Life and Death in the Central Highlands: An American Sergeant in the Vietnam War, 1968-1970
By James T. Gillam
Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2010. Pp. xx, 295. ISBN 978-1-57441-292-5.
Apparently these are the days when American Vietnam War veterans feel the
need to write about their wartime experiences, lest they be lost to the passing
of time: hundreds of memoirs have appeared in the last two years.[1] In Life
and Death in the Central Highlands,[2] James Gillam provides an account of
his life during the period 1968-70. Dismissed from Ohio University for poor
academic performance, he received his draft notice in August 1968 and arrived in
Vietnam about a year later, after extensive military training. As an
infantryman, he saw substantial combat in the following nine months. He
participated in many search and destroy missions, killed several enemy soldiers,
and was repeatedly wounded. Although promoted regularly and rapidly, Gillam
never embraced the culture of military life and has nothing good to say about
the US Army.
Gillam received a doctorate at Ohio State University and presently teaches
Chinese history at Spelman College in Atlanta. This is his first book (he has
also written two scholarly articles). His background is critical to how he
perceives and writes about his experiences: Life and Death ... "is the
product of all the pieces of the puzzle that I call my identity" (xv). His
service in Vietnam is an integral part of that identity, not just something that
happened forty years ago.
This book blends monograph and memoir. The monograph relies on primary
sources from US military archives plus various secondary sources. According to
Gillam, these materials, being impersonal and objective, only tell part of the
story. By contrast, the memoir deals with fear, anxiety, terror, and closure.[3]
The famous 1968 Tet Offensive resulted in high casualty rates for Americans
as well as Vietnamese. As a result, the US Army had many vacancies, and draft
boards across the country worked hard to fill them. Gillam, an African American,
was not an enthusiastic draftee: he went AWOL his first night in the Army and
compared his recruit training to slavery. Fed up with harassment by instructors,
Gillam kicked one of them in the head, inflicting a broken nose and concussion.
Nonetheless, he was named outstanding recruit trainee and went on to infantry
training, where he suffered a broken hand. To minimize the time he would have to
spend in the Army (and in Vietnam), Gillam volunteered for the NCO
(noncommissioned officer) Academy at Fort Benning, Georgia. Normally, it took
four to five years for a soldier to achieve the rank of sergeant or staff
sergeant. However, due to the existing manpower shortage, a top academy graduate
could achieve that rank after twenty-four weeks. Not all was harmony at Fort Benning;
NCO trainers "despised the captains and lieutenants" (29) who oversaw them.
After only ten months in the Army, Gillam was made a sergeant. After serving
briefly as an instructor—he managed to both publically tell a senior NCO "to
kiss my ass" (34) and be named outstanding NCO of the training cycle—it was off
to Vietnam.
Gillam reported for duty with the 4th Infantry Division in September 1969. By
January 1970, he had been promoted to staff sergeant and was serving as a squad
leader. The American army in Vietnam was experiencing widespread problems of
morale and discipline, including "class and caste antagonisms of officer versus
enlisted men and professional soldier, or Lifer verses draftee" (104). Although
he held the traditional rank of a career soldier, Gillam harbored "prejudices
against officers, Lifers, and West Point graduates" (266), who embraced the
Army's goals of winning the war. Gillam, like other draftees, simply wanted to
return home alive.
The post-Tet Army was less professional than the one that had arrived in
Vietnam in 1965. Gillam writes that pistols were confiscated from enlisted men
to prevent self-wounding to avoid combat and be sent to the rear (212). On one
road clearing operation, the men were "really pissed" (83) when Gillam refused
to let them drink beer on patrol. At the outset of another operation, the men
were "as usual … hung over" (232-33). In another awkward situation, he had to
forbid them to cut the ears off a live prisoner (103). Toward the end of his
tour, Gillam adopted "the short timers' habit of sitting inside a bunker as much
as possible" (233) on a search and destroy mission. Preparing to leave Vietnam,
he threatened to kick a captain's "tubby ass" (238). Just before embarking, he
punched and kicked an Air Force policeman and was told to stop threatening to
"rip his throat out" if he wanted to board the airplane (246). He then punched
and broke the ribs of an obnoxious civilian at the Chicago airport on his way
home to Cleveland.
Although his considerable training made him a technically proficient soldier,
Gillam never developed the sympathy or loyalty the Army desired in its NCO
corps. He remained a violent man in a violent environment. He threatened to
shoot a fellow soldier for not maintaining a clean weapon ("[he] was just not
into clean weapons" [165]). He considered shooting his company executive officer
out of prejudice against officers who wanted to win the war (266). He wanted to
murder an Army sergeant he suspected of black market activities, but was
prevented from doing so by military police (192-93).
Errors are scattered throughout: "Khe Sahn," the best known battle of the
war, is twice misspelled (7) even in this revised edition. South Vietnamese
General Loan famously executed a VC during Tet with a .38 Special, not a .357
Magnum (7). Walter Cronkite's famous "Vietnam is a stalemate" speech aired from
New York at the end of February 1968, not Saigon early in the month (8). Gillam
claims President Johnson, after listening to the Cronkite broadcast, lamented
"if I have lost Walter Cronkite, I have lost Mr. Average Citizen" (8). In fact,
Johnson did not say this. Cobra helicopter gunships fire 2.75-inch, not 122mm
rockets (91, 200). Gillam refers to a South Vietnamese Army corps commander as a
"Maj." (41) instead of major general. He claims North Vietnamese Army [NVA]
soldiers coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1969 were "as well equipped as any
unit in the US Army" (36), overlooking the armored personnel carriers,
self-propelled guns, and helicopter gunships of the US Army in Vietnam. He
describes the devastation and bomb craters he witnessed after a B-52 raid, but
oddly cites a journal article to support this personal observation (getting the
author's name, article title, and page number wrong). He characterizes Operation
Ranch Hand as a "chemical rain of death" (133) and non-explosive defoliants and
herbicides as "weapons of mass destruction" (116) deployed in the "kind of
warfare America went to war in Iraq to prevent" (133). Gillam seems unaware that
these herbicides were routinely used in the United States at the time and that
the South Vietnamese government had urged their use in Vietnam.[4] He maintains
that the NVA, to further its strategic aim of demoralizing US forces, executed
two American POWs in September 1969 (102). In fact, the two POWs were captured
by the Viet Cong in 1963 and executed in 1965. Certainly the Viet Cong's
strategies and tactics in 1963-65 differed from those of the North Vietnamese in
1969-70.
Historian George Lepre has written about the role of the NCO corps in the
decline in morale and discipline among US ground forces in the second half of
the Vietnam War.[5] Earlier in the war, NCOs, especially staff NCOs (E-6 and
above), had managed and mitigated conflict and turbulence during periods of
social change. After Tet in 1968, many NCOs who had skillfully overseen the
enlisted ranks left the service. Too few replacements for such experienced men
were available, since the Army decided not to call up the reserves. Stopgap
measures like the "Shake and Bake" NCO Candidate School program by which Gillam
so quickly received his sergeant stripes failed to instill the high performance
standards achieved in 1965-68. These programs could teach technical skills, but,
without the requisite military service, the resulting sergeants did not identify
with the values and culture of their predecessors.
The book's glossary contains obvious terms such as "mortar" and "KIA" but
omits many less familiar ones (chieu hoi, military crest, fire base, NVA, AK-47,
reaction force). REMF is defined as "a man who lived in a safe area and took
advantage of those who did not" (284), unfairly denigrating doctors, chaplains,
and bomber pilots. The index, too, suffers from serious omissions: for example,
Walter Cronkite, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, and the Tet Offensive (!).
Seen as a monograph, Gillam's book contributes no new evidence or analysis
regarding such important topics as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Vietnamization,
Communist goals during the Tet Offensive, and the Cambodian invasion. Much of
the narrative is tediously over-reliant on descriptions from archival sources.
More interesting are Gillam's personal recollections. These range from bizarre
(exchanging clothes with a dead soldier because the corpse's uniform was
cleaner, killing a cobra in his bunker with a grenade, and suffering four broken
ribs in an encounter with two orangutans) to terrifying (strangling a Vietnamese
to death in a dark tunnel). There are some exaggerations: leather combat boots,
if kept wet, "would rot off your feet in a couple of weeks" (105); no, but the
boots would get moldy. Punji stake wounds "at minimum ... could give you gangrene
or hepatitis" (276); "at minimum" such wounds resulted in neither. A few
descriptions are quite compelling: Gillam's account of the planning and
execution of his first ambush (68-70) is so thorough that this reviewer feels he
could carry one out himself. However, as a memoir, Life and Death in the
Central Highlands lacks the impact and eloquence of the best of the genre.[6]
In 1971, Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr., in one of the most influential
articles ever written about the American forces in Vietnam, asserted that "The
morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the US Armed Forces are, with a few
salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and
possibly in the history of the United States."[7] Gillam's book unintentionally
confirms Heinl's description of the problems facing the US military in the
latter half of the Vietnam War. It also corroborates Lepre's assessment of the
NCOs' inability in this period to solve critical problems of discipline, morale,
and professionalism.