Only 40 Cents: GI revolts: The breakdown of the US army in Vietnam - Richard Boyle

GI revolts: The breakdown of the US army in Vietnam - Richard Boyle

Two stories of revolts by US troops, including the shooting of a top sergeant and the mutiny of Bravo Company at Firebase Pace near Cambodia, written by Richard Boyle, a war correspondent who spent three tours in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War was one of the least popular in American history. It was also the least “popular” with the GI’s who were sent to fight it. By the late 1960’s, news of GI unrest was being carried on TV and in newspapers around the country and Vietnam vets were speaking at anti-war demonstrations.

But word of the GI resistance in Vietnam itself trickled back more slowly — the soldiers flashing peace signs and Black Power salutes, the group refusals to fight, anti-war petitions and demonstrations, and even the fragging of officers. What we’ve read in the newspapers, however, has just been bits and pieces. Seldom have we had a chance to hear the whole story from the GI’s themselves.

This pamphlet tells in vivid terms two stories of GI revolts — the shooting of a top sergeant and the mutiny of Bravo Company at Firebase Pace near Cambodia. They are taken from Richard Boyle’s book Flower of the Dragon — The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam (Ramparts Press, 1972). Boyle spent three tours in Vietnam from 1965 through 1971 as a war correspondent, and was on hand personally to record many of these events as they happened.

Not all of the stories of GI resistance told in Boyle’s book are as dramatic as the story of Doc Hampton or the mutiny at Firebase Pace. Boyle could only cover a few of the thousands of GI revolts in Vietnam.

Many of these revolts were private affairs by GI’s who were strung out on dope, or scared, or angry at being ordered to risk their lives to capture a useless piece of real estate. But as the war dragged on, an increasing number of GI’s — like the men at Firebase Pace — felt they shouldn’t be in Vietnam in the first place, and turned to organized resistance.

Resentment was especially high among Black and other minority GI’s, who were concentrated in combat units all out of proportion to their numbers in the population and were faced with continual racial harassment.

The result, for the military, was devastating. By 1969 the morale and discipline of the U.S. ground forces in Indochina had so broken down that it was no longer a reliable fighting force. This fact was one of the major causes for the change in U.S. strategy. The U.S. government had no choice but to withdraw American troops. Nixon may call the Vietnam settlement “peace with honor.” But his alternative was war without an army.

Here then is the GI’s eye-view of the Vietnam War.

Doc Hampton

Although many of us in the Saigon press corps had heard rumors of fraggings attacks by enlisted men on officers with a fragmentation grenade, usually slipped under the floor of the officer’s hootch — it wasn’t being reported to the people back home.

Then-President Lyndon Johnson, in response to the growing antiwar movement, once said, “You don’t hear the boys in Vietnam protesting.” Hawks consistently called for escalation “to support our boys.” To be against the war, they claimed, is to stab GIs in the back. The Army brass was particularly worried about stories of GI unrest leaking out. They did everything they could to cover up, and until 1969 they were successful.

They covered up the story of the revolt in 1968 of black GIs at Long Binh Jail, the notorious Army prison outside Saigon. Fed up with abuse and beatings at the hands of the guards, black troops seized the prison, repelling successive attempts by hundreds of MPs backed up by armored cars to retake the prison. In the end, of course, the troops lost out.

The easiest way for the Army to cover up news of GI unrest was simply not to report it at the five o’clock follies. (Note: this refers to newsmen’s skeptical name for the Army’s news briefings.) The Army’s massive PR machine daily cranked out press releases about how the GIs supported the war, how high their morale was and how we were gloriously winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.

So the press simply never heard of the fraggings, of officers shot in the back by their own men, of near-revolts of whole units. Most of the newsmen, when they did go out in the field, spent their time in the officers’ mess and in officers’ clubs drinking with the brass. It seemed most newsmen didn’t really like or understand the grunts; they felt more comfortable with the lifers.

Besides, most of the grunts didn’t trust the Saigon press corps. They knew the Army’s Central Intelligence Division (CID) often sent agents onto bases disguised as newsmen to get information and evidence about fraggings or possible mutinies. El Cid, as the grunts called the spies, was everywhere.

But there was another, even greater, obstacle to uncovering stories of fraggings. If a reporter wanted to go on base, he had to sign up for a military flight, giving the reason for his trip. If he told the truth and said he wanted to do a story about fraggings, the brass would try to block him every way they could-say he couldn’t get to the base because of bad weather or, if they did let him go, send along a public information officer to follow him around and make sure no damaging information got out. If he lied about why he wanted to go, they would still make sure he saw and heard only what the PIO wanted.

The Overseas Weekly was the first paper to report on fraggings, probably because most of our stories came from the GIs themselves. On stories the Army didn’t want us to know about-and there were many -we usually had to sneak on base to get the story at all.

One day in August 1969, Ann Bryan, our editor, got a call from some troops at Cu Chi, headquarters of the 25th Division, who said they had a story for us. She made an arrangement for me to meet them secretly on the base.

The streets at Cu Chi had beautiful names-Maui Street and Oahu Street-but they were very drab. Behind a pizza parlor two GIs were waiting. I identified myself and we drove down the street, past the massage parlor where GIs got a five-dollar hand job.

“I think we got a safe place to meet,” said one of the GIs. It was very risky for them to talk with me, because if they were caught they would probably be shipped to Firebase Jackson the next day. Jackson, they said, was a place they didn’t want to be.

Photo caption: “I’m over here fighting a war for a cause that means nothing to me. It means nothin’ but my life, and life’s a very dear thing to me...” — GI in First Cavalry Division (picture shows exhausted GIs at a campsite). End caption.

They took me to a small hootch. About eight GIs, half of them black and half of them white, were sitting on the floor when we entered. While they took turns watching for lifers outside. the GIs slowly began to tell me the story of two men.

“I guess I’ll start by telling you about Doc Sp4 Enoch ‘Doc’ Hampton,” said a sandy-haired soldier, Sp4 W. C. Benn. “Doc was our friend, everybody liked Doc. He was a real good medic.”

“Yeah. he never bothered nobody,” said another soldier. “He treated people like you would want to be treated.”

They talked about Doc for a while, then they told me about the other man. Sfc. Clarence Lowder, whom they called “Top.” Things started to get bad, they said, when Top came into the unit as the new “first-shirt,” or top sergeant. Top didn’t think much of the new “Action Army.” It was too soft. “He wished he was back in the old army,” said Pfc. Rich Hanusey, a clerk in the orderly room. In the old days, Top would tell his men, he could straighten out a soldier “without going through a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo.” Top was a big, powerful man and many GIs were afraid of him. “Top would threaten to hit people or send them to Jackson,” said Hanusey.

Firebase Jackson was like a death sentence. Some of the GIs doubted Top had enough power to send a man there, but nobody wanted to test him.

“He treated us like machines,” said one GI. “I’m not a robot, I’m a human being.” Instead of loading supplies on a truck, Top would make the men walk and carry the stuff all the way. He liked to belittle men in front of others. “He had no respect for people,” Benn said.

“He was disappointed being here,” said Hanusey, who had worked with Top and knew him better than most of the enlisted men. “He would have been a great first sergeant in training, the kind they use to scare trainees. But over here he was creating a fiasco.”

Top once ordered a private to dig a six-foot ditch. The soldier dug a six-foot peace symbol in the ground. “That really blew Top’s mind,” said Hanusey. After that Top worked on the Pfc almost constantly for six weeks. The Pfc got stoned every night and dreamed about killing Top. “That man isn’t going to live through the day,” he would shout. Finally, the Pfc cracked and was shipped out.

One non-commissioned officer in the unit used to shake and drink heavily after his encounters with Top. “One night Top almost made him cry,” said one of the GIs. Another time the NCO threatened to kill Top and had to be restrained.

After his second week in the unit, Top got a warning from his men — a CS gas grenade under his hootch. “When they put gas on you, yeah, you know they mean you no good,” said one of the men with a smile.

Benn, the Sp4 who had started the story, began to be afraid that someone might kill Top. “He didn’t deserve to die. We just wanted him out.” So Benn went to the battery commander, but the commander refused to believe any soldier would go that far. Then Benn went to the inspector general. “I just got a patronizing look,” he said. “Lifers are still battering down drawbridges. They haven’t entered the twentieth century.”

Benn even went to the chaplain, who told him things weren’t “as bad as all that” and advised him to go back through the chain of command.

A few weeks later one non-com urged Top to go to the enlisted men’s club and have a few beers with the men. Top refused. When the NCO warned Top he was pushing his men too hard and might get zapped, Top reportedly fired back, “Not one of them would have the guts.”

They didn’t hate Top, the men in the hootch told me; they thought he was a victim of the system, just like them. He just didn’t know what was going on in Vietnam, or he wouldn’t have said, “Not one of them would have the guts.” He hadn’t been in Vietnam long enough, he didn’t know that in some parts of Vietnam war existed between the grunts and the lifers.

It was just about this time that the black GIs in Top’s units were beginning to think about the war, beginning to tell themselves that if they had to die they wanted to die for a cause of their own choice. To many of them the lifer sergeant was more of an enemy than the Asian peasant soldier outside the wire. There was also a different kind of white soldier in the unit, like the private who dug the six-foot peace symbol. Young white soldiers smoked grass, wore beads, and flashed the peace sign as a standard greeting. In the evenings, black and white troops would get together, blow grass, and rap. The heads and the blacks, the men in the hootch told me, were beginning to get it together. I remembered what one of the doper GIs had told me at Nha Trang: “The lifers are more afraid of what’s in this camp than what’s outside it.”

After about two months with the unit, Top started harassing Doc Hampton about his Afro haircut, telling him to get it cut. Doc’s hair was no longer than an inch and a half — within Army regulations — but Top kept pushing him to trim it.

At the mess hall one evening, Doc said that Top had “his thing,” the book and the law, and that he, Doc, had his-an M-16 rifle. Doc said he was going to the orderly room to see the first sergeant, “Either I’ll come out alone,” he said, “or neither of us is coming out.”

Hanusey, the clerk, was working in the orderly room when Doc came through the doorway. “His face was cold, stone cold,” Hanusey said. “He looked like a man in the movies who was about to kill.”

The barrel of Doc’s M-16 was pointed downward, his feet planted firmly apart. Slowly he raised the barrel and fired a full clip into Top. The sergeant’s back exploded as pieces of flesh and blood spattered all over the orderly room. Then Doc walked out.

Photo caption: Pointing to his wound, a veteran member of Alpha Co. and his buddies celebrate his getting out of combat. End caption.

Hanusey couldn’t believe it, almost thinking Doc was firing blanks until he heard the empty shell casings hit the floor. It just didn’t seem real. Then the captain screamed, “Stop him.” Hanusey just looked down at Top, heard him groan and saw him move his head slightly, and then Top was dead.

Benn was outside when he saw Doc running for a bunker, “like a deer being chased.” Suddenly there were about forty MPs and other men with shotguns and submachine guns running after Doc, shouting, “Get him, kill him.”

“The chase after Doc was like a hunt, he didn’t have a chance,” said another GI.

The lifers cornered Doc in an empty bunker. But Doc was armed; nobody wanted to go in after him. It was a standoff. Taking up positions around the bunker, the lifers ordered him to surrender.

“I wasn’t going to let it happen,” said Ben Denson, a black soldier who hadn’t spoken before. “If they shot Doc, there was going to be a slaughter, a bloodletting. There would have been a war.” When black troops in the unit started going for their weapons, they saw that there were many whites with them.

As white and black troops started running out of their huts and bunkers towards Doc, they were blocked by armed MPs. “They wanted to gun him down and didn’t want anyone to stop it,” said Denson. Both sides were lining up for a confrontation and when the black and white troops trying to save Doc looked around, there were more of them than there were lifers.

Then a single shot sounded in Doc’s bunker. One lifer started to make a move for the bunker, but was stopped by black troops. Two black soldiers went in. Doc Hampton was dead.

Denson had a theory about why Doc Hampton shot himself. “It was his last protest. He didn’t want to be killed by his oppressors.”

Hampton and Lowder became statistics in the new war, but to the GIs in his unit, Doc was a hero, a martyr to the cause of freedom. “I will remember Doc all my life and I will dedicate myself to keeping his memory,” said Benn.

In the days following the shooting, the battery area was tense. “The lifers ran around,” said Benn, “with their private arsenal of shotguns to use against us.” “There was a scrimmage line, us and them,” Denson added. The battery commander gave a “eulogy” for Doc which infuriated the men. He called Doc “this boy,” and implied Doc was crazy. “Some eulogy,” stormed Denson. “They attacked his character.”

“Hampton didn’t kill the sergeant,” said Denson. “There was a crime, but these two men were killed by the hierarchy.” Top, he said, was just a poor guy doing the establishment’s dirty work.

“I blame the IG [Inspector General] and the commander,” added Benn. “Top had a lot of good in him but they pushed him too far.”

“There was nothing wrong with Doc,” said Denson, still angry about the commander’s statement that Doc was crazy; “he just got pushed too far.” Doc, Denson said, was no different from thousands of other black GIs who had taken a hard look at what they saw in Vietnam and didn’t like it. “We’re not winning the war in the glorious way we are hearing about — it’s the biggest farce I’ve ever seen.”

Just before we broke up, Benn told me about seeing an American intelligence officer, an “average Joe,” question two Vietnamese, husband and wife. When the man refused to talk, said Benn, the officer threw the wife out of the chopper while in flight. “That’s what the war does to people’s minds,” he said.

Next morning I walked into the orderly room and asked to see the battery commander, Capt. Robert Haney. The men stopped talking and the clerks stopped typing as I walked in.

“I think your newspaper is a rag and I’m not going to write your stories for you,” Haney told me over a cup of coffee at the officers’ mess.

“Captain,” I said, “I’ve got statements of thirteen men who saw what happened to Lowder and Hampton. I would like your side of the story.”

Haney was startled to learn that I had sneaked on base, interviewed his men and slept in his battery area without his knowing it. He became more cordial and agreed to answer my questions.

“It was a great surprise when I found out who had done it,” he said, adding that Doc was the last man in the unit he would have expected to gun down Lowder. He admitted that the men had talked to him about Top, but added, “It never occurred to me something like this would happen. It is a trend, a part of a worldwide rebellion against authority.” The Army, he said, had the same problems, generated by the rebellious attitudes of young people, as people had back home — “but we are going to take care of our problems.”

“I didn’t care for the way the battery had been run,” Haney commented. “Individuals were not meeting Army standards in dress and in the way they looked.” Doc’s haircut, he said, “didn’t conform.” He said Doc “appeared to be intelligent,” but must have had “a lapse of reasoning.”

Haney thought for a moment, then asked me, “Do you think a haircut should cost a man’s life?”

I tried to tell him some of the things his men had told me -that some of the GIs wanted to decide what it was they were going to die for. I told him I thought Doc Hampton had made his decision: the lifers were more his enemy than the Vietcong.

Haney recoiled at the word “lifer.” “I don’t like to be called a lifer,” he said. “We are career soldiers; it is a patriotic calling.”

Doc Hampton was not alone. All over Vietnam, GIs were fragging their officers and their lifer noncoms. On some patrols, if a lifer was too “gung ho,” he was shot in the back by his men, who would report he was killed in combat. More often, a unit ordered to go on patrol would simply go a few hundred yards beyond the wire and then sit down and smoke dope. I had been on one such patrol but for obvious reasons hadn’t reported it.

In many units, the men had virtual control, either by intimidation or by having non-lifers in command. In some places it was more like open warfare, with the heads and black troops on one side and the lifers on the other.

Of everything that was said to me by Doc’s friends at Cu Chi, something one of them said at the end of the evening stuck in my mind. He said it in a very matter-of-fact way, not as a boast or a threat but almost calmly:

“If they fuck with us they are going to die.”

Continued:
http://libcom.org/history/gi-revolts-breakdown-us-army-vietnam