One of the hazards of being Santa Claus in a library is that one sees all sorts of interesting items in between promises for Barbie dolls and AK-47s. I happened to run across Rick Atkinson's Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966 in the Forreston Public Library. This is just a wonderful book. Based on scores of interviews, Atkinson spent 10 years gathering material. The reader gets to know the pains and pleasures (very few indeed) of 4 years at West Point. The class becomes a microcosm of American society for the next 20 years as many of the officers suffer the same agonies and worries as their countrymen. Atkinson describes the revolution that Kennedy tried to foment in the officer corps. In his address to West Point in 1962, Kennedy referred obliquely to the war in southeast Asia as a new kind of war with insurgents, assassins, ambushes and an enemy seeking to win by exhaustion rather than engagement. Kennedy wanted the new officers to be as much diplomats as soldiers, particularly to be nation builders. After Vietnam, an American officer said to his Vietnamese counterpart: "You know you never beat us in battle." To which the other replied, "That's true, it's also irrelevant." West Point resisted the change. They were used to creating a fighter who gave no quarter and who won by massive firepower. Yet the army desperately needed a new mission in the atomic age so counter-insurgency techniques were a godsend yet these proficiencies were virtually unknown. In 1951, a senator asked Omar Bradley if the army had learned anything new fighting in North Korea. His reply was that "we have certainly been up against one type of warfare we never had before, and that is the guerilla type, in which you have infiltration of your lines by large groups." Military historians were stunned. The 19th century army had destroyed a whole continent of gorilla fighters, often by fighting unconventionally; they had successfully defeated the Tagaloos in the Philippines, not to mention the British in the late 18th century. West Point Superintendent Dave Richard Palmer wrote, "The army corporate memory was little more than one generation long, stretching back no further than the experiences of the men in it."The impact of Vietnam on the corps was tremendous. The contrast between the strict honor code of the Point and the mendacity of the army in the field: lying on readiness reports and digging up graves to inflate body counts. Ironically, the first class of '66 graduate to die became a metaphor for the war. His own rifle killed him when he became mired in mud and handed his M-16 to a soldier butt first without the safety on. The soldier accidentally hit the trigger and Frank Rybecki died in a hail of his own bullets. The number of soldiers killed by friendly fire was astonishing. In the book's most intense section we watch several '66 graduates maneuver their troops up hill 875, 6 of the 8 classmates in the battalion were to become casualties. One died as a jet flew the wrong trajectory and dropped his bomb in the middle of Company C killing 42 and wounding all the rest. Paradoxically, the hill was then evacuated after finally being taken. The West Point chaplain's story is particularly poignant as he presides over an increasing number of funerals of boys whose weddings he had officiated at not too many months before. Atkinson follows the class through Grenada and Panama and for many into their civilian careers. An interesting tidbit: Battle fatigue causalities (acute environmental reaction -- which I always thought was something parents suffered from) was much lower in Vietnam (2-3%) than in WW II (20-30%). A WW II study found that soldiers reached peak efficiency at 90 days of combat and that after 200-240 days the value of battle-hardened men to their units became negligible. That was the reason for one-year tours in Vietnam.
