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Vietnam War going out to war process


godfrey811
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I was kind of curious about the process of how US citizens who were drafted to the front line in the Vietnam War went from their homes to fighting. Were they picked up in trucks and then flown to Vietnam? How much training was given and was that given in the US first? And how exactly did they get to the front line? Are they flown there? Do they have base camps that they return to or do they stay out on the front line for a long time? 

I know a lot of these questions would sound pretty stupid but I'm not really sure how it worked back then and was wondering how the random people being drafted to the infantry coped.

Any insight would be very appreciated.

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Are... you talking about the logistics of getting soldiers over to Vietnam during the Vietnam War? I'd likely put my money on the majority of US troops and supplies coming in by navy. There's a really good reason why most of the stuff transported internationally across the world goes by sea. Planes are just too expensive and small to fly in armies. 

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On ‎9‎/‎25‎/‎2018 at 4:28 PM, godfrey811 said:

I was kind of curious about the process of how US citizens who were drafted to the front line in the Vietnam War went from their homes to fighting. Were they picked up in trucks and then flown to Vietnam? How much training was given and was that given in the US first? And how exactly did they get to the front line? Are they flown there? Do they have base camps that they return to or do they stay out on the front line for a long time? 

I know a lot of these questions would sound pretty stupid but I'm not really sure how it worked back then and was wondering how the random people being drafted to the infantry coped.

Any insight would be very appreciated.

No question or interest in history is stupid. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.

 

The Vietnam War draft is essentially like the modern "selective service." Upon the age of 18, every American citizen was required to register with the government their name and information, which was then partially cooped by the relatively nascent Social Security Administration. You wanted to get social security benefits? You have to register with the government. You want food stamps or college aid? You have to register with the government. Not to mention it was a federal crime not to.

Your view of drafting sounds more along the lines of something out of the Soviet Union during the Second World War ("Great Patriotic War"), where military police, reserves, and NKVD secret police units would round up young men into trucks and trains and "draft" them into the conflict. Not that much prodding was necessary then, given the situation, but everyone was either in a factory position or on the frontlines.

The Vietnam era was a lot more different with less stakes. To give you a sort of scale, the Soviets lost 3 million men in the Rezhev meatgrinder alone between winter of 1941 and fall of 1942. By the end of the war, Soviet losses were at a staggering 15 million fighting men, and even more countless civilians. Roughly 1 in 8 Russians died in that conflict. In contrast, the US, since its inception in 1776 to the modern day, has not had more than 2 million total war casualties across every war, including the Civil War, where roughly a million Americans on both sides lost their lives. The Soviets lost that on a good day in the Rezhev pocket. In reality, the amount of American troops in the Vietnam war deployed at any given time was around 100,000 men at the time of the surge in the 1970s.

The drafting process beings as such: First, you receive a letter in the mail after you have registered with the Social Security Administration and the government. The letter is similar to a subpoena, in which you are required to appear at a military base (we have them all over the place in the US, since quartering troops in houses was something we fought a war over previously) under the penalty of criminal punishment. i.e., you get a letter in the mail saying that if you don't pack your things and show up to a military base to be drafted, we will arrest you and put you in jail. Second, you receive training at the base camp, typically around 8 weeks give or take your branch of service. The training would include small arms fire training, squad tactics, explosive and special weapons training, basic first aid, and military culture. After your training, you are assigned a unit, typically newly formed or added to an existing unit. If you are a newly formed unit, you may be called upon to deploy to Vietnam with your unit. If you are attached to an existing unit as replacements, either for those who had died or were on leave for whatever reason, you would be shipped out immediately. Most often, you would board a commercial flight, typically to a naval base in the region or directly to US-controlled Saigon, depending on the conditions and logistics that were laid out for you. If you were in the navy, you were likely posted to Okinawa, Japan and then sent on a ship to patrol the South China Sea region and support carrier task forces. If you were in the air force, you were likely take a flight to Guam or the Philippines, depending on what kind of pilot you were, and then stationed either there, on a Forward Operating Base (FOB), or on an aircraft carrier for missions. If you were in the army or marines, you were likely directly flown to Saigon or a nearby military base and then transported via truck to a FOB where you were deployed. Helicopters were generally used for medical or transport directly into a combat zone, and rarely used for ferrying troops, contrary to popular belief.

FOBs varied in size, but this is generally where all frontline troops stayed at. They could be a giant encampment outside of Saigon with a fully functioning airfield and transport infrastructure, or, if you have crap luck, a clearing in a jungle where a company of 300 men constantly patrol the base camp with mines all around you. If you were on the big FOBs, you enjoyed cooked food, proper restrooms, office space for desk workers and administration officials, and a general life similar to a typical army base camp. If you were on a smaller FOB, the purpose of the FOB is to hold a location. Often, these FOBs were pockets deep inside the jungles, with the real possibility that you could be surrounded at any moment. Life in these FOBs were hard. No warm food, no toilets, rudimentary tents and shelters. It was wet, miserable, and deadly. Imagine camping out in a humid, hot jungle with centipedes the size of your head and poisonous snakes everywhere. Imagine squatting in a designated shit zone a little outside of the camp with your bare ass exposed to mosquitos and flies. Imagine wet rain pouring every other day making the place a wet, smelly, hot shithole. Imagine that the only food you have is meat in a can that gives you constipation. Now imagine that place that you've decided to camp out in is filled with mines and ferocious Asians with AKs trying to kill you. Compare that life with the cushy desk job of a communications officer in a FOB outside Saigon. It honestly depends on where you are deployed.

And to be clear, the people who were drafted were not completely random. By the Vietnam war, the army's policy of segregating the armed forces by color was dissolved. For the first time in American military history, Black NCOs commanded white enlisted men. But by far, proportionally to the population size, there were more black men fighting in the dark holes of Vietnam than white men. To be sure, the draft itself was not racist. It's just that the draft affected the less affluent. There were several ways you could "avoid" the draft at the time. You could have been in college, in which case your draft was "deferred." You could also avoid the draft if you had a medical condition. The draft was suppose to make everyone equal, but because of these exceptions, the draft disproportionately affected some more than others. Most colleges had their student bodies entirely made up of white people. College required tuition and was thus out of reach for some Americans. Having a medical condition meant that you had a primary care physician that you paid money to diagnosis the condition. Furthermore, even though there was a penalty for not registering with the SSA, some people risked it anyway, particularly more affluent people who didn't rely on social security or government programs. You rolled the dice when you draft dodged, since the government could come after you at any moment. White people just tended to have more resources at their disposal to defer the draft.

The best example of draft dodging by a rich white person is the current president of these United States. Donald Trump had "deferred" his draft by having his physician diagnosis him with "bone spurs." Three times, actually. It helped that his father was one of the richest men in Manhattan and had powerful connections to get him out of the draft. Trump just had to defer his draft enough times to outlast the length of the war.

Not all people tried to avoid the draft. There were people who really did believe that what the US was doing in Vietnam mattered. The late senator John McCain was one such person, though he was a navy pilot. Navy pilots, generally speaking, have it better than the boots on the ground in terms of day-to-day lifestyle on a carrier, but at no less risk. His life story there is one such example, and if you are interested, I suggest you read more about him.

Ultimately, the most miserable part of the Vietnam war was ironically the lack of technological and infrastructural sophistication of the enemy. The US had taken the Blitzkrieg tactic of the Germans from the Second World War and added supersonic jets and a massive Cold War military-industrial complex behind it. The standard tactic of the US was to use aircraft and artillery to soften up an enemy, send fat armored tanks to roll over the remains, and send infantry to mop up and capture strategic objectives that inhibited the ability of the enemy to fight back. In the Vietnam jungles, there were no artillery targets. You couldn't run a 30 ton armored tank into the jungle to soak up bullets. You couldn't see what you were dropping bombs on. There were no strategic objectives to hold. Vietnam was an infantry fight, a brutal, close-quarters small-arms firefight where the enemy would shoot at you, run away, let you get wet and miserable in the shithole jungle, and then come back and see if you are more exhausted yet.

When the Germans attacked Stalingrad in 1942, they first bombed out the entire city, creating this massive jungle of bricks that their tanks couldn't roll over. To mitigate German air superiority and artillery firepower, the Soviets ordered their troops to advance as close to the enemy as possible. That battle also became an infantry fight, often resulting in hand-to-hand combat with shovels and knives. The Germans called the battle the "Rat War." Only the most cunning, ferocious, kill-or-be-killed resourceful badasses survived there. Vietnam was America's Rat War.

 

 


 

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It's a useful mental exercise. Through the years, many thinkers have been fascinated by it. But I don't enjoy playing. It was a game that was born during a brutal age when life counted for little. Everyone believed that some people were worth more than others. Kings. Pawns. I don't think that anyone is worth more than anyone else. Chess is just a game. Real people are not pieces. You can't assign more value to some of them and not others. Not to me. Not to anyone. People are not a thing that you can sacrifice. The lesson is, if anyone who looks on to the world as if it was a game of chess, deserves to lose.

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