The War Within the War

A stereo set was blaring in an enlisted men's hootch shortly after midnight as two majors from the 5th Mechanized Division made their rounds of the U.S. Army camp in South Viet Nam's Quang Tri province. The officers stopped at the hootch and told the five black G.I.s to turn down the music. Defiantly, one of the men turned the stereo up full blast; angrily, one of the officers yanked out the plug. Five pistol shots rang out. Major Michael Davis of Bennetsville, S.C., managed to drag himself to a first-aid station. There was no helping Major Robert Degen of Buffalo who lay dead in front of the hootch.

Last week the Army formally charged a young Floridian, Specialist 4 Alfred B.W. Flint, 24, with murder and attempted murder in the shootings at Quang Tri.

G.I.s have a more informal and morally neutral term for such incidents--"fragging," a word derived from the fragmentation grenades that Americans often use against one another in Viet Nam. Over the past 18 months, as combat with the enemy has diminished, the term and the chilling genre of violence it connotes have become a fact of life and death among the 332,500 troops remaining in Viet Nam.

Along with drugs, insubordination and racial tension in the barracks, fragging is part of a mosaic of disintegrating discipline in Viet Nam that is disturbing the highest echelons of the Pentagon. Only 18 months ago, every general worth his stars was complaining that troops were being withdrawn too fast. Now, officers from Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland on down are known to be arguing that they are not being pulled out fast enough. "If we are going to have to fight it as we are now," a Pentagon general said last week, "then Jet's get everyone out as fast as possible. We're just murdering ourselves sitting there."

Sometimes that is quite literally the case. No one knows how common fraggings are. Major General James Baldwin, commander of the Americal Division, concedes that it is "a very significant problem." So serious, in fact, that fragmentation grenades are no longer issued to G.I.s going on bunker guard duty at the Americal Division's base camp at Chu Lai.

Tightening Up. In front-line companies, soldiers tell of "bounties" ranging from $50 to $1,000 being offered to the G.I. who will get rid of a "gung-ho" officer--one who is too eager for combat or too much of a stickler for trilling rules. A "stray" M-16 round during a firefight might do it; recently a company commander was run down and killed by one of his own armored personnel carriers.

Fraggings are more frequent in rear areas, where boredom peaks and morale plunges. In most cases, to hear the grunts tell it, an overzealous officer or noncommissioned officer gets two warnings before he is done in. First, a harmless smoke grenade is rolled under his bunk. Next comes a CS tear-gas grenade. Then comes the more lethal stuff. By now, stories of such incidents are so common that in many units officers are running scared, and there is no longer any reason for G.I.s to terrorize them. Says a young trooper with the 198th Infantry Brigade at Chu Lai: "We haven't had a fragging in maybe four or five months. We've got our officers tightened up!"

Often, racial tensions will set off a fragging. In Nha Trang last week. 4th Infantry Division Private Willie Clayborne Jr. went on trial for the murder of a white sergeant. For some time Clayborne had felt "hassled" by whites in general. Last September he grabbed his M16, put it on automatic and gunned down the sergeant and two other soldiers in three quick bursts. As he fired, he repeatedly screamed "Lifer!"--a derisive term for a career soldier.

Not long ago, a white sergeant caught a black Marine dozing on perimeter guard duty at Danang. The sergeant grabbed the sleeping grunt by the throat and told him: "If I were a V.C., you would be dead." That night the Marine lobbed a grenade into the sergeant's hootch, killing him and sending two other NCOs to hospitals in Japan.

Deadly Choppers. Fragging is only part of a problem confronting an Army that no longer has any real mission but to survive. Last October, for the first time in the long history of the war, casualties inflicted by the enemy were lower than casualties caused by accidents, disease and other factors. In the past ten years, 9,091 Americans have been listed as nonhostile fatalities v. 44,268 killed in action. Battle casualties continue to subside; last week's total of 27 dead was the lowest weekly total in five years. But over the past year the Army's mortality rate per 10,000 troops from nonhostile causes has risen by 27%, from 10.4 to 13.2. What is most disturbing is that the rate was increasing just as overall troop strength was being reduced.

Next to the Viet Cong, the helicopter has been the greatest threat G.I.s have had to face in Viet Nam; chopper mishaps account for most of the 2,448 Americans killed in air accidents over the past decade in Southeast Asia. In the last three months of 1970, aircraft accidents were the chief cause of noncombat deaths (91), ahead of mishaps with "friendly" mines and other explosive devices (39), auto accidents (30), suicides (18) and accidental gunshot wounds (17). But the fastest-rising cause of noncombat deaths is drug abuse. In 1969, the Army did not even bother to tabulate drug deaths, they were so rare. But from October to December last year, 29 soldiers died as a direct result of overdoses.

The Pentagon yearns for the time, perhaps mid-1973, when the Vietnamization program enters Phase III and the U.S. presence can be trimmed to a taut, all-volunteer force of about 40,000 troops, technicians and advisers. For now, however, the Army is trying to devise ways of convincing the troops that they still have a significant mission in Viet Nam. Under a proposed "fire-brigade program," for instance, one Army brigade in each corps area will stand ready to bail out South Vietnamese forces that get into trouble.

Whether such artifices will work is questionable. As one G.I. from the 5th Mechanized Division put it, "We are the unwilling doing the unwanted for the ungrateful." The Army may not be able to turn such attitudes around very much or very soon. The simple fact is that it is hard to exhort soldiers to fight a war that even the Pentagon wants to write off as fast as possible.

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