A Vietnam-era tale

Novelist Lucian K. Truscott IV (USMA '69) tells an interesting Vietnam-era anecdote in this piece from Salon. Excerpt:

The easiest way to get me out of the Army was to charge me with insubordination and court martial me. But the officer to whom I had been insubordinate was Major General Rogers, and he didn’t want to testify at a court martial in which he could be questioned about the details of the insubordination I was charged with. They knew I would take the opportunity of the court martial to put the Army’s drug policy — and the way Rogers was implementing it — on trial. So the word was passed down to the brigade commander to get me on something under the Army’s catch-all charge. “Conduct unbecoming” could be anything they said it was. 

It just so happened there was a Specialist Fourth Class (Spec-4) who had recently been caught with marijuana, so the brigade commander told my battalion commander to offer him a deal. They would drop the charges against him if he reported that I had flashed a peace sign at him instead of saluting when we passed in the battalion area. The Spec-4 got word to me through one of the cooks in the mess hall that I was being set up. Sure enough, I was called into the battalion commander’s office and charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. The charge was that I had formed a “V” with my forefingers and flashed the peace sign when the Spec-4 saluted me. And what do you know, but they had pressured two of the other lieutenants in my company to say that they had witnessed this grave offense against the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Read the rest for the dénouement and this gifted writer's thoughts on whether Article 133, UCMJ (conduct unbecoming) should apply to the Commander in Chief.