Packages of medals
The post-Vietnam revolution in ethical affairs is paying big dividends

Vietnam veteran Larry Heineman writes in the New York Times,

The plain fact is that in Vietnam medals were handed out like popcorn, right down to the Good Conduct Medal and the Rifle Sharpshooter Badge, particularly among career-minded officers and NCO's. Ticket-punching lifers, we called them with all the derision that the phrase implies; they seemed more interested in tending their precious careers than anything else.

I was commissioned into the Army in 1977, a few years after the Vietnam war ended, so I have no way of evaluating Heineman's claim firsthand.

But I did personally hear a three-star Army general, also a Vietnam veteran, say that the Army handed out "packages" of medals for officers who served in Vietnam, and which medals were in a package depended on the officer's rank and duty position. This statement occurred at an award ceremony at the Pentagon when I was stationed there. I don't remember the LTG's name, but he was serving as the Director of the Army Staff at the time (I was there 1990-1993). The LTG made it clear he didn't think it was altogether a good thing, but neither was it altogether bad.

Near the end of the Vietnam war, the Army's chief of staff charged The Inspector General (TIG) to investigate the moral character the officer corps; did Duty, Honor Country really mean anything any more? The shock of the My Lai Massacre was the straw that broke the camel's back, leading to this investigation, which began in the early 1970s. But the Army's senior generals realized that My Lai was a tragic result of a deeper illness within the officer corps as a whole, including its senior leaders.

Not only TIG was studying the officer corps. A study by the U.S. Army War College, Study on Military Professionalism, reported,

A scenario that was repeatedly described in seminar sessions and narrative responses [to questionnaires] includes an ambitious, transitory commander . . . engulfed in producing statistical results, fearful of personal failure, too busy to talk with or listen to his subordinates, and determined to submit acceptably optimistic reports which reflect faultless completion of a variety of tasks at the expense of the sweat and frustration of his subordinates.

To make it worse, the officers reporting these habits were students at the War College itself, senior field-grade officers, extremely experienced, from whom the next generation of generals would be selected.

In fact, the Army's problems were so severe that one of the War College study's authors, Col. Mike Malone, told me in 1981 that "Duty, honor, country," had been in real danger of being displaced by "Me, my [posterior] and my career."

What is often overlooked in analyzing the officer corps' ethical vacuum of the time is that its roots predate the Vietnam war. IMO (and that of many others) the soil from which ethical corruption grew was an official "Zero Defects Program" instituted Army-wide in the early 1960s (1962 comes to mind specifically).

An outcome of systems-analysis management, the ZDP literally assumed that the Army could be and must be mistake free. Unlike Total Quality Management (which also had a brief Army heyday in the 1990s), ZDP did not allow for acceptable variances from a standard - perfection was the only acceptable outcome. Soon junior officers understood that perfection was the only acceptable thing to report as well. By the time the Vietnam war was well along,

The divergence of opinion on the source of the Army's leadership problems was symbolic of a general breakdown of communication between junior and senior officers which had deep negative effects on the officer corps. Junior officers came to feel that their superiors had little interest in their opinions or their welfare. Senior officers demanded loyalty from their subordinates to the point of subservience but paid them little respect in return. Consumed with impressing their own superiors in order to move on up the promotion ladder, officers focused on their own careers to the detriment of their subordinates. Frequently superior officers treated their subordinates as tools to be used to assist the superior officer in assembling an impressive six month record of accomplishment during his command tour, then discarded. [link, p. 17]

So you can imagine how the officers were treating the enlisted ranks.

In response to these blunt reports, the chief of staff. Gen. William Westmoreland, began a series of reforms that were expanded and continued long after he retired. The Army's next major test, 1991's Gulf War, proved that the reforms were deep, effective and pervasive throughout all ranks. I would emphasize as well that eliminating the draft was a key event in restoring the Army's professionalism, a fact that Col. Malone came grudgingly to accept.

This post is long enough, so I won't detail all those reforms, but I emphasize that as important as technology, reworking the Army's schools, funding and advanced training have been to making the Army the pre-eminent force in the world (see here), the most important revolution was ethical and moral. Duty honor, country really did return to the fore as the guidon of the officer corps. For a few years of my service in the '80s, there was a lot of discussion about drawing up a formal code of conduct for the officer corps. Fortunately, after fairly service-wide debate and a number of draft codes floated here and there, this idea was abandoned and we stuck with the ancient code of the US Military Academy: And officer does not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do.

by Donald Sensing, 8/27/2004 02:39:02 PM. Permalink |