MUD SOLDIERS
Life Inside the New American Army
George C. Wilson
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989
228 pages, $19.95
"The Athenian commanders before Salamis," wrote Korean War veteran and historian T.R. Fehrenbach in his classic This Kind of War, "talked of art and the Acropolis, in sight of the Persian fleet. Beside their own campfires, the Greek hoplites chewed garlic and joked about girls.
"Without its tough spearmen," Fehrenbach continued, "Hellenic culture would have had nothing to give the world. It would not have lasted long enough. When Greek culture became so sophisticated that its common men would no longer fight to death, as at Thermopylae, but became devious and clever, a horde of Roman farm boys overran them.
"Thus," concludes Fehrenbach, "The time came when the descendants of the Macedonians who had slaughtered Asians till they could no longer lift their arms went pale and sick at the sight of the havoc wrought by the Roman gladius Hispanicus as it carved its way toward Hellas."
Has that time come for America? Have our infantrymen--the present-day counterparts of Fehrenbach's tough Greek spearmen--gone weak and soft? That is the question Washington Post military correspondent George Wilson set out to address in his remarkable new book, Mud Soldiers, "an account from the inside of where the fighting part of the American Army stands today."
Wilson, a World War II Navy veteran and a frontline war correspondent in the Vietnam War, begins with an account of a latter-day Thermopylae, the April 11-12, 1966, battle of Charlie Company, Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry, First Infantry Division, in the jungles of Vietnam's Phuoc Tuy province, southeast of Saigon.
Reconstructed by Wilson through interviews with the survivors, the battle was among the most ferocious of the Vietnam War. An estimated 150 enemy soldiers of the Viet Cong's D-800 main force battalion were killed, but the price had been high. Thirty-five of Charlie Company's infantrymen were killed in the fierce battle and seventy-one wounded. "With 106 out of 134 men killed or wounded, Charlie Company's casualty rate for the Easter battle was 80 percent."
One of the long-term effects of those high casualties was pressure to end conscription. "Thousands of young men fled to Canada or took other steps to dodge the draft rather than fill the holes in Charlie Company," notes Wilson. "These draft dodgers and protesters 'deserve our sympathy and respect,' said Chairman J.W. Fulbright (D-Ark) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 21, 1966, ten days after Charlie Company was almost annihilated in its unheralded stand in the jungle.
"Other soldiers kept dying," and on July 1, 1973, Congress allowed the authority to draft young men to end. The result was that today, Wilson says, "the United States is gambling its safety on [a] new small, all-volunteer, post-Vietnam Army. The biggest gamble is whether the Charlie companies of this Army will fight and hold like the old one
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