The Last Full Measure (51 page)

THE VIETNAM WAR
has the tragic distinction of being America’s bloodiest post–World War II conflict (and, even bloodier for
North and South Vietnam). Of the 58,000 American troops who died, 48,000 were killed outright in battle or died from wounds (about 6 percent of the approximately 776,000 who saw combat).
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The ARVN, the South Vietnamese loyalists—who tended to be contemptuously dismissed as cowards and shirkers—lost 224,000. The North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong paid the heaviest price, with 1.1 million killed.
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In comparison, almost 32,000 American ground troops died in Korea, while their enemy, the People’s Republic of China, lost approximately 132,000 killed; South Korea lost over a quarter of a million men killed.

These huge disparities between American lives lost compared with their enemies became even more pronounced during the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars. In the 1991 Gulf War, for example, the coalition forces lost fewer than 150 combatants (a significant proportion to friendly fire), while the hapless Iraqis had 200,000 killed.
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In the first phase (“shock and awe”) of the Iraq War, starting in 2003, 148 US troops were killed in action, and of those a substantial number were from friendly fire; of the 24 British soldiers killed, 9 deaths were caused by US fire.
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By comparison the Iraqi army had an estimated 100,000 killed and 300,000 wounded.
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And yet, despite the emphatic disparities in American and enemy dead and the thumping defeats meted out, the Persian Gulf wars have not shone with the clear and unambiguous heroic light of World War II.

On the political and social level, the wars of America and its allies since World War II drove great divisive wedges through their societies. A battle for what might be called the heroic spirit of these wars was waged between liberals and conservatives, with governments sometimes being forced into a little “creative rewriting” to establish a just cause and a compelling moral context (the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Vietnam War and the potential “mushroom cloud” of WMDs in Iraq being among the more egregious examples).

These rifts had a profound effect on the soldiers sent to fight. No longer secure in the wholehearted support of the nations that had dispatched them, they did what soldiers always do—created their own inward-looking and self-referencing world. If some kind of moral ambiguity clouded the picture, and if they were denied the heroic status that had been awarded to the warriors of World War II, they would create one for themselves. They would find their own diamond in the mire.

In the face of what they felt was either open hostility or simple neglect and indifference, soldiers often developed a fierce and angry defiance, giving the finger to a society they felt did not support them. Their war would have its own down-and-dirty integrity, as unattractive as that might be to the folks back home. It was, as a Vietnam vet puts it, “using whatever means available to beat somebody else whatever the reason, right or wrong.” Or, as another put it, “War is fucking people up.” “It was a dirty back-alley street fighting—killing the other guy before he kills you.”
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Staff Sergeant David Bellavia of the US First Infantry Division in Iraq turned the dirtiness of his killing business into a defiant statement of pride: “This is our war: we can’t shoot at every target, we can’t always tell who
is
a target; but we look out for one another and we don’t mind doing the nation’s dirty work.… War’s a bitch, wear a helmet.”
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If they were to be rejected, they would turn that rejection into a badge of honor.

The messiness on the social/political level was mirrored on the strategic and tactical. The manner in which the wars were fought was irregular, the enemy combatants often indistinguishable from civilians, the tactics classic guerrilla, whether it be fighting the VC in Vietnam, the mujahideen in Iraq, or the Taliban in Afghanistan. One of the characteristics of heroic warfare is that the combatants must be clearly distinguished as such, whereas the opposite is true in insurgency warfare. In fact, one of the main ways insurgents can offset the weapons superiority
of their enemy is by blurring the distinction between combatant and civilian, much to the fury, disgust, and confusion of “regular” troops. Not being able to read cultural signs—literally not being able to see the enemy—presents a huge disadvantage, as Captain Doug Beattie of the Royal Irish Regiment in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2006, recognized:

Dale Canter was in Cu Chi, Vietnam, in 1966 and described the unnerving ambiguity of the locals: “During the day, there was a lot of military traffic in and out, but at night, it still had a very ominous VC presence.… I honestly believe that some of these people really liked us. It was kind of a strange mixture. They were VC, some of their family and friends were VC, but when they got to know us, they had a genuine affection. But they had no qualms about reporting our activities and setting us up for ambushes, which would result in the death of many GIs.”
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Kids and old ladies can get soldiers killed. As a Marine major in “Indian country” in Vietnam, Charles Cooper sent one of his rifle companies out on patrol. “A day or two later they had a couple more men killed. This time it was done by a small child. This kid had waved to the Marines while they were on patrol and signaled them to come over. As they closed in on him he reached down and pulled up an AK-47 and started shooting. Two guys were killed and a few more wounded and this kid capered off toward the village of Son Thang.”

The next night a Marine “killer team” went into Son Thang and executed twenty women and children.
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In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the same kind of combatant/civilian “camouflage” constantly caught the invaders off-guard. The initial blitzkrieg phases had been hugely successful. In Afghanistan surgical strikes by special forces and air had unseated the Taliban. But in Iraq, coalition (the U.S.–led Multi-National Force) planners had focused almost entirely on a recognizable enemy, the Republican Guard, and very quickly combat dissolved into a fight with Baathist irregulars, and coalition troops had to contend with what they considered underhanded tactics. In other words, the Iraqis, like the Vietcong, refused to recognize the rules of “heroic” combat as codified over centuries of Western warfare. “The Iraqis were not going to fight on the Americans’ terms. The enemy faced by U.S. forces would be largely amorphous, not in uniform, and rarely part of an organized military force.”
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The Iraqis used civilian vehicles, civilian houses as strongpoints, and civilians as shields. An American soldier records a bewilderment that could have come straight out of the Vietnam War: “There’s no tanks, there’s no BMPs [armored infantry carriers], there’s no uniforms. This is not anything we planned to fight. I mean, they’re running around in black pajamas.”
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The rules of engagement that are meant to determine for regular armies the legitimate use of deadly force are critical if civilian
casualties are going to be contained and thus make the country more sympathetic to occupation, but they are a constant source of frustration and danger to the occupiers in the chaotic and confusing combat environment of insurgency warfare. Sergeant First Class Anthony Broadhead was part of the American thrust during the opening phase of the Iraq War. In Samawah he discovered just how bewildering the rules of engagement could become when the insurgents did not recognize those rules: “They were using an ambulance to pull up, drop new soldiers, and pick up the dead guys and leave.… So they did this all day long. Sergeant McCollough wanted to kill the ambulance and I’m like no, we can’t do that. As long as they’re not firing, even if they’re transporting new soldiers to the battlefield, they got the Red Crescent on it.”
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In the chaos of insurgency warfare there are wrenching decisions to be made. Captain Ed Hrivnak, a member of a medevac team in Iraq, recalls that a wounded soldier “confides in me that he witnessed some Iraqi children get run over by a convoy. He was in the convoy and they had strict orders not to stop. If a vehicle stops, it is isolated and an inviting target for a rocket-propelled grenade. He tells me that some women and children have been forced out onto the road to break up the convoys so that the Iraqi irregulars can get a clear shot. But the convoys do not stop. He tells me that dealing with the image is worse than the pain of his injury.”
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Donovan Campbell, a young Marine officer embroiled in the urban warfare of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, describes how officers at the sharp end took a Damoclean sword to the knot of the rules: “Once the firing started and once the targets had been positively identified, though, the in/out of the fight concept would get tossed out of the window. Instead, we would stop our shooting according to the dictate of the Pine Box Rule: If there’s any question about whether it’s you or the bad guy who is going home in a pine box, you make damn certain that it’s the bad guy. Of
course we wanted to avoid as many innocent victims as possible, but if someone had already tried to kill us, there was no way we would risk our own lives simply to meet a vague legal condition of extremely dubious validity.”
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Soldiers from the West, whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, found themselves enmeshed in a type of warfare utterly alien to their instincts and training. The rules had been bent, and the techniques of combat were not suited to their more formal approach—a potentially fatal combination.

It is said that we always refight the last war, and armies steeped in a tradition of head-on “transparent” combat were caught off-kilter when it came to fighting insurgents. As US ambassador to South Vietnam, retired US Army general Maxwell Taylor advised President Johnson in February 1965: the “white-faced soldier, armed, equipped, and trained as he is, not a suitable guerrilla fighter for Asian forests and jungles. The French tried to adapt their forces to this mission and failed. I doubt that US forces could do much better.”
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Thomas Giltner, a junior infantry officer, described a training regimen that, if anything, was designed to get soldiers killed:

As a young officer, Lawrence Tahler recalls of his time in Vietnam: “Few officer leaders knew what they were doing. The top brass were fighting another war and most of us junior officers were trained to take Normandy, not fight insurgents. The grunts knew what was happening, but few officers listened to them. ‘What do they know? They’re just enlisted men’ was too often the prevailing attitude.”
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