Everyone recognizes the importance of motivation among soldiers; it is a great variable, capable of equalizing armies with widely disparate numbers and matériel, of leading the underdog to victory, of rendering strategic and tactical brilliance irrelevant. But as central as everyone recognizes it to be, the sources and nature of that motivation have engendered a dispute that, in broad outline, pits scholars of soldiers in recent wars against historians of earlier United States and European history. In general, the historiographical trend for studies of modern U.S. soldiers is to downplay the relevance of ideology to motivation. The trend for most other periods, by contrast, is to emphasize the role of ideas.
     Resolution of this difference is especially pertinent for understanding the U.S. military experience in Vietnam, a war born of ideology, but one in which the effect of ideology on the morale of troops goes mostly unstudied. At the time, military and political leaders and experts expressed genuine concern for the troops there, and plainly understood that morale was a crucial element in the war effort. But despite efforts to preserve it, morale largely disintegrated in Vietnam, leaving policymakers picking up the pieces of an Army falling apart. That disintegration poses complex questions for historians concerned with issues of morale among soldiers and undermines the dominant sociological paradigm for understanding the American soldier in the twentieth Century. The fundamental historical conceptions of both morale and ideology are at issue.
     The dominant paradigm for understanding modern American soldiers emphasizes social and psychological motivations. An outgrowth of research on World War II soldiers, this sociological school maintains that the real impetus to fight comes from the bonds between men in small units facing the enemy. Small unit cohesion has become something of a mantra among writers of modern U.S. military history. A soldier fights, they maintain, when he knows and bonds with the man on the right and the man on the left, his buddies. Scholars in this school consider the breakdown of American morale in the Vietnam war as a symptom of many things -- poor leadership, meddling politicians, and an incompetent press corps among others -- but they most frequently cite the military's 365 day rotation policy. Such a policy, these writers maintain, precluded the small unit cohesion necessary for good morale.
     I argue that the Vietnam war illustrates a need to revise the dominant interpretation of soldier morale. My evidence suggests that small unit cohesion existed to a much larger degree than proponents of the sociological school argue. Unit cohesion fails to explain the dynamics of morale breakdown in that war. The sociological school needs revision in as much as the problems in Vietnam cannot adequately be explained without reference to ideology. I also contend that the issue of ideology helps clarify the war. American involvement in Southeast Asia resulted, of course, from the Cold War anti-communist ideology that precipitated the policy of globalized containment. But while the articulation and implementation of anti-communist ideals seemed worthwhile and noble through at least the beginning of the Vietnam war (and at various times since), the war tested the depth of the nation's commitment to anti-communism. By the time the U.S. commitment in the region began escalating in the 1960s the ideology of anti-Communism was on the wane. It still dominated American policy, and enjoyed widespread support, but only on a superficial level. The American soldier ultimately did not share the anti-Communist elements of the dominant ideology articulated by social and political leaders to a degree sufficient to overcome the difficulties and contradictions and internal conflicts inherent in the Vietnam war effort. Fundamentally, the war did not seem worthwhile, and to the extent that it did not, the military was ineffective because morale was redirected into counterproductive channels. There was never an effective synthesis wrought between military necessity and the ideology behind military engagement. Hence, the failure of military morale in Vietnam was largely an ideological one. By the time United States officials had decided to withdraw from Vietnam, the soldiers were well on their way to terminating the fight anyway

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