The wheels were really coming off the US military around 1970 and that was why US left Vietnam. They knew that in another year or two they’d have an all out mutiny on their hands, led by the same class of people who comprised the vanguard stateside.
And the guy who wrote it wasn’t fucking around. He wanted to get his point across as unambiguously as he could.
On top of that, a report from a US Colonel in 1971 described the collapse of discipline in the US military as only being exceeded by the collapse of the Tsarist army in 1917. By the end of the war in Vietnam, 30% of US officer casualties were fratricide. Think of the level of solidarity there was among the rank and file that nobody in the platoon snitched when somebody put a bullet in the lieutenant’s back.
The wheels were really coming off the US military around 1970 and that was why US left Vietnam. They knew that in another year or two they’d have an all out mutiny on their hands, led by the same class of people who comprised the vanguard stateside.
And the guy who wrote it wasn’t fucking around. He wanted to get his point across as unambiguously as he could.