October 30, 2006
Nixon and Vietnam Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:15 PM EST In the course of researching my new book project on America’s encounter with the 1970s, I’ve had occasion to sift through two important oral-history collections at Columbia University. Both were transcribed in the 1970s, one recording the experiences of Vietnam War veterans, and the other recording the experiences of antiwar activists.
I originally intended to use these collections to contrast the experiences of young servicemen, who came disproportionately from working-class homes, and antiwar protesters, who were predominately middle-class and had enough social capital and institutional savvy to secure medical exemptions or student deferments from the draft. As it happened, the oral histories have proved a useful source for just that purpose.
But as I read through the Vietnam veterans’ interview transcripts, a new and darker theme presented itself. I encountered several instances where interviewees—all former enlisted men—admitted to “fragging” their officers, or to witnessing their officers being fragged. The term was popularly understood by Vietnam-era servicemen to connote the murder of officers whose combat inexperience, ineptitude, or arrogance led them to endanger their troops’ lives. Nobody will ever know for certain how many officers died in this fashion, but an Army investigation discovered 600 attempted fragging cases between 1969 and 1971 alone. It’s hard to imagine that frightened or disgruntled enlisted men, who often claimed more time in-country than their officers, did not on occasion succeed in eliminating what they viewed as the primary threat to their safety and well-being. Above all, the upsurge in reported fraggings suggests that by 1970 the U.S. military was under tremendous pressure from all sides and in deep distress.
In some of my earlier posts for AmericanHeritage.com, I’ve been hard on Richard Nixon, and my book will not treat his foreign policy favorably. But on a few subjects, Nixon was a shrewd political leader. If many military analysts now view his faith in air power as misplaced, nevertheless the shift from a ground war to an air war allowed him to reduce troop levels from 475,000 in late 1969 to 156,800 by 1971 and just 24,200 by 1972, and to thereby defuse the antiwar movement. If secret bombing raids against Cambodia briefly inflamed antiwar passions, the general troop withdrawal helped alleviate antidraft pressure on American campuses and eased tensions within the ranks of enlisted men who had been bearing the brunt of the war. In this sense, Nixon may have lost the war abroad but won it at home.
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