Mass Desertions Over Radiation Could End the War in Ukraine
November 29, 2024
U.S. Medevac helicopter at An Khe, South Vietnam, 1970.
Photo: Mike Hastie, Medic, Vietnam
NATO leaders have been dithering about Russia’s recent retaliation against Ukraine’s lofting one of Lockheed’s long-range missiles deep into its interior. Their emergency huddle was about Putin’s new multi-missile (“Oreshnik “) which traveled 10 times the speed of sound (range: 310-3,400 miles) to hit a former ICBM factory . So far, either side seems to have considered the one factor that could end their planet-destroying, nuclear game of chicken.
It’s the real possibility of monumental mutiny and desertions by those boots-on-the-ground that both sides count on to do the heavy lifting in WWIII.
Most soldiers may be willing to risk death by bullets and bombs, but not radiation exposure. Despite recent official assurances by U.S. war planners that nuclear weapons would be used only on battlefields, radiation drifts for thousands of miles. It ignores borders and body protections—as proved by Hiroshima in 1945 and the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.
Russian president Putin claimed Oreshnik’s speed makes NATO’s current defense systems powerless and said its production was imminent. But while the West’s missile designers set up a crash program to counter this latest escalation, these warhawks and their counterparts evidently still ignore the ever-expanding deserter numbers or silent mutinies abuilding in Ukraine and Russia. However, troops usually know military officials traditionally underestimate or conceal death rates lest it demoralize both them and the public to begin questioning the worth of continuing a war.
Current desertion rates in Russia by August were 18,000 and increasing daily, Newsweek reported. Russia’s death rate by September was said to be 71,000 by its independent media outlet Mediazona. The Economist in July put total casualties—dead/wounded/ captured—at between 462,000 and 728,000.
Small wonder then why Putin “borrowed” nearly 12,000 combat troops from North Korea in October for front-line duty. Equally, NATO members have promised troops as well. Many now on site as “advisors” for their equipment—tanks and munitions to aircraft—and infantry training.
Ukrainian desertions have now become legendary, along with increasing populations of neighboring Romania, Poland, and Germany. The Kyiv Post just reported some 60,000 alone are facing criminal charges of desertion since the war’s start in 2022. Thousands of others have not been caught nor wooed or forced back to the ranks. The Eurasian Review also noted Ukrainians on the 629-mile frontline were poorly armed and often out of ammunition. It commented:
“Ukraine’s military is now ‘Outgunned and Outnumbered’, struggling with low morale and high rate of desertions….This prolonged war nearing three years have near
decimated many Ukrainian infantry battalions, making the situation grim on the battle limes. Reinforcements are few and difficult to be created, leaving soldiers exhausted, demoralized and desert [ing].”
Not to mention the 44,000 draft-age Ukainian males who by August had slipped through border-police lines of other nations. The Wall Street Journal says 15,000 fled to mountainous Romania in particular.
Writers covering wars or uprisings in antiquity tended to focus more on mutinies than desertions. Deserters have always been punished by shunning and shaming pejoratives (“coward,” “draft-dodger,” “chicken,” “runaway,” “traitor”). Today’s dishonorable discharges punish further by denying all veteran/civilian government benefits, and civil rights.
However, many thousands who’ve deserted seem to believe their action was well worth it. Escaping unwinnable and unjust wars or enduring significant privations even if a cause is crucial still cannot overcome most men’s instinctual drive to survive. Far better to skedaddle and “live to fight another day” despite a lifetime of guilt. Author Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage, set in the Civil War, plays on this subtle message to oppose war fears and pacifism in teenaged boys. Not for nothing has it been required reading in many public high schools for years.
Mutiny and desertions are ancient. Never say soldiers lack courage in confronting officialdom over orders or a war’s justification. They risk certain death. But if a mutiny is successful, a “cause” has been won. So there’s much to be said for it.
Indeed, our country was founded by a nationwide mutiny against Britain’s King George III. The eight-year (1775-83) war’s costs in blood (25,000 to 70,000 dead), disease and treasure ($1.141 billion in 2024 dollars ) from both the wealthy rebels who signed the Declaration of Independence—and most anti-British colonists. The situation is almost the same when other countries’ nationalists attempt to wrest national independance from foreign occupiers and exploiters.
In the 8th century b.c., for instance, the prophet Isaiah warned would-be mutineers: “If you are willing and obedient, You shall eat the good of the land; But if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword.” In his day—and ours—the authorities
feared uprisings by the unruly. So military punishments for mutiny in Rome’s army were swift and gruesome public examples: crucifixion, beheadings, hanging, whippings, stonings, and decimation (executing every tenth soldier).
Too, nothing can stamp out a revolt by the ranks once it takes root and becomes widespread, as we know from Rome’s Capua mutiny in 342 b.c. by 20,000 troops, angry over pay. Rebel numbers and military necessity earned the mutineers debt cancellations and immunity along with several political benefits.
By contrast, the ancient military code for disobeying a direct order or insubordination exists to this day: death.
When Rome’s great general Scipio Africanus was trying to conquer Spain in 206 b.c., some 8,000 troops formed their own army, principally again over a pay issue. Knowing Rome could not resolve it, he invited their leaders to discuss the matter at Sucro. After they arrived, he berated their disloyalty in midst of war and had his legions strip and behead them.
That lesson governed the ranks for many centuries—until the American and French revolutions. Then, whole populations outnumbered the British and French armies, respectively, and overthrew royal rule. Few Americans may know that by late 1780 George Washington’s bedraggled army of 26,000 suffered “desertions” by 11,000 tired of fights over pay, enlistment contracts, no clothing, and little food.
After three years of war, the fiery cause of independence could not keep them from going home or, worse, joining the British army for far better living and pay conditions. In early January 1781, Pennsylvania regiments led other states’ mutinous legions in a march to army headquarters in Princeton for redress about broken contracts, back pay, clothing—and immunity from court-martials.
They won by dint of numbers, leadership, organization, persistence, and the advantage of General George Washington’s desperate manpower needs and his fears of wholesale defections. That successful lesson also was learned in France through it took a blood-drenched revolution of 1793 to found a republic after centuries of kings.
Another great mutiny was equally bloody, but because of political differences among the rebels, it led to a civil war over leadership.
At WWI’s start in 1914, the long-brewing Russian revolution was quietly growing with both the war-weary, disheartened public and the army. Mutinous soldiers were committing large-scale internal sabotage: massive desertions, fraternization with
Germans and Austrians, theft of military and civilian supplies, drunkenness, and especially self-inflicted wounds. Some 350,000 were “finger-injured” out of the 2.6 million wounded.
Finally, in 1917 the revolution erupted March 8 with a great strike in Petrograd. Ordered to suppress strikers, the army refused and, instead, quickly joined them. That was the last straw for those on the Russian battle lines and trenches. They abruptly quit the war en masse and left for home, leaving the revolutionaries to liquidate the Romanoff rulers and replace them with a dictatorship of the Communists.
The greatest army mutiny in U.S history to date involved the 1955-75 Vietnam war. The troops and the American public were told repeatedly that the cause was to prevent a “domino effect” of Chinese Communism’s spread to Asia’s vast populations. “Better fight them there than here” was the government’s war cry to prop up Vietnam’s rulers and business leaders. But once the advance troops arrived, even buck privates could see an impoverished population ruled by a corrupt government in league with foreigners to export its rich natural resources .
Asians had been exploited for years by European colonialists. Vietnam’s rubber trees for France’s Michelin tires, for example, as well as rice, sugar cane, coal, iron ore, and tin. Mutiny by the Vietnamese against French control succeeded in May 1954, partitioning the country into north (Communist) and south (national) states. To “protect” the South’s resources from the North’s “reunion” plans, the U.S. intervened. It used over 543,000 troops by 1968 in the subsequent war that was to cost the U.S. 58,220 lives and a major defeat—all to retain business as usual in world markets.
Aside from opposing intervention in Asia after the Korean war—and with a draft—the basic cause of the army mutiny was the unfairness that always accompanies conscription even for a one-year “tour.” Exemptions went to students (especially divinity and medical), vital professions, conscientious-objectors, family men, the National Guard, and the physically and mentally unfit.
Add the traditional class separations of the privileged becoming officers; the poor, the uneducated, and minorities becoming infantry “cannon-fodder.” And race. Some 300,000 Blacks served (31% of ground troops), so that by 1965, thousands were militant and vocal against discrimination and their menial duties.
The huge anti-war movement in the States was more than matched by mutinous deeds of combat troops, marines, sailors, and airmen in Vietnam and U.S. bases around the world. Galvanized by those demonstrations and teach-ins at home, GIs organized informally to do the same, but at barrack conspiracies, discussions at nearby activist coffeehouses about resistance, and by hundreds of defiant underground newspapers (Fort Polk Puke, Semper Fi, A’bout Face, RITA Notes, The Bond, P.E.A.C.E., Duck Power, Aerospaced, etc.).
Overt actions ranged from thousands of combat refusals and do-nothing night patrols (“search and avoid”), incapacitation from narcotics and alcohol, and stockade riots to fraternizing with the enemy, disabling a ship by fire and dropping nuts, bolts, and chains into another’s main gear shaft. But above all—and viewed as the most effective—was “fragging” hated officers with fragmentation grenades. Secret warnings led to undermining their confidence and to field incompetence. Historically, wars have always had soldiers murdering officers perceived as endangering their comrades by incompetence or recklessness, as ISR associate editor Joel Grier points out.
Statistics on fragging incidents were not kept before 1969 and apparently it’s still difficult to pry any Pentagon forensics data about whether a shot in the back was from “friendly fire” or the Viet-Cong. And for good reason: low morale leads to depression and suicide or to mutiny and desertions. Hence, army fragging casualty numbers (incidents: 1,017; deaths: 86; wounded: 714) are still under dispute, though obviously undercounted by the Pentagon. After all, the unofficial rate was said to be at least one fragging per week.
The overall result of fragging was lax discipline by frightened officers and enraged and exhausted troops refusing to die—or suffer lifetime disabilities— for a cause few soldiers understood or believed in. Nor did most Americans at home. The choice troops made to mutiny de-escalated combat, and finally stopped the Vietnam War.
David Cortright, is a Vietnam veteran who authored perhaps the seminal book on the army’s resistance to that war (Soldiers in Revolt, 2005, Haymarket Books). He makes the timeless point to soldiers, civilians, Congressional warhawks, military officials—and particularly presidents, prime ministers and generals that:
“[The] central lesson of the GI movement…is that people need not be helpless before the power of illegitimate authority, that by getting together and acting upon their convictions people can change society and, in effect, make their own history” (243).
So when presidents Putin and Biden and NATO leaders assume those “boots-on-the-ground” will mindlessly obey orders to escalate the Russo-Ukrainian war from super-sonic missiles to nuclear warheads, they better think about the U.S. mutiny in Vietnam. It has furnished lessons and tools for all soldiers for all time so instead of “Do or die,” perhaps an overwhelming number will demand to know “Why?”
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