Excerpt from Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., “The Collapse of the Armed Forces”

One of the remarkable phenomena spawned by the Vietnam War – and one of the presumptive bases for Vietnamization – was the active resistance that emerged within the ranks of those Americans tasked with fighting in Vietnam. Desertion and racial tensions were widespread, drug use was endemic, and troops were periodically “fragging” their superiors and refusing to obey orders. The situation had become so dire, Colonel Robert Heinl argued in a 1971 essay in the Armed Forces Journal, that, “[b]y every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous.”