CHAPTER 21

The end of a war, the end of an Army

T he history of the Vietnam War is far more complex than what is rendered in popular culture. Even now, almost four decades after it ended, it is probably the least understood of America’s wars. No authoritative military history of the Vietnam War exists. There is no narrative that captures the ebb and flow of the war tactically and strategically, showing both battlefield actions and the deliberations of senior officials. Existing histories of the war give a taste of combat and thereafter tend to concentrate on the political and diplomatic discussions among senior American officials in Saigon and Washington.

The Vietnam War certainly was not one long, steady descent into a quagmire, as some books, films, and songs would have us believe. Rather, it was a series of complicated interactions between four major military forces: the South Vietnamese forces, the American military, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese Army. By late 1968 and early 1969, each of those forces had been altered by its experience in the conflict. The Viet Cong had been decimated and demoralized by the Communist offensives in February and May of 1968, which also had brought to the surface the VC’s clandestine network in the South and shown its face to local officials, making it far more vulnerable. In 1965, Communist forces in the South were about three-quarters Viet Cong, while by 1970 they were about three-quarters North Vietnamese Army, according to a comment made by Gen. Creighton Abrams in the latter year. (However, some contemporary historians caution against accepting the notion that the Viet Cong had only a small role in the war after Tet, noting that it has been in the interests of the Hanoi government “to minimize the role of local forces in the conquest of South Vietnam.”) “By winter of 1969 the VC were just sort of running around like a bunch of chickens and it really was no contest,” said Lt. Gen. Julian Ewell, who commanded the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta in 1968 and then was promoted to lead a corps-level headquarters.

The conventional North Vietnamese Army moved in large numbers into the South, but the new Northern troops who replaced the Viet Cong were largely inexperienced. “The NVA were tenacious but not very successful against U.S. forces,” said Al Santoli, who served with the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1968–69. “They suffered needless mass casualties attempting frontal assaults on U.S. positions and, in most cases, where they used concealment of terrain for ambush, they were unable to sustain initiative beyond immediate surprise against U.S. infantry.” By the spring of 1970, military mail intercepted en route from North Vietnam “was pleading with the units and the party cadre not to get engaged in military ground action at all,” recalled Maj. Gen. Elvy Roberts, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge who commanded the 1st Cavalry Division in 1969–70. “They realized they couldn’t sustain it. They were too weak. The letters said, ‘We’re winning the war at the conference table in Paris, so don’t fight the Americans.’”

On the other side, South Vietnamese forces were increasingly seasoned, but they were not much respected by their American allies. The Americans also brought many of their own problems to the battlefield. Despite serving the most powerful nation on earth, U.S. troops at this point in the war often were short on combat experience and led in the field by similarly green sergeants and platoon leaders, largely because of shortsighted and inept personnel policies that had their origin in a fateful decision by President Johnson. In mid-1965, the Army, its eye on Vietnam, had written plans to call up 100,000 reservists for two years of active duty and also extend the enlistments of active-duty personnel. But President Johnson had vetoed that plan and instead, on July 28, 1965—a key date in the history of the war—publicly stated that he had “concluded that it is not essential to order Reserve units into service now.” It is difficult to overstate how damaging that decision was. The Army was not designed to go to war without the reserve forces. Their absence was felt in Vietnam, where the Army lacked logisticians, but perhaps even more in the United States, where reservists normally would have performed many of the tasks of training new recruits. The president’s refusal to activate the Army Reserve meant that the Army would use up its active-duty sergeants and lieutenants quickly in the following three years, with some killed and others leaving the military after their tours of duty or moving to less hazardous positions in rear-echelon units. Ironically, by not mobilizing the reserves, LBJ forced the Army to rely on involuntary conscripts much more heavily, which ultimately intensified political opposition to the war much more than a reserve call-up would have done.

Often in warfare, it is the first year of fighting that seasons forces, which become more effective as those who survive gain skill, good leaders rise to the top, and units become more cohesive over time. Counterintuitively, as the Vietnam War progressed, the American frontline force weakened. In 1966, remembered Paul Gorman, the battalion he commanded had fourteen senior sergeants who had been in the unit for more than ten years, all of them trained by a legendary sergeant major who had landed at Normandy with the Big Red One. By contrast, he said, five years later, when he was commanding a brigade in the 101st Airborne, good sergeants who could provide the backbone of units, especially by maintaining standards and enforcing discipline, were hard to find. “I didn’t have the NCOs [non-commissioned officers]. The NCOs were gone.” By 1969, draftees made up 88 percent of the infantry riflemen in Vietnam. Another 10 percent was made up of first-term volunteers, meaning that the fighting force was almost entirely inexperienced and often led by novice first-term NCOs and officers. In one company in 1970, of two hundred men, only three—the captain, one platoon sergeant, and one squad leader—had been in the Army for more than two years. In addition, because of the rotation policy, units not only arrived green but stayed that way. “After only two months in Vietnam, I had more experience than half the men in Vietnam,” recalled one sergeant. There were plenty of career soldiers in Vietnam, but they disproportionately served at higher headquarters, not in line units doing the fighting. Small units in the field were “appalling,” agreed Donn Starry, who took command of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at the end of that year:

There would be a lieutenant as the company commander—he might be a captain, but if he was a captain he was a two-year captain, and he didn’t have a long tour as a lieutenant. Then you had some very junior sergeants. . . . You had absolutely no experienced leadership, and there they were out there groping with a problem of some enormity. As a regimental commander, you just had to look at the situation and say, “What have we done to ourselves? It’s not fair.” And it wasn’t their fault. It was the Army’s fault. We did that to ourselves.

Westmoreland, in his new role as chief of staff of the Army, would compound the problem in 1969 by insisting that the most experienced soldiers be allowed to leave Vietnam first, further stripping the force of much-needed field knowledge. “Individual personnel redeployments destroyed unit integrity, increasing turbulence in units remaining,” wrote Starry. “In the end, it caused leaders to go forth to battle daily with men who did not know them and whom they did not know. The result was tragedy.”

Abrams takes command

In 1968 and 1969, three personnel changes at the top resulted in a major shift in the American conduct of the war. In mid-1968, Gen. Westmoreland was replaced by Gen. Abrams. Six months later, President Johnson was succeeded by Richard Nixon. Robert McNamara, meanwhile, had left office earlier in the year, replaced at the Pentagon by Clark Clifford, who would then be replaced, under Nixon, by Melvin Laird.

There has been a running battle for decades among American military historians about whether in late 1968 and 1969, with the shift from Westmoreland to Abrams, the conduct of the war really improved. The Army itself probably has overemphasized the change, elevating it to mythic importance. At one low point in the war in Iraq, for example, commanders were recommending that subordinates read Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, a history of Abrams’s time in command in Vietnam, as evidence that things could get better in Iraq. In fact, there were more continuities between Westmoreland and Abrams than not—most units continued to do pretty much the same things in pretty much the same ways. Even so, there were significant changes in what Abrams chose to emphasize about those operations, with less talk of “body counts” and bringing the enemy to battle and more of pacification and protecting the population. More important, the nature of the war began to change, and this led to some changes in American tactics. Walter “Dutch” Kerwin, who had been Westmoreland’s chief of staff, perceived a sharp difference between the two U.S. commanders:

The way Westy ran the organization was just the opposite from the way General Abrams would have run it. . . . [It] was quite evident that almost immediately after General Westmoreland left, we pulled out of Khe Sanh. General Abe did not believe that was the way to run a war. . . . He changed the tactics, techniques and methods of handling the corps commanders.

Abrams put aside Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition. “In the whole picture of the war, the battles don’t mean much,” Abrams told subordinates in a comment that would have been heresy to Westmoreland, DePuy, and other generals earlier in the war. Nor, he said, did he care to be briefed on tallies of enemy killed. “I don’t think it makes any difference how many losses he takes.”

Instead, in his meetings and briefings, Abrams expressed more interest than Westmoreland ever had in the nuts and bolts of pacification, especially about programs that supported security in the villages. What a commanding general emphasizes will ripple throughout his organization—indeed, on a day-to-day basis, the subjects he chooses to focus on might be the most important thing he can do. Abrams was using more of the approach the Marines had advocated years earlier, which was one reason he got along better with the Marines than Westmoreland had.

It was a good time to change the emphasis, for there was a new opportunity emerging in rural areas. “Hanoi had pushed most of the best Viet Cong cadre into the cities during Tet, and so the Tet Offensive really destroyed the flower of the Vietnam insurgency,” said Robert Komer, who was overseeing the rural pacification program. “I argued there was a vacuum in the countryside.”

But the biggest change was over Abrams’s head and was made by the new president. By early 1969, the American priority was no longer winning the war but getting out of it. This shift was felt down to the front lines. “When Johnson rolled out and Nixon came in, the emphasis was black and white from where I sit,” said Lt. Col. Gary Riggs, who was in Vietnam from 1966 to 1970. “The emphasis became, ‘Let’s get the damn thing over. Let’s close it out, with as much dignity as we can, but let’s just back off and come home.’” This became known as the “Vietnamization” of the war. And while Westmoreland “was very aggressive, ‘We’re going to win this mother,’” Riggs said, Abrams “came with a different message, which was, ‘Contain, pacify.’”

Oddly, the Americans were starting to leave just as their years of struggle were paying off. It was not really seen by the American public at the time, but there is little doubt now that the Communists were rapidly losing control of large parts of the South Vietnamese countryside in late 1968 and for the following three years. At the end of 1964, only 40 percent of the population had been under government control, Komer said. By the end of 1971, he noted, about 97 percent of the population was considered to be in “relatively secure” areas.

The change in the American stance took the enemy by surprise and led to one of the most difficult phases of the war for the Communists. Hanoi’s official history of the war drops its triumphalist tone for several pages as it grimly relates how this period unfolded. “During late 1968 the enemy discovered our vulnerability in the rural areas,” the history stated. It continued:

Because we did not fully appreciate the new enemy schemes and the changes the enemy had made in his conduct of the war and because we underestimated the enemy’s capabilities and the strength of his counterattack, when the United States and its puppets began to carry out their “clear and hold” strategy our battlefronts were too slow in shifting over to attacking the “pacification” program and we did not concentrate our political and military forces to deal with the enemy’s new plots and schemes.

In a startling change of tone, the Communists’ history seems almost admiring of the effectiveness of the new approach:

The political and military struggle in the rural areas declined and our liberated areas shrank. . . . The enemy built thousands of new outposts, upgraded puppet forces, drafted new troops, and expanded the puppet army, especially local forces and people’s self-defense forces used to oppress the population. They blocked our entry points and attacked our supply routes from the lowlands to our base areas. The enemy also collected and tightly controlled the people’s rice crops in order to dry up local sources of supply for our armed forces.

That paragraph is a very good summary, through the eyes of an adversary, of how to carry out an effective counterinsurgency campaign.

The Hanoi history mentioned in a footnote that, in one region, the Communists lost all but three or four of their forty-two rice collection points, a loss that had grim consequences for Communist forces. Some units were reduced to eating less than one hundred grams of rice a day. Hungry and dismayed, Communist soldiers began defecting in greater numbers. “The enemy’s horrible, insidious pacification program and his acts of destruction created immeasurable difficulties and complications for our armed forces and civilian population,” the history dolefully observed.

This official history conceded that during 1969, North Vietnamese main-force units had retreated from the lowlands, and American soldiers, working with local South Vietnamese security units, had begun to push the Viet Cong out of large parts of the South. By the end of that year, it stated, “the population of our liberated areas had shrunk to 840,000 people,” while “the enemy established 1,000 new outposts and gained control over an additional one million people.” Recruitment began to dwindle, starting a vicious cycle of decline for Communist control of the countryside. In 1968, some sixteen thousand new Viet Cong had enlisted in the lowlands of the South. But in the same area in all of 1969, the Hanoi history related,

we recruited only 100 new soldiers. . . . Our liberated areas were shrinking, our bases were under pressure, and both our local and strategic lines of supply were under ferocious enemy attack. We had great difficulty supplying our troops. . . . Some of our cadre and soldiers became pessimistic and exhibited fear of close combat and of remaining in the battle zone. Some deserted their units to flee to rear areas, and some even defected to the enemy.

Hanoi’s official account is consistent with those given by Viet Cong veterans. “There’s no doubt that 1969 was the worst year we faced, at least the worst year I faced,” recalled Trinh Duc. “There was no food, no future.”

Huong Van Ba, a North Vietnamese artillery officer, also had harsh memories of that time. “When the Tet campaign was over, we didn’t have enough men left to fight a major battle, only to make hit-and-run attacks on posts. So many men had been killed that morale was very low. We spent a great deal of time hiding in tunnels, trying to avoid being captured. We experienced desertions.” In mid-1969, orders from the Central Committee in Hanoi were conveyed to field commanders as “COSVN Resolution 9,” telling them to hunker down in force-preservation mode—that is, hang back, harass the Americans with sappers, and try to outlast them. “The Communists are simply avoiding contact with us,” one general said that summer. “The reasons are not clear. But there is no doubt that right now there is a very peculiar situation on the battlefield.” From 1965 to 1968, the Communists launched an average of seventy battalion-size assaults annually. In 1969 and 1970, the rate fell to twenty. This led to a virtuous cycle: Smaller and fewer operations by the enemy meant that the Americans could reduce large-scale search-and-destroy sweeps and instead conduct more small-unit patrols in the countryside, reinforcing their control.

In addition, the Phoenix Program, aimed at rooting out the Viet Cong command infrastructure, expanded rapidly in 1968, with devastating effect. “In some locations . . . Phoenix was dangerously effective,” remembered Truong Nhu Tang, a Viet Cong official, who saw the VC network “virtually eliminated” in the province near his base area. The success of the program illustrates the point that winning over a defector is more damaging to the enemy than simply killing one of his soldiers. Nguyen Thi Dinh, the deputy commander of the Viet Cong, said in an interview years after the war ended that the Phoenix Program was greatly feared,

because they were able to infiltrate our infrastructures, using Vietnamese to kill Vietnamese. . . . What they did was to train and organize demoralized and disenchanted people to come back into our areas and to reveal our infrastructures to the Americans. We considered this a most dangerous program for us. We were never afraid of a military operation with a full division of troops, for example. But for them to infiltrate a couple of guys deeply into our ranks would create tremendous difficulties for us.

In a remarkable tribute to the twin policies of pacification and Vietnamization, the Communists decided to imitate the American and South Vietnamese tactics, dispersing main-force troops into villages to bolster their hold on local security.

But for the Americans and South Vietnamese, the chimera of victory appeared too late. By the time the U.S. Army generals started getting Vietnam right—that is, operating effectively—the U.S. military had been involved in Vietnam for thirteen years and fighting there in large numbers for three. The situation had improved for the Americans tactically, but strategically they were facing an enemy force that knew they were leaving and was thus operating with the goal of simply dodging and outlasting them. “The problem was that it came too late,” Gen. DePuy later said, speaking specifically of the success of pacification and of local Vietnamese forces. “We were ready to pull out. And the North Vietnamese just kept coming.”

Most important, the American people were tired of a war they had not asked for and never understood. Jeffrey Record, who served as a pacification adviser during the war, concluded, in one of the most balanced appraisals of those years, that “the United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price.”

Even if the American people had been willing to pay a higher price and support fighting for many more years, the Army itself was probably too weak to carry such a burden. “By ’69, it was just a joke” trying to train soldiers in the Army, recalled Herb Mock, who fought with the 25th Division in Vietnam. Charles Cooper, the Marine officer who had listened to President Johnson curse at the Joint Chiefs in 1965, was serving in Vietnam as a battalion commander in 1970. “Things were going to hell in a handbasket,” he thought. “They were just flooding us with morons and imbeciles.” Even good career officers were avoiding Vietnam, recalled William Richardson, a brigade commander at about this time. “It was very difficult to get outstanding battalion commanders to come to Vietnam. I knew one, in particular, who I tried to recruit to come to Vietnam. An outstanding officer, he didn’t want to come to Vietnam and be a battalion commander. I was distressed to see an attitude of, ‘I may damage my career.’”

In other words, when victory was a possibility, the Army was too depleted to grasp the chance. Judith Coburn, a reporter, summarized the dilemma eloquently: “When I hear people say we could have won the war, I always think: Where were you going to get the soldiers?” As a result of Westmoreland’s and Johnson’s squandering of people and resources from 1965 to 1968, the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were unable to take lasting advantage of the huge opportunities that emerged from 1969 to 1971.

Massacre at Firebase Mary Ann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end of an Army

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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