Dave Drake: Soldiers and the Civil Government

Anyone with a background in history knows that mercenary soldiers often have a difficult relationship with the government they’re working for. Mercenaries have sometimes overthrown the employing government, but from my reading I don’t believe that’s as common as national armies mutinying to put their general on the throne. (Occasionally even against the general’s wishes; but once the subject is raised, the general has no option but to go along with the rebellion).

A more common scenario is for a civil government to decide that it’s more practical to stiff mercenaries of their pay—and often, for safety’s sake, to massacre the former mercenaries.

Some of the most famous figures in the classical world were involved in this sort of treachery. Aratus of Sicyon, the greatest leader of the Achaean League, decided that paying the League’s mercenaries after one of its wars with the Aetolians would cause the citizens of the League undue financial strain—so he simply dismissed the troops unpaid.

The consequences for the League weren’t immediate, but they were serious nonetheless: the Acheans weren’t able to hire mercenaries the next time they needed them—and war was endemic in Greece of the third century bce. In the slightly longer term, Aratus and the League might have been better off if they had behaved honorably.

In a similar situation, the Carthaginians fought the First Punic War largely through mercenaries. (The most famous being Xanthippus, the Spartan soldier who trained the Carthaginians to defeat and destroy the Roman invasion force under Regulus.)

Despite the victory over Regulus, Rome won the war and imposed heavy penalties on Carthage. The Carthaginians decided they were unable to pay Rome and also pay their mercenaries—and decided that cheating the mercs was the better option. They decided to disband the mercenaries in small groups and send them away with partial payment or less. The mercenaries figured this out and rebelled before the plan could be implemented.

The result was an extremely vicious war that the Carthaginians eventually won by putting Hamilcar Barca in charge. He had been leading the mercenaries effectively in Sicily, and due to Hamilcar’s skill, the revolt was suppressed. The mercenaries were largely slaughtered.

In this case, there’s no question but that Carthage would have been better off treating the mercenaries honorably to begin with. That isn’t the way that governments seem to think. Soldiers are, to civilian governments, basically disposable once the fighting ends.

I’m not talking only about “mercenary soldiers” who are, after all, hirelings and often foreigners. (“Often” but not by any means “always.” Housman’s famous Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries referred to the professional soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, who stopped the many-times larger German First Army’s drive for the coast, thereby saving France. To an upper-class Brit they, though British citizens, were merely mercenaries because they fought for pay.)

For an example of more personal interest to me, consider the way the United States government treated its soldiers during the Vietnam War. All that the government cared about us—enlistees as well as draftees—was numbers.

Robert S. McNamara, the technocrat who shaped the US conduct of the war, lowered the Army minimum intelligence test level for recruits by two points, adding another hundred thousand manifestly unfit soldiers (Project 100,000). He also began drafting graduate students. I don’t know how many bodies that added, but my estimate in 1969 was that a third of my Basic Training Battalion was white kids from western North Carolina, a similar percentage black kids from Detroit, and the remainder college graduates.

The first thing the army tried to do after drafting college graduates was to get us to sign up for a longer period of active duty than the two years we were required to serve. A lieutenant took me into his office and ran through a long list of special training that I could take. Except for the last, all the options involved me giving the Army an additional one or two years of active duty. (It would also involve my serial number being changed from US to RA—that is, enlisted instead of drafted. Keep that in mind when you look at figures on how many of the troops in Nam had been drafted.)

The lieutenant also emphasized why I might want to do that: anyone with a college degree who didn’t sign up for a special school would be classified 11B—infantry—and sent to Nam as a grunt. (I took the last option, a 47-week Vietnamese language course in 30 weeks. I was still going to Nam, but this way I wound up riding armored vehicles instead of humping through the boonies on foot. That was just good luck.)

Everyone knows that the American public didn’t welcome returning Nam vets, but how did the US government prepare us to return to the civilian lives from which it had ripped us for what Mr. McNamara later described as “a terrible mistake”?

In my case, I got several weeks knocked off my tour in Viet Nam so that I could return to Duke Law School (out of which I’d been drafted). Seventy-two hours after I left the Returnee Barracks at Long Binh, heading for my flight to Travis AFB in California—back to The World, as we put it in Nam—I was in the lounge of Duke Law School, preparing to start my fourth semester.

There was no counseling offered (not that I wanted it; I just wanted out of the Army). The US government didn’t care any more about its former soldiers than Aratus or the Carthaginian Senate had about theirs.

I guess we should be glad that they didn’t decide to massacre us. I’m very much afraid that it may have crossed some governmental minds, though.

The government left it up to me and other veterans to take care of ourselves. My way of doing that was to write stories which allowed me to describe the experience of a soldier in Viet Nam, using fiction as a distancing mechanism. I wasn’t writing history; I wasn’t even writing personal memoirs.

I was, however, trying to tell the truth about what a soldier feels—and perhaps more important, what a soldier doesn’t feel. If you let yourself feel too much in a war zone, you go nuts. You do the things you have to do and you keep on going. Or, of course, you die; and even if you walk off the plane without a visible wound on your return to The World, you may have given yourself up for dead months before.

This sort of realistic appraisal of what it means to be a soldier was almost unique in the science fiction of the ’70s when I started writing about Hammer’s Slammers. The stories didn’t sell for over a year, but I continued to write them: they were my counseling, a chance to tell the truth aloud—and let my anger out in a socially acceptable fashion.

When the stories did sell, they gained a following—there were a lot of veterans out there. As a result it’s now possible to write military sf that realistically explores the cost of war, including the cost to the soldier. The book you’re holding is an example of that new appreciation.

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Dave Drake lives outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This piece will be the foreword for the upcoming anthology The Good, The Bad, and the Merc from Seventh Seal Press.