We hear it often, the assertion that protests at home destroyed troop morale in Vietnam, and that peace protesters “hurt the troops”. This convential wisdom, a cultural ointment smeared on any debate about war, seeks to “explain” why the United States lost in Vietnam.
It is, frankly, crap. The photo to the right has the following caption:
Grieving soldier
An American infantryman mourns the death of a fellow soldier in Haktong-ni, South Korea, August 1950.
What does broken morale really mean? Isn’t it just a form of grieving, a sudden acceptance or realization that a “noble cause” wasn’t worth the cost in blood, in treasure, in lost limbs and shreaded souls? It is a byproduct and a part of all wars, and the protests at home were only one of many reasons for soldier’s lost morale in Indochina, reasons as numerous as there are victims in any war.
General Washington faced endless struggles over maintaining troop morale, often shaky due to losses on the battlefield, privation, the cold and a perceived lack of support from the people. Somehow, he managed to hold the Army together, but it was a close thing.
What about troops in the Civil War? In Red Badge of Courage we read:
Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier. He lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.
The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.
During the march the ardor which the youth had acquired when out of view of the field rapidly faded to nothing. His curiosity was quite easily satisfied. If an intense scene had caught him with its wild swing as he came to the top of the bank, he might have gone gone roaring on. This advance upon Nature was too calm. He had opportunity to reflect. He had time in which to wonder about himself and to attempt to probe his sensations.
Absurd ideas took hold upon him. He thought that he did not relish the landscape. It threatened him. A coldness swept over his back, and it is true that his trousers felt to him that they were no fit for his legs at all.
At which point does morale break? Or does it break and repair and break and repair, as minds and spirits under stress are faced with horrors that they couldn’t contemplate before experiencing, or by the quiet contemplation in the rubble afterward. Perhaps a letter from home, abandoned by a sweetheart, causes the break. Perhaps it’s the cold film that clouds the eyes of a dead friend. Perhaps it’s poor pay, poor uniforms, the vagaries of nature, the misfortune of incompetent leadership in the field, or worse, heartless leadership from afield. At which point, which cause, which domino do we label as the “cause”?
What about the veterans who camped out in the Mall after WWI, General Smedley Butler’s Bonus Army, were they bad for the morale of the troops who fired upon them, having camped out to demand only what was promised to them? What about Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian who was celebrated as one of the flag raisers at Iwo Jima, what broke his morale, a genuine hero in the war won by the “greatest generation”, what led him to freeze to death in a ditch after falling into despair in the years following the end of that war? Was it the racism that denied even a hero a real place in the country he’d fought for?
Just what, just who, just how does morale become broken? How many vets suffer in silence in the years following conflict, on what dark hook do they hang the blackness that hangs just out of sight like a funeral shroud? How is it that some suffer no ill effects, that some aren’t haunted?
There are as many reasons as there are survivors. There are as many nightmares as there are those who seek uneasy rest. The constant refrain that protestors “break morale” serves only to protect politicians from the consequences of their policies, and even more so, it serves to protect citizens from THIER complicity in the dirty, nasty, bloody business of war. When we can’t avert our eyes any more, when we see the ghosts of Hiroshima or the ashen treasures of Dresden or we read of women’s wombs turned into tobacco pouches after Sand Creek, we can lash out at those who make us see what we cheered for and celebrated and funded and took self-satisfaction from. My Lai wasn’t Sy Hersh’s fault, and the collapse after Tet wasn’t damage cause by “dirty hippies”.
Attacking protest in the name of morale is the equivalent of a child being confronted by something it doesn’t want to face. It is clamping hands over the eyes of a citizenry that should at least face what is being done in its name, a blindfold hastily tied into place because NO ONE wants to confront those horrors, and those who profit from the waging of war know they wouldn’t get their blood money if honest debate and recitation of the carnage were presented honestly.
There are many reasons why people lose spirit, why units lose cohesion, as many reasons as there are spent cartridges after a furious battle. There is one common reason that holds true across times and cultures and wars … spirits break when lies are revealed, and if you want to pick ONE reason why the United States lost in Vietnam, why the United States is losing now, why Ira Hayes froze and the Bonus Army marched, that is your reason. Soldiers, people, civilians, survivors learn they were lied to, and the toll paid to the undertaker wasn’t worth what was actually left when the tissue of falsehoods is torn away.
