Books: Fragging
Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam
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“Fragging” is a term that U.S. soldiers in Vietnam used to refer to the assassination of a superior officer via a fragmentation grenade. Grenades were preferred because they allowed covert attack. A common method was for the perpetrator to sneak up to the officer’s tent and roll a live grenade into it before making his escape. Unless he was spotted by someone, there was little chance of identifying the culprit.
Amazingly, there were around 900 confirmed or suspected fraggins during the war, against about 58,000 total deaths among US forces.
George Lepre’s Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam addresses what sort of conflicts provoked fragging and what made it especially common during this conflict.
The popular image of fragging is that it was a matter of self-preservation. Soldiers, unwilling to lay down their lives for an unpopular war with uncertain aims, were willing to eliminate officers who would expose them to unnecessary risk. Thus they used fragging to rid themselves of officers who were too gung-ho and eager for combat, or perhaps who were just dangerously incompetent.
But the picture Lepre paints is quite different. While there were some cases that resembled the popular image, the majority of confirmed fraggings stemmed from more prosaic interpersonal conflicts. Usually fraggers were angry about acts of discipline directed at them personally.
Sometimes these sanctions were fairly severe, unusual by the standards of military discipline. For example, one soldier with an otherwise outstanding record killed a superior who, as even fellow officers testified, singled him out for special surveillance and restriction. The officer even attempted to regulate the soldier’s private life, disapproving of the soldier’s Vietnamese wife and going out of his way to keep the soldier from visiting her. This soldier resorted to fragging only after unsuccessful attempts to appeal to other superiors for help with the conflict.
In other cases, though, fragging resulted from completely routine discipline: getting chewed out, busted down, or given punishment duties like cleaning latrines. And in some cases the offense that triggered the fragging was something most outsiders would see as completely trivial: One officer was killed for making a soldier cut his hair, while another got fragged for not handing out a large enough ration of cigarettes (Lepre, p.99).
It may sound bizarre that a soldier would blow someone up with a grenade for such small matters. But it’s not so different from patterns of criminal homicide in civilian life.
Way back in 1958, criminologist Marvin Wolfgang reported the patterns he found in 625 homicide cases in Philadelphia. One of his major conclusions was that the typical homicide stemmed from he called “trivial” altercations. Killing was the end result of a conflict that started when one guy looked too long at another in a bar (“hey buddy, what you staring at?”), or overheard someone saying his sister was an easy lay, or took the last beer out of the fridge without asking. Subsequent studies of homicide find much the same. A man in Houston kills an acquaintance who took a French fry off his plate after he told him to stop, a guy in Detroit kills someone for insulting him in front of others. To those unfamiliar with either modern street toughs or old-fashioned notions of honor, such incidents are shocking. But the sort of people most prone to resort to lethal violence tend to do so over what many of us would see as minor matters. To them, though, the heart of the matter is usually an unwillingness to tolerate disrespect.
Another piece of evidence against the conventional view of fragging is that most fraggings did not actually happen near the front lines. Rather, most fragging occurred in the rear areas, where danger from the enemy was the least: “All of the fragging incidents cited in this study occurred in garrison or garrison-type environments” (Lepre, p.33).
Garrison has less danger, but it also has more discipline. In his reporting on soldiers in Afghanistan, journalist Sebastian Junger describes the disdain soldiers have for the “petty tyrannies of garrison life.” The front brings greater danger, but also greater autonomy. In the outposts and firebases the men are relatively free from “chickenshit” discipline and martinet officers. The things they do have to do are all important in the sense of helping them and their friends survive.
Junger also reports a belief among soldiers that good garrison soldiers make lousy combat soldiers, and vice versa. The sort of guys who do well with autonomy and danger tend to chaff at the spit-and-polish obedience. Along these lines, it’s notable that one of Lepre’s cases involved a soldier who performed admirably in combat roles, but committed a fragging (using a Claymore mine rather than a grenade) after being sent to the rear area. There’s reason to doubt the average fragger was an especially able combat soldier, but Lepre does suggest that while most fraggings happened at the rear, the rate of offending was higher among those who had seen combat.
Lepre notes that there were some hardships common to the front lines and garrison life: “They were just as far from home, it was hot, they too received “Dear John” letters….To make matters worse, the perceived harassment from superiors associated with garrison duty was not accompanied by the usual off-duty benefits or comforts of garrison life found in the United States” because most towns were off limits and interaction with locals was often limited to prostitutes.
The rear areas also had more dysfunction of other kinds. Drug use was worse – and Vietnam was a conflict that saw a lot of drug use among US soldiers. The rear areas also had more racial conflict between black and white soldiers.
If you’re only vaguely aware of how 1960s racial tensions spilt over into Vietnam, the scale of the racial conflict is shocking. This was the most racially integrated Army yet, with large numbers of black soldiers serving, disproportionately, in combat roles. Black soldiers complained of discrimination within the military, and the Black Power movement growing in the US was reflected in militancy among black soldiers. The assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King in 1968 inflamed tensions. Racial animosity in turn contributed to fragging. Black soldiers were underrepresented in the officer corps but overrepresented among fraggers.
In some cases the pattern was still one of a soldier reacting to some particular grievance against a particular superior, though the grievance involved racial discrimination. In other cases the attacks were more indiscriminate, targeting white officers or soldiers in general. For example:
On the evening of 5 February 1970, four black marines of Force Logistic Command’s maintenance battalion decided to kill some ‘beasts’ – white marines. While a music group performed at the unit’s club, two grenades were tossed onto the crowded patio floor. The first failed to explode....The second killed Corporal Ronald D. Pate and injured sixty-two others (p.103).
A week later, in the same battalion, a dispute with a superior led one black private to throw a grenade into a hut full of white NCOs.
Sometimes fragging was even part of larger collective rebellion:
After a black soldier was arrested in Tuy Hoa in August 1971 and charged with aggravated assault, approximately forty-five black troops gathered around the provost marshal’s office and demanded his release. When the man was returned to the custody of his unit for transfer to the stockade, several nights of fragging and arson ensued (p.105).
In an even larger scale rebellion, on August 29, 1968 hundreds of black prisoners at Long Binh Jail overwhelmed the prison guard, captured the stockade commander, and set the administration building and mess hall on fire.
Collective targeting of whites also involved other kinds of violence, such as a shooting rampage not so different from the school and workplace shootings of later decades: “Specialist Four James E. Paul of the 25th Infantry Division opened fire on a group of white soldiers at a USO show, killing Sergeant Joe E. Raber and Private First Class Gary R. White and wounding ten others” (Lepre, p.110).
Though most cases of interracial fragging were blacks attacking whites, there were some cases of the reverse. The following case shows a soldier targeted based solely on his race: After some verbal conflicts between black and white soldiers during a movie screening, one private was “still a bit ‘riled up’ when a group of armed blacks passed his tent. He and a friend then noticed a lone GI wandering in the darkness nearby…[The private] said ‘If this guy is black, I’m going to frag him’” (p.10).
It’s notable that racial conflict, like fragging, was worse in the rear areas than in the front lines. Shared external threat encourages social bonds. In his book on war, Junger dwells at length on the solidarity found in combat units, where men are in constant contact with one another and well-aware of how much they depend on one-another for protection. Such bonding forces can overcome other sorts of difference. The fictional trope of fire-forged friends is based on reality. This might also contribute to why those at the front lines were less likely to assassinate their officers.
In addition to explaining why fragging (and other violence) was more common in the rear areas, one must also explain why it was so common during this particular war. Furthermore, as Lepre shows, fragging incidents became more frequent as the war wound on. Why?
Fraggers themselves rarely cited anti-war motives – they “generally seemed apolitical…most of them were loners who were not given to participating in idealistic causes” (p.115). But Lepre holds that the overall morale of the troops still mattered.
His theory is what sociologists and criminologists would call a strain theory, one that explains violence as the outcome of frustration. The specific incidents that triggered fraggings were one kind of frustration, but these occurred against a backdrop of soldiers having low morale and little investment in their cause – a kind of chronic strain that would affect how they responded to acute strain. It was this backdrop of general resentment of the war, the army, and their leaders to made them intolerant of offenses by their superiors, and willing to engage in insubordination, rebellion, and assassination.
This, says Lepre, helps explain why fraggings became more frequent as the war went on and public opinion and media portrayal of the war turned increasingly negative. Misbehavior in general increased as the war went on. Court martial rates were low during 1966 and 1967, and there were high reenlistment rates. Morale began to decline in 1968, following the Tet Offensive, which – despite being a military victory for the US – shocked and demoralized a US public who thought the enemy incapable of such ambitious action. As public support declined at home, problems among the ranks – malingering, drug use, insubordination, fragging -- increased. Particularly damaging, Lepre argues, was the policy of “Vietnamization” – maintaining troops in combat roles while planning a withdrawal. Soldiers knew they were not fighting for victory.
Another factor leading to more fraggings – and other sorts of conflict and dysfunction – was the caliber of soldier recruited to fight the war. For this was the war of the Pentagon’s Project 100,000 through which the army admitted a large number of men who would previously have failed the mental and physical standards. The result was a lot of soldiers with unusually low cognitive ability (AFQT scores in the 10-30th percentile).
Some of these men were, by any common definition, mentally disabled – unable to learn to tie their own shoes, to count or to read. Others were just quite dumb, unable to keep straight military ranks and regulations and procedures, leading to frequent problems with their superiors and comrades. In review of a book on Project 100,000, Gwern gives some examples of grievances arising when you throw such men into a military situation:
“He was perpetually angry and aggrieved, and he talked back to the sergeants. When they cursed him and threatened him, he would say angrily, ‘I just wanna go home! Why don’t you let me go home?’”
“One mutinied from the drills, under the impression that being sent to the ‘stockade’ meant going home, until it was explained to him that the word meant ‘jail’”
The Project 100,000 soldiers also tended to have correlated psychiatric and social problems, including criminal histories that would have disqualified recruits under older standards. One investigation found that the low aptitude men “seemed to have a lower stress tolerance and a relative lack of the usual mechanisms of coping with stress” (p.64). And these soldiers let in under the new standards – who would have been rejected under the old ones – tended to get in more trouble: Their court martial rate was twice that other soldiers (Lepre, p.64). Lepre argues that they contributed disproportionately to the fraggers, who were also more likely to be high school dropouts and tended to come from “broken homes” with “family histories [that] were often so disturbing that the troubling details were offered in mitigation when the men faced military justice” (Lepre, p.69).
One interesting twist to this is that more educated and affluent draftees were often more bitter about their situation. At least some of the Project 100,000 men found military life materially far superior to the poverty they came from – three meals a day and dental care were a big step up. Lepre claims that educated draftees tended to express more dislike for the service and open criticism of the war, and their units had more discipline problems.
Notably, though, it wasn’t the draftees who were committing most of the offenses in those units. Lepre explains this pattern as the low-ability men, many with emotional problems, being prone to act out on the loose talk of the more educated draftees (p.65). Several fraggers are described by sources as being easily influenced people who followed others and were inspired to their deeds by the idle threats of other soldiers. If true, this would be an interesting example of how group composition effects individual behavior over and above individual traits themselves.
Speaking of the influence of social relationships, Lepre points to several variables that would look familiar to a sociologist of conflict, particularly one using the theories developed by Donald Black. For instance, there’s a general pattern of social closeness -- intimacy, cultural similarity, and interdependence – promoting toleration, and of social distance encouraging more severe and violent ways of handling conflict. We can see the bonds of friendship preventing collective violence in one of Lepre’s cases: Several black soldiers gathered in a vacant tent “to find ways and means of doing something to ‘Whitey’ to force him to pay attention to the blacks” . . . One man suggested fragging an enlisted club frequented by white soldiers but this idea quickly rejected, as many of the men had white friends and did not want to injure anyone” (Lepre p.122).
But Lepre points to various changes to the military during the period that led to greater social distance between soldiers and especially between soldiers and their officers.
For instance, Lepre mentions that in World War II, the military practiced unit rotation – when men taken off the front lines for rest and relaxation, the whole company was taken as a group, and they likewise returned to battle as a group. In Vietnam, rotation was done on an individual basis, such that members of the unit would regularly disappear and be replaced by virtual strangers.
Tour lengths were also shorter in this conflict than in prior wars. Soldiers in World War II were in for the duration; they only got to go home when the war was over. Soldiers in Vietnam had tours of one year. This coupled with the individualistic system of rotation led to shallower relationships.
Social distance between soldiers and officers was even greater. Student deferments, Project 100,000, and racial integration meant the enlisted men were a relatively poorer, or at least more working class, population than in previous wars. Officers of course were still educated, and they were also still mostly white. And their rotations were even shorter than those of the enlisted men: Company and field grade officers were to spend only 6 months their positions. Lepre describes a couple of fragging cases where officer and offender were completely new to one another, with one of them recently rotated. He has no statistics on this point, but we might hypothesize that new arrivals were at elevated risk as both victims and offenders.
According to Blackian theory, the social structure of a conflict doesn’t just explain the odds of it turning violent, but also what form the violence takes. In the case of fragging, the violence is covert and often premeditated, if only by a few minutes. The aspect of social structure that helps explain this is hierarchy: Fraggings mostly handled upward grievances, against social superiors. Soldiers had many lateral or downward grievances, as well, and some of these turned violent. But as Lepre notes, such violence almost never took the form of assassination with a grenade. Rather, when soldiers killed fellow soldiers, they shot them, usually in the heat of an argument and without making any attempt at escape. Lateral violence tends to be overt, while upward violence tends to be covert.
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