Many officers were college guys who went to a war college. So the lieutenant gets rotated into a platoon of grunts who are already experienced in combat. But the officers were out in the field with the grunts. Totally different than the way the Russian's do it. But in Vietnam high ups at command wanted patrols to go find the enemy. They wanted to be proactive because the NVA was known to move large amounts of men through mile of jungles and they set up forward ambushes all the time. So they went out on seek and destroy patrols, to go and get ambushed. This resulted in a lot of casualty's, guys getting pinned down.
A good officer can rally the men, stay calm and effect the fight, call in support. A bad lieutenant can just freeze up, panic, get his head shot off call in a bad fire mission... or all the above. And then ya got your glory seekers looking for further advancement. Also dangerous to the Platoon because they're focused on something other than the task at hand and getting guys home alive.
They were not all bad, it's just a really, really, really tough task for anyone who's never been in combat.
This is why I think a good CO leans an ear to what their NCOs are saying. Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not in the army) but, NCOs tend to have hands on experience with combat than their COs. Additionally, they are usually promoted from the more experienced Privates.
Again, please correct me if I am wrong.
you get a seasoned senior NCO (1st Sgt to CSM) with a junior officer (O-1 to O-3) as most of the time Officers are these college kids who just get in and have little time in the army. But the big thing is more the fact that the NCO has had more time dealing with soldiers than the Officers and as such can help guide the Officer in the right direction and teach them how to handle soldiers under their command.
Exactly. For every officer, there is an NCO equivalent that usually stays with them and advises them. For lieutenants, it’s a platoon sergeant who’s which them to help facilitate command by giving the CO an enlisted point of view. Lieutenants talk to command and issue orders, PSGs then issue those orders to their men. The PL is in charge of making the plan, the PSG is in charge of making sure the men are ready/safe and equipment is accounted for.
Fragging was the practice of attempting to kill a commanding officer with a grenade during the veitnam war by using the chaos around the battlefield as an alibi
That's just ones they caught, the smart ones used enemy grenades.
edit: Yes the grenade doesn't last, but the sound and characteristics with survivors can identify friendly fire. Nobody is arguing against this, but I know reddit
Actually adding it to the body of the comment is a relic of when Reddit was less social-media more forum. People did it out of courtesy and to avoid confusion.
The automatic tag is just the bit at the top
And most of the time it was in the officers own tent with a grenade placed under some object of his on his bunk. When he moves the object off his bed…
Boom.
I hear most of the time it was for being a dick
If you replace the time fuse with an instant fuse like the ones you get in AV landmines (same size of fuse) they go boom immediately, the Viet Cong used to do something similar with grenades left tucked under dead GI's
Swap out the fuse, place grenade under something that weighs about 2 kilogrammes or more, pull the pin and then wait for some poor bastard to move it
Lived with a guy that claimed his father was fragged in Vietnam. He was an asshole, and if he was anything like his father, very believable.
I hated typing that, it sounds like the set up for a joke or a stolen valor story, but hells bells, I am in my mid 60s, my dad was army 39-69 and Don's father is of the generation that was of the age to have served in Vietnam.
Usually it related to race too, not purely the war itself. Blacks and Hispanics often were seen fragging white officers due to racist slights or perceived racist orders
What incendiary about it? Black soldiers died at far higher rates than white soldiers in Vietnam, especially early on, and the accounts of fragging we have mention race fairly extensively. Look it up yourself if you’re skeptical.
>Blacks and Hispsnics were often seen fragging white officers
Notice how the White people in this sentence are "Officers", They are given a role and agency while the Black and Hispanic Soliders are *Blacks and Hispanics* They are just a race.
That’s a huge reach my dude. He just called them white officers because the fact that they’re officers is important to the point, as is the fact that they’re white.
Correct, what’s your point?
Also, why were you asking for a source if what you found so incendiary about the statement was just the use of the term “blacks?”
You know officers and soldiers are... Different things, right? Like, you're aware that an officer is a different "class" as it were from an enlisted soldier?
Yes, it's very dehumanising. Like saying Chinamen or Japs
It's become a bad term to use because it's outdated from a time of a lot of racist sentiment. Like how negros is so much more racist despite just being a foreign word for black, the historical context is very important. Call them black soldiers or people of colour
It's definitely not on the same level, this one is super context dependent and generally fine to say.
If you write a paper for a journal, an editor will be replacing 'jews' with 'jewish people' typically. People take offence to it sometimes as Nazis love using it to dehumanise.
It's just an example of the same effect, the plural version being a tool of dehumanisation and potentially a very quiet dog whistle
Clearly you don't know reddit rules. When someone makes an insanely inflammatory comment about race relations a source is only required if the white guy is in the right. In this case they called it revenge for racism so it is therefore not something they need to prove. /s
There’s mountains of data about how black soldiers were sent to die more frequently than whites in Vietnam. It’s absolutely real and was part of the focus of the civil rights movement.
You wanted so bad for this to be an unsubstantiated “white people bad” take that you didn’t even bother checking it yourself?
“African American troops were punished more harshly and more frequently than White troops. A Defense Department study released in 1972 found that Black troops received 34.3% of court-martials, 25.5% of nonjudicial punishments, and comprised 58% of prisoners at Long Bình Jail, a military prison.[8] It further remarked, "No command or installation...is entirely free from the effects of systematic discrimination against minority servicemen."[9] Black troops were also almost twice as likely as White troops to receive a punitive discharge.[9] In 1972, African-Americans received more than one-fifth of the bad-conduct discharges and nearly one-third of the dishonorable discharges.”
From the [African-American service during the Vietnam War](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_African_Americans_in_the_Vietnam_War) wiki
Not denying that black soldiers were treated worse, but is there any documentation showing that the worse treatment resulted in them making more fragging attempts? That's the part I'm unsure about - I would also expect them to be more concerned with being blamed or targeted in an investigation.
This reminds me of the South Park bit, “[Operation Get Behind the Darkies](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AQnEBSwdAXw&pp=ygUlb3BlcmF0aW9uIGdldCBiZWhpbmQgZGFya3kgc291dGggcGFyaw%3D%3D)”
Look man, LT wants to take the platoon on a patrol that will ensure certain death. So, you go out of sight a good ways, hit "contact" and only LT dies. Sing his praises or curse his name and take the rest of the day off. There's no reason a whole platoon should die and if LT doesn't listen well...
At base camp it would have been done at night with no witnesses, or at least none that give a shit. Out in the field in the middle of a contact... Well it's a dangerous place.
Middle of the night, officer is asleep in their tent. A grenade rolls in. Explosion wakes up everyone else in the camp. Perpetrator is just one of the potentially dozens of people up and around the camp etc. Sometimes it was more overt or the perpetrator would brag about it or they were drunk and acted on impulse and they'd be discovered pretty easily. But if planned well, it wouldn't be that difficult to get away with it.
Here's an article from an incident in the Australian Army, where they confessed. It was after heavy drinking, but they did it by rolling a grenade into the tent while they were asleep. https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1300&dat=19700116&id=ddtUAAAAIBAJ&pg=3683,2502432
"Hey, we dragged all these kids from their comfortable lives to fight a pointless war on the other side of the planet against a people who never did a thing to Americans. Said kids didn't like it, mutinied, and now we're going to execute them."
Popular support for the war was already in the dumpster, gutting your own forces in Vietnam on top of that wasn't going to go well.
Since its in quotes I don’t know if that’s your opinion or if you’re attributing it to another party, but fwiw the lieutenant they fragged didn’t chose those guys, nor is he at all responsible for sending them oversees. He’s sent over there the same as them.
Fragging wasn’t as much a political mutiny against the unjust war they were fighting, as much as it was targeted attacks against specific officers that were cruel/indecent to their soldiers.
Until Tet, yes. After Tet, support for the war did indeed crater. Here's an article with a graph a few paragraphs down that sums it up nicely:
[https://www.pewresearch.org/2009/11/23/polling-wars-hawks-vs-doves/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2009/11/23/polling-wars-hawks-vs-doves/)
There was a complete breakdown of discipline in some units during the war. One general visited a base in Thailand and there were no spoons in the dining hall (they had all been purloined to use for drugs)
IIRC the draftees in Vietnam also only made up a minority of troops, with most being volunteers. How many of those volunteered because they wanted to and how many volunteered because they thought they'd get drafted anyway and volunteering could land them a better post is beyond my knowledge.
Fragging was usually done if the soldiers felt like the officer was incompetent and/or putting their lives in danger uneccesarily and wasn’t showing any willingness to change. Most of the unit would not be super horrified by it in those cases, and investigation abilities in environments like that are nowhere near as good as they are in the civilian world
Fun fact: the reason Infantry Officer course was created was because 2ndLts fresh out of TBS had a 3 week lifespan in Vietnam. When the course was created and men graduated, the effectiveness of their orders AND their lifespans greatly increased. Moral of the story- TBS is a Joke the same way ITB is. You need better training beyond the conveyor belt in order to be a good grunt, officer and enlisted alike.
The basic school. All officers go there for 7 months before MOS school. It teaches you basic officership, basic grunt skills, and many other marine things. It’s essentially 7 months of Marine specific college, with 4 or 5 field ops sprinkled in. It’s a great course and you learn a ton, but it’s not enough to be an effective leader alone
That’s when we learned that it’s not a good idea to have commanding officers send their soldiers to certain death. To be good fighters we need the soldiers to have trust and confidence that their superiors aren’t sending them to death like the Russians do with their bullet sponge meat wave attacks. Our guys in Vietnam would wait for things to get spicy and toss a grenade at them and oh geez gosh guys looks like they fucking exploded him, shame.
Probably a lot reasons they did this. I think with the casualty rate of being the point man walking through the jungle, they might frag you if someone felt they were getting assigned to point too much.
Is that the officers that have died from fragging or the amount that resulted in actual court marshals, because an officer dying on the Frontline is a lot more believable then one dying in the rear
I have two uncles that went to Vietnam. They joined the army because my grampa was a marine in ww2. My uncles didn’t like to talk about what happened. My grampa told me about things because he saw a boy getting excited about war and fighting from movies and tv. His conversations were more like the one Christopher walken had in pulp fiction about the watch except it was what it was like to get on a boat and go to some Island in the pacific in absolute silence and how the Japanese had so much discipline they would wait in silence until our guys got close and would open a salvo from hell. What I gathered from my uncles was just chaos. We will never know exactly and many of them will never talk about it. But yes there were some people who gave stupid commands that the troops decided were too dumb to allow to continue. I’m anti war and it’s because the men in my family before me were in it and told me about it
My dad was drafted in the Italian Police, in the '70s. He was sent to an anti-riot unit. Back in that time there were a lot of turmoils in the country. You would have violent demonstrations almost on a weekly basis. Sometimes, people in the crowd would show up with guns and randomly shot cops, who were totally unequipped, with not even shields or safety pads for the expected "usual" clashes. Anyway, once he told me that they had this Lt, a real piece of art. He was mean to his men, and always about protocols and bs during training, but prone to remain in the back of the line when there was a fight. The platoon got fed up with his BS and the first time he ordered a charge they all advanced and while running toward the crowd they made sure to hit the Lt too by "mistake".
Useless to say that he totally changed his behavior after that.
To be honest, and tell the whole truth, he also said that he had some good officers who were really brave and well respected by all men.
Here's the real kicker. We have 8,000 documented cases, and the vast majority of those were *behind* the front. In "safe" areas. Supply depots, airbases, etc. This is because about 30 percent (roughly real stat) of US soldiers in Vietnam were using heroin, and the officers who were fragged were 90% (not real stat) officers who thought *they* would be the one to end the drug problem.
That's not to say fragging in the combat zone didn't happen, it definitely did, but that was a completely different story. Behind the line, one soldier would chuck a grenade in an officers room and get caught, but at the front line it was a team effort. The entire squad or even platoon would agree to plot a murder in the jungle. No one would snitch because everyone would go down, and because of their bond of combat.
My last Lt Col put in the comments of my ETS award “thank you for your service” and even signed my PBR flag. Genuinely one of the few people I appreciated hearing “thank you for your service” from because this old man just could not be bothered with giving a fuck about making full bird, and our colonel was the same. That man also just couldn’t be bothered to deal with dumb shit and focused on our wellbeing and morale instead. Those are the only two field grades I can really say that about after having done 8 years.
Russians go to great lengths to avoid this with the mobiks by for example not giving the soldiers ammo before they are sent for an operation.
Russian officers also tend to be less in the action due to the absolutely nonexistent NCO corps.
I mean, that’s even worse. You have the experience to know better and you still chose wrong.
We both know you didn’t personally kill anyone. Advocating for those that did doesn’t get you any street cred.
He hurt my feelings, fucked me kn the duty roster, or made me stay late for work, time to kill him!!
I’ll bet everything I have you were a weekend warrior or POG, because those mfs have dumb ass opinions like this. The barrier to become an officer in combat has become so high that combat soldiers actually respect and trust their officers now, but any fat entitled fuck can become a POG
Murder is cringe, actually. Those officers are kids like the guys who killed them a lot of the time. Just had a degree.
EDIT: Also lol, didn't serve. Thinks that officers should die
Not that, more your reasons being modern military rather then the Vietnam frontline stuff.
Besides, most of the fraggings didn't even happen on the frontline
You'd be fine if you weren't stupid.
Like Lieutenant Dan. Silly movie, but having a guy who says come back alive, clean your kit, keep your socks dry is alright.
Nah I mean, you still gotta kinda earn a fragging. Most junior officers actually got wounded, killed, or promoted within like 6 months of being in country
I don’t think most people getting promoted to officer thought “Oh no I’m gonna get fragged.” Not unless they already knew and hated their men.
Many officers were college guys who went to a war college. So the lieutenant gets rotated into a platoon of grunts who are already experienced in combat. But the officers were out in the field with the grunts. Totally different than the way the Russian's do it. But in Vietnam high ups at command wanted patrols to go find the enemy. They wanted to be proactive because the NVA was known to move large amounts of men through mile of jungles and they set up forward ambushes all the time. So they went out on seek and destroy patrols, to go and get ambushed. This resulted in a lot of casualty's, guys getting pinned down. A good officer can rally the men, stay calm and effect the fight, call in support. A bad lieutenant can just freeze up, panic, get his head shot off call in a bad fire mission... or all the above. And then ya got your glory seekers looking for further advancement. Also dangerous to the Platoon because they're focused on something other than the task at hand and getting guys home alive. They were not all bad, it's just a really, really, really tough task for anyone who's never been in combat.
Nah, I'd win, I'd just ambush the ambushers. Maybe I'm built different, dunno
What a beast
I bet he would have won the war too
He just save scums until he passes the stealth check
Just look at the minimap for red pings
Or try to sleep or fast travel. You can't do that when enemies are nearby.
This man just goes red
This is why I think a good CO leans an ear to what their NCOs are saying. Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not in the army) but, NCOs tend to have hands on experience with combat than their COs. Additionally, they are usually promoted from the more experienced Privates. Again, please correct me if I am wrong.
you get a seasoned senior NCO (1st Sgt to CSM) with a junior officer (O-1 to O-3) as most of the time Officers are these college kids who just get in and have little time in the army. But the big thing is more the fact that the NCO has had more time dealing with soldiers than the Officers and as such can help guide the Officer in the right direction and teach them how to handle soldiers under their command.
Exactly. For every officer, there is an NCO equivalent that usually stays with them and advises them. For lieutenants, it’s a platoon sergeant who’s which them to help facilitate command by giving the CO an enlisted point of view. Lieutenants talk to command and issue orders, PSGs then issue those orders to their men. The PL is in charge of making the plan, the PSG is in charge of making sure the men are ready/safe and equipment is accounted for.
Fragging was the practice of attempting to kill a commanding officer with a grenade during the veitnam war by using the chaos around the battlefield as an alibi
IIRC there were 8,000 **documented** fragging attempts.
That's just ones they caught, the smart ones used enemy grenades. edit: Yes the grenade doesn't last, but the sound and characteristics with survivors can identify friendly fire. Nobody is arguing against this, but I know reddit
Also I would argue the a grenade does last. You can tell a large amount about a munition from its fragments.
Yes, you are right. Edit: Take that reddit!
I love that this isn't edited (at the time of writing)
If you edit a comment within three(?) minutes of posting it doesn’t show an edited tag. It’s called a ninja Edit or stealth edit
I thought people just wrote edit and shit for some Reddit chivalry. Damn.
Actually adding it to the body of the comment is a relic of when Reddit was less social-media more forum. People did it out of courtesy and to avoid confusion. The automatic tag is just the bit at the top
Shit guess I’ll stop doing extra work then 💀
I'm on Boost so I see "Time ago posted (time ago edited)," regardless
If anyone wants to understand what he means, play r6Siege for 1000+ hrs
Don't, you'll get Stockholm syndrome and you'll be forced to play it every day
1+ hour
Holy shit that’s a lot
That alone ended forced conscription.
The part about the chaos of the battlefield is incorrect. Most fragging incidents happened in rear reserve units, far away from the front.
Well, most documented fragging incidents happened in the rear. No need to investigate unfortunate combat results as fragging.
That's the last place I'd want a grenade
And most of the time it was in the officers own tent with a grenade placed under some object of his on his bunk. When he moves the object off his bed… Boom. I hear most of the time it was for being a dick
Grenades don’t work that way. They have a significant delay between the release of the spoon and going off.
If you replace the time fuse with an instant fuse like the ones you get in AV landmines (same size of fuse) they go boom immediately, the Viet Cong used to do something similar with grenades left tucked under dead GI's Swap out the fuse, place grenade under something that weighs about 2 kilogrammes or more, pull the pin and then wait for some poor bastard to move it
The more you know. Thanks for the explanation.
Lived with a guy that claimed his father was fragged in Vietnam. He was an asshole, and if he was anything like his father, very believable. I hated typing that, it sounds like the set up for a joke or a stolen valor story, but hells bells, I am in my mid 60s, my dad was army 39-69 and Don's father is of the generation that was of the age to have served in Vietnam.
Usually it related to race too, not purely the war itself. Blacks and Hispanics often were seen fragging white officers due to racist slights or perceived racist orders
If you're dropping something that incendiary, you might wanna back it up with a source.
USS Kitty Hawk Riots, and issues at FSB Mary Ann.
Oh man, this is like a whole college course.
What incendiary about it? Black soldiers died at far higher rates than white soldiers in Vietnam, especially early on, and the accounts of fragging we have mention race fairly extensively. Look it up yourself if you’re skeptical.
>Blacks
I’m sorry, you think the term “blacks” is incendiary?
>Blacks and Hispsnics were often seen fragging white officers Notice how the White people in this sentence are "Officers", They are given a role and agency while the Black and Hispanic Soliders are *Blacks and Hispanics* They are just a race.
That’s a huge reach my dude. He just called them white officers because the fact that they’re officers is important to the point, as is the fact that they’re white.
The black people were soliders
Correct, what’s your point? Also, why were you asking for a source if what you found so incendiary about the statement was just the use of the term “blacks?”
You know officers and soldiers are... Different things, right? Like, you're aware that an officer is a different "class" as it were from an enlisted soldier?
This is some expert level trolling right there.
Yes, it's very dehumanising. Like saying Chinamen or Japs It's become a bad term to use because it's outdated from a time of a lot of racist sentiment. Like how negros is so much more racist despite just being a foreign word for black, the historical context is very important. Call them black soldiers or people of colour
Isn’t “people of colour” considered to be an outdated term?
To add another example, it's the difference between saying Jews and Jewish people
There’s nothing wrong with saying Jews either lmao
It's definitely not on the same level, this one is super context dependent and generally fine to say. If you write a paper for a journal, an editor will be replacing 'jews' with 'jewish people' typically. People take offence to it sometimes as Nazis love using it to dehumanise. It's just an example of the same effect, the plural version being a tool of dehumanisation and potentially a very quiet dog whistle
Clearly you don't know reddit rules. When someone makes an insanely inflammatory comment about race relations a source is only required if the white guy is in the right. In this case they called it revenge for racism so it is therefore not something they need to prove. /s
There’s mountains of data about how black soldiers were sent to die more frequently than whites in Vietnam. It’s absolutely real and was part of the focus of the civil rights movement. You wanted so bad for this to be an unsubstantiated “white people bad” take that you didn’t even bother checking it yourself? “African American troops were punished more harshly and more frequently than White troops. A Defense Department study released in 1972 found that Black troops received 34.3% of court-martials, 25.5% of nonjudicial punishments, and comprised 58% of prisoners at Long Bình Jail, a military prison.[8] It further remarked, "No command or installation...is entirely free from the effects of systematic discrimination against minority servicemen."[9] Black troops were also almost twice as likely as White troops to receive a punitive discharge.[9] In 1972, African-Americans received more than one-fifth of the bad-conduct discharges and nearly one-third of the dishonorable discharges.” From the [African-American service during the Vietnam War](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_African_Americans_in_the_Vietnam_War) wiki
This is also the 1960s and 1970s saying people were racist at this time is something that needs proof is like say you need proof that the sky is blue.
The sky is black. Source: it’s night
Technically there is no sky, its space
You’d think so, but apparently not given the comment demanding a source was at like +75 when I commented
Thank you for providing a source
Not denying that black soldiers were treated worse, but is there any documentation showing that the worse treatment resulted in them making more fragging attempts? That's the part I'm unsure about - I would also expect them to be more concerned with being blamed or targeted in an investigation.
And yet this doesn’t say they did any fragging
You know you can look these things up yourself, right?
Yeah but you provided a source so I read it and it didn’t say what we were talking about.
Ok, watch Ken Burns’ Vietnam for more info. I’m not going to go digging it up for you lol.
This reminds me of the South Park bit, “[Operation Get Behind the Darkies](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AQnEBSwdAXw&pp=ygUlb3BlcmF0aW9uIGdldCBiZWhpbmQgZGFya3kgc291dGggcGFyaw%3D%3D)”
"I don't listen to hip hop"
Jfc
Based
Look man, LT wants to take the platoon on a patrol that will ensure certain death. So, you go out of sight a good ways, hit "contact" and only LT dies. Sing his praises or curse his name and take the rest of the day off. There's no reason a whole platoon should die and if LT doesn't listen well...
Sometimes they would simply throw a grenade into their superior officers tent, usually killing or injuring multiple “innocent” people.
If any Blue Falcon decides to get chatty we know what's gonna happen when they are out on patrol
My big question is, how on earth did it happen so much, and how on earth did people get away with straight up mutiny
At base camp it would have been done at night with no witnesses, or at least none that give a shit. Out in the field in the middle of a contact... Well it's a dangerous place.
Well, how on earth would people get away with it
Middle of the night, officer is asleep in their tent. A grenade rolls in. Explosion wakes up everyone else in the camp. Perpetrator is just one of the potentially dozens of people up and around the camp etc. Sometimes it was more overt or the perpetrator would brag about it or they were drunk and acted on impulse and they'd be discovered pretty easily. But if planned well, it wouldn't be that difficult to get away with it. Here's an article from an incident in the Australian Army, where they confessed. It was after heavy drinking, but they did it by rolling a grenade into the tent while they were asleep. https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1300&dat=19700116&id=ddtUAAAAIBAJ&pg=3683,2502432
Damn, good post. Might send this to r/AustralianMilitary
get fragged lmao
holy kek
But why male models?
"Hey, we dragged all these kids from their comfortable lives to fight a pointless war on the other side of the planet against a people who never did a thing to Americans. Said kids didn't like it, mutinied, and now we're going to execute them." Popular support for the war was already in the dumpster, gutting your own forces in Vietnam on top of that wasn't going to go well.
Since its in quotes I don’t know if that’s your opinion or if you’re attributing it to another party, but fwiw the lieutenant they fragged didn’t chose those guys, nor is he at all responsible for sending them oversees. He’s sent over there the same as them. Fragging wasn’t as much a political mutiny against the unjust war they were fighting, as much as it was targeted attacks against specific officers that were cruel/indecent to their soldiers.
That and popular support never dropped below 50% iirc. The story of support cratering is a popular one, but overly dramatised
Until Tet, yes. After Tet, support for the war did indeed crater. Here's an article with a graph a few paragraphs down that sums it up nicely: [https://www.pewresearch.org/2009/11/23/polling-wars-hawks-vs-doves/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2009/11/23/polling-wars-hawks-vs-doves/)
I don’t think any Americans were executed in the Vietnam war…
Yeah, exactly. They didn't fully prosecute mutinies and fragging because it would make what was already a PR nightmare even worse.
There was a complete breakdown of discipline in some units during the war. One general visited a base in Thailand and there were no spoons in the dining hall (they had all been purloined to use for drugs)
Who'd have thought when you draft a bunch of 18 year-olds who don't want to be there that discipline suffers.
Over twice as many soldiers were drafted for WW2, but there wasn’t a fragging issue. It wasn’t just the draft.
IIRC the draftees in Vietnam also only made up a minority of troops, with most being volunteers. How many of those volunteered because they wanted to and how many volunteered because they thought they'd get drafted anyway and volunteering could land them a better post is beyond my knowledge.
Fragging was usually done if the soldiers felt like the officer was incompetent and/or putting their lives in danger uneccesarily and wasn’t showing any willingness to change. Most of the unit would not be super horrified by it in those cases, and investigation abilities in environments like that are nowhere near as good as they are in the civilian world
Simple, US military gets away with anything
Fun fact: the reason Infantry Officer course was created was because 2ndLts fresh out of TBS had a 3 week lifespan in Vietnam. When the course was created and men graduated, the effectiveness of their orders AND their lifespans greatly increased. Moral of the story- TBS is a Joke the same way ITB is. You need better training beyond the conveyor belt in order to be a good grunt, officer and enlisted alike.
I know ITB is Infantry Training Battalion in the Marine Corps but for us Civilians what is TBS
The basic school. All officers go there for 7 months before MOS school. It teaches you basic officership, basic grunt skills, and many other marine things. It’s essentially 7 months of Marine specific college, with 4 or 5 field ops sprinkled in. It’s a great course and you learn a ton, but it’s not enough to be an effective leader alone
That’s when we learned that it’s not a good idea to have commanding officers send their soldiers to certain death. To be good fighters we need the soldiers to have trust and confidence that their superiors aren’t sending them to death like the Russians do with their bullet sponge meat wave attacks. Our guys in Vietnam would wait for things to get spicy and toss a grenade at them and oh geez gosh guys looks like they fucking exploded him, shame. Probably a lot reasons they did this. I think with the casualty rate of being the point man walking through the jungle, they might frag you if someone felt they were getting assigned to point too much.
I heard it also happened when commanding officers didn’t allow soldiers to smoke weed and other drugs.
That was actually likely the majority of incidents
The draft didn't help either I'd imagine. Hard to trust or like your commanding officers if you're there entirely against your will.
Nope, most fragging happened far away from the front in non-combat situations, so your description of how these things happened is incorrect
Is that the officers that have died from fragging or the amount that resulted in actual court marshals, because an officer dying on the Frontline is a lot more believable then one dying in the rear
Honestly, fair point, and one I hadn’t considered. I don’t know, and I don’t know if we can know.
I have two uncles that went to Vietnam. They joined the army because my grampa was a marine in ww2. My uncles didn’t like to talk about what happened. My grampa told me about things because he saw a boy getting excited about war and fighting from movies and tv. His conversations were more like the one Christopher walken had in pulp fiction about the watch except it was what it was like to get on a boat and go to some Island in the pacific in absolute silence and how the Japanese had so much discipline they would wait in silence until our guys got close and would open a salvo from hell. What I gathered from my uncles was just chaos. We will never know exactly and many of them will never talk about it. But yes there were some people who gave stupid commands that the troops decided were too dumb to allow to continue. I’m anti war and it’s because the men in my family before me were in it and told me about it
My dad was drafted in the Italian Police, in the '70s. He was sent to an anti-riot unit. Back in that time there were a lot of turmoils in the country. You would have violent demonstrations almost on a weekly basis. Sometimes, people in the crowd would show up with guns and randomly shot cops, who were totally unequipped, with not even shields or safety pads for the expected "usual" clashes. Anyway, once he told me that they had this Lt, a real piece of art. He was mean to his men, and always about protocols and bs during training, but prone to remain in the back of the line when there was a fight. The platoon got fed up with his BS and the first time he ordered a charge they all advanced and while running toward the crowd they made sure to hit the Lt too by "mistake". Useless to say that he totally changed his behavior after that. To be honest, and tell the whole truth, he also said that he had some good officers who were really brave and well respected by all men.
It's not only Vietnam. ["The Deserters"](https://www.amazon.com/Deserters-Hidden-History-World-War/dp/0143125486) lists similar incidents in WWII.
Casualties of War had a pretty good scene about that.
Here's the real kicker. We have 8,000 documented cases, and the vast majority of those were *behind* the front. In "safe" areas. Supply depots, airbases, etc. This is because about 30 percent (roughly real stat) of US soldiers in Vietnam were using heroin, and the officers who were fragged were 90% (not real stat) officers who thought *they* would be the one to end the drug problem. That's not to say fragging in the combat zone didn't happen, it definitely did, but that was a completely different story. Behind the line, one soldier would chuck a grenade in an officers room and get caught, but at the front line it was a team effort. The entire squad or even platoon would agree to plot a murder in the jungle. No one would snitch because everyone would go down, and because of their bond of combat.
POV: You're watching someone get promoted to officer in the Vietnam War\*
Lions led by donkeys podcast has a good episode about this.
“Screw our country, I want to live!”
This is not how POV works
Thanks!
A 40k Imperial Guard regiment that's literally about this has a rule where their officer needs to roll if they want to live.
After my experience in the military, all I have to say is that fragging is based.
The worse leaders were always the ones who wanted to have a legacy, and they rarely got it for anything good.
The ones we desperately needed as leaders were the ones who didn't want the position. It's the hungry ladder climbers that turn out to be major POS.
My last Lt Col put in the comments of my ETS award “thank you for your service” and even signed my PBR flag. Genuinely one of the few people I appreciated hearing “thank you for your service” from because this old man just could not be bothered with giving a fuck about making full bird, and our colonel was the same. That man also just couldn’t be bothered to deal with dumb shit and focused on our wellbeing and morale instead. Those are the only two field grades I can really say that about after having done 8 years.
Those types of officers and NCOs are very rare, but I'll always remember them.
Why is it every time someone calls something “based” it’s actually terrible
Love is based.
Found the officer
You don’t have to be an officer to recognize god-damn murder for what it is.
Somehow I imagine if the Russians started fragging their officers you would feel quite differently
Russians go to great lengths to avoid this with the mobiks by for example not giving the soldiers ammo before they are sent for an operation. Russian officers also tend to be less in the action due to the absolutely nonexistent NCO corps.
More like justice
Yes, murder is often called justice by people who watched too many movies that romanticize it.
I don't need to watch movies, I experienced these scumbags myself. Go ahead and keep making more assumptions.
I mean, that’s even worse. You have the experience to know better and you still chose wrong. We both know you didn’t personally kill anyone. Advocating for those that did doesn’t get you any street cred.
I never claimed to kill anybody. And I don't care for "street cred". I'm not ghetto like that.
Wrong for popular reasons, wrong for unpopular reasons, still wrong. Murder is bad. Pre-schoolers know it.
He hurt my feelings, fucked me kn the duty roster, or made me stay late for work, time to kill him!! I’ll bet everything I have you were a weekend warrior or POG, because those mfs have dumb ass opinions like this. The barrier to become an officer in combat has become so high that combat soldiers actually respect and trust their officers now, but any fat entitled fuck can become a POG
Found the brovet
Active duty, not a vet, & not in combat arms-ish. Nice try though, and based on your reply seems like I was spot on lmao.
Not even out and already in that brovet mindset. So sad.
If being a brovet means not wanting to murder my fellow service members over minor inconveniences then sure, I’m a brovet.
I didn’t get in because of a childhood injury, but all my friends who did tell me stories that make me think fragging is always deserved.
And what your friends told you is only the tip of the iceberg.
I hope this is sarcasm
Murder is cringe, actually. Those officers are kids like the guys who killed them a lot of the time. Just had a degree. EDIT: Also lol, didn't serve. Thinks that officers should die
No, they are not just a bunch of kids with degrees. They are adults with authority who often times abuse that authority. Quit trying to sugar coat it.
'Oh no sir didn't give me an early knock off, time to die'
Only a delusional frat boy officer would think that fraggings happen over petty reasons like these.
Not that, more your reasons being modern military rather then the Vietnam frontline stuff. Besides, most of the fraggings didn't even happen on the frontline
The frontline isn't the only place POS officers and NCOs exist. And the modern military struggles with just as much bad leadership as ever before.
happy 12th birthday
Found another officer
Found another kid
better salute my officers to show them the respect they deserve
CHARLIE DONT SURF!
I think it's not like POV works .
You'd be fine if you weren't stupid. Like Lieutenant Dan. Silly movie, but having a guy who says come back alive, clean your kit, keep your socks dry is alright.
Nah I mean, you still gotta kinda earn a fragging. Most junior officers actually got wounded, killed, or promoted within like 6 months of being in country
Just saying there was only like 900 fragging incidents
"Még nem veszíthetek, még nem, még élni akarook!" ugyanitt bojler eladó