Both served in vietnam, now join historians to discuss low morale in the final years of the vietnam war. It was part of an allday conference titled manpower and mora morale. I would like to welcome everybody back for afternoon session. Charles bowrey, i would like to start off again by thanking beth bailey and ksu for hosting this great event today as well as thanks to our historical colleagues at the u. S. Army combined center in ft. Leavenworth, kansas, for their collaboration in this and others surrounding the vietnam 50g9 wah anniversary. Archivists working around the world do their best to ensure that the Historical Perspective and Critical Thinking skills generated by a study of history are leveraged throughout the army and that they make the army a learning organization. The army History Program provides a capability that results in a more effective future force, and im honored to serve as this communitys advocate at the department of the Army Headquarters level. Without furth ado, well begin our afternoon sessions. We had a great discussion this morning about the problems of morale in the post tet offensive, u. S. Army force in vietnam. This afternoon, well build on that conversation and talk about the ways in which the army and the nations military leadership grappled with these issue in terms of manpower and force management. Well introduce our panel for session three. Beth bailey distinguished professor here at the university of kansas, norman kamp, meredith lair is an associate professor of history at George Mason University and gary solis, add juncture professor of law at georgetown university. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. I want to start by saying how pleased i am to be included in todays proceedings. This is a very special subject for me. Im honored to be amongst all the distinguished historians that are, you know, speaking and attending. I was really an accidental historian. Didnt set out to be one. Didnt want to be one. But it came to pass. I am very pleased in 2015, the army general Surgeons Office published my book, which is being illustrated, representing some 35 years off and on of an attempt to put together all the pieces i could find alluding to the morale and Mental Health, and i will say crisis that we ended up in vietnam. I hope to illustrate that in the time that i have today. Shameless plug. Here is the book if anyone wants to look at it. If youre interested, all the references im going to put up here are in the book. Im not going to put references in these slides but i do have some cards if youre interested that have the website to the army Surgeon Generals office. The book is free online. And you can access anything you want that you might be interested in. Draw down vietnam from hasian to heroin. To me that, says it all. Let me get rid of that little thing there. I am refuting i was going to ask if any of these lights can be brought down at all. I know were filming. Is that a no . Okay. Is there a curser up here . Okay. Need to go back. That wont do it. Okay. I was in vietnam 1970, 71 as a psychiatrist. I was a Commanding Officer for a detachment, one of the two Treatment Centers in vietnam for the army. And i left gratefully in 1971 in october and really hoped to put it in my rear view mirror for the next decade, waiting for surely the army was going to study the problem, the crisis that we had there and smarter people than i would come up with the answers and after ten years, i decided nope, they werent going to do it. And if anything was going to be done like that, it was going to be up to me. Fortunately, i was able to get an assignment at Walter Reeds Army Institute of research and spent five years there in the back part of the building because they were all interested in world war iii, which they were sure was going to happen soon. But they werent that interested in vietnam. One thing i did discover, to my dismay, is that the army would retain no psychiatric records from vietnam and so any hope that we would have primary sources to study these problems evaporated. So what i ended up doing was trying to find all the psychiatrists who served in vietnam, which i was able to do, all the ones that were surviving. And i ended up with a structured instrument that i sent out to them. I ended up asking them all the questions i wanted to know about what they did, what they saw, how did it work, and how did they feel about what they did in vietnam. Then it took years to analyze. I had too much data. In any event, i left vietnam exhausted professionally, and deeply troubled by all that surrounded me and my colleagues as well as dismay at our corporate failure, the country, government, army and certainly Army Psychiatry. The book has been my redemption in all of this. I knew what we saw but i didnt know what the real story, the full story was. Thats whats in the book. Its not a memoir at all. Ill show you some of the findings. Some of it is impressionistic. Some of it are graphs and some are photographs with expressions by the soldiers that i think helped tell the story. Let me go to the first one. We can make this work. Okay. This is the two vietnam wars, as i call it, the disconnect between late war rising, army rates psychiatric casualties, psychosis and combat intensity. Combat intensity is a term thats been adopted, usually comparing wounded in action rate to troop strength but in this case to have it on the scale with the psychiatric casualties i used the battle death rate. These are not raw numbers. These are percentages of those who were deployed. And you end up with this totally unprecedented disconnect between the psychiatric issues and the combat stress, as it would be measured, at least by this index. Its really important to emphasize to you that military psychiatry doesnt wait in the hospital for patients to show up. Military psychiatry, through the last dozens of decades really has been involved as much in morale as it is involved in Mental Health. And, in fact, following world war ii and korea, we had them and their support personnel embedded in combat divisions and we did that in vietnam. The combat units were amply supplied with Mental Health personnel. Psychiatric indices are not just measuring acute psychiatric conditions per se. Let me go on to the next one. This is a summary of the psychiatric story in vietnam. And i want to emphasize here i want to bring into our consideration what someone has called and i would love to know who started this inverted morale as opposed to just low morale. When troop commitment cohesion is replaced by sub mute news opposition to military authority. In vietnam, hospitalization rates quadrupled, misconduct, performance failures accelerated and as seen in noncombat fatalities, combat refusals, profiteering, judicial, nonjudicial disciplinary actions, including defiance and dissent or especially, combat aggression, combat atrocities. Violence or threats against military leaders, including fraging, which was mentioned earlier, suicides and drug use especially, heroin after 1970. Ill have more to say about the heroin situation. But the peak estimates these are Reasonable Estimates based on everything that ive read, is that 60 were using marijuana of all soldiers and 30 were using heroin. That doesnt mean they were addicted to heroin. Perhaps 5 were truly addicted to heroin but 30 were using it at least recreationally. Mental Health System became disheartened, disgruntled soldiers and army psychiatrists were for character and behavior disorders or personality disorder diagnoses because of the regulation that insisted before the commander could get at least soldiers under certain groupings a 212 discharge from the army, administrative discharge from the army, they had to have a psychiatrist take a look at them and see whether they deserved it instead of medical discharge from the army. As it turned out, it could be a short cut for the commander, who was fed up with certain troops so that they really hoped that they would have a friendly psychiatrist at the other end of this referral line so that they could get these things rubber stamped and accelerate them getting out of the unit and out of vietnam. In the last couple of years, psychiatric conditions became the most prominent medical problem faced by the army in vietnam. Most prominent medical problem. Voluntary or forced treatment, rehabilitation of heroin users was unsuccessful. We went through all sorts of gymnastics to try to rehabilitate these soldiers without really ultimately any useful effect. So, let me see the last one. Medical evacuation back to the states became the treatment of choice. It was really a remedy, i guess, for huge numbers of soldiers. The medivac rate forced 1969 was four per thousand troops per year and grow steadily to reach 130 per thousand by april 72, which meant at that point one out of every eight soldiers was medically evacuated from vietnam, primarily for drug use, primarily for heroin use. So what i want to do in the remaining slides is to some of them anyway, to let the soldiers speak for themselves here. And what im talking about, or ive paired photographs that i have, for one reason or another, happen to have with slogans that i thought were exceptionally poignant and telling of what these soldiers were feeling. Here is the first one. Early war bravado, im calling this. I dont know if youre familiar with that phrase but i had heard it at walter reed. Throughout the first couple of years, the morale stayed high, including for combat stress. They were no greater than a stateside force. I think that was said earlier this morning. The ultimate reality is that winning proved to be far more difficult than anticipated in vietnam. Wont surprise this group. Accompanied by growing alarm that the war was causing unacceptable levels of destruction, Collateral Damage and displaced refugees. Now this didnt end up being a poster but its the same idea here. I particularly like this one so much that i put it on the cover of the book. Antiaircraft weapon that the troops have nicknamed. I dont know if you can see it. The peace maker. Both sides of it, one of them is the International Peace symbol and the other is the hand slogan for peace. And i dont know if you can see up at the top the machine gun i have the curser there. The machine gun, theyve named this the pill pusher. So you might see here some ambivalence. Annual replacement troops came to doubt their purpose and risk in sacrifices, attitudes strongly encouraged by the growing antiwar, sentiment within a dispassionate Youth Movement. Ill show you some slides, some graphs here as we go along. On all of them, the attention is on 1968. This is a gallup poll that it just happens to be in 68 that those who favor the war begin to be lower than the ones who are in favor of the war. Excuse me. The other way around. Those who disapprove of the war exceed those that are in favor of the war. Weve said this phrase several times today. I guess it was the abiding refra refrain, wasnt it . Ive labeled this also loss of the will to fight. Increasingly affected by ive parsed it out. Counter culture Youth Movement socalled generation gap which was in sync with the growing new left. Number two, Civil Rights Movement incei inform diary, polarization against american institutions especially the u. S. Military. Number four, a spreading often sav acknowledge savage antiwar unit and drug culture which increasingly involved more dangerous drugs. Paralleling the Civil Rights Movements in the state, antipllt attitudes and behaviors in vietnam found their fullest expression among black troops, increasingly demoralized by africanamericans became increasingly common. Can you read the slogan . Can you read this one . Participating in inadequate for losing. The public seemed to condemn anyone connected to the war or military, including those whose duty it was to serve there, as if the only honorable attitude for the soldier was one of opposition and avoidance. Thousands of young men were sent to vietnam as late war replacements to defend americas cause under circumstances of decreasing moral ambiguity. In this slide, it sort of gives you this is worldwide army awol and desertion rates. Why you cant look at it as a measure of anything. There was nowhere to go in vietnam if you went awol or deserted. You have to look more broadly than that to see what the morale of the military was, the army and, of course, in vietnam was only worse. This is my favorite one. We are the unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful. There it is. I hear that. There it is. Yeah. So to me, this is representative of inverted morale and the loss of the will to serve. Troops were reacted to feeling purposeless, confined, bored, isolated, vulnerable as the ranks thinned in vietnam, shamed due to the publics condemnation of the military, debased and oppressed by American Authority and that their sacrifices and hardships were not justified or appreciated. This is worldwide all branches, not just the military. I didnt have access to otherwise from 1968 on. Administrative discharge rates. Maladapted behavior. They would end up in the psychiatrists office for evaluation. The institution of the army was simultaneously impaired. Vietnam dont mean nothing. I dont know if you can read on the left. Late draw down denial. Dont mean nothing, of course, is blowing things off. But it also, to me, represents a wish to deny and disassociate from your circumstance and the best way to do that was with drugs, was with heroin. And the indigenous heroin market began early 1970 and soldiers found this a popular way to try to get through their year in vietnam, eclipsed other medical and psychiatric problems. By late 71, more soldiers were being evacuated for vietnam for drug use than for war wounds. July of 72, one of eight soldiers was evacuated back to the states. Okay. It was a problem for which the army and Army Psychiatry had no answers. Thats a story in itself. Thats the biggest chapter in the book. The heroin use, was it a psychiatric problem, medical problem or discipline problem and they each fought over what to do, whose problem it really was. Oops, i didnt mean to get there that fast. Nonjudicial punishments over time right to 1972 where it drops off like psychiatric patients drop off. Now were evacuating people out of the theater. Thats the orange line there. As well as courtmartialing them. This is [ laughter ] there it is. There it is. Anyway. That speaks for itself. Real quick, this is the race for fragging and overdose deaths. Notice, there is no 1968 or before that, because there werent any to speak of. No one was counting them anyway. We start to have the fragging incidents and narcotic overdoses. Suicide rate jumping up in 1968. Takeaw takeaway, ill finish with this. After 68, growing antiwar, antisentiment produced widespread soldier dissent, psychiatric reactions and behavior, including heroin use and assassination threats and attempts on superiors and increasing institutional dysfunction. These failed to yield to efforts to strengthen military leadership, troop commitment and cohesion or conventional psychiatric approaches, thus a Public Health crisis and potential military disaster. Thank you. [ applause ] hello again. I am working on a book that is about how the u. S. Army as an institution tried to manage what it often called during this period the problem of race during the vietnam era. And so im really interested in the question behind this panel, not how whether or not there was a problem of race or how people claimed racial equality or rights but how did this massive institution in the middle of a very difficult and increasingly unpopular war, address what its leaders identified as perhaps the central problem of morale that the institution faced, a war within a war that had become so violent and disruptive that many army leaders identified it as a threat to combat readiness and combat effectiveness. So, how does this army war, given its current mission, institutional culture, its logic, its circumstances try to neutralize what most people begin to agree is a highly disruptive force, the problem of race . So, to begin, its really key to remember that in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s, in general in the United States, including among africanamerican leaders, the u. S. Military was widely heralded as a success, including by africanamerican leaders. I want to emphasize that one more time. And as the United States military and the army, im looking in particular, moved into vietnam, it got an awful lot of attention to the issue of race. And thats in part because the war in vietnam was the first u. S. War that was fought by a fully, intentionally integrated armed force. But it was also because it was coinciding with the beginning of a lot of racial uprising in american cities. So the violence at home was being contrasted with the comedy being found at least in the combat troops in vietnam. You see this whole flood of articles in the press, heralding how well the u. S. Army, the military in general, is doing. You get this constant refrain. I see only one color and thats olive drab. I could have given you another dozen. I have some fabulous pictures but wasnt able to get permissions ahead of time. So youll have to deal with the text. There was only one color and its olive drab. Its not that theyre wrong. In many ways, even though there was plenty of individual and institutional racism that africanamerican soldiers and other people of color in the military had to cope with during this era. I can say that another 20 times just to reinforce it. Compared to civilian society, the u. S. Military really did, in general, offer better opportunities for people of color than did their civilian counterparts. And racial conflict among combat troops in vietnam was relatively rare, even if it was rarely as much of a warborn racial understanding and love fest as the public media often portrayed. They got really sack rin in their discussions of this. Particularly in the office of the secretary of defense to follow racial equality. The major move made was to remove racial designations of all forms. It wasnt made on the basis of race and therefore equality would be best fostered. But as the