An old college prof told my class many moons ago that if you survived your first six weeks in Vietnam, you had a very high probability of making it home alive.
His explanation was that young kids, fresh out of basic training still tended not to follow the rules and various other safety tips and ended up being killed at a far higher rate that men who had been on the ground for a while.
Does anyone know if anything about this is even remotely true?
I’ve heard something along the same lines, and it seems reasonable. I don’t know if the Army ever studied or released figures that would tell for sure.
The men I know who served there said the same thing, but with less of blaming the victim. They said that for people who had been there longer, survival (for everyone in the unit) was the objective, not the military or political objective of the mission.
The rules and safety tips the new guys didn’t follow were not things they were taught in basic, but practices that would ensure survival of the troops.
Most of these men served in the later years of the war.
If the implication is that this was new to the Vietnam War, no, it was not. Otherwise, yes.
Naturally inexperienced soldiers are more likely to make mistakes and get killed than experienced ones, this has been true for the whole of military history. What makes you doubt it?
I would presume that if you’re assigned to a supply unit or somewhere far away from the action, most likely you’re going to survive that first six weeks and go on to survive the whole tour. I wonder if they factored in that aspect of it.
Nonsense. The longer you stay in a dangerous environment, the greater your chances of getting in harm’s way. Not every death was caused by a mistake or foolishness.
Were the new guys sent out front more often? Or is that bullshit?
I think you’ve grossly misunderstood the claim. The professor was claiming that the fresh troops died at a much higher rate. Obviously, with extended time in conflict, your overall chance of being killed goes up, but there’s no reason that the distribution of deaths wouldn’t be skewed towards the beginning of battle.
In other words, the first day is the most dangerous one.
This is similar to something I’ve heard about World War II, where the US Army’s replacement policy of adding fresh troops straight from the States into units in the line of battle caused veterans to avoid the ‘green’ recruits who were more likely to do something stupid that would get one of them killed. That made it difficult for the recruits to get started and the older troops to accept them as a part of the unit.
Does anyone know if what I wrote above is true?
Right. That’s how my Bro and his freinds survived; non-frontline combat.
According to my Dad the WWII vet, if you were in front-line combat, then being experienced helped a lot. Examples being: birds flying suddenly, no bird songs at all, the odd sound of a motar round coming right at you (he was in the jungle in New Guinia)- all these things would be second nature after you had lived through them once or twice. A veteran would hit cover while the newb was still scratching his head.
Still, even if you hit cover, a direct hit could still get you.
My father was also a WWII vet, on the front line in Germany. He was driving a jeep along an empty road when something seemed wrong – it was “too quiet.” He slowed down to reduce engine noise so he could listen, and almost immediately, a mortar exploded in the road directly in front of him. They’d had him lined up and timed almost perfectly, except that something suddenly “felt wrong” to him, and it saved his life. As I recall, his unit spent the longest continuous time at the front of any in the war, since they were advancing through Germany too fast for reinforcements to replace them.
He also, BTW, had NO tolerance for anyone glorifying war or combat in any way.
Yep, sounds familiar. And you can also tell a real combat vet by that- they will tell you endless stories about boot camp, sadistic DI’s, horrible food, their buddies and SNAFU’s- but try to pry real combat stories out of them is tough. Posers and wannabe’s are always talking combat-* but they haven’t seen any.
*
I’ve never been close to war, but a similar thing happens when I travel. For the first few hours in a new place you are a marked man for hustlers and pick pockets. After a while you get used to the rhythm of a place and stop being so conspicuously non-native.
I studied the percentage Army killed in Viet Nam by grade/rank.
The rank of “recruit” is E-1, and virtually no Army “e-1”'s died in Viet Nam. E-1 is also the punitive rank, when you get busted down.
E-2, Private in the Army, PFC in the Marines, would be the lowest rank of a combat soldier in Viet Nam as described by the OP – right out of training, into the fray.
Interestingly, E-2’s were only 1.3 percent of Army deaths (all deaths, including accidents and disease. Viet Nam had about 47K combat deaths, and about 11k from other causes – disease, accidents, suicide, murder, drugs, etc.)
The highest percentage were E-3 and E-4’s,(about 25 % E-3 and 35% E-4) which combined accounted for about 60% of all deaths. I think to be an E-3 or E-4, you had been in longer than “right out of basic and into the bush”.
E-5’s, Sergeants or SPC 5, were about 16% of deaths.
A statistical analysis at least casts doubt on the theory. I served right after Viet Nam and served with lots of VN vets. Here is what I picked up anecdotally: A newbie being killed was very notable (as was that of a short timer). New guys would make their big first (and last) mistakes on patrol, but combat units usually did not want to send new guys on patrol lest they get everyone killed. New guys were typically assigned to Fire Base perimeter defense, etc., until they were acclimated. This is all only anecdotal and refers only to Marines, but it supports the statistics.
You’re throwing “always” around a little carelessly.
I think it depends on the person - some people are more likely to reminisce while others aren’t.
This guy certainly wasn’t afraid to talk about what he did in the Marine Corps - he told those stories for sixty years. Notice what he’s wearing around his neck in those photos.
This notion about combat veterans always being reticent about their experiences isn’t much borne out by hanging around them and listening to stories that run the gamut. I think it is true that some guys with relatively undistinguished records will gild the lily from time to time, but that’s as much as I can glean from it. Specific cases of severe embellishment and fraud can always be found as well - again, I don’t know if these point to a general trend or just jerkish behavior from a few people.
Steven Ambrose wrote almost exactly the same thing in several of his books about WWII in Europe. He thought the Army’s policy of putting green recruits into established units engaged in combat was very wrong, and caused many additional casualties.
On the other hand, had the Army created entirely new formations out of recruits, we’d now be talking about how dumb it was for them to do that and not expose recruits to experienced soldiers.
As for the notion that veterans who’ve seen combat don’t want to talk about it, I call bullshit. I think it varies on the individual, but most I’ve talked to seemed to want to tell stories to make your ears fall off. Both my grandfathers were combat veterans, and I do mean combat, and lots of it; my peternal grandfather was a fighter pilot who shot down V-1s and strafed German trains, was shot down in Holland and spend five months fighting with the Dutch resistance, starving and eating grass and roots while he shot Nazis. My maternal grandfather flew thirty-five combat missions in a Halifax bomber, watching wingmen shot down from both sides on pretty much every mission, shot down a Bf-109 with his nose gun and saw men being cleaned from their gun turrets with hoses and towels. When he moved to Germany to work for NATO in the early 50’s and saw the bombed-out cities he’d attacked, he cried. Both saw a lot of horrifying shit, but they still liked to talk about it.
I get this too. I had an uncle who was a Battle of the Bulge veteran, and while he was a modest man who wouldn’t volunteer to tell stories, he wouldn’t shy away from answering almost any question. And he liked to socialize with other veterans a lot - he went to reunions regularly, and the stories flowed there more freely than the liquor, which was saying quite a lot.
I had another uncle who was a destroyer sailor in the Pacific during WWII, and you wouldn’t even have to ask him to come out of his shell to hear about any of it.
I don’t know where this notion came from that “real” veterans don’t talk about their service, but it has become pretty widespread on the strength of no evidence whatsoever, and plenty to the contrary.
It’s mostly bullshit perpetrated by posers and wanabees who want to seem like “real” veterens but don’t have any real stories to tell and don’t want their bullshit called on. 
the raw data is interesting. However by itself it means little, until one knows the
(i) total number of each serving at each level, and where (combat, semicomat, supplies etc
(ii) total time served
(ii) how many E3s and over were experienced combat soldiers or inexperienced career soldiers etc
