U.S. “GRUNTS” IN COMBAT

As far back as the American Revolution, when British regulars haughtily dismissed the Continental Army, foreign adversaries have questioned the fighting ability of the American soldier. In Vietnam the U.S. military’s extensive use of firepower encouraged a new generation of skeptics to speculate how the average American “grunt”—Army and Marine infantrymen—would have fared against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army without heavy artillery and air support.

Enemy forces beaten back by U.S. firepower tried to make the case that Americans relied on the might of their weapons because U.S. grunts lacked the skills and courage to achieve battlefield victories on their own. In William Broyles Jr.’s “The Road to Hill 10: A Veteran’s Return to Vietnam,” a 1985 article in The Atlantic, an unidentified communist veteran said Americans were “afraid to leave their base, their helicopters, their artillery.”

Similarly, an early Viet Cong assessment of American troops stated that Americans had “no spirit of combat” and always depended “on modern weapons so they lose initiative and self-confidence,” as quoted in Otto Lehrack’s The First Battle: Operation Starlite and the Beginning of the Blood Debt in Vietnam. Gen. Van Tien Dung, chief of the North Vietnamese General Staff, argued that American troops, “when deprived of the fire support provided by aircraft, armoured cars and artillery, are not better, even worse, than puppet [South Vietnamese] soldiers.” Dung added that his troops, though “inferior in firepower,” were superior in fighting spirit and combat ability.

Dung’s deputy, Gen. Vuong Thua Vu, echoing his boss, denigrated U.S. combat troops in David Maraniss’ acclaimed book, They Marched into Sunlight. “Their basic fighting methods are the following: Seek ways to quickly get away from liberation troops and determine enemy and friendly lines in order to call for help from air and artillery units,” he wrote. “This is a very monotonous and outmoded