After terrorists retaliated for the U.S. government’s interventionist antics in the Middle East, the “terrorists” (or the Muslims) became the new official enemy. The “war on terrorism” became as lucrative as the 45-year “war on the Reds.”
I entered Virginia Military Institute as a freshman in 1968. By that time, the Vietnam War was in full swing. During the four years that I was at the school, VMI graduates were among the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers who were being killed or injured for nothing.
Everyone at VMI was required to be in the corps. Naturally, as a military school, we would periodically have field training exercises, which usually were supervised and run by military officers in the military-science department.
Since I was going into army infantry, my field training exercises were based on hypothetical situations entirely involving Vietcong or North Vietnamese forces.
For example, we would be told that a North Vietnamese unit was known to use a particular path through the jungle. Our mission, as platoon leaders, was to prepare an ambush of the unit employing our three squads. (We were trained to align all three squads on the same side so that they wouldn’t be firing at each other.)
This went on for four years. All of the field training exercises — without exception — were based on hypothetical situations involving Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces.
During the year I graduated — 1972 — President Nixon began withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. I was offered the option of trading a two-year active-duty commitment for an 8-year commitment in the Reserves, which included 3 months of active duty attending infantry school at Ft. Benning, Georgia. I readily accepted the offer.
In 1974, I temporarily dropped out of law school to fulfill my 3-month commitment. By this time, it was clear that the U.S. government was completely leaving the Vietnam War behind.
Of course, I was wondering what they were going to do with those field-training exercises. They didn’t skip a beat. From Day 1 of infantry school, they had a brand new official enemy that became the subject of infantry training. That new official enemy was the Russians.
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