I’ve heard from several sources about a practice allegedly used in the US army during the Vietnam war and possibly during the Second World War as well. It’s called “fragging”, is done by the grunts to an officer they dislike (too cruel, too stupid…) and somehow involves a fragmentation grenade. I’ve heard at least four different descriptions of what this practice is:
A few grunts grab hold of the officer in question and hold a fizzing grenade in front of his face. The grenade, presumably, does not explode.
A grenade is thrown into the officer’s quarters when he’s not there. It explodes, leaving a permanent impression.
A fizzing grenade is thrown into the officer’s quarters when he’s there. It does not explode.
A grenade is thrown into the officer’s quarters when he’s there and explodes, killing him.
1 is strange, given that retaliation would be a certainty since the officer presumably knew who grabbed him. 4 is even more so, since I’d say the officer has to be pretty damned cruel before his men kill him. 2 and 3… OK, I suppose it can happen to a severely disliked officer.
Has anyone else heard of this? Does anyone know what the correct method was/is?
All of the rigorous references (of which none yet seems definitive) I can find seem to be talking about assassination of a disliked officer, implying definition 4.
But it may be that all of the sources I’m reading are simply repeating each other.
It’s use in popluar culture (e.g.: Animal House and Twilight Zone: The Movie) indicates #4. In the first, we learn “Niedermeyer was killed in Vietnam by his own troops.” This lead to John Landis having his characters talk about fragging Niedermeyer in Twilight Zone.
I got all the definitions I list from popular culture. I remember Kurt Vonnegut mentioning #1 in a book; not sure where the others came from. I almost expected the whole thing to turn out to be a myth, since I’d never heard about it from any non-fiction source. You’d think one of all the war documentaries I’ve seen would mention it, but no such luck.
I guess the derivation of the word is from the grenade, as you’ve decribed (esp. #4), but more generally it just came to mean killing your superior, by whatever means. I think generally they just did it out in the field (not in his quarters).
Priceguy, I don’t have a source for the word derivation, but my source for the meaning of the word is 1) I remember the general usage of the word at the time (I guess I’m older than you), and 2) talks with my ex-husband, who is a Vietnam vet.
In a conversation with a vet, he told me that soldiers had taken out (shot) officers during firefights. They’d wait until actual combat with the Cong and then shoot their own officer. Under those circumstances it was near impossible to discern what had actually happened. He didn’t imply that it was common, just that it did happen.
In battle it’s difficult to tell what is deliberate and what is accidental. A percentage of the fatalities in a battle will be from actions of fellow soldiers. Therefore, the term “killed by friendly fire”. Right now we have military on trial for accidently killing Canadians in Afghanastan.
Therefore, nobody will ever know how many despised officers were “fragged” in Vietnam. Troop morale had declined drastically in Vietnam and many experienced soldiers just wanted to do their tour and get out alive. Unfortunately, they were sometimes being led by inexperienced officers (fresh ROTC grads) that really didn’t know what they were doing on the battlefield. Undoubtedly, some of these officers got “fragged” by guys who thought they were being led to their death. How many, when, where? It will probably always remain a guess and the guys that did it certainly aren’t likely to be talking.
The term frag might be new, but I would hazard a guess that grunts have been killing despised officers in the chaos of combat since the dawn of organized armies.
Fragging by any other term has a long and ignoble history.
Emperor Darius III was killed by one of his own satraps after the defeat of his army by Alexander the Great at Gaugamela.
Perdiccas, one of the successors to Alexander the Great, was murdered by his own troops while trying to invade Ptolemaic Egypt.
Perhaps most entertaining is the death of a Gallic “Emperor” in 269 A.C.E., who was killed by his own troops after successfully defeating a rebellious army and then refusing to allow his troops to sack the town of Moguntiacum. His name? Postumus.
(I hope nobody figures out to send a hand grenade by e-mail.)
It should be pointed out that a grenade does not necessarily have to kill him, and in fact some explosives are designed to wound rather than kill (A wounded soldier is a greater drain on the enemy tan a dead one). All you’re really aiming for is some shrapnel in his butt so he gets replaced.
Or for that matter, just scare him enough so he asks for a transfer.
It happened quite a bit in Vietnam. I wish I still had my notes, but apparently something like 140 officer deaths in Vietnam were reported as ‘suspicious’, but as has been noted here already, it’s hard to prove intentional friendly fire. The main reason it was so high in Vietnam as compared to other wars was that the tour of duty for an enlisted man was a year while the tour of duty for an officer was half a year. Obviously, this led to many situations where the soldiers knew way more than their officers. There was contempt and fear of officers to a degree never seen before. Throw in the fact that we could for the first time ever assemble troops for a battle in a day, creating a scenario where soldiers could go from battle to battle instantly, rather than having the months of rest that they did in previous wars, and a complete lack of understanding as to why they were fighting in some tiny little country they’d never heard of, and all of the sudden, the average soldier’s stress level is understandably high enough to kill an officer deemed incompetent.
The preferred method, as I’ve been told, was rolling a frag grenade under the officer’s cot while he slept. I have to imagine that’s not true though, as it seems that’d be way easier to label as murder than if he were to get shot in the heat of battle.
I have never served in the military, and I certainly do not know any thing about war. But, my two bits, says that if you have an incompetent officer, in a prolonged battle like Vietnam, you have to get rid of him or you will probably die. Hence, if I had to kill my commanding officer, I would do it with a captured enemy weapon, of which there were plenty in Vietnam, and I would do it any way possible. I would not limit myself to American made, fragmentation grenades.
