Measles for democracy

Alternative title: fragging in the USA

Back in the Vietnam war, at the height of the conflict and the draft, between 1969 and 1971, demoralized troops had a way of dealing with disliked and distrusted officers called “fragging.” This was so named after the fragmentation grenades that were used to murder those officers, either by booby-trap, or outright killing, making it look like an accident or enemy action. The number of fragging incidents during Vietnam is believed to be shockingly high, with the most reliable estimates over 700. In prior wars, murder of officers by enlisted men was relatively rare: about 1:12,700 service members. In Vietnam, the ratio rose as high as 1:572 by 1971.

The main contributors to this phenomenon were loss of unit cohesion, racial tension, the draft, and rampant drug use. This pitted many officers against their men, especially when an inexperienced officer commanded troops nearing the end of their combat tours. Nobody wanted to be killed by incompetence, but resorting to murder, according to one journalist’s research, yielded some surprising results.

Measles Vaccination Campaign at Ole Miss. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

Journalist Eugene Linden, in “The Demoralization of an Army: Fragging and Other Withdrawal Symptoms,” had his arguments supported by data.

• 80 percent of the murders happened at base camps, not in the field;

• 90 percent of assaults took place within three days after an argument;

• offenders typically felt they had been unfairly treated;

• 88 percent of attackers were drunk or high;

• on average they'd been in Vietnam for six months;

• 26 of 28 were volunteers, not draftees;

• only five were high school grads; and

• many were loners or had psychological problems.

Actually, most of these results aren’t so surprising in the light of recent events. Give an uneducated young man an assault rifle and a bag of explosives, put them under authority whom they do not trust, and place them in a high-stress situation with ready access to drugs, and it makes sense that murders will happen. What is surprising is that most of the fragging was done by volunteers, not draftees. But again, is that so shocking? These men signed up to avoid the draft, or perhaps because they had some patriotic sense of duty, or maybe just to get some money—a job. When they got to Vietnam, their experience was so different from what they expected that they really believed their officers were trying to get them killed.

Look at some of the senseless murders we’ve seen lately. Luigi Mangione was not uneducated, but he meticulously planned the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthCare, because he believed that big insurance companies were trying to get people killed. He didn’t trust the system or the motives, and believed a message needed to be sent. The latest attacks on ICE facilities come as political violence is rising.

The experience of many young Americans is so different from what they have been led to believe is true. The America people the age of our national political leaders grew up with is not the America that our young adults and thirty-somethings experience today. The older Americans remember Vietnam, and the distrust of our government, because our government repeatedly lied to the people. The vowed to fix that, and told their own children things would be better. But things are not better, and in fact, they are demonstrably worse due to the rise of social media, the explosion of popular podcasts favoring all kinds of conspiracies and falsehoods, and political propaganda executed at scale.

All that brings me to COVID-19, and ultimately, to measles.

When COVID-19 hit, I remember my reaction at first seeing the R0 (“R-naught”) number in early 2020. It was 2, meaning for every infected individual, two more would be infected. I thought “that’s unsustainable for containment, and this will become a pandemic very quickly.” I told my coworkers in our first management meeting that we’d better button up everything, and quick. What should have happened is the government should have told everyone the truth about masks, about social distancing, about countermeasures.

That did not happen. We were gamed, played, and sacrificed to political needs. We were told we didn’t need N95 masks, not because we didn’t need them—we did!—but because there weren’t enough masks to go around. So instead of being honest, we were told to use gaiters, or simple hospital masks that do not filter virus particulates, just to give us something to do. We were told to social distance, as long as it was not a political gathering. We were told to stay out of the public, while politicians still had their parties.

Many health workers and leaders did the right thing. But many, like the terrible Andrew Cuomo, did things for the sake of optics, while the elderly perished. President Donald Trump had a superspreader event in the Rose Garden of the White House, when he knew he himself was infected. The source of the virus was covered up and those who questioned the “official” line were hit hard for their intransigence.

So, Americans did what the troops in Vietnam did to their incompetent and disliked officers. We fragged the health system, and with it the political system. We didn’t overthrow our government or anything like that. We simply used democracy to plant a grenade in it, and make it look like a horrible accident or enemy action.

We elevated people who cannot be trusted to positions of immense trust. We now have a government that has actively promoted known and debunked conspiracy theories and falsehoods, only retracting them when forced to tell the truth (like the Epstein files). Our entire health structure is led by people who are fragging the basics of our immunization practices.

And you know the term “fool around the find out” (or the more crass version of it), FAFO? Measles is the poster child for FAFO. It doesn’t take much of a push to get it to push back, hard. Since 2000, the United States government has declared measles to be “eliminated” in our country. But now, measles is roaring back.

In 2019, the Orthodox Jewish communities in New York had a low vaccination rate, and experienced an outbreak. That accounted for most of the 1,274 cases in 2019. In 2025, the west Texas outbreak has already exceeded 2019. In 2019, New York City officials mandated 60,000 doses of the measles vaccine in affected areas. We don’t know how Texas will respond, given that federal funding for vaccination programs has been slashed, and Texas is already dealing with floods and other emergencies.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy gave a half-hearted endorsement of the measles vaccine, while undermining it at the same time. He said vaccination is a personal choice, and encouraged other treatments that have not been proven to work, and in many cases as known to do nothing at all. When vaccination rates against measles fall below 95 percent, the disease starts to spread due to the lack of herd immunity. Vaccines are not 100 percent effective, therefore some will always be unprotected if they come in contact with an infected person. The answer has been to limited the number of infected people. This is simple arithmetic, like COVID-19’s initial R0 of 2.0.

When vaccination rates fall to 93 percent, then we get outbreaks. It’s as predictable as giving sugar to diabetics leads to bad health. It’s as predictable as what happens when you give assault rifles and bags of explosives to young disillusioned kids in the jungle of Vietnam, who have not enjoyed a well-rounded education, and who are angry at what they believe to be a lying class of officers trying to get them killed.

In Vietnam, there were very few court martials for fragging incidents. It did, however, degrade the fighting ability and cohesion of our military. It took many years to rebuilt that culture to a professional force. Now, we’ve done the same thing to our healthcare system. We’ve fragged it, and destroyed the cohesion and degraded our ability to fight the enemy.

Except in Vietnam, all we had to do was go home. We went home, licked our wounds, and accepted a bad outcome for Vietnam. It’s amazing—I can’t help going down the rabbit hole—that President Trump just touted a trade deal with Vietnam to help us with our China trade problem. For measles, there is no “go home.” There’s no retreat and wound-licking. There’s only sick children, some of whom will die.

For our national fragging, there’s no retreat either. We can’t just leave here and abandon our governance to the disaffected, the nincompoops, the podcasters, conspiracy-flingers, Jew-haters, Holocaust-deniers, Hitler-defenders, playtriots, tricorn-hat-wearing preppers, leftist violent rebels, anarchists, monarchists, and no-border globalists. All these people have been given way too much airtime, head space, and volume.

The proof of this is 1,277 cases of measles, only halfway through the year. This is not the way to win, and it’s not a battle we can afford to lose. Wake up, people.

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