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By Paul
Richter, Times Staff Writer April 10, 2000:
Los Angeles Times
CARLISLE, Pa.--On a mud-splattered
landing strip near the demilitarized
zone, Capt.
Bob Scales said a final farewell, through
streaming tears, to
the men of Battery B. He
had led 55 artillerymen across Vietnam's
canopied
forests and mountain crags, through
midnight firefights and thundering
bombardments
during the Convulsive summer of 1969. And now
Vietnam
was over for him, he believed. A mission
accomplished. A chapter closed.
He was wrong. The
Vietnam War, which ended 25 years ago on April
30,
touched Scales again and again as he moved
from one command to
another during a 34-year
military career that has elevated him to the
rank of major general. In the 1970s, as U.S.
troops withdrew to a
homeland thrown in turmoil
by the war, Scales saw his Army nearly
destroyed
by internal strife
and neglect. He felt the
scorn of civilians
as he pursued graduate
studies at a university where decorated veterans
like himself knew it was only prudent to trade
uniforms for bell-bottom
jeans, to keep their
warrior pasts a secret.
Scales saw
Vietnam sow doubts in some of the Army's best
officers,
including his own father, and observed
how it reshaped the U.S.
military's fundamental notions of when and where to fight. He made
sure
its lessons were not forgotten as he and other
veterans who
stayed in the Army rebuilt the shattered force over a period of 15
years. And
today, Vietnam's legacy
permeates the military
worldview
that Scales, now 55 and commandant of the Army War College here,
imparts to new
generations of officers.
For the Army,
"Vietnam is, in many ways, an invisible scar,"
said Scales,
a man with piercing blue eyes who
is considered one of the service's
visionaries.
The war so changed the Army and so influences it
today, he
said, "you can't understand the one
without the other."
The fall of Saigon
25 years ago marked the end of a 16-year
calamity that
shook the nation's ideals and its
institutions. Nowhere were the wounds
more
grievous than within the U.S. military, once the
proud symbol of U.S. dominance but suddenly
the humbled loser in an unpopular and ultimately
unsustainable war in Indochina.
In the years since,
the armed forces have triumphed in a war in the
Persian
Gulf. They have leaped so far past their
peers in prowess that even close
allies have
become anxious. Yet the painful lessons of
Vietnam remain
ingrained in veterans like Scales
who, though fast dwindling in numbers,
still
guide the armed forces.
The legacy of
Vietnam is visible when the Air Force bombards a
creaky
Yugoslav army from the safety of 15,000
feet, when the Navy launches
unmanned cruise
missiles from hundreds of miles away to punish a
dictator
in Baghdad and when the Army offers
arms and trainers--but not combat
troops--to
help a Colombian regime fight a jungle
insurgency.
It is evident today, when
Pentagon leaders fret publicly that the
peacekeeping deployment in Kosovo is changing, through a
phenomenon known as
"mission creep, "into a dangerous quagmire.
In
the generals' secret war councils at
the Pentagon, no one mentions
Vietnam. No one
has to: Its lessons
were long ago imprinted on
their
psyches. How this lesson was embedded is
plain in the stories
of
soldiers like Scales,
who was trained as a military historian and has
seen the Army from the
perspectives of field
commander, administrator
and strategist.
Scales' dad, Robert
H. Scales Sr., was a career Army officer from
the Texas
Hill Country who piloted amphibious
landing craft in the Pacific campaign
of World War II. He took pride and purpose in
the way that war had become
a unifying national
crusade. The younger Scales wanted to be like
his dad
and chose his life's work at age 5.
He read books on military history "as far
back
as I can remember" and bored through Douglas
Southall Freeman's
weighty "Lee's
Lieutenants," a book about the Confederate Civil
War
generals, while in
middle school.
He was appointed to
West Point, class of 1966, a group that produced
dozens
of top officers, including Gen. Wesley K.
Clark, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization
military chief in the Kosovo war. Scales' class
also
suffered more casualties--including 38
dead--than any other in the
academy's
history.
Scales was restless in his
college days, ready to start his military
career.
But when he finished 422nd in a class of
580, he fretted that he would not
get
a top
combat assignment in a war that was swiftly
building to peak
intensity. The best students
got to choose among assignments in Vietnam;
Scales' first
posting was to command an
artillery unit in Germany. When
President Lyndon
B. Johnson, facing deepening controversy over
the
war, announced on March 31, 1968, that he
would not seek a second
term, Scales
panicked.
"I thought, 'Oh, my God, the
war's going to end before I get there,' "
he
said. Scales was sent to Vietnam in 1968 and
was dispatched to the
front lines in May 1969
after the death of an artillery battery
commander
involved in a pivotal struggle in
the Ashau Valley near the Laotian border.
Suddenly, he
was leading a unit in the battle of
Apbia Mountain, which
became known as Hamburger
Hill when 50 Americans died in a 10-day
fight
that stirred new controversy at home about the
conduct of the war.
Actions Earn Scales a Silver
Star: Scales' six 105-millimeter guns
were assigned to fire shells across the valley,
a distance of about five miles, in support of
U.S. infantry units. Yet two
brigades of North
Vietnamese troops lurked in the valley and at
intervals
tried to overrun the American fire
bases. Scales won a Silver Star for his
actions on June 14, 1969, when, in an attack
before dawn, 96 North
Vietnamese regulars
briefly overran Fire Base Berchtesgaden, lobbing
explosives called satchel charges, killing 11
and injuring 43.
He was "knocked to the
ground several times as satchel charges went off
near him," according to his citation papers. Yet
he moved from artillery
piece to artillery
piece, firing at enemy soldiers, helping tend
weapons
and directing defensive fire from U.S.
helicopter gunships. Despite the
heavy
casualties, Scales' battery survived three major
assaults.
Throughout that summer, he said,
"we were fighting for our lives."
Many American
soldiers experienced Vietnam as a
counterinsurgency,
a shifting and ambiguous
battle waged for hazy military goals against
guerrillas who were often impossible to
distinguish from civilian
noncombatants. Retired
Gen. Colin L. Powell, the former chairman
of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, was sent into the Ashau
Valley in 1963
on a mission that summed up, for
him, the pointless quality of the
war. The
forces were there, a South Vietnamese officer
told him,
to protect an outpost that existed to
protect an airstrip that was
there solely to
service the outpost. The Vietnam War "rarely
made
more sense than in [that] circular
reasoning," Powell wrote in his
autobiography.
Scales, however, experienced a different sort of
war.
The war his unit fought in the
isolation of the mountains was a
straightforward, conventional conflict between
regular troops.
The soldiers didn't have to worry about harming civilians or wrestling
with
other political issues that made the war so
anguishing for others.
While some units were
troubled by drug use, race friction and poor
leadership, the soldiers of Battery B focused on
simply doing their job
and staying
alive.
Scales saw his battery as
professionals--a "band of brothers"--and didn't
worry much about the larger political issues
involved in the war. Yet
years later, he learned
that his father, posted a few hundred miles to
the
south, was gnawed by doubts about a conflict
that did not have the
clear purpose--or public
support--of World War II. While his son was
fighting in the mountains, Col. Scales was
watching the war uneasily as
deputy commander of
the huge Long Binh military depot. A veteran
soldier
as "tough as woodpecker lips," in the
words of his son, the elder Scales
remembered
how World War II officers and enlisted men
together endured
the hardships of dirt and
disease in the South Pacific. And it made him
uneasy to find himself sitting in a huge
air-conditioned office eating steak
and lobster
and watching through the window as fighters
streaked off
to pound distant
targets.
The younger Scales began to see
the war from a different perspective
when he
returned to the States. He went to graduate
school at Duke
University from 1971 to 1973
and found himself thrown together with
young
professors who made no secret of their distaste
for the military.
This was "a different kind
of
close combat," he recalled, and it came
as "a
real shock to me."
Meanwhile, the end of
the Vietnam War left the Army a shambles and
"cloaked in anguish," Scales wrote later in his
book, "Certain Victory,"
the official Army
account of the Persian Gulf War and the
rebuilding that
preceded it. Tens of thousands
of the Army's best officers and soldiers
walked
away as its troubles deepened. The toll was
especially heavy
among noncommissioned officers,
who were rotated through the combat
zone, tour
after tour, at a far higher rate than officers.
Many were killed,
many others bailed out, and
their replacements, thinly trained
"shake-and-
bake" NCOs fresh from the ranks, were
often not as motivated or as skilled.
Some, indeed, were deeply angry with the Army. At Ft.
Benning, Ga.,
in the mid-1970s, Scales saw
authorities post guards with truncheons
outside
buildings to prevent soldiers from breaking in
and carrying
off equipment.
President Nixon
ordered an end to the draft, but interest in the
new
all-volunteer Army, begun in 1973, was so
scant that recruiters were
compelled to take 40%
of their recruits from the lowest category of
mental
aptitude, the so-called Category IV. The
Army was an institution "fighting
merely to
maintain its existence in the face of growing
apathy, decay and
intolerance," Scales later
wrote. For Scales, the Army has been a family
business: In addition to his father, his wife's
father and her sister's husband
were in the
service. Both of Scales' daughters also joined
the Army.
But in the early 1970s,
Scales found himself wondering about the Army's
future. He had searching discussions with his
father and wife about
whether he should leave
for civilian life. But if you left, his father
asked,
would you feel that you'd abandoned the
Army? The answer was yes,
Scales concluded. He
decided to give the Army "one more
shot."
In addition to its
personnel problems, the Army of the mid-1970s
was
jolted by anxieties that it might fail in
its most essential mission: throwing
back
a Soviet attack on the plains of central
Europe. Vietnam had cost
the nation about $120
billion--money that would have gone, in part, to
keeping the armed forces competitive with its
foes. And in 1973, the Army
was shocked to see
in the vast tank and missile battles of the Yom
Kippur
War how much the lethality and range of
Soviet-built war machines had
improved. In the
years that followed, with gathering momentum,
the
Army reinvented itself--partly from fear of
the Soviet adversary and
partly from a desire to prove its competence after Vietnam. It developed
a new generation of weapons, including the M-1
tank and the AH-64
Apache attack helicopter, all
more deadly, more precise, more rugged.
It
rebuilt the NCO corps and put more emphasis on
teaching troops to
handle the complex new
weaponry, a step that came to be called the
"training revolution."
The Army's
rebuilding job turned the corner in the early
1980s as new
money was poured in for equipment,
pay and college benefits. The nation's
anger
over Vietnam was fading. In 1992, during the
height of this
reinvention, Scales took
command of 650 men in an artillery battalion
at
Panmunjom, at the border of North and South
Korea. By then,
the NCOs were "good," he
said. And by 1988, when he was
commanding
NCOs at the Artillery Training Center at Ft.
Sill, Okla.,
they were "superb."
The
American public came to share that view in 1991,
when U.S. and allied
ground troops overwhelmed
Iraqi forces in the Persian Gulf War in 100
hours. Americans deluged the troops with tens
of thousands of pieces of
fan mail. The military
was viewed as the nation's most admired
institution,
polls showed. The Scales family,
too, exulted. Scales' father, haunted by
a
feeling that he had bailed out of the Army at
its darkest moment, showed
his pride
by placing on his car, for the first time, a
sticker identifying him
as a retired
colonel.
Yet, while the Army had shaken
off the stigma of Vietnam, the great debate
over
the war's lessons was anything but settled--and,
indeed, continues to
rage today. Since the
1980s, officers of the Vietnam generation and
others
had argued that the United States should
avoid any new quagmire by
following new rules for
use of force. The "Powell doctrine," advocated
by
the Joint Chiefs chairman, said that the
United States should use force only
where vital
national interests were at stake, where it could
apply
overwhelming force and where it had
clearly defined military goals and
an exit plan.
Its advocates argued that the United States must
avoid the
gradualism of Vietnam, where American
leaders incrementally applied
more and more
force in a vain hope of finding a point at which
the enemy
could endure no more. In
Scales' view, the guidelines of the Powell
doctrine are worthy--yet, too
often, not
practicable. Like it or not, he said, the
military will rarely have the
latitude to
unleash its destructive power in full fury, as
it did in Kuwait. Far
more often, it will
confront the questions of how to use limited
force to gain
limited ends. It will be
compelled, in other words, to work through the
dilemmas again that tormented the U.S.
leadership in the Vietnam War
and in the Korean
War before it. The Persian Gulf
War, with vast tank columns slugging it out in
an
unpeopled desert, may turn out to be "the
last great Machine Age
war," Scales said. "The American military will never again have a
free
hand to apply violence
on the battlefield,"
he said. "We need to get
used to
that." Yet he believes that the
uniformed leadership should continue to heed the
war's chief lessons of minimizing U.S.
casualties, making conflicts as short as
possible and keeping public support strong.
Vietnam's broadest lesson,
Scales said, is how
much can go wrong in war, a lesson taken to
heart by the Vietnam generation of officers.
Today's soldiers are accused of
being "worst-casers--safe siders. We always
ask for too much ammunition, too
many men, too
much time to do it," he said. Yet
in Vietnam, by the middle of the 1960s, both
sides were so committed
to a battle of
wills--fearing that they had so much to lose in
defeat--that
there were "no levers or knobs"
to turn the war off. Another principal
lesson is that in choosing war, leaders must pay close
heed to intangibles,
such as the adversary's
will, rather than the kind of statistical
measures
that created the illusion of
ever-approaching victory in Vietnam.
In
Vietnam, legions of U.S. analysts kept close
tabs on the destruction of
enemy guns, trucks
and troops. But they overlooked the
determination of
the North Vietnamese to
fight on. Scales got a powerful view of this one
night in his mountain firebase. In the predawn
hours, his battery had
opened a deafening
barrage to inform nearby enemy troops that the
Americans
were awake and ready to repel any
attack. Despite the
warning, minutes later
dozens of North Vietnamese troops came surging
across the concertina-wire perimeter--running
directly into lethal
American fire. This was "a
very determined enemy, a stoic enemy,"
Scales
said.
And the Americans' failure to
appreciate this, Scales said, was the nation's
"fundamental miscalculation" in its longest
war.
* * *
A
MILITARY CAREER: Highlights in
the life of MAJ. GEN. ROBERT H. SCALES
JR. August 5, 1944: Born in
Gainesville, Fla. 1966: Graduates from U.S.
Military Academy, commissioned as field
artillery officer, Germany. 1968: Commands
headquarters artillery battery, 101st Airborne
Division, South Vietnam. 1969: Commands
artillery battery in front-line fighting in
central
Vietnam, returns to United
States. 1971-73: Pursues graduate work in
history at Duke University for
master's and
doctoral degrees. 1982-83: Commands artillery
battalion, U.S. forces in Korea. 1986-88:
Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. Army V Corps,
Frankfurt, Germany. 1990: Chief of Staff,
U.S. Army Field Artillery Center, Ft. Sill,
Oklahoma. 1991: Director, Desert Storm
Special Study Group, authors
"Certain Victory,"
the Army's official account of the Persian Gulf
War. 1995-97: Deputy Chief of Staff, Army
Training and Doctrine Command,
develops "Army
After Next" blueprint for the future design of
forces. 1997-present: Commandant, U.S. Army
War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pa.
* *
* Lessons and Legacies:
25 Years After Vietnam: The longest
war America has ever fought--and the first one
it lost--
Vietnam continues to provoke questions
and evoke emotions both
vivid and
complex. The U.S. was involved in Indochina
from the late
1950s until the fall of Saigon on
April 30, 1975.
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