CHAPTER 20

Morale and Discipline

A Time of Troubles—Atrocities, Rules of Engagement, and Personal Response—'Friendly on Friendly' The Challenge to Authority: Race, Drugs, Indiscipline—'Fragging' and Operation Freeze Training and Morale-Building—Cohesion or Disintegration?

A Time of Troubles

For III MAF, the last year and a half of ground oper­ations in Vietnam was a time of troubles. The decline in combat, combined with increasingly critical pub­lic and mass media scrutiny of the military actions of all Services, brought into prominence two long­standing and distressing problems: the protection of noncombatants in a battle fought among and for con­trol of the people, and the prevention of accidental killing and wounding of Marines by their own fire. These problems lent themselves to the traditional mili­tary solutions of intensified training and rigorous en­forcement of operating procedures, rules of engagement, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

More complex and difficult to deal with were the manifestations among Marines of the racial upheaval, antiwar dissent, and generational conflict plaguing American society in the early 1970s. These manifesta­tions added up to a many-faceted challenge to com­mand authority. Black militancy, expressed in forms ranging from haircuts and hand signs to mass confron­tations and assaults, set Marine against Marine. The youth drug culture, imported from the United States, found fertile soil in Vietnam, where cheap narcotics abounded. Political dissent, encouraged and some­times organized by a militant segment of the antiwar movement, raised the threat of mass disobedience of orders. All these forms of discontent merged into a general attitude of resentment and suspicion toward authority among many enlisted Marines, an attitude that occasionally erupted in deliberate attempts to murder officers and NCOs, the heinous crime known by the slang term, 'fragging.' Of this turbulent peri­od, Sergeant Major Edgar R. Huff, Sergeant Major of III MAP, later observed: 'If I were asked to sum up the 'Marine Experience' in Vietnam, I would say that the Corps grew far too fast and that this growth had a devastating impact on our leadership training and combat effectiveness.*1

Ill MAF, following general Marine Corps policy, adopted two main lines of approach to its disciplinary problems. On one hand, III MAF reemphasized tradi­tional Marine values of pride in country and Corps, discipline, and loyalty to unit and comrades, while dis­playing the determination to punish gross violations of orders and regulations. The Marine Corps used ex­isting legal and administrative procedures to purge its ranks of the most persistent offenders. On the other hand. III MAF tried to understand and make al­lowances for the pride and resentment of young Black Marines, sought ways to prevent drug abuse by edu­cation, and sponsored efforts to find common ground between a tradition-minded leadership and an often antitraditional rank and file. Although most Marines recognized that unrest was largely confined to the rear areas, where leadership is often put to its severest test, they also found that the problems were widespread and not amenable to simple or fast solutions. The balance between established, still valid standards of military discipline and professional conduct and ac­commodation to irreversible social and cultural change was not easy to find. That search was still under way as the last Marines of the 3d MAB left Vietnam.

Atrocities, Rules of Engagement, and Personal Response

On the evening of 19 February 1970, Company B, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, operating in the Viet Cong-dominated countryside south of FSB Ross, sent out a five-man roving patrol.2 Called a 'killer team,' the patrol had the mission of setting ambushes near the many pro-VC hamlets in the Que Son Valley to catch enemy troops or underground members moving in and out. Of the members of the team, Lance Corporal Randell D. Herrod, the leader, had been in Vietnam for seven months; PFC Thomas R. Boyd, Jr., had spent six months in the war, and Private Michael A. Schwartz, three months. The remaining two patrol members, PFCs Samuel G. Green and Michael S.

* Sergeant Major Huff had the unique experience of twice hav­ing been the senior enlisted man in III MAF. Towards the end of his first tour in Vietnam (1967-1968) during which he was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart Medals, he served as Sergeant Major, III MAF. In 1970-71, he was again Sergeant Major, III MAF and took part in the headquarters withdrawal from Vietnam. Henry I. Shaw, Jr. and Ralph W. Donnelly, Blacks in the Marine Corps (Washington: MCHC, 1979), pp. 79-80.