In '72 ...It was hardly successful. Less than a year later it wasn't
'murican tanks rolling in to Saigon, was it.
In 1972 was also the year Col. Henl wrote in the Armed Forces Journal:
"THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces
are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in
this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam
is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or
having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned
officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.
Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.
Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social
turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian
scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft
and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general
government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted,
disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services
today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who
doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.
The responses of the services to these unheard-of conditions, forces
and new public attitudes, are confused, resentful, occasional
pollyanna-ish, and in some cases even calculated to worsen the malaise
that is wracking. While no senior officer (especially one on active
duty) can openly voice any such assessment, the foregoing conclusions
find virtually unanimous support in numerous non-attributable
interviews with responsible senior and mid-level officer, as well as
career noncommissioned officers and petty officers in all services.
Historical precedents do not exist for some of the services' problems,
such as desertion, mutiny, unpopularity, seditious attacks, and racial
troubles. Others, such as drugs, pose difficulties that are wholly
NEW. Nowhere, however, in the history of the Armed Forces have
comparable past troubles presented themselves in such general
magnitude, acuteness, or concentrated focus as today.
By several orders of magnitude, the Army seems to be in worse trouble.
But the Navy has serious and unprecedented problems, while the Air
Force, on the surface at least still clear of the quicksands in which
the Army is sinking, is itself facing disquieting difficulties.
Only the Marines - who have made news this year by their hard line
against indiscipline and general permissiveness - seem with their
expected staunchness and tough tradition, to be weathering the storm.
Back To The Campus
To understand the military consequences of what is happening to the
U.S. Armed Forces, Vietnam is a good place to start. It is in Vietnam
that the rearguard of a 500,000 man army, in its day and in the
observation of the writer the best army the United States ever put
into the field, is numbly extricating itself from a nightmare war the
Armed Forces feel they had foisted on them by bright civilians who are
now back on campus writing books about the folly of it all.
"They have set up separate companies," writes an American soldier from
Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, "for men who refuse to go into
the field. Is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go
to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of
refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at
another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys
don't even put on their uniforms any more... The American garrison on
the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our
weapons from us and put them under lock and key...There have also been
quite a few frag incidents in the battalion."
Can all this really be typical or even truthful?
Unfortunately the answer is yes...."
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/heinl.html
redvet
Facilitator
Hawaii LP
Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Anti-Imperialist
http://www.vvawai.org/