by Lewis Sorley
***
BEFORE THE END of that year Westmoreland took time to reassure his West Point classmates that all was going well in Vietnam. "Westy sent greetings to the whole class," reported the Scribe who wrote the 1936 notes for Assembly, the West Point alumni magazine. "Until his message," Phil Gage added, "I believe I was not alone in slipping into negative thoughts about the impossibility and meaninglessness of the effort out there. I am thrilled to say that in one short paragraph Westy painted a completely different situation. I am so impressed with what this famous classmate said that I quote him verbatim: 'The American troops over here are doing a tremendous job and have played a major role in keeping this country from becoming completely unglued. I feel there are prospects for success in the future, but the challenge is beyond dimension. Be assured we have our chins up.'" The Scribe then added his own conclusion: "How fortunate we are to have such a great leader in command of our destiny—and he is from 1936."27
HAVING DECIDED EARLY ON that search and destroy was a dumb way to prosecute the war, General Williamson was equally unimpressed by Westmoreland's direction of it. "Westmoreland was simply present," he said. "A succession of staff and sub-staffs conducted the war. But Westmoreland was very, very responsive to the civilian guidance he was getting from the States. Body count was an element of it. What the newsprint was saying was another. He had back channel communications with a lot of people, some military and some civilian, who were not part of the government."28
Williamson was not a Westmoreland admirer on yet other grounds. "General Westmoreland," he said, "had a trait that was repulsive. He always, invariably, had someone between himself and anything unpleasant. If it was the slightest bit tenuous, it was always somebody else's fault or responsibility. He was just unbelievably agile at that."29
Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard observed that tendency while serving as Chief of the Operations Analysis Branch in MACV J-3. "Westy has more studies, boards, and reorganizations going on than I ever heard of," Kinnard wrote in a letter to his family. "His solution to all problems is study it or form a board of reorganization, none of which, of course, disposes of the problem."30 Major General Winant Sidle, Westmoreland's long-serving information officer, commented on his related inability to sort out good ideas from bad ones, calling that his "worst trait" and concluding that in consequence "he generated an enormous amount of waste effort."31 One rather bizarre example, cited by Westmoreland himself in his history notes, was dated 12 September 1965, only weeks after commencement of major U.S. ground force deployments to Vietnam. "Although at this juncture the prospect looks remote," noted Westmoreland, "I asked the J-5 to begin studying how we might proceed to phase down our military effort in Vietnam." One can only imagine how that tasking was received in J-5.
But Westmoreland was very proud of this welter of activity, on one occasion citing in dictation for his history file a rubber plantation study which he "had directed several weeks earlier." That study, he said, was "another example of the initiative that MACV has exercised on other than military matters. Sadly and regrettably, the Embassy and Mission are not organized to do much advanced thinking or planning. It therefore seems that much of this falls to our lot. There have been many other studies outside of my area of interest that should have been made. I am in an awkward position to exercise this initiative; however, if I think these problems bear in any way on the military, I do not hesitate to do so."32
IN LATE AUTUMN OF 1965 Secretary of Defense McNamara was briefed in Saigon, then on 28 November 1965 reported his reaction: "I wasn't at all reassured about what I heard yesterday. I have been concerned every time I have been here in the past two years. I don't think we have done a thing we can point to that has been effective in five years. I ask you to show me one area in this country... that we have pacified." As we learned much later, McNamara had concluded, possibly—according to his testimony—as early as the latter part of 1965, "that the war could not be won militarily."33
Subsequently the futility of massive operations was repeatedly illustrated, as for example by a November 1966 foray by some 25,000 troops from at least five brigades—"in what a U.S. spokesman called the largest American action of the war," reported UPI—looking for the enemy in War Zone C, a notorious communist refuge in the northern half of Tay Ninh Province. "U.S. troops hacked deeper into the jungles today and killed 20 more of the enemy," said the report, "but resistance was scattered and light."34 The enemy had declined to fight fair, and 25,000 American GIs had spent a day tracking down 20 of them.
AN ARRESTING CONVICTION was expressed by General William DePuy, who after two years as Westmoreland's J-3 then commanded the 1st Infantry Division for another year. "General DePuy came in to pay his farewell call," Westmoreland told his history file, "and I enjoyed talking to him about his observations, the primary one of which concerned the importance of massive firepower against VC units in populated areas. He feels that military power is the overwhelming force in influencing the people of the hamlet to abandon the Viet Cong."
Westmoreland unfortunately shared that view, telling Lieutenant General William Rosson during the battles of Tet 1968 that "Prov[ince] Chiefs should tell villagers that if they are going to allow VC to set up mortars they can expect to get hit with counterfire."
Meanwhile Westmoreland maintained that, "once these main force units are destroyed," it would be possible for pacification to proceed.35 He was never able to destroy those units, and in fact was no closer to doing so at the end of his four years in command than when he began. Whatever forces he "destroyed" were simply replaced by the enemy, leaving the task to be performed over and over again and thus never actually accomplished.
In consequence, later admitted General DePuy, "we ended up with no operational plan that had the slightest chance of ending the war favorably."36 Westmoreland could never bring himself to acknowledge that reality.
BRUCE PALMER AND WESTMORELAND were West Point classmates and had known one another for a very long time, but throughout his assignment to Vietnam, going back to March or so of 1967, Palmer had been appalled by Westmoreland's way of waging war. "I went over to Vietnam as Westy's deputy," he said, referring to his eventual assignment as Deputy Commanding General, U.S. Army, Vietnam, "and it was just a mess. We were losing and trying to put it together, and it just wasn't working. There wasn't anything that was working."37 In the spring, when he was commanding II Field Force, Vietnam, said Palmer, "it became forcibly obvious to me that we could not achieve our objectives fighting the way we were. I confided my doubts to General Westmoreland, who really didn't want to talk about it."
When Creighton Abrams came out in May 1967 to become Westmoreland's deputy, Palmer took him aside and poured his heart out about the deficiencies of the Westmoreland approach, about how he had "basic disagreements with Westy on how it was organized and how we were doing it." But Abrams responded, "You know, I'm here to help Westy and, although I privately agree with many things you are saying, I've got to be loyal to him. I'm going to help him."38 That response may have been conditioned somewhat by Abrams's understanding—not then known to Palmer—that within a matter of weeks he would be taking over from Westmoreland, although ultimately that plan was not carried out, leaving Abrams to serve as deputy for the next thirteen months.
If Westmoreland had problems with fellow Army officers over the viability of his big war approach, those problems were compounded when it came to dealing with Marines. The senior Marine leadership saw the war much differently than did Westmoreland, taking a view entirely compatible with the findings of the PROVN Study (discussed below). In addition—to Westmoreland's disgust—such senior Marines outside Vietnam as Commandant of the Marine Corps General Wallace Greene and Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, Commanding General of Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, maintained close contact with Lieutenant General Lewis Walt, commanding III Marine Amphibious Force in Vietnam, giving him plenty of opinion and advice, much of it contrary to what Westmoreland was advocating. Wrote Allan Millet
t, a reserve Marine colonel and distinguished historian, "Marine generals like Victor H. Krulak made life miserable for General William C. Westmoreland because of their obsession with pacification and working with the Vietnamese military and paramilitary forces."39
Just as the major ground force involvement of U.S. troops was in full swing in October 1965, for example, Krulak followed up a recent visit to Vietnam with a cable to Walt. "I am glad you were able to impress Westy with the magnitude of your activity," he said. "At the same time, I am sure that he has not altered his view that 'find, fix and destroy the big Main Force units' is really the answer, and that patrols, ambushes and civic action are all second class endeavors, more suitable for the ARVN and the paramilitary. I disagree with this, and I know you do, too."40
Westmoreland was actually quite unimpressed with what the Marines were doing. "I believed the Marines should have been trying to find the enemy's main forces and bring them to battle," he noted, "thereby putting them on the run and reducing the threat they posed to the population."41 Later, as input for his memoirs, Westmoreland said he "just did not find the same initiative in I Corps as elsewhere. Marines seem complacent about enemy possibilities. Walt [was] dedicated and sincere but found it hard to grasp the big picture and project into the future." Taking just the opposite tack, Krulak argued that "our effort belonged where the people were, not where they weren't. I shared these thoughts with Westmoreland frequently, but made no progress in persuading him."42
Lieutenant General Stanley Larsen, observing this situation, rendered a telling judgment. "I don't know what General Westmoreland would say about this," he stated in an oral history interview, "but for all practical purposes the III Marine Force in the I Corps area was not commanded by General Westmoreland, it was commanded by the senior Marine on the CINCPAC staff."
GENERAL JOHNSON WATCHED the proliferation of large-unit sweeps primarily in the deep jungle and was appalled. "I felt in 1962," he stated, "and I still felt in 1968—with virtually no way to influence it—that what was required was a lot of scouting and patrolling type of activity by quite small units with the capacity to reinforce quickly. We didn't get into very much of that."43
Johnson was also dismayed by the incredible expenditures on unobserved artillery fire, known as harassment and interdiction, with nothing much good to show for it and potentially a lot of negative impact on South Vietnamese peasants. During one trip to Vietnam Johnson learned that only some 6 percent of artillery fire was observed, the rest just being fired out into the jungle on the premise that some enemy might happen to be there. "Today," he told Westmoreland, "we are writing checks for a quarter of a billion dollars every month to pay for ammunition, which totals out to three billion dollars a year." Johnson suggested Westmoreland take another look at what was being done. "A reduction of perhaps as much as 50 per cent in the application of unobserved fires as they relate to the destruction of physical facilities in Vietnam, in terms of silencing the battlefield, in terms of scaling down the level of violence, or in terms of reducing the costs of the war, has a lot of attractive features."44
Westmoreland was uncomprehending, or at least impervious, to such reasoning. Just over two weeks later he cabled major subordinates to say that "a study of the present rate of fire of artillery currently in the Seven Mountain area reveals that the tempo could be drastically increased in order to effectively harass and interdict enemy movements and actions." He instructed them to "increase rate of fire of existing artillery... by orders of magnitude, e.g., 100 to 200 rounds per tube per day."45
When in January 1968 Major General Charles Stone went out to command a division under Westmoreland, he had done his homework and already had very strong misgivings about Westmoreland's tactical approach. "Before coming to Vietnam," he said in a later debriefing report, "I studied many after action reports and talked to many persons who had been here. My observations convinced me that the concept of search and destroy operations was not a valid one." As Stone saw it, "I have everything the enemy wants and he has nothing I want. I fight the war on that basis." Thus: "I will not contend him for a triple canopy jungle with no population and no foodstuffs. I am perfectly willing to let him have the border areas where there are no important political or military objectives. He cannot achieve his objectives by staying in the jungle. He has to come to where I am."46
As things evolved, Stone's views were shared by a number of other senior Army officers. Douglas Kinnard's survey revealed that 42 percent of Army generals who had commanded in Vietnam thought these large-scale operations were "overdone from the beginning," while 32 percent viewed the search and destroy concept as "not sound," and 51 percent said the execution of search and destroy tactics "left something to be desired," a response that ranked below "adequate." Kinnard observed that "these replies show a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, to put it mildly, by Westmoreland's generals for his tactics and by implication for his strategy in the war."47
General Arthur Brown recalled an occasion during his service in Vietnam as an advisor when a colleague had some graphics prepared. They portrayed what areas of Vietnam were controlled by the Viet Cong and where the government was in control. Then he had flips that depicted where all the resources of the country were—the rice, the fish, and so on. "What it showed was very dramatic," Brown recalled. "The VC were in there with the fish and the rice. What we had was the places where nothing was."48
General Stone—and many others—understood the implications of that incongruence, but Westmoreland never did. Perhaps he didn't care since, as South Vietnamese Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong observed, Westmoreland had taken for himself much the easier task. "Compared to search-and-destroy operations," said Truong, "territorial security activities were immensely more complex."49 Those had been left to the South Vietnamese.
Very early on it was clear that the Westmoreland approach was not only saddling the South Vietnamese, more or less unassisted, with that more difficult task—support of pacification—but that Westmoreland personally was determined to remain uninvolved in that aspect of the war. General Earle Wheeler saw the strategic and tactical situations much as Westmoreland did and consistently backed him in implementing his approach. Said the JCS history of the war: "General Wheeler thought that there was too much concentration by 'many Washington agencies' on pacification/RD [Revolutionary Development] as the answer to all problems in RVN."50
Despite Westmoreland's many protestations of his abiding interest in and robust support for pacification, there was no substance to the claim. General Phillip Davidson saw it clearly from his post as MACV J-2: "Westmoreland's interest always lay in the big-unit war. Pacification bored him."51
Westmoreland was unrepentant. "Pacification was oversold in the United States and oversold to the Johnson administration, where it was the 'end all,'" he insisted in his oral history. "It was never the end all with me," he said, "and I got pressure after pressure after pressure to put emphasis on pacification at the expense of allowing the main forces to have a free rein."52
Westmoreland blamed civilian officials for much of that pressure, singling out the Systems Analysis and International Security Affairs staffs in the Pentagon as well as people at State and CIA. "I was fighting them off constantly," he recalled, "just fighting them off. I took steps to demonstrate that I was not against pacification, but I certainly was not going to become so obsessed with pacification that we would give the North Vietnamese Army and the main forces of the Viet Cong a free rein and allow them to attack when and where they chose."53
Yet Davidson saw clearly the defects in Westmoreland's approach. "If the United States ground troops could not 'find' the enemy or 'fix' him," he said, "they manifestly could not 'fight' or 'finish' him. Yet that was what the strategy of attrition required—the ability to inflict unacceptable losses on the enemy, and the United States could never do it."54
In one of his most disastrous judgments, Westmoreland expressed the conviction—even before large-scale American elements had ent
ered the ground war—that what they would face was "attritional war and we are in a better position than the enemy to fight such a war."55 Long after the war was over Westmoreland was asked if, looking back, he would do anything differently. "I've thought of that many times," he replied. Apparently the answer was no. "Other courses of action were either infeasible at the time or would have created some unforeseen and some foreseen problems."56 Thus, he concluded, there was no other option.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH had been advocated by an ad hoc group headed by Lieutenant General Andrew Goodpaster, then Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The July 1965 study on winning in Vietnam observed candidly that "the capability of the RVN to handle the problems of pacification, even with the defeat of the VC/DRV main force units, without extensive guidance, is questionable." The reason: "The extensive losses of officials at the village and hamlet levels, coupled with attrition of higher officials, has left the RVN in a weak position." Thus "unless there are substantial desertions from the guerrillas, subversives and sympathizers, extensive pacification programs probably will be required to restore government authority to the countryside and win popular support. Such programs probably will be beyond the RVN capability."57
The needed alternative, one wholly compatible with the ad hoc group's approach, was soon developed under the aegis of General Harold K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff. Known as PROVN (Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of Vietnam), this comprehensive study was not only a direct refutation and dismissal of Westmoreland's way of war but also a detailed articulation of a more availing option.58 PROVN's summary statement was unequivocal: "The critical actions are those that occur at the village, the district and provincial levels," it held. "This is where the war must be fought; this is where the war and the object which lies beyond it must be won."