The Cold War

by Robert Cowley

  Why have you become so involved in the process of healing and reconciliation? When did you start getting involved in this?

  I retired on the first of July, 1972. At that time, the war was an unpopular war, which rubbed off unfavorably on the warriors. I was very sensitive about this. I felt it was so terribly unfair. I felt that when I retired, I had an obligation to take the darts, and to try to explain this very complex war to the American people. I decided nobody knew more about the Vietnam War than I did, and I was going to make myself available to talk to anybody. You can't believe the abuse I got, but I didn't let it get to me.

  I'm sure some people said that what Westmoreland was fighting for was his own reputation as well.

  I don't think you can separate the two. I'm a veteran. I'm the number one veteran. I'm symbolic of the others.

  They came back from the war and were tagged as losers.

  But they never lost a battle.

  I am aware of that, but we are talking about what people perceive, and as the number one veteran, you were perceived as the number one loser.

  No question about that, no question about that. Many of them had hid the fact that they were Vietnam veterans, and they will admit that to you. The turning point in the public attitude was when the Vietnam veterans converged on Washington and had a “Welcome Home” parade for themselves; nobody else would do it. I led the parade, and they loved it.

  That parade took place in November 1982. You came down to Washington from the CBS trial in New York.

  I've been to many parades, and I've found it's great for morale if the old man can mingle with the troops while they are forming up. When you have a parade like that, the troops start forming about two hours ahead of time, so I went around to every state group, and any number of them said, “General, please march with us.” I said, “Naw, naw, I'm not going to march with you guys.” I like to kid troops, and have fun bantering back and forth.

  “Who are you going to march with?” some of the soldiers asked me.

  “I'm going to march with Alabama.”

  “General, why the hell are you going to march with Alabama?”

  I said, “Alabama starts with A, it is leading the parade, and I'm going to lead them!”

  It was an exhilarating thing for me. As I talk about it, I get tears in my eyes, and I admit it.

  What do you think about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington—the Wall?

  I've been there twice. I was there for the dedication. I found Fred's name and made a rubbing of it to bring to Kitsy. She has never been to the Wall.

  What went through your mind when you found his name?

  There was a big crowd around me, so I didn't physically weep.

  Were there tears inside?

  Well, certainly, certainly. That kid was the closest thing I ever had to a brother. Of course, when I approached his name, there were hundreds and thousands of names just like his. Many of them had been cadets under me at West Point. The names of some of my finest cadets are on that Wall.

  When you look at the Wall, it must be like looking at your family.

  Yes, in a sense, a family of Americans, young men that I relate to. With all those names, you get an impression and understanding of the price we paid during that war.

  To change the subject—what was the hardest decision you had to make in Vietnam? The one that caused you the most anguish or turmoil?

  The initial commitment of American troops in 1964.

  Did you have doubts about sending combat troops?

  Oh, boy, I tell you this was a very, very tough decision. Nobody wanted to do it. I didn't want to do it. I was hoping the American military adviser effort could work for the Vietnamese and make them fight their own battles.

  Why did you think committing our troops was a bad idea?

  I didn't think it was a bad idea. I thought it was essential after I evaluated it, but it was a very tough decision to come to—to commit American troops in a foreign land where a unique type of war was being fought. But I saw that it would be impossible for the Vietnamese to cut it. Does that slang expression mean something to you?

  Yes, it does.

  The decision to commit American troops was one that none of us wanted to take, but it was a question of whether or not we abandoned Vietnam, which was going down the drain. They had lost confidence, they were in the dumps, they were losing a battalion a week. My judgment was that if we had not committed American troops, it was just a matter of time till they disintegrated. I think the same thought process took place in Washington with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president.

  What did you think of LBJ? How would you characterize your relationship to him?

  LBJ always did what he said he would do. He didn't always do what I asked, but he always listened. I was very candid. But I put a premium on loyalty. I wouldn't undercut the chain of command. In no way did I try to undercut the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the secretary of defense. But I was forthcoming when LBJ asked me questions. I said we couldn't expect immediate results, that this was primarily a war of attrition. During his first year in office—l964—we went from 500 advisers to 15,000 military personnel. We assumed the responsibility of shoring up the South Vietnamese.

  Another key player in 1964 was Robert McNamara. What did you think of the secretary of defense?

  I don't dislike Bob McNamara. He was fair to me. He came over in March or April of 1964. I remember I talked to him in 1964, one-on-one, in the old embassy in the middle of Saigon. He was really quite surprised by the complexity of the situation he found in Vietnam and the ambiguity of the solutions. I knew it was a complex situation and would take a long time to solve. Maxwell Taylor was the ambassador at the time, and his deputy was U. Alexis Johnson. We discussed at great length what to do, and came to a consensus that we would ask for combat troops. But we did not visualize that it would take as many as it finally did.

  I wondered if the American people would stick with our effort. I felt the American people had to get emotionally involved. I suggested to McNamara something like a people-to-people program between South Vietnam and the United States to facilitate this. Later, I talked to one of his aides about following up on this idea. But McNamara apparently didn't want to get the American people emotionally involved in the war—he wanted to play it low-key. He wanted to fight on the cheap—to program and manage it so that we wouldn't end up with huge stockpiles like we did after World War II. McNamara was managerially oriented.

  I want to go back for a moment to what you originally said. I find it a striking statement that out of your four and a half years in Vietnam, the initial decision to send combat troops was the most difficult to make.

  We were actually operating in the unknown. Young American boys would have to perform on the battlefield with hardened Vietcong forces and the tough North Vietnamese troops that had defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, in an alien land with all the problems of terrain, disease, etc. These presented formidable problems.

  Now, in 1954 I had been on the Army General Staff as a brigadier general when consideration was made to put troops into Dien Bien Phu. The administration was totally disenchanted about going into another war. We had finished World War II and had just negotiated the armistice with the North Koreans, and politically, another military involvement wasn't feasible. I was in on those deliberations, where all the negatives were exposed. Had I not been in on them, my doubts about the wisdom of committing American troops in 1964 may not have occurred to me.

  Of the decisions you made as commander in Vietnam, which are you most proud of?

  The decision to hold Khe Sanh.

  Why?

  I interpreted the intelligence and the performance of the enemy during the Tet Offensive to mean that they were trying to dominate and take over Thua Thien and Quang Tri provinces and to establish a provisional government and political headquarters at Hue, the ancient capital. The holding of Khe Sanh thwarted the enemy plans. Let me go a little further. If they had ov
errun Khe Sanh, they could have moved into the lowlands with two divisions and mingled among the people. It would have been hard to ferret them out. The armchair strategists back in the U.S. said it was crazy to hold Khe Sanh. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, said that I ought to be relieved of my command, that I was the worst general since Custer. [Laughs.]

  Then why, if Khe Sanh was so important, was it later abandoned?

  Once it became evident that the enemy had abandoned the area, I could not afford to tie down troops there. We were in a position to reoccupy Khe Sanh at any time, and the enemy was not about to move in, having lost so many men. The terrain in Vietnam was so extensive that we could not afford to tie down troops unless they were essential to the prosecution of the war. We had an eight-hundred-mile front. That was unprecedented, unless you go back to the Civil War. There are many similarities between Vietnam and the Civil War.

  Give me an example or two.

  The common denominator between the two was that they were wars of mobility, in which you only tied down troops when necessary. You had to keep troops mobile. In the Civil War, you had foot soldiers, horses, and boats on the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers. In Vietnam we also had boats, and we exploited the river-ways. The thing that replaced the horse was the helicopter, and without the helicopter, we could not have accomplished what we did. In neither war was the holding of terrain the primary emphasis. And in both wars, it was a question of bringing the enemy to the battlefield in order to attrite his ranks.

  That Laos-Cambodia frontier really bothered you, didn't it?

  Oh, it plagued us. The enemy would cross it and fight us. He chased us, but we couldn't chase him. I tell you, I think the finger points at Averell Harriman. Are you familiar with the book Key to Failure, by Norman Hannah? The essence of the book is that because of the prestige of an earlier ambassador to the Soviet Union—who must have been Harriman—tacit agreement was made with the Russians that if we would not cross the border, they would not be part of the capture of Laos. Harriman had a lot of prestige, and he carried the day on that.

  Do you think there has been a good Vietnam movie?

  I haven't seen one.

  What went through your mind when you watched Platoon?

  I was aghast when they had soldiers killing other soldiers, smoking pot at night in their bunker. It didn't happen.

  Are you saying it didn't ever happen?

  No, I was about to qualify that. If it happened, it was very exceptional. The marijuana that was used was in the main used in the rear areas by the stevedore types who were kind of bored with what they were doing and had more access to drugs. A well-trained, well-disciplined combat unit would not tolerate marijuana because it would jeopardize their own safety.

  Let me throw another factor into this equation that you may be aware of, but my feeling is probably you aren't. One of the real liabilities that influenced Vietnam was the decision made to call up—I think this was in 1965 or '66—a hundred thousand category fours. Now, does category four mean anything to you?

  I think I've heard it mentioned.

  Category four is a dummy. You can probably make a soldier out of ten percent of him. Give him menial jobs, and he is not a troublemaker. But it is awfully difficult to utilize that many category fours.

  Now, whose decision was that?

  It was alleged that it was McNamara's, but I'm not sure. It was a political decision. To understand that is important when you start reflecting on the drug syndrome, the fragging, or on the type of person who had been dismissed by a judge from a criminal charge if he would join the army and go to Vietnam. And that did happen. So that introduced a weak-minded, criminal, untrained element into the army. When those people came to Vietnam—and they started arriving in late '68, '69, '70—that's when disciplinary problems began on the battlefield.

  What would have happened if you had taken thousands of men from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton?

  There would have been an uproar. The army, over the years, had always drawn its officer corps from the college campuses, where you presumably have men of character and leadership. That avenue was mostly cut off by educational deferments, but the army still had to have officers. So they had to lower their requirements for the officer candidate schools. That brought about the commissioning of people like Lieutenant Calley.

  What were the differences between the World War II soldier, the Korean War soldier, and the GI in Vietnam?

  The World War II soldier was fighting a war that the American people perceived as a war concerned with the survival of America and the American way of life. He was older—his average age was twenty-six. Everybody was expected to serve, and most did. Men who were drafted would have volunteered anyway. The whole country was mobilized; the war was viewed as a crusade.

  And in Korea?

  Korea—let me just make some parenthetical remarks. The Korean War has not been studied and analyzed, and there is more to be learned from that war than from any of the three. There are so many lessons to be learned.

  Give me one or two of the most important lessons.

  We didn't have a national objective. When the North Koreans came down in 1950, the policy makers in Washington did not face up to what the objective was. Was it to restore South Korea, along the 38th Parallel? Or was it to defeat North Korea? Or was it to go to the Yalu, which they did, and it was a terrible mistake. They could have given MacArthur firm instructions: You will destroy the enemy south of the 38th Parallel. If that had been done, I am not sure that the Chinese ever would have come in. This was our first experience with limited war, and our policy makers blew it. The Korean War only lasted three years; if it had lasted five, you would have had the same public reaction as you did with Vietnam.

  How old was the average soldier in Korea? He couldn't have been as young as the one in Vietnam.

  Oh, no, I think I can make a fairly reasonable guess, it was probably twentythree, twenty-four years of age. In Vietnam we threw a terrible burden, under very difficult circumstances, on soldiers who were even younger—as I've said, less than nineteen.

  What was our objective in Vietnam?

  It was not to conquer Vietnam. It was to get the Communists off the backs of the people who wanted to live in a non-Communist state. The objective was made clear by the National Security Council. Now, you hear time and again that there was no strategy. That is an erroneous statement. One can say that it was not the optimal strategy, and I would agree with that. But there was a strategy. That was to bring the North Vietnamese to the conference table, as we had done in Korea. It was not to unify the two Vietnams, it was not to defeat the enemy as we had done in World War II. Now, one can criticize the tactics involved, and that airpower was not used by Johnson in 1968, as it might have been. If he had done what Nixon did four years later, they would have come to the conference table and we would have been in a position of strength.

  Are you referring to the Christmas bombing in 1972?

  Yes. Have you ever heard of a man named John Colvin? Several years ago, John Colvin wrote a piece for The Washington Quarterly. Colvin was the British consul in Hanoi in 1966 and 1967. He was in constant contact with many of the senior leaders in Hanoi. And in this article, he stated that at the end of '67, Hanoi's morale was so low that the leadership was on the verge of capitulation—by virtue of the damage done by our air strikes. Our planes would bomb a bridge, and they would work every night for a week to repair it. We would take a photograph of it, and then the next day we'd drop it again. This was beginning to wear on them, and Colvin thought they were on the verge of capitulation. But the interesting thing is that you saw no visibility in our media about efforts being made to bring the North Vietnamese to the conference table. After their defeat in the Tet Offensive, I thought there was really a good chance of that.

  What about the Tet Offensive? In these past twenty years, have you had any new thoughts about Tet?

  No new ones, but some earlier ideas have been reinforced. When T
et hit, we knew they were going to attack. We didn't know how massive that attack would be, but we knew it would be in multiple places. At that time, I put a cable in to Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, Jr., the U.S. Pacific commander, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying, in effect, that the enemy has changed his strategy and we should reevaluate our own. I felt that if we had done that, if the bombing campaign had been stepped up then, that the outcome of the war could have been different.

  The Tet Offensive was a terrible gamble by the enemy, and they were crushed. After that defeat, I think there was a really good chance of bringing them to the conference table. But public opinion was disgusted with a war that was dragging on and on. The president later told me that he didn't have the votes. Johnson counted the votes; most politicians do. But I object to saying that was the point when the war was lost. That was the point when it became evident that America was not going to make good its commitment to the Vietnamese.

  Tet was our last chance. We had thrown away all our trump cards when we finally got them to the negotiating table in Paris. Their big trump card was the POWs. We didn't have any trump cards because we were already withdrawing our troops. We'd even sanctioned letting their troops remain on South Vietnamese soil.

  Hypothetically, if you could sit down with any of your opposing NVA commanders, who would it be and what would you ask?

  At that time, General Giap was the commander of the NVA forces, and I think I would ask him why they launched the Tet Offensive. They proceeded to fight our type of war—and where did they get the impression that there would be a public uprising? That the South Vietnamese would flow to their ranks? That Tet would be a success, militarily? I would also be very curious to know how they knew that we were not going to cross the Laotian and Cambodian borders. Did they get that from the Russians?

  Was consideration ever given to using nuclear weapons in Vietnam?

  We had no tactical weapons in South Vietnam, but if we needed them, they could have been flown in. This was my thought process: It was conceivable that a situation would arise when the president, through the chain of command, would ask me if it would be feasible to use a tactical nuclear weapon. After I had that thought, I talked to Admiral Sharp. We agreed it was conceivable, not probable, that we could be asked about the use of a tactical nuclear weapon. Both of us knew what was available. We decided that we would study the options. For example: Under what circumstances could a tactical nuclear weapon be used? What type of weapon would be appropriate? How would it be delivered? What would be the influence of factors like weather patterns, etc.? When LBJ heard about the study group, he said, “Knock it off.” It was rather ironical. We were doing the study so we could have answers in case he asked. I wasn't disposed to recommend it. But you can't make a decision unless you do a study.