Historians to discuss the problem of low morale in the final years of the vietnam war. This discussion was part of an allday conference titled manpower and morale after tet hosted by the university of kansas, its an hour, 20 minutes. Id like to welcome everybody back for our afternoon session. My name is charles bowry, im the executive director of the u. S. Army center of u. S. Military history in washington, d. C. Id like to thank beth bailey and the ku center for host ting this great event as well as thanks to our historical colleagues at the u. S. Army combined arms center in fort lerch worth, kansas for their ongoing collaboration surrounding the vietnam 50th anniversary. The u. S. Army has more than 500 historians, Museum Professionals working around the world who do their best to ensure that the his tor c Historical Perspective and Critical Thinking skills generated by a study of history are leveraged throughout the army and make the army a learning o. 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, and without further adieu, well begin our afternoon session. We had a great discussion about the impact of morale. This afternoon were going to build on that conversation and talk about the ways in which the army and the nations military leadership grappled with these issues in terms of manpower and force management. With that well introduce our panel for session three, beth bailey is the Foundation Distinguished Professor here at the university of kansas. Norman cant is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University medical center, meredith lair is an associate professor of history at george mason university, and gary solis is an adjunct professor of law at georgetown university. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. I want to start by saying how pleased i am to be included in this 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. 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 ar army Surgeon GeneralsOffice Published my book, which is up here being illustrated which represents 35 years off and on of an attempt to put together, the pieces, all the pieces i could find alluding to the morale and Mental Health and i will say crisis that we ended up with in vietnam. I hope to illustrate that in the time that i have today, so shameless plug here, heres the book if anybody wants to look at it, and if not, if youre interested all the references to what im going to put up here are in the book, so 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. The title i titled my talk today, draw down vietnam from hall seon to heroin, really to me that says it all, and i am let me get rid of that little thing there. I am refuting, and i was going to ask if these if any of these lights can be brought down at all. I know were filming. Is that a no . Okay. Some of the is there a cursor up here . Okay. Go back. That wont do it. I was in vietnam, 1970, 71 as a psychiatrist. I was the Commanding Officer for 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 Rearview Mirror for the next decade waiting for surely the army was going to study the price, the problem, the crisis that we had there, and the smarter people than i would come up with the answers, and after ten years i decided no, they werent going to do it. And if anything was going to be done like that, it was going to be up to me. So fortunately i was able to get an assignment at Walter Reeds Army Institute of research, and i 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. They werent that interested in vietnam. One thing i did discover to my dismay was that the army retained no clinical records, psychiatric records from vietnam, and so any hope that we would have primary sources to study these problems evaporated. What i ended up doing is trying to find all the psychiatrists that served in vietnam, which i was able to do, all the ones who were surviving, and i ended up with a structured as the result that i sent out to them, so 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 the misery that surrounded me and my colleagues as well as dismayed at our corporate failure, the country, the government, the army, and certainly Army Psychiatry. So the book has been, i suppose somewhat of my redemption in all of this to try and find all the pieces that i could find that i didnt have. 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. Im going to show you some of the findings, some of its impressionistic, some of its graphs, and some are photographs with expressions by the soldiers that i think helped tell the story. Let me go to the first one, if i can make this work. The two vietnam wars, the disconnect between late war army rising psychiatric casualties and psychosis and the declining combat intensity. Combat intensity is a term thats been adopted, usually its comparing wounded in action rate to the troop strength, but in this case to have it on a scale with the psychiatric casualties i instead used the battle death rate. But 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, and its really important, i think, to emphasize to you all that military psychiatry is not just another medical specialty that lives in the hospital and waits for patients to show up. Military psychiatry, you know, 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 then in korea, we placed psychiatry we had them embedded and some of their support personnel embedded in combat divisions and we did that in vietnam. The combat units were amply supplied with Mental Health personnel. In any event, as kroyoull see,e psychiatric indices here are not just measuring the psychiatric, you know, acute psychiatric conditions per se. Let me go on to the next one. What this really is is a summary of the psychiatric story in vietnam, and i want to emphasize here, i want to bring into our consideration what someones called, and id love to know who started this, inverted morale as opposed to just low morale. When troop commitment cohesion is replaced by based on sub mutinous opposition to military authority. So in vietnam, psychiatric hospitalization rates quadrupled as you can see in that earlier slide. Misconduct and performance failures accelerated, and as seen in noncombat fatalities, combat refusals, corruption and profiteering, racial incidents, judicial, nonjudicial disciplinary actions including defiance and dissent, excess combat aggression and combat atrocities, violence or threats against military leaders including fraging which was mentioned earlier. Suicides and then drug use, especially heroin, after 1970. Ill have more to say about the heroin situation, but the peak estimates and these are Reasonable Estimates based on everything that ive read, is that 60 in the last couple 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. 30 were using it at least recreationally. The Mental Health system became swamped with belligerent and fundamentally untreatable soldiers, and army psychiatrists were relegated to performing command directed assessments for character and behavior disorders or personality disorder diagnoses, and this was because of the regulation which insisted that 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 instead a medical discharge from the army. So as it turned out, it could be a shortcut 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, these character and behavior disorders and 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, and we went through all sorts of gymnastics trying to come up with programs that, in fact, would 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 medevac rate before 1969 was 4 per thousand troops, psychiatric medevac rate per year, and then it Rose Steadily to reach 130 per thousand by april of 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 or some of them anyway is to let the sole skrediers speak for themselves here. What im talking about, i 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, and so its not just them, its cleollectively. Heres 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 reid. Throughout the first couple of years of the war, morale stayed high, rates for psychiatric attrition were surprisingly low, including for combat stress. In fact, they were no greater than a stateside force. I think that was said earlier this morning. The ultimate reality was 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, so this is an antiaircraft weapon that the troops have nicknamed. I dont know if you can see it, the peacemaker and on both sides of it, one of them is the International Peace symbol, and the other one is the hand slogan for peace, and i dont know if you can see up at the top where the machine gun okay, the cursor the machine gun placement would be, its theyve named this the pill p h pusher. So you might see here some ambivalence. Annual replacement troops, primarily draftees and reluctant volunteers came to doubt their purpose and risks and sacrifices, attitude strongly encouraged by the growing antiwar, antimilitary sentiment within a passionate dissident Youth Movement. And ill show you some slides, some grafs hephs here as we go , and on all of them the attention is on 1968. This is a gallop poll it just happens to be in 68 where 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 refrain, wasnt it . Ive labeled this also loss of the will to fight. Replacement troops sent to vietnam were increasingly affected by and ive parsed it out into five groups here a radicalized increasingly liberal Counter CultureYouth Movement socalled generation gap, which was in sync with the growing new left. Number two the Civil Rights Movement and associated racial polarization. Widespread antagonism towards american institutions, especially the u. S. Military. Number four, a spreading off and savage into antiwar movement, and number five an expanding youth drug culture which increasingly involved more dangerous drugs. Paralleling the Civil Rights Movements in the state, the antimilitary Attitudes Behaviors in vietnam found their fullest expression among the large numbers of black troops, increasingly demoralized, disruptive, sometimes violent behaviors by angry young africanamericans became increasingly common. Can you read the can you read the slogan . Can you read this one, foolish for going, wrong for participating and inadequate for losing. The public seemed to condemn anyone connected to the war or the 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 who shared the countrys war wariness were sent to vietnam as late war replacements to defend americas cause under circumstances of increasing moral am by ambiguobiguity. This is worldwide army aw ol an desertion rates. Theres 1968 again, and its a reminder of why you cant look at awol and desertion rates in vietnam as a measure of anything. There was nowhere to go in vietnam if you went aw ol or deserted. You have to look more broadly than that to see what the morale was. In the army and of course 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, did i hear that . Someone said there it is. There it is. Huh . There it is, yeah. Okay. So to me this is representative of inverted morale and the loss of the will to serve. Troops were reacting to an intolerable combination of feeling purposeless as the war effort was waning, confined, bored and isolated. Vulnerable, shame ed due to the publics condemnation, debased and depressed by military authority and that their sacrifices and hardships were not justified or appreciated. This is all branches not just the military. I didnt have access to otherwise from 1968 on. Administrative discharge rates, for maladaptive behavior, these are the ones that would end up in the psychiatrists office for evaluation, the institution of the army was simultaneously impaired obviously. Vietnam dont mean nothing, i dont know if you can read that on the left. Late drawdown denial. Dont mean nothing of course, you know, 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 this indigenous heroin market began in 1970 early and the soldiers found this very a very popular way to try and get through their year in vietnam. It eclipsed other medical and psychiatric problems. By late 71 more soldiers were being evacuated from vietnam for drug use than for war wounds. In july of 72 one of eight soldiers was evacuated back to the states. It was a problem for which the army and Army Psychiatry had no answers, and thats the story in itself. Its the biggest chapter in the book, but what was disputed until the end was whether the heroin use was a psychiatric problem, a medical problem or a discipline problem, and all the authorities from each of those sections fought over what to do, whose problem it really was. Oops i didnt mean to get there that fast. This slide is similar to that other one, but this time im using wounded in action rate and showing nonjudicial punishments over time right until 1972 where it drops off, just like psychiatric outpatients drop off. The reason is now drops off is because now were evacuating people out of the theater. Thats the orange line there, as well as courtmartialing them. This is there it is. There it is. Anyway, that speaks for itself. Real quick, this is the rates for fragging and overdose deaths, and you notice there is no 1968 before that because there werent any to speak of or nobody was counting them anyway, so then we start to have the fragging incidents and narcotic overdoses. This is a suicide rate. Theres 1968 jumping up in 1968. Takeaway, ill finish with this. After 68, growing antiwar, antimilitary sentiment drove the u. S. Morale in vietnam steeply downward which produced widespread soldier dissent, psychiatric reactions and behavior problems including heroin use and assassination threats and attempts on superiors and increasing institutional dysfunction. These failed to yield to efforts to strengthen military leadership and troop commitment and cohesion or conventional psychiatric approaches, thus a Public Health crisis and a 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