by Lewis Sorley
But Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker acknowledged, in an unpublished manuscript, that "there was an intelligence failure. We had no inkling of the scope, the timing, or the targets of the offensive." Brigadier General John Chaisson briefed the press early in the offensive, observing afterward that "Westy thought I pounded down too hard on surprise. He pouted."
Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky expressed the South Vietnamese outlook on the offensive: "Savage, brilliantly executed, it caught all of us off balance. Almost before we knew what happened, we were fighting for our lives in the streets of Saigon, Hue, and a dozen other cities."29 ARVN Major General Nguyen Duy Hinh wrote that "the surprise achieved by the enemy was absolute."30 And Colonel Hoang Ngoc Lung, South Vietnam's top intelligence officer, was also unequivocal: "One thing was certain. The enemy had really achieved the element of surprise."31
IN WASHINGTON THERE was also plenty of surprise to go around. In a White House meeting soon after the offensive began, Secretary of Defense McNamara stated that "Westmoreland did not expect the strength of attacks throughout the cities."32 George Christian, the White House press secretary, observed that "the Tet offensive came as a brutal surprise to President Johnson and all of his advisors. We had been led to believe that the Viet Cong were pretty well defanged by that period, that the pacification program had worked very well, that most of the villages in South Vietnam were secure, and that it was virtually impossible for the Viet Cong to rise to the heights that they did in 1968."33
The reaction to these events was costly to Westmoreland's reputation. Newsweek cited a devastating measure of the fall: "In November, when he was conjuring up the light at the end of the tunnel, he was affectionately called 'Westy.' But by last week he was 'General Westmoreland' in most official and unofficial briefings."34
Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson accompanied the President when he flew down to Fort Bragg to see off troops being sent to Vietnam. "On the flight," recalled Colonel Fred Schoomaker, "LBJ was on the telephone with General Westmoreland in Vietnam, and he was just tearing into him: 'What the hell is going on out there?!! You just told Congress light at the end of the tunnel and all that!!!'"35
Still, Westmoreland sought to shed the disgrace of having been surprised, writing to Congressman Dale Milford: "I want to lay the canard to rest that the Tet offensive represented an intelligence failure. The large-scale attacks that occurred were not only anticipated, but I personally directed each commander to place his forces in a maximum alert posture, in anticipation of the attack I knew was coming, 36 hours in advance." And: "The only surprise was its rashness. The enemy assumed risks, inviting great casualties, due to attacks on heavily defended areas where superior firepower could be brought against them."
In later years Westmoreland became more and more expansive on this point, claiming for example that the Tet Offensive "was a surprise to the American people but not to us on the battlefield."36
Westmoreland did concede one element of surprise discovered at Tet: "The offensive revealed an unexpected determination by North Vietnam to pursue the war regardless of the price."37
***
WESTMORELAND'S EXPLANATION FOR the enemy's offensive, one he clung to until the end, was that "in 1967 we hurt the enemy to the point where he changed his strategy from that of a protracted war, a war of attrition, so to speak, to a general offensive."38
In reality, however, all Westmoreland's attrition strategy had been doing was killing large numbers of the enemy, losses the enemy was able and willing to replace. Meanwhile the enemy's covert infrastructure in South Vietnam's hamlets and villages, totally untouched by the war of the big battalions in the remote jungle, continued to maintain control of the rural populace through coercion and terror. Far from seeing this as a losing situation, the enemy leadership seemed quite satisfied with engaging the Americans in useless bloody battles that did nothing to undermine their control of the war's real object, the people. General DePuy, among many other senior officers, saw this clearly. Before Tet 1968, he said in his oral history, "It was a stalemate."
Despite Westmoreland's insistence that the enemy's new departure at Tet was forced on him by the reverses that he, Westmoreland, had been inflicting during 1967, the MACV Historian, Colonel Argo, suggested a different interpretation. In a memorandum to Westmoreland dated 11 May 1968 he commented on "the enemy's current willingness to do battle under conditions where success not only is not assured, but is extremely improbable." That may be explained, he said, by the fact that "he no longer needs to win the battle to attain his basic political-psychological goals. He merely has to demonstrate his presence by fighting. The tactical defeat is inconsequential."39
Robert McNamara was also among those who never accepted the Westmoreland viewpoint. "MACV interpreted Tet as a great victory for the United States," he said. "I always felt this was a preposterous claim."40 He had a point. Westmoreland's claims of victory were based on the familiar criterion of body count. He had indeed stacked up plenty of enemy bodies in years gone by, but had nothing to show for it in terms of a favorable outcome to the war. More bodies were probably not going to change that.
While Westmoreland was busy trying to portray the Tet Offensive as forced by his successes, his boss had a different outlook. In his 1967 Memorial Day proclamation Lyndon Johnson called the war a "bloody impasse," then at a White House meeting on 4 November 1967 complained that, in prosecuting the war, "We've been on dead center for the last year."41
ON THE NIGHT OF 6–7 February 1968, the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, near Khe Sanh, was attacked and eventually overrun by communist infantry and sappers reinforced by nine PT-76 tanks. In such circumstances the Marines at Khe Sanh were supposed to reinforce Lang Vei, as they admitted in their after action report: "The mission of the 26th Marine Regiment was to... be prepared to conduct operation in relief of or reinforcement of the CIDG Camp at Lang Vei."42 But when the crunch came, the Marines sat tight and let the outnumbered defenders of Lang Vei fend for themselves. "No marines came down from the big base in Khe Sanh to help out," wrote Charles Simpson bitterly in a history of Special Forces in the war.43 The defenders of Lang Vei also asked the Marines at Khe Sanh to fire preplanned artillery in their support. That didn't work out very well, either. "The mission initially landed on top of the camp, but was adjusted on target," said the Special Forces after action report.44
There were 24 U.S. Special Forces soldiers with the indigenous troops at the base. John Prados reported that "Lang Vei resisted heroically but was overrun." Of the 24 Americans, 13 were wounded and 10 more reported missing and presumed dead.45
This failure of the Marines to carry out an assigned mission immediately became a matter of furious controversy. "When he learned the Marines would not carry out the relief plan," wrote Robert Pisor in his account of Khe Sanh, "the Special Forces commander in Vietnam, Colonel Ladd, called Saigon and demanded to be put through to COMUSMACV. Westmoreland was awakened, but he said he would not second-guess a commander at the scene. He rang off."46
Westmoreland addressed the issue in his memoirs, astonishingly siding with the Marines. Recalling that he had twice during the night been awakened by General Chaisson, he acknowledged that "under established plans, the marines at Khe Sanh were to send a relief force if Lang Vei got into trouble, but twice the marines had turned down Lang Vei's call for help. They reasonably considered that a relief force moving by road was bound to be ambushed and that a helicopter assault in the darkness against a force known to have armor was too hazardous." Thus, said Westmoreland, "honoring the prerogative of the field commander on the scene, I declined to intervene until I could ascertain more of the situation."47 That was, as things played out, going to take quite a long while, and in the interim things at Lang Vei became very bloody.
Westmoreland maintained that the next day he "called a conference of Marine Corps and Army commanders operating in the I Corps Zone and flew to Danang. There were a number of topics to be discussed..., but of first priority wa
s the crisis at Lang Vei. I directed General Cushman to provide helicopters for a relief force of CIDG troops with Special Forces advisers to bring out American and South Vietnamese survivors."48
Colonel Jonathan Ladd, the Special Forces commander, remembered it differently. "I called General Abrams on the phone and told him what was happening, and I said, 'I just can't get Westmoreland's attention long enough to do anything.'" Abrams called the Marine air chief, Major General Norman Anderson, said Ladd, "and told him that he was telling me to go ahead and evacuate the camp at the earliest opportunity and for the Marines to help us, which they did." Further, per Ladd: "Now in Westmoreland's book, he said that he did all that, but he didn't. Abrams did it, because he, Westmoreland, kept going back to these civic action meetings. Abrams was the one who just said go ahead and do it." Also: "Anderson was a great help." "And old Lownds, you know, he just kept saying that it was a suicide mission."49
Westmoreland appeared to have some later regrets about the matter. "I will say in all candor that I did have two disillusioning experiences with the Marines, and I may as well tell you about them," he said in his meeting with the Marine historians. "One was... the question of that outpost that was overrun, not too far from Khe Sanh. Nothing was being done about that."50 In Robert Pisor's view, "the fall of Lang Vei evaporated Westmoreland's last reserves of confidence in the Marines."51
General Cushman spoke about Lang Vei in his oral history. "We didn't relieve Lang Vei because we didn't want to loose [sic] a lot of men unnecessarily," he said. "It would have been a grave risk to send Marines from Khe Sanh to Lang Vei in the hours of darkness."52 Of course, it was also something of a grave risk to be defending Lang Vei when it was attacked by tanks.
Subsequently, even before succeeding Westmoreland and taking formal command of MACV, General Abrams cabled General Cushman with some pertinent observations. "I have been reflecting on the actions at Lang Vei, Ngok Tavak and Kham Duc," he began. "Based on the scant detail which is available to me through reports, I have assessed each of these actions as minor disasters. I do not believe that we would have had this string of failures if our plans for the support, or relief, of these camps had been carefully prepared." Abrams provided some suggestions for reviewing and improving command and control, communications, planning, reaction procedures, and reporting. "Through this process I would expect that when your command is confronted with a similar imminent problem, appropriate actions would be taken so that we would not lose another camp."53
ON 6 FEBRUARY 1968 the President sent Westmoreland a reassuring cable professing continued confidence in him, pretty close to the kiss of death. On 22 March 1968 the White House announced that Westmoreland was coming home to be Army Chief of Staff, a post he would assume at the beginning of July. General Chaisson wrote that "we had a birthday dinner for [Westmoreland] Tuesday night at the HQ. He gave a rather bitter speech in which, half facetiously, he said he didn't think he could get confirmed for his new post, because the Senate should hold him responsible for all of our failures—such as 'search and destroy,' ARVN corruption, lack of fight in ARVN, the Tet offensive, the Khe Sanh trap, and others."
That outlook was shared, and not in jest, by at least some of Westmoreland's senior associates. "I felt very strongly that, with Tet having occurred, General Westmoreland's credibility as a commander had suffered damage that could not be repaired," said Lieutenant General Charles Corcoran. "I think it was important to the country and important to the military forces there that General Westmoreland leave quickly."54
Two months or so after the Tet Offensive erupted the Washington Post ran a devastating piece describing the progress of the Vietnam War as charted in statements by Westmoreland. They began the compilation with this 20 June 1964 comment: "I don't see any reason for expansion of the U.S. role in Vietnam. I am optimistic and we are making good progress." On 8 July 1964: "At the present time I believe the whole operation is moving in our favor." Then on 14 April 1967, one of the most infamous: "We'll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster for several generations." And from his address of 28 April 1967 to the Joint Session of Congress: "Backed at home by resolve, confidence, patience, determination and continued support, we will prevail in Vietnam over the Communist aggressor." In Honolulu en route back to Vietnam he had said, on 1 May 1967: "Based on what I saw and heard [while in the United States], I'd say 95 per cent of Americans are behind us 100 per cent."55
There was more. Again visiting the United States in the summer, Westmoreland said in Washington on 13 July 1967: "We have achieved all our objectives, while the enemy has failed dismally." And again in Washington, at the National Press Club on 23 November 1967: "The end begins to come into view. The enemy's hopes are bankrupt. I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing. We are winning the war of attrition." For that appearance, said Westmoreland, "I wrote the speech." Then came the Tet Offensive, leading him to comment on 1 February 1968: "That was a treacherous and deceitful act by the enemy."56
Sir Robert Thompson, who had followed the war closely for a number of years, wrote a powerful assessment published in the London Sunday Times as the Tet battles raged. Noting that General Giap's objectives had "been achieved only at high cost to the Vietcong and North Vietnamese in manpower—the one resource in which they have a surplus," he stressed that the initiative was with the enemy and that they had "calculated the price so that, at a cost acceptable to themselves, they are imposing a cost which cannot indefinitely be acceptable to the United States." Then, in a direct swipe at the position Westmoreland had staked out, Thompson observed that "if some American reactions are to be believed that the battles are acts of desperation or a 'go for broke' attempt to improve Hanoi's negotiating position, then there is still a complete lack of understanding of the strategy of the war and of the stage it has now reached."57
THERE WAS ONE further consequence of the Tet Offensive, one having to do with the order of battle controversy of the previous year in which Westmoreland, and MACV, had prevailed in arguing for a far lower estimate of enemy strength than the number much of the rest of the Intelligence Community advocated. That matter now surfaced again. Confirmed an officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency: "DIA did join CIA in publishing a report reintroducing the self defense militia and upping enemy strength to 500,000."58 The battlefield realities had induced second thoughts about going along with Westmoreland's insistence on reporting an artificially constrained number.
Ronald Smith, then CIA's South Vietnam Branch Chief, verified that after Tet the Agency had "argued for quantification and inclusion of all categories—including self-defense and secret self-defense militia forces and political cadres—in estimates of total enemy strength because all of these categories worked together and contributed to the enemy's war effort." In April 1968, at the request of CIA Director Richard Helms, a new order of battle conference was convened at CIA Headquarters "as a result of the increasing and widespread concern in the wake of the Tet Offensive that MACV's official strength estimates were understated." CIA estimated total enemy strength as of 31 March 1968 at 440,000 to 590,000, while MACV "held to its familiar estimate of about 300,000."59
Concluded General DePuy, "[T]he North Vietnamese lost the battle, but they won the war as a result of Tet. It terrified and horrified the people in Washington."60
Westmoreland himself, however, professed no second thoughts in the wake of the Tet Offensive and three years of attrition warfare. "Basically," he said in a contemporaneous interview with the Associated Press, "I see no requirement to change our strategy."61
19. Troop Request
WESTMORELAND DENIED THAT he ever made a request for 206,000 more troops in the wake of the Tet Offensive. It was a hard case to make.
When the offensive erupted, in several places the night of 29–30 January and then pretty much all over the country the following night, Washington had been stun
ned and—some people said—panicked. MACV was a good bit stunned as well. Almost at once there began a fascinating exchange of messages between Westmoreland and General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.1
As early as 3 February 1968 Wheeler was cabling Westmoreland, "at the President's request," to ask whether "there is any reinforcement or help that we can give you."2 Westmoreland replied the following day that "the enemy has dealt the GVN [Government of Vietnam] a severe blow," but made no mention of any need for additional forces.
On 8 February Wheeler cabled again, and again he raised the issue of more troops. "Do you need reinforcements?" he asked Westmoreland. This is a new situation and the old criteria need not apply, he said reassuringly. "If you consider reinforcements imperative you should not be bound by earlier agreements." Just to be sure Westmoreland got the message, Wheeler drove it home one more time: "In summary, if you need troops, ask for them."3
The following day, 9 February, Wheeler was back again: "Please understand that I am not trying to sell you on the deployment of additional forces.... However, my sensing is that the critical phase of the war is upon us, and I do not believe that you should refrain from asking for what you believe is required under the circumstances."4 Westmoreland finally got the word, replying within hours to this latest invitation: "Needless to say, I would welcome reinforcements at any time they can be made available."5
Then, in the same way that Wheeler had become increasingly insistent in his elicitations, Westmoreland escalated the specificity and urgency of his replies. On 11 February he told Wheeler: "I am expressing a firm request for additional troops.... A set back is fully possible if I am not reinforced."6