Edward Lotterman
One beauty of economics — the study of how human beings use scarce resources — is that its basic principles apply to life even if money is not involved. Opportunity cost, externalities, sunk costs, marginal changes, imperfect information all pop up in non-monetary human relations.
These may be within the household: Whom do we marry and why or what careers we follow.
But economic principles also show up in apparently non-monetary actions of our nation: Whom do we wage war against and why? Which of us is put in harm’s way and how? Which of us escapes combat? When U.S. forces are firing live ordnance against our enemies on a monthly, if not weekly, basis, these are not abstract questions. They cut deeply to who we are as a nation and a people.
This obviously is a personal essay. It springs from two chance reminders from my past as I was reading about current issues.
One reminder is a snapshot of a USAF F-105 Thunder Chief nosing over to drop a second napalm bomb on a hillside in Vietnam in 1970. The second one is the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s daily casualty report for July 22, 1970, detailing all the brigade’s killed-in-action and wounded in the 24 hours ending at 4:00 p.m. that day. Fifty-five years later, I still re-read it every July.
It lists two men killed and 12 wounded. Five years into the 173rd’s seven-year stay in Vietnam, these were high numbers. Except for the first KIA listed, the other 13 casualties all were from one unit: Company A, 4th Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment was one of 16 rifle companies in the four infantry battalions of the oversized brigade.
One first lieutenant had been wounded the day before. The “WIA-MFW B/Legs” notation told us that he had been wounded in action with multiple fragment wounds in both legs. His comrade, 1Lt. Kenneth Slaughter, had been killed only hours before the report was issued. It also listed 12 of his men wounded at the same time.
Two only had sprained backs, thrown through the air by the blast of the 15 pounds of TNT as the bursting charge in a 94-pound dud 155mm U.S. howitzer shell. Some enterprising Viet Cong had defused this and turned into a booby trap detonatable by wires from brush a few hundred feet away. Ten men had suffered FW or MFW (fragment wound / multiple fragment wounds) to legs, arms, hips and elsewhere. Three who had been hit in the head or face were all marked (NED) for “no eye damage.”
However, their lieutenant’s death was macabre, listed as “KIA-T/A. B/Legs, R/Arm.” “TA” meant “traumatic amputation” — blown off — rather than “S/A” for “surgical amputation.” Putting their leader’s scattered body parts in a “Pouch – Human Remains” had to have been terrible for the unhurt men in his platoon, but almost certainly something they had done before.
While rifle companies had a nominal strength of some 220 men, it was rare for any to have much over 135-150. Including the lieutenant from the day before, Company A had suffered literal “decimation.” One-tenth of them had been struck down even if not killed. Lt. Slaughter was a high school graduate rushed through Officer Candidate School who died two days after his 21st birthday. As the next-senior officer, he was slated to take over as company commander in September had he lived. I knew him only as a name tape on the uniform of someone I had sold a money order to or perhaps stood with in the developed photo pickup line at the tiny PX. Other info about him I learned only after his death.
A somber tale. But 55 years later, how does it really matter? And what economics can possibly lie in any of this?
It matters a lot. And economic principles aid our understanding.
In 1970, questions of justice permeated who we sent to Vietnam and what tasks they were given. Over 15 years of war, 64 graduates of Edison High School in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia would be KIA. So would nearly 50 from Detroit’s Central H.S. Only 22 Harvard University grads perished. Over 300 West Point grads would die, but the number of lieutenants with 12 years of school and six months of OCS (such as Lt. Slaughter) killed was far higher.
In a rifle company in the 82nd Airborne two years earlier, none of us enlisted men in my platoon of 50-plus had a college degree. But at Landing Zone English in Vietnam, the 25-man military intelligence detachment just down slope from us had only two or three without bachelor’s degrees.
Many in the army had sneered that the “AA” in the 82nd’s shoulder patch meant “Almost African” rather than “All-American” because we had the highest proportion of Blacks of any division. Getting the extra $55 in jump pay on top of PFC base pay of $137.70 helped keep families alive in South Chicago or on the Mississippi Delta. The bunkmate below me kept $10 a month for haircuts, shoe polish and sodas. The rest went to his mama on their sharecropper 40 acres.
Yes, details now differ. There is no draft and no exemptions therefrom that favored middle- and upper-class white boys. Pay is higher now and attracts nearly enough enlistees. War is higher tech. Shot-down unmanned remote control drones supplant human military casualties — but not so for civilians. Seal Team and Delta Force members are true volunteers.
Nevertheless, questions of justice over who our society chooses to send to war remain sharp. Moreover, issues of how efficiently or inefficiently we expend resources matter to society. And the opportunity cost of what we do not fund because we spend $950 billion in taxes on “defense” involves justice as well as efficiency.
The broadest issue affecting society as a whole is why and when we unleash our military power against other nations or groups within them. In what ways and for which reasons do we do this? Do we consider the negative spillovers, often in the future, of attacks we find convenient now?
Thus my photo of the F-105 dropping napalm on a jungled hillside as far from my camera in 1970 as our condo near the Bell Museum on Larpenteur is from the deli at Como and Snelling.
I first must emphasize that I was never in combat in Vietnam. By then I was a postal clerk and was never in significant danger, never out in the rice paddies or mountain jungle in a rifle company. I had been trained as an 11B, light weapons infantry, and had served briefly as such in the 82nd. But then karma detoured me through the U.S. military mission to Brazil before Vietnam. By then I was more valuable as a postal clerk than a rifleman. I saw very unpleasant things and had passing scares, but my life was never really in peril.
Yet violent war was all around us. There was not a day or night that you did not hear artillery fire. You knew what was outgoing somewhere and incoming somewhere else. You heard small arms fire, especially at night. When a medevac chopper or gunship had to go up at night, exhaust from its turbine spooling up fluttered the screen above my ammunition crate bunk. We clerks spent long hours on perimeter guard because infantry units were dead exhausted when back in from the bush. And inevitably, perhaps driving down to the Phu Cat AFB 60 miles south, you might come across an enemy grotesquely dismembered or incinerated in a firefight before dawn.
Excessive empathy is a curse. Napalm flame flashing above trees made me think of the poor guys on the receiving end. So did ground vibrations from three B-52s dropping 324 500-pound bombs in the central highlands just to our west. Sound travels 13 times as fast through bedrock as air, and so the audible rumble came later and then sight of the bombers turning back to Guam.
But I learned that distance from violence makes it less disturbing. I still have occasional dreams of the pass after pass that a helicopter gunship made to save a patrol in a desperate situation a third of a mile off our perimeter. Yet my unease must be a tiny fraction of that of men from either side on the ground that night.
How is this relevant to current national policies? Because more than any other industrialized nation in the world, we are quick to use bombs and missiles against people or nations that have angered or even just frustrated us. No enemy bomb has ever fallen on the lower 48 states.
Only a fraction of 1% of voters have ever been within even a mile of a bomb or howitzer shell exploding. EMTs and ER workers see grotesque mutilations of human bodies, but the rest of us don’t. We never worry that some 20-year-old in a trailer at Minot AFB joy-sticking a Predator drone will mistake our backyard bash for an insurgent conclave and blow us and our toddlers away with the 18 pounds of plastic explosive in a Hellfire missile.
The upshot of the very socially and economically skewed way we staff our military and the complete isolation of our citizenry from the horrific realities of modern weapons means that we are quick to call for and use military force against others. The negative primary, secondary and tertiary results of that radiate out in ripples that eventually rebound to our collective harm.
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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.
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