brewer12345 said:
Anyone know the history around what happened in VN with troops refusing orders?
I don't think we had to wait until Vietnam to discover that phenomenon, but no doubt we'll keep rediscovering it as long as there are leaders & followers.
Over 30,000 French infantry mutinied in the trenches in 1917 for nearly six weeks. The book "The Caine Mutiny" describes a fairly common "authoritarian CO" situation in America's WWII Navy, especially with the classic comment "Hundreds of other ships had to survive that typhoon, too, XO, but none of them had to mutiny to do it!". And many ordnance handlers mutinied, rightfully so, after the 1944 Port Chicago munitions explosion.
Vietnam wasn't just having trouble in the infantry. Racially-motivated activism in Nov 1972 kept the USS CONSTELLATION in port for a number of days. During LINEBACKER II in Dec 1972 the bombing strikes were centrally planned by SAC (in Omaha, NE, that hotbed of tactical warrior proficiency) instead of by the local bomber/fighter commands in Guam & Thailand. The rigid & predictable tactics were loved by the NVA while the harsh "no deviations, press on" discipline was hated by the B-52 crews. Similar problems occurred on the Navy side. There was no documented outright mutiny but a few acquaintances were involved in several headgear-related scatological discussions. One of my friends says this situation has essentially ruined his ability to place his trust in anyone, including his two ex-wives. Even today it doesn't take much to set him off.
A typical O-1 or O-2 has to think through the consequences of his reactions when a sergeant tells him what to do with his helmet. There's the possibility that the order was stupid to begin with, and if the officer put the sergeant on report then that poor lieutenant would have to recite his sorry officer's tactical skills all the way up the chain of command. An enlisted guy has to think through his response, too-- it's a lot easier to "misunderstand" the order and do whatever the heck you think should be done, or even to sloppily carry out an order in a slow, disorganized manner, than it is to square off and refuse it outright. There are times when more lives are saved by "bad hearing" or a lack of aggression than by foolhardy slavish obedience to orders. So there are a lot of options that accomplish everyone's goals (the order was "followed", nobody got hurt) yet still fall short of mutiny. I don't think that blatant mutiny will be very common in Iraq.
IMO the root causes of Vietnam mutiny situations were poor training-- at all levels, not just in the ranks or among the NCOs or in the officer's mess. Too many people were drafted for too short a time to get any real training, let alone experience, and there was too much of a "conscript mentality" for junior enlisted to feel that they were worth more than cannon fodder. The draft led directly to this sorry situation, and that's why the military doesn't want to go there again.