Gone West

Every war is horrific. That’s part of the definition. The cost is calculated first and foremost by the casualties. Yet that is not the sole cost – primary, but never sole. Societies are affected very differently by different conflicts: thriving after some (e.g. the US after WW2) and sickening after others (e.g. the Weimar Republic after WW1). Nor is there always an obvious correlation between the affect (yes, the spelling with an “a” is intended) and the size of the conflict or its battlefield outcome. Italy was on the winning side of WW1, for example, but had a bad aftermath. The Vietnam War was deeply unwholesome in its affects and effects in the United States in a way that Korea, for example, was not. The US was not so very different a place in 1953 than in 1950. The US was a vastly different place in 1973 (for that matter by 1968) than in 1965, and the war had much to do with it. Vietnam broke something in the American body politic and the US never really recovered from it – the military did but not the US as a whole. The deep divisions which ail us so much today have their roots in the era: among them wholesale (all too often justified) distrust both of officialdom and the press (the “credibility gap”) and a polarization of the public that led to more extremism and violence than we tend to remember.

It is anyone’s guess what would have followed had the Johnson Administration opted not to introduce large ground force units into Vietnam – or opted not intervene further at all. (It should be remembered that JFK already had upped the number of “advisers” there by 16,000 in 1963 and their numbers climbed to 23,000 by 1965, but they weren’t officially combat troops and Johnson could have ordered them withdrawn without overmuch fanfare.) What if the war went ahead but had gone differently? We only can speculate, but Lewis Sorley makes the case that it could have gone very differently with a single change at the top in his book Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam.

Whenever I see a title like that about some military figure I check the author’s credentials before checking out the book. If it contains the judgments of a purely armchair strategist…well… consider the source. It’s hard to find credentials much better than Sorley’s however. A West Point graduate with a PhD from Johns Hopkins, he led the 1st Tank Battalion, 69th Armor, US Army in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. He retired from the army as a Lt. Colonel in 1975 but then moved on to the CIA as Chief of the Policy and Plans Division. He is also a well-regarded historian. That’s plenty of credibility, but for an alternate view I nonetheless paired Sorley’s book with a re-read of General William Westmoreland’s A Soldier Reports, a memoir I first read more than 40 years ago.

Prior to his time in Vietnam Westmoreland had a solid and soldierly military record. He graduated in the middle of his class at West Point, led the 34^th Field Artillery Battalion in Tunisia and Sicily in 1943, and commanded the 187^th Airborne in Korea in 1952. At the end of his time in Korea he was promoted to Brigadier and sent to the Pentagon where he worked as a staff officer on everything from personnel to budget matters. He was fully capable in those roles and accordingly added stars. His competence won him the confidence of his superiors, particularly General Taylor and General Wheeler who in 1964 tagged him for Commander MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) in overall charge of US operations there.

Yet, his previous experience in war zones was, though high level, subordinate; one gets the feeling that he was excellent at being second in command. Nothing in his career indicated imaginative or flexible thinking in tactical or strategic matters. This alarmed some of his fellow officers when they heard of his selection. Brigadier General Amos Jordan actually went directly to Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance to thwart the appointment, saying that “it would be a grave mistake to appoint him. He is spit and polish two up and one back. This is a counterinsurgency and he would have no idea how to deal with it.” Vance heard Jordan out, but told him the appointment had been made. Also concerned was Major General Yarborough commanding the US Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. Yarborough sent Westmoreland an unsolicited 8-page letter arguing against conventional warfare using American troops: “Under no circumstances that I can foresee should US strategy be twisted into a ‘requirement’ for placing US combat divisions into the Vietnamese conflict…The key to the beginning of the solution to Viet-Nam’s travail lies in a rising scale of population and resource control.”

Westmoreland disagreed. He opted for a conventional big unit strategy using American and allied troops to seek out and engage enemy formations, leaving the more difficult task of territorial control to the ill-equipped ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam). The Johnson Administration accepted his recommendations and kept delivering on his repeated requests for more troops until finally denying the last one for 206,000 more in 1968, at which time 525,000 already were in country. In his own memoirs Westmoreland complains, “In lamenting what came to be known, however erroneously, as ‘the big-unit war,’ critics presumably saw some alternative…Yet to my knowledge no one ever advanced a viable alternative that conformed to the American policy of confining the war within South Vietnam.” But they did. General Abrams, who really was an imaginative thinker, had different ideas, though by the time he succeeded Westmoreland, he was prevented from starting from scratch by the need to unwind and rework the force structure already in place amid “Vietnamization” and by vanishing support for the war at home. During Westmoreland’s tenure an attrition war inflicted huge losses on the enemy, but they were losses they were prepared to accept and replace. The effect has been described as fighting the birthrate of North Vietnam. Americans, on the other hand, were not prepared to accept steady losses just because they were fewer.

The alternative always had been properly equipping and supporting ARVN to defend its own country. Ironically the large scale introduction of US troops prevented this for years since naturally US troops had first call on those supplies. To take one example, the Vietcong with their AK47s consistently outgunned the ARVN, who used WW2 vintage M1 rifles. (Quite aside from its lesser firepower, the M1 is an 11.6 pound [5.3kg] weapon more than 3.5 feet [1100mm] long; the average ARVN soldier was 5 feet [151cm] and 90 pounds [41kg]). Not until 1969 were M16s supplied to the South Vietnamese in large numbers. The two books take very different perspectives on Tet and Khe Sahn, both of which were serious tactical defeats for the VC and North Vietnamese but which succeeded in further turning American public opinion against the conflict.

Both books conclude that the war could have ended far differently. “Sadly, it could have been otherwise,” said Westmoreland in his memoirs, but “otherwise” meant having followed through on progress he firmly believed to have been made by 1968, which sounds a lot like more of the same. Sorley laments the “waste” of 5 years prior when public support for helping South Vietnam was robust and an alternative strategy had a chance. Perhaps he is right that with a different commander during those years there wouldn’t be that wall in DC today, and, less importantly but still notably, we might be a less broken polity.

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