THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504280688
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book review
SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
James Kitfield knew he couldn't sell his editors on a ``good news'' magazine story about the U.S. military's accomplishments after Desert Storm.
Editors simply don't buy it in this age of nitpicking every weapons system and training method the nation's defense industry invents.
Besides, such stories don't always sell magazines or newspapers.
So he did the next best thing.
He wrote a book. His first.
``Prodigal Soldiers'' (Simon & Schuster, 476 pp., $25) tells how a generation of officers, who received their military baptism during the Vietnam era, learned in 20 years what a modern military really ought to be about. They revolutionized the American style of war-fighting by the time they commanded forces in the Desert Storm conflict of 1991.
Kitfield's approach is a believable and honest assessment of a bad era turned good and a much-needed look at what a generation of lessons has produced in the defense industry.
He took the senior commanders from Desert Storm and profiled their lives back to Vietnam, during the days of the hollow forces.
There is Army Gen. Colin Powell, the nation's youngest and first African-American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose realization of reality came while he was a lieutenant colonel in South Korea, worried more about race riots among his troops than of hostilities from North Korea; Air Force Lt. Gen. Chuck Horner, the irreverent combat pilot who watched the Air Force fall into the habit of lying to itself in Vietnam, who was called upon to lead the air war over Iraq; Army Major Gen. Barry McCaffrey, wounded three times in Vietnam and nearly killed, who became Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's most aggressive division commander and the most decorated general in uniform; and Adm. Stanley Arthur, combat air veteran from Southeast Asia, who had to calm down his service members during Desert Storm so they would fight a joint-service war.
There are others: Marine Gen. Walt Boomer, Army Gens. Freddie Franks, Bush Funk, Creighton Abrams and dozens more.
Except for Schwarzkopf, who declined interviews while he was writing his own book about Desert Storm, Kitfield managed over 2 1/2 years to interview the other senior officers.
He showed how all the services reformed themselves from the awful days of Vietnam and beyond.
They had regained the pride and confidence they lost in the summer of 1973, when officers spent their time trying to quell race riots, when the ranks were riddled with drugs and disorder - almost anarchy on foreign soil.
Today they have become this rather magnificent and competent group that claimed easy victory over the Iraqis, Kitfield said.
That the book hits stores exactly 20 years after the fall of Saigon - April 30, 1975 - is particularly telling.
``I got the idea to write this book after nearly everyone seemed surprised that the military did as well as it did in Desert Storm,'' said Kitfield, in Norfolk recently on a speaking and book-signing engagement.
Many still believed the military wasn't up to the job, he said. ``It was frozen in their minds in the late 1970s as sort of the gang that couldn't shoot straight. This book is about how they got from there to here.''
In profiling all the senior commanders of the Desert Storm operation, Kitfield ended up taking the book all the way back to Vietnam simply because it became very clear that all the senor commanders from the Persian Gulf conflict had served there.
``That's where they got their start as officers. That's where they determined what the military should be, could be,'' he said. ``Vietnam was the seminal event in these general officers' lives, and they used the lessons from Vietnam to shape the military of today.''
The very reason the United States has an all-volunteer military today stems from Vietnam, Kitfield said.
``President Nixon decided in 1973 that Vietnam protests were tearing so much of the fabric of society that we could no longer afford it, so he decided to do away with the draft.
``But it took them a decade to figure out how to quit taking soldiers for granted and how to change - simple things, like a six-day work week to five days.
``In the pre-Vietnam Army, officers needed passes to go off base on overseas posts. It was an Army where draftees tended to keep their noses clean, do their two years, and get out, and the old-timer sergeants and crusty lifers sometimes slept off Saturday night in the stockade.''
Such drunkenness merely cost them a few stripes but earned them a badge of respect among fighting men, he said.
That was one seminal event that happened in Vietnam.
Another obvious one was the total force. Today's military is the most dependent in history on the citizen soldier and reserves.
``But when LBJ mobilized the military for Vietnam, he sent 180,000 active-duty solders, but he refused to call up the reserves.
``A lot of the guys I talked to . . . believe that was one mistake where you can trace a lot of the tragedies of Vietnam.
``By not calling up the reserves, (Johnson) did not rally the American people behind the war effort. He never sent the signal that you have to do without your sons and daughters and husbands in time of war. Now it is ingrained.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
James Kitfield
by CNB