The Lieutenant’s Dilemma

by Dave Hollar

“I hate war and love the warriors.”

– Leon Standifer, author of Not in Vain, WWII veteran

In The Patriot, Mel Gibson plays a planter in South Carolina during the Revolutionary War. He wants freedom from Britain and supports the patriots but he cannot go to war with Britain. He exhibits pacifist qualities since he would not join the freedom fighters. His oldest son rebels and joins the Continental army. Later, when his son is home on leave from the war, a British unit attacks his farmhouse, burns it, captures his son, and kills his next oldest son, a teen. Gibson is outraged and has a change of heart.

After the soldiers leave with his oldest son as a prisoner, he has his two youngest sons join him and seek out his son’s killers. The three are in the woods at the top of a gulley with a dirt road below. The unit that killed his son is approaching.

He asks the boys whether they know how to identify the officers. They replied that they do. He instructs them when they shoot: “I want you boys to start with the officers and work your way down.”

That was the dilemma any infantry leader faced in South Vietnam, whether a sergeant, company commander, or lieutenant. It was common knowledge among OCS candidates of the risks a lieutenant faced in combat. There were various claims that second lieutenants lasted only a short time in a firefight. Ron Milam, Ph.D., in Not a Gentleman’s War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War, wrote:

“The commonly held belief and Hollywood-inspired belief that the average life span of an infantry lieutenant was minutes was probably an exaggerated claim, but the danger for lieutenants exceeded that of other ranks.”^[1]

This knowledge raised my distaste for the US Army recruiters who misled me.

I was usually towards the front of a column moving through the jungle. I was the second or third man in my queue. The man closest to me would always be my RTO [Radio Telephone Operator]. He carried his radio on his back, and the antenna pointing into the sky was like a giant arrow over our heads with large letters on it reading “kill them first.”

I expect this is what happened on Halloween evening in 1969. The CO would have had two RTOs, one radio for communicating with his three platoons and the other to communicate with battalion headquarters on a separate frequency. The whip antenna for the battalion radio was significantly longer than the company radio and, therefore, more visible. On that occasion, Captain Saunders was the only person wounded.

From time to time, as we were moving through the jungle or taking a rest, the thought would come to mind that a VC sniper might be in the trees near me with the crosshairs of his scope fixed on my helmet or the heart of the guy next to the soldier carrying the radio.

Another element of the lieutenant’s dilemma was that I was responsible for the lives of some 30 men in my platoon. I made daily decisions that would affect their safety and security. We were trained well in OCS; however, my ultimate responsibility was in South Vietnam. It required that EVERY decision I made had to be the right one. I was not satisfied that 90% of them were the right ones – it had to be 100%. Otherwise, someone could be injured or worse. Of course, it was not possible to be correct all the time. Add to that the stress of a combat environment and mistakes are bound to be made. In effect, infantry platoon leaders and company commanders were “set up” to fail because we would not and could not always be perfect.

^[1] Ron Milam, Not a Gentlemen’s War, (The University of North Carolina Press), 4.

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David Hollar graduated from college in 1967. Two years later he was in South Vietnam as an infantry lieutenant with the First Infantry Division. He has written two books: Casualties of War – An Infantry Lieutenant in Vietnam and Mr. NewHeart – Heart Attack to Transplant and Beyond. Both are available here – www.lulu.com/spotlight/dshollar and at Amazon.

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