Читать книгу Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War - John A. Wood - Страница 9

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Who Were the Vietnam Veteran-Memoirists?

Lewis Puller Jr., author of the memoir Fortunate Son, always knew he would join the marines someday and, with luck, command troops against America’s enemies. This eagerness for combat was a product of his upbringing. Puller’s father was Marine Corps legend Lewis “Chesty” Puller Sr., and he raised his son to see fighting for one’s country as a duty and an honor. The younger Puller entered marine officer training immediately after college graduation and, a few months later, volunteered to lead an infantry platoon in Vietnam. He had, however, many disillusioning experiences during his combat tour, chief among them the day he realized he was very much unlike the enlisted men under his command. Whereas Puller was a college graduate who grew up in comfortable economic circumstances, half of his men were high school dropouts, and all came from “lower-middle-class backgrounds.” He also learned that, at age twenty-three, he was an “old man” compared to the “teenage misfits” who composed the bulk of the platoon.¹

Puller, as the son of a famous general, grew up in exceptional circumstances, but he was not the only former-officer-turned-memoirist who discovered that his own background differed greatly from those of his men. William Broyles Jr., who had already earned an MA degree from prestigious Oxford University when he joined the marines in 1968,² wrote this entry in his journal after meeting his troops in Vietnam for the first time:

I have fifty-eight men. Only twenty have high school diplomas. About ten of them are over twenty-one. Reading through their record books almost made me cry. Over and over they read—address of father: unknown; education: one or two years of high school; occupation: laborer, pecan sheller, gas station attendant, Job Corps. Kids with no place to go. No place but here.³

Both Puller and Broyles served their combat tours relatively late in the war, a period when many GIs in Vietnam were only there because they lacked the money, connections, and know-how needed to procure a draft deferment. Philip Caputo, however, who led an infantry platoon in the opening stages of the war, was also struck by the generally disadvantaged backgrounds of his troops. Many in his platoon had not finished high school, and most, he writes in A Rumor of War, came “from city slums and dirt farms and Appalachian mining towns.”⁴ Everyone in the platoon was a volunteer, but Caputo speculated that many enlisted to avoid the draft, or because the military offered “a guaranteed annual income, free medical care, [and] free clothing.”⁵ Caputo was not the son of a war hero or the graduate of a famed European university, but as a college graduate from a middle-class family, his upbringing was nevertheless privileged compared to those of his men.

It is no coincidence that the platoons of all three of these memoirists were composed predominantly of economically and educationally disadvantaged men in their late teens or early twenties. Christian G. Appy argues that most enlisted men who served in Vietnam came from poor or working-class backgrounds; were, on average, nineteen years old when they went to war; and had not gone to college. Most middle- and upper-class young men were able to skip military service in the Vietnam era, primarily through college deferments. Less privileged men generally could not afford higher education in this era, which left them at the mercy of their draft boards. Most disadvantaged men who turned eighteen during the war had only two real choices when it came to the draft: await the arrival of their draft notice, or submit to the inevitable and volunteer for military service.⁶

Over two million American soldiers served in Vietnam, but only a small percentage were consistently involved in combat. As Meredith Lair has shown, most GIs in Vietnam filled a myriad of noncombat roles that a large, modern military force requires to function, from mess-hall cook to intelligence analyst.⁷ There is debate over exactly how many American military personnel in Vietnam were combat soldiers, but the ratio of support troops to combat troops was, according to Appy, “at least 5 to 1.”⁸ It is significant, therefore, that Puller, Broyles, and Caputo were all in charge of infantry platoons. These were the US Army and Marine Corps grunts who carried out the bulk of American ground combat operations during the war.⁹ Due to military procedures of the period, recruits with poor educational backgrounds were frequently assigned to the infantry.¹⁰ Since education level was a strong indicator of social-class level in the Vietnam era, these policies ensured that poor and working-class troops filled the infantry’s ranks.¹¹

The enlisted men commanded by Puller, Caputo, and Broyles represented average combat soldiers. These three authors, like most veteran-authors, were combat veterans too, but they, also like most memoirists, did not resemble ordinary combat troops for several reasons. The majority of memoirists were middle-class college graduates and, on average, twenty-seven years old when they served in Southeast Asia. While most veteran-authors served as officers, nearly 90 percent of the troops in Vietnam were enlisted men.¹² Although underprivileged men of all races and ethnicities were more likely to see combat than their more fortunate counterparts, infantry units were disproportionately staffed by African Americans and other nonwhites.¹³ The fact that America’s fighting force was heavily populated by the least fortunate segments of its population is a significant facet of Vietnam War history. It is worrisome that people may not have been exposed to this important historical reality if they read books written by veterans who were primarily middle class, college educated, and white.

Despite the importance of the memoirists’ socioeconomic characteristics, this topic has garnered little attention from scholars or popular writers. A handful of literary critics and scholars have written about the demographics of Vietnam veteran-authors. C. D. B. Bryan speculated in his 1976 New York Times review of Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July that few Vietnam veterans had produced memoirs or war novels by that point because those most “capable of writing the Vietnam-era’s equivalent to a Naked and the Dead . . . were also capable of avoiding the draft.”¹⁴ Merritt Clifton, the editor of Those Who Were There, a 1984 bibliography of firsthand accounts of the war, theorized that the existence of so many capable Vietnam-era veteran-writers was explained by the relatively high recruiting standards of the Marine Corps, which “drew heavily from those achieving a medium level of education: at least a high school diploma, perhaps a year of college.”¹⁵ Philip K. Jason speculated that many Vietnam veterans “had the equipment to turn their experiences into literary documents” because of the post–World War II expansion of educational opportunities in the United States.¹⁶

Bryan, Clifton, or Jason, however, did not discuss author demographics beyond these few statements. Crucially, these writers also did not speculate on the possible influence of veteran-author backgrounds over readers’ conceptions of Vietnam War history. A few other literary scholars, however, touched on this subject. Philip Beidler writes about how the distinctive backgrounds of the veteran-authors affected the portrayal of the war in cheap paperback memoirs and novels.¹⁷ Two other scholars, Herman Beavers and Perry Luckett, speculate about how a lack of African American veteran-writers affected the depiction of racial issues in Vietnam War literature.¹⁸ These literary critics, however, only focus on how a single demographic veteran-author characteristic, such as race or military occupation, influenced readers’ conceptions of Vietnam. This limited exploration of memoirist demographics, however, still goes beyond what historians have written about the topic. In keeping with their tendency to only see veteran narratives as unequivocal sources of information, historians have placed little importance on the backgrounds of authors who provided such information.

This chapter takes a different approach by analyzing the available demographic data of fifty-one authors of the fifty-eight memoirs that serve as the basis of this book. The authors’ background information, gleaned from the memoirs and other sources, has been organized into eleven categories: year born, race, premilitary education level, method of induction into the armed forces, highest rank achieved while in Vietnam, method of acquiring officer commission, military branch, age upon arrival in Vietnam, number of years served in Vietnam, military occupational specialty (MOS), and total number of years served in the military. In addition to the data organized under these headings, other less quantifiable pieces of information, such as reasons for joining the military and social-class level, are also factored into the analysis.

Examination of the compiled data indicates that the authors fall into three distinct rank-based groups. The first group consists of ten individuals who served in Vietnam as high-ranking officers: nine “field-grade” or “general-grade” commissioned officers, and one senior enlisted noncommissioned officer, or “NCO.” These men were white career soldiers who joined the military well before the start of the war, went to Vietnam at the average age of thirty-eight, and served in the military for many years, sometimes decades, after the war. The second group consists of fifteen memoirists who were low-ranking enlisted men and junior NCOs in Vietnam. These authors’ backgrounds, in many ways, represent those of ordinary combat soldiers: only one had a college degree, they served in Vietnam at the average age of twenty, and none spent more than a few years in the military. Although nonwhites are underrepresented among memoirists no matter how they are divided up, four of six nonwhite authors fell into this second cohort.

The third and largest group is composed of twenty-six veterans who went to war as low-ranking “junior” commissioned officers. These lieutenants and captains were only slightly older than the enlisted men they oversaw in Vietnam, but most other aspects of their backgrounds set them apart from enlisted grunts. Over half the authors in this group earned college degrees before entering the military, most appear to be from middle-class households, and all but two were white. Though not as career-minded as the senior officers in group one, nearly half of the authors who served as junior officers in Vietnam pursued military careers after their combat tours ended.

Splitting up the memoirists into these groups does nothing to mitigate their overall dissimilarity to regular combat troops. In fact, it demonstrates that only fifteen of the fifty-one authors had backgrounds that closely resembled those of the soldiers who did most of the fighting and dying in Vietnam. Taking this approach, however, indicates that a majority of the veteran-authors were similar to average combat soldiers with regard to one crucial category: type of Vietnam experience. Most senior US officers, like the ten authors in group one, were personally and geographically distant from enlisted men in Vietnam. While American infantrymen searched for the Vietcong in the countryside, the generals and colonels who had ordered such patrols usually stayed out of harm’s way. Junior officers, on the other hand, as Ron Milam has shown, worked, fought, and sometimes died alongside the enlisted men under their command.¹⁹ This means that most of the fifty-eight memoirs were written by former low-ranking enlisted personnel and junior officers who, whatever their social or educational backgrounds, experienced the grunts’ war.

The possible effects of the memoirists’ demographics on how they portray the war are, therefore, both positive and negative. Readers may be misled about what types of Americans actually fought in Vietnam because authors normally have dissimilar backgrounds from average combat soldiers. Memoirists sporadically mention that large numbers of people unlike themselves, poor whites and minorities, fought in Vietnam. But most do not. Consequently, the common story of the poor teenager from the inner-city ghetto or Appalachia who was drafted and became a foot soldier because he could not afford college is rare in these accounts. On the positive side, most of these books were written by combat veterans who were ex-enlisted men or, more likely, authors who fought alongside such men as low-ranking officers.

. . .

The government and military leaders who planned and managed America’s long conflict in Vietnam were men in or around middle age, most of them members of the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II. In contrast, the great majority of American soldiers who fought in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s belonged to the generation born after World War II, the Baby Boom Generation.²⁰ The birth year statistics for the memoirists as a group do not reflect this reality. The average birth year for the authors is 1941, and well over half were born before 1945, the final year of World War II. These unrepresentative results mostly reflect the presence of the former senior officers among the fifty-one authors. The average birth year for the senior officers in group one was 1927, with most of their birth dates falling in the 1920s and 30s.²¹ Whereas most soldiers who served in Vietnam were born after the United States defeated Germany and Japan, all the former senior officers were alive during that conflict, and three actually fought in it. The average birth year for the enlisted men in group two was 1946, and only three were born before 1945, which corresponds to their status as generally average combat veterans. Although only eight of the twenty-six junior officers were true Baby Boomers, most, with an average birth year of 1944, were only slightly older than typical enlisted GIs.

More important than when a veteran was born is at what age he or she served in Vietnam. The average age for an American soldier in this “teenage war” was nineteen, which is young compared to their Second World War predecessors, who marched off to battle at a median age of twenty-six.²² Almost 44 percent of all US servicemen killed in Southeast Asia were less than twenty-one years old when they died.²³ The average age of veteran-authors during their Vietnam tours, however, was twenty-seven. This outcome was, again, partly the result of the presence of the former senior officers in group one, who served in Vietnam at an average age of thirty-eight.

In contrast to the senior officers, the fifteen ex-enlisted men in group two were sent to Vietnam at around twenty years of age, the former junior officers at twenty-four. This means that the great majority of memoirs were written by two groups of writers who were relatively young when they went to war. The age gap between enlisted men in their teens and officers in their mid-twenties, however, was wider than it seems. Broyles argues in his memoir, Brothers in Arms, that “impressionable, immature” teenage soldiers, probably “away from home for the first time,” were affected by the war differently than men only a few years older.²⁴ His assertion is supported by the experiences of memoirist Bruce Weigl, who was forever scarred by the swift, jarring transition from naïve teenager to army foot soldier.²⁵ There are no real counterparts to Weigl’s brutal coming-of-age story in the memoirs of former officers.

The fighting force sent to Vietnam was not just youthful, but also economically disadvantaged. Appy estimates that the “enlisted ranks in Vietnam were comprised of about 25 percent poor, 55 percent working class, and 20 percent middle class, with a statistically negligible number of wealthy.”²⁶ This situation was largely the result of a draft system, dubbed “channeling” by the Selective Service,²⁷ designed to steer draft-aged men “in directions that served the national interest.”²⁸ The most common and significant manifestation of this system was the draft exemption given to college students, a policy designed to give “the next generation of doctors, scientists, and engineers” the chance to complete their educations.²⁹ Since most low-income Americans could not afford college during the Vietnam era, middle- and upper-class men were the primary beneficiaries of this policy.³⁰ Men of more privileged backgrounds were also better equipped to take advantage of other means used to avoid the draft, such as obtaining phony medical exemptions or joining the National Guard.³¹

The benefits of class and education did not disappear when recruits, draftees and volunteers alike, entered the armed forces. After basic training, Pentagon computers assigned recruits to occupational specialties according to their education levels, how they performed on intelligence and aptitude tests, and other relevant criteria.³² Personnel “with above-average aptitude or ability were . . . assigned special functions, often far from the combat zone.”³³ Well-educated recruits, furthermore, were “skimmed out of the manpower pool by officers who wanted reliable clerks, messengers, servants, or other helpers.”³⁴ Soldiers “of lesser talents,” conversely, were regularly slated for infantry training, which increased the likelihood of seeing combat.³⁵ Because low-income recruits had comparatively substandard educations, many fared poorly on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), the intelligence test that partly determined a soldier’s MOS.³⁶ Since only a small percentage of Americans from underprivileged backgrounds went to college, fewer GIs from such circumstances were assigned to technical and clerical positions ordinarily staffed by college graduates.

What, then, was the class makeup of the memoirists? Considering the prohibitive expense of higher education in mid-twentieth-century America, education level is a good way to answer this question.³⁷ Of all the troops who went to Vietnam, 18 percent were high school dropouts, 59 percent high school graduates, 15 percent attended college from one to three years, and 8 percent attended college four or more years.³⁸ The overall education statistics for the fifty-one memoirists are glaringly unrepresentative of this reality: five were high school dropouts, ten were high school graduates, eleven attended college but did not graduate, and twenty-three—almost half—were college graduates.³⁹ This overrepresentation of college graduates is a direct result of the preponderance of officers in the study, since a college degree was generally required to obtain a commission.

Over half of the former officers in the study had college degrees before entering the military, indicating that many of them hailed from backgrounds significantly more privileged than those of ordinary combat troops. Only a few of these individuals, however, graduated from elite civilian universities, the US Military Academy (“West Point”), or the US Naval Academy. A closer look at the backgrounds of the college graduates confirms that most were hardly the sons and daughters of the upper class. Caputo points out that his family had “just recently struggled out of the working class,” and that his degree came from “a parochial commuter-college.”⁴⁰ Colin Powell, future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State, grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Hunts Point in the Bronx, New York, and graduated from City College of New York (CCNY).⁴¹ Everett Alvarez, a former fighter pilot and prisoner of war, paid for college with money his mother earned working in a produce packing plant.⁴²

Aside from the few authors who attended military academies, all the former officers who graduated from college before entering the military obtained their commissions through completion of either the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program or Officer Candidate School (OCS). ROTC cadets undertook officer training while still in college and received their commissions upon graduation. Those who took the other route enlisted in the military after graduation and were rewarded with commissions upon completion of OCS. There were other ways to become an officer that did not require a college degree, and thirteen of the former officers used one of these methods. OCS was the most common means used by GIs without college degrees to obtain a commission. Although college graduates were preferred, OCS was open to all enlisted men who met the necessary qualifications.⁴³ Six authors, ranging in education level from less than four years of high school to a few years of college, became officers through this method. The nine other former officers without premilitary college degrees obtained commissions through other less common means, including graduating from an “aviation cadet program,” earning a “field commission,” or joining the US Army Nurse Corps.

Since West Point produced relatively few officers and participation in ROTC programs plunged as the war progressed, about 50 percent of all the junior army officers who served in Vietnam were OCS graduates.⁴⁴ With so many non-college-educated men and women obtaining commissions through OCS or other means, it is likely that the Vietnam-era officer corps was composed of a substantial number of people from poor or working-class backgrounds.⁴⁵ Several of the thirteen former officers without college degrees validate this assumption. Tobias Wolff was raised by a single mother, a secretary who worked nights as a waitress. When he joined the army in the mid-1960s, he was a teenage high school dropout. After basic training, however, Wolff went on to complete airborne school, Special Forces training, and finally, OCS.⁴⁶ Another memoirist, Frederick Downs, grew up on a farm in Indiana and only completed a couple years of college before he enlisted in the army, but he also made it through OCS and became an officer.⁴⁷

Although the great majority of authors were not from truly wealthy backgrounds, most nevertheless apparently came from the middle class. The disproportionately large number of memoirists with college degrees is one indication of this,⁴⁸ but many veterans also provide other clues in descriptions of their pre-Vietnam lives. Authors regularly describe growing up in comfortable surroundings, often in the suburbs, and usually with at least one parent holding a secure, well-paying job. Joseph Callaway’s father worked in a “prestigious, major, advertising firm,”⁴⁹ and Robert Mason’s father sold real estate for a living.⁵⁰ Lynda Van Devanter describes her childhood as “middle-class suburban.”⁵¹ Even the relatively few memoirists who were raised in unambiguously working-class households sometimes describe their childhoods as stable and carefree. Ron Kovic, for instance, grew up in a working-class suburb, and his father worked in a supermarket. He nevertheless describes his prewar life as an idyllic world of baseball games, John Wayne movies, and parades.⁵² The prewar lives of low-income men who ended up in Vietnam, however, were not usually so untroubled.⁵³ They were instead “full of very adult concerns: money, jobs, and survival.”⁵⁴

Class was the most important factor in determining who saw combat in Vietnam, but race also came into play. Like whites in the same economic circumstances, impoverished African Americans were vulnerable to military and draft policies that favored better-educated groups. In the earliest phases of the war, the number of African Americans killed in Vietnam was greatly out of proportion to their overall share of the US population.⁵⁵ Less information about other nonwhite groups is available, but it is likely that some, especially Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans, also shouldered more than their fair share of the fighting. Considering the inordinate sacrifices made by these groups, it is noteworthy that only six of the fifty-one most prominent memoirists were nonwhites: five African Americans and one Mexican American.⁵⁶ This dearth of minority authors was probably due to the overrepresentation of officers and college graduates in the pool of eligible candidates. During the war years, only a small percentage of the officer corps was nonwhite and, prior to the 1970s, the number of minorities who graduated from college lagged far behind that of the white population.⁵⁷

The draft struck fear into the hearts of many young men during the war, and the statistics show that their apprehensions were not unfounded. Draftees accounted for about a third of all the troops who served in Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1970, the percentage of American soldiers killed in Southeast Asia who were draftees steadily rose from 16 to 43 percent. In the US Army, the military branch in which most draftees served, the yearly death rates for draftees were even higher, topping out at 62 percent in 1969.⁵⁸ But these figures do not tell the whole story. Many young men, preferring to have some degree of control over their fates, or believing that volunteering lessened the chances of going to Vietnam, enlisted rather than waiting to be drafted. Almost half of the respondents to a 1968 Defense Department survey of army volunteers said that the “most important reason” for their enlistments was to avoid the draft.⁵⁹ This was true not just for enlisted men, but also for officers: 60 percent of all the officers who volunteered in 1968 signed up because of the draft.⁶⁰

“Draft-motivated” enlistees comprised another third of all the troops who served in Vietnam. The remaining third were “true volunteers,”⁶¹ although this phrase is somewhat misleading, for the great majority of them did not enlist to help the South Vietnamese fight Communist aggression. Only 6 percent of the respondents to the Department of Defense survey said they signed up to “serve [their] country,” with the rest (besides the draft-motivated respondents) citing sundry other reasons, including “to become more mature and self-reliant,” “to leave some personal problems behind me,” and “to learn a trade.”⁶² John Helmer, as part of his study of Vietnam veterans, Bringing the War Home, asked true volunteers for the primary reason they enlisted. The number one response was “nothing else to do.”⁶³

Veteran-authors differed significantly from average combat GIs when it came to how they joined the military, for only seven out of fifty-one were draftees. As for why the authors joined the military, almost half signed up before the war had even started, so Vietnam played no part in their decision. Those who did join during the war, however, were also dissimilar to regular combat troops because many cited intensely personal reasons for volunteering. A few, such as W. D. Ehrhart, signed up specifically to fight Communism. A true believer who wanted to help South Vietnam in its moment of peril, he forsook college to join the Marine Corps.⁶⁴ Many more said they joined out of a general sense of patriotism, to prove their manhood, carry on family traditions, or to fulfill some other noble goal or desire. Michael Norman volunteered for the marines in 1966 because “history was unfolding and [he] had an urge to be a part of it.”⁶⁵ Charles R. Anderson told his parents he enlisted because he wanted to repay his country for all the freedoms it had given him.⁶⁶

Several memoirists say that the draft factored into their decision to enlist, but most attest that other more profound reasons also propelled them. Rod Kane enlisted because a recruiter convinced him not to wait to be drafted, but he also wanted to emulate his Korean War veteran uncle.⁶⁷ Nathaniel Tripp says in his memoir, Father, Soldier, Son, that the “draft board was closing in” at the time of his enlistment. But he also “burned for a new adventure” and was inspired to volunteer after a friend was killed in Vietnam.⁶⁸

Now that it is clear what types of Americans fought in Vietnam, what was combat like for these troops? The Vietnam conflict was famously a war without frontlines, so it was possible for any American in South Vietnam to fall victim to an enemy attack. The Vietcong ambushed infantry platoons in the jungle, but they also lobbed mortar shells onto airbases and planted explosives in jeeps parked outside restaurants. During the 1968 Tet Offensive, Vietcong fighters attacked American forces throughout South Vietnam, including troops stationed in Saigon, the supposedly safe capital city.⁶⁹ Van Devanter, who served as a nurse in an army hospital, was told on her first day in Vietnam, to her shock, that the Vietcong considered all Americans legitimate targets, including women.⁷⁰

Even if all US personnel in Vietnam were theoretically at risk of being attacked, most lived and worked in relatively safe areas referred to as “the rear” by GIs. Clerks, truck drivers, and other support troops, labeled “REMFs” (“rear echelon mother fuckers”) by resentful infantrymen, were needed to maintain America’s massive military machine. Approximately 75 percent of US military personnel in Vietnam served in noncombat positions. Most memoirists, however, saw heavy combat. Veteran narratives, consequently, along with movies and novels, suggest that average Vietnam tours mostly consisted of patrols in Vietcong-infested jungles or days-long battles with the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Many GIs did live lives of danger and hardship, but most were provided with a level of “comfort unparalleled in military history.”⁷¹ Thus, it is the so-called REMFs who experienced the most typical Vietnam tour.⁷²

Unlike the majority of GIs in Vietnam, however, most memoirists directly participated in the fighting. That being said, how do their battlefield experiences compare to those of ordinary combat troops? The importance of this information is highlighted by the massive post-1990 output of cheap paperback Vietnam War novels, biographies, and memoirs that focused on the exploits of elite combat outfits. If readers got all of their information about the war from these types of books they might think that practically every soldier in Vietnam belonged to a group like the Army Special Forces (“Green Berets”) or the Navy SEALs. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, since such soldiers represented only a miniscule percentage of combat personnel.⁷³

A little under half of the fifty-one memoirists belonged to select units like the Green Berets, or were involved in other atypical combat activities, such as the veteran who worked as an advisor to US allies in a remote Vietnamese village.⁷⁴ Nine of these atypical veterans were former combat pilots who flew bombing missions over North Vietnam. One of these ex-fliers, Arizona senator John McCain, notes the difference between air combat, which was “fought in short, violent bursts,” and the experiences of infantrymen who “slog[ged] through awful conditions and danger for months on end.”⁷⁵ He and the other ten pilot-memoirists were also members of the tiny minority of American servicemen who were prisoners of war during the conflict.⁷⁶ The war POWs lived through was certainly nightmarish, but it bore little resemblance to the ordeals faced by foot soldiers.

About half of the authors, on the other hand, fought as Army or Marine Corps infantrymen, and most served only one tour in Vietnam. Crucially, this group was composed exclusively of either low-ranking enlisted men or junior officers. Field and general-grade officers spent much of their time in the rear, with access to “air conditioned billets with movie theaters, swimming pools, and officer’s clubs.”⁷⁷ Junior officers, conversely, served alongside their men, and had the high casualty rates to prove it.⁷⁸ Two authors who fought as junior officers, Downs and Puller Jr., sustained major wounds while on patrol with their platoons. Downs’s arm was blown off when he stepped on a “Bouncing Betty” landmine,⁷⁹ and Puller lost both legs when he triggered a buried, booby-trapped artillery shell planted by the Vietcong.⁸⁰ Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage contend that officers “must be perceived as willing to share the risks and sacrifices of battle” to be effective leaders.⁸¹ Senior officers in Vietnam, in their opinion, utterly failed to meet this standard, but Puller, Downs, and many others like them demonstrated that the same cannot be said of junior officers.⁸²

Just as important as what memoirists did in Vietnam is how long they served in the military, because there are major differences between the points of view of short-term soldiers and professionals. Enlisted men and officers who stay in the armed forces for a short amount of time are “citizen soldiers” who put their normal lives on hold while they serve their country. Despite the training and indoctrination necessary to transform a civilian into a capable soldier, the nonprofessional retains a civilian outlook on life.⁸³ The career soldier chooses instead to become, as Samuel P. Huntington puts it, a specialist in “the management of violence.”⁸⁴ In many ways, military men and women are like professionals in other fields, but their focus on warfare sets them apart from the civilian world. Military personnel follow particular codes of honor and traditions, usually live and work only with other soldiers, and often see their career as a “calling” or a “special mission.”⁸⁵

Someone who enlisted in the armed forces during the Vietnam era generally signed up for a two- to four-year commitment; draftees had to serve at least two years. Most enlisted men did not choose to stay in the military beyond their first enlistment, which is no surprise since the ranks were filled with draftees and draft-motivated volunteers at that time.⁸⁶ Officers were nearly as unwilling to pursue military careers as enlisted men. From 1966 to 1970, the number of army OCS officers who stayed on beyond their initial years of obligated service fell from 56 to 22 percent. In 1970, only 11 percent of ROTC officers signed up for additional years. At the beginning of the war, almost 100 percent of West Point graduates remained in the army after fulfilling their mandatory term of service. This figure dropped to 72 percent by war’s end.⁸⁷

As usual, the fifteen enlisted memoirists resemble ordinary GIs, for none of them served any longer than four years in the military. The former senior officers joined the armed forces well before the war started and, in most cases, continued their military careers after coming home from Southeast Asia. Eleven (43 percent) of the junior officer memoirists stayed in the military after completing their combat tours. Taken as a whole, then, the authors consist of thirty veterans who were short-term soldiers and twenty-one who were career officers. This proportion of career soldiers is high since most GIs returned to civilian life shortly after finishing their Vietnam tours. Half of the veterans, nevertheless, no matter how long their military careers lasted, were low-ranking officers in Vietnam and shared the hardships of the enlisted men they commanded.

. . .

A publishing company executive quoted in a Washington Post review of Kane’s 1990 memoir, Veteran’s Day, asserted that the book was important because it “filled a void that was societal as much as literary”:

It’s a curious thing that many of the Vietnam books have been written by [veterans] who had lots of education and came from relatively sophisticated backgrounds, guys who had been to college and were officers. Rod Kane really represents the disenfranchised, the people who came out of the high schools, the drifters, the kids who had no one to speak for them. They were the ones who paid the price, they were blown to pieces.⁸⁸

The executive’s assessment is accurate. The fifty-one most prominent Vietnam veteran-memoirists had, as a whole, strikingly dissimilar backgrounds from the average American combat soldier. Whereas the typical infantryman was a teenage enlisted man with a high school education, veteran-authors were generally former officers who served in Vietnam after graduating from college. Most GIs in Vietnam came from low-income families and were primarily draftees or draft-motivated volunteers, but most memoirists were middle class and often volunteered for idealistic reasons. Finally, although combat infantry units in Vietnam were disproportionately composed of African Americans and other minorities, all but six memoirists were white.

The unsettling fact that the nation’s poorest citizens bore the heaviest burden in Vietnam is one of the most important aspects of the war. It is subsequently unfortunate that this facet of the conflict’s history is largely absent from the most popular veterans’ memoirs. The authors of these narratives had uncommonly privileged backgrounds, and most did not mention that their pre-Vietnam lives were any different than those of average combat soldiers. This hole in the depiction of the war is partially compensated for by the existence of several popular oral histories that feature numerous interviews with apparently ordinary combat veterans, but because these titles are small in number compared to veteran memoirs, their influence has been limited.⁸⁹

Although the backgrounds of the memoirists were different from average combat troops in many respects, the two groups were similar in one crucial aspect: wartime experiences. Most memoirists were either junior officers or enlisted men who spent a year in Vietnam and then returned to civilian life. About half were former infantrymen who took part in conventional combat operations, and most were actively involved in combat due to low rank. The publishing executive was correct in stating that most memoirists came from exceptional backgrounds. But the majority of authors, former junior officers and enlisted men alike, still “paid the price” and risked getting “blown to pieces.”