Did soldiers really frag officers in Vietnam?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
41

msmith537 said:

RoadRage said:

I wasn’t there, have never been in the military, so this is difficult to really feel. I can sort of accept that playing with grenades (i.e. pulling the fuses, or blowing up outhouses) was accepted and nobody really made a fuss. What I think is striking the incredulity meter is the idea that someone could blow up an outhouse that had an officer in it, the officer die, and the military ignore it. That just doesn’t sound right. Given that people were prosecuted for killing their officers, and given that discipline is a major component of military culture, I just can’t believe that the military would ignore the death of an officer at the hands of an enlisted man based upon it being a prank gone wrong. Sure, accidents in the field happen, but something as silly as a prank causing death would get attention.

Whereas I can easily see how the rumor that an officer was in the outhouse could be started and passed along. It amplifies the sense of retribution for the enlisted. And I can see how the rumor could be spread even if the officer corps itself knew it wasn’t true - there wouldn’t be any real way for them to stop it.

42

I think if you read Roadrage’s post carefully, you will discover that he never claimed the officer in the outhouse was killed - or even hurt, for that matter. You have jumped to the conclusion that this was a fatal incident and gone from there to speculating about mlitary culture etc.

Peter

43

This is what I meant to clarify. The pilot did not literally mean what he said because on a surface level reading, someone could walk away with the impression that the pilot would not only condone this action, but would aid in it.

The Vietnam experience was a valuable one for no other reason than it is a strong example of how not to conduct war. Every element of the chain of command was set up for failure from bottom to top. It is no wonder that breakdowns of good order and discipline happened as frequently as they did. It is something that we in the last decade of the 20th and the opening decade of the 21st never had to deal with.

That said, I did explicitly mention the possibility of others getting hit because that was the first thing that popped into my mind.

I was not there and I generally don’t presume to judge the actions of those who were. I don’t know you, I don’t know the shooter, and I don’t know the colonel in question, but reading your story, I cannot help but judge. This shooter is an buddyfucking asshole lowest order. If he had a homicidal urge against the colonel, while I don’t condone, I can understand. Firing at the command chopper? Sorry, no. There’s other guys up there.

So no, I can’t imagine the pilot, the co-pilot, or the enlisted crew, presumably of which there are at least three onboard (crew chief, door gunner, CO’s ratelo) would be too happy about this incident.

Nor do I imagine his squadmates were too happy about his drawing fire.

You can bet your ass if that if I had ever heard of something like that going on in my unit, somebody would have been nailed the wall.

But then, those were different times, different circumstances and a different army.

44

petersally, perhaps I did draw the conclusion that when RoadRage was talking about fragging officers, he was talking about killing them (what the term means), rather than just blowing up outhouses as a form of protest (which is how the story started). Perhaps I am making the assumption that a device designed to send sharp metal fragments at high velocities combined in an explosive mix that sets off a shock wave that can level an outhouse will tend to put high velocity fragments into anyone inside said outhouse.

Okay, let us assume that there was an officer in the outhouse when said outhouse was hit by a grenade. Let us assume said officer somehow escaped major injury and death - maybe he got a few splinters and a ringing in the ears for a few minutes. Now you’re telling me that said officer is not going to scream bloody murder to his chain of command about discipline in the ranks? In a military where striking a superior is an act that can get you sent to Leavenworth (actually in time of war, it can be punished by death)*, you’re really saying that that the military hierarchy would laugh off the potential death of an officer because some enlisted soldier felt denigrated by the different amenties? Because regardless of what the actual circumstances might have been (surviving and no injuries), you cannot tell me that being in the vicinity of a detonating grenade is something that couldn’t lead to death. That’s what they are designed to do.

I’m sorry, but even in Vietnam, junior officers weren’t cheap enough to allow our own soldiers to kill them for sport.

I suppose one could argue the specifics of the terms of this article with regards to “while he is in the execution of his office”. There’s also language concerning being a direct superior officer, so maybe this specific regulation does not apply. But the categorization of the severity of the results still is relevant.

45

Exactly. The chopper guys let loose a stream of pretty good bullets where they knew there was likely their own troops. Even if the colonel was clueless, the door gunner probably knew exactly what was going on and decided to make a point.

That they didn’t hit anyone may have been deliberate or may have been luck.

However, if the guy is a royal flaming a-hole, odds are the command chain knows it too. As long as nobody is hurt, their motivation to investigate would probably be low, just to reinforce the object lesson. “I.e. Just because we back doesn’t mean there’s no limit to how you abuse the troops” is the unspoken subtext. The “we are unable to figure out who did it” part sort of remind the officer to smarten up. Smart people learn from experience.

For serious investigations, the search for strawberris in *The Caine Mutiny *comes to mind.

Not every officer was a clueless dick.

46

Irishman, you’re approaching this from the wrong perspective.

What do you think are the primary insecurities (psychological) of a junior officer? I will tell you right now that it’s not being killed, wounded or maimed. A junior officer, above all, fears appearing weak, incompetent, and cowardly. This is essentially the common soldiers’ experience of seeing the white elephant, only applied to command and leadership.

An incident such as the one that was described is a slap-the-face wake-up call that not only are you not performing well, but that you have lost any respect and good will that you may have had. That everyone else around you isn’t doing anything about it means that everyone around you feels the same. If this happens to you and your CO does nothing about it, it means that your CO probably thinks you need to apply some corrective action to your behavior, pronto. So in Roadrage’s story, I can understand.

The Vietnam experience is one that is in the back of every junior officer mind, for no other reason that most guys don’t want to be THAT lieutenant.

47

Look, I don’t doubt there was a crime involved in the events described by Roadrage. I’m not defending the acts involved. But, it seems to me that folks on this board like to parse very finely what other people say, and yet, they also like to leap to conclusions.

Roadrage said someone blew up the outhouse with an officer inside. He did not say the officer was killed or even hurt. You leaped to that conclusion and I caught you in mid-flight.

You can get on your high horse and spout about military regulations… Leavenworth (Marines, BTW, go to Portsmouth)… little metal fagments. But, you’re caught in an assumption.

Peter

48

Let’s assume the colonel was as smart as the pilot. The pilot figured out that it was GIs firing at the helicopter, the colonel must have, too. Let’s also assume that the colonel discussed the incident with all his officers at the next staff meeting - all the battalion officers knew as well.

My squad leader, a sergeant, knew it was GIs doing the shooting. If I knew, he knew.

What would you have me do? Report the incident to my sergeant? Report it to my platoon leader, a lieutenant? Both already knew as much about it as I did.

Would you have me go over and confront the other squad - one man against ten? Would you have me just bushwack them and shoot them all?

I would love to hear what you propose. What would you do to nail them to your wall? Your bluster is amusing.

Peter

49

As I clearly stated in my post, Peter, I don’t know because I wasn’t there and I don’t know what it was like.

The entire notion of some idiot taking knowingly taking aimed rifle shots at ANY friendly vehicle and having everyone else cover for him is a foreign concept to anyone who put in his time in the past twenty years. We don’t function that way no and we haven’t functioned like that for a very long time for a very good reason.

Let’s say that everything you believe to or propose to be true is true and happened in the manner in which you describe - and I have no reason to believe otherwise. Every key element would have been handled differently.

If that comes across to you as bluster, then maybe you should take a step back and stop being so defensive.

As for my value judgment, it is what is.

50

[Nitpick]Marines went to Portsmouth. The Portsmouth Naval Prison closed in 1974. [/Nitpick]

51

Was this after all the prisoners escaped into the Los Angeles underground?

52

Just new to this discussion, but here are my two cents worth:

I served two tours with the Australian SAS performing deep reconnaissance and infiltration.

On more than one occasion, we lay in the bush watching as a patrol of Americans wandered past, totally oblivious of our presence.

It would have been trivial for me to pick off one or more of their officers, and they would have had no clue as to where the hit came from. Since we would have been using allied issue weapons and armaments, any such hit could have been interpreted as a “friendly fire incident”, or even “fragging”.

If the dead guy was an a******, the rumour of a “fragging” would quickly develop, and in no time at all it would have been a “fact”.

If a concealed VC had done the hit, this also could have been interpreted as a “fragging”.

The main reason that captured weapons were not to be used in the field, is that each weapon has a distinctive sound.

In combat in Vietnam, usually you couldn’t see your opponent (except when in a set ambush). However, you could hear his weapon, so you would fire toward the sound of the weapon. If anyone on your side was foolish enough to be firing an opposition weapon, he would quickly end up dead.

If later on the corpse were examined, it would be found to be riddled with “friendly fire” wounds, and this could also give rise to a “fragging” incident. (Under “ideal” conditions, an M16 entry wound was smaller than an AK47 wound). But who would bother to check?

Bottom line: many “friendly fire” incidents could be interpreted as “fragging” simply because of the circumstances under which they occurred, and because the victim was unpopular with his own men.

Personally, I can say that if I had wanted to “frag” anyone I could have done it very easily, and nobody would have known about it but me. That’s the difference between an amateur and a professional.

53

Okay, “Aussie30001”

54

I was never in Vietnam but I will definitely say that what petesally says is what makes sense to me as someone that was in the U.S. Army for over two decades.

As someone who is interested in military history I’ll also add that most famous mutiny incidents (on sea or land) didn’t happen in the heat of battle. I think it has always been the case that when a grunt has a problem with an officer in most armies in the history of the world, if they were going to try and “settle up” they didn’t do it in the middle of battle where everyone’s life was on the line.

I also imagine that interpersonal issues get magnified when people are bored. If you’re engaged in fighting, heavy marching or et cetera you simply aren’t going to have time to get pissy over the fact that your officers get better beverages at base camp than you do. A few weeks in camp and that kind of thing starts to get under your skin.

55

OTOH, I would imagine that with the less respectful attitude to authority the last few decades, any Lieutenant that tried the traditional WWI type maneuver would soon earn himself a bullet. The serious death toll from WWI was from the mistaken belief athat a full-frontal assault on a protected enemy with automatic weapons would succeed. The officers responsible for these commands usually sat well back from the front lines and did not stick their head over the trenches.

The reputation of Vietnam (not that I went, being Canadian and a little young then) was that the lieutenants were book-learned idiots. The same sort who are lower to mid level managers in large corporations today, making the typical cubicle workers’ lives hell. Apparently they were rotated in and out too fast so every aspiring career officer could ahve a turn earning “combat experience”; developed no cameraderie and were gone by the time they were experienced enough to have learned from any mistakes. Think Dilbert with live ammo…

56

I was a combat Infantry 1LT. in Vietnam, 1970-71. I knew of friends from previous duty stations who were fragged. It is correct that most fragging were in ‘rear areas’ by rear-echelon troops.
So the reasons for more fragging in Vietnam than other wars:

  1. Most fraggings were from young black soldiers against white officers and NCOs, particularly after M.L. King was killed in January 1968. Racial problems were rampant. Not so much among senior NCOs, more so among the lower ranks and young soldiers.
  2. Vietnam had an extremely high ‘support - to - in the field’ ratio. Some statistics say as high as 14 men in support to one in the field, at the HEIGHT of the war. When I was there, only 2% were in the field (1970-71). Fraggings rarely occurred in the field, where men depended on each other and acted somewhat more as ‘brothers’, regardless of race.
  3. A large percentage of young men in the Army and Marines were there because this country gave them a choice of jail or military. A horrible way to handle the nation’s woes. An easy answer for the horrible court system we had (and have), but tough to put the burden of problem youths on the leaders in war. That’s the last thing a leader in combat needs. Shame on the U.S. system. Today, it’s a much different and better military than in the Vietnam era.
57

Cites for any of the above?

58

I had an Army buddy whose Father was in Vietnam and daddy claimed to have attempted to blow up some outhouse with an Officer in it. I believe it likely did happen and it probably was more likely in the rear as people have said. His Dad also supposedly a mechanic and was taking some kind of amphetamine type of substance to keep up with the workload. I’ve heard of the soldiers in Vietnam taking heroin and stuff like that, would uppers also have been available in Vietnam?

59

I can’t answer directly but the US military supplied amphetamines in WWII, Gulf War 1 and Afghanistan*. LSLGuy talked about being given amphetamine in the 80s. So it’s likely that it was available in Vietnam. From coffee to khat to meth to amphetamine to modafinil, stimulants are a mainstay of (at least modern) war.

Stimulants can also increase aggression, decrease self-control and cause psychosis. A young man who started out with poor impulse control, is forced into a situation like Vietnam and takes a lot of speed could become unwise.
*History and culture of substituted amphetamines - Wikipedia

60

Welcome to the dope and thanks for sharing your experience and opinion. You don’t necessarily need a cite for this. It’s based on your personal experiences. I joined after Vietnam, in 1980. I was too young to serve during ‘Nam. I count myself fortunate to have served mostly during peace time and not in harm’s way during Desert Shield/Storm.