After the Battle

By Jon Larsen

SOLDIER

by LIEUT. COLONEL ANTHONY B. HERBERT, U.S.A. (ret.) with JAMES T. WOOTEN 498 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $10.95.

The Viet Nam War may be over for the U.S., but its errors and tragedies linger on. So do potential controversies, investigations, recriminations. They lie about like unexploded shells after a battle, to be detonated or defused according to public inclination.

Take the case of Lieut. Colonel Anthony B. Herbert, 42. Herbert, an altar boy carved out of Pennsylvania anthracite, went to Korea ("I wanted above all else to be a soldier") and emerged as that war's most highly decorated enlisted man--over 25 medals, including three Silver Stars, one Bronze Star and four Purple Hearts. At one of many ceremonies in his honor, a bayonet that had been run through his side was polished up and ritually presented to him by Jennifer Jones. Then Eleanor Roosevelt drew him aside, told him to leave the Army and go to college.

Obediently, Soldier Herbert did so, got a degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1956, and then reenlisted. Twelve years of training camps, survival courses, cold war duty and spy work followed. When he was finally sent to Viet Nam for a regular tour in August 1968, he was a lieutenant colonel--one of the best-trained, most highly respected officers in the service, with a string of outstanding evaluation reports behind him and a promise of a slot at the Command and General Staff School before him--a necessary stop on the way to the top of the Army hierarchy.

Tiger. After chafing for four months at desk jobs, Herbert got what he had always longed for--the command of a battalion. He quickly turned it into a model for the entire brigade. Most commanders in Viet Nam watched the action from helicopters--a form of vertical absenteeism. Herbert led his men on the ground, right down into enemy bunkers. Fellow officers often relied upon artillery strikes to do the killing and the grunts to do the counting after death. Partly as a result, civilian dead were regularly recorded as killed Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers. Herbert trained his men to "close and kill--just like it says in the manual." Over and over he told them: "I want results with enemy soldiers, not civilians, not women or old men and kids."

The results were spectacular. In the first month, his battalion killed more of the enemy than the other four battalions combined. It captured 90 P.O.W.s; the other four captured eleven. Such success seemed a mystery to other officers, but to Herbert it was as obvious as a pair of cross hairs. "Rabbits hide, tigers stalk," he writes. "If the infantry is to win, it must be a tiger." In 58 days of combat, Tiger Herbert won another Silver and three more Bronze Stars.

Then suddenly a terrible change set in. One minute Herbert was a hero about to be put up for a Distinguished Service Cross. The next, he was stripped of his field command, packed off to a Stateside desk job, and harassed and humiliated until he was forced to retire.

Exactly why is still open to legitimate debate, but Herbert convincingly argues that it was because he continually kept reporting war crimes and atrocities to his superiors. An unbending believer in the old codes, Herbert made a red flag of the Geneva Accords and waved it at the slightest provocation. Apparently, his finger pointing became more than his commanding officers could bear. At first they were incredulous; then they called him "soft"; finally they got rid of him.

Soldier is the fascinating tale of Herbert's fall from grace. In a larger sense, it is also a study of the Army in decline. At times, because it carries the entire weight of Herbert's obviously one-sided case against his superiors, the account seems self-righteous. Indeed, the Army has done its best to discredit Herbert, accusing him of creating "fiction," insubordination and poor leadership. But whatever weaknesses Herbert's case against his two immediate superior officers may contain, the evidence he presents against the Army's conduct as such is overwhelming, triangulated as it is by all the press reports, the My Lai trials and the PX scandals that have come before.

By Herbert's math, the half million fighting men the U.S. had in South Viet Nam at the height of the war actually included less than 50,000 grunts. Nine out of ten soldiers were in the rear or in noncombat jobs at the front. This book offers the reader dreadful panoramas of the Hieronymous Bosch Viet Nam landscape as it can be seen only by the insider: American interrogation experts presiding over whippings and water torture and electric-shock "therapy" of V.C. suspects (including women), fire bases overrun by enemy sapper squads because the defenders were all stoned on grass, the fragging, the profiteering, the six-month ticket punchers, the "cover your ass" mentality.

Herbert may have retired from the Army, but not from battle. Soldier is simply a salvo in a continuing campaign to clear his own name and work revenge upon the Army. Like the Ancient Mariner, he drifts from lecture hall to talk show, telling his ghastly tale. In a recent appearance on the Dick Cavett Show with Senator Barry Goldwater, Herbert dropped yet another bomb. He declared he had in his possession a whole series of memos (some signed by Generals Westmoreland and Sidle and Army Secretary Froehlke) that vowed to discredit and punish him. Goldwater, a member of the Armed Services Committee, promised to investigate. And so the war goes on.

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