My review of "Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam"

[Geoff Cain]

Comments? http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2098599,00.html

In his 1955 classic The Quiet American, Graham Greene adroitly foresaw
the tragic and absurd quality that came to characterize U.S.
intervention in Vietnam. In the novel, a naive, priggish American spy,
Alden Pyle, backs a rogue Vietnamese army's bid to free the country
from both communism and French colonialism. After its operatives
detonate a car bomb in Saigon, Pyle is assassinated for his role in
the plot. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the
trouble he caused," the narrator, a British journalist, says of him.

Less than 10 years later, that summing up was made flesh in the person
of William Childs Westmoreland — the Vietnam War warrior whose
disastrous leadership of the first four years of U.S. combat, from
1964 to '68, forms the heart of Lewis Sorley's Westmoreland: The
General Who Lost Vietnam. It's a sweeping, 416-page study, based on
dozens of interviews and years of archival research, and tells how a
promising young infantry commander, promoted to a role beyond his
competence, led U.S. forces into a ruinous imbroglio.

Sorley is a pre-eminent historian of the Vietnam War and has no truck
with the notion that Westmoreland was merely one player among a toxic
mix of ill-informed Washington policymakers. Instead he pillories the
hapless general for what are now seen as horrendous gaffes of
counterinsurgency: alienating the press, embellishing body counts and
relying on search-and-destroy missions that produced dramatic kill
rates without offering long-term strategic benefit. This is one of
several works to argue that the general's costly war of attrition,
along with the failure to build up South Vietnam's military strength,
got the U.S. off to a terrible start in the conflict. Sorley's 1999
Pulitzer-nominated A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final
Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam claimed as much, with such
rigor that it influenced debates within the Pentagon over the Iraq
troop surge of 2007.

Westmoreland isn't in the same league. Sorley sometimes gives erratic
soapboxes to the general's detractors without logical flow or
analysis. And being committed to the idea that defeat was not
predestined, he fails to adequately address the backstory.
Westmoreland was apparently vainglorious — "He loved being on TV,"
said a Washington Post correspondent in Saigon, "and it tainted him
not only in the eyes of the press but in the eyes of a lot of military
men." But it is also true that in betraying its World War II ally, the
widely respected Ho Chi Minh, and in setting up a corrupt and
incompetent government in South Vietnam, the U.S. planted the seeds of
calamity well before a shot was fired.

With his campaign a failure, Westmoreland was sent back to Washington
in 1968 and allowed to see out his career in the face-saving position
of Army chief of staff, retiring in 1972. He spent the rest of his
life trying, and failing, to restore his military reputation, even
suing CBS for libel over a 1982 documentary alleging he had knowingly
underestimated enemy numbers (the case was settled out of court).

By the time of his death in 2005, his mistakes were being studied by a
new generation of military leaders. In 2006, General David Petraeus
published his Counterinsurgency Field Manual, drawing on the failures
of Vietnam and setting out a template for his own conduct of the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, where, in contrast to Westmoreland, he
attempted to deploy political nous alongside brute force. Yet as those
conflicts have shown, counterinsurgency remains a devilishly difficult
pursuit. In the face of hangdog troop withdrawals, daily violence
continues to plague both countries. Years after the start of U.S.
intervention, both remain chaotic and deeply troubled. Hopefully, it's
for the very best of motives.

[William Thatcher Dowell]

Certainly Westmoreland was a dunce.  I remember sitting next to him in a bus in Saigon after some briefing or other. Westmoreland could barely string two coherent sentences together.  He still believed, years after the war was over, that the Tet Offensive had been a diversion to distract the US from the real North Vietnamese target at Khe Sanh. 

 At one point I was having lunch in a Saigon BOQ, and I happened to sit next to the projectionist for the Army's AFRTN station.  The guy I was talking to said that the latenight movie they had shown the night before had snapped halfway through. They immediately got a call from Westmoreland in person, demanding that the film restart exactly where it had left off. I was still in the Army at the time, and I had been stationed near to Loc Ninh at a Special Forces B-team in An Loc. I knew that people in the field were barely holding on, and the idea that the commanding general was worried about watching a grade-B movie brought home the ridiculous futility of the situation.  

Before leaving for Vietnam, I had done an intensive 6-month course for in French for military attachés at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, just outside Washington DC. One of my classmates was a much older colonel who had only recently been in charge of White House communications.  He was in the process of being dispatched as an attaché to some West African country. We had lunch every day. "We know that Westmoreland is incompetent," he said.  "The decision has already been made to have General Abrams (who was then Chief of Staff for the Army) replace him.  They are just looking for the right moment."  After that conversation, I went to Vietnam, ended up on the Cambodian border, saw a great deal of silliness on the part of the US command in Saigon, and finally went through the Tet offensive. An Loc was the only province capital not overrun. The reason was that it had no defenses at all, so the VC saved it for later when they thought they might need an easy victory. The tragedy was that the Army, not wanting to admit that Westmoreland had been one of the disasters that allowed the Tet offensvie to take place, decided to keep Westmoreland several months longer.  I was for dumping him in the river.  But ironically, I later went back to Saigon in 1995, this time as Hong Kong bureauchief for TIME, and I interviewed the North Vietnamese generals who had engineered the final assault on Saigion.  I asked them what they had thought of Westmoreland.  "We thought that he was a fine man," one of the generals said. "He was an honorable man."  When I got back to Hong Kong, I mentioned the exchange to a friend. "Of course," he said. "Westmoreland won the war for them. Why wouldn't they like him?"  I chalked the exchange up to a difference of opinion.  I was still mad at Westmoreland for being a handsome, impressive-looking ass. But even that anger is a waste of time.

Thomas Mann said about his protagonist in The Magic Mountain, "We  could have blamed him had he not been so resolutely mediocre."  Westmoreland was that kind of mediocrity. You could not really hate him or blame him for what happened. He was simply too obtuse to understand what was going on around him.  

The truth is that the real villain in the piece was greed.  You did not have to be in Vietnam in the military very long to realize that everyone knew from the start that the war was lost. But while it lasted, there was personal profit to be made.  If you were an officer, you needed your ticket punched with a combat ribbon. You just hunkered down and hoped you made it through the thing alive. There were more than 500,000 men in Vietnam, and casualties at their worst were around 500 killed a week, one in a thousand. If you played your cards right, the odds were that you could get in and out in one piece and move on with your career in someplace more hospitable.  If you were a contractor, or had any contract with the US government, the chances were you might get rich, or at least a lot richer than you were likely to get if there hadn't been a war on. 

Vietnam was a precursor to Iraq and Afghanistans, when it came to perfecting wholesale theft of American tax money through  Washington cronyism.  The Shirley Highway bandits were deft and fast. There were no limits. The Vietnamese used to ask me if the US was out to steal Vietnam's rice crop. It was the only reason they could imagine for the US engaging in such a misbegotten enterprise. I used to answer, "No. It is really reversed colonialism. The ones being colonized are the American tax payers. The Vietnamese are simply innocent bystanders, collateral damage."  The bottom line, however, is that the war was not senseless, it was simply a bloody accident of history propelled on by evil, self-centered  people for personal gain, and perpetuated far too long by an American public that was misinformed and badly led. The domino theory had always been a myth and a lie.  America's national security was never seriously involved, except for the damage that we did to ourselves.  No one cared about Vietnam once the last Americans pulled out. Now, even the Vietnamese want the Americans back. 

Many men died heroically in Vietnam, but their deaths did nothing to help America. All their dying did was to help perpetuate a tragedy that was too painful for any of us to admit the truth, that it had all been for nothing.  

I finished my tour in the Army in February 1969. I spent a few months in New York, which seemed oblivious to what was being done in the name of the United States.  I decided that the truth did matter for me, so I contacted an old friend at UPI who told me that his editors were convinced that the story was over and no one cared anymore. "Do you think that?" he asked.  I said No, and that in any case I didn't care what anyone else thought about it. "Fine," he said. He wrote a letter to get me press credentials in Saigon.  I borrowed $3,000 and went back to Vietnam as a freelance to start whatever career I might have in a journalism. I realized that the war, bloody awful as it was, had also given me a start. It had punched my career ticket, for good or bad. 

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William Dowell

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[don kirk]

One relatively minor point here: The VC/NVA fought hard for An Loc in the 1970 offensive, more than two years after Tet 1968. The town was totally shot up. What stopped them was non-stop bombing. They had the town surrounded and held route 13 almost as far south as Lai Khe, but they couldn't hold on forever against air strikes in relatively open territory. They did, of course, raise the flag over Loc Ninh taken in the 1970 offensive and never lost. Don --- On Sat, 11/5/11, William Thatcher Dowell <wtdo...@gmail.com> wrote:

[WLend...@aol.com]

I never had any admiration for Westmoreland, except for one small incident.  I saw him at a distance several times, but never talked to him except for one encounter a day or two after the Tet offensive.  I was in Pleiku with CORDS and Saigon sent a message that a wounded North Vietnamese soldier was in the large US Army field hospital there and was so grateful for the good treatment he was getting that he was ready to talk for the record.  I hustled to the hospital with my recorder, and hoped that my serviceable Vietnamese would help him to say something useful.  

 

Of course it was nonsense -- the guy was hurting bad and in no condition to talk, but he was being treated well and lying in the ward with all the US wounded, bloody bandages and quiet moans all over the place.  Well, along comes Westmoreland with an aide or two, visiting the wounded in the aftermath of the fighting.  I followed along closely and could hear the conversations.  What impressed me was his quiet respect for the GIs -- no condescension, no glory words, no mugging for publicity, just short conversations with each GI able to talk, expressing appreciation for their service and sympathy for their wounds, some of which were ghastly. 

 

OK, maybe no big deal, but I had respect for Westmoreland and they way he handled that situation that day.   

 

Bill Lenderking 

[tony clifton]

Bill, thanks for that heartfelt reminiscence. best.  Tony

[daniel rodill]

Premise: General Westmoreland, according to anyone who knew and anyone who saw, was an incompetent, obviously in over his handsome head in a large, tragic enterprise.

Question:  Who, then,  was responsible for putting such a commander in such a position... and keeping him there for so long? Lyndon Baines Johnson, the hard politicking "Great Society" Commander-in-Chief at the time, wasn't known as a Clausewitz of the Potomac, true, but he certainly would have had the best military minds available to advise and help him out. Were the best good enough? Or was he?

I mean, is there any accountability at all today, from any political faction?

dcr
Vietnam/Kampuchea 1969-June 30, 1975

[Drew Pearson]

I'm a little late coming to this discussion, apologies. Sorley has no
clue about Vietnam and it's pointless to imagine that Westmoreland
could have done anything to change the outcome of the war. It wasn't
within his capacity or any American general's capacity to win it.
Ever. All out war, invasion of the north, nukes, even bombing the
dikes along the Red River were off the table for good reason. Those
American ground troops were there just to prevent defeat and profound
embarrassment in Washington, DC... and theoretically give our Saigon
friends a chance to do a little nation building. But in their
arrogance, US commanders thought they could just forget about all the
S Vietnamese issues and do their thing. And it would be all over in
six months. The "Sir" Robert Thompson idea was very popular at the
time because of his Malaya experience, which had nothing to do with
Vietnam. But his notion about that ten to one ratio was very
appealing to the US brass. Kill ten more of them than us and we're
golden. But a year later it hadn't worked and two years later it
still hadn't worked. Blame Westy for not understanding his enemy?
But generals are like journalists, they go to whatever war's next and
have no idea where they are. Just follow the action, right? What did
he know about Vietnam? He probably hadn't even read anything that
Fall wrote because the FBI was so busy telling the Defense Dept and
State that he was a French spy. See Dorothy Fall's excellent recent
book about Bernard and the dull Dulles Brothers. At least David H.
and the early reporters got it right at Ap Bac.

Sorley says Westmoreland should have devoted more resources to South
Vietnamese forces and pacification. Nonsense. Vietnamese generals
for the most part never had the capacity to lead troops in combat
against either VC main force much less N Vietnamese regulars. They
were far too busy trying to secure extended family survival. There was
never any sense of national dedication to country. There was no
country. No willingness to sacrifice for the common good. Drafting
and training soldiers is meaningless unless they have leaders.
Pacification? Too bad Nguyen Be's dead; he despised S VN generals.
(Nguyen Be ran the CIA funded and organized Vung Tau RD training
school.)

The limiting factor in S Vietnam was the capacity of Saigon Vietnamese
to create a viable country. Even after the incredible VC casualites
during Tet, they still couldn't do it. There are all sorts of
historical and sociological reasons for the failure and it's
astonishing that Sorley is so ignorant about them.