VIETNAM VETERANS GET MEDALS FOR HEROIC ACTIONS...

[pinboy3niner]

42. You seem to be reacting to arguments others may have made, not what I posted

In response to assertions that most troops in VN were draftees, I simply replied with information that that was not the case and provided some relevant statistics.

Draftees WERE more likely to end up in the Infantry, as suggested by the fact that while they represented only 25% of the force in VN, they accounted for more than 30% of the fatalities. But the vast majority of those who served in-country or in-theater were enlistees.

The Army did have programs and poicies that offered some choice of MOS or duty assignment (and some of these required a longer, 4-year enlistment). But if you washed out of training, you'd end up with a different MOS assignment, including the Infantry among those possibilities.

Apart from the official Army program guarantees, there are a lot of horror stories about oral promises and guarantees made by recruiters that didn't turn out the way they were supposed to. So there were a lot of enlistees who didn't get the choices they thought they were signing up for, and some who enlisted to avoid Vietnam and ending up as a grunt in combat probably ended up doing just that.

Any discussion of "combat" versus "non-combat" or "support" troops is problematic, especially in relation to the experience of individual troops in VN. The Army's major combat branches are the Infantry, Artillery and Armor, and in Vietnam I think the ratio of "support" troops to "combat" troops was about 10 or 11 to 1. But generalizations don't serve well here because so many support troops had some exposure, and in many cases significant exposure, to combat and to the traumatic casualties of combat.

My little brother served with me in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. He was a personnel clerk at our Division HQ, but he also pulled duty periodically for which he was issued combat gear and stationed as a bunker guard to defend the perimeter of his basecamp. (That's what he was doing the day I was wounded, and he had to be pulled off bunker guard that night and report to his orderly room to receive the telegram the Army Secretary sent him in Vietnam to notify him about me.) The point is that while most of the time my brother was manning a typewriter, he also spent some of his time as a so-called "support" troop manning an M-16 and guarding his basecamp against enemy attack.

When it comes to the Artillery, the notion that the Arty "rarely if ever came under enemy fire," "except in some small cases of mortar attacks," is absurd. Besides the artillery batteries stationed at major basecamps--which ALL experienced enemy attacks, including even the large U.S. Army Vietnam HQ at Long Binh and other major installations--hundreds and hundreds of Fire Support Bases were established throughout South Vietnam to position Arty batteries in range to support combat operations of Infantry and other combat units.

Moreover, these firebases usually were small and often especially vulnerable to both indirect fire and ground attacks. Many FSBs in "hot" places like the A Shau Valley ended up being abandoned because of the frequency of attacks and the difficulty of defending them.

After I was medevac'd, my company was overrun two or three times at artillery firebases in the next few months--once with casualties so extensive that they had to be pulled out of the field until they could be replenished with enough replacements to meet minimum combat strength. The guys in the arty batteries who went through those attacks alongside our Infantry unit at those FSBs might have something to say about the suggestion that they were relatively safe and rarely experienced enemy attacks.

Another example of combat-exposed Artillery: The Army's combat Infantry companies in the field in Vietnam often had Arty personnel attached to them as Forward Observer teams (usually an Arty branch Lt. from an artillery unit plus an Arty radioman). One friend who is a retired Army Arty officer half-jokes that his biggest regret about his VN tour is that he spent his whole damn year there humping the boonies with an Infantry company as their FO and going through combat with them and he wasn't eligible for the CIB--the Combat Infantryman Badge.

About the performance of draftees (or any troops who opposed the war), my experience was that in combat it was about the same as everybody else, if not better. When things got hot, political views tended to take a back seat to survival. And if there was one thing the antiwar grunt opposed more than the war, it was the idea of his life being wasted for it.

btw, I was a draftee who volunteered for the draft so I could get out in 2 years (minimum enlistment term was 3). I thought that was very unique, but I've met other vets who did the same thing. For me it was as simple as calling up my local draft board and asking them to take me. They were happy to oblige. I don't know if that spared someone else, but I guess it may have.

My 2-year hitch ended up being 4-1/2 years. I volunteered for Infantry, then for Infantry OCS, VN, and combat assignment. Graduating from OCS with a commission as a 2nd Lt. started a new 2-year obligation, and I already had more than a year in at that point. I had another year in and was a 1st Lt. by the time I got orders for VN. When I was wounded by AK fire while serving as an Infantry platoon leader there, I ended up spending 18 months in treatment at an Army hospital, and 14 months of that was past my ETS (the date I was due to get out of the Army).

I am just one more of so many of us in those days for whom things didn't turn out like we planned or expected...