FRAGGING: assassination of an officer by his own troops, usually by means
of a grenade
==
http://news.tbo.com/news/MGALSISEZDD.html
Grenade Attack Fragging Throwback?
By GEORGE CORYELL ***@tampatrib.com
Published: Apr 2, 2003
TAMPA - The grenade explosion in Kuwait's Camp Pennsylvania killed two
officers, injured 14 and ripped through memories of soldiers who served in
Vietnam.
Was fragging back?
The term was coined during the late 1960s and early 1970s, so-called
because the fragmentation grenade was a favorite tool of U.S. troops who
sought to kill or maim unpopular officers at the height of the conflict in
Southeast Asia.
``When you get a commander who's perceived as a glory hound and not out for
the troops, you've got the potential for fragging,'' said Ron Mooneyhan,
55, who served as a lieutenant with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam in 1969
and 1970.
However, the attack March 22 at Camp Pennsylvania - two days after the war
in Iraq began - seems far removed from the circumstances that led to
fragging in Vietnam.
The sergeant suspected of the attack in Iraq, a black Muslim, is described
as resentful about alleged religious and racial discrimination in the Army.
Killed in the attack on a brigade command center of the 101st Airborne
Division were Army Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert, 27, of Easton, Pa., and
Air Force Maj. Gregory Stone, 40, from Boise, Idaho.
Command Tents Targeted
The Army said three grenades were thrown or rolled into the front opening
of three command tents.
A military magistrate has found probable cause that U.S. Army Sgt. Asan
Akbar committed the crime. Akbar has been moved to Germany and could face
charges of murder and aggravated assault.
``I'm rather surprised it did happen,'' said Cecil Currey, 70, a military
historian who teaches a class at the University of South Florida. ``In
Vietnam, in terms of fragging, it was a real problem. [Noncommissioned
officers] and junior officers there lost most of their authority because
they were afraid someone would take them out. There were bounties on
officers. I'd hate to see that come back.''
From 1969 to 1972, such killings took at least 86 lives in Vietnam and
wounded at least 788, according to an Associated Press report.
Rod Nishimura, who retired as an Army Special Forces colonel from the U.S.
Special Operations Command in 1996, served in Vietnam with the 25th
Infantry Division in 1967 and 1968.
Nishimura, 57, of Brandon, said his time in Vietnam was before fragging
became widespread.
``When my brother went over in 1970, he said it was a whole different
situation,'' Nishimura said. ``The morale problems were getting bad and
race was more of an issue. I was fortunate that I didn't experience those
kinds of problems.''
Nishimura said he thought the Iraq case would be an isolated incident.
``I would say something is wrong with the individual guy,'' he said. ``I
don't think there is widespread dissatisfaction in the 101st. Now that
they're committed to battle, they're going to focus their energy on the
enemy.''
Different Conditions
By 1968, several factors were creating morale problems in Vietnam. War
protests in the United States were becoming larger. The number of teenagers
drafted to fight who didn't want to be there was growing. The assassination
of Martin Luther King Jr. reminded black soldiers of their aggrieved status
in much of the United States. And the drug problem among soldiers was
worsening.
``When I went in the military and when I went out, the country did a 180,''
Mooneyhan, of Tampa, said. ``Then you got people who were incompetent
sending you in harm's way for something you don't really believe in. The
black-white issue became more of a problem. Black soldiers saw Martin
Luther King [Jr.] killed when they didn't have freedom.''
The situation today is different in many ways. It is an all- volunteer
Army, and the 101st is a 22,000-member division known as a gung-ho, hard-
charging unit. Drugs are far less of a problem. Although race relations are
strained at times, the Army typically has a wide cross section of minority
officers.
One Nashville newspaper, The Tennessean, reported Akbar had told his mother
he feared persecution because he is a Muslim and was reprimanded recently
for insubordination.
Insubordination could become more common, feeding such attacks, depending
on the course of the war.
``This was supposed to be a pushover. Now they're talking about weeks and
months,'' Currey, the military historian, said. ``If the enlisted soldiers
feel they are in an impossible situation, especially if chemical or
biological weapons are used against them, I'd expect we'd see fragging
again. People will turn against authority again.''
Mooneyhan said this was probably an isolated incident, unless the war drags
on and U.S. casualties go up.
``This is starting to be the same guerilla-type situation as Vietnam, where
you're starting to get shot in the back by the locals,'' he said. ``There
is no rear area.''
==
http://www.isreview.org/issues/09/soldiers_revolt.shtml
International Socialist Review Issue 9, August-September 2000
Vietnam: The Soldier's Revolt
By Joel Geier
The hidden war
Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse,
with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their
officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where
not near-mutinous[C]onditions [exist] among American forces in Vietnam
that have only been exceeded in this century by...the collapse of the
Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.
Armed Forces Journal, June 19711
THE MOST neglected aspect of the Vietnam War is the soldiers' revolt--the
mass upheaval from below that unraveled the American army. It is a great
reality check in an era when the U.S. touts itself as an invincible nation.
For this reason, the soldiers' revolt has been written out of official
history. Yet it was a crucial part of the massive antiwar movement whose
activity helped the Vietnamese people in their struggle to free
Vietnam--described once by President Johnson as a "raggedy-ass little
fourth-rate country"--from U.S. domination. The legacy of the soldiers'
revolt and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam--despite more recent U.S. victories
over Iraq and Serbia--casts a pall on the Pentagon. They still fear the
political backlash that might come if U.S. ground forces sustain heavy
casualties in a future war.
The army revolt was a class struggle that pitted working-class soldiers
against officers who viewed them as expendable. The fashionable attempt to
revise Vietnam War history, to airbrush its horrors, to create a climate
supportive of future military interventions, cannot acknowledge that
American soldiers violently opposed that war, or that American capitalism
casually tolerated the massacre of working-class troops. Liberal academics
have added to the historical distortion by reducing the radicalism of the
1960s to middle-class concerns and activities, while ignoring working-class
rebellion. But the militancy of the 1960s began with the Black working
class as the motor force of the Black liberation struggle, and it reached
its climax with the unity of white and Black working-class soldiers whose
upsurge shook U.S. imperialism.
In Vietnam, the rebellion did not take the same form as the mass stateside
GI antiwar movement, which consisted of protests, marches, demonstrations
and underground newspapers. In Vietnam, the aim of the soldiers was more
modest, but also more subversive: survival, to "CYA" (cover your ass), to
protect "the only body you have" by fighting the military's attempt to
continue the war. The survival conflict became a war within the war that
ripped the armed forces apart. In 1965, the Green Machine was the best army
the U.S. ever put into the field; a few years later, it was useless as a
fighting force.
"Survival politics," as it was then called, expressed itself through the
destruction of the search-and-destroy strategy, through mutinies, through
the killing of officers, and through fraternization and making peace from
below with the National Liberation Front (NLF). It was highly effective in
destroying everything that military hierarchy and discipline stand for. It
was the proudest moment in the U.S. army's history.
Like most of the revolutionary traditions of the American working class,
the soldiers' revolt has been hidden from history. The aim of this essay is
to reclaim the record of that struggle.
A working-class army
The Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war by themselves or govern
themselves.
Vice President Richard M. Nixon, April 16, 19542
From 1964 to 1973, from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to the final
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 27 million men came of draft age. A
majority of them were not drafted due to college, professional, medical or
National Guard deferments. Only 40 percent were drafted and saw military
service. A small minority, 2.5 million men (about 10 percent of those
eligible for the draft), were sent to Vietnam.3
This small minority was almost entirely working-class or rural youth. Their
average age was 19. Eighty-five percent of the troops were enlisted men; 15
percent were officers. The enlisted men were drawn from the 80 percent of
the armed forces with a high school education or less. At this time,
college education was universal in the middle class and making strong
inroads in the better-off sections of the working class. Yet, in 1965 and
1966, college graduates were only 2 percent of the hundreds of thousands of
draftees.4
In the elite colleges, the class discrepancy was even more glaring. The
upper class did none of the fighting. Of the 1,200 Harvard graduates in
1970, only 2 went to Vietnam, while working-class high schools routinely
sent 20 percent, 30 percent of their graduates and more to Vietnam.5
College students who were not made officers were usually assigned to
noncombat support and service units. High school dropouts were three times
more likely to be sent to combat units that did the fighting and took the
casualties. Combat infantry soldiers, "the grunts," were entirely working
class. They included a disproportionate number of Black working-class
troops. Blacks, who formed 12 percent of the troops, were often 25 percent
or more of the combat units.6
When college deferments expired, joining the National Guard was a favorite
way to get out of serving in Vietnam. During the war, 80 percent of the
Guard's members described themselves as joining to avoid the draft. You
needed connections to get in--which was no problem for Dan Quayle, George
W. Bush and other ruling-class draft evaders. In 1968, the Guard had a
waiting list of more than 100,000. It had triple the percentage of college
graduates that the army did. Blacks made up less than 1.5 percent of the
National Guard. In Mississippi, Blacks were 42 percent of the population,
but only one Black man served in a Guard of more than 10,000.7
In 1965, the troops came from a working class that had moved in a
conservative direction during the Cold War, due to the long postwar boom
and McCarthyite repression. Yet, in the five years before the war, the
civil rights movement had shaped Black political views. The troops had more
class and trade-union consciousness than exists today. The stateside
Movement for a Democratic Military, organized by former members of the
Black Panther Party, had as the first points of its program, "We demand the
right to collective bargaining," and "We demand wages equal to the federal
minimum wage."8 When the Defense Department attempted to break a farm
workers' strike by increasing orders for scab lettuce, soldiers boycotted
mess halls, picketed and plastered bases with stickers proclaiming "Lifers
Eat Lettuce."9 When the army used troops to break the national postal
wildcat strike in 1970, Vietnam GI called out, "To hell with breaking
strikes, let's break the government."10
Shortly after the war began, radicalism started to get a hearing among
young workers. As the Black liberation struggle moved northward from 1965
to 1968, 200 cities had ghetto uprisings--spreading revolutionary
consciousness among young, working-class Blacks. In the factories, those
same years saw a strong upturn in working-class militancy, with days lost
to strikes and wildcats doubling.11 Left-wing ideas from the student
movement were reaching working-class youth through the antiwar movement. In
1967 and 1968, many of the troops had been radicalized before their entry
into the army. Still others were radicalized prior to being shipped to
Vietnam by the GI antiwar movement on stateside bases. Radicalizing
soldiers soon came up against the harsh reality that the officers viewed
working-class troops as expendable.
The middle-class officers corps
Let the military run the show.
Senator Barry Goldwater12
The officer corps was drawn from the 7 percent of troops who were college
graduates, or the 13 percent who had one to three years of college. College
was to officer as high school was to enlisted man. The officer corps was
middle class in composition and managerial in outlook. Ruling-class
military families were heavily represented in its higher ranks.13
In the Second World War, officers were 7 percent of the armed forces, an
amount normal for most armies. The officer corps used the postwar permanent
arms economy, with its bloated arms budget, as its vehicle for
self-expansion. By the time of the Vietnam War, the officer corps was 15
percent of the armed forces, which meant one officer for every six plus
men.14
After the end of the Korean War in 1953, there was no opportunity for
combat commands. As the old army song goes, "There's no promotion/this side
of the ocean." In 1960, it took an excruciating 33 years to move from
second lieutenant to colonel. Many of the "lifers," professional officers
and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), welcomed the Vietnam War as the
opportunity to reinvigorate their careers. They were not disappointed. By
1970, the agonizing wait to move up the career ladder from second
lieutenant to colonel had been reduced to 13 years.15 Over 99 percent of
second lieutenants became first lieutenants, 95 percent of first
lieutenants were promoted to captain, 93 percent of qualified captains
became majors, 77 percent of qualified majors became lieutenant colonels
and half of the lieutenant colonels became colonels.16
The surest road to military advancement is a combat command. But there were
too many active duty officers of high rank, which produced intense
competition for combat commands. There were 2,500 lieutenant colonels
jostling for command of only 100 to 130 battalions; 6,000 colonels, 2,000
of whom were in serious competition for 75 brigade commands; and 200 major
generals competing for the 13 division commands in the army.17
General Westmoreland, the commander of the armed forces in Vietnam,
accommodated the officers by creating excessive support units and rapidly
rotating combat command. In Vietnam, support and service units grew to an
incredible 86 percent of military manpower. Only 14 percent of the troops
were actually assigned to combat. Extravagant support services were the
basis for the military bureaucracy. The armed forces created "numerous
logistical commands, each to be headed by a general or two who would have
to have high-ranking staffs to aid each of them." Thus it became possible
for 64 army generals to serve simultaneously in Vietnam, with the requisite
compliment of colonels, majors etc.18
These superfluous support officers lived far removed from danger, lounging
in rear base camps in luxurious conditions. A few miles away, combat
soldiers were experiencing a nightmarish hell. The contrast was too great
to allow for confidence--in both the officers and the war--to survive
unscathed.
Westmoreland's solution to the competition for combat command poured
gasoline on the fire. He ordered a one-year tour of duty for enlisted men
in Vietnam, but only six months for officers. The combat troops hated the
class discrimination that put them at twice the risk of their commanders.
They grew contemptuous of the officers, whom they saw as raw and
dangerously inexperienced in battle.
Even a majority of officers considered Westmoreland's tour inequality as
unethical. Yet they were forced to use short tours to prove themselves for
promotion. They were put in situations in which their whole careers
depended on what they could accomplish in a brief period, even if it meant
taking shortcuts and risks at the expense of the safety of their men--a
temptation many could not resist.
The outer limit of six-month commands was often shortened due to promotion,
relief, injury or other reasons. The outcome was "revolving-door" commands.
As an enlisted man recalled, "During my year in-country I had five
second-lieutenant platoon leaders and four company commanders. One CO was
pretty good...All the rest were stupid."19
Aggravating this was the contradiction that guaranteed opposition between
officers and men in combat. Officer promotions depended on quotas of enemy
dead from search-and-destroy missions. Battalion commanders who did not
furnish immediate high body counts were threatened with replacement. This
was no idle threat--battalion commanders had a 30 to 50 percent chance of
being relieved of command. But search-and-destroy missions produced
enormous casualties for the infantry soldiers. Officers corrupted by career
ambitions would cynically ignore this and draw on the never-ending supply
of replacements from the monthly draft quota.20
Officer corruption was rife. A Pentagon official writes, "[the] stench of
corruption rose to unprecedented levels during William C. Westmoreland's
command of the American effort in Vietnam." The CIA protected the poppy
fields of Vietnamese officials and flew their heroin out of the country on
Air America planes. Officers took notice and followed suit. The major who
flew the U.S. ambassador's private jet was caught smuggling $8 million of
heroin on the plane.21
Army stores (PXs) were importing French perfumes and other luxury goods for
the officers to sell on the black market for personal gain. But the black
market extended far beyond luxury goods: "The Viet Cong received a large
percentage of their supplies from the United States via the underground
routes of the black market: kerosene, sheet metal, oil, gasoline engines,
claymore mines, hand grenades, rifles, bags of cement," which were publicly
sold at open, outdoor black markets.22
The troops were quickly disillusioned with a war in which American-made
military matériel was being used against them. And then there were endless
scandals: PX scandals, NCO-club scandals, sergeant-major scandals, M-16
jamming scandals. In interviews, when Vietnam veterans were asked what
stood out about their experience, a repeated answer was "the corruption."23
The ethics of the officer corps imitated those of the business elite they
served. They were corrupted by six-month command tours while their men
served a year, by career advancement at the expense of troop welfare, by
black market profiteering, and by living in luxury in the midst of combat
troop slaughter. The corruption of the officers, combined with the combat
plan that avoided officer casualties while guaranteeing the slaughter of
their men, produced explosive results.
A ruling-class strategy
We know we can't win a ground war in Asia.
Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on "Face the Nation" (CBS-TV), May 3, 197024
The political and military position of the U.S. was hopeless from the
moment it entered the war. The U.S. was fighting to protect capitalism and
empire. The Vietnamese were fighting to reunify their country and break
free of foreign control. The American-controlled government of South
Vietnam was the political representative of the landlord class, which took
40 to 60 percent of the peasants' crop as rent. In National Liberation
Front (NLF)-controlled territory, rents were lowered to 10 percent,
creating enormous peasant support for the Communist insurgency.25
As the NLF expanded their areas of control, it became increasingly
difficult for the landlords to collect rents. They therefore struck a
fateful bargain with their government: the army would collect the peasants'
rent in return for a 30 percent cut, which was to be split three ways
between the government, the officers and the troops. Rent collection became
more important to the army than fighting. The corrupt South Vietnamese
government and its army were little more than tax collectors for the
landlords. The enormous economic and military power of U.S. imperialism was
no stronger than the social relations of its most corrupt and reactionary
colonial clients.26
The war was fought by NLF troops and peasant auxiliaries who worked the
land during the day and fought as soldiers at night. They would attack ARVN
(Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and American troops and bases or set
mines at night, and then disappear back into the countryside during the
day. In this form of guerrilla war, there were no fixed targets, no set
battlegrounds, and there was no territory to take. With that in mind, the
Pentagon designed a counterinsurgency strategy called "search and destroy."
Without fixed battlegrounds, combat success was judged by the number of NLF
troops killed--the body count. A somewhat more sophisticated variant was
the "kill ratio"--the number of enemy troops killed compared to the number
of Americans dead. This "war of attrition" strategy was the basic military
plan of the American ruling class in Vietnam.27
For each enemy killed, for every body counted, soldiers got three-day
passes and officers received medals and promotions. This reduced the war
from fighting for "the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese" to no larger
purpose than killing. Any Vietnamese killed was put in the body count as a
dead enemy soldier, or as the GIs put it, "if it's dead, it's Charlie"
("Charlie" was GI slang for the NLF). This was an inevitable outcome of a
war against a whole people. Everyone in Vietnam became the enemy--and this
encouraged random slaughter. Officers further ordered their men to "kill
them even if they try to surrender--we need the body count." It was an
invitation to kill indiscriminately to swell a tally sheet.28
Some enlisted men followed their officers into barbarism. The most infamous
incident was the genocidal slaughter of the village of My Lai, where
officers demanded that their men kill all inhabitants--more than 400 women,
children, infants and old people. Only one minor officer, Lt. Calley,
received a sentence for this Nazi-like war crime. President Nixon quickly
pardoned him.29 At that point, 32 percent of the American people thought
high government and military officials should be tried for war crimes.
Rather than following their officers, many more soldiers had the courage to
revolt against barbarism.30
Ninety-five percent of combat units were search-and-destroy units. Their
mission was to go out into the jungle, hit bases and supply areas, flush
out NLF troops and engage them in battle. If the NLF fought back,
helicopters would fly in to prevent retreat and unleash massive
firepower--bullets, bombs, missiles. The NLF would attempt to avoid this,
and battle generally only occurred if the search-and-destroy missions were
ambushed. Ground troops became the live bait for the ambush and firefight.
GIs referred to search and destroy as "humping the boonies by dangling the
bait."31
Without helicopters, search and destroy would not have been possible--and
the helicopters were the terrain of the officers. "On board the command and
control chopper rode the battalion commander, his aviation-support
commander, the artillery-liaison officer, the battalion S-3 and the
battalion sergeant major. They circled...high enough to escape random
small-arms fire." The officers directed their firepower on the NLF down
below, but while indiscriminately spewing out bombs and napalm, they could
not avoid "collateral damage"--hitting their own troops. One-quarter of the
American dead in Vietnam was killed by "friendly fire" from the choppers.
The officers were out of danger, the "eye in the sky," while the troops had
their "asses in the grass," open to fire from both the NLF and the
choppers.32
When the battle was over, the officers and their choppers would fly off to
base camps removed from danger while their troops remained out in the
field. The class relations of any army copy those of the society it serves,
but in more extreme form. Search and destroy brought the class relations of
American capitalism to their ultimate pitch.
Of the 543,000 American troops in Vietnam in 1968, only 14 percent (or
80,000) were combat troops. These 80,000 men took the brunt of the war.
They were the weak link, and their disaffection crippled the ability of the
world's largest military to fight. In 1968, 14,592 men--18 percent of
combat troops--were killed. An additional 35,000 had serious wounds that
required hospitalization. Although not all of the dead and wounded were
from combat units, the overwhelming majority were. The majority of combat
troops in 1968 were either seriously injured or killed. The number of
American casualties in Vietnam was not extreme, but as it was concentrated
among the combat troops, it was a virtual massacre. Not to revolt amounted
to suicide.33
Officers, high in the sky, had few deaths or casualties. The deaths of
officers occurred mostly in the lower ranks among lieutenants or captains
who led combat platoons or companies. The higher-ranking officers went
unharmed. During a decade of war, only one general and eight full colonels
died from enemy fire.34 As one study commissioned by the military
concluded, "In Vietnam...the officer corps simply did not die in sufficient
numbers or in the presence of their men often enough."35
The slaughter of grunts went on because the officers never found it
unacceptable. There was no outcry from the military or political elite, the
media or their ruling-class patrons about this aspect of the war, nor is it
commented on in almost any history of the war. It is ignored or accepted as
a normal part of an unequal world, because the middle and upper class were
not in combat in Vietnam and suffered no pain from its butchery. It never
would have been tolerated had their class done the fighting. Their
premeditated murder of combat troops unleashed class war in the armed
forces. The revolt focused on ending search and destroy through all of the
means the army had provided as training for these young workers.
Tet--the revolt begins
We have known for some time that this offensive was planned by the
enemy...The ability to do what they have done has been anticipated,
prepared for, and met...The stated purposes of the general uprising have
failed...I do not believe that they will achieve a psychological victory.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, February 2, 196836
The Tet Offensive was the turning point of the Vietnam War and the start of
open, active soldiers' rebellion. At the end of January 1968, on Tet, the
Vietnamese New Year, the NLF sent 100,000 troops into Saigon and 36
provincial capitals to lead a struggle for the cities. The Tet Offensive
was not militarily successful, because of the savagery of the U.S.
counterattack. In Saigon alone, American bombs killed 14,000 civilians. The
city of Ben Tre became emblematic of the U.S. effort when the major who
retook it announced that "to save the city, we had to destroy it."
Westmoreland and his generals claimed that they were the victors of Tet
because they had inflicted so many casualties on the NLF. But to the world,
it was clear that U.S. imperialism had politically lost the war in Vietnam.
Tet showed that the NLF had the overwhelming support of the Vietnamese
population--millions knew of and collaborated with the NLF entry into the
cities and no one warned the Americans. The ARVN had turned over whole
cities without firing a shot. In some cases, ARVN troops had welcomed the
NLF and turned over large weapons supplies. The official rationale for the
war, that U.S. troops were there to help the Vietnamese fend off Communist
aggression from the North, was no longer believed by anybody. The South
Vietnamese government and military were clearly hated by the people.37
Westmoreland's constant claim that there was "light at the end of the
tunnel," that victory was imminent, was shown to be a lie. Search and
destroy was a pipe dream. The NLF did not have to be flushed out of the
jungle--it operated everywhere. No place in Vietnam was a safe base for
American soldiers when the NLF so decided.
What, then, was the point of this war? Why should American troops fight to
defend a regime its own people despised? Soldiers became furious at a
government and an officer corps who risked their lives for lies. Throughout
the world, Tet and the confidence that American imperialism was weak and
would be defeated produced a massive, radical upsurge that makes 1968
famous as the year of revolutionary hope. In the U.S. army, it became the
start of the showdown with the officers.
Within three years, more than one-quarter of the armed forces was absent
without leave (AWOL), had deserted or was in military prisons. Countless
others had received "Ho Chi Minh discharges" for being disruptive and
troublemaking. But the most dangerous forces were those still active in
combat units, whose fury over being slaughtered in useless
search-and-destroy missions erupted in the greatest rebellion the U.S. army
has ever encountered.38
Mutiny
If an officer attempted to impose disciplinary punishment upon a soldier,
the power did not exist to get it executed. In that you have one of the
sure signs of a genuine popular revolution. With the falling away of their
disciplinary power, the political bankruptcy of the staff of officers was
laid bare.
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution39
The refusal of an order to advance into combat is an act of mutiny. In time
of war, it is the gravest crime in the military code, punishable by death.
In Vietnam, mutiny was rampant, the power to punish withered and discipline
collapsed as search and destroy was revoked from below.
Until 1967, open defiance of orders was rare and harshly repressed, with
sentences of two to ten years for minor infractions. Hostility to
search-and-destroy missions took the form of covert combat avoidance,
called "sandbagging" by the grunts. A platoon sent out to "hump the
boonies" might look for a safe cover from which to file fabricated reports
of imaginary activity.40
But after Tet, there was a massive shift from combat avoidance to mutiny.
One Pentagon official reflected that "mutiny became so common that the army
was forced to disguise its frequency by talking instead of 'combat
refusal.'" Combat refusal, one commentator observed, "resembled a strike
and occurred when GIs refused, disobeyed, or negotiated an order into
combat."41
Acts of mutiny took place on a scale previously only encountered in
revolutions. The first mutinies in 1968 were unit and platoon-level
rejections of the order to fight. The army recorded 68 such mutinies that
year. By 1970, in the 1st Air Cavalry Division alone, there were 35 acts of
combat refusal.42 One military study concluded that combat refusal was
"unlike mutinous outbreaks of the past, which were usually sporadic,
short-lived events. The progressive unwillingness of American soldiers to
fight to the point of open disobedience took place over a four-year period
between 1968-71."43
The 1968 combat refusals of individual units expanded to involve whole
companies by the next year. The first reported mass mutiny was in the 196th
Light Brigade in August 1969. Company A of the 3rd Battalion, down to 60
men from its original 150, had been pushing through Songchang Valley under
heavy fire for five days when it refused an order to advance down a
perilous mountain slope. Word of the mutiny spread rapidly. The New York
Daily News ran a banner headline, "Sir, My Men Refuse To Go."44 The GI
paper, The Bond, accurately noted, "It was an organized strike...A shaken
brass relieved the company commander...but they did not charge the guys
with anything. The Brass surrendered to the strength of the organized
men."45
This precedent--no court-martial for refusing to obey the order to fight,
but the line officer relieved of his command--was the pattern for the rest
of the war. Mass insubordination was not punished by an officer corps that
lived in fear of its own men. Even the threat of punishment often
backfired. In one famous incident, B Company of the 1st Battalion of the
12th Infantry refused an order to proceed into NLF-held territory. When
they were threatened with court-martials, other platoons rallied to their
support and refused orders to advance until the army backed down.46
As the fear of punishment faded, mutinies mushroomed. There were at least
ten reported major mutinies, and hundreds of smaller ones. Hanoi's Vietnam
Courier documented 15 important GI rebellions in 1969.47 At Cu Chi, troops
from the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry refused battle orders. The "CBS
Evening News" broadcast live a patrol from the 7th Cavalry telling their
captain that his order for direct advance against the NLF was nonsense,
that it would threaten casualties, and that they would not obey it. Another
CBS broadcast televised the mutiny of a rifle company of the 1st Air
Cavalry Division.48
When Cambodia was invaded in 1970, soldiers from Fire Base Washington
conducted a sit-in. They told Up Against the Bulkhead, "We have no business
there...we just sat down. Then they promised us we wouldn't have to go to
Cambodia." Within a week, there were two additional mutinies, as men from
the 4th and 8th Infantry refused to board helicopters to Cambodia.49
In the invasion of Laos in March 1971, two platoons refused to advance. To
prevent the mutiny from spreading, the entire squadron was pulled out of
the Laos operation. The captain was relieved of his command, but there was
no discipline against the men. When a lieutenant from the 501st Infantry
refused his battalion commander's order to advance his troops, he merely
received a suspended sentence.50
The decision not to punish men defying the most sacrosanct article of the
military code, the disobedience of the order for combat, indicated how much
the deterioration of discipline had eroded the power of the officers. The
only punishment for most mutinies was to relieve the commanding officer of
his duties. Consequently, many commanders would not report that they had
lost control of their men. They swept news of mutiny, which would
jeopardize their careers, under the rug. As they became quietly complicit,
the officer corps lost any remaining moral authority to impose discipline.
For every defiance in combat, there were hundreds of minor acts of
insubordination in rear base camps. As one infantry officer reported, "You
can't give orders and expect them to be obeyed."51 This democratic upsurge
from below was so extensive that discipline was replaced by a new command
technique called ''working it out.'' Working it out was a form of
collective bargaining in which negotiations went on between officers and
men to determine orders. Working it out destroyed the authority of the
officer corps and gutted the ability of the army to carry out
search-and-destroy missions. But the army had no alternative strategy for a
guerrilla war against a national liberation movement.52
The political impact of the mutiny was felt far beyond Vietnam. As H.R.
Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, reflected, "If troops are going to
mutiny, you can't pursue an aggressive policy." The soldiers' revolt tied
down the global reach of U.S. imperialism.53
Fragging
The moral condition of the army was hopeless. You might describe it by
saying the army as an army no longer existed. Defeats, retreats, and the
rottenness of the ruling group had utterly undermined the troops.
Leon Trotsky,History of the Russian Revolution54
The murder of American officers by their troops was an openly proclaimed
goal in Vietnam. As one GI newspaper demanded, "Don't desert. Go to
Vietnam, and kill your commanding officer."55 And they did. A new slang
term arose to celebrate the execution of officers: fragging. The word came
from the fragmentation grenade, which was the weapon of choice because the
evidence was destroyed in the act.56
In every war, troops kill officers whose incompetence or recklessness
threatens the lives of their men. But only in Vietnam did this become
pervasive in combat situations and widespread in rear base camps. It was
the most well-known aspect of the class struggle inside the army, directed
not just at intolerable officers, but at "lifers" as a class. In the
soldiers' revolt, it became accepted practice to paint political slogans on
helmets. A popular helmet slogan summed up this mood: "Kill a non-com for
Christ." Fragging was the ransom the ground troops extracted for being used
as live bait.57
No one knows how many officers were fragged, but after Tet it became
epidemic. At least 800 to 1,000 fragging attempts using explosive devices
were made. The army reported 126 fraggings in 1969, 271 in 1970 and 333 in
1971, when they stopped keeping count. But in that year, just in the
American Division (of My Lai fame), one fragging per week took place. Some
military estimates are that fraggings occurred at five times the official
rate, while officers of the Judge Advocate General Corps believed that only
10 percent of fraggings were reported. These figures do not include
officers who were shot in the back by their men and listed as wounded or
killed in action.58
Most fraggings resulted in injuries, although "word of the deaths of
officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain
units."59 The army admitted that it could not account for how 1,400
officers and noncommissioned officers died. This number, plus the official
list of fragging deaths, has been accepted as the unacknowledged army
estimate for officers killed by their men. It suggests that 20 to 25
percent--if not more--of all officers killed during the war were killed by
enlisted men, not the "enemy." This figure has no precedent in the history
of war.60
Soldiers put bounties on officers targeted for fragging. The money, usually
between $100 and $1,000, was collected by subscription from among the
enlisted men. It was a reward for the soldier who executed the collective
decision. The highest bounty for an officer was $10,000, publicly offered
by GI Says, a mimeographed bulletin put out in the 101st Airborne Division,
for Col. W. Honeycutt, who had ordered the May 1969 attack on Hill 937. The
hill had no strategic significance and was immediately abandoned when the
battle ended. It became enshrined in GI folklore as Hamburger Hill, because
of the 56 men killed and 420 wounded taking it. Despite several fragging
attempts, Honeycutt escaped uninjured.61
As Vietnam GI argued after Hamburger Hill, "Brass are calling this a
tremendous victory. We call it a goddam butcher shop...If you want to die
so some lifer can get a promotion, go right ahead. But if you think your
life is worth something, you better get yourselves together. If you don't
take care of the lifers, they might damn well take care of you."62
Fraggings were occasionally called off. One lieutenant refused to obey an
order to storm a hill during an operation in the Mekong Delta. "His first
sergeant later told him that when his men heard him refuse that order, they
removed a $350 bounty earlier placed on his head because they thought he
was a 'hard-liner.'"63
The motive for most fraggings was not revenge, but to change battle
conduct. For this reason, officers were usually warned prior to fraggings.
First, a smoke grenade would be left near their beds. Those who did not
respond would find a tear-gas grenade or a grenade pin on their bed as a
gentle reminder. Finally, the lethal grenade was tossed into the bed of
sleeping, inflexible officers. Officers understood the warnings and usually
complied, becoming captive to the demands of their men. It was the most
practical means of cracking army discipline. The units whose officers
responded opted out of search-and-destroy missions.64
An Army judge who presided over fragging trials called fragging "the
troops' way of controlling officers," and added that it was "deadly
effective." He explained, "Captain Steinberg argues that once an officer is
intimidated by even the threat of fragging he is useless to the military
because he can no longer carry out orders essential to the functioning of
the Army. Through intimidation by threats--verbal and written...virtually
all officers and NCOs have to take into account the possibility of fragging
before giving an order to the men under them." The fear of fragging
affected officers and NCOs far beyond those who were actually involved in
fragging incidents.65
Officers who survived fragging attempts could not tell which of their men
had tried to murder them, or when the men might strike again. They lived in
constant fear of future attempts at fragging by unknown soldiers. In
Vietnam it was a truism that "everyone was the enemy": for the lifers,
every enlisted man was the enemy. "In parts of Vietnam [fragging] stirs
more fear among officers and NCOs than does the war with 'Charlie.'"
Counter-fragging by retaliating officers contributed to a war within the
war. While 80 percent of fraggings were of officers and NCOs, 20 percent
were of enlisted men, as officers sought to kill potential troublemakers or
those whom they suspected of planning to frag them. In this civil war
within the army, the military police were used to reinstate order. In
October 1971, military police air assaulted the Praline mountain signal
site to protect an officer who had been the target of repeated fragging
attempts. The base was occupied for a week before command was restored.66
Fragging undermined the ability of the Green Machine to function as a
fighting force. By 1970, "many commanders no longer trusted Blacks or
radical whites with weapons except on guard duty or in combat." In the
American Division, fragmentation grenades were not given to troops. In the
440 Signal Battalion, the colonel refused to distribute all arms.67 As a
soldier at Cu Chi told the New York Times, "The American garrisons on the
larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken the weapons from
us and put them under lock and key."68 The U.S. army was slowly disarming
its own men to prevent the weapons from being aimed at the main enemy: the
lifers. It is hard to think of another army so afraid of its own
soldiers.69
Peace from below--search and avoid
The army was incurably sick...so far as making war was concerned, it did
not exist. Nobody believed in the success of the war, the officers as
little as the soldiers. Nobody wanted to fight any more, neither the army
nor the people."
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution 70
Mutiny and fraggings expressed the anger and bitterness that combat
soldiers felt at being used as bait to kill Communists. It forced the
troops to reassess who was the real enemy. Many began to conclude that the
enemy was the lifers or the rulers in the U.S.--that it was the capitalist
class and not, as they had once believed, the NLF.
In a remarkable letter, 40 combat officers wrote to President Nixon in July
1970 to advise him that "the military, the leadership of this country--are
perceived by many soldiers to be almost as much our enemy as the VC [Viet
Cong] and the NVA [North Vietnamese Army]."71 Extraordinary as this officer
admission was, it was too little, too late. Fort Ord's Right-On-Post
proclaimed that GIs had to free themselves and all exploited people from
the oppression of the military, that "we recognize our true enemy...It is
the capitalists who see only profit...They control the military which sends
us off to die. They control the police who occupy the black and brown
ghettoes."72 For others, the enemy was more immediate. As the GI paper, the
Ft. Lewis-McChord Free Press, stated, "In Vietnam, the Lifers, the Brass,
are the true Enemy, not the enemy."73
From there it was a short leap to the idea that "the other war, the war
with Charlie," had to be ended. After the 1970 invasion of Cambodia
enlarged the war, fury and the demoralizing realization that nothing could
stop the warmongers swept both the antiwar movement and the troops.74 The
most popular helmet logo became "UUUU," which meant "the unwilling, led by
the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful." Peace, if it
were to come, would have to be made by the troops themselves, instituted by
an unofficial troop withdrawal ending search-and-destroy missions.75
The form this peace from below took came to be called "search and avoid,"
or "search and evade." It became so extensive that "search and evade
(meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually
a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, 'CYA' (cover your
ass) and get home!" It was not just a replay of early combat avoidance, of
individual units hiding from the war--it was more open, more political, and
more clearly focused as a strategy to bring peace.76
In search and avoid, patrols sent out into the field deliberately eluded
potential clashes with the NLF. Night patrols, the most dangerous, would
halt and take up positions a few yards beyond the defense perimeter, where
the NLF would never come. By skirting potential conflicts, they hoped to
make it clear to the NLF that their unit had established its own peace
treaty.
Another frequent search-and-avoid tactic was to leave base camp, secure a
safe area in the jungle and set up a perimeter-defense system in which to
hole up for the time allotted for the mission. "Some units even took enemy
weapons with them when they went out on such search-and-avoid missions so
that upon return they could report a firefight and demonstrate evidence of
enemy casualties for the body-count figures required by higher
headquarters."77
The army was forced to accommodate what began to be called "the grunts'
cease-fire." An American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times,
said, "They have set up separate companies for men who refuse to go out
into the field. It is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to
go to such and such a place, he no longer goes through the hassle of
refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another
base camp."78
An observer at Pace, near the Cambodian front where a unilateral truce was
widely enforced, reported, "The men agreed and passed the word to other
platoons: nobody fires unless fired upon. As of about 1100 hours on October
10,1971, the men of Bravo Company, 11/12 First Cav Division, declared their
own private cease-fire with the North Vietnamese."79
The NLF responded to the new situation. People's Press, a GI paper, in its
June 1971 issue claimed that NLF and NVA units were ordered not to open
hostilities against U.S. troops wearing red bandanas or peace signs, unless
first fired upon.80 Two months later, the first Vietnam veteran to visit
Hanoi was given a copy of "an order to North Vietnamese troops not to shoot
U.S. soldiers wearing antiwar symbols or carrying their rifles pointed
down." He reports its impact on "convincing me that I was on the side of
the Vietnamese now."81
Colonel Heinl reported this:
That 'search-and-evade' has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored
by the Viet Cong delegation's recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks
that Communist units in Indochina have been ordered not to engage American
units which do not molest them. The same statement boasted--not without
foundation in fact--that American defectors are in the VC ranks.82
Some officers joined, or led their men, in the unofficial cease-fire from
below. A U.S. army colonel claimed:
I had influence over an entire province. I put my men to work helping with
the harvest. They put up buildings. Once the NVA understood what I was
doing, they eased up. I'm talking to you about a de facto truce, you
understand. The war stopped in most of the province. It's the kind of
history that doesn't get recorded. Few people even know it happened, and no
one will ever admit that it happened.83
Search and avoid, mutiny and fraggings were a brilliant success. Two years
into the soldiers' upsurge, in 1970, the number of U.S. combat deaths were
down by more than 70 percent (to 3,946) from the 1968 high of more than
14,000. The revolt of the soldiers in order to survive and not to allow
themselves to be victims could only succeed by a struggle prepared to use
any means necessary to achieve peace from below.84
The revolt was not just against body bags, it was the "Revolt of the Body
Bags," of men who refused to allow themselves to be shoved into body bags,
to become American capitalism's road kill. The soldiers' revolt won the
internal war within the army. Ground troops were removed from Vietnam. The
armed forces are still afraid to use them elsewhere.
Revolution and the army
It is a manifest fact that the disorganization of armies and a total
relaxation of discipline has been both precondition and consequence of all
successful revolutions hitherto."
Engels to Marx, September 26, 185185
It is a maxim of revolutionary politics that for revolution to be
successful, some part of the army must go over to the revolutionary forces.
For that to occur, the revolutionary movement must be strong enough to give
confidence to soldiers that it can protect them from the consequences of
breaking military discipline.
The army revolted in Vietnam--but it lacked revolutionary organization.
There was no revolution for it to go over to. The revolt was successful in
ending the use of ground troops, but left intact the structures of the
army, which allowed imperialism to slowly rebuild out of the wreckage.
The army revolt had all of the strengths and weaknesses of the 1960s
radicalization of which it was a part. It was a courageous mass struggle
from below, creatively improvising the necessary tactical means to
accomplish its goals as it went along. It relied upon no one but itself to
win its battles. It was revolutionary in temper and tactics, but it lacked
the prerequisites for revolutionary success: organization, program, cadre
and leadership. It is possible to name dozens of heroic acts of the
soldiers' revolt in Vietnam, but impossible to record any organization or
leader. They are nameless.
It was brilliant but brief. The only organizing tools were the underground
GI newspapers. A newspaper, as any revolutionary can tell you, is an
organizer, the scaffolding for the building of organization. But newspapers
became a substitute for organization. There was scaffolding, but no
building. Had revolutionary organization coordinated, centralized,
politicized, made conscious and generalized the striving of the soldiers'
revolt, the potential for change would have been enormously greater, and
the outcome unimaginable.
A contradiction of modern imperialist armies is that they serve
ruling-class wars of conquest, while they rely on working-class troops,
who--whatever their initial ideological confusion--have no material
interest in conquest. This contradiction has the potential to destroy
armies. In the 20th century, it did so to the Russian and German armies at
the end of the First World War, the Portuguese army in the African colonial
wars in the 1970s and the American army in Vietnam. But armies have also
been used for counterrevolution, of which the defeat of the Chilean
revolution is a still living reminder.
The hidden history of the 1960s proves that the American army can be split
and won to the revolutionary movement. But that requires the long, slow
patient work of explanation, of propaganda, of education, of organization,
and of agitation and action. The Vietnam revolt shows how rank-and-file
soldiers can rise to the task. The unfinished job is for revolutionary
organization to also rise to that level. When it does, the troops of the
American army can become the troops of the American revolution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., "The Collapse of the Armed Forces," Armed
Forces Journal, June 7, 1971, reprinted in Marvin Gettleman, et al.,
Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p.
327.
2 Quoted in William G. Effros, Quotations: Vietnam, 1945-70 )New York:
Random House, 1970), p. 172.
3 Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and
Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 18.
4 Appy, pp. 24-27 and James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in
Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), pp. 214-15.
5 James Fallows, "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" Vietnam:
Anthology and Guide to a Television History, Steven Cohen, ed. (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 384.
6 Appy, p. 26. The rate of Black deaths in Vietnam in 1965 was double their
army participation rate, but was brought down to normal proportions within
three years because of Black soldiers' struggle against racism. The
struggle for Black liberation within the army in these years deserves
another article of its own. For more information, see David Cortright,
Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1975), pp. 201-16.
7 Appy, pp. 36-37.
8 Larry G. Waterhouse and Mariann G. Wizard, Turning the Guns Around: Notes
on the GI Movement (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 136-38.
9 Camp News, January 15, 1971, and March 15, 1971.
10 Vietnam GI, May 1970. Of the hundreds of underground GI newspapers, only
a handful appeared regularly over time and had readership beyond a
particular base or army division. Of these, the most important were Camp
News, The Bond and Vietnam GI. Vietnam GI had the largest following in
Vietnam due to its ability to put a clear, radical political analysis in
language that connected with the experiences of the grunts. It was put out
by Vietnam vets and by former members of the left wing of the Young
People's Socialist League, who were loosely associated with, although
organizationally independent from, the current that became the American
International Socialists.
11 Kim Moody, "The American Working Class in Transition," International
Socialism, No. 40 (Old Series), Oct/Nov 1969, p. 19.
12 Effros, p. 209.
13 Appy, pp. 25-26.
14 Cincinnatus, Self-Destruction, The Disintegration and Decay of the
United States Army During the Vietnam Era, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981),
p. 155.
15 Cincinnatus, p. 139.
16 Cincinnatus, p. 145.
17 Cincinnatus, p. 146.
18 Cincinnatus, pp. 147-48.
19 Cincinnatus, pp. 157-59.
20 Gibson, p. 116.
21 Cincinnatus, p. 54-56.
22 Cincinnatus, p. 55.
23 Cincinnatus, p. 53.
24 Effros, p. 217.
25 Gibson, p. 71.
26 Gibson, pp. 74-75.
27 Gibson, pp. 101-15 and Cincinnatus, pp. 75-82.
28 Appy, pp. 155-56, and Cincinnatus, pp. 84-85.
29 Seymour M. Hersh, "What Happened at My Lai?" in Gettleman, pp. 410-24.
30 Cohen, p. 378.
31 Appy, pp. 152-58, 182-84.
32 Cincinnatus, pp. 62-63, 70.
33 Cincinnatus, p. 147, 161.
34 Cincinnatus, p. 155.
35 Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage, Crisis in Command: Mismanagement
in the Army (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 16.
36 Effros, p. 89.
37 Gibson. See Chapter 6, "The Tet Offensive and the Production of a Double
Reality."
38 Robert Musil, "The Truth About Deserters," The Nation, April 16, 1973
and for "Ho Chi Minh" discharges, Steve Rees, "A Questioning Spirit: GIs
Against the War" in Dick Custer, ed., They Should Have Served that Cup of
Coffee (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 171.
39 Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan, 1957), Vol. 1, p. 256.
40 Appy, p. 244-45.
41 Cincinnatus, p. 156 and Richard Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: GI and
Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (Perspectives in the Sixties) (New
Brunswick: Rutgers, 1996), p. 44.
42 Matthew Rinaldi, "The Olive-Drab Rebels: Military Organizing during the
Vietnam Era," Radical America, Vol.8 No. 3, May-June 1974, p. 29.
43 Gabriel and Savage, quoted in Appy, p. 254.
44 Cortright, p. 35-36.
45 The Bond, September 22, 1969.
46 Cortright, p. 38.
47 Moser, p. 45.
48 Cortright, p. 36 and Heinl, p. 329.
49 Moser, p. 47 and Cortright, p. 37.
50 Rees, p. 152 and Cortright, p. 37-38.
51 Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam (New York:
Henry Holt, 1994), p. 474.
52 Moser, p. 133 and Cortright, p. 35.
53 Wells, p. 475.
54 Trotsky, Vol.1, p. 260.
55 Quoted in Heinl, p. 330.
56 Eugene Linden, "Fragging and Other Withdrawal Symptoms," Saturday
Review, January 8, 1972, p. 12.
57 Cincinnatus, pp. 51-52.
58 Moser, p. 48 and Appy, p. 246.
59 Heinl, p. 328.
60 Terry Anderson, "The GI Movement and the Response from the Brass," in
Melvin Small and William Hoover, eds., Give Peace A Chance (Syracuse:
Syracuse University, 1992), p. 105.
61 Andy Stapp, Up Against The Brass (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970),
p. 182 and Heinl, p. 328-29 and Appy, p. 230-31.
62 Vietnam GI, June 1969.
63 Linden, p. 14.
64 Wells, p. 474.
65 Linden, p. 12-13.
66 Cortright, p. 44 and Moser, p. 50.
67 Cortright, p. 47 and Moser, p. 50.
68 Quoted in Heinl, p. 328.
69 Linden, p. 15.
70 Trotsky, Vol. 1, p. 261.
71 Cortright, p. 28.
72 Quoted in Moser, p. 98.
73 Quoted in Heinl, p. 330.
74 Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor, recalled "a grave heroin
epidemic...surfaced right after the Cambodian invasion." Interviewed in
Wells, p. 456. Heroin addiction thereafter affected between 10-30 percent
of the troops.
75 Appy, p. 43 and Cincinnatus, p. 27.
76 Heinl, p. 329.
77 Cincinnatus, p. 155.
78 Quoted in Heinl, p. 328.
79 Richard Boyle, GI Revolts: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam
(San Francisco: United Front Press, 1972) p. 28.
80 Moser, p. 132.
81 Wells, p. 526.
82 Heinl, p. 329.
83 Moser, p. 132.
84 Cincinnatus, p. 161.
85 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International
Publishers, 1982) Vol. 38, pp. 469-70.