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  • From Vietnam to the All-Volunteer Army
  • G. Kurt Piehler (bio)
Ron Milam. Not a Gentleman’s War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xv + 238 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.
Kara Dixon Vuic. Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. xii + 271 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $50.00.
Beth Bailey. America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

Military historians often bemoan their marginalization within the academy, but as the works of Ron Milam, Kara Vuic, and Beth Bailey show, this discipline is thriving. These three monographs deserve a receptive audience and, like many good works in military history, will appeal not only to academic historians, but will also be read at military postgraduate schools such as the Army War College, policy think tanks, and in the officer corps of the armed services. Collectively, these monographs possess broad appeal for scholars, but also for general readers who seek to understand the Vietnam War and the impact it had on American society.

Ron Milam addresses a question that has been looming since the fall of the South Vietnamese regime in 1975: what went wrong? For unrepentant “hawks” such as Harry G. Summers, Jr. (On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, 1982), the fault rested not with the military, but with civilians who lacked the political will to support commanders on the ground. Others have seen the American war effort as poorly executed by the armed forces, especially due to the failure to develop either the strategy or necessary forces to wage an effective counterinsurgency campaign against forces of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese Army. Often blamed for the shortcomings of the American war effort is the poor performance—even worse, the criminal conduct—of many junior officers. For many scholars and senior officers who served in the Vietnam War, Army Lieutenant William Calley serves as poster child for all that went wrong in this conflict. Milam, a veteran of the conflict [End Page 726] who went on to earn a doctorate in history at the University of Houston, seeks to debunk the widely held notion that his fellow junior officers, especially those trained at Officer Candidates Schools (OCS), were irresponsible, inept, or immoral.

Milam makes a convincing case that OCS represented the most effective way to train and deliver junior officers vital to the dramatic escalation of U.S. forces after 1965. Moreover, Milam even argues that, despite the OCS’ compressed schedules, it did a better job than either West Point or ROTC in providing the training necessary for combat leadership in Vietnam. During the 1960s, West Point could provide only a fraction of officers needed for the force build-up, and graduates of that academy needed additional postgraduate training in combat leadership before being deployed overseas. ROTC provided a substantial number of the educated officers the army desired, but their numbers diminished over the course of the 1960s as the war became more unpopular. Moreover, while officers coming out of ROTC did possess a key credential sought by the army—a college diploma—their academic training contained relatively few courses in military science, and their physical training was largely confined to short summer camps. As Milam shows, OCS simulated much of West Point’s rigor and discipline while effectively balancing physical, field, and academic training needed by future combat leaders. Far from turning out marginal candidates, OCS weeded out scores of potential officers when they failed written examinations or could not pass more subjective evaluations. OCS candidates were required to periodically fill out “bayonet sheets” on their fellow classmates and to cut those they thought did not make the grade as leaders.

Milam goes on to describe the limited, but crucial, in-country training all junior officers received in Vietnam. Most of it centered on learning practical issues such as how to use weapons like the M-16, how to detect booby traps, and how to engage in offensive and defensive operations. Relatively...

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