War Games

War Games

Vietnam shook to its foundations the sense of America that reigned when the Army and Navy football teams faced off in their legendary 1964 game.

The following is adapted from Every Army Man Is with You: The Cadets Who Won the 1964 Army-Navy Game, Fought in Vietnam, and Came Home Forever Changed (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). 

“Football, beyond any game invented by man, is closest to war.” These were the words of Earl “Red” Blaik, the legendary football coach of the Army football team at West Point in the 1940s and ‘50s.

They were also words that the players on the 1964 Army football team—which beat Navy and its All-American quarterback and future Dallas Cowboys star, Roger Staubach, in the climactic game of their season—believed in. The players came of age in a West Point culture that saw victory on the football field as a prelude to victory on the battlefield. In Vietnam the players were, however, forced to confront a different and harsher reality than the one they had been led to expect. They took pride in serving, but it was not possible to come away from Vietnam believing they were part of a successful war effort.

The players experienced firsthand the grim realities of America’s military strategy, with its focus on body counts, and beginning in 1971, with the publication of The Pentagon Papers, they were forced to deal with the revelation that the war they had been asked to fight was one that the president and secretary of defense who sent them into battle came to doubt could be won, even as they ordered more troops into combat.

Had the players shared the politics of so many college students their age, it would have been easy for them to grow cynical about the country, treating America as Amerika. But the players belonged to a different group of 1960s young. They didn’t fit neatly into anyone’s category—liberal or conservative—of what a Vietnam vet is supposed to be like, and, fifty years later, they still don’t.

On September 28, 2012, I drove from New York City to West Point to watch Rollie Stichweh, the captain of the 1964 Army football team that defeated Navy and its All-American quarterback, Roger Staubach, be inducted into the Army Sports Hall of Fame. Forty-eight years earlier, Stichweh, playing quarterback on offense and safety on defense, had led Army to an 11–8 victory over Navy in the final game of his college career. After five straight losses to Navy, the victory was a must-win for Army, but for me what made Stichweh and his teammates special was the way in which their football lives gave way to their military lives. Before the 1960s were over, they would all be in Vietnam. In the coming years, they could not look back on the greatest triumph of their football careers without thinking of the war that changed them and took the lives of so many of their classmates.

My new book, Every Army Man Is with You—the phrase comes from a telegram retired president Dwight Eisenhower wired the team on the eve of its 1964 game with Navy—is the story, told through the lives of seven players who survived the Vietnam War, of how the 1964 West Point football team made the transition from the football field to the Vietnam battlefield, then back again to the States before their twenties were over. The emotional core of the book lies in this journey, which began at West Point as a collective undertaking but quickly changed course in Vietnam, where as junior officers the players were dispersed throughout the country.

The seven players were chosen because of the key roles they played in the 1964 Army–Navy game. Five of them—quarterback Rollie Stichweh, wingback John Johnson, tackle Bill Zadel, and guards Peter Braun and Sonny Stowers—were offensive-team starters whom coach Dietzel asked to play the entire game on defense as well. The two other players—end Sam Champi and tailback John Seymour, who also did West Point’s punting—were crucial to Army’s scoring. Champi caught the pass that accounted for Army’s only touchdown. Seymour kept drive after drive alive with his running.

The players at the center of Every Army Man Is with You were the cream of the football crop at West Point, and if their Vietnam War experience had been anything like the World War II experience of their fathers’ greatest generation, victory on the football field would have been followed by victory on the battlefield. But the opposite was the case. Vietnam shook to its foundations the sense of America that reigned when the 1964 Army–Navy game was played and that the game itself helped to define. Six of the seven players whose lives are the subject of Every Army Man Is with You left the service rather than make a career in the military.

West Point football was also changed by the Vietnam War. As the war grew in unpopularity and pro-football teams offered college stars increasingly lucrative contracts, more and more high school athletes decided against going to West Point with its compulsory military service requirement. In 1973, the year America withdrew all its combat troops from Vietnam and switched to an all-volunteer Army, West Point lost all ten of its football games and was beaten by Navy 51–0, the most lopsided defeat in the history of their rivalry. Army no longer had the ability to recruit the types of players who would allow it to play a schedule filled with nationally ranked teams.

The players’ post-Vietnam lives were no less a struggle to balance past and present. The players had not opposed the war before they were sent to Vietnam, and they would not join the antiwar movement after they came home. They believed antiwar protests by returning vets such as themselves harmed the morale of troops still in combat. The players did not, though, minimize the toll that General William Westmoreland’s Vietnam War attrition strategy, with its emphasis on body counts, took on everyone who fought in Vietnam. Nor did the players hide the bitterness they later felt on learning from the Pentagon Papers that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had come to doubt the war in Vietnam could be won, even as they sent more troops into battle.

It did not surprise the players that so many of them and so many of their classmates decided against making a career of the Army, opting instead to return to civilian life once their period of required military service ended. The players had experienced nothing in Vietnam different from other vets, but they did come back from the war with a level of disappointment that was special to them. As Army tackle Bill Zadel put it, “We were idealistic.” The players’ West Point experience both on the football field and in the classroom had primed them to believe the Vietnam War would result in the kind of victory that the generals they admired believed in. They took seriously General Douglas MacArthur’s dictum that “in war there is no substitute for victory.” But they found themselves forced to realize—long before America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became the norm—that such unambiguous military victories belonged in the past.

Although the players had grown up as the loyal sons of World War II’s greatest generation, they were not, it was clear to them, going to be able to transmit World War II’s victory culture intact to their own generation, nor was anyone else their age going to accomplish that feat. What they should do instead was the legacy question that these players faced. It was not easy being the first generation of West Pointers to fight a war widely viewed by Americans as a failure. Nothing in their West Point educations and nothing in the hypercompetitive West Point football culture had prepared the players for such a turn of events or for having antiwar dissent, traditionally directed against the government, directed against troops like them.

In 1975, the year North Vietnam took control of Vietnam and America evacuated its embassy in Saigon, the future National Book Award winner James Fallows published a personal account of his Vietnam experience in a Washington Monthly essay, “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” Fallows was the players’ opposite with respect to Vietnam. In his essay, he recounted how, in the fall of 1969, he, along with many of his Harvard classmates, gamed the draft system to avoid both the Army and service in Vietnam. They took what Fallows ironically labeled “the thinking-man’s routes to escape.” It was not an episode in his life that Fallows was proud of. Much of his essay is an apology for personally risking so little during the Vietnam era. What made the essay especially telling in 1975 was that the draft avoidance Fallows described was widespread. Of the 27 million men who became draft eligible between 1965 and 1973, only eleven million ever served in the military, and of these only 1.6 million went to Vietnam. Pro athletes were particularly adept at avoiding the war at this time. The Pro Football Hall of Fame lists just twenty-eight National Football League players, three of them Hall of Famers, who served in the military during the Vietnam War.

The figures reflect why Army’s football players so often felt divided from their own generation. Their thinking on Vietnam never came down to a single viewpoint, despite their closeness with one another and their recognition that the war had not gone as planned. They returned home with multiple perspectives on the politics of the Vietnam War, its conduct, its justification, but behind these multiple perspectives there remained the players’ awareness that they had reached their conclusions on Vietnam through direct experience. When America went to war, they had paid their dues, not asked others to pay their dues for them.

In the players’ minds, there was honor in such an act. It meant, they believed, that no apologies from them were in order when it came to explaining their time in Vietnam or the decisions so many of them finally made to lead private lives rather than continue in the military (a choice the players also respected). In post-Vietnam America, rejecting a career in the Army did not from the perspective of Army’s 1964 football team involve settling for a diminished life or retreating into a shell. It meant coming to terms with what was feasible, putting aside the expansive habits of mind and unearned confidence behind so much of the overreaching in Vietnam. As they began their postwar lives, the players knew they could never have the faith they once did in their government and its leaders, but they also did not have a sense of restarting their lives from zero. When it came to shared undertakings, they were very clear about what they had achieved together in the game by which they measured themselves.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author, most recently, of Every Army Man Is With You.