An Army chief of staff labels Special Forces soldiers ‘fugitives from responsibility,’ too odd for the regulars

I had no idea that an Army chief of staff would feel so anti-Special Forces, and would say so. When I was up at Carlisle I read the oral history that Gen. Harold K. Johnson, who preceded William Westmoreland as Army chief, gave in 1973, and this jumped out at me:

The Special Forces…were what I would describe as consisting primarily of fugitives from responsibility. These were people that somehow or other tended to be nonconformists, couldn’t get along in a straight military system, and found a haven where their actions were not scrutinized too carefully, and where they came under only sporadic or intermittent observation from the regular chain of command.

Of course, Johnson was speaking a few years after the biggest scandal in Special Forces history, when Col. Robert B. Rheault, the commander of SF in Vietnam, was charged by the Army with murder, only to get the charges dropped because the CIA said it would not allow its people to testify against him. (Rheault supposedly was one of the inspirations for the Marlon Brando character in ‘Apocalypse Now.’)

But Johnson also was speaking a few years after My Lai, and you don’t see him condemn all infantrymen because of that.