KILLING OUR OWN

If one were to give any credence to the radio talk zealots, one would get the impression that the tragic downing of the Blackhawk helicopters over northern Iraq was the first time in our nation's history when American servicemen had killed other American servicemen. It has happened since the Revolutionary War -- and every war since. It's called "friendly fire".

In Vietnam, the American ground troops -- "grunts" -- were ordered to engage the enemy by acting as bait to lure the Viet Cong into combat. As James Webb put it, "We invited an enemy attack much as a worm seeks to attract a fish: mindlessly, at someone's urging, for someone else's reason." One of the grunts said, "We ain't nothing but bait...worms dangling on a hook."

The theory was that once the bait had been sufficiently exposed, the enemy would take to the bait and then "supporting fire" could hit 'em with everything but the kitchen sink: artillery, bombs, napalm, rockets -- you name it. General William Westmoreland viewed this bait-and-bomb as a "capital intensive techno-war" that would produce thousands of enemy bodies. We would win the war by attrition.

The "grunts" resented being treated like worms on a hook. One sergeant said, "Our commanders couldn't find out where the enemy was. We were used as scapegoats. That's all we were -- bait...They loved for us to run into a regiment which would wipe us out. They could plaster the regiment with air strike and artillery and they'd have a big body count. The general gets another damn medal. He gets promoted. Oh, I only lost 200 men, but I killed 2,000."

One author, drawing on the experiences of the 25th Infantry Division wrote, "Soldiers became lures to flush out the elusive enemy. Whether such a policy would have been tolerated if the American troops had been more middle-class is an especially unpleasant question to ponder."

But the bait sometimes worried as much about the supporting fire as the enemy. Artillery and air strikes sometimes went awry and landed on the Americans instead of the Viet Cong. "Air and arty" was risky and often misdirected.

In 1968, Colonel David Hackworth did a Pentagon study and concluded that "15 to 20 percent of all U.S. casualties were caused by friendly fire." Misdirected bombs, artillery and strafing took lives. In the chaos of battle, American soldiers killed other American soldiers. If Hackworth's "15 to 20 percent" estimate is anywhere close to correct, it means that of the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 perished as a result of friendly fire -- an incredible figure.

Then there was a particularly ugly facet of friendly fire. You might call it "unfriendly friendly fire" -- fragging, the murder of American officers and NCOs by American foot soldiers. The term comes from the word "fragmentation" because the hand grenade was the weapon of choice when some grunts decided to execute their lieutenant. As infantrymen increasingly lost respect for the quality of our field command, the number of fraggings escalated: 126 in 1969, 271 in 1970, 333 in 1971. During this same 1969-1971 period, when fragging sharply escalated, the number of American troops in Vietnam declined from 500 thousand to 200 thousand.

During the Gulf War, one-fourth of the American fatalities were caused by their own brethren through mistakes, inadvertence or confusion. Of the 148 American dead, 35 were by friendly fire. The British lost 35 soldiers in the Gulf War -- nine of these were mistakenly killed by Americans.

In the two incidents in which the most Allied lives were lost to friendly fire, A-10 aircraft misidentified the silhouette of armored personnel carriers.

The Pentagon says that there is always a degree of confusion in military operations. In the Gulf War, it was caused by "a combination of featureless desert terrain; large complex and fast-moving formations; rain, darkness or low visibility; and ability to engage targets from long distances."

As one general put it after the Blackhawk incident, "Friendly fire is one of the dirty secrets of a dirty business called war."