In 1969, 126 officers in Vietnam were assassinated, or "fragged," by their own troops. The following year that number more than doubled, to 271. And in 1971, 333 officers lost their lives to grunts under their command.

At the end of the war the Army admitted that it couldn’t account for how 1,400 of its officers had died. Taken together, these numbers suggest that 20 to 25 percent—if not more—of all American officers killed during the war were killed by enlisted men, not by the official enemy.

The troops’ violent resistance to the conduct of the war helped change its course. A military judge who presided over fragging trials not only called fragging “the troops’ way of controlling officers” but also deemed it “deadly effective.”

In July 1970, 40 combat officers authored a letter to President Nixon warning him that “the military; the leadership of this country—are perceived by many soldiers to be almost as much our enemy as the VC [Viet Cong] and the NVA [North Vietnamese Army].”

American soldiers so often refused orders to fight that the Army was forced to accommodate what became known as “the grunts’ cease-fire.” When Cambodia was invaded in 1970, soldiers from Fire Base Washington conducted a sit-in instead of boarding troop transport airships.

Within a week, there were two additional mutinies, as men from the 4th and 8th Infantry refused to board helicopters to Cambodia. According to one observer, U.S. soldiers near the Cambodian front “agreed and passed the word to other platoons: nobody fires unless fired upon."

In October 1971 the men of Bravo Company, 11/12 First Cav Division, declared their own private cease-fire with the North Vietnamese. It was later learned that Viet Cong units were ordered not to engage American units that did not molest them.

Between 1968 and 1971 desertion nearly doubled in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps. In 1970, the Army had 65,643 deserters, or roughly the equivalent of four infantry divisions.

Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird visited Vietnam in January 1970 and reported that he was “shocked” by the magnitude of drug use and mutinous attitudes among American troops.

Laird found these problems to be “considerably more serious than he had been led to believe” and worried that they might “approach crisis proportions unless the end of the U.S. involvement is brought more rapidly in sight.”

Laird was therefore “planning a speedup in the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.”

In December 1970 the journalist Stewart Alsop reported that the mutiny among GIs was substantially responsible for “a growing feeling among the Administration’s policymakers that it might be a good idea to accelerate the rate of withdrawal from Vietnam very sharply.”

Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., writing in the Armed Forces Journal in June 1971, made it clear that U.S. soldiers were more interested in fighting their superiors than Vietnamese communists.

“Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse," Heinl wrote, "with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous . . .

"[C]onditions [exist] among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by...the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.” H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, admitted, “If troops are going to mutiny, you can’t pursue an aggressive policy.”