In order to prevent soldiers’ mental breakdowns from combat stress, the Department of Defense employed sedatives and neuroleptics. Psychoactive substances were issued not only to boost the fighters, but also to reduce the harmful impact of combat on their psyche. Some remembered that when the effect of speed faded away, they were so irritated that they felt like shooting “children in the streets.” In short, the administration of stimulants by the military contributed to the spread of drug habits that sometimes had tragic consequences-because amphetamine, as many veterans claimed, increased aggression as well as alertness. Research has found that 3.2 percent of soldiers arriving in Vietnam were heavy amphetamine users however, after one year of deployment, this rate rose to 5.2 percent. Amphetamine, as many veterans claimed, increased aggression as well as alertness. Before leaving for a long and demanding expedition, members of special units were also administered steroid injections. You were wired into it all and at times you felt really invulnerable.” Soldiers in units infiltrating Laos for a four-day mission received a medical kit that contained, among other items, 12 tablets of Darvon (a mild painkiller), 24 tablets of codeine (an opioid analgesic), and six pills of Dexedrine. He recalled a description he’d heard from a navy commando, who said that the drugs “gave you a sense of bravado as well as keeping you awake. government,” said Elton Manzione, a member of a long-range reconnaissance platoon (or Lurp). “We had the best amphetamines available and they were supplied by the U.S. The annual consumption of Dexedrine per person was 21.1 pills in the navy, 17.5 in the air force, and 13.8 in the army. In 1971, a report by the House Select Committee on Crime revealed that from 1966 to 1969, the armed forces had used 225 million tablets of stimulants, mostly Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine), an amphetamine derivative that is nearly twice as strong as the Benzedrine used in the Second World War.

The standard army instruction (20 milligrams of dextroamphetamine for 48 hours of combat readiness) was rarely followed doses of amphetamine were issued, as one veteran put it, “like candies,” with no attention given to recommended dose or frequency of administration. “Pep pills” were usually distributed to men leaving for long-range reconnaissance missions and ambushes. Since World War II, little research had determined whether amphetamine had a positive impact on soldiers’ performance, yet the American military readily supplied its troops in Vietnam with speed. The British philosopher Nick Land aptly described the Vietnam War as “a decisive point of intersection between pharmacology and the technology of violence.”

The conflict was distinct in another way, too-over time, it came to be known as the first “pharmacological war,” so called because the level of consumption of psychoactive substances by military personnel was unprecedented in American history. The Vietcong were fighting in an unexpected, surprising, and deceptive way to negate Americans’ strengths and exploit their weaknesses, making the Vietnam War perhaps the best example of asymmetrical warfare of the 20th century. Instead, it was a formless conflict in which former strategic and tactical principles did not apply. Some historians call Vietnam the “last modern war,” others the “first postmodern war.” Either way, it was irregular: Vietnam was not a conventional war with the frontlines, rears, enemy mobilizing its forces for an attack, or a territory to be conquered and occupied.

Speed drug