What happens if the US Army mutinies in Vietnam in 1968?

What would happen if following the Tet offensive,the US army or most of it in Vietnam mutinied(like the French army in 1917)? Would force be used against the US Army mutineers or leaders? I think this would hasten the withdrawel of US forces from Vietnam by maybe two years. I don't think force would be used,the leaders would be court-martialed and imprisoned .
 

katchen

Banned
I have read reports that unofficial low level mutinies in the form of officers who led men on too many patrols or failing to do as little as possible getting fragged (blown up in their tents or in the field) were quite common after 1968.Like everything else in the Vietnam War, they were unofficial and asymmetric, apparently.
An ORGANIZED mutiny involving media coverage would either get the mutineers killed or result in the mutineers getting political asylum--probably the same way Edward Snowden is getting it--via China and Russia to a third country, in this case, Sweden. And yes, something like that WOULD be the kind of black eye that would likely drive the US out of Vietnam that much sooner---and spark that much more of a conservative backlash back home.
 
There were a number of conflicts on U.S. naval vessels like the carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk IIRC. Race riots basically among the sailors.
 
I mean, I'm sure there'd be a liberal sympathy *and* conservative backlash to a mass mutiny. Americans aren't just going to shuck it off if so many of their boys mutinied.


Peace demonstrations probably would get violent. It would make the 1968 Democratic and Republican Conventions very interesting.
 
Would the National Guard join the Army? There wouldn't be much to quell the protests and riots. The FBI will go ballistic.


That would the question. I'm not sure the what the answer would have been. The FBI under Hoover would definitely be trying to find out who the leaders were(if any) if it happened. He would most likely think this was a possible Communist Revolution.
 

katchen

Banned
There would be both sympathy AND backlash. Sympathy in the North and among students and people of liberal beliefs who questioned the war to begin with and backlash in the South among people who believe that all wars are moral. Something like this would be horribly divisive.
 
There were a number of conflicts on U.S. naval vessels like the carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk IIRC. Race riots basically among the sailors.

Its questionable if "conflict or riot" are the right words to describe what happened on those ships. They were mainly small groups (50 to 200) of black sailors refusing to work, destroying things and attacking any random lone white sailors they could find. If the majority of white sailors had actively fought back or if the leadership of hadn't stopped the ship's Marines from reacting violently (I don't recall which carrier it was that the Master at Arms called out the Marine platoon, but I think it was Kitty Hawk.) to the "riot" things could have been much worse.

Of course the mutiny (that's what it was really) on the USS Kitty Hawk (Maybe I am confusing that mutiny with the one on the USS Constellation.) was kind of odd seeing how the ship had an African Americen executive officer which is in my experience normally the person that day to day overseas inspections of compartments and such.
 
So they mutiny after having one of the greatest successes of the war? Hardly makes sense.

It for the same reason most Americans believe it was mainly draftees that went to Vietnam when in fact that group was only about 25% of the total number that served in country. Also I've read draftees only made up 30% of the total causalities unlike what's popularly portrayed.
 
The big issue is that unlike popular opinion the war wasn't unanimously hated amongst solders. some were violently against the war but many were for it. So it would be hard to see any mutiny having a large enough support in even the NCOs to disrupt the war effort. It wouldn't be good if say 30% of the men dropped their guns and refused to fight. Likely cause no end of trouble for the White House and may have a ripple effect amongst the peace movement. Popular culture would certainly be greatly affected if this were to happen, but I think at most it would take a few weeks to dishonorably discharge the mutineers and send them home.

Unless one side used violence which would cause huge problems. On the battle field the moral would likely be nonexistent. The home front might even be worse and fights between loyalist and rebel families would be common.

Even worse if the mutainy was along race or class lines. Most drafties were poor and many were Black or Latino. If people came to think of the Black solders, fairly or not, as disloyal or unamerican then expect to see the Civil Right Movement become very heated and lose support from middle America.
 
There is unlikely to be a large scale mutiny. The US in Vietnam never got to the point of France in 1917 where there was already, what a million dead and millions more wounded? The US had 58,000+ dead and 300,000 wounded. That is a magnitude less.

It takes a lot to ruin a modern army, and the US hadn't reached that state yet. When real damage started being done in the military as a result of the war, it was when everyone knew the US was going to pull out without winning the war and morale plummetted (because no one wants to be the last guy killed in a defeat).

At best, you might have several small mutinees in protest of idiotic commands which would cause great scandal and cause a reevaluation of the conduct of the war.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
If a large and violent mutiny were to occur, the Weathermen would go crazy. They'd see themselves even more as the vanguard party on the verge of a massive revolution. You might even see the peace movement start to go red and the SDS start to get serious numbers.
 
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