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Originally Posted by tw
BTW, how did 2nd LTs survive in Vietnam? They first turned to their Sgt and ask, "How do we do this". The sign of an intelligent officer.
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AND an intelligent Sgt who got them out of the mess that the green 2nd Lt had put them in!
I'm not going to argue semantics with you, and its true enough that most officers tend to be better educated than most enlisted men, especially if we start comparing E2's and E3's to majors and colonels.
In today's military, however, many do join the enlisted ranks precisely because the military holds out the carrot of a college education, so you can hardly condemn today's rank and file soldier for not wishing to better himself or having a lesser intelligence.
I suspect the Vietnam era draftee would have displayed more intelligence if he had been asked to risk his life for an intelligent cause. The cause in Vietnam was far from an intelligent one and the unwilling soldiers who were swept up to be cannon fodder for Johnson and Nixon showed great cunning in merely staying alive.