Men of Company D (Ranger), 151st Infantry, Indiana Army National Guard, in Vietnam. These men are all wearing ARVN tiger stripe uniforms, a uniform that was common in the ARVN and popular with US special forces.
It wasn't universally mobilized for the war, unlike it had been in prior wars. The Army Reserve, which only existed in modern form following World War Two, wasn't either.
Army National Guard units mobilized and sent to Vietnam include:
Kentucky's 2nd Battalion, 138th Artillery;
Indiana's Company D (Ranger), 151st Infantry, a highly decorated unit;
Hawaii's 29th Infantry Brigade;
Kansas' 69th Infantry Brigade, supplemented with one infantry battalion from the Iowa Army National Guard;
California's 1st Squadron, 18th Armored Cavalry;
New Hampshire's 3rd Battalion, 197th Artillery;
In addition, numerous smaller engineer, postal, medical and support units from the Guard were mobilized and went. Unlike the Army Reserve, the Army National Guard is mostly combat arms.
The Air National Guard sent the following units, officially:
120th Colorado,
174th Iowa,
136th New York
188th New Mexico.
These were all fighter wings. However, Air National Guard deployments are highly deceptive as the Air Guard units that were equipped with reconnaissance and transport aircraft flew a lot of missions in support of the Vietnam War while never being counted as deployed to it. This included the medical air transport unit of the Wyoming Air National Guard, which flew in and out of Vietnam, but which was never considered to be activated for the war.
Indeed, Air Guard deployments remain deceptive to this day, as the Air Guard can deploy a plane or two, rather than a unit, for support and come across as simply doing routine flying.
Army Reserve units also were mobilized for Vietnam following the 1968 Tet Offensive. I don't know which units went, and frankly as they were support, it's harder to find information on them.
Added to these figures is the harder yet figure to arrive upon for individual Guardsmen and Reservists who were activated for the war by default or by their own volition. There are always members of the Guard and Reserve who seek to have their individual reserve status changed to active and serve at any one time, including wartime. I'm personally familiar with individuals doing that. The service doesn't actually like reservists seeking activation and it seeks to discourage it in various ways, but it will accept them if they persist. The reason they discourage it is that, from their prospective, having a fully manned active and reserve component is important, and they don't like taking a service member from one status to another on an individual basis. I suspect, but don't know, that was easier to do during the Vietnam War however.
Also included in this group, fwiw, at that time were reservists who fell afoul of drill requirements for one reason or another. Simply activating these men and making them serve as full timers has always been an option, although I never saw it done in the 1980s. In the 1960s, however, when there was a need and a desire on the part of a lot of people (which we'll get to in a moment) to get into the reserves, they would.
I note that as the Ken Burns document on Vietnam correctly noted, as is so rarely the case, that while 30,000 Americans crossed into Canada to avoid service in the Vietnam War, 30,000 Canadians crossed the border to serve in the US Armed Forces during the war as well, balancing out the number (and not including Canadians who were residents of the US and liable for the draft, as was a cousin of mine who served in Vietnam as a drafted Canadian citizen). We'll get to Vietnam War enlistment in the reserves in a moment, but I note that as while its surely the case that men entering the reserves in the hope of not being drafted for Vietnam did not balance out against those seeking deployment from the Guard and Reserve in the regular Army, that did occur.
Okay, so what's your point. There's cat videos to watch on YouTube after all and we can't linger here all day for no reason. . .
Well, just this.
I've been watching, as I noted here yesterday, Ken Burn's new documentary on the Vietnam War. I'll review it soon, but one impression a person might acquire, as with nearly any other documentary on the Vietnam War, is that the Guard of the era was a bunch of untrained college slackers avoiding the draft (and you'd hardly be aware that there was an Army Reserve at all).
Frankly, that impression isn't completely unfair, but its not fair either.
If you follow our posts here, which are generally centered on an early era, you'd know that the Guard was integral to our military efforts in the 1910 to 1920 time frame. We couldn't have fought World War One without it, even though some in the Army wished to, and the same is true of World War Two and Korea, IE., we couldn't have fought those wars without the Guard, and the Guard generally provided good units, often excellent units.
So what was up with the Vietnam War.
Well, as I've posted here before, I think that a lot of the history of the Vietnam War is not properly understood and certainly isn't well understood in context. The war was a war, albeit an undeclared war (there wouldn't have been a sovereign to declare war upon) but it was also a campaign in the Cold War. Korea was as well, but it came so early that it came during the period of time during which the Army was being rebuilt following the big dismantling of the Army following World War Two. I.e, fighting the Korean War without the Guard, the Army Reserve, the Air Guard and Reserve and the Marine Corps Reserve would have been flat out impossible.
Not so for the Vietnam War which came at the height of our huge Cold War standing military.
The US deployed up to 500,000 men in Vietnam, but the Armed Forces were so large at the time that was possible to do without calling up the reserves. And the Johnson Administration didn't want to as it felt that would have made the war unpopular, at a time when it wasn't completely unpopular. The thought was that taking a bunch of men out of a community would have been noticed more than individual draftees. Perhaps that's right, but it was also frankly a bit disingenuous. But disengenuity was the hallmark of every American Administration during the Vietnam War.
Added to that, the nation still needed to retain a force to counter possible other threats, and there were plenty of them. Real fears existed about Soviet actions in Europe, and the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising added to them. Korea remained a very hot part of the Cold War at the time, and indeed there were fears of a re-ignition of the Korean War following the 1968 North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo. The Middle East was a mess then just like now, although the character of the mess was considerably different. In short, with significant (but not even 50%, we should note) of the regular strength of the military committed to Vietnam, committing much of the Guard and the Reserve would have been problematic as it is, after all, a reserve.
Having said that, much of the decision was simply political.
The fear as that taking an entire group of men out of a single community, which is of course what happens when a Guard unit is activated, would spark discontent about the war. Indeed, it was felt that this had happened with Truman had Federalized the Guard due to the Korean War.
And the impact of doing that was greater at that time then it is now. Now, with a much smaller Guard, the units are fewer and more concentrated. Earlier, this wasn't the case. In the 1930s, for example, Casper had an armory for a National Guard unit, but even tiny Glenrock actually had a Guard unit, something that's completely unimaginable today. Indeed, as I travel around the state I pass old National Guard armories all the time for units that no longer exist, with those armories no longer serving that function. Take a bunch of men out of a small town and, well, people notice.
Particularly, I'd add, if you send those men to a distant guerrilla war. That had been done once before in American history in regards to the Philippine Insurrection, and it had proven to be massively unpopular. There's just something about it, and you can easily see why. Guardsmen just don't envision that when they sign up, and the local community doesn't really. Or at least they didn't. In more recent times, this seems to be much less the case, and the deployment to Guard units to the guerrilla was in Afghanistan and Iraq have not caused protests in the streets.
This meant, as a byproduct, that the Guard and Reserves (remember the Reserves? They're part of this too) became a sort of unintentional haven for those who didn't want to be drafted and send, possibly, to Vietnam. This definitely occurred, but at the same time it's important to remember that it was never the case, as so often seems to be assumed, that the Guard was entirely made up of men who took that route. Far from it.
Indeed, a Guard unit typically has an unusual concentration of older veteran soldiers in it, which is one of the things that makes it distinct from the Regular Army in some ways. There are, of course, always younger men in it in the lower enlisted and lower commissioned ranks, but there are always a lot of veteran solders as well. Indeed, the Guard unit I was in during the 1980s had one soldiers whose service had started during World War Two. It had in addition other troops whose service dated back to the late 1940s, or included the Korean War, and, perhaps ironically, a lot of Vietnam veterans. There's no reason to believe that Guard units of the 1960s were any different. Indeed, assuming the same range of service ages some Guard units in 1968 undoubtedly had men who had commenced their service in the late 1920s.
Which is not to say that men didn't join to try to avoid going to Vietnam. Some did. I've known one fellow who joined the Guard for that reason (he was later a Guard officer and felt terribly about it) and one who joined the Army Reserve for that reason. I don't regard that decision as illegitimate in any fashion. They were still serving.
It does mean, however, that the Guard has been unfairly tainted for years as a haven for those seeking to avoid actual service. This slam still existed in the 1980s when I was in the Guard although it was highly ironic as the unit I was in was full of Vietnam veterans. Indeed, the unit was a hotbed, in a way, of discontent in regards to draft evaders as it was full of men who had not avoided the draft. Even more ironically, some of the Guardsmen of that era held men who had joined the Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, and then later gotten out of the Guard, with contempt. In watching the recent Ken Burns documentary I think I've determined hat much of my view about men who went to Canada or avoided the draft during the war was formed when I was in the Guard, as I have a hard time looking at that objectively.
Well, in recent wars we've returned to patter, and the old "Weekend Warrior" taint of the 60s seems to have passed. I'm glad that it has.
Should the Guard have been sent to Vietnam in the same fashion that it was to Korea? That's a harder question. I suspect that Johnson's concern was correct, and it would have made the war unpopular. . . which it became anyway. But perhaps it should have, indeed, it should have, been deployed sooner and in somewhat greater numbers than it was. That would have leavened the joining to avoid Vietnam gamble a bit, if not removed it. And if that made the war more unpopular, quicker, well perhaps that would have been a positive development in unknown ways.
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