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The base was sealed off and no outside personnel were admitted for three days
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| bet | 8/27 | | Sana | 01.04.2017 | | Hajmi | 1.31 Mb. | | #2680 |
The base was sealed off and no outside personnel were admitted for three days.
Combat refusal and outright mutinies spread rapidly after the Tet offensive in 1968.
But news about this form of growing GI resistance was kept rather efficiently from most of the American public until August 1969, when correspondents reported firsthand on the unanimous battlefield refusal of a badly mauled infantry company to go back into combat.
During the next two years, the press published numerous reports of entire units refusing direct combat orders, and the public actually got to see two incidents of rebellion on network television.
“A Common And Less Conspicuous Method Of Killing Unpopular Officers: Rifle Fire Often In The Midst Of Combat”
Resistance took another form so widespread that it brought a new word into the English language: “fragging.”
Originally taking its name from fragmentation grenades but soon applied to any means of killing commissioned or noncommissioned officers, fragging developed its own generally understood customs, usages, and ethos.
Officers who aggressively risked or otherwise offended their men were customarily warned once or twice by a nonlethal grenade before being attacked with a booby-trapped or hurled grenade.
By mid-1972, the Pentagon was officially acknowledging 551 incidents of fragging with explosive devices, which had left 86 dead and more than 700 wounded. These figures were no doubt understated, and they did not include a common and less conspicuous method of killing unpopular officers: rifle fire often in the midst of combat.
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