Fragging by George Lepre

In 1969, with the Vietnam War raging, we had nowhere near the patriotic fervor of WW2. Gone were the scores of young men dropping out of college to enlist. Gone were the Black Americans begging for combat assignments. On the contrary, there was growing anti-war militancy among Black soldiers, not to mention pervasive drug use among soldiers of all races. Scores of soldiers didn’t want to be there, so it’s no wonder that so many officers were murdered with fragmentation grenades.

The best part of the book is the chapter on Australian fraggings. I doubt that the Aussie experience ein Vietnam was as bad as that of the US army, because most of the Aussies were there by choice. The Australians didn’t draft troops like the USA did, and there was no Black-White rift, so that eliminates one source of trouble. There were only 11 fraggings, and they were for the same reasons as the US ones; the soldier in question didn’t want to be there. In one case the murderer was a 20 year old soldier, twice rejected from the service, and had a juvenile criminal record. You’d have to wonder why the army let him in if he obviously couldn’t be trusted, but the answer is simple. They were desperate for men. They had to take whomever volunteered.

Fragging is essentially a book about how and why the US involvement in Vietnam couldn’t work. The soldiers didn’t want to be there, and with so many men avoiding military service, the army had to take anyone it could. What we ended up with was an army full of unmotivated malcontents, babysitting the unmotivated soldiers and lazy playboy officers of the South Vietnamese army. They result was that they were no match for the well-disciplined and motivated Vietcong.

George Lepre has written a great book on an issue that has often been ignored.  Many US officers were killed by grenades tossed into their huts, but few soldiers were caught and tried. The army investigations were incompetent, and even if the army had trained homicide detectives, it wouldn’t have worked. By the time the detectives were flown all the way from the USA, the evidence would’ve washed away and eaten by ants.

When a fragging occurred in Iraq, the offending soldier had the same reasons as the Vietnam-era troops who murdered their officers; he didn’t want to be there. But this time round, there was no sloppy investigation. The army was ready for this to happen, and he was quickly brought to justice and found guilty. The case was kept in the military courts and not the civilian ones, because this time round, there was no way the army was going to let him look like a martyr and a hero.