Re: MASH physicians

[<Cfbernard@aol.com>]

Margaret Brown,

My brother Kelly went to Korea as a medic PFC in the 224th Infantry in 1951.  
He left in 1952 as a decorated S/Sgt (Soldiers Medal and Combat Medic Badge). 
 He is literate as the article pasted to this attests, and speaks very well.

He spend the rest of his professional life as a high school English teacher.  
Let me know if he interests you as a speaker.  His e-mail address is 
Kbernard@redshift.com

Best regards,

Carl Bernard



What Is To Be Done


Because reliable military intelligence is critical in all stages of 
preparation, it holds high priority with our nation's leaders.  They have 
underwritten vast international systems of data collection and analyses.  
Unfortunately, size is not a guarantor of reliability.  Reliability requires 
that the intelligence be timely and correctly processed from accurate data.  
If any of these three elements are compromised, reliability suffers.  This 
paper will point to several examples in recent national history when the lack 
of accurate, timely, or misinterpreted intelligence has led directly to 
national failures.  Our seemingly endemic failure to acquire and process 
relevant information into effective intelligence is one of the most damning 
of our various recurring faults.  It has sometimes caused horrific damage.

Ages ago, Sun Tzu insisted that knowing the enemy was essential.  We did not 
know our enemy in Vietnam and our situation was further abraded by our 
military and political chiefs not knowing our own forces' capabilities, nor 
the culture that shaped our allies and, even more embarrassing, not even our 
allies' languages.  The question: "Why do their Vietnamese fight and ours do 
not?" was posed often during that conflict.  We refused to confront the 
correct answers to this because it would have made our inappropriate, even 
bankrupt tactics and policies undeniable, invalidating our continued 
presence.  We preferred posting a half million soldiers there to do what we 
knew how to do-fight a conventional war-rather than learn to fight the 
unconventional people's war we had entrapped ourselves in.

Our proclivity to ignore or misunderstand advice from allies is well known.  
Our blatant Vietnam displays of this talent were exposed in two recent books, 
Prelude to Tragedy, by Harvey Neese and John O'Donnell, and Backfire, by 
Loren Baritz.   In Prelude to Tragedy, three driving, long-lived American 
faults are discussed: 1) supporting the coup that eliminated President Diem, 
2) constant bureaucratic in-fighting, and 3) our near total misconception of 
the "people's war" in which we had intervened.  Clearly, we had no practical 
understanding of how to fight it.  The decision to commit U.S. forces to 
fight the GVN's war was made with ignorance of an unusually gross dimension.  
In Backfire the author also contends, in powerful language and with 
undeniable logic, that our near total unfamiliarity with the culture of 
Vietnam was matched by an equally disabling lack of knowledge about ourselves 
and the war we were fighting.

In 1962, the French provided three detailed volumes of their "lessons 
learned" from Vietnam to the Army's Special Warfare School with an admonition 
to avoid the errors described.  A much-abridged translation was published 
several years later by the Rand Corporation, but read by very few of our 
policy makers and evidently understood by none.  The French Colonel Roger 
Trinquier's, La Guerre Moderne (translated as Modern Warfare) is a careful 
definition and examination of "Peoples' War," learned well by him from the 
Vietnamese.  It was, and remains, the type of warfare against which our 
tanks, B-52's and aircraft carriers could not prevail.  Our failure to learn 
from this available information led to our appalling casualties and eventual 
collapse in Vietnam.  Prelude's clearly stated central theme is that our 
willful disdain of an enemy we did not understand, hence knew not how to 
fight, prevented us from winning the war. Its authors unveil behavior of 
several U.S. central bureaucracies that made our defeat inevitable. Our 
senior officials' ignorance of the phenomenon of People's War was complete.  
Had they assimilated the French data, their altered perceptions might have 
reduced the deplorable list 
of casualties on the Memorial Wall.  The combat tactics and structure of our 
forces, readied to defend against an armored attack of Warsaw Pact forces 
through Germany's Fulda Gap, were altogether inappropriate when transferred 
to Vietnam. The effect was as absurd as if we 
attempted to seize an enemy warship at sea using paratroops.  We were not 
fighting the war that engulfed us.

Backfire, Loren Baritz's indictment of our mismanagement of the People's War 
that we were fighting but did not understand, is focused on our cultural 
capability that enables us to ignore reality.  "Why do their Vietnamese fight 
and ours don't?"  A central, applicable lesson from Vietnam is the potency of 
what we have mislabeled "brain-washing."  Its most important use was the 
indoctrination and dedication imposed on the Viet Cong to execute their 
missions. The French documents thoroughly discuss the "auto-critique" and 
"speak bitterness" tools, and the dedication this training method gave their 
adversaries.  We also were exposed to its results, but never did understand 
its efficacy for those we were fighting.  We still have not understood that 
its techniques were a major reason we were out-fought by them.  Those 
techniques made the difference between the indifferent soldiers of our South 
Vietnamese ally and the first rate soldiers of the North Vietnamese enemy, 
and their Viet Cong allies in the south.  Why did we not listen to our French 
allies when they tried to inform us?  Perhaps our cultural arrogance that 
keeps us from knowing our allies-or even their language! 

Ignorance-in all three military services, and in USAID, the State Department 
and the CIA as well-virtually assured that our decision-makers would not have 
unbiased, disinterested information.  Advice given by functionaries in these 
entrenched bureaucracies was not simply a patent concoction of some liars 
attempting to mislead for personal advantage. These were honest but ignorant 
and arrogant authorities who knew little, but had no idea that much of what 
they thought they knew was not so.

The recent mea culpa of Robert MacNamara, the SECDEF of this era, in his book 
Argument Without End, validates these multiple, severe descriptions of the 
securely ensconced chiefs in uniformed as well as civil bureaucracies.  Each 
described the wonders his own service would accomplish, and then, when they 
failed, perfunctorily requested another increase in its committed force.  

In Viet-Nam, communications from the field to headquarters were seldom 
permitted to include setbacks or program failures.  Rather, success had to be 
reported.  At times, reportage of Intelligence employees was implausible, 
even laughable, to colleagues from other agencies and services.  Intelligence 
employees even hampered relations with our Vietnamese allies in that they 
would describe themselves as being "from the Embassy."  When officers from 
the Embassy had to deal with Vietnamese who had been in contact with U.S. 
intelligence employees, the Vietnamese quickly assumed that the Embassy 
officers were simply more CIA agents roaming the country.

It probably is fair to speculate that useful, accurate intelligence might 
have averted two wars.  Had Dean Acheson better intelligence about the Far 
East and Korea in particular, he might not have made the speech in which he 
said that Korea and other areas were outside the sphere of U.S. interest.  
That virtually handed North Korea a license to invade South Korea.  Had our 
Ambassador to Iraq in 1990 better intelligence, her audience with Saddam 
Hussein might well have avoided conveying to him that he could invade Kuwait 
with impunity.

Several recent books reveal how our cold war with the Soviet Union nearly 
heated up to fissionable temperature, precipitated by insufficient 
intelligence on both sides. (In the new dark ages that we narrowly avoided, 
these accounts might still have been written, but with pieces of charcoal on 
flattened walls of buildings in both countries.)  Sergei Khruschev's story of 
the career of his father, Nikita Khruschev, and the Creation of a Super 
Power, relates the Soviet side of the fury that caused his father to dispatch 
their missiles to Cuba. 

The British historian, Robert Surface, supplies in his recent work, Lenin, an 
enlightening stage setter and introduction for Josef Stalin's control of the 
Soviet Union.  Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin's dictatorial rule three 
years after his death made him a respected figure to some communist 
officials, but anathema to many others.  It was a driving factor in his 
abrupt removal from office in 1964.

Mikhail Gorbachev's Memoirs provides his reaction to Khruschev's removal and 
a studied, credible account of its effects on the Soviet Union.  Gorbachev's 
sponsorship of Glasnost and Perestroika, based on his conviction that the 
structure and mission of the Politburo had to be reformed, lights a 
political/historical path all thinking Americans should survey.

These books strongly reinforce my long-standing contention that improving the 
qualifications of our intelligence officers is critical for national 
security.  Our world has undergone enormous changes with entirely new kinds 
of terrorist threats.  Civil and holy wars require new approaches by 
intelligence services.  Our defense establishment must accommodate today's 
environment and give up the outmoded tactics and practices of yesteryears.  
We then had negligible information on what really was motivating the Russians 
and how they perceived our various actions toward them.  And today, will our 
National Missile Defense initiative provoke them similarly?  Adequate, 
reliable intelligence might inform us.

What can be done?  One improvement would be to change the practice of 
assigning less competent personnel to Intelligence positions.  Over my long 
army career, the way we located the least competent captain in an infantry 
battalion was by calling for the S-2.  The least competent major was the 
regimental S-2.  Has this changed?  I hope so, but if not, it is a practice 
that must be stopped.  These faults persisted in my day because troop units 
always needed the best officers available, and the operational, logistic, and 
personnel officers were also needed every day. The intelligence officer's 
role was esoteric, hence his post would be filled by whoever was available. 

We certainly should make better use than in the past of employees of 
non-intelligence agencies. During the Viet-Nam war, some of the political 
officers furnished by the State Department to Corps and Province teams were 
far more effective than those of our own meager military resources.  The 
Vietnamese of both factions accepted one of these people working for John 
Paul Vann as readily as if he were one of the French planters they knew well. 
He was given information both opposing elements wanted passed back to Vann 
and others. 

We should listen to officers who have thought deeply about these matters.  
One of the finest Army officers I've ever known, then Colonel Eugene Lynch 
whom I met in Vietnam, has thought through the world in which we operate.  
The matrices Mike has used to illustrate his findings are the most serious of 
all extensions of Clausewitz that his devotees have seen to date.  Mike views 
the Principles of War from strategic, tactical, and operational levels in 
charts that could be understood by a C&GSC student within a week's exposure.  
Mike's focus on Force versus Power; Form versus Function, and Measures versus 
Ends would make young officers/operators of the Navy's SEALs and our Army's 
Special Force far more valuable than their Vietnam era processing could do.  
Exposure to his structure combined with a stringent examination of their own 
past experience would provide a much fuller comprehension of the world they 
will now serve. 

Our most abject failing stems from our poor capacity to understand other 
cultures.  Officers 
trained in anthropology and several other social sciences would be useful.  
Our pacification programs in Vietnam would have benefited from such officers. 
 I was exposed to the ability of anthropologists to cross cultures by 
watching Tom Dooley's team work in their field hospital in 1961 in western 
Laos (Ban Hue Sai).  Colonel Yarborough, then commanding the Special Warfare 
Center, was very sensitive to any tactic likely to make our White Star Mobile 
Training Teams more effective.  He shared his "Black Bag" with the graduate 
students of Weston Labarre, author of The Human Animal, then teaching at Duke 
University.  Our Special Forces teams became far more effective in a matter 
of months.  It is a pity none of us realized our successors would 
betray/abandon the Hmong mountain people that our new skills enabled us to 
recruit.

An obvious task of the new Bush Administration is to resolve these continuing 
failures.  What can be done other than the self-evident "close down and start 
over" response, which itself is not a credible solution?  The just completed 
Hart-Rudman Commission has illuminated some 
organizational steps that can improve operational capabilities in forces that 
circumstances may again require us to commit.  The first of these other 
remedies should be to require agreement on "lessons learned" from our Vietnam 
folly.

The simplistic "never again" motto is attractive, but it has had no real 
impact on the structure or orientation of the involved bureaucracies that 
misled Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon about Vietnam.  What 
do we know now about indigenous cultures in areas where we may commit forces? 
 Has our new focus on "peacekeeping" missions stimulated beneficial 
evolutions in the forces we may have to consign about the world?  Would 
present technologies have resolved the situation our commitment to Somalia 
imposed on the forces sent there?  What will be the eventual "blowback"* from 
our decision to protect the people of Kosovo with our aircraft?  Will our 
on-going actions become more effective, and still be acceptable to our nation 
and the rest of the world?

Both Prelude's and Backfire's candid denunciations of the errors we made in 
Vietnam focus on our near total ignorance of that culture as well as our 
driving obsession with the "domino" theory.  Lenin wrote of "sloganizing the 
revolution."  It is evident that stultifying intellectual concepts, when 
rendered to simple sounding phrases, can become an enemy's most effective 
weapon-as with the domino theory we revered.  Adopting this one certainly 
disabled us and forced us to pay an enormous price in lives, equipment and 
national unity.

_____________
* "Blowback" is the CIA's term for "unintended consequences" of a policy or 
action. The book of this title by Professor Chalmers Johnson is another "must 
read" work. He makes it very evident that inertia is the most powerful force 
generated by bureaucracies. The six years I spent alongside Johnson and 
Professor Bob Scalapino of the Political Science Department of the University 
of California at Berkeley (1972-78) took me down intellectual paths that 
could have saved us enormous toll in treasure and lives had these been seen 
and appreciated by our decision-makers.