Can The Volunteer Army Fight?

Doctor Johnson's celebrated judgment--"Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier"--is no longer true in the United States or in western Europe. No one not old enough to have been called to the colors between 1940 and 1945 thinks meanly of himself for not having served--even, or perhaps especially, those who managed to avoid service during the two late wars on the Asian rimland. The war in Korea made, and still makes, arguable sense for the United States; the war in Vietnam was strategic nonsense. (To a man, the generals and colonels interviewed for this article averred: "We shouldn't have gone in in the first place; but once we went in, we should have gone in and done the job, hard and fast.") In any case, few adult males who missed "soldiering" in either of those nasty little wars regret it.

But Dr. Johnson's idea of soldiering, in an age when the British regular army still counted in its ranks men who had marched across Europe with Marlborough and whose subalterns would live long enough to die gasping and groaning unpitied before Alexandria and at Waterloo--Dr. Johnson's idea of soldiering has little in common with the modern recruit's notion of what he volunteered for. And perhaps the current statistical success of the Volunteer Army (VOLAR) owes most to the difference between the two notions. In 1975, the recruit has enlisted out of motives that have almost nothing to do with his wanting to soldier. He will be very well paid ($345 per month after taxes, for openers); he is committing himself for only three or four years; and if he went on active duty before July 1, 1975, he will still be able to use the Vietnam-era GI Bill when he is discharged; he can pick up a high school diploma and plenty of rather cheaply earned college credits while he is on active duty, and on the Army's time, not after hours; he can make a contract with an obliging recruiting sergeant that usually guarantees where he will serve or in what military occupational specialty--though the recruiting sergeants sometimes incline to the overobliging promise ("I'm tellin' ya, I can't put it down in writing that you're gonna be a computer technician, but once you get to basic, they'll fix it up for ya"); perhaps he can't get a job on the outside--though the Army is in no hurry to collect data on this; and, unless he's an idiot (and the Army is at great pains to demonstrate that no mental-category Vs--the lowest--are allowed to enlist), he must recognize that his chances of fighting in a war between 1975 and 1978--1979 are remote.

So it would appear--all the bennies and very little of the pain.

That these incentives, rather than the wish to become proficient, in the art of exterminating one's fellow man ("the organized management and application of violence" currently reigns as the official euphemism), are what is attracting recruits should give comfort to anyone who foresaw a Volunteer Army of Chesty Pullers, Pachuca alumni, Hell's Angels, psychopaths, inbred albino mountain boys and 38-year-old privates dividing their time between the bayonet range and the whorehouse. And it will be the same kinds of blandishments, with cash bonuses thrown in, that will cause some 30 percent of the volunteers entering the Army in 1975 to want to re-enlist in 1978, not--and this is the critical point--any active dissatisfaction with democratic politics or a desire to chastise lesser breeds without the law: slopeheads, Bolshevists and what have you. The point should be stressed, for it was the dim, gnawing apprehension that the Army would become a right-wing mercenary force that was at the very heart of the early objections to it, back in the days when Melvin Laird--at his master's bidding, and responding to skyrocketing A.W.O.L. rates, desertions and rumors of small mutinies among largely conscript units in Vietnam--announced we were striving to achieve a zero draft; this and the sense that the wellborn and the privileged, the rich and the educated would remain exempt from military service under the volunteer system. Unfortunately, this is still true. Only in an all-out war will the Ivy League be drafted--if there's time for it.

The question was put to five recruits in their seventh day at the reception center at Fort Dix, New Jersey (a $4,800,000 brick edifice, built in 1973, centrally goddamned air conditioned: Its ambience is that of a state-university student-union building; it is laid out around an atrium, or plaza, with parti-colored umbrellas sheltering each refreshment table): "Why did you come into the Army?"

Private Don Patterson, Wilmington, Delaware: "It seemed like a way to better myself. I signed up as a heating-and-cooling specialist."

Private Randy Halcomb, Oneida, Kentucky: "Because it pays to be a vet." Halcomb, after he finishes the seven-week course, will go to voice radio school.

Private James Sherwin, Watervliet, New York: "To open my eyes up. I'll be a computer technician with the 82nd Airborne Division."

Private Ray Zander, Oxnard, California, a 1975 graduate of Whitworth College: "I haven't the foggiest.... I suppose I want to try everything before I get stuck behind someone's desk."

Private Joaquin Rosado III, Bethlehem. Pennsylvania: "For the training and tradition of being a soldier." What kind of soldier? "Oh, a medical technician."

Five privates, randomly selected from a group of 50 recruits who sat chatting in a large waiting room: They were about to be given certain diagnostic proficiency and aptitude tests.

They sat chatting. Hell, yes, they sat chatting. To anyone who remembers the naked terror induced by his first collision with a sinewy Marine D.I. at the Seaboard Rail Depot in Yemassee, South Carolina, and the first three or four days and nights of his 13-week basic combat training at Parris Island, the sight is downright bizarre.

Patterson, Halcomb, Sherwin, Zander and Rosado--they are relaxed and genial, curious. Zander, a tall black, punctuates his comments with elegant gestures; he sits on a bench with his legs crossed, dangling his foot like a young executive at First National City. Several yards down the hall, other recruits are talking baseball with the barber, whose ministrations leave them looking rather like brushcut college boys of the Fifties, no worse. Why shouldn't they be relaxed and genial? On their second day at Dix, they received a substantial advance pay. They have all slept eight hours a night, the Army's M.D.R. (minimum daily requirement), and woe betide the drill sergeant who deprives them of it. They have eaten very well in a place that looks like a fraternity dining room, have had their physicals and been fitted for uniforms. Though they have not yet formally been embodied as a training company--that comes tomorrow--they have already seen their drill sergeant. "He looks like a real decent guy," says another recruit.

It's jarring, all right. Of course, things will get tough in the weeks ahead. There will be plenty of physical training, several road marches, battle-sight zeroing, weapons qualifications, bivouacs, drill, classes on military justice and hygiene and traditions of the Service, a rousing speech from the general--who points out the South Vietnamese army as an example of a force "that broke and ran because they had no discipline" and who piously hopes they will be proud enough of being soldiers that they will wear their uniforms home on leave and "stand tall in them" (some things never change)-- a little K.P., but also a 36-hour pass at the end of the third or fourth week of training; but the inflection is no longer one of grim, implacable menace on the part of the D.I.s and the young officers set over them, of kicking ass and taking names, of grim, threatening descriptions of the post stockade, which is now called the area confinement facility. No, the atmosphere is one of calm, measured purposefulness, of helping the recruit, of making his transition from civilian to soldier an efficient but relatively unjarring one.

Now, there is not the slightest shred of evidence that this kind of treatment will produce soldiers less capable, less able to fight than those who finished basic 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. No evidence--but one remains a bit suspicious, all the same. Most of the senior noncommissioned officers at Dix, as elsewhere, are as outspoken and irascible as ever; many are downright resentful--like Sfc. Daniel Conaghan, a weapons instructor whom the recruits will meet during their sixth week: "Training has lightened up to where you're takin' a kid and keepin' him a kid."

Throughout the Army, it is the older N.C.O.s who most resent what has happened. As usual, officers in the grade of major and higher are certain that things are getting better, that the young volunteers like the Army or can be made to like it. The lieutenants can't really tell, except, perhaps, for the few among them old enough to remember the Army before VOLAR. The volunteers themselves--well, they tolerate Army life, some of them are proud of their units; but when you ask them if they're thinking of re-enlisting, most of them laugh in your face.

This should not come as startling news to the great mass of citizen-soldiers in America, to those millions of veterans who are not active in the alumni organizations of American arms--the Legion, the V.F.W., and so on. Their memories of military life are not, when they come to think of them, very pleasant. No vision of glory girds them, no recollection of duty happily and proudly fulfilled can smooth over the pocked and seamy texture of remembered wartime lives: lives often of deprivation and fatigue, of frantic pleasure taking on furlough, lives punctuated by the lacerating taunts of N.C.O.s charged with whipping men into shape, lives of separation from those they loved, lives of squalor and tedium and sometimes terror. No. Military duty is not a happy business for most people. For members of what sociologists call armies of the Western democratic type, it is unlikely that it ever will be. Behind every immaculate Grenadier Guardsman stands a dusty motor pool in the English Midlands; for every resplendent curaisseur on the Champs Elysées there is a miserable private on a bunk in a training center near Lyons; for every ranger battalion N.C.O. with his absurd shaved head there are 20 privates smoking dope at Fort Lewis: and for every ebullient cocksure American general, there are 500 bored and distracted enlisted men racing for their cars on Friday afternoons. Remember it all? The six of you steaming in the 1949 Mercury with two cases of Schlitz, dead bugs on the windshield, tearing up Route I from Lejeune to Philly or the Bronx? From Hood to Austin? From Fort Lewis to Portland?

It has not fundamentally changed in the Volunteer Army. It is very doubtful that it ever will.

There are three reasons for this. First, as we have seen, the opportunity to fight, the chance to "soldier"--these things are not what is luring volunteers for the Army. For the Marines, yes; the Army, no. (And, incidentally, that Marine Corps recruiting pitch we inwardly admire--you ain't good enough, clown; we didn't promise you a rose garden, we only want a few good men, etc.--is nowhere nearly as successful as you or I or the Marine Corps expected it would be.) Second. the Army is lavish in its promises of education to those who volunteer; not exactly education along the Cardinal Newman-F. R. Leavis axis but education as Seventies America apparently wants it--and it is precisely this that will fuel most soldiers' desire to leave the Service when their obligated service is up. Third, there is only so much even the most inventive officers can devise to keep the troops happy. Yes, you can send a few men to the three new ranger battalions--units developed to deal smartly with small disorders abroad that might threaten United States interests or American nationals and give the Army a new corps d'élite not unlike the Green Berets of the early Sixties--you can send them to these units if that sort of thing appeals to them; you can stick a man in the embassy in Rome, perhaps, or detail three men as lifeguards at the club, or two to the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School at Fort Belvoir. or give prizes for the best-maintained back yard or the best-turned-out Sheridan, or take the (continued on page 158)Volunteer Army(continued from page 86) company out for ten days' adventure training or the battalion out to Yakima for six weeks in the field. But for the great bulk of our soldiery, military life must remain its old admixture of maintenance and training--at Fort Hood and Forts Bragg, Lewis and Gordon. The men train and maintain. They do P.T. They "work on their gear." (Remember that?) But this gets old. Men get out--all but the 25-30 percent who become the cadre of N.C.O.s and officers who will welcome a new generation of volunteers. But you had them with the draft.

For the Pfc.s and spec fours, it is still, for the most part, a life of tedium and spasm and hassle. Something like civilian life.

The conclusions are inescapable. They must comfort every citizen whose vision of a volunteer soldiery was Shakespeare's vision in Henry V:

They grow--like savages.

As soldiers will, that nothing do but meditate on blood

whose impression of the evolved Volunteer Army, finally, is of an Army of disciplined phalanxes of 40-year-old black men with shaved heads marching to take over the Government in Washington.

One concludes:

1. The Volunteer Army will certainly work as well as any American Army in the past, in peacetime as a deterrent and in certain small wars of policy. It would have to be augmented, certainly, for service in any big conventional war--such as a war in Europe--in which case, they'd have to augment it awfully fast.

2. The present officer corps is more competent, more dedicated and more honest than that of the Vietnam period. It is managed with striking efficiency and there are very few pikers commanding troops. (In the 1976 R.I.F.--reduction in force, those involuntarily to be separated from the Army--are no fewer than 132 West Point regulars.)

3. Most enlisted volunteers don't like it enough to want to re-enlist.

4. The concept remains unfair to blacks, other minority groups and the socially disadvantaged.

5. Trying to deliver on what the recruiters are promising is making training difficult for commanders in the field. Not enough people want to be Willie and Joe in the trench.

6. And, of course, the thing's costing a fortune. It would be nice to have the whiz kids back in the Pentagon to cost it all out.

Some Scenes Wherein Life In This Volunteer Army Is Shown; Impressions, Conversations And Interviews; Reflections On These.

I once heard it urged, and very seriously urged, that the United States should keep a pot-boiling little war in being, "somewhere down in the Caribbean," to train the troops. Recruit units could be sent there for a week or two of getting blooded, at the end of basic or advanced individual training, shoot a few people, get some trigger time, take a few casualties, flesh wounds and that kind of thing, and then go on leave before reporting to their first duty stations. The assumption behind this cunning proposal was that, among those who had been trained in this unusual way, there would be fewer casualties in the first week of a serious war than in the training war in the Caribbean. Therefore, it would be cost-effective. "But, hell," the Marine D.I. went on (it was 1957), "that's maybe not feasible politically."

The Army really has no way of knowing what young soldiers will do in combat. Therefore, one cannot say with finality whether or not the Volunteer Army will "work." The prevailing attitude is, as always, that training should as closely as possible approximate the conditions of combat; and the closest the simulation comes, in basic training at Fort Dix, is on Range 30C, where the troops crawl under fire from a fixed-mount M-60 machine gun, and on Range 30B--the Fire and Maneuver Course. But the troops do not take either test with any particular high seriousness.

On a sultry July afternoon, half of Alpha Company, Second Battalion, Third Training Brigade is going through the Fire and Maneuver Course. These recruits are in the second day of their sixth week at Dix. The course consists of eight parallel lanes, each about eight meters wide by 325 meters long. In the middle of the eight, at the starting line, is a control tower; at a signal, the recruits advance along each lane, two per lane, with a sergeant following each pair.

Each recruit carries an M-16 at low port, two magazines of ten rounds each and a grenade that, when thrown and detonated, literally goes "Pfffft." All along the lanes are little revetments like embedded railroad ties, and holes carved out of the soft gray sand about as big as--coffins. The idea is that one man takes up "a good prone position," rifle poised over the railroad tie, while the other recruit scurries forward. Fire and maneuver. The recruits havee camouflaged faces--taupe, green and black; some have added that N.F.L. grease slash on their cheekbones.

Artillery simulators are detonated. One recruit, more ambling than scurrying, falls to his knees--something like a reluctant Episcopalian in church, worrying about his creases. He engages a green pop-up target that obligingly falls. Etc. At the end of the lane is an enemy bunker. The other recruit runs screaming and flailing toward the bunker, which has direct fire on him. Still he keeps running at it, pulling the pin on his grenade as he moves forward. He stands in front of the opening in the front of the bunker, throws in the grenade and falls to the ground.

•

About 15 miles from Headquarters, Second Armored Division, Fort Hood; it is 0800 on a Thursday in August. Of a mechanized-infantry company (authorized strength 189), only 60 modern volunteers are present. Tonight there is to be a company insertion by helicopters. after which the soldiers will seize an objective. Now they sit in a ragged semicircle facing a pilot detailed to lecture them. The pilot, a first lieutenant, lounges standing up, speaking in the strange patois of his kind: a dizzying mixture of laconic technicalities, shower jokes, historical allusions.

He spits. "You can rely on this bird, it rarely crashes. You don't walk into the rotors, however. This, ah, Leen-ardo da Vinci, he wasn't doing nothing one day, so he come up with the helicopter. It didn't fly properly until gentleman by the name of Sikorsky got it all together. . . ." Lest the troops infer that Sikorsky was some half-crazed Renaissance inventor, the pilot, momentarily ruminant, adds, "That wasn't until 1939. Also, don't throw anything out of the aircraft while in flight." There follow comments on the aerodynamics of live ducks thrown from helicopters at "three to four thousand feet," a divertissement not unknown during the late war. The soldiers, as in 1942 and 1954 and 1965, are mostly sitting on their helmets, their hands on the hand guards of their rifles, whose butts rest on the earth. They are all looking at the ground.

•

"The number of soldiers in combat units (infantry, armor and artillery) compared with the number in combat-support units (research, medical, intelligence, communication and transportation) is up from 43 percent in FY 73 to 53 percent in FY 76."--"Department of the Army Fact Sheet." 1975. These numbers represent an improvement, certainly. But their blandness is self-serving, since the combat divisions themselves are full of soldiers in "combat support" roles.

•

Fort Lewis, Washington, is surely the handsomest major Army post in the United States. Immediately to the west lies Puget Sound; 55 miles to the east stands--visible even on the hazy cool afternoons of a Pacific Northwest summer--the blue-white shoulder of Mount Rainier. The climate is temperate, much of the post's 135 square miles is covered with rich green groves and forests of Douglas fir. alder and cedar. Even the artillery-impact areas seem waving upland meadows. Moreover, the civilian world beyond the entranceway to the post remains quite uncontaminated by the commercial refuse that seems to stick to the Army wherever it settles: The signs may be tacky--a motel on Interstate 5 promises a "bedder night"--but there are no hideous strips of used-car lots, porn shops, furniture wholesalers, Burger Kings, gaping shopping centers, massage parlors, military-insignia shops.

Lewis is the home (all Army posts are the "home" of something) of the Ninth Infantry Division--the Old Reliables--whose last headquarters was at Dong Tam, Republic of Vietnam. Its mission is training for combat; and the unit would deploy, in C-5As and C-141s, from nearby McChord Air Force Base. Presumably, it would fly to Guam or the Philippines or Japan, "stage" from one of those places and be in combat in two weeks. "Korea or somewhere," a lieutenant says.

To the visitor, it is an impressive division. To a man, the commanders of its brigades, battalions and companies seem to represent the best the Army has to offer. In the idiom of the Fifties, they are gung ho--full of their jobs, cheerful, capable. They are all very fit. They give every appearance of candor (perhaps, but not necessarily, prompted by former Army Secretary Howard Callaway's "I'm glad you asked" Army-wide policy). The slogan is as naïve as an American primitive painting; viz.: "What percent of your troops use drugs in the barracks, Colonel?" Colonel, gasping and apoplectic: "I'm glad you asked. ..." But they are forthright--this comes through, even though they have mastered the compleat bureaucrat's knack of admitting small errors and problems, to establish credibility.

Colonel Cornelius J. Gearin, Infantry, Commander, Second Brigade, Ninth Infantry Division: "You're looking at a moving train. Eighty-six percent of our soldiers have high school diplomas; the rest are finishing them or getting college credits at Old Reliable University--either that or they're taking vocational training. Some of them can get their union tickets while they're stationed out here. A few men even finish their B.A. degree while they're with us."

Old Reliable University's faculty is mainly of the adjunct-professor kind--teachers who lecture at various universities in the Northwest and teach part time at Lewis. Under the normal training cycle, a brigade will alternate five weeks' training, either at Lewis or, beyond the Cascade Mountains, at the vast Yakima military reservation, with five weeks' schooling. In this latter phase, soldiers from the brigade can spend all their working afternoons or mornings at Old Reliable U. It is one of the division's big selling points.

"These people'd give a damn good account of themselves," says Gearin. "The soldier's biggest enemy is boredom," and, presumably, once the division is honed to a fighting edge, all it has to do is maintain that edge, and the five-and-five cycle is probably sufficient to keep it honed.

•

"This division really soldiers--that's what really engages the soldiers' interest."--Robert Leahy Fair, Major General, Commander, Second Armored Division, Fort Hood, August 9, 1974.

"It's just a lot of bullshit. They just give you the run-around. They fuck with you all the time at Hood."--A Pfc., a modern volunteer, Second Armored Division, Fort Hood, August 12, 1974.

"The old GI is always bitchin'. He's not happy unless he's bitchin'. The more he bitches, the better he likes it."--Fort Lewis captain, July 11, 1975.

The hills are scraggy and dun-colored, the earth parched. Clumps of tangled mesquite, sumac, dwarf oak. At the immediate limit of the horizon to the north squats a hill, perhaps 400 meters from the mechanized-infantry-company night laager. Tiny heads come jodding against the sky. then shoulders, then the men running. Forty of the 60 are on the homeward leg of a mile run. The column is an accordion, squeezing in response to the N.C.O.'s voice, stretching and dangling when the voice is still.

Before the sergeant will order "Quick time, huarch!" seven men will have fallen out, half the remainder will be executing an exhausted crazy-skip-walk; only a hard cluster of 18 or 20 stays the course. The last of the seven to drop out stands bent over, hands on his thighs, his arms cocked inward like a basset hound's forelegs. He is throwing up.

"What're you, a goddamn pussy?"

The dropout is about 5'8", 220 pounds. Real lard. "Shit," he says.

A sergeant turns to the visitor. "Of course," he says, "mech infantry don't run much. They got tracks."

•

It is 0800 at Fort Lewis. The tidy roads on the post are filled with traffic moving at the base speed limit. Over by Second Brigade, a line of cars has been halted by two road guards from the ranger battalion--so that a small ranger detachment on its morning run can cross safely. However, a Volvo at the head of the line of cars is in a hurry; it begins to inch ahead, toward the road guards. The two of them get into a kind of crouch, scrambling in place in front of the Volvo. They growl at it.

•

The texture of Army life in garrison is largely unchanged. The war in Vietnam was but an unhappy irruption. Traditions must still be served.

When I was at school, there was a huge old English etching next to the door to the Latin classroom. It showed two enormous knights (richly caparisoned, etc.) riding out of a sally port, with their squires and retainers following them. One knight, who had the face of Bishop General Leonidas Polk and the body of Richard Coeur de Lion, was pointing with his sword at a distant copse. The squires and soldiery following were looking at the copse. All these military people were going forward to get at something. In 20 minutes, half of them would have arrows through their livers, or their arms hacked off or their tibias crushed or be disemboweled. But Gentle Viewer was to think of Godfrey of Bouillon or the Black Prince or Lee at Chancellorsville or, God only knows, Thomas Wolfe's mighty rivers going along in darkness. Doing your duty. Panoply, ritual, progress, parades to keep the vision of slaughter noble: going forward, going along together, sallying forth, O the brave fellows. Stiffen up the sinew, etc. That is the idea behind parades: Get them there orderly and nobly.

It is a hazy-dry midmorning at Fort Hood, the sky a bleached tint of pale blue. Overhead, an old Huey bats languidly along. The suggestion of Vietnam is overwhelming, and the bright splotches of medal ribbons on the officers' dress khakis ram home the recollection. This morning's is to be an awards parade, but--it being peacetime--the awards will be neither green weenies nor M.C.M.s nor Silver Stars but, rather, a colonel confides, certificates attesting "Most Improved Motor Pool," or various pewter and sterling trophies for divisional handball and squash and what not.

The parade ground is of the type known at Parris Island as a grinder, gravel over macadam. It is very hot, and already some of the troops' khakis are discolored at the armpits. Down at the extreme right of the company-in-line formation stands The Best Goodamned Band in the Army. The band comprises 76 souls--the bands-persons standing at parade rest in white short-sleeved shirts, blue trousers and black shoes. At the heels of the shoes are spurs. Three of the 76 are WACs, all of them in just-below-the-knee light-green bombazine? samite? cotton?--it is impossible to tell. They are wearing spurs on their pumps. Thus is tradition served. The division medical battalion, the unit doing the parade, its turn having come up in normal rotation, is wearing T.W.s, trousers bloused, most of the troops wearing only the Shirley Highway (National Defense) ribbon. The battalion awaits orders.

The guests demurely mill around at the edge of the blacktop, just in front of the bleachers. A lieutenant colonel's wife is talking about not having been back to Vassar since her graduation in, one would guess, about 1965. Her classmates have married Greenwich and Wall Street. Her Husband looks 28, has a 31-inch waist, no jowls, no shake, no love handles. He has a wonderful frank smile. He is so trim. The woman seems to be thinking, See what I mean?--I don't mind Fort Hood one bit. The tone of the conversation among the officers and their wives is alternately declarative and accommodating, the conversational tone of all bureaucracy at its ease. Senior asserts, junior agrees or makes his demurrer a kind of little joke. All the wives are wearing white gloves.

Adjutant's call is sounded. The commander of troops is another lieutenant colonel. He is an M.D. He gives good voice, jerking his head like a pouter pigeon with each command. The elaborate ceremonial is got through crisply and quickly: officers front and center, awardees front and center, the march past. Everyone down to the last WAC is in step, marching in that limber athletic gait peculiar to the American Army. "When you do an eyes right, lemme hear them eyeballs click!" The commanding general stands isolated above us on the reviewing stand like an Ozymandias in Foster Grants, while his engaging, pleasant wife, in a brown-linen dress, smiles at the companies passing below him. Finally, the last unit leaves the parade ground, now strutting out to the unofficial division anthem, the Patton March.

"If they look good at parade, they can go on pass right away," the driver says.

"They look good?"

"Shit. Most of 'em in Waco by now."

(Incentive.)

•

Only the Ninth Infantry Division is at Fort Lewis. At Fort Hood there are two divisions--the Second Armored and the First Cavalry. There is a wary rivalry among the officers of the two division staffs at Hood. Which division is better? The re-enlistment rates for the Second A.D. are very good, indeed, as are most of the statistical indexes that the division uses to measure its readiness and to send forward to Forces Command Headquarters at Fort McPherson. Those for the Cav are not quite so good. In the Cav's headquarters, handsomely printed copies of the following circulate:

The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who puts down what he damn pleases.

--Sir Josiah Stamp Inland Revenue Department England, 1896-1919.

•

Private David Jensen, let us call him, is a member of the mortar platoon of Company A, Second Battalion, 60th Infantry at Fort Lewis. He is from San Jose and did not finish high school, though he is working toward the G.E.D. (high school equivalency). He took basic at Fort Ord and advanced individual training at Fort Polk, Louisiana. The more he bitches, the happier he is supposed to be. Only it is not that simple.

Jensen lives, like most soldiers in the Ninth Infantry Division who are not married, in a four-man room that the authorities permit him and his roommates to decorate any way they please. What they've done with it is not bad: Big bright posters hang from the walls; there is a rug on the floor. Jensen and his friends are working on their gear. On their color TV is a talk show from Seattle.

"I got suckered into the infantry. I wanted to be a 'Sixty-four Bravo diesel mechanic. The recruiter says, like, he couldn't give it to me in writing, but if I went into the Ninth Division, I'd get it. Shit. But I didn't care. In the afternoons after school, we'd go out to my dad's place and get wasted. Nothin' heavy like angel dust, but, you know, LSD and pot. I wanted a change of pace.

"They fuck you over all the time, like their haircut policy."

Did Jensen feel proficient with his weapon? (He is assigned as a loader for an 81mm mortar tube.) What about his squad and platoon?

"Hell, yes. We could outshoot anybody on this post. The platoon really works together."

How would it do in combat?

"They'd do great. Only, if another thing like Vietnam comes along, they're gonna do it without me. You know how far Fort Lewis is from Vancouver?"

But it is not that simple, either. Jensen "couldn't see anything like Vietnam ever happening again. And if it was the right war," he'd go.

All of which means only this: When the Ninth Infantry Division gets its orders to combat at the start of a new Asian war, Jensen, who does not like the Army much but would "probably re-up if they give me a big enough bonus," would go with the division and be one of the best mortarmen in the war. His attitude differs little from the draftees' who preceded him. He came in for a change of pace and because he'd heard the money was all right. He doesn't like the hassle. He likes to sleep in. He feels no loyalty or attachment to the Army or the Ninth Division, but he knows his mortar squad can outshoot anybody on the post and his friends are all in the squad. Jensen is typical.

•

Until his selection for promotion to lieutenant general late last spring and his reassignment from Fort Hood in August, Robert Fair commanded the Second Armored Division--1200 officers and warrant officers and 16,900 men. In addition to its support elements--engineers, air defense, aviation, maintenance people, communicators, and so on--the division comprises five major commands: division artillery and four brigades. Each brigade is heavy in tank and mechanized-infantry stock: M-60 tanks (54 per battalion) and armored personnel carriers (A.P.C.s). Should the division be committed to battle, it would be strengthened by several "round-out" units from the Army Reserve. Though it trains for deployment anywhere, the division has Middle East written all over it.

"It was great fun commanding a division in the desert"--the opening line of Marshal Slim's memoir Defeat into Victory. Given the chance to fight his division in the desert or in Europe, General Fair would have made the most of it.

This is an admirable soldier. For the most part during his time as commander, he was feared and admired rather than liked. (Graffito in the officers' club: 1 May not be right, but I'm fair.) Many of the clichés about generals apply to him. Clichés embody truths and disagreeable necessities. Fair is leathery, tough, pile-driving, limitlessly energetic, dedicated, ambitions. "Once in a while, I'll relax on a Monday night." On these occasions, he sits with his paperwork in his lap, watching the nine-o'clock spectacle. All generals like football.

At Fort Hood, General Fair worked 110 hours a week. He could be found, quite literally, at any point on the 340-square-mile reservation of Fort Hood. He thirsted for details and statistics. He drove his commanders relentlessly; and his brigade and battalion commanders knew that their success would determine whether or not they, too, would be generals. (The success of these officers was measured by General Fair in his ratings and endorsements on their O.E.R.s--Officer Efficiency Reports. Each year, a board of some 15 general officers meets for two or three weeks to select colonels for promotion to brigadier generals. Between 50 and 60 are selected. The system operates with a peculiar and usually unacknowledged efficacy, despite the built-in "inflation"; that is, the O.E.R.s abound in adjectives that try to assure promotion for those officers generals like Fair think should be promoted: "brilliant, tireless, innovative," etc. But the generals know how to work the system, how to read the O.E.R.s. One colonel put it succinctly: "We've got an inflated report-card system which has discriminators in it." The board can separate apparently strong ratings from really powerful ones. Besides, as the Army shrinks--it is now but 60 percent of the size of the 1969 Army--the chances that the officers under consideration for promotion will be known personally to members of the selection boards will increase.)

Fair has the Westmoreland jaw, which he juts a good deal, his breezy, avuncular salute nicely balancing the stern uplifting greeting. "Goodlookin'soldier!" he would shout at a spec four walking along Tank Destroyer Boulevard. (What do the soldiers think? Does it make them feel good to have generals say such things to them? It is a military article of faith that it does, but cf. Siegfried Sassoon: "He's a cheery old card, muttered Harry to Jack/But he did for them both with his plan of attack.")

Fair was always in bristling motion. For the first two hours each morning, after the early bantering conference with his sergeant major and chief of staff, in which he would find out what went on the previous night in the division area and how the soldiers behaved in Killeen--what crime, what rifles missing, what A.W.O.L.s. etc.--he would glide about the division area in his staff car with an aide. Sequence: Car stops, Fair "dismounts," strides into a subordinate headquarters to ask his questions, firing away like Montgomery at pre-D-day inspections: peppery, quizzical, head cocked; into the Patton Museum to see how the displays are shaping up; over to the railhead to inspect the weekly battalion load-out; through the gleaming mess halls with their strange smell, a compost of Lysol and dairy barns; into the division recruiting office; out to the held--always out to the field. Everyone in his suite scampers: Fair moves at the head of the draggle like a prow: demands, muses, lights one of the day's 50 True cigarettes, praises, claps men on the back, catalyzes, shakes up, reorients, invites, cajoles, leaves.

His successor at the Second A.D. is Major General George S. Patton III, and he will have a tough act to follow. In fiscal 1974, Fair's division re-enlistment goal was 813: 1222 took their burst of six. In July 1973, before Fair got to the division, the A.W.O.L. rate was 44 per 1000; a year later, it was 14 per 1000. From January to June, 1974, 1194 troopers raised their G.T. scores, and of all the soldiers who re-upped when Fair was in command, 72 percent re-enlisted for his division.

What about crime?

"Crime, that's down forty percent," he said.

•

Ranger humor: In the fall of 1973, during the most recent Arab-Israeli shooting war, a class of about 150 ranger students was called together by its sergeant instructors. For the nine-week course, perhaps the toughest and most demanding of all the American military-training programs, the students are virtually isolated from all outside news. The senior instructor told the class he had serious news for them: World War Three had broken out that morning. He wanted to know haw many students would volunteer to quit the course, so that they could join a Middle East Expeditionary Force. There was nothing much left of the United States. The students gaped . . . their families in Philadelphia and St. Louis and Detroit.

About a half hour later, the sergeant told them he was only kidding.

•

"No reveille? What army you been readin' about? They may not have, like, standing in formation at five-thirty in the morning, but I gotta be in then. I live in Copperas Cove. I get up at four-thirty. What do I do when I get in? Go on cleanup detail for a few minutes. But they'll let you sleep until eight after that's over."--Spec Four, Third Brigade, Second Armored Division.

•

In mid-1975, 22.2 percent of the total enlisted strength of the Army were black soldiers: 13 percent of the 17-to-20-year-old population of the United States is black. Suggestive? Of course it is. Not so suggestive, however, as the following: During the first six months of 1974, the percentages of black recruits varied from a January low of 23.3 to a high, in June, of 29.9. But during the same period of 1975, which was one of sharp national recession--when more and more people volunteered--the percentages of blacks entering the Army ranged from a January low of 18.2 to a June high of 22. Put simply, the Army, which will at least acknowledge that a recession allows its recruiting people to be more "selective," accepting very few in the two lowest mental categories, finds a disproportionately large number of blacks in those categories. The number of blacks coming into the Army has dropped dramatically.

•

"You want your spaghetti, get your L.B.E. on!" A soldier walks back to the edge of the clearing, crawls inside the M-113 armored personnel carrier, puts on his load-bearing equipment, shoulders his M-16 and returns to the chow line, having lost his place.

He is one of only 80 soldiers of A Company, First Battalion, 50th Infantry in the field. The company is in the field training for REFORGER, an operation in which, later in the year, one of the brigades of the Second A.D. will be airlifted to West Germany. The battalion commander is back at the post, having been detailed to preside over a court-martial. Where are the rest of the men? "Oh, we got some on S.D. [special duty], some new people signing in, some sick, some people on guard duty, some guys in their educational cycle. . . ." More precisely, the company has three men in confinement, two in the hospital, 13 percent on leave, five waiting for discharge (in both the Ninth Infantry and the Second Armored divisions, the quarterly turnover rate hovers around 20 percent), 11, including the supply sergeant and the armorer, in garrison, nine transferring. Of the hospitalized, one has a hernia, the other caught clap in Killeen. At the moment, no one is detached for aggressor or instructor duty with National Guard units in training on post.

In any case, the 42 percent of the company that have made it to the field appear to enjoy it. They have made a 40-mile "march" in their big tracks and will stay in the field for three days of dismounted tactics, helicopter training, night-defensive-perimeter tactics, night patrolling. They take their chow and sit around the clearing.

Captain Brownlee, commanding: multiple combat decorations from two tours in Vietnam, a degree in sociology, 35 years old. He appears to possess what Marshal Lyautey wrote was the prime requisite for a good officer: gaiety. The earnestness, both terrible and pathetic, of so many officers running the volunteers in the field is absent in him. He is one of Archilochus' bandy-legged, swaggering soldiers.

How will the Volunteer Army keep trained men in uniform? "You got to show them the Army is interested in them, show 'em all the special services available to them; give 'em the good surroundings, make the squad leaders sensitive to the needs of the individual, keep the individual informed. You gotta make him feel he's a link in the chain, give him recognition. If he's good--make him general's orderly six times." Brownlee senses the visitor's skepticism, winks and laughs. "I dunno. . . . I guess the thing'll work when the first round goes off. Hell, they get three hundred and forty-five dollars a month."

He is offered a beer but refuses it because the men aren't drinking in the field. "I think sixty percent of our trouble is brought on us by the goddamn frag order. They can't let us do one thing at a time. I want to spend three, four nights in the field with these people, the rest of the time back in the billets, but these people frag you to death. Five men here, ten men there, twenty men to this school, ten men come down on levy for Germany--just when we got them trained here. I got three men lifeguards at the club. . . ."

•

Command Sergeant Major Paul Greer stands against a gray Dempster dumpster. "These damn people gotta quit fooling around with tangibles. That's not how you get good men in the Service. Yeah, we still got the same old American GI, but the draftees were a better group."

•

Were they? They were about the same, one must judge. By the end of November 1974, the last draftees had been mustered out, excepting only those who had taken their bursts of six or those awaiting trial.

Certain generalizations can be made. The new Army's Willie and Joe tend to come from Louisiana instead of the south Bronx. They are somewhat younger, on the average. And yet, adding in your poor black from Shreveport, they remain your standard Battle Cry collection of the dispossessed, the curious, the naughty, the gung ho, the indigent, the unemployable, the romantic, the shiftless. Really, the only members of the old squad not now present for duty are the Northeastern liberal--say, the English major from NYU--and his bemused friend from Greenwich or Grosse Pointe who "did not want the responsibility of a commission," who read Nietzsche at lunch and who said sentences to his sergeant that began with the words "But surely. . . ." The Army now has none of these types. The infantry companies lose the bright captious bastards who could run the orderly room and rip through the paperwork; the colleges and universities lose the students who were once GIs. It is a loss for both institutions.

The privates are still wiping dust off footlocker linings and arranging their toilet articles. They are still eating huge, though somewhat tastier, piles of cholesterol for lunch. They remain generally suspicious of the older N.C.O.s, who return the suspicions fourfold; they are tolerant of second lieutenants, with the exception of the black privates, who mostly despise the black lieutenants--"You're one of the swine, man. You're eatin' outa Charley's hand." (Only 4.8 percent of the officer corps is black.) The soldiers are still too often shunted, with bewildering and numbing irregularity, from one piece of make-work to another; they still go out to the boonies on training exercises with less than half the company present for duty. The great and idiotic bataille de l'haircut still sputters along in a disconnected series of rear-guard actions and watchful truces, now stimulated by the added tactical problem that Army dermatologists are allowing some of the black soldiers to grow beards.

Off post there are still those perfectly vile little Army towns to roam sadly, dispiritedly about--towns like Killeen, Texas, and Wrightstown, New Jersey--places that prosper feeding off the soldiers: towns that sell books on spanking, six-ounce drafts at $1.55 a throw with a bored topless dancer thrown in, quarter-carat diamond rings, air-hockey games, trailers called Moh-Bisle Homes. Haggar slacks, infantry fourragères, used Buicks, sets of the Britannica, painted-in portraits of The Individual, whores, Hondas and Naugahyde settees. "There's talk of cuttn' way back on personnel at Dix," said a cab-driver in Wrightstown. "They do that and this place is dead."

"Maybe ninety percent of them use pot," a Fort Lewis colonel estimated airily. "Let's say ten percent are into the harder drugs. I think the effect on training is negligible. Not many of them turn on in the barracks anymore."

He is right; the effect on training is negligible: nowhere nearly as debilitating as the world-wide musical-chairs program the Army keeps playing. "They keep coming down on levy"--this is the litany sung by officers and N.C.O.s alike: As soon as the Stateside divisions have the soldiers more or less efficiently integrated into their units--after 16 months, on the average--the soldiers are swept up to replace other men leaving Germany and Korea. And though the units will do well enough on their annual ARTEP (Army Training and Evaluation Program, in which battalions, companies and platoons are evaluated on their ability to perform certain tasks basic to their combat missions: daylight attacks, tactical road marches, withdrawals with and without pressure, raids, movements to contact, and so on), there can be no question but that they'd do better without the "turbulence." But they must live with it: Not enough people volunteer to spend their three or four years in Korea or Germany.

As to the officers: It is as though, sometime in the years between the withdrawal of American Army forces from Vietnam and the summer of 1975, some omnipotent and exalted general of the Armies screamed, at the top of his lungs: "For Christ's sake, calm down!" Oddly, the officer corps seems to have listened. The era of crazed ticket punching, of moving from one assignment to another every 6 or 12 months, in order to compile a brilliantly diverse career, has ended. Other routes have been hacked through the careerist jungles to the top: routes other than command of battalions and brigades; though the number of officers on active duty has dropped from a peak of 169,000 in 1969 to 100,000 today--the total strength of the Army is 785,000--there are but several hundred brigades and battalions to command. An officer not selected for command is no longer necessarily out of the running for his general's stars. Slowly this is being communicated to the officer corps, and with good results. But command remains the broadest and best-traveled road to the top.

But here's the real hell of it all. Hawthorne wrote that when he read a Trollope novel, he felt as though he were staring down on an anthill whose top some careless giant had kicked off. Suddenly, he could see the quiet, orderly frenzy of the worker ants in the green and placid world of Trollope's Barchester people, all of whom seemed to move along the converging and separating axes of their ambitions, affections, ideals, quiet buried lusts. But did Trollope. Hawthorne must have wondered, imagine that some supervening purpose guided the workers in their lives and labors? Did some common goal keep them at their stations, at their tasks?

In the modern Volunteer Army, the officers from the grade of major upward seem to imagine that their perception of the goal can be communicated to the workers and that, if the workers understand it, and if they are made comfortable as they labor to achieve it, well, then, they will keep on getting better and more efficient and more "motivated." For a while, it is said, a little knot of senior officers dragged their heels on the Volunteer Army, angrily and quietly spouting what they hoped would be self-fulfilling prophecies about its inevitable failure. Those officers are now gone. The ones left, by God, are going to make the thing work. And the good stiff recession isn't hurting them at all.

The funny thing is, as Captain Brownlee said. "The system'll work when the first round goes off." Roughly, no matter what. It'll work no matter how happy the modern volunteers at Fort Lewis and Fort Hood are: whether or not they are content, whether or not they like going to the field as much as the officers imagine they do, whether or not crime is down 40 percent, whether or not the troops are out of yellow jackets and into hash or Coors beer, whether or not they spend 15 percent or 60 percent of their time in the field, whether or not they get enchiladas for lunch instead of pork-sausage patties, whether or not there are beer machines in the barracks alongside candy machines, whether or not they get off at 2:30 or 4:30, whether or not the brigade headquarters company has a race-relations seminar once a month, whether or not the general stops some stupefied private on the street and spot-promotes him because he looks like a soldier. . . .

"It really don't make a shit. You can't change it," said a Pfc. at Fort Lewis. For the volunteer soldier, all the tangible benefits, all the momentary pleasure of rumbling forward over the arroyos and hillocks of Hood in the big tanks and clattering A.P.C.s, all the prizes and awards, all the education--all the caring of the officers--all of these things and more will not prove "attractive" enough to keep more than one third of them in the ranks of the Regular Army beyond their contracted terms of duty.

But the United States will be richer for their having served, and the Army better for their having left it--and for their being replaced by new legions of volunteers.