Making the Military Face the Music

...The Gardner and Sherrill books are eloquent examples of the crucial role a free and vigorous press can play...

...Both books not only constitute an indictment of the military legal system, but suggest, albeit indirectly, potential lines of inquiry...

...As the Bay of Pigs and the early Vietnam escalations showed, a new Executive untrained in martial affairs tends to defer to the professionals...

...These two books will further attract public attention to the complexity and seriousness of the situation...

...How threatened by all this the officers feel????their personal lives, value structures and mode of conduct seemingly crumbling????is strikingly revealed in the authors' accounts of the courts-martial...

...Reviewed by Judith P. Vladeck Civilian co-counsel for Jeffrey Russell, Fort Dix 38 After more than a year's investigation, the Special Civilian Committee for the Study of the United States Army Confinement System last month released its report...

...The President, unfortunately, is in a still poorer position than Congress when it comes to restricting the military...

...If anyone, the Secretary of Defense is most qualified to provide effective supervision of the military in its mundane operations, yet he is usually preoccupied with weightier questions of national destiny...

...Sherrill, too, reports at length on the mutiny trial, but he takes up other recent notorious instances of Army injustice as well...

...Their protest had been triggered in part by the appalling conditions in the stockade, and in part by a guard killing a fellow prisoner two days earlier...

...In October 1968, 27 prisoners from the Presidio stockade in San Francisco broke roll call and staged a sit-down on the grass, insisting on speaking to the prison commander...

...Its most fundamental proposal urged the shifting of responsibility for operating the stockades from local post commanders to an independent Army correctional command...

...For, as the report of the Special Civilian Committee for the study of the Army's confinement system reaffirms, high officials, no matter how great their power, genuinely fear the wrath of public opinion...

...Focusing on many of the abuses that have aroused public concern in the past few years?overcrowded stockades, lack of adequate medical and psychiatric personnel, use of untrained and often brutal guards, cruel punishment?the panel recommended a sweeping revision of military penal procedures...

...The fact that this report was issued at all, and that the Army immediately responded by announcing it intended to adopt several of the committee's suggestions, may be due in large measure to the journalists who publicized the festering ugliness of military prison conditions...

...even if they were misguidedly inducted, it is almost incomprehensible that they were allowed to remain in service...

...Moreover, thanks to this structural weakness, when the parent bodies do act it is to veto or limit the scope of some legislation, not to initiate new legislation or expand what has been proposed...

...The Armed Forces committees have long been dominated by men generally favorable to military leaders and more or less unconcerned with the common soldier, and the structure of both houses of Congress is such that individual committees, and often subcommittees, are almost entirely autonomous...

...In his chapter on Army prisons, Sherrill demonstrates that in many instances congressional indifference to existing conditions has exceeded even the inattention of career military men...

...It is widely believed that Levy's court-martial was contrived to punish him less for any breach of regulations than for what the Army conceived to be his radical political views...

...A committee's sins of commission are thus much easier to correct than its sins of omission????And the transgression against military justice is largely one of congressional nonfeasance...

...He goes too far, I think, in suggesting that the military get out of the justice business altogether, but it clearly lacks the equipment to remain in the reform-school business, the adolescent-psychology business and the moral-uplift business...

...How, especially in times of conscription and a consequently inflated Army, can a balance between the rights of the individual and the necessities of the military be achieved...

...But again, miscarriages of military justice receive less notice????not to mention effective action????than such manageable issues as large expenditures for useless hardware...

...Sherrill and Gardner point out that much of the current crisis springs from a conflict between career and noncommissioned officers and draftees...

...The second book, Robert Sher-rill's Military Justice Is to Justice as Military Music Is to Music, is wider in scope...

...225 pp...

...they force consideration of the underlying questions: How is it possible to guarantee minimum standards of fair treatment and due process without unreasonably impairing the Army's efficiency...

...Gardner is a good journalist...

...So the answer must finally lie with the press...

...This, of course, is hardly surprising...

...From the evidence presented by Gardner and Sherrill it is apparent that none of the soldiers involved in the Presidio "mutiny" belonged in anyone's army...

...The problem is compounded by draft boards finding it difficult to fill quotas and accepting young men unable to cope with military life...

...For example, the House and Senate will cut or override specific purchasing authorizations by one of the military committees, but almost never do they add to the shopping lists...

...his account of the mutiny trial is professionally skillful, marred only by his too-obvious hostility to the military...

...Even if he were to devote his energies to less cosmic aspects of military life, this would undoubtedly be restricted to specific incidents attracting fervid, if short-lived, public attention: Military justice is bound always to be a low-priority problem for those who are potentially able to do something about improving it...

...Nothing Sherrill says would dispel that belief...

...Among these is the case of Captain Howard Levy, who was court-martialed on charges stemming from his refusal to operate a training program for Green Berets...

...Although the prevalent distaste for our objectives in Indochina has made every Army activity particularly vulnerable, it was the publicity surrounding the Presidio "mutiny" that led to the appointment of the investigative panel...

...Fred Gardner's The Unlawful Concert (subtitled "An Account of the Presidio Mutiny Case"), is primarily a detailed factual report of the events culminating in the longest court-martial in American history...

...Ironically, the hostility toward the Armed Forces brought on by the Vietnam war????particularly in the Senate????has at the very least made members of Congress more skeptical about military behavior...

...Many of the Presidio 27, Sherrill observes, had been "hidden" in the Army the way society hides others in jails, mental institutions and the like...

...More than merely attacks upon the Uniform Code of Military Justice and its trial and appeal procedures...

...6.95...

...One of the most interesting issues raised by the two books, and echoed in the civilian committee's report, is that of new screening methods to prevent the drafting of youths with physical or emotional problems...

...Their case studies spotlight an organization under the most severe stress, going from relatively placid anonymity a decade ago to an enormous increase in size, function and exposure to public hostility...