“I’ll tell you a little story, maybe it’ll make sense. When I came back from Vietnam the first time I went to the Reserve Training Center, like I said. It wasn’t really big over here yet. We all knew it would get bigger, though, and we figured Johnson would call up the Reserves. We kept telling all the Weekend Warriors that they’d better get their shit in one bag, because they were going to war. Like Korea. And it got bigger, but Johnson didn’t have the balls to call up the Reserves. Reserves can vote. And they drive airplanes for United. And they run businesses. Instead, Johnson just made a bigger draft, filled it with loopholes, and went after certain groups of kids.”
“You said yourself the kids were great.”
“It ain’t what happens here that’s important. It’s what’s happening back there. Shit, Lieutenant, you’d hardly know there was a war on. It’s in the papers, and college kids run around screaming about it instead of doing panty raids or whatever they were running around doing before but that’s it. Airplane drivers still drive their airplanes. Businessmen still run their businesses. College kids still go to college. It’s like nothing really happened, except to other people. It isn’t touching anybody except us. It makes me sick, Lieutenant…. We been abandoned, Lieutenant. We been kicked off the edge of the goddamn cliff. They don’t know how to fight it, and they don’t know how to stop fighting it. And back home it’s too complicated, so they forget about it and do their rooting at football games. Well, fuck ’em. They ain’t worth dying for.”
The American troops’ disenchantment with the country’s civilian cohort was real, but so was civilian disenchantment with the Vietnam War, and with the military itself. And it was not confined to student activists and peaceniks. The worst of the war had been beamed into middle-class living rooms all across America—the blood and gore, the death, the waste, the atrocities. The public’s idea of the country and what it stood for had taken a holy beating. One active-duty company commander who returned from Vietnam to a job at a recruiting station in Kansas City was stung by the overriding sentiment he found among his new neighbors. “This is a horrible war and our troops are doing terrible things over there,” they’d say, “but we know you’re not like that, Paul.”
Much as the military man tried—“I am them. I am typical. I am what the Marine Corps is all about”—he never felt able to convince his civilian friends that they had a military to be proud of.
Said one veteran: “There’s a wall ten miles high and fifty miles thick between those of us who went and those who didn’t, and that wall is never going to come down.”
We’d gone to war in Vietnam in a way that we’d never gone to war before, and no one liked how it turned out. So while we did what we’d done after every war, while we dramatically drew down ground troops in Vietnam—from 510,054 in 1969 to 212,925 in 1971 to 265 in 1973—this time the brass decided it would be done differently: in the future, presidents wouldn’t have the option Johnson chose. The next time America went to war, it wouldn’t be the military out there alone, “kicked off the goddamn cliff” as Webb’s NCO would say. Officially, the post-Vietnam restructuring of the military was called the Total Force Policy; unofficially, everyone called it the Abrams Doctrine.
Creighton Abrams was the US commander in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972, while troop strength there went from more than half a million to one-fifteenth of that number. Then he returned to Washington, where he served as Army chief of staff from 1972 until he died in 1974. And as chief, while winding down that increasingly unpopular and costly war, Abrams restructured the United States Army in a way that made it harder for a commander in chief to go to war, or at least harder to fight a war without having first sought the support of the American people for that war.
It’s hard to make the case that Abrams began his reorganization with the intent to remake the nation’s political structures, or with the express purpose of closing off options available to America’s elected officials. He certainly never talked about it that way. His overriding concern was the restoration of the institution to which he’d devoted his entire life: the United States Army. Vietnam had bled that institution dry. Its combat readiness around the world had been greatly diminished; the Seventh Army in Germany had become little more than a pricey replacement depot for Southeast Asia. The Guard and Reserves were in shambles, viewed as a haven for shirkers. And Abrams had seen firsthand how even the soldiers who had served honorably and proudly in Vietnam were demoralized. He personally knew the sting of civilian criticism: Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, had trouble hiding his contempt for Abrams. In 1971, Nixon said to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that Abrams “had his shot” to win a military victory in Vietnam, “and he’s not going to get any more.” The following year, he wrote to Kissinger of Abrams, “Our military leadership has been a sad chapter in the proud military history of this country.”
As commander on the ground of a hated war, Abrams grew to love the Army and its soldiers all the more. “In a changing world, changing times and changing attitude and the various political motivations that have thrust themselves upon our country,” he told the First Infantry Division in their last hours before returning home, “[you] represent a constancy of those essential virtues of mankind: humility, courage, devotion, and sacrifice. The world is changed a lot, but this division continues to serve as it had in the beginning. I choose to feel that this is part of the cement and the rock and the steel that holds our great country together.”
Abrams’s passion as Army chief at the end of Vietnam was to manage the nation’s demobilization from that conflict in a way that protected the military. Even as wartime appropriations dried up and the size of the Army shrunk dramatically and the now-hated draft was abolished, Abrams wanted a big national investment in military readiness. He had served in three American wars, and he described how calling up an unprepared Army out of an unprepared nation meant shedding too much American blood when it came time to fight: “We have paid, and paid, and paid again in blood and sacrifice for our unpreparedness…. I don’t want war, but I am appalled at the human cost that we’ve paid because we wouldn’t prepare to fight.”
His solution was elegant in its simplicity and its financial efficiency. Under Abrams’s Total Force Policy, the Guard and Reserves would no longer be shelters to avoid service but rather integral parts of the nation’s fighting capacity. It would be operationally impossible to go to war without calling them up. Abrams wove the Guard and Reserves into the fabric of the active-duty military; he made those in-your-neighborhood citizen-soldiers responsible for functions without which we could not wage a major military campaign. And in weaving the Guard and Reserves into the active-duty military, he also wove the military back into the country.
John Vessey, who worked under Abrams during the restructuring, remembered the general’s central focus: “He thought about [the kind of nation America was] an awful lot, and concluded that whatever we’re going to do we ought to do right as we are a nation. Let’s not build an Army off here in the corner someplace. The Armed Forces are an expression of the nation. If you take them out of the national context, you are likely to screw them up. That was his lesson from Vietnam. He wasn’t going to leave them in that position ever again.”
And so the political threshold for going to war was raised. The Abrams Doctrine—the Total Force Policy—put American politicians in the position of being “designed out” of waging war in a way that was dislocated from the everyday experience of American families. Remember Russell’s advice to Johnson when the president wondered whether he’d have to address a joint session of Congress about a huge escalation in Vietnam:
The loudest story of the summer and fall of 1973 may have been the Senate slowly tightening the noose of Watergate around President Nixon’s neck, but at the same time Congress was also busy writing “A Joint Resolution Concerning the War Powers of Congress and the President.” The War Powers Resolution of 1973 would be an explicit reassertion of the prerogative spelled out under Article 1, Section 8, “to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States” that Congress—and Congress alone—had the power to declare war.
The framers had been voluble in their rationale for and in their defense of Article 1, Section 8. “The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates,” wrote James Madison, “that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.” Even that suspected monarchist Alexander Hamilton saw the
