What, then, was the class makeup of the memoirists? Considering the prohibitive expense of higher education in mid-twentieth-century America, education level is a good way to answer this question.37 Of all the troops who went to Vietnam, 18 percent were high school dropouts, 59 percent high school graduates, 15 percent attended college from one to three years, and 8 percent attended college four or more years.38 The overall education statistics for the fifty-one memoirists are glaringly unrepresentative of this reality: five were high school dropouts, ten were high school graduates, eleven attended college but did not graduate, and twenty-three—almost half—were college graduates.39 This overrepresentation of college graduates is a direct result of the preponderance of officers in the study, since a college degree was generally required to obtain a commission.
Over half of the former officers in the study had college degrees before entering the military, indicating that many of them hailed from backgrounds significantly more privileged than those of ordinary combat troops. Only a few of these individuals, however, graduated from elite civilian universities, the US Military Academy (“West Point”), or the US Naval Academy. A closer look at the backgrounds of the college graduates confirms that most were hardly the sons and daughters of the upper class. Caputo points out that his family had “just recently struggled out of the working class,” and that his degree came from “a parochial commuter-college.”40 Colin Powell, future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State, grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Hunts Point in the Bronx, New York, and graduated from City College of New York (CCNY).41 Everett Alvarez, a former fighter pilot and prisoner of war, paid for college with money his mother earned working in a produce packing plant.42
Aside from the few authors who attended military academies, all the former officers who graduated from college before entering the military obtained their commissions through completion of either the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program or Officer Candidate School (OCS). ROTC cadets undertook officer training while still in college and received their commissions upon graduation. Those who took the other route enlisted in the military after graduation and were rewarded with commissions upon completion of OCS. There were other ways to become an officer that did not require a college degree, and thirteen of the former officers used one of these methods. OCS was the most common means used by GIs without college degrees to obtain a commission. Although college graduates were preferred, OCS was open to all enlisted men who met the necessary qualifications.43 Six authors, ranging in education level from less than four years of high school to a few years of college, became officers through this method. The nine other former officers without premilitary college degrees obtained commissions through other less common means, including graduating from an “aviation cadet program,” earning a “field commission,” or joining the US Army Nurse Corps.
Since West Point produced relatively few officers and participation in ROTC programs plunged as the war progressed, about 50 percent of all the junior army officers who served in Vietnam were OCS graduates.44 With so many non-college-educated men and women obtaining commissions through OCS or other means, it is likely that the Vietnam-era officer corps was composed of a substantial number of people from poor or working-class backgrounds.45 Several of the thirteen former officers without college degrees validate this assumption. Tobias Wolff was raised by a single mother, a secretary who worked nights as a waitress. When he joined the army in the mid-1960s, he was a teenage high school dropout. After basic training, however, Wolff went on to complete airborne school, Special Forces training, and finally, OCS.46 Another memoirist, Frederick Downs, grew up on a farm in Indiana and only completed a couple years of college before he enlisted in the army, but he also made it through OCS and became an officer.47
Although the great majority of authors were not from truly wealthy backgrounds, most nevertheless apparently came from the middle class. The disproportionately large number of memoirists with college degrees is one indication of this,48 but many veterans also provide other clues in descriptions of their pre-Vietnam lives. Authors regularly describe growing up in comfortable surroundings, often in the suburbs, and usually with at least one parent holding a secure, well-paying job. Joseph Callaway’s father worked in a “prestigious, major, advertising firm,”49 and Robert Mason’s father sold real estate for a living.50 Lynda Van Devanter describes her childhood as “middle-class suburban.”51 Even the relatively few memoirists who were raised in unambiguously working-class households sometimes describe their childhoods as stable and carefree. Ron Kovic, for instance, grew up in a working-class suburb, and his father worked in a supermarket. He nevertheless describes his prewar life as an idyllic world of baseball games, John Wayne movies, and parades.52 The prewar lives of low-income men who ended up in Vietnam, however, were not usually so untroubled.53 They were instead “full of very adult concerns: money, jobs, and survival.”54
Class was the most important factor in determining who saw combat in Vietnam, but race also came into play. Like whites in the same economic circumstances, impoverished African Americans were vulnerable to military and draft policies that favored better-educated groups. In the earliest phases of the war, the number of African Americans killed in Vietnam was greatly out of proportion to their overall share of the US population.55 Less information about other nonwhite groups is available, but it is likely that some, especially Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans, also shouldered more than their fair share of the fighting. Considering the inordinate sacrifices made by these groups, it is noteworthy that only six of the fifty-one most prominent memoirists were nonwhites: five African Americans and one Mexican American.56 This dearth of minority authors was probably due to the overrepresentation of officers and college graduates in the pool of eligible candidates. During the war years, only a small percentage of the officer corps was nonwhite and, prior to the 1970s, the number of minorities who graduated from college lagged far behind that of the white population.57
The draft struck fear into the hearts of many young men during the war, and the statistics show that their apprehensions were not unfounded. Draftees accounted for about a third of all the troops who served in Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1970, the percentage of American soldiers killed in Southeast Asia who were draftees steadily rose from 16 to 43 percent. In the US Army, the military branch in which most draftees served, the yearly death rates for draftees were even higher, topping out at 62 percent in 1969.58 But these figures do not tell the whole story. Many young men, preferring to have some degree of control over their fates, or believing that volunteering lessened the chances of going to Vietnam, enlisted rather than waiting to be drafted. Almost half of the respondents to a 1968 Defense Department survey of army volunteers said that the “most important reason” for their enlistments was to avoid the draft.59 This was true not just for enlisted men, but also for officers: 60 percent of all the officers who volunteered in 1968 signed up because of the draft.60
“Draft-motivated” enlistees comprised another third of all the troops who served in Vietnam. The remaining third were “true volunteers,”61 although this phrase is somewhat misleading, for the great majority of them did not enlist to help the South Vietnamese fight Communist aggression. Only 6 percent of the respondents to the Department of Defense survey said they signed up to “serve [their] country,” with the rest (besides the draft-motivated respondents) citing sundry other reasons, including “to become more mature and self-reliant,” “to leave some personal problems behind me,” and “to learn a trade.”62 John Helmer, as part of his study of Vietnam veterans, Bringing the War Home, asked true volunteers for the primary