continued, Kennedy believes that coercive measures would have been even more necessary: “Had the crisis continued to deepen, and the government been forced to sift the population ever more finely for men to send to France, it was altogether likely that ballyhoo would have increasingly given way to bayonets.”20 With variations, this process occurred in all the wars of the draft era. When the supply of prewar regulars and enthusiastic volunteers gave out, the country coerced growing numbers of reluctant, even resentful, draftees into serving.
The first to rally to the wartime colors were the volunteers, and despite the workings of the Selective Service System, various channels remained available for them to enter service. During World War I many volunteers did indeed conform to the generalization about idealistic crusaders. They were Francophiles or Anglophiles who feared that Europe would be crushed under the Prussian boot heel.21 None were more idealistic than the thousands of Americans who volunteered to serve in the Allied armies or in American volunteer ambulance and truck units, even before the United States entered the war. Amos N. Wilder was one such volunteer, joining more illustrious compatriots such as John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway in serving as an ambulance driver. As did many of his colleagues, he transferred to the American forces following the U.S. entry into the war, serving as a corporal in an AEF artillery battalion. Wilder saw himself and his fellow volunteers as ideological bellwethers: “Thus when it came to motivation of whatever elements and ranks in the armed forces, one should recognize the leavening influence of those with a more grounded perception of the issues at stake and a more enlightened dedication.”22
More than a few Americans volunteered to serve because they believed the stories, actively fed by Allied propaganda, of German atrocities and worried that America might share the Allies’ fate. Private Alphonso Bulz quit high school in Texas to enlist, fearing the war was going so badly for the Allies that they might lose and that the Kaiser’s next target might be America. Then there were “all those awful things the Germans were doing to the Belgians—cutting the fingers off the men so they couldn’t pull the trigger on a gun and raping all those nuns and all that.”23 Corporal Horatio Rogers joined his local National Guard outfit in Massachusetts out of similar concerns: “The papers were full of German atrocities and Allied unsuccess. Each ‘great drive’ the Allies made seemed to accomplish nothing. Then Russia was overthrown, and I had visions of a Prussianized world.”24
The accepted wisdom is that such idealistic concerns did not figure so prominently in later conflicts, given the disillusionment with war as a force for good generated by the Great War, but belief in the cause continued to motivate some volunteers. GIs in World War II considered Nazism more evil than its Prussian predecessor and were proud, as Lieutenants Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell put it in their memoir about a World War II rifle company, to be “part of the mighty endeavor, the Great Crusade to free Europe.”25 Or put more prosaically by marine private Robert Stiles, “There was no question who wore the white hats—we did.”26
Korean War soldiers equated Communism with Nazism and believed America was justified, even obligated, to save South Korea. Historian Henry Berry noted the prevalence of this attitude among the Korean War veterans he interviewed. One of his interviewees commented, “The Communists seemed just as bad as the Nazis to us. I think my age group had been bred on the patriotic fervor of World War II. You either went into the service or you were a bad guy.”27
Ideological motivations are rarely discussed as a factor in why the Vietnamera soldier served, but many who enlisted believed in the cause—a far cry from the perception that most grunts were resentful draftees. A significant minority of soldiers, at least early in the war, believed in stopping the spread of Communism, defending the fledgling Republic of South Vietnam, and heeding their charismatic president John F. Kennedy’s call to serve one’s country.28
Marine corporal and Vietnam veteran William D. Ehrhart believes that “those who went to Vietnam—well into the 1960’s and contrary to popular perception—were largely young volunteers, eager and idealistic.”29 Marine sergeant Ron Kovic was one such volunteer. He and others joined so “that we could serve our country like the young president [Kennedy] had asked us to do.”30 Both Ehrhart and Kovic, like others, eventually became disillusioned with the war, but their beliefs provided a strong incentive for initially volunteering.
While some men volunteered out of a genuine belief in the cause, even more joined up looking for excitement, or at least for a change of pace from their boring civilian lives. Many World War I volunteers conformed to the generalization about middle-class, Victorian-era men seeking adventure in the chivalrous, masculine arena of combat. Corporal William L. Langer spoke for the men in his unit, the all-volunteer First Gas Regiment: “I can hardly remember a single instance of serious discussion of American policy or of larger war issues. We men, most of us young, were simply fascinated by the prospect of adventure and heroism. Most of us, I think, had the feeling that life, if we survived, would run in the familiar, routine channel. Here was our one great chance for excitement and risk. We could not afford to pass it up.”31
Even some of the self-proclaimed idealists like Amos N. Wilder admitted that, beyond their “crusading spirit,” they were animated by “a sense of high adventure.” The “main idea,” he added, “was to be where the action was, and with this was mixed the romance of adventure.”32 Will Judy, a clerk in the Thirty-third Division, noted a similar combination of eagerness and idealism in his called-up National Guard outfit: “The spirit of great adventure is upon us and we compare ourselves not too modestly with the crusaders of other centuries.”33
Of course, these eager crusaders soon discovered that modern warfare was not so much adventurous as deadly and impersonal; hence the perception that American GIs went to war reluctantly in World War II and even less enthusiastically in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In reality, however, thousands of volunteers went off to those later wars with as much eagerness and naïveté as did their doughboy predecessors. Most of these adventure seekers were young, without family responsibilities, and a war promised more excitement than going to school or getting a job.
Novelist James Jones, a World War II veteran, believes that the lure of adventure drew many to the colors: “There is always that exciting feeling about the beginning of a war. . . . All restraints are off, everyday life and its dull routines, its responsibilities, are scratched and a new set of rules take over.”34 Audie Murphy, who received a battlefield commission in World War II and survived the war as America’s most decorated soldier, was a classic case of a young man attracted to war as an alternative to life’s “dull routines.” One of nine children born into a family of poor sharecroppers, Murphy dreamed about the glories of combat as his “one escape from a grimly realistic world.” On reaching his eighteenth birthday, he wasted no time in joining up, finally being accepted into the infantry after being rejected by the marines and the paratroops because of his small size and weight.35
John L. Munschauer came from a background quite different from Murphy’s. The college-educated son of a comfortably middle-class family, he had by 1944 received a commission in the army’s Medical Service Corps and was safely ensconced as a training company commander in Colorado. Yet he decided to transfer to the infantry and was soon in combat in the Philippines, because sitting the war out in Colorado meant “missing out on the greatest event of the century, and deep down that was the strongest pull. I did not want to miss the show.”36
A sense that they had, indeed, “missed the show” in World War II, usually because they were too young, motivated some men to jump at the chance for action when the Korean War erupted in 1950. John A. Sullivan was too young to serve during World War II, but the war had “left a strong impression” on him: “Our young men were fighting the twin evils of German and Japanese dictatorship, and the entire nation seemed mobilized to support them.”37 In 1950, Sullivan was old enough to seek the adventure he had missed out on a few years earlier: “Boyhood dreams from military school and the Second World War flooded back. Could I now lead troops in combat? Could I ever earn the right to wear the Combat Infantry Badge?”38
By the time that President Lyndon Johnson decided to commit substantial ground forces to Vietnam in 1965, a new generation of young men, weaned on romanticized accounts of World War II provided by authors, historians, and especially filmmakers, was ready for its share of wartime adventure, or at least escape from a humdrum civilian existence.39 Ron Kovic, who saw in the Vietnam War a chance to meet President Kennedy’s challenge of service to America, also sought to escape a dead-end civilian life: “I didn’t want to be like my Dad, coming home from the A&P every night. . . . I didn’t want to be like that, working in that stinking A&P, six days a week, twelve hours a day. I wanted to be somebody.”40 Lieutenant Alfred S. Bradford and his fellow Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps comrades volunteered with visions of future glory: “Even before we (ROTC officers) had gone to war, we imagined ourselves back, telling our own stories to an awe-stricken audience. After all, Vietnam was our generation’s great adventure and we had volunteered for it; we wanted to go to war.”41
Thus, each new generation sought its “great adventure,” and for the American youth of the twentieth century, that adventure was as often as not a war. Yet each generation also produced, along with its would-be heroes and crusaders, a large contingent of men content to forgo adventure for the security and prosperity of peacetime, no matter how boring. Historian Peter Karsten notes that in an ideal democratic society, “young men, conscious of the freedoms and rights they possess . . . , will freely consent to military service with a sense of political obligation.”42 While some Americans served out of just such a sense of obligation, Karsten adds that many more men “acquiesced,” at best, to serve, leaving their peacetime lives, families, and jobs to heed the call to arms only with great reluctance.43
Certainly not every doughboy conformed to the generalization of the eager volunteer in search of adventure, out to rid the world of Prussianism. Wilder noticed that the draftee replacements arriving to fill up his artillery battalion shared neither his ideals nor his enthusiasm: “The drafted soldiers here in camp as replacements—who have had only a dull experience on top of their first homesickness—really exhibit blueness over the failure of [President Woodrow Wilson’s] peace proposition. They really hope not to go to the front.”44 Many reluctant doughboys undoubtedly shared the sentiments of Tennessee mountain man Sergeant Alvin C. York, who, unlike the Anglophile and Francophile Ivy Leaguers and custodians of culture, “had no time nohow to bother much about a lot of foreigners quarrelling and killing each other over there in Europe.”45 Then there is the case of Jack Herschowitz, pulled from his thriving dried-food business in New York City by his induction notice. He ended up a rifleman in the AEF, but he was not happy about it for the most sensible reason: “I didn’t feel like going—who wants to get killed?”46
The workings of Kennedy’s coercive volunteerism explain in part why so many Americans were willing, if not exactly eager, to go to war. An important aspect of coercive volunteerism was social and peer pressure, which could be coercive indeed, as when vigilantes tracked down draft dodgers during World War I. More typically, however, it involved young men who could not face the scorn, disappointment, or rejection from schoolmates, girlfriends, relatives, and community leaders that their draft evading would generate. Conversely, volunteering or at least stoically accepting one’s draft notice brought congratulations and sympathetic support.
Ronald Schaffer discusses the various reasons why men served during World War I, noting that they were often “influenced by their connections to others in their hometowns or neighborhoods or schools or colleges or families.”47 Marine private Carl Andrew Brannen was so influenced. He believed his family had to “do their bit in uniform,” so he “joined the exodus from Texas A&M College, as cadets went into different branches of service.”48
The fear of public condemnation coerced a reluctant Charles F. Minder into serving in the AEF, and into not seeking a possible draft deferment as the sole supporter of his mother: “I wish now that I had claimed exemption when they asked me; like a fool I said, ‘No,’ just because I was too much a coward to be a Conscientious Objector. I was afraid of what others would think of me.”49
Peer and social pressure remained a central aspect of coercive volunteerism during World War II. Leon C. Standifer provides an excellent assessment of the multiple pressures working on a young man in a small, conservative, rural community. In Clinton, Mississippi, one did not dodge the draft: “Clinton would not tolerate a man who took a war-essential job just for draft deferment.” The high school football team members set the standard, wanting “to become marines or fighter pilots.” Then there were the girls, whose opinions mattered a great deal to an eighteen-year-old boy: “Girls were fascinated with the whole war. They seemed to want us all to become fighter pilots, marines, or at the very least paratroopers.” This was enough for Standifer: “Personally, I was eager to be in uniform. I wanted to come home on leave, have everyone brag about me, and be able to date any girl in town.”50
James Jones sees this peer pressure as a critical feature differentiating World War II from the wars that followed: “The only real difference, the main difference, between World War II and later wars was the greater overall social commitment and, therefore, the greater social stigma attached to refusing to go.”51 Jones is no doubt correct in a relative sense, but young men in those later wars continued to serve in part because they feared the condemnation that would ensue if they refused to do so. At least until the later stages of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, when public opinion had turned against those wars, young men who dodged the draft or deserted from the service could not expect the blessings or the support of their communities.52
Vietnam veterans confirm that fear of censure by friends and community was often an important factor in convincing them to comply with their greetings from Uncle Sam. Tim O’Brien was one such draftee who ultimately decided, because of social pressure, to fight in a war he believed was wrong: “Here we are. Mama has been kissed goodbye, we’ve grabbed our rifles, we’re ready for war. All this not because of conviction, not for ideology; rather it’s from fear of society’s censure.”53 Or, to put the problem into sharper perspective, as one of Christian Appy’s interviewees did: “Suppose I had found a way out. How could I face my friends who were drafted or joining up? And how would I feel walking around town, seeing their parents, and knowing that they were over in Nam getting shot at while I’m home partying? I’d feel like a chickenshit.”54
Another aspect of coercive volunteerism that persuaded the reluctant to serve was the threat of punishment. Draft evading or desertion could mean jail or exile, in addition to social censure. Often, as in the case of Korean War private Rudolph W. Stephens, a mix of social pressure and fear of punishment convinced a wavering draftee to serve: “Inside I wanted to run away, assume a strange name, and get lost in this big country of ours, but there was no way I could do such a thing when other boys were leaving to do the part they were called to do. Besides, the military would be looking for me for a long time to come, and I wasn’t raised to be a coward. I also didn’t want to take the chance of going to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to spend time behind bars.”55
In all the wars of the draft era, some men failed to register for the draft or evaded induction when called up, despite the potential punishments. Draft evasion, for example, reached serious proportions during the later stages of the Vietnam War. Baskir and Strauss describe how the legal system became swamped, to the point of virtual breakdown, by the thousands of potential legal cases generated by this draft evasion. But no matter how dysfunctional the system became, enough draft evaders were convicted in often highly publicized cases that “the choice was made clear for nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who might have had second thoughts about obeying their draft boards: Report for induction, or you’ll go to prison.”56
Many young men thus shared Charles Strong’s rationale for heeding the call during the Vietnam War: “I chose not to evade the draft but to conform to it. I figured it was better to spend two years in the service than five years in prison. And I figured that for nineteen years I had enjoyed a whole lot of fruits of this society. I knew that you don’t get anything free in this world.”57
Once of age and registered for the draft, and if no deferment or exemption was forthcoming, then the potential draftee knew that it was just a matter of time before he received his induction notice. At that point, many men elected to volunteer for duty in the hope of being accepted by a service or for a military specialty that would be the least dangerous. The U.S. Army Research Branch conducted thousands of surveys and studies of American soldiers during World War II, the results of which were consolidated after the war in a four-volume report, commonly referred to as the Stouffer Study (after Samuel A. Stouffer, director of the Research Branch’s professional staff and one of the editors of the report). The Research Branch discovered that except for the adventure seekers, draftees sought safe jobs, and only a small fraction of those who had managed, by whatever means, to land a safe job (defined as “noninfantry”) had any desire to leave it to join the infantry.58
In a similar vein, a survey of Vietnam veterans showed that as many as two-thirds of those who had volunteered were “draft-motivated.” That is, they volunteered in the face of probable induction in the hope of joining a service (the navy or air force) or acquiring a military specialty that would keep them out of Vietnam, or at least out of ground combat.59 Enlistment meant three or four years’ service instead of the usual two for draftees, but most men considered this a reasonable price to pay. John Ketwig was one of those draft-motivated enlistees. After passing his preinduction physical examination, he saw the handwriting on the wall. He considered running away but did not want to dishonor his family and feared that he would never be able to return home. The waiting list to join the reserves or National Guard was too long—he would probably be called up first. The air force and navy were not accepting any more recruits at that time. Finally, he enlisted to become a mechanic.60 This choice, as it turned out, did not keep him out of Vietnam, but it did keep him out of the infantry.
Similar stories can be found from earlier wars. Howard S. Hoffman, facing imminent induction on reaching his eighteenth birthday during World War II, attempted unsuccessfully to enlist in the navy’s flight training program (not necessarily a safe occupation, but better than a foxhole).61 Robert G. Thobaben, like thousands of other young men during World War II, opted for the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) because it allowed him to stay in college, obtain a commission upon graduation, and then serve in some specialized (as in noncombat) field.62 To the dismay of most ASTP participants, the program was later canceled and many of them found themselves in the infantry, which desperately needed fresh replacements.
In another case, James Brady faced the unwanted prospect of peacetime induction for a two-year tour of duty in the years following World War II. He thought he would beat the system by joining the Marine Corps’s Platoon Leaders’ Class (PLC). It exempted him from the draft and presented him with a Marine Reserve commission upon his graduation from college—which occurred about a week before the Korean War broke out. Brady was soon on his way.63
Coercive volunteerism, with its social pressures backed by the threat of legal consequences, was not the only influence pushing draft-age men toward military service. Many felt a genuine obligation to serve, as their fathers and grandfathers had done. They believed that they owed their country something for educating, raising, and sustaining them. Kennedy acknowledges that this sense of obligation was an important corollary to the coercive aspects of volunteerism: “Few words were so widely bruited in American society in the World War I era as ‘service,’ and it is a matter of some importance that the term was incorporated into the official title of the draft agency. . . . Everywhere Americans agreed that a commitment to ‘service’ was an attribute of the national soul that the war had quickened.”64 Bob Hoffman, whose father had fought in the Spanish-American War and his grandfathers in the Civil War, was one of those who believed “that it was a man’s duty to fight and die for his country,” and he immediately enlisted in April 1917 “in an endeavor to live up to the tradition of our family.”65
A sense of obligation to family, community, and country was an important motivator in later wars as well. Sergeant Floyd Jones, a World War II artilleryman, had no illusions about war being an adventure, but he went without question when called: “I served because it was my job and I don’t dodge jobs I feel I must do whether I like them or not.”66 Many a man attributed his sense of duty, as World War II paratrooper George William Sefton did, to being “eminently pre-conditioned to volunteer for military service based on his upbringing.”67 These men had relatives who had fought in previous wars (Sefton held his father, a company commander in World War I, in high esteem), and they had a strong sense of community (Sefton was raised in a small, church-going, midwestern town). William Manchester is another case in point. His father, a marine corporal in World War I, had been seriously wounded in the Meuse-Argonne fighting. Manchester grew up in a close, religious New England family of old stock. His ancestors on his mother’s side had fought for the Lost Cause in the Civil War. Thus, “in the spring of 1942, guided by the compass that had been built into me, I hitchhiked to Springfield and presented myself to the Marine Corps recruiting station.”68
Such feelings were not dead with the advent of Vietnam, despite Jones’s earlier comment that soldiers in the wars since World War II lacked “social commitment.” One Vietnam veteran told oral historian Mark Baker that his family’s tradition of service was a key factor in his complying with his induction notice: “One way or another in every generation when there was a war, some male in the family on my father’s side went to it. I had never had it drilled into me, but there was a lot of attention paid to the past, a lot of not-so-subtle ‘This is what a man does with his life’ stuff when I was growing up.”69
John Foote, a draftee who went to Vietnam even though he could have obtained a medical deferment for allergies, was another man driven by a sense of duty. His father had served in World War II and his ancestors in the Civil War. Moreover, Foote said, “Both of my parents, though not particularly warlike, were strong believers in the duty to serve and the honor that was associated with honorable service.”70 Sergeant Bill Morgan, the protagonist in Jack Fuller’s novel Fragments, was the quintessential reluctant warrior driven to accept his draft notice, despite misgivings about the Vietnam War, because he could not do otherwise: “When you come from where I did, when you’d been raised on certain tales, when you’d learned to respect your father and his friends, not because of what they did in the wars but rather because of what they suffered, then you simply had no alternative when your number came up. You were swept along despite the arguments [against the war]. And it wasn’t the great historic ebbs and flows or even the coercive power of the state that did it. You were moved forward by your own ineradicable past.”71
Most of the soldiers discussed thus far, whether reluctant draftees or eager volunteers, came from the ranks of the citizenry. In discussing the American soldier in the wars of the draft era, historians understandably focus on these citizen-soldiers since they constituted a majority. But a fair number of regular army soldiers and salty leathernecks from the peacetime forces also went to war, and their motives for joining the service often differed from those of the citizen-soldier.
Having joined in time of peace, these soldiers, though patriotic enough, clearly were not motivated by wartime ideology or any immediate desire to experience combat. Some hoped to see something of the world or to do interesting things while in the military, but many were simply in search of a decent job. The service offered security and a chance for advancement.
Schaffer explains that many of those entering the regular army prior to World War I were impelled to enlist because of “lack of opportunity or disappointment in civilian life” or just sought a warm place to sleep.72 Several of Henry Berry’s interviewees joined the National Guard units being called up and deployed to the United States–Mexican border in 1916 because they were bored with civilian life, and going to the “Wild West” sounded exciting.73 Many of these men were still in uniform when America went to war in 1917.
Prior to World War II, hard times during the depression made military service an acceptable option for some men, despite the poor pay and the low esteem in which the army was held by the general populace. Sergeant Henry Giles was one such enlistee: “I was sick and tired of the scrabbling and the shame of the commodity lines and no jobs. . . . Nobody knows what the army meant to me—security and pride and something fine and good . . . putting on that uniform not only meant that for the first time in my life I had clothes I wasn’t ashamed of, but for the first time in my life I was somebody.”74
For Rod Rodriguez, the son of a poor Cuban immigrant, joining the just-federalized Florida National Guard in 1940 was a good idea, despite the lowly private’s pay of thirty-one dollars a month: “In truth, compared to the poverty I had known in Tampa, the army seemed like a good deal. All my material needs were provided.”75 By 1948 a slump had hit the American steel industry, and John Babyak could not find a job after graduating from high school in Youngstown, Ohio: “So, rather than hang around, I decided to join the [Marine] Corps.” Winter 1950–1951 found Babyak in Korea, “up to my rear end in snow with God knows how many Chinamen trying to kill me,” when to his chagrin he received a letter from home telling him that “there are plenty of jobs available back in Youngstown.”76
With the integration of the armed forces in the 1950s, the army provided a steady job and upward mobility for blacks as well as whites. A 1954 Gallup Poll showed that 92 percent of black veterans—twice as many as white veterans—felt that they were better off for their army service and had found it rewarding.77 Increasingly, blacks made the military a career. By 1965, black reenlistment rates in the armed forces were more than twice those of whites.78 Blacks enlisted for many of the same reasons as whites, citing personal factors, patriotic duty, or draft-motivated enlistment, but blacks mentioned self-advancement almost twice as often as white enlistees did as a reason for joining the military.79
Significantly, even when enlistment in the army during the Vietnam era usually entailed a tour of duty in Southeast Asia, young men from the minorities continued to enlist, seeking socioeconomic benefits.80 Captain Joseph B. Anderson Jr., a platoon leader and company commander in Vietnam, observed that “for many black men, the service, even during a war, was the best of a number of alternatives to staying home and working in the fields or bumming around the streets of Chicago or New York.”81 Albert French, a black marine corporal, certainly felt that way. While he and a hometown buddy from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were on their way to Vietnam, French told his friend that the Marine Corps was not so bad: “You get used to it—it’s better than the streets. Half the dudes in jail already, ain’t a job nowhere, mills ain’t doing shit.”82
Moreover, a measure of self-esteem came with donning the uniform. Sergeant Emilio P. Milett, a poor Puerto Rican immigrant, had shined shoes in Harlem, but “then he had found the Army, where a life to be proud of lay within a man’s aspirations: even a Puerto Rican’s.”83 A career in the army, or even just a tour of duty, meant for many minority soldiers what it did for Arthur E. Woodley Jr.: “I felt I could escape from my environment and get ahead in life.”84
Some young men joined the peacetime army to learn a skill useful in the civilian world or, during the period of the GI bill, to earn educational benefits. Many of these men joined up never expecting, or wanting, to experience combat. War came as a rude, unwelcome surprise. The army itself often made matters worse by championing the material benefits of service while downplaying, in its recruiting program, the fact that soldiers exist to fight. Historian Roy E. Appleman notes that this was the case in the peacetime army before the Korean War: “The great majority of the enlisted men were young and not really interested in being soldiers. The recruiting posters that had induced most of these men to enter the Army mentioned all conceivable advantages . . . , but never suggested that the principal business of an army is to fight.”85
A similar situation existed in army and marine reserve units prior to the Korean War. Many men had joined the reserves for the drill pay and the camaraderie. No one had anticipated a war. Thus occurred the ironic phenomenon of soldiers and marines bemoaning the fact that they had not bargained on fighting. The Seventh Marine Regiment, hastily cobbled together for the Inchon landing, contained many unhappy, called-up reservists: “Some had just begun their first civilian jobs; others were college boys. A few were on summer vacation from high school. All of them had been called abruptly from their homes, and none had signed on for reserve duty with expectations of a shooting war.”86
Despite the lesson of Korea—that war could come at any time—men continued to join the peacetime army with thoughts of combat far from their minds. Robert Mason, who loved to fly and held a civilian pilot’s license, joined the army’s helicopter flight program in 1964, earning his wings and becoming a warrant officer. He had not factored a war into his plans, but he soon found himself en route to Vietnam with the First Cavalry Division: “It was a revelation . . . that came too late. I was going. I owed the army three years of service for teaching me to fly helicopters. And there you had it.”87
While some men joined the service as a temporary expedient, hoping to learn a skill, earn educational benefits, or simply tide themselves over until something better turned up “on the outside,” others found that they liked soldiering and made the service a career. Cynical commentators have charged that professional soldiers welcome war because it provides for advancement, and wartime often did lead to expansion of the military and promotions. Most professional soldiers, however, did not wish for a war to boost their careers. Indeed, because of their training, they had a better appreciation of war’s hardships and dangers than most naive citizen-soldiers. Career soldiers were nevertheless drawn to the fighting once war broke out for the elementary reason that it was what they were trained to do. Historian Richard Holmes, in his study on soldier behavior, is one of the few to appreciate this basic fact: “Regular [army] soldiers . . . share an intense professional curiosity as to how well their weapons, tactics and training will work in a real war. War is—and I mean this in no derogatory sense—the opportunity for them to apply what they have studied.”88
Thus, when a war broke out, most professional soldiers wanted to be in on it. Bill Mauldin, visiting the front in Korea as a correspondent for Collier’s magazine, encountered a rare species—a soldier voluntarily serving a second tour. As the soldier, an engineer, explained, “I’m a career man and this is my business, so it seemed like this is where I ought to be.”89 Corporal Ehrhart’s equally laconic sergeant in Vietnam, a career marine, likewise chose combat duty over a safe job in the rear: “I’d rather be out here where I can keep you boys out of trouble.”90
Career officer Joseph R. Owen, upon hearing of the outbreak of war in Korea, saw a chance to prove himself: “The news about Korea had inflamed my hope for an opportunity to lead troops in combat, to put myself to the test. I was a twenty-four-year-old second lieutenant, a professional marine officer, intensively trained for combat leadership but as yet untried in battle.”91 Marine captain Richard D. Camp, about to take command of a rifle company in Vietnam, shared Owen’s sentiments: “This is it! . . . This is what I had been working up to for all those years. . . . Now, at last, I was really part of it. It was my turn.”92
Some initially reluctant wartime draftees came to adopt a similar attitude. After months of individual and unit training, many citizen-soldiers were as ready as their regular army counterparts, whom they now closely resembled, to try out their new skills. Sergeant Hoffman, to his own surprise, found that he and his comrades were eager to get into action in World War I: “I couldn’t understand how men could desire to go out and fight and die. But it is something that grows on you. You train and expect so long that finally you become anxious to get into it, to get it over with.”93
After two years of training, the citizen-soldiers of K Company, 333d Infantry, Eighty-fourth Infantry Division, felt much the same way on the eve of their first battle in World War II: “After journeying this far and working so long and hard to become soldiers, we would have felt cheated to miss out on the fighting.”94 Lieutenant Sullivan felt an urge to try out his newly acquired skills during the Korean War: “The education process is over, and I am about to put into practice the accumulated knowledge of two years of training. It actually felt good to be a member of the team that my government had fielded to stem the Marxist hordes.”95
In sum, the generalization of enthusiastic doughboys in World War I, resigned GIs in World War II and Korea, and resentful grunts in Vietnam, though not entirely inaccurate, is too simplistic to encompass the myriad attitudes displayed by those who rallied to the flag. In each war of the draft era, belief in the cause, a quest for adventure, a desire for socioeconomic betterment, military professionalism, social pressure, the threat of legal action, and a sense of obligation affected each individual differently, producing soldiers whose motivations varied from enthusiastically positive to glumly resigned.
Even this list does not exhaust the factors that motivated men to serve. A few soldiers joined seeking revenge, making for a very personal war. One of Audie Murphy’s comrades in World War II was a recently immigrated Pole named Novak, to whom all Germans were “sonsabeeches” for overrunning his beloved homeland in 1939. Novak hated Germans “personally and passionately.”96 George Ahlhausen, one of the men in Lester Atwell’s squad, volunteered for service in World War II after his kid brother was killed in the Pacific. Ahlhausen, who as guardian had signed the papers allowing his seventeen-year-old brother to join the marines, decided he could not remain idle: “I start thinking I should do something, you know, like to make up to him for. . . . Well, I wanted to get into it.”97
Matthew Brennan tells the story of his platoon sergeant, Sergeant Terry, who had been seriously wounded earlier in Vietnam and discharged. When his brother was killed in Vietnam, Terry rejoined the army. Because of his disabilities he could serve only in a noncombat specialty, but by becoming a helicopter mechanic, he landed a tour of duty in Vietnam, after which he finagled his way into an aerorifle platoon in the First Cavalry Division. Earlier, Terry “swore a vendetta with the Communists,” and now he could carry it out.98
Some men served because they believed that the war would be the defining event of their generation, and they did not want to miss it. Walter Rosenblum, a combat photographer in World War II, believed he was “doing something worthwhile” in capturing on film the demise of fascism: “You felt you were an actor in a tremendous drama that was unfolding. It was the most important moment of my life.”99 Michael Lee Lanning felt an obligation to serve his country during the Vietnam War, but he also did not want to “miss the chance to experience the major significant event of my generation.”100 John Foote felt the same way: “I began to see Vietnam as the preeminent historical experience of my lifetime, certainly of my youth.”101
Other men served for less inspired reasons. Their choice was the army or the penitentiary. As Baskir and Strauss write, “Many judges agreed with [Lewis B.] Hershey [director of the Selective Service System] that military service was a good way to rehabilitate social misfits and petty criminals. They sometimes gave convicted offenders a choice between joining the military or going to jail.”102 The enforced discipline and responsibilities of military service did turn some wayward rowdies around. In most cases, however, hoodlums and misfits did not make good soldiers. Men who could not conform to society’s norms and laws were even less successful at complying with military standards of discipline and behavior.103
At the opposite extreme from the criminal who chose the army over jail was the young volunteer who believed that combat was a proving ground, or rite of passage, from which he would emerge a man. For eighteen-year-old Robert G. Thobaben, even the simple act of registering for the draft in 1942 seemed a step toward manhood: “Suddenly I felt older, more mature. I was a boy who had become a man, courtesy of a small paper [draft] card.”104 If a young man had a reputation as a coward or weakling, he was often especially eager to go to war to prove his detractors wrong. Robert Rasmus, a World War II rifleman and selfadmitted “mama’s boy,” looked forward to going overseas: “I was going to gain my manhood then. I would forever be liberated from the sense of inferiority that I wasn’t rugged. I would prove that I had the guts and the manhood to stand up to these things.”105
Some seekers of manhood, to their horror, found themselves doing “women’s work” while in uniform. Corporal Charles S. Crawford manned a telephone switchboard in Quantico, Virginia, at the height of the Korean War: “Imagine how I felt when people asked me what I did in the Marine Corps.”106 Crawford soon managed a transfer to Korea as an individual replacement, where he took up the more manly pursuit of forward observer.
The macho, war-as-rite-of-passage theme is also evident in Vietnam War memoirs. Marine lieutenant Caputo “needed to prove something—my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it what you like.” Caputo’s battalion went to Vietnam as a unit, hence his platoon experienced first combat together. Caputo saw this combat, at least in retrospect, as a passage to manhood: “Having received that primary sacrament of war, baptism of fire, their boyhoods were behind them. Neither they nor I thought of it in those terms at the time. . . . We were simply aware, in a way we could not express, that something significant had happened to us.”107 One of Baker’s interviewees felt much as Caputo did: “I wanted to go to war. It was a test that I wanted to pass. It was a manhood test, no question about it.”108
For some, as was the case for Corporal Ehrhart’s fellow marine in Vietnam, the Japanese immigrant Kenokura Amagasu, duty in the military was a shortcut to American citizenship.109 Thousands of immigrants became citizens by serving in the military. Many immigrants, even those already holding citizenship, joined the military and fought because they wanted to show their loyalty and gratitude to their new American homeland. Russian immigrant Morry Morrison, for example, joined up in World War I even though, since he was not yet a citizen, he was exempt from the draft. He wanted to fight for his adopted country, and other immigrants he met in uniform felt the same: “Germans, Irish, Polish—no matter what country the man I talked to had come from, it was always the same. ‘Sure, I went. Why not? It was as much my country as anyone else’s, wasn’t it?’”110
Yet for whatever reason, or more often multiple reasons, that a man decided to rally to the flag, he soon found himself, as a new recruit, in an alien and distinctly unpleasant world—the army or marine training camp.
TRAINING IN THE DRAFT ERA: THE SOLDIERIZATION PROCESS
The training a recruit received before his baptism of fire varied significantly in duration and quality. During the massive mobilizations of World War I and II, the army and marines scrambled to expand their minuscule peacetime training apparatus. Equipment, facilities, and instructors were initially in short supply. Most soldiers trained as part of the unit they would go to war with, but in both wars camps were also established to train individual replacements.
The recognition, based on the experiences of the two world wars, that soldiers could be more efficiently trained at centralized camps by experienced cadre led to the system common to the Korean and Vietnam Wars of first training individual recruits in basic soldier skills (marching, military courtesy, physical conditioning, rifle marksmanship, and so on) followed by advanced training in a designated special skill such as infantryman, artilleryman, or truck driver. Only then was a trainee assigned to a unit, often one already in combat, but possibly one still preparing to be sent overseas.
Despite these somewhat different approaches, the twin goals of the training, or soldierization process, were understandably consistent: to teach recruits basic tactical, physical, and weapons skills while simultaneously instilling the discipline and behavioral norms necessary to succeed in combat.111 This soldierization process, as sociologists Arthur J. Vidich and Maurice R. Stein explain, entailed the transformation of the “civilian-minded recruit” into a “reliable soldier who will respond according to expectation. The institutional techniques for accomplishing this involve a process of self-dissolution and reconstruction.”112 Or, to put it in less clinical terms, as one of the Vietnam War veterans interviewed by Christian G. Appy did, “they tore you down. They tore everything civilian out of your existence . . . and then they re-built you and made you over.”113
“Tear down” and “build up” imply an extreme, even violent, process. Most of the soldier-authors who comment on their training experience did indeed find it physically demanding and emotionally traumatic. The degree of harassment and stress varied, largely depending on the personality of the recruit’s all-important and seemingly omnipotent cadre noncommissioned officer (NCO), or drill instructor/drill sergeant, as he was commonly called during much of this period. Whatever the variations in individual experiences, most recruits considered their initial training an important preliminary to combat, and most emerged from it just as they were supposed to—feeling like soldiers and proud of it.
Though a proud soldier may have been the end product, the process of getting there was painful, especially during the tearing-down phase, which lasted the first several weeks of a recruit’s army basic training or marine boot camp. Canadian broadcaster Gwynne Dyer, in researching his television series on war for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, visited the Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, where he learned that the first step in the “conversion process” of turning civilians into marines “is the destruction of an individual’s former beliefs and confidence, and his reduction to a position of helplessness and need.”114 This conversion process was intentionally stressful.115 James R. Ebert, in studying army basic training in the Vietnam era, found that “harassment and regimentation gradually increased over the first four weeks of training” as part of a calculated effort “to expose the men to tolerable levels of stress,” because stress was something they would surely have to deal with in combat.116
The separation from all things civilian began immediately and often dramatically when the new recruits arrived at the induction center (or “reception station,” as it was called in the Vietnam era). The reception process lasted several days, during which the trainees turned in their civilian clothes for uniforms, received haircuts (meaning shaved heads), learned to maintain their bunks and footlockers, and began learning the rudiments of military drill and courtesy.117
Many recruits vividly remember exactly when this process began—the moment the drill instructor stepped aboard their bus after it arrived at the reception station. The process of transporting enlistees to their induction centers or reception stations varied but generally involved a train trip followed by a final bus or truck ride to the center, there to be met by a drill sergeant. Robert Leckie and his fellow marine recruits received a typically ominous greeting from their drill sergeant when they arrived at Parris Island during World War II: “Boys—Ah want to tell yawl something. Give youah hearts to Jesus, boys—cause youah ass belongs to me!”118
William D. Ehrhart has similar memories of his arrival at Parris Island in 1966. The drill instructor who met his bus, whom Ehrhart nicknamed “the Voice of God,” quickly set the ground rules: “You will do everything you’re told instantly, and you will do nothing else. I’ll kill the first cocksucker that fucks it up. You scuzzy shitbirds are mine, ladies! And I do not like you. Now, MOVE!”119 The “Voice of God” revealed, in these few sentences, all the characteristics of verbal abuse that the trainees would learn to endure during the tear-down process: abrasively loud commands, shockingly vulgar language, demeaning references to their lack of masculinity, and no positive encouragement whatsoever—indeed, just the opposite (“I do not like you”).
At the end of their first day in the army or Marine Corps, more than a few recruits wondered, as World War II enlistee Howard S. Hoffman did while lying on his bunk at the induction center, just what they had let themselves in for: “I didn’t cry or break into tears or anything, but I felt very, very much threatened; I felt that I was now in the grip of forces that I couldn’t do anything about; that what was happening to me was largely a matter of chance; that I was at the very bottom of the totem pole.”120 If anything, Ehrhart was even more distraught as he lay on his bunk at the end of his first day: “With all my heart and soul, I did not want to be here. I couldn’t understand how any of this had happened. I lay there for what seemed like hours in a kind of trance, staring at the ceiling, my mind in neutral and somebody flooring the accelerator.”121
Adding to the new recruit’s anxiety was his total separation from his previous, comforting civilian life, except for mail and in recent times limited telephone contact. To make matters worse, many young recruits were away from home for the first time. After only a few days at the induction station, World War II draftee John L. Munschauer noticed that “some of the biggest, toughest-looking bruisers were already showing signs of homesickness. Many of these men had never been out of the state, some hardly out of their neighborhood, and more than one had never slept in a house other than their own.” At the same time that the recruit was separated from his previous life and “torn down,” he was also “leveled off.” The recruits discovered that their previous civilian status and accomplishments meant nothing. All were treated the same—badly, as far as they were concerned. Munschauer learned about the leveling process on his first day at the induction station: “Rich or poor, . . . all of us were rabble.”122
If anything, civilian accomplishments, such as being a “college boy,” could bring scorn and extra harassment. Prate Stack and his brother, both former Yale students, made the tactical error of arriving at Parris Island during World War II in a private Pullman railroad car arranged for by their father. The drill sergeant was not impressed: “I’ve already got what is undoubtedly the dumbest bunch of college bastards who will ever come to Parris Island,” he snarled, “and now I have a couple of big-time clowns like you two. You college guys are a swift pain in the ass.”123
During the reception process, the recruit was relieved of his previous identity. First to go were any physical signs of his civilian past. Leckie and his fellow marine recruits, after turning in their civilian clothes for fatigues and receiving their buzz haircuts, felt “stripped of all vestiges of personality.”124 The Vietnamera recruit felt as humiliated as his World War II predecessors, as evidenced by a comment by Bill Morgan, the protagonist in Fuller’s novel Fragments: “We were stripped down to the essentials, heads shaven, uniforms all the same, no past and damned little in the way of a future.”125
After the reception process, the recruits were formed into platoons of about forty men for the duration of their training.126 As part of his platoon, the recruit continued the process begun at the reception station of learning to make his bunk, keep his footlocker, and maintain his uniform and equipment to the demanding standards of the drill sergeant. Every waking moment of a long training day was regulated. Uniformity was demanded. The recruits learned to march, talk, and look the same. Recruit Leckie soon realized that it was a “process of surrender” of individual personality and freedom in order to meet group standards of appearance and behavior: “At every turn, at every hour, it seemed, a habit or preference had to be given up, an adjustment had to be made.”127 Many recruits, like Hoffman, found this loss of individuality alarming and demeaning: “You quickly lost your identity in the sense that you became a number very quickly or an item. I was very depressed by the whole situation.”128
The drill sergeant often resorted to group punishments for individual infractions, thereby reinforcing the idea that the recruit was part of a group first and an individual a distant second. Leon Uris provides an example in Battle Cry of one of the most common causes of group punishment—a recruit dropped his rifle (an even more heinous crime than referring to one’s rifle as a gun). The entire platoon paid for this accident by having to balance their rifles on the tops of their fingers with arms extended straight out to the front, palms down.129
Recruits resented being punished as a group for an individual’s mistake, but because they could not change the system, they began to zero in instead on the “screw-ups” who were causing the punishments.130 They might try to help a well-meaning but slow-learning comrade avoid mistakes, but as one World War II study points out, “deviants” who brought on group punishment by angering the drill sergeant were another matter: “When a whole platoon or an entire company is penalized because of a recalcitrant few, the collective wrath turns upon these few.”131 As Ebert explains in his discussion of Vietnam-era basic training, such deviants “were ostracized and verbally humiliated or bullied into conducting themselves properly,” and in a few extreme cases, “group frustrations toward a recalcitrant ‘screw-up’ resulted in acts of violence, such as ‘blanket parties’ in which the target of the group’s wrath was beaten.”132 In this way the group learned to police itself, and this self-enforcement was exactly what the drill sergeants were out to achieve.
In addition to resorting to group punishments, the drill sergeants went out of their way to harass the trainees verbally and physically. To avoid such harassment, trainees tried to keep a low profile. They learned, according to one World War II study, “to avert attention from themselves by avoiding any erratic behavior.”133 (Many trainees, incidentally, sought to keep a low profile for the remainder of their time in service, perhaps best summed up by the army adage, “never volunteer.”) In 1951, army basic trainee Rudolph W. Stephens struggled to keep a low profile: “You did your job and tried to keep everything in order so the noncoms would stay off your back; these people did everything they could to break you down.”134 This advice remained sound for trainees in the Vietnam era as well, as Ebert learned from one marine veteran: “Marine Corps boots learned early that if they did what was asked and did so quickly, they could make it through training without drawing attention to themselves. Anonymity was the key to avoiding punishment.”135
While trainees, at least some of the time, succeeded in avoiding the attention and hence ire of the drill sergeant, they could not avoid the close physical proximity of the rest of the men in their training platoon. Trainees lived in communal-style barracks. The loss of privacy was yet one more shock the recruit had to adjust to during the tearing-down phase.136 Leckie found the total lack of privacy to be the worst part of the “process of surrender” of his individuality in boot camp: “Everything was done in the open. Rising, waking, writing letters, receiving mail, making beds, washing, shaving, combing one’s hair, emptying one’s bowels—all was done in public and shaped to the style and stricture of the sergeant.”137 This lack of privacy would prove to be a hallmark of military service, and the recruits would find they had even less, if that were possible, when living in the combat zone.
During the tearing-down phase, the recruit, for the life of him, could not see what any of this unpleasantness had to do with preparing him for combat. Learning to shine shoes, march, salute, pull kitchen duty, and make a bunk in a military fashion did not strike him as useful skills. After several weeks of such training, the recruits hit a nadir. They were demeaned, frustrated, and angry. They had worked hard but received little in the way of positive reinforcement, and they certainly did not feel like soldiers—slaves perhaps.138 David Parks’s attitude only a week into army basic training in 1965 indicates just how fed up the trainees could become: “These drill instructors drive you nuts. They go around hollering the same thing every day. . . . Hour after hour they’re bugging us, how to salute, how to present ourselves to an officer, how to say ‘sir,’ how to obey orders—how to become robots. . . . Drill—drill—drill. March—march—march. I’ve had it.”139
Yet just when trainees’ frustrations hit a high point and their morale a low point, things began to change, albeit almost imperceptibly at first. The tear-down phase ended and the buildup began. Appy summarizes the shift: “Having been broken down to nothing—their identities stripped, their compliance won, and their aggression heightened—recruits were gradually rebuilt into soldiers.”140
The skills the recruits began to learn took on a decidedly more military flavor and hence were more interesting and important in their eyes. Lee Kennett, in his study of the World War II GI, observes: “What the soldiers liked best were those activities that fitted their preconceptions of what a soldier should be doing, and to be precise, they liked those things that had the violence and flavor of combat.”141
The first activity that most trainees recall as being “useful” and interesting was rifle qualification. They had been issued rifles, taught to march with them, disassemble and assemble them, clean them, and memorize their performance characteristics, all of which was tedious and boring—that is, until they went to the rifle range. Leckie remembers the rifle range as a distinct turning point: “If you are undone in Parris Island, taken apart in those first few weeks, it is at the rifle range that they start to put you together again.”142 No matter how naive, the trainee understood that marksmanship was a skill that he was very possibly going to need in the near future. David Parks, for example, paid special attention to the night-firing training: “The word is that they do a lot of night fighting in Vietnam. So it was an important class.”143
The trainees began learning other decidedly martial skills also, such as throwing a hand grenade, using a bayonet, and moving in basic tactical formations. Even the hated forced marches, often to the firing ranges and back, made sense—soldiers had to be in top physical condition. World War II surgeon Klaus H. Heubner, after marching all night with his infantry battalion in Italy, conceded the value of his training marches: “I guess these are the sort of forced marches we trained for in the States. One needs stamina to keep up.”144 The training marches not only built stamina but also confidence and a sense of accomplishment. Paul Fussell, no eager soldier by his own admission, nevertheless felt “pleasure and pride” on completing the final forced march during basic training, adding that “happiness . . . can be consistent . . . with deprivation and pain, exhaustion and tears—as long as self-respect is intact, and even, as here, augmented.”145
Not only did the soldier find the training more relevant and interesting during the buildup phase, but he also began receiving some recognition, earning a marksmanship badge and perhaps a certificate for good performance on the obstacle course or in bayonet drill.146 Fussell, beginning to feel fit and tan as a result of his training, “attained the grade of Expert Rifleman and won thereby a carton of Chesterfields [cigarettes]. Scared of loud noises as a child, I grew to love them. I enjoyed the bang of the rifle in my ear, as well as the kick against my shoulder.”147 Parks earned the marksmanship rating of Sharpshooter: “It felt good. A lot of guys didn’t even come close.” He was also proud of winning his training company’s bayonet contest.148
Even the drill sergeants seemed less like ogres during the buildup phase. The trainees came to realize, at least in retrospect, that their drill sergeant was deliberately starting to bolster their confidence and group pride.149 Howard Matthias, going through marine officer candidate training at Parris Island in summer 1951, noticed that “the process worked”: “Loyalty and pride started to show itself quickly. We were proud to belong to the finest squad, the best platoon and the greatest battalion in the Marine Corps. We could out drill, outmarch, and outfight any other outfit.”150 World War II marine veteran Roger Tuttrup shared Matthias’s belief in the process. The drill sergeants “really put you in your place. That’s a polite way of sayin’ it. They humiliate ya, they make ya do things that you don’t think are physically possible. At the same time, they’re makin’ you feel you’re something. That you’re part of something. . . . It was the high point of my life.”151
During the buildup phase, the trainee did not feel as humiliated and demeaned as he had during the tear down, not only because the drill sergeants began mixing in some praise with the chewing outs but also because he was getting over his “environmental shock.”152 He was becoming habituated to army life, learning to blow off steam through the time-honored ritual of griping. Trainees learned to complain about virtually every aspect of basic training—the food, the drill sergeants, the inspections, the harassment, and the lack of freedom and free time. They did not expect anyone in authority to listen, but they could at least voice their displeasure.153
Griping was also a form of social interaction, allowing trainees to commiserate over their fate, making use of their newly acquired military foul mouths in the process.154 Many recruits were shocked at first, as Leckie was, by the stream of four-letter expletives flowing from the mouths of their drill sergeants, but “we would become inured to it, in time, have it even on our own lips.”155 Many recruits were soon equaling, in color and profusion, the language of their veteran sergeants, as Kennett notes: “The younger and more impressionable probably took to obscene expressions the way they took to wearing their overseas caps at a jaunty angle—it fitted their image of a soldier.”156 Swearing was thus one more way, during the buildup phase, that the trainee continued his conversion from civilian, in whose society such language was not acceptable, to soldier, for whom swearing was a virtual art form.
As the trainees’ anxiety lessened, the platoon comics began to get up the nerve to challenge the drill sergeants in small ways, or at least to mimic them behind their backs. Much like griping, the humorous antics of the platoon cutups provided a relief valve for frustrations. John Faris, who paid close attention to the role of the drill sergeants in his study of basic training, noticed that they not only began sprinkling some praise and recognition amid the criticism but also began to allow, within limits, some trainee–drill sergeant banter.157
Uris provides a classic example of a platoon comic, L. Q. Jones, in Battle Cry. During boot camp, Jones mimicked the southern accent and colorful language of the platoon’s drill instructor, Corporal Whitlock. Unfortunately for Jones and his audience, Whitlock entered the barracks and witnessed Jones’s performance. For punishment, Whitlock had the culprits march about camp with buckets on their heads, chanting “I’m a craphead,” much to the amusement of all, trainee and cadre alike.158 The punishment imposed by Corporal Whitlock, though no doubt embarrassing to the marchers, was deliberately mild and provided some comic relief for the entire camp. The value of such antics was not lost on Robert G. Thobaben, going through army basic training in 1943. He praised the comic skills of his platoon’s cutup, “Strap”: “He could duplicate the voice and actions of anyone. His sense of humor was finely honed, and his quick wit and droll burlesque brightened many a bivouac and march.”159
The trainees also mastered the art of “goldbricking,” to use the term common in World War II, as a way to beat the system. Work details could be dodged, or at least the effort expended on them kept to a bare minimum. The trainee would not goldbrick if by so doing he brought punishment on the group. At other times he was too closely supervised to get away with it. But he goldbricked when he could, and Irving L. Janis believes he did so as an overt, if minor, act of rebellion: “In making the independent decision to goldbrick rather than to carry out his assignment adequately, the recruit asserts his willfulness. He creates for himself the illusion that he is achieving a victory over the superior who required him to perform the menial job.”160 Goldbricking, “slacking,” or “ghosting,” like griping, was a time-honored soldier skill that the recruit would practice, within certain bounds, throughout his military career.
Another factor contributing to the trainee’s improving morale and confidence during the buildup phase was the support he received from his friends. After several weeks of living together, most trainees formed friendships with one or more of their bunkmates. Buddies encouraged and helped each other.161 George William Sefton, after describing the diverse characters in his platoon, went on to praise his “closest buddy,” an older man named Donald Townsend, who took “a big-brother interest” in Sefton’s welfare.162
These personal friendships shifted somewhat as buddies had a falling out or became sick or injured and had to recycle with a different platoon not as far along in the training program, but overall they grew stronger with shared hardships and experiences. The platoon started to bond together, and thanks also to the group recognition and praise that the drill sergeant occasionally provided, the trainees began to consider themselves a unit, and a good one at that. This phenomenon occurred in Thobaben’s World War II training platoon. After more than three months of training together, the platoon had become “a genuine unit. We were bound by a hundred common experiences. We had become friends.”163
During the buildup phase, the trainee began to think of himself not as a lowly recruit but as a budding soldier. Not only did he find marksmanship to be the first interesting subject encountered in his training, but he also noticed that the army considered it a distinctly “soldierly,” as opposed to “trainee,” skill.164 The trainee also began to realize that his job was to kill. The drill sergeants reinforced this theme by unabashedly emphasizing that where the recruit was heading, kill-or-be-killed was the order of the day. Morgan, in the novel Fragments, came to just such a realization in basic training: “The longer training went on, the more you had to confront just what it was they were training you for. You could grumble about the wet, endless days on the rifle range, but when the target popped up, it had the silhouette of a man. You could bitch about the way they made you crawl up and down the piny dunes, but you had to admit that it made sense to keep your profile low. You did not even try to kid yourself about what you might be facing. You sought it out. You grilled the drill sergeants about their experiences in the jungles across the pond.”165
Stanley Goff and his fellow army trainees adopted a “war mentality” similar to Morgan’s: “We got to feel that these people [the instructors] knew what they were doing. . . . Once we were into the war mentality, . . . psychologically our training got to us. Even though you didn’t want to succumb to it, we couldn’t help it. . . . We were brainwashed. . . . We were ready to go to Vietnam. Nobody was crying about it.”166 Certainly not all soldiers were as “ready” to go to Vietnam as Goff claims, but his basic point about the conversion to a war mentality is valid. Most trainees came to think of themselves as soldiers. This awareness was in itself an important step in the process of converting civilians to soldiers.
By the end of the training process, a transformation had occurred. The angry, fed-up, demoralized trainee had become a physically fit, skilled, confident, even cocky soldier.167 By the end of boot camp during World War II, Eugene B. Sledge and his fellow trainees “were hard physically, had developed endurance, and had learned our lessons. Perhaps more importantly, we were tough mentally.”168 Rudolph W. Stephens, after completing army basic training in 1951, was confident and fit: “Somehow I managed to endure this sixteen weeks and that put me in the best physical condition I have ever been in in my life. I felt I could handle any situation that might come my way.”169 William Ehrhart, who had lain in his bunk the first night of boot camp in a state of shock, graduated eight weeks later with a promotion and a chestful of pride: “I burst into a broad grin, barely able to contain the pride struggling to get out of me in a mighty shout. In a few moments, I would be meritoriously promoted to Private First Class W. D. Ehrhart, United States Marine.”170
The graduating trainees had even developed a grudging admiration for their drill sergeants, although there were a few notable exceptions.171 Indeed, as Dyer had discovered in observing marine boot camp, the drill instructors had become “not just role models and authority figures, but the focus of the recruits’ developing loyalty to the organization.”172 Robert Leckie came to understand that the drill sergeants had been tough for a reason: “On the whole, the sergeants were not cruel. They were not sadists. They believed in making it tough on us, but they believed this for the purpose of making us turn out tough.”173 Stan Goff and his fellow army trainees came to the same conclusion two wars later concerning their drill sergeant: “We found that he was damned serious and very concerned about the men. We could read it in him. Even though he was very, very mean, we could tell he was sincere. He felt that it was his responsibility whether we made it through the Nam or not.”174
In sum, drill sergeants, who worked long, hard hours to implement the training program, were for the most part neither deliberately cruel nor callous. The training had to be tough and stressful to prepare the trainees for the physical and emotional trauma of combat, as observers of the process, including Dyer, came to appreciate: “The men . . . who teach the recruits how to kill and how to die are not cynical in their manipulation of the minds of impressionable teenagers; they believe every word they say. And if you accept the necessity of armed force in the world as it is . . . [then they] are absolutely right.”175
PERSONAL VALUES VERSUS CONDITIONED BEHAVIOR
Once the erstwhile civilian was torn down and rebuilt into a fit, confident, and aggressive soldier, he proceeded to more advanced training, either as part of a tactical unit or as an individual. Those trainees with combat specialties learned to use machine guns, mortars, antitank weapons, tanks, armored personnel carriers, or artillery. Thus the desired product, from the first day at the reception station through completion of advanced training, was a trained killer. Not surprisingly, some observers found this process abhorrent. The pacific, civilizing values had been stripped from the trainee, and a soldier conditioned to kill emerged in his stead. The philosopher and World War II veteran Jesse Glenn Gray saw this emergent soldier as a different breed from his previous civilian self: “Man as warrior is only partly a man, yet, fatefully enough, this aspect of him is capable of transforming the whole. When given free play, it is able to subordinate other aspects of the personality, repress civilian habits of mind, and make the soldier as fighter a different kind of creature from the former worker, farmer, or clerk.” Gray went so far as to establish a new species for the combat soldier—Homo furens.176
Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton was even more alarmed over this conversion process and specifically charged the training system, at least in the Vietnam era, with responsibility for turning mild-mannered civilians into “socialized warriors”: “To reach the desired psychological state, the socialized warrior has always required some kind of initiation process. . . . In that rite (now called basic training), his civil identity, with its built-in restraints, is eradicated, or at least undermined and set aside in favor of the warrior identity and its central focus on killing. Only through such a prescribed process can the warrior become psychically numbed toward killing and dying, shielded from complexity, and totalized in his commitment to the warrior role.”177
Certainly the soldierization process generated “uncivilian” norms of behavior, but some experts question the extent to which a recruit could be programmed by a few months of military training to modify or reject personal values instilled by years of parental, educational, and social influences. Sociologists Morris Janowitz and Roger W. Little are two such skeptics, who point out that recruits are not cultural tabula rasa, nor does the military train in a social vacuum: “It is a fundamental error to assume that the military establishment is some sort of self-contained organism which digests and assimilates foreign bodies.”178 The beliefs and attitudes the recruit brings with him from civilian society must therefore be taken into account when examining the effect of the soldierization process.
Furthermore, as Lee Kennett points out in his study of the World War II GI, the average American citizen-soldier was never fully purged of those civilian beliefs and attitudes. Military training introduced new skills and norms of behavior, but it did not destroy those values a recruit brought with him into the service. The GI was thus “suspended between two ways of life and held in that state of suspension as long as he wore a uniform. Physically he left civilian life, yet mentally he never joined the Army; he was in the service but not of it.”179
A citizen-soldier “suspended” between two worlds is a far cry from a “socialized warrior,” devoid of civilized values. Further complicating the debate is the lack of consensus over exactly what values a recruit brought with him in the first place. Perhaps, as Dyer suggests, violence is not so much programmed into recruits as it is a carryover from civilian society: “There is aggression in all of us. . . . Armies don’t have to create it, and they can’t even increase it.”180 The philosopher Sam Keen also sees a connection between military and civilian violence: “Sadism in war is hard to explain only if we assume that there is a discontinuity between soldiers who enjoy inflicting pain and normal men and women. The assumption that there is a vast difference between the moral fiber of the man who enjoys killing in battle and you and me is the illusion on which the notion of normality is built.”181
The level of violence in civilian society certainly lends credence to Dyer’s and Keen’s arguments, but if the average recruit entered service with a natural or socialized propensity for aggression, then how does one explain those soldiers who fought, and killed, only reluctantly, gaining no enjoyment from doing what they considered a necessary but distasteful job?
The reality is that recruits did bring deeply ingrained beliefs and attitudes with them into the service but that each individual’s beliefs were unique.182 Too often the experts assumed a degree of cultural homogeneity that simply did not exist.183 Just as individual motives for rallying to the flag varied significantly, so too did the recruit’s reaction to the soldierization process, depending on his attitude and past experiences. “The orientation which the civilian society gives to recruits,” note Janowitz and Little, “will either assist or retard their assimilation of military roles.”184 Thus the enthusiastic volunteer tended to emerge from training as an enthusiastic soldier and the reluctant draftee a reluctant soldier. A study of Vietnam-era trainees found, for example, that their reaction to basic training was positive or negative in about the same ratio as their attitude toward the military upon entering service.185
The World War II trainee Kurt Gabel conducted his own one-man sociological study of those around him at the reception station. He noted a wide range of reactions to army life based on the inductees’ attitudes and backgrounds. There was the young, homesick type; the older, married type who worried and missed the comforts of home; the well-to-do fraternity type, disdainful of his ignorant companions and spartan surroundings; and the Oakie type, who was content with army life because he was used to austerity and hard work.186 Gabel failed to mention his own type—the eager volunteer who enthusiastically took to the training (he became a paratrooper).
Although Gabel is guilty of stereotyping, his point about the diversity of attitudes among trainees is valid. Based on those attitudes, recruits’ reactions to basic training varied, as Fuller’s trainee Bill Morgan observed: “You saw some men crumble, some men grow. You saw who was selfish, who was scared. . . . Some guys became isolated in adversity; they were afraid of having to carry any more than their own weight. But others bonded together against it, and the worse it got the closer they became.”187
Some recruits found the training process so stressful and the values of military life so alien that they broke down or even committed suicide. An interdisciplinary group of scholars commissioned after World War II to study American military manpower policy during the war examined, among other things, why some recruits failed to complete their initial training and had to be discharged from the army. They found that some trainees broke down because they could not stand the separation from home or had received disturbing news from home about sickness, financial problems, or infidelity. Others did not suffer a mental breakdown, but they lacked any sense of social responsibility or obligation, refusing “to make much of an effort once they had been inducted,” resulting in their discharge as unfit for service.188
Psychiatrists discovered further reasons why recruits broke down during World War II. Robert A. Clark learned that some trainees could not adapt to the aggressive behavior that basic training demanded of them because they suffered from inferiority complexes, excessive dependence on others, and various other emotional instabilities.189 Psychiatrists Meyer H. Maskin and Leon L. Altman cataloged a variety of reasons why some trainees could not cope: unwillingness to submit to authority, fear of assuming responsibility, depression over leaving home and loved ones, inability to make friends or work as part of a group, and resentment over the loss of personal identity.190
To the average recruit, untutored in psychological terminology, compatriots who broke down were labeled “mama’s boys” because they exhibited homesickness, physical weakness, or a milquetoast demeanor.191 John L. Munschauer recalls a mama’s boy who broke down on his second day in the army. The young man had lived at home with his mother all his life, ate only food “fixed the way he liked it,” and had built his social life around this woman, “who was a widow and pretty well managed her son.”192 Such insecure, sheltered young men often fared poorly in the alien, stressful world of the barracks room.
At the other extreme were those recruits, most often volunteers, who entered service with positive attitudes toward soldiering. For them, training was a challenge, not a stress. A phrase commonly shouted by recruits during training was “WETSU”—“We Eat This Shit Up.” According to Marlowe’s study of army recruits in the 1950s, 10 to 15 percent of the trainees actually meant it: “There are those . . . who experience an absolute minimum of anxiety or dislocation on entering the service and perform and function with ease from the very first day.”193 Not surprisingly, these eager recruits were the ones who most often volunteered for even more challenging training and service with elite units such as the Special Forces, Rangers, or airborne.194
Some recruits, although they completed the training process, were not so much proud and confident, like their fellow trainees, as they were disappointed and unhappy over their training experience. They hated the inconveniences and the loss of freedom and individuality that being a soldier entailed. Disgruntled World War II trainee Carl M. Becker went so far as to claim that the army’s effort to build “obedience to command, subordination of individualism, loyalty to the group, and bonding to one another” had failed completely in the case of his training platoon: “Such desiderata were a will-o’-the-wisp. Our ordinary routines fostered instead an ethos of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.”195
David Parks, whose basic-training experience was not entirely negative, had nothing good to say about the advanced infantry training (AIT) that followed: “Finally finished A.I.T. Eight sickening, boring weeks of pure crap.”196 John Ketwig was equally negative about his advanced training as a mechanic in 1967 at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. He had “expected the humiliation and harassment to end after basic, but it had followed us to Aberdeen.” He had hoped that his army training would parallel his experience playing high school sports, where his coaches had instilled team discipline, but “this was not teamwork. The lifers [training cadre] had stripped us of all dignity and self-respect and seemed to delight in rubbing our noses in our impotence.”197
Like Ketwig, each recruit brought his own set of personal values, expectations, and motivations with him into the army. Some found army training to be all that they expected and more. Others were as disappointed as Ketwig. A few were so traumatized that they broke down before completing basic. The training process did succeed in “conditioning” most trainees to believe that they were well-trained, fit, and confident soldiers or marines; but as the wide variation in individual reactions to the soldierization process indicates, the trainee was neither purged of all his previous beliefs and attitudes nor turned into some sort of automated killer.
Whatever their attitude on completing training, many of these freshly minted soldiers soon faced the prospect of combat. Their newly acquired skills, stamina, and military discipline would be sorely tested in the environment of war.