Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (8 page)

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COMES THE REVOLUTION

Yet putting the volunteer army on a healthy footing required more than better pay and benefits, more rigorous training, and a more comfortable lifestyle. It entailed courting groups that demonstrated a particular propensity to enlist or had been notably underrepresented during the draft era. Prominent in the first category were African Americans. Prominent in the second were women.

In both cases, the key to courtship lay in removing barriers to opportunity. In post-Vietnam America, the operative definition of
equality
emphasized leveling the playing field. Yet even in the 1960s, when it came to participation, promotion, and access to power, the army clung to rules, written and unwritten, that favored white males. The viability of the all-volunteer force depended at least in part on the army’s ability to create credible paths to career success for those who were not white and not male. “With the advent of the volunteer military,” the sociologist Charles Moskos wrote nearly thirty years ago, “the white middle-class soldier became something of an endangered species.”
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Into the breach created by his departure came the black working-class soldier and women of all colors.

BLACK BOSSES

With regard to race, although the army had officially desegregated during the Korean War, equality was less than perfect. In the enlisted ranks, African American males did enjoy considerable upward mobility. Even during the draft era, the noncommissioned officer corps was disproportionately black. Yet access to commissioned ranks—still then carrying the connotation of “officer and gentleman”—remained restricted, especially at the senior levels.
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So although Benjamin O. Davis Sr. had achieved the rank of brigadier general during World War II—his promotion an act of undisguised tokenism—it was a full twenty years
after
President Harry Truman ordered the armed services to integrate before the army had its second black general officer.
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A nation awash in pervasive racial discrimination, as was the United States even after World War II, found this entirely tolerable—indeed, could congratulate itself on the relatively generous opportunities granted the Negro in military service. By the beginning of the 1970s, however, with the draft ending, the army’s this-far-but-no-farther approach to racial equality no longer sufficed. The battle to preserve legal segregation had ended in ignominious defeat. Where overt racism lingered, it had become the preserve of yahoos, louts, and the incorrigibly ignorant. Even southern senators found themselves obliged to adjust their attitudes—or at least to make a pretense of doing so.

Equally important, the rise of the Black Power movement signaled a new assertiveness among African Americans, especially notable among the very age groups the army was most eager to recruit. Counting on black volunteers to enlist in large numbers while keeping the officer corps almost entirely white was not a recipe that promised success. The circumscribed equality that had sufficed into the 1960s would no longer do. The racial disharmony roiling the army (as well as the other services) during the latter part of the Vietnam era—manifesting itself in widespread, ostentatious self-segregation and no small amount of violence—had made that obvious to all.
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One thing was clear: the all-volunteer experiment was never going to get off the ground unless each of the armed services demonstrated an unambiguous commitment to creating a race-neutral force.

Whatever the proportions of institutional self-interest and enlightened consciousness involved, real change ensued in remarkably short order. The African American presence at the United States Military Academy offers an illustrative example. Even in the 1960s, the total number of blacks in any entering West Point class never exceeded ten, with African Americans during that decade constituting less than one percent of the Corps of Cadets.
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My own West Point class, graduating a total of eight hundred cadets in 1969, included a grand total of eight African Americans.
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Prior to the 1960s, such underrepresentation elicited little notice. By the end of that decade, it had become a problem to which the academy leadership began to attend. The class entering West Point a month after I left included forty-four black cadets. Six years later, the class of 1979 had eighty-six African Americans, numbers thereafter fluctuating between eighty and one hundred per class. When Benjamin O. Davis Jr. received his diploma as a member of the class of 1936, he became the
first
black West Pointer of the twentieth century and only the
fourth
to graduate from the United States Military Academy since its founding in 1802. Yet by 1991, reflecting the army’s post-Vietnam commitment to racial equality, the one thousandth black West Pointer had joined the Long Gray Line.
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Something similar was occurring in the senior ranks. In June 1971, the number of African American brigadier generals on active duty in the U.S. Army stood at zero. One year later there were three; a year later seven; by June 1974 ten. From 1980 to 2010, the number of African Americans serving as brigadier generals in the regular army averaged thirteen, only twice dropping below ten—even as the total inventory of army brigadier generals was falling by 40 percent due to post-Vietnam and post–Cold War personnel reductions.
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The point is not that the army banished every last taint of racism. Yet to the extent that the “revolution” associated with the 1960s had a racial dimension, the army adapted itself to its requirements with alacrity and effectiveness. As a consequence, by the 1990s it had become “the only place in America where blacks routinely boss around whites.”
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GI JANE

With regard to gender, the army traveled a more circuitous route but arrived at nearly the same destination. In the aftermath of World War II, the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, signed into law in 1948, had established a niche for women in the peacetime military. Yet rather than “integrating” women in any meaningful sense, the legislation created a gendered version of “separate but equal.” The law directed that no more than 2 percent of the total force be female. It established colonel (or, in the navy, captain) as the highest rank to which women could aspire—there would be no generals or admirals in skirts. It prohibited women from serving on warships or crewing combat aircraft, largely confining them to medical and administrative duties. By converting the Women’s Army Corps from wartime expedient into permanent entity, the legislation guaranteed women the opportunity to serve—not a trivial achievement—but only as second-class citizen-soldiers.

These terms of reference persisted well into the 1960s when they began to give way, the demands of feminists converging with the imperatives of “manning” a postconscription army. One obvious way to ease the transition to an all-volunteer force was to remove the 2 percent cap on the number of women in uniform, effectively doubling the pool of potential volunteers. Yet an exclusively male army leadership keen to increase the number of women in the ranks had no intention of ceding its authority to dictate the parameters under which women would serve. Any cultural or ideological insistence on absolute gender equality would take a backseat to a professional weltanschauung that saw war as an essentially masculine domain. Such was the intent anyway.

Although generals and admirals did fight a determined rear-guard action to preserve male primacy, their efforts proved largely (although not entirely) futile. As with race, so, too, with gender: proponents of social change seized upon military service as a realm in which to press their broader agenda, with gender traditionalists—now labeled sexists—thrown on the defensive. On the political correctness scale, the military’s version of Jane Crow soon ranked only slightly above the now thoroughly discredited system of Jim Crow. By the 1970s, an army eager to recruit women in unprecedented numbers confronted a choice. It could abandon the proposition that war should remain a male preserve, endorsing gender equality as fully compatible with military effectiveness. Alternatively, it could
selectively
lift some limitations on women in military service, while maintaining actual combat as an exclusively male pursuit—knowing full well that women’s rights advocates were unlikely to find such half measures acceptable.

The army leadership chose the latter course with predictable results. Those campaigning for women’s rights adamantly refused to accept anything less than full equality. As a consequence, the army found itself obliged to cede yet more ground, which it did neither gracefully nor happily.

So whereas the post-Vietnam army had worked hard to increase the number of black cadets at West Point, it worked just as hard or harder to keep women out altogether. Since its founding, the United States Military Academy had been an all-male institution. With something close to unanimity, army leaders (and West Point alumni) favored that arrangement and saw no reason why the advent of the all-volunteer force should require change. As a very young officer, I myself subscribed to that position. By the 1970s, however, a policy that denied women entrance to a publicly funded institution appeared increasingly problematic. What to some qualified as hallowed tradition, to others amounted to flagrant discrimination. Congressional action in 1975 obliging the service academies to admit women—the vote was 303–96 in the House of Representatives with Senate passage by a voice vote—established a pattern of sorts: while welcoming larger numbers of women into their ranks, the army and other services nonetheless resolved to preserve certain all-male enclaves, to which feminists in and out of uniform promptly laid siege, forcing the services to retreat farther.
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The enclaves of masculine exclusivity grew ever smaller.

In waging this fruitless campaign, the army was its own worst enemy. Recurring episodes involving sexual misconduct by male soldiers occupying positions of authority grabbed public attention, leaving the service constantly on the defensive. In 1996, at a major army training installation, eleven drill sergeants (and one officer) were charged with harassing female trainees. Among the accusations: trainers had granted favorable treatment in return for sex. Hard on the heels of this so-called Aberdeen Scandal came an even greater embarrassment: a female NCO with over twenty years’ service charged the sergeant major of the army—the service’s senior enlisted soldier—with a pattern of harassment. The ensuing court-martial of Command Sergeant Major Gene McKinney generated a cascade of adverse publicity.
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So, too, did the case of a general officer accused of preying on the wives of his subordinates. In 1999, the army recalled retired Major General David Hale to active duty, investigated the charges, and, after a plea deal, reduced him in rank—with the press again paying careful attention.
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Hale was not the sole general officer offender. Later that same year, the army charged Major General John Maher with propositioning a female enlisted soldier and sleeping with the wives of his immediate subordinates. He ended up losing both his stars and left active duty as a colonel.
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Worse was to come. In 2000, the army’s highest-ranking woman—Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy—charged a two-star colleague with making unwelcome advances in her own Pentagon office. The accused, Major General Larry Smith, eventually received a letter of reprimand, forfeited his announced promotion to three-star rank, and was obliged to retire.
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Again, all of this occurred with a full blast of unwelcome media attention. Hitherto all but unknown, General Kennedy became a heroine and a well-regarded public figure.
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In part due to these successive waves of negative publicity, issues related to women in the military remained an especially active front in the ongoing culture wars. Book-length polemics questioned whether a feminized military would remain capable of winning the nation’s wars.
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James Webb, highly decorated Vietnam veteran, best-selling novelist, former Pentagon official, and future senator, emerged as the most vocal exponent of this critique. For Webb, himself a naval academy graduate, the admission of women to the service academies had marked the opening salvo in what had become a decades-long campaign by “sociologists, agenda feminists, and a small core of political-activist military officers” seeking “to destroy the military culture from the outside.” Willing to grant women a role in military service, Webb was intent on excluding them from combat as such. Effectiveness in that environment, he insisted, depended in considerable part on small-unit cohesion, based on male-male bonding. Male-female relationships were inevitably about sex. Admit women into combat units and cohesion would fall victim to “the sexual jealousies, courtship rituals, and favoritism that are the hallmarks of romantic relationships.” Webb viewed the assault on traditional military culture as a proxy war, an offshoot of the larger ongoing effort to subvert American culture.

In its drive for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist movement saw the military as its optimal “peripheral” battle. To win on the issue of women in combat, the most quintessentially male obligation in any society, would moot all other debates regarding female roles. For many males who did not serve [in Vietnam], particularly the high achievers who wished no blemish on their reputations, the “demasculinization” of the military was a natural deterrent to any attack on their manhood as their youthful actions came to be viewed in retrospect.
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Yet well before Webb advanced his argument, the very concept of a “quintessentially male obligation” had already become extinct. The problem with Webb’s formulation lay not with the adverb or adjective but with the noun. Two decades earlier, a young female recruit had succinctly captured the essence of the matter: “If there’s another war, we’ll be there,” she told a reporter, “because with this voluntary system the men who don’t want to be here aren’t here.”
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Male and female alike, Americans had abandoned collective obligation in favor of personal choice. Thanks to Richard Nixon, this applied to soldiering no less than to other pursuits.