Mission Impossible?

By Keith R. Johnson

MILITARY MEN by Ward Just. 256 pages, Knopf. $6.95.

What ever happened to the U.S. Army that once fought popular wars and always seemed to win Total Victory? Gone is the glory of Normandy, the Bulge and Okinawa--battles in which, Ward Just recalls, there were "real heroes fighting real villains." In 1971, the Army is painfully on the defensive at home and in full psychological retreat in Viet Nam. Assessing the present plight of the military in an acute if contentious book, the Washington Post's former Viet Nam correspondent finds not a juggernaut but a jumble of men and machines in search of a mission.

As Just tells it, the Army is obsessed with the idea that it is not responsible for the Viet Nam fiasco and, like the French army before it, blames the whole mess on civilian leaders. A senior general in Viet Nam told Just: "I will be damned if I will permit the U.S. Army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war." But it is precisely the current effectiveness of the Army's institutions, doctrine and traditions that Just calls into question.

Like Foreigners. A basic problem is a shift in attitude toward soldiering in general. At West Point, which a young Pentagon lieutenant colonel irreverently calls "the first station of the cross" for Army hierarchy, some officers still see the service as the sole bulwark against national rot. But many of the cadets quickly shed their uniforms for civvies once they get home on leave, and explain to dates that they go to "an upstate New York college, or the U. Va., some place like that."

Today only 5% of Army officers are West Pointers. The rest get direct commissions, come from ROTC, or make their way up from the ranks through Officer Candidate School. According to one senior officer, "the bastards at Harvard wouldn't fight, wouldn't step up to their responsibilities. They got their deferments and left the war to the least competent people."

Field commanders complain that soldiers lack aggressiveness and sometimes even refuse to fight. One colonel said that some of his men were "like foreigners," speaking a language utterly different from his own. The military's new efforts to relax unnecessarily rigid discipline and humanize the whole system (TIME cover, Dec. 21) may reduce this generation gap somewhat, but it is not only the enlisted men who find the Army wanting. A wonderfully articulate major, who read Timon of Athens during a slow day in Viet Nam, confided to his diary: "Once I was sure that whoever would be a good soldier must be an educated man. Slowly I shift from that conviction. An 'educated man'--in my terms--becomes disenchanted with an enterprise which cannot truly enlist his abilities, his experience, what he has in his heart of hearts."

Low Intensity. For a career officer, playing it safe is the way to get promotion in today's Army of organization men, perhaps even more than in the past. The derring-do Green Berets, for example, are often derisively referred to in the service as "green beanies," and looked upon as oddballs. Flamboyance and originality are mistrusted.

Modern weaponry has become immensely complex. Yet, according to Just, many of the generals seem to be preoccupied with the unlikely possibility that the next war will be a happily orthodox crunch against the mechanized Soviet army on the plains of Europe. Brigadier General Samuel V. Wilson has been wrestling with the Army's role, and he confesses: "We haven't learned how to wage that which will be the most likely form of war in the coming decades"--the Viet Nam-style actions that he studiedly calls "low-intensity warfare."

Unhappily, Just comes to no conclusions of his own about the ways in which military force may have to be applied in the 1970s--or about how the U.S. Army might better prepare itself. His gift is descriptive, not analytical; the book is a fascinating piece of journalism, larded with nicely observed vignettes and informed by an unusual empathy for the military man.

Classically, armies are most effective when the issue underlying a war is simple and dramatic, and in a social climate where authority and discipline are easily accepted. Viet Nam is only the most obvious reason why those conditions no longer exist for the U.S. and the world. Just makes no attempt to resolve what may be an unanswerable question: in the complex, chaotic America of today, can a citizen's army really work?

Keith R. Johnson

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