Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War. John A. Wood
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