Anybody here ever served 4 combat tours? I guess I was lucky.

[alcibiades_mystery]

48. Two reasons: conscription and conscription

1) The reason tours could be limited to 12 months is because you had a virtually endless supply of fresh troops through conscription. It should also be noted that the fact of conscription also raised voluntary enlistment numbers, at least through the early periods of the war (1965-1966). You didn't need to send the same guy back because you had a new guy coming off the conscription assembly line that day. Not so much in the "professional" military. When everyone is "career" military in theory, everyone is treated that way for deployment. Career military people generally did more than their 12 month tour in Vietnam, too.

2) Voluntary re-up was also a function of conscription: you had a two-year commitment (in some cases, three) with conscription. Twelve months of that may be in country. Then you had another twelve to do in some horrible bore factory like Leonard Wood - a fucking nightmare for a 20 year old. So, the military gave you a choice: take another 6 months in country, and you're done, finished, DEROS and out. Now, you might think that anybody in their right mind would sit in Leonard Wood for a year rather than hump the Central Highlands for even another day, and that's likely true. But the vast majority of people who served in Vietnam were NOT "frontline" combat troops, but logistics and other rearward support. The vast majority. Vietnam had some ludicrous "tail-to-tooth" ratio, meaning the ratio of support troops to combat troops. So, quite likely, you weren't spending your time taking hilltops at Dak To or humping the A Shau Valley (though, certainly, a fair share were doing just that), but unloading beer or pushing paper in some rear position, or sending out artillery from some Americal Division super base, never saw the fucking enemy even once. In which case, taking the extra six months rather than a year of being shit on by some old sergeant stateside seems pretty appealing.