five African Americans and one Mexican American.56 This dearth of minority authors was probably due to the overrepresentation of officers and college graduates in the pool of eligible candidates. During the war years, only a small percentage of the officer corps was nonwhite and, prior to the 1970s, the number of minorities who graduated from college lagged far behind that of the white population.57
The draft struck fear into the hearts of many young men during the war, and the statistics show that their apprehensions were not unfounded. Draftees accounted for about a third of all the troops who served in Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1970, the percentage of American soldiers killed in Southeast Asia who were draftees steadily rose from 16 to 43 percent. In the US Army, the military branch in which most draftees served, the yearly death rates for draftees were even higher, topping out at 62 percent in 1969.58 But these figures do not tell the whole story. Many young men, preferring to have some degree of control over their fates, or believing that volunteering lessened the chances of going to Vietnam, enlisted rather than waiting to be drafted. Almost half of the respondents to a 1968 Defense Department survey of army volunteers said that the “most important reason” for their enlistments was to avoid the draft.59 This was true not just for enlisted men, but also for officers: 60 percent of all the officers who volunteered in 1968 signed up because of the draft.60
“Draft-motivated” enlistees comprised another third of all the troops who served in Vietnam. The remaining third were “true volunteers,”61 although this phrase is somewhat misleading, for the great majority of them did not enlist to help the South Vietnamese fight Communist aggression. Only 6 percent of the respondents to the Department of Defense survey said they signed up to “serve [their] country,” with the rest (besides the draft-motivated respondents) citing sundry other reasons, including “to become more mature and self-reliant,” “to leave some personal problems behind me,” and “to learn a trade.”62 John Helmer, as part of his study of Vietnam veterans, Bringing the War Home, asked true volunteers for the primary reason they enlisted. The number one response was “nothing else to do.”63
Veteran-authors differed significantly from average combat GIs when it came to how they joined the military, for only seven out of fifty-one were draftees. As for why the authors joined the military, almost half signed up before the war had even started, so Vietnam played no part in their decision. Those who did join during the war, however, were also dissimilar to regular combat troops because many cited intensely personal reasons for volunteering. A few, such as W. D. Ehrhart, signed up specifically to fight Communism. A true believer who wanted to help South Vietnam in its moment of peril, he forsook college to join the Marine Corps.64 Many more said they joined out of a general sense of patriotism, to prove their manhood, carry on family traditions, or to fulfill some other noble goal or desire. Michael Norman volunteered for the marines in 1966 because “history was unfolding and [he] had an urge to be a part of it.”65 Charles R. Anderson told his parents he enlisted because he wanted to repay his country for all the freedoms it had given him.66
Several memoirists say that the draft factored into their decision to enlist, but most attest that other more profound reasons also propelled them. Rod Kane enlisted because a recruiter convinced him not to wait to be drafted, but he also wanted to emulate his Korean War veteran uncle.67 Nathaniel Tripp says in his memoir, Father, Soldier, Son, that the “draft board was closing in” at the time of his enlistment. But he also “burned for a new adventure” and was inspired to volunteer after a friend was killed in Vietnam.68
Now that it is clear what types of Americans fought in Vietnam, what was combat like for these troops? The Vietnam conflict was famously a war without frontlines, so it was possible for any American in South Vietnam to fall victim to an enemy attack. The Vietcong ambushed infantry platoons in the jungle, but they also lobbed mortar shells onto airbases and planted explosives in jeeps parked outside restaurants. During the 1968 Tet Offensive, Vietcong fighters attacked American forces throughout South Vietnam, including troops stationed in Saigon, the supposedly safe capital city.69 Van Devanter, who served as a nurse in an army hospital, was told on her first day in Vietnam, to her shock, that the Vietcong considered all Americans legitimate targets, including women.70
Even if all US personnel in Vietnam were theoretically at risk of being attacked, most lived and worked in relatively safe areas referred to as “the rear” by GIs. Clerks, truck drivers, and other support troops, labeled “REMFs” (“rear echelon mother fuckers”) by resentful infantrymen, were needed to maintain America’s massive military machine. Approximately 75 percent of US military personnel in Vietnam served in noncombat positions. Most memoirists, however, saw heavy combat. Veteran narratives, consequently, along with movies and novels, suggest that average Vietnam tours mostly consisted of patrols in Vietcong-infested jungles or days-long battles with the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Many GIs did live lives of danger and hardship, but most were provided with a level of “comfort unparalleled in military history.”71 Thus, it is the so-called REMFs who experienced the most typical Vietnam tour.72
Unlike the majority of GIs in Vietnam, however, most memoirists directly participated in the fighting. That being said, how do their battlefield experiences compare to those of ordinary combat troops? The importance of this information is highlighted by the massive post-1990 output of cheap paperback Vietnam War novels, biographies, and memoirs that focused on the exploits of elite combat outfits. If readers got all of their information about the war from these types of books they might think that practically every soldier in Vietnam belonged to a group like the Army Special Forces (“Green Berets”) or the Navy SEALs. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, since such soldiers represented only a miniscule percentage of combat personnel.73
A little under half of the fifty-one memoirists belonged to select units like the Green Berets, or were involved in other atypical combat activities, such as the veteran who worked as an advisor to US allies in a remote Vietnamese village.74 Nine of these atypical veterans were former combat pilots who flew bombing missions over North Vietnam. One of these ex-fliers, Arizona senator John McCain, notes the difference between air combat, which was “fought in short, violent bursts,” and the experiences of infantrymen who “slog[ged] through awful conditions and danger for months on end.”75 He and the other ten pilot-memoirists were also members of the tiny minority of American servicemen who were prisoners of war during the conflict.76 The war POWs lived through was certainly nightmarish, but it bore little resemblance to the ordeals faced by foot soldiers.
About half of the authors, on the other hand, fought as Army or Marine Corps infantrymen, and most served only one tour in Vietnam. Crucially, this group was composed exclusively of either low-ranking enlisted men or junior officers. Field and general-grade officers spent much of their time in the rear, with access to “air conditioned billets with movie theaters, swimming pools, and officer’s clubs.”77 Junior officers, conversely, served alongside their men, and had the high casualty rates to prove it.78 Two authors who fought as junior officers, Downs and Puller Jr., sustained major wounds while on patrol with their platoons. Downs’s arm was blown off when he stepped on a “Bouncing Betty” landmine,79 and Puller lost both legs when he triggered a buried, booby-trapped artillery shell planted by the Vietcong.80 Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage contend that officers “must be perceived as willing to share the risks and sacrifices of battle” to be effective leaders.81 Senior officers in Vietnam, in their opinion, utterly failed to meet this standard, but Puller, Downs, and many others like them demonstrated that the same cannot be said of junior officers.82
Just as important as what memoirists did in Vietnam is how long they served in the military, because there are major differences between the points of view of short-term soldiers and professionals. Enlisted men and officers who stay in the armed forces for a short amount of time are “citizen soldiers” who put their normal lives on hold while they serve their country. Despite the training and indoctrination
