After the Tall Timber (27 page)

In order to gain these federal concessions and subsidies while maintaining states’ rights (in the early 1900s, southern and midwestern states’-rights congressmen had become the main supporters of the Guard, the northeastern states having more or less lost interest in it), the National Guard had to argue that it was the nation’s principal military reserve force. The National Defense Act of 1916 gave it that status. Guard divisions were renamed and officially renumbered, divisions 26 to 75 inclusive, and sent off to World War I—with mixed results. Some Guard units
were
preserved intact, with their own state patronage-appointed officers. Many of those officers soon had to be replaced for sheer incompetence. Some Guard units were used as “depot divisions,” just to supply replacements for casualties among regular army division volunteers and draftees. Out of leftover Guard units from several states, the army created the symbolic, “overarching” interstate Forty-second (Rainbow) Division, in which Douglas MacArthur served as brigade commander in France. The Rainbow has since become the division that left with Colonel Pellicio for Camp Drum.

After World War I, the Guard, except for its lobby (led by a Guard officer who was also chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association), languished again—until the Depression, when drill pay earned by Guardsmen became a new source of patronage for governors, and of bitterness for men on relief who could not get appointed to the Guard. In World War II, the Guard’s performance once again was controversial and mixed. The December 1941 issue of
Fortune
said that the National Guard, untrained and unprepared as it was, could not be reorganized, because it had become “a political hornet’s nest.” Other branches of the military, in any case, were not impressed with it. When New York’s Twenty-seventh Division of the Guard, for example, was put under marine command at Saipan, Marine Lieutenant General H.M. Smith found that while his own units advanced about ten miles each day, the Guard division, composed mainly of New York politicians and their friends and relatives, invariably stayed put. The marines would have to drop back each night to maintain a line. Finally, General Smith replaced every single officer of the Twenty-seventh—creating a terrific scandal back home in New York. An entire Guard division from the Midwest, on the other hand, was wiped out at Corregidor, and New Mexico Guard tank units at Bataan were annihilated, leaving towns in the states from which they came bereft of their entire populations of young men. To avoid a recurrence of these regional disasters, and to circumvent the ineptitude of Guard officers, Guard divisions were broken up. Of eighteen National Guard division commanders at the beginning of World War II, only two retained command at the end. One general of the regular army began calling the National Guard Bureau itself “an organizational monstrosity.” In 1944 Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commanding general of the army ground forces, said, “The training experience of this headquarters for nearly four years has its most important lesson in the inadequacy of the National Guard in practically every essential . . . . One of the great lessons of the present war is that the National Guard, as organized before the war, contributed nothing to national defense.”

General McNair recommended that the Guard be abolished. So did his successor, Lieutenant General Ben Lear. National Guard General Ellard A. Walsh, the adjutant general of Minnesota, who was head of the Guard lobby in 1944, was quick to respond. He spoke of the regular army’s “undiluted and undisguised hate of us” and of “a diabolical attempt to destroy a great citizen force.” He recommended more, newer, and fiercer lobbying. It worked. In 1948, National Guardsmen became, by law, completely exempt from the draft. (The token Guard units that were federalized for service in Korea required seven to nine months to train—as long as regular draftees who had received no training before.) Although the states had traditionally financed their own militias, until the years when the local businessmen started to, the federal government began to pay 97 percent of the cost of the Guard. A Guardsman now receives, for a half day’s drill, the equivalent of a regular army soldier’s full day’s pay. And despite the existence of a regular army reserve, the fiction is still maintained—in Congress, in the Guard, in the Department of Defense—that the National Guard is the first line of reserve for some future war, and that training its men for war is what the Guard ought primarily to do.

There exist, in Guard archives, fairly riveting accounts of more or less recent Guard tactical maneuvers, like 1960’s Operation Big Slam/Puerto Pine (“In this exercise there was a notable ‘first,’ the movement, on short notice, of a National Guard Artillery Battalion from Utah to Puerto Rico, in ‘off season’ for the part-time soldiers, and their speedy inauguration of a realistic field training program in unaccustomed surroundings”); Exercise Dixie (“The map problem set up for study involved defense of the Southeastern United States against an Aggressor airborne and seaborne attack in the vicinity of Mobile Bay, Alabama. The first phase consisted of the Aggressor successfully invading the Florida Peninsula by airborne and waterborne units, which were met by XII Corps troops. In addition to the invasion of Florida, Aggressor agents worked constantly to upset the civilian population”); and Operation Vikings Thrive in Arctic Cold (“The purpose was for the Minnesota Guardsmen from the 47th ‘Viking’ Infantry Division to learn how to ski and to overcome the handicaps of cold weather”). Air National Guard units (which, since Guardsmen almost immediately after Kitty Hawk could afford their own planes, have often predated regular air force units, and which now consist largely of air force veterans, civilian pilots, and men who just like to fly) are allowed to fly brief cargo missions to Vietnam and elsewhere. One recent Air Guard “combat” mission to Vietnam turned out to be Operation Yuletide—a ferrying over of Christmas presents to servicemen.

Sixty-three percent of young Guardsmen in a recent survey acknowledged that they had “joined the Guard because it offered least interference with your personal plans”; 49 percent that they had joined “because you knew you would be drafted if you did not”; 71 percent that “some individuals you know joined the Guard to avoid service in Vietnam.” Only 19 percent thought that they might reenlist in the Guard when their time was up or that their second lieutenants were capable of combat leadership. Waiting lists for Guard units, since the Vietnam War began, have been so long that they are often closed, and the persistence of professional athletes, movie stars, relatives of politicians and of people with political influence in Guard units (as well as the reminiscences of young men who have recently completed their service in the Guard) yield the impression that the waiting lists are seldom impartially administered. Despite what was meant to be an intensive program for recruitment of blacks after the Detroit riots of 1967, the percentage of blacks in the Army Guard actually went down, from 1.18 percent to 1.15 percent, between 1968 and 1969. The percentage of blacks in the Air National Guard, it is true, went up—from 0.77 to 0.90.

The adjutants general of the National Guard in all but two states (South Carolina, where the highest Guard officer is elected by the public, and Vermont, where he is chosen by the legislature) are appointed by the current governors. They, like all Guard officers, are meant to meet standards set by the federal government, but as early as 1948 the army’s Director of Personnel and Administration complained that “experience since the war has demonstrated that governors will not accept the decision of a Federal Recognition Board.” National Guard General Walsh himself complained, in 1948, that Governor Earl Long had fired a Louisiana adjutant general because of political pressure from a Plaquemines Parish constituent, Leander Perez. In six states today, the adjutant general of the National Guard is also the Director of Selective Service. National Guard officers sit on almost all draft boards—which is a bit like asking the leaders of the draft-avoiders (or, as friends of the Guard prefer to put it, the “draft-motivated”) to administer the draft impartially. In a recent
Congressional Quarterly
survey, only twenty-two U.S. senators and representatives actually said they had sons or grandsons in the reserves or the National Guard. But of the 234 draft-eligible sons and grandsons of members of Congress, 118 had received other sorts of deferment since the Vietnam War began. Only twenty-six served at all in Vietnam. None were missing or killed. One—Captain Clarence D. Long III, son of a representative from Maryland—was wounded.

One hundred and twenty-two U.S. senators and representatives (more than a fifth of the members of Congress) currently hold commissions in the reserves or the National Guard, and an organization of young Guardsmen and reservists, called the Reservists Committee to Stop the War, has filed suit against the secretary of defense on the ground that the Constitution specifically forbids U.S. congressmen from holding “any office” bestowed by, or under the control of, the executive branch of government.

In “In Pursuit of Equity: Who Serves When Not All Serve?”—a report prepared in 1967 by the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service, under the chairmanship of Burke Marshall—recommendations for draft reform included something on the order of a draft lottery, which we now have, and the abolition of the National Guard as a draft haven, which may follow of itself, in December 1970, when the draft lottery has gone completely into effect. There may then be National Guard problems of an entirely other kind.

A chronology of domestic duty by National Guard units since World War II reads like a history of the country transposed into a rather special key. In 1945, there were only three call-ups, all local—one for an industrial dispute in Indiana, two for reasons now forgotten, labeled in Guard histories “unknown.” In 1946, there were five call-ups, all for nothing much, three of them “unknown.” Between 1947 and 1950, there were nine, including five “industrial disputes,” one “threat to local sheriff” (Loudon, Tennessee), and, in Puerto Rico, one “uprising against government.” In 1951, there was just one call-up, a “race riot” in Cicero, Illinois. In 1952, there were three: two “prison riots” and a “student riot,” at Columbia, Missouri. In 1953, there was nothing. In 1954 and 1955, two “crises in law enforcement” (Phenix City, Alabama; Gulfport, Mississippi), three “prison riots,” one “industrial dispute,” and (in Whiting, Indiana) a “natural disaster.” In 1956—two years after the Supreme Court decision to integrate the schools—there were three “integration crises” and one memorable “teenage riot” (on the beach, at Daytona, Florida). There were four “civil disturbances” in 1957 (in Benton, Prentiss, Marion, and Simpson Counties, Mississippi), one “industrial dispute” (in Portsmouth, Ohio), and—from September 6 to September 20—the federalization of the National Guard in Little Rock, Arkansas, with which the first phase of the most recent period of the Guard begins.

In September 1957, Governor Orval E. Faubus called out the Arkansas Guard to prevent the enforcement of school integration. President Eisenhower federalized the state Guard to ensure enforcement and sent in some regular army troops as well. From then on, the Guard was engaged for some years in protecting civil rights, during what Guard archives started calling “racial disturbances,” in the South. In 1958 and 1959, the Guard was called up for eight “racial disturbances” (all of them in Mississippi); also for one “prison riot” and three “industrial disputes.” In 1960, there was just one call-up: the Rhode Island Guard for a “civil disturbance” (jazz festival) at Newport. In 1961, there was one “teenage riot,” one “prison riot,” three “racial disturbances,” and two mysterious “sabotages of microwave stations” (in Utah and New Mexico).

In 1962 and 1963, there were suddenly three federalizations of the Guard: one each for “integration crises” at the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama, and one after the bombing of the four young girls in a church in Birmingham. These federalizations of the National Guard in the southern states gave the regular army a chance to shake up and reorganize (as in wartime) some of the most patronage-ridden state units in the country. The Guard reforms were much like the changes that southern offices of the FBI underwent, under pressure from the Justice Department, in the same years. The army officer in charge of Guard federalizations and reform was General Creighton W. Abrams, who is now Commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. In 1963, too, there was a call-up of Guard troops by the Washington, D.C., commissioners for what Guard archives call simply a “civil-rights demonstration” in Washington—the one in which Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was heard at the Lincoln Memorial. In September 1963, Governor George Wallace called out the Guard, as Faubus had done six years earlier, to prevent compliance with the law in the school “integration crises” at Birmingham, Mobile, and Tuskegee. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama Guard, and General Abrams shook the Guardsmen up again. In 1964, there wasn’t much. Nineteen sixty-five begins with a federalization of the Alabama Guard, and the addition of some regular army, for the march from Selma to Montgomery; has a little call-up for a “motorcycle riot” in June (at Weirs Beach, New Hampshire); and ushers in another era in August, with the rioting in Watts.

There followed what might be called the period of the urban disasters—in which, having been for eight years primarily a peacekeeping force, the National Guard was suddenly in the position of killing people. In Watts, 13,393 California Guardsmen were called. Four thousand blacks were arrested, several hundred were hurt, and thirty-four were killed. National Guardsmen do not have the authority to make arrests, but they do carry arms, and, as the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, under Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois (in a report more valuable for its substantive descriptions of events than for its philosophical generalizations), subsequently put it, of those thirty-four dead blacks “several  . . . were killed by mistake.” In July 1966, there was the Filmore race riot in Chicago (4,300 Illinois Guardsmen called out, three blacks killed, including a thirteen-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl) and the Hough race riot in Cleveland (2,000 Ohio Guardsmen called out, four blacks killed, and several children injured, as in Chicago, by “stray bullets”). In state after state, Guardsmen were called out to deal with urban looting and rioting—with tanks, guns, and training designed for waging war against an organized, armed foreign enemy. In July 1967, in Newark, 4,400 New Jersey National Guardsmen were called out. The New Jersey adjutant general, James F. Cantwell, was at the time, and still is, president of the National Guard Association. When order was restored, there were twenty-three dead, twenty-one of them blacks, two of them children. Later that month, in Detroit, when 10,253 Michigan Guardsmen were called and then federalized, the disturbance ended with forty-three blacks dead. There began a period of serious deliberation about the Guard. It became as clear as anything about the National Guard ever gets that Guardsmen were performing duties other than those of a “first line of military reserve,” and the possibility arose that in civil disturbances much, if not most, of the tragedy and nearly all of the deaths were attributable to forces called out to restore order. Detroit was a crisis in the history of the National Guard.