PTSD and Fragging of Officers in Vietnam

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Welcome Home, Tom

So some FNG with a title and a dream tells you to "make contact". Sure thing Looey. I'll take you where the See-Eye-Bee's come from. Some cigar suckin lifer on his second maybe third blood lust sits back and tells you how his generation won their wars. Some eye in the sky looks down and sends you in. Kill-Don't kill? F*CK YOU MAN. THEY WERE ALL VC. We should have emptied that MF. Rubber and dope. That is what you get from that place. I never fragged and stopped four from going down. I'd like to

Editor: Willy, I get the feeling there was more to this, might have been cut off.  For the record, the writer of this article is awesome, he was in WWII, he is totally on our side with this, total advocate for Veterans, all good.  Thanks.

I was the target of a fragging in 1970. Two innocent Captains died when they encountered a booby trap set for me. Killer was sentenced. They never had a chance.

Tim King from Salem-News.com: Andy, I would be very interested in hearing more about this if you were interested.  You can email me at tim@salem-news.com. Thanks for your comment and for your service to your country.

According to the History channel on the history of the M16 and the history from Armilits and colt, Mattel had nothing to do with the weapon except making a toy one.

And what did the hell of Vietnam accomplish? Appx 200,000 American kids lost their fathers, 110,000 American parents lost their child, hundreds of thousands of lives ruined not to mention the hell that the Vietnamese peasants went through, and the appx 1.3 million that died. Remember the Domino Theory?? We HAD to fight in Vietnam, because if we didnt, one by one, like dominos, the countries of the world would become communist until the US would be surrounded by communist countries !!! I also remember how while American kids were being shot up , American businesses were making big bucks. Even toy manufacturer Mattel got in on the gravy train, making stocks for M-16s. We have to remember that the government and the military ALMOST ALWAYS LIE. (see Gulf of Tonkin incident)They claim to want peace, but are constantly agitating for war. If you are well-placed, war is a cash cow. If you are a weapons manufacturer like Boeing, GE, Raytheon or a host of others, war is a Godsend. We already have more weapons that the rest of the world combined..so how do the politicians and their financiers justify spending more on killing without a war of some kind? The only war we should fight would be a war where someone is invading our country..where we, the people can "see with own eyes" and not place our lives and the lives of our children on the line because another lying politician/businessman says that we have to. We have to start refusing and resisting unjust laws and orders. We need to start being less forgiving when our "public servants" attend AIPAC meetings, take lobby money from weapons manufacturers, or get caught lying to us. Things that we do not get to vote on should not be binding for us, whether they be wars, bail-outs or "patriot acts". We need to stand up for ourselves en mass or continue to be lied to, used and abused.

"Desertion during World War II was no less a problem than in previous wars. Desertion rates peaked at 6.3% [that's 63 per 1,000] in 1944, but dropped to 4.5% [45 per 1,000] the following year. During the war, 21,049 soldiers were sentenced for desertion..." ... That was "The Greatest Generation"! So how great is today's generation of soldiers who have a desertion rate of 1/10th the rate of The Greatest? ... How do the desertion rates of today's soldiers compare to the rates during the Vietnam War? ...in 1966 the rate was 14.7 per 1,000; by 1970 the Army had a rate of 52.3 per 1,000. ... The Vietnam rates are all lower than the rate of the Greatest Generation. The desertion rate for the Korean War was 22.5 per 1,000. ..." Currently the desertion rate is approximately 7 per 100,000. Possibly the big difference is related to a draft versus a volunteer military?

Myth: Body Counts Were Falsified This is another one of those enduring myths that actually had its roots with the South Vietnamese Army. During the period when Americans were strictly advisors to the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) the South Vietnamese were courting favor with the Kennedy Administration. In order to make it appear that they were doing more to fight the insurgents then they were actually doing, and therefore be eligible for more military assistance, they faked the number of VC they claimed to have killed in most operations. Reporters covering the war from Saigon assumed that the Americans would do the same thing and that is basically what they reported. They took the position that any casualty estimate, or as they put it, body count, must be inflated. Personally, I never heard the term "body count" until I returned to the United States after my tour. They were called "enemy casualtiy reports" in Vietnam just as they were in Germany. In actuality, every enemy casualtiy report made by every unit I was attached to had to be verified by a senior officer before it was accepted. More than once we had to haul dead NVA/VC out from remote battlesites on the back decks of our tanks to a place where a battalion or brigade officer could see them in person before they were counted. On several occasions my crew and I, along with an infantry rifle squad, sat in the sun babysitting bloated corpses until they could be officially counted. Only then did we get the unpleasant job of burying the bodies. The NVA and VC took great pains to remove their dead from the battalefield in order to conceal their true losses. More than once we found wooden "body hooks" the NVA used to haul their dead from the field of battle. This led to a practice of adding estimates of the number of "probables" (i.e., "probably killed, no body recovered") to the count of "confirmed" killed. While it is certainly possible that some commanders choose to report the sum of these two numbers rather than separate figures, I doubt whether this was a systemic practice based on personal experience. There was a standard formula for estimating enemy wounded, based on statistics gathered from World Wars One and Two that basically said that two men were wounded for every one killed. The irony of this whole affair is that on April 3rd, 1995, on the 20th anniversary of the end of the Second Indochina War, the North Vietnamese Communists finally admited their true casualties. While the U.S. Command had officially stated that we killed about 750,000 NVA and VC, the Communists declared, in an official press release to Agence France, that we had actually killed 1.1 million NVA soldiers.

The term "fragging" was coined for the intentional murder of a superior officer or non-commissioned officer since a fragmentation hand grenade, or "frag", was the weapon used in some of these incidents. Given the total number of these incidents (230) over the 10-plus years of American involement, from a percentage standpoint you were far less likely to be a homicide victim in Vietnam than on the streets of Berkeley, California. Given that everyone who was in-country from the spring of 1969 to 1972 was keenly aware that U.S. troops were being withdrawn from Vietnam, it is nothing short of a miracle that morale remained as good as it did (which wasn't very) during this period. It was precisely during this period that the overwhelming majority of homicides occurred. But it must be taken into account that the soldiers who were sent to Vietnam during this period, especially the draftees, had been bombarded for years by the anti-war movement and were more inclined to question authority, especially military authority. It was also no help to good order and discipline when judges started giving convicted criminals the choice of jail or the Army. You can be assured that even an understrength rifle platoon would have preferred to remain understrength than to be given sociopaths as replacements. This misguided policy on the part of state judiciary systems was part of the reason that discipline began to erode from about 1970 onwards. A good number of the intentional homicides committed during this period were perpetrated by these sociopaths. Finally, it must be understood that intentional homicides, especially of superior officers and non-commissioned officers, have occurred in every war in history. This includes Americans in WWII and Korea.

Much has been made of drug use among personnel in Vietnam. What is ironic is that the overwhelming percentage of American drug users were civilians, and a very high percentage of anti-war activists were drug users. The number of drug-related arrests by Military Police officers and CID agents during the war actually represents a much smaller percentage of drug use among the military than in the overall civilian population during the Vietnam War.
Further, drug use in Vietnam was confined almost exclusively to personnel stationed at base camps and other relatively secure installations. Drug use in the field was rare and was discouraged even by personnel who used drugs in the rear. The reasoning was fairly straightforward: drug use in the field endangered lives. It was not a "victimless crime" in the field. Peer pressure was usually enough to discourage drug use when in the field. Those who were stupid enough to use drugs in the field were often beaten senseless by their non-drug-using comrades. Those that persisted were usually killed in action, sometimes by hostile fire, and occasionally, tragically, by friendly fire.

Editor:  I think, according to all of the veterans I have spoken to who were there, and manuscripts like John Steinbeck IV's article for the Washatonian Magazine titled "Why Everyone is Stoned in Vietnam" actually suggest that pot use in particular, was rampant particularly among those directly involved in combat operations.  This led to sayings like, "well at least he died stoned" and other questionable slogans that underscore the desperate situation these men were placed in by the great American war machine.  Nobody should be proud of any government that makes young Americans die while neither allowing them to adequately fight the war, or win: Vietnam War Pot Smoking 

Thanks for the info, possibly you have a source link so I can use it as I inform others about this info?

Editor:  Kelly, you can Google this stuff the way doc did, but he puts that data together with life experience that most of us will never have.  Fragging is an issue that is painful to many and there are serious lessons to be learned from all of it.  Most of us who served in the enlisted ranks of the military like myself, believe that the '90-day wonder' concept is dangerous.  They take 22-year old's, put them through OCS, and promote them to an officer grade which means they instantly outrank 30-year combat veteran Sergean Major's who have fought in multiple wars.  When those men assume command, they are in a dangerous position because they are in charge and they decide where the platoon goes.  A 2nd Lt. in the Marines or Army infantry is typically a platoon commander.  If you want additional information I can dig it up for you, that would best happen through email, tim@salem-news.com.