teens and officers in their mid-twenties, however, was wider than it seems. Broyles argues in his memoir, Brothers in Arms, that “impressionable, immature” teenage soldiers, probably “away from home for the first time,” were affected by the war differently than men only a few years older.24 His assertion is supported by the experiences of memoirist Bruce Weigl, who was forever scarred by the swift, jarring transition from naïve teenager to army foot soldier.25 There are no real counterparts to Weigl’s brutal coming-of-age story in the memoirs of former officers.
The fighting force sent to Vietnam was not just youthful, but also economically disadvantaged. Appy estimates that the “enlisted ranks in Vietnam were comprised of about 25 percent poor, 55 percent working class, and 20 percent middle class, with a statistically negligible number of wealthy.”26 This situation was largely the result of a draft system, dubbed “channeling” by the Selective Service,27 designed to steer draft-aged men “in directions that served the national interest.”28 The most common and significant manifestation of this system was the draft exemption given to college students, a policy designed to give “the next generation of doctors, scientists, and engineers” the chance to complete their educations.29 Since most low-income Americans could not afford college during the Vietnam era, middle- and upper-class men were the primary beneficiaries of this policy.30 Men of more privileged backgrounds were also better equipped to take advantage of other means used to avoid the draft, such as obtaining phony medical exemptions or joining the National Guard.31
The benefits of class and education did not disappear when recruits, draftees and volunteers alike, entered the armed forces. After basic training, Pentagon computers assigned recruits to occupational specialties according to their education levels, how they performed on intelligence and aptitude tests, and other relevant criteria.32 Personnel “with above-average aptitude or ability were . . . assigned special functions, often far from the combat zone.”33 Well-educated recruits, furthermore, were “skimmed out of the manpower pool by officers who wanted reliable clerks, messengers, servants, or other helpers.”34 Soldiers “of lesser talents,” conversely, were regularly slated for infantry training, which increased the likelihood of seeing combat.35 Because low-income recruits had comparatively substandard educations, many fared poorly on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), the intelligence test that partly determined a soldier’s MOS.36 Since only a small percentage of Americans from underprivileged backgrounds went to college, fewer GIs from such circumstances were assigned to technical and clerical positions ordinarily staffed by college graduates.
What, then, was the class makeup of the memoirists? Considering the prohibitive expense of higher education in mid-twentieth-century America, education level is a good way to answer this question.37 Of all the troops who went to Vietnam, 18 percent were high school dropouts, 59 percent high school graduates, 15 percent attended college from one to three years, and 8 percent attended college four or more years.38 The overall education statistics for the fifty-one memoirists are glaringly unrepresentative of this reality: five were high school dropouts, ten were high school graduates, eleven attended college but did not graduate, and twenty-three—almost half—were college graduates.39 This overrepresentation of college graduates is a direct result of the preponderance of officers in the study, since a college degree was generally required to obtain a commission.
Over half of the former officers in the study had college degrees before entering the military, indicating that many of them hailed from backgrounds significantly more privileged than those of ordinary combat troops. Only a few of these individuals, however, graduated from elite civilian universities, the US Military Academy (“West Point”), or the US Naval Academy. A closer look at the backgrounds of the college graduates confirms that most were hardly the sons and daughters of the upper class. Caputo points out that his family had “just recently struggled out of the working class,” and that his degree came from “a parochial commuter-college.”40 Colin Powell, future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State, grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Hunts Point in the Bronx, New York, and graduated from City College of New York (CCNY).41 Everett Alvarez, a former fighter pilot and prisoner of war, paid for college with money his mother earned working in a produce packing plant.42
Aside from the few authors who attended military academies, all the former officers who graduated from college before entering the military obtained their commissions through completion of either the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program or Officer Candidate School (OCS). ROTC cadets undertook officer training while still in college and received their commissions upon graduation. Those who took the other route enlisted in the military after graduation and were rewarded with commissions upon completion of OCS. There were other ways to become an officer that did not require a college degree, and thirteen of the former officers used one of these methods. OCS was the most common means used by GIs without college degrees to obtain a commission. Although college graduates were preferred, OCS was open to all enlisted men who met the necessary qualifications.43 Six authors, ranging in education level from less than four years of high school to a few years of college, became officers through this method. The nine other former officers without premilitary college degrees obtained commissions through other less common means, including graduating from an “aviation cadet program,” earning a “field commission,” or joining the US Army Nurse Corps.
Since West Point produced relatively few officers and participation in ROTC programs plunged as the war progressed, about 50 percent of all the junior army officers who served in Vietnam were OCS graduates.44 With so many non-college-educated men and women obtaining commissions through OCS or other means, it is likely that the Vietnam-era officer corps was composed of a substantial number of people from poor or working-class backgrounds.45 Several of the thirteen former officers without college degrees validate this assumption. Tobias Wolff was raised by a single mother, a secretary who worked nights as a waitress. When he joined the army in the mid-1960s, he was a teenage high school dropout. After basic training, however, Wolff went on to complete airborne school, Special Forces training, and finally, OCS.46 Another memoirist, Frederick Downs, grew up on a farm in Indiana and only completed a couple years of college before he enlisted in the army, but he also made it through OCS and became an officer.47
Although the great majority of authors were not from truly wealthy backgrounds, most nevertheless apparently came from the middle class. The disproportionately large number of memoirists with college degrees is one indication of this,48 but many veterans also provide other clues in descriptions of their pre-Vietnam lives. Authors regularly describe growing up in comfortable surroundings, often in the suburbs, and usually with at least one parent holding a secure, well-paying job. Joseph Callaway’s father worked in a “prestigious, major, advertising firm,”49 and Robert Mason’s father sold real estate for a living.50 Lynda Van Devanter describes her childhood as “middle-class suburban.”51 Even the relatively few memoirists who were raised in unambiguously working-class households sometimes describe their childhoods as stable and carefree. Ron Kovic, for instance, grew up in a working-class suburb, and his father worked in a supermarket. He nevertheless describes his prewar life as an idyllic world of baseball games, John Wayne movies, and parades.52 The prewar lives of low-income men who ended up in Vietnam, however, were not usually so untroubled.53 They were instead “full of very adult concerns: money, jobs, and survival.”54
Class was the most important factor in determining who saw combat in Vietnam, but race also came into play. Like whites in the same economic circumstances, impoverished African Americans were vulnerable to military and draft policies that favored better-educated groups. In the earliest phases of the war, the number of African Americans killed in Vietnam was greatly out of proportion to their overall share of the US population.55 Less information about other nonwhite groups is available, but it is likely that some, especially Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans, also shouldered more than their fair share of the fighting. Considering the inordinate sacrifices made by
