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Fragfree

Another reason Iraq is not like Vietnam. No one’s getting fragged. Someone may want to tell the 12 captains, draft-happy anti-war Dems, etc.  Sending people to war who don’t want to go gets (the wrong) people killed. Better to leave war to the people who want to fight:  

RALEIGH, N.C. — American troops killed their own commanders so often during the Vietnam War that the crime earned its own name - “fragging.”

But since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has charged only one soldier with killing his commanding officer, a dramatic turnabout that most experts attribute to the all-volunteer military.

And some argue the case of Staff Sgt. Alberto B. Martinez shouldn’t even be considered fragging, since his motive was unclear.

…

He faces a possible death sentence if convicted of setting off several grenades and a mine in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces near Tikrit, Iraq.

The June 2005 blast, initially blamed on a mortar round, killed Martinez’s company commander, Capt. Phillip Esposito, 30, of Suffern, New York, and 1st Lt. Louis Allen, 34, of Milford, Pennsylvania, the unit’s operations officer.

At a hearing in Kuwait early in the case, a witness testified Martinez had said twice that he disliked Esposito and was going to “frag” him.

Between 1969 and 1971, the Army reported 600 fragging incidents that killed 82 Americans and injured 651. In 1971 alone, there were 1.8 fraggings for every 1,000 American soldiers serving in Vietnam, not including gun and knife assaults.

“These people knew the war was pretty much lost, that they were going to be sacrificed,” said Texas A&M University history professor and Vietnam veteran Terry Anderson. “They just wanted to get out of Vietnam.”

After the 1968 Tet offensive, enlisted troops in Vietnam increasingly felt their lives were being placed at risk for a losing cause.

“Many of them were trying to go through the motions without getting themselves killed,” said Duke University history professor Alex Roland. “If an officer or hard-charging sergeant was in his foxhole and a grenade rolled in, you probably would never know where it came from.”

…

In Vietnam, fragging increased as drafted troops became more demoralized during the conflict’s later years.

Both Roland and Anderson said today’s all-volunteer military, compared with soldiers being forced into duty in Vietnam, is the primary reason why fragging attacks are almost nonexistent in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Turns out for all its similarities with Vietnam … necessary war against a clear evil under trying political and military circumstances, with greater threat of defeat on homefront than battlefield … Iraq is in other ways not like Vietnam at all. Low KIA rate, virtually non-existent offensive capacity on the part of the enemy beyond murderous harassment of troops and terrorism against civilians. And no fragging.  Also, a virtually non-existent anti-war movement.  Well, OK, there is a majority in Congress that is to varying degrees anti-war.  I guess I meant a thus-far entirely ineffective and virtually irrelevant anti-war movement.  

Drafting citizens would make sense if we were engaged in a war that required mass mobilization. We’re not.  There are far easier, cheaper, less traumatic and more  productive ways to expand the military to suit our national security needs. Financial incentives and recruitment campaigns that appeal to personal values and public service, making it clear what military service is about and asking Americans to rise to the occasion.  The ones that have it in them have and will. A draft as it has been proposed has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with politics.  It is a bid to force thousands of people into a government-subsidized anti-war campaign, and to engineer a situation in which mob rule can trump leadership, election results, and our normal process of governance, with no regard for either national security or the lives of millions of people who are relying on us. It’s a measure not intended to win a war but to lose one. 

It’s tragic and immoral, verging on criminal and treasonous, the way the people who most oppose Iraq as a new Vietnam want to turn it into one.

h/t Conf Yank, who has a different take.  CY thinks AP’s rueful about the lack of fragging. I applaud them for pointing it out.

Welcome Punditeers, etal! Come on in. Y’all know what a Hudna is?  Everyone wants to come home, and hopes it’ll be there when they do. Vlad and A’jad, sittin in a tree … Hey, if you haven’t yet, you’re going to want to tune in the latest on HTV. 

Topics: Iraq, military

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:15 am on Thursday, October 18, 2007

6 Responses to “Fragfree”

1. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   October 18th, 2007 at 12:20 am

   What, Iraq isn’t another Vietnam? Quick, someone tell Kennedy! But give him a drink first, to cushion the shock.

   From Confederate Yankee: “You can almost feel their pain.” Heh…..and no sympathy from me.

2. Don Surber » Blog Archive » No draft, no fragging Says:
   October 18th, 2007 at 9:14 am

   [...] UPDATE: Jules Crittenden has fun with it. [...]

3. The Thunder Run Says:
   October 18th, 2007 at 11:48 am

   Web Reconnaissance for 10/18/2007

   A short recon of what�s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.

4. RebeccaH Says:
   October 18th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

   From Confederate Yankee: “You can almost feel their pain.” Heh…..and no sympathy from me.

   No sympathy here, either, but plenty of disgust, and an abiding disrespect.

5. Vanguard of the Commentariat Says:
   October 18th, 2007 at 12:34 pm

   Poor Lefties. Unfairly robbed of another one of their race/class warfare narratives. Poor serf draftees killing their Tsarist officers. Or “black men being sent to kill yellow men on behalf of white men and Dow Chemical”.

6. saltydog Says:
   October 18th, 2007 at 6:08 pm

   This is just one more dream of the nostalgic that has been dashed on the rocks. Perhaps that is why they have worked so hard to stir up racial trouble.

   The problems that plagued the troops in Viet Nam were the result of the problems that were causing riots and burning cities stateside, along with the revelations out of the Pentagon that those leading them thought the war was lost and a more generalized drug culture that traveled with the troops in country.

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