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the similarities between social conditions in Vietnam and the situation in
American being protested by Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and others.
And when the World Heavyweight Champion, Muhammad Ali, was stripped
of his title for refusing induction into the army in 1967–saying “no Viet Cong
ever called me ‘Nigger’”–racial antagonism jumped noticeably. In April 1968,
at the time of King’s assassination, several units verged on civil war when
White soldiers flew Confederate flags to taunt the African American troops.
On top of such problems, drug use was rampant among the troops in
Vietnam. Leaders of the RVN and Laotian generals working with the CIA
were running the drug trade, so the U.S. could not pressure them to end it
and marijuana, opium, and heroin, among others, were available and cheap.
And the American soldiers took advantage of a buyer’s market. Marijuana in
Vietnam had a particular kick to it, with THC levels of 5 percent, compared
to 1 percent in the weed usually available at home; in addition, most dope in
Vietnam was treated with opium, intensifying the high. Heroin was also
widely available by 1969. It was 95 percent pure but incredibly cheap—where
a vial in the United States might cost $200, in Vietnam it would be a dollar
or two. According to a 1971 congressional survey, drugs in Vietnam were more
plentiful than cigarettes or chewing gum. By 1973, the Pentagon admitted that
about one-third of American troops were using heroin and about 20 percent
were addicted at one time or another. Indeed, the drug problem became so
severe that on some bases, commanders would allow prostitutes into the bar-
racks so that the soldiers could avoid the downtown brothels, where illicit
substances were sold and bought so easily. For the soldiers, drugs were a way
of coping with, or forgetting about the war.
The combination of class and racial discrimination and drug use led, per-
haps inevitably, to a breakdown in morale and ultimately active antiwar behav-
ior among the troops in Vietnam. Fraggings, deliberate attacks on one’s own
officer with a fragmentation grenade, were common in the war zone, espe-
cially when soldiers believed that officers took unnecessary risks with the
soldiers’ lives, like making them go out on patrols in enemy territory where
they would be vulnerable to VC attack. Some military analysts estimated that
over 2000 fraggings were committed and about 100 U.S. officers killed; accu-
rate numbers are probably much higher. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers
also received dishonorable discharges; and most importantly, organized dissent
within the armed forces badly shook the military establishment.