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CHAPTER 1
Inheritance
When, in January 1964, General William C. Westmoreland was sent out to Vietnam as deputy to General Paul Harkins — and became, a few months later, his successor in command of U.S. forces there — he was chosen from a slate of four candidates presented to President Lyndon Johnson. The others proposed were General Harold K. Johnson, who instead became Army Chief of Staff; General Creighton Abrams, who was assigned as Vice Chief of Staff to Johnson; and General Bruce Palmer, Jr., who replaced Johnson as the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations. The choice of Westmoreland was a fateful one in terms of how the war would be fought. As later events demonstrated conclusively, the other three candidates were of one mind on that matter, all differing radically from Westmoreland's approach.
Beginning in the spring of 1965, Westmoreland repeatedly requested additional troops, the better to prosecute his self-devised strategy of attrition warfare. Simply stated, his intention was to inflict on the enemy more casualties than they could tolerate, thereby forcing them to abandon efforts to subjugate South Vietnam. A key element of this approach was reaching the "crossover point," the point at which allied forces were causing more casualties than the enemy could replace, whether through recruitment and impressment in South Vietnam or infiltration from North Vietnam. At a February 1966 conference with President Lyndon Johnson in Honolulu, Westmoreland had been given an explicit directive to achieve this goal, to demonstrate that he could make good on his chosen strategy of attrition. "Attrit by year's end, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces at a rate as high as their capability to put men in the field," he was told. While Westmoreland eventually claimed to have accomplished that mission, in fact — despite horrendous losses — the enemy buildup continued throughout his tenure, as did Westmoreland's requests for more and more troops to meet what he once called his "relatively modest requirements."
Westmoreland often predicted that the enemy was going to run out of men, but in the event it turned out to be the United States that did so, or at least found it extremely difficult to deploy more forces in the face of reluctance to call up reserve forces and pressures to reduce draft calls. Resistance to calling reserves was a constant during Lyndon Johnson's presidency, a stance apparently dictated by unwillingness to have the war affect the lives of millions of ordinary citizens and families affiliated with the reserves. Ironically, that impact fell instead on those who were drafted or volunteered for service. Meanwhile, failure to call up reserve forces had an adverse impact on all the services, and especially the Army, since all contingency plans for deployments of any magnitude had included at least partial reliance on mobilized reserves.
Types of units found primarily in the reserve components and needed in Vietnam now had to be created from scratch, while the existing units and seasoned leaders in the reserves remained unavailable. Instead the expansion of forces consisted, as Creighton Abrams once observed, "entirely of privates and second lieutenants," resulting in progressive decline of experience and maturity of the force, particularly at junior levels of leadership. This in turn seems directly related to later problems of indiscipline in the services.
It is significant that, even before Tet 1968, the administration had declined to add more troops, rejecting Westmoreland's request of the previous year for another increment of 200,000. In part this may have reflected declining political will and the effects of a growing antiwar sentiment, but widespread realization — even among those who supported the war — that Westmoreland's approach was not achieving significant results also spawned unwillingness simply to escalate the level of confrontation with no assurance that anything would be gained in the process.
Losses imposed on the enemy had been inflicted through concentration on what was often referred to as the "war of the big battalions," an operational approach emphasizing multibattalion, and sometimes even multidivision, sweeps through remote jungle areas in an effort to find the enemy and force him to stand and fight. These "search-and-destroy" operations were costly in terms of time, effort, and matériel, but often disappointing in terms of results. The reality was that the enemy could avoid combat when he chose; accept it when and where he found it advantageous to do so; and break contact at will as a means of controlling casualties. He was aided in this by the use of sanctuaries in adjacent Laos and Cambodia, off limits to allied forces because of political restraints. His principal logistical support route, nicknamed the Ho Chi Minh Trail, also branched out into South Vietnam from main arteries spiking down through those adjoining countries.
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge reflected some of the frustration this situation induced in a June 1966 cable to Lyndon Johnson. "The best estimate is that 20,000 men of the Army of North Vietnam have come into South Vietnam since January," he wrote, "and as far as I can learn, we can't find them."
Other costs derived from the single-minded concentration on the Main Force war — notably neglect of the advisory task and of the need to improve South Vietnam's armed forces, and equally neglect of the crucial pacification program, thereby leaving largely undisturbed the enemy's shadow government, its infrastructure within the villages and hamlets of rural South Vietnam. "Westmoreland's interest always lay in the big-unit war," said his senior intelligence officer, Lieutenant General Phillip B. Davidson. "Pacification bored him." And, in his enthusiasm for taking over the Main Force war, Westmoreland in effect pushed the South Vietnamese out of the way, thus also abdicating his assigned role as the senior advisor to those forces and essentially stunting their development for a crucial four years.
At the end of 1966, the Pentagon Papers authors later observed, "the mood was one of cautious optimism, buoyed by hopes that 1967 would prove to be the decisive year in Vietnam." In an interview published in Life magazine, Westmoreland went further. "We're going to out-guerrilla the guerrilla and out-ambush the ambush," he asserted. "And we're going to learn better than he ever did because we're smarter, we have greater mobility and firepower, we have more endurance and more to fight for. ... And we've got more guts." This was ominous, for Westmoreland had by then been in Vietnam for nearly three years. Indeed, the previous year he had told the President that the war would be over by the summer of 1967.
In February 1967 General Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made one of his periodic visits to South Vietnam, afterward reporting to the President that "the adverse military tide has been reversed, and General Westmoreland now has the initiative. The enemy can no longer hope to win the war in South Vietnam," he added. "We can win the war if we apply pressure upon the enemy relentlessly in the North and in the South."
Instead of being the decisive year in the war, 1967 became the year in which criticism of Westmoreland's war built from many quarters. "From inside and outside the government," wrote historian George Herring, "numerous civilians joined [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara in urging [President] Johnson to check dissent at home by changing the ground strategy. [Nicholas] Katzenbach, [William] Bundy, McNamara's top civilian advisers in the Pentagon, a group of establishment figures meeting under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment, and the president's own 'Wise Men' agreed that Westmoreland's search-and-destroy strategy must be abandoned."
In Vietnam, reported William Conrad Gibbons, compiler of an authoritative collection of documents on the war, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge "was so strongly opposed to attrition strategy that he contemplated resigning in the spring of 1967 and making a public statement of opposition." Nor was the military leadership in full support. Lieutenant General Frederick C. Weyand, commanding a U.S. corps, was convinced that "the key to the war was in providing security to the villages and towns of Vietnam."
While he was Chief of Staff, General Johnson had sponsored a study called "A Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of Vietnam," known as PROVN for short, that thoroughly repudiated Westmoreland's concept, strategy, and tactics for fighting the war. "People — Vietnamese and American, individually and collectively — constitute both the strategic determinants of today's conflict and 'the object ... which lies beyond' this war," the study maintained. Thus the imperative was clear: "The United States ... must redirect the Republic of Vietnam — Free World military effort to achieve greater security." Therefore, read the study's summary, "the critical actions are those that occur at the village, the district and provincial levels. This is where the war must be fought; this is where the war and the object which lies beyond it must be won." The study also made it clear that body count, the centerpiece of Westmoreland's attrition warfare, was not the appropriate measure of merit for such a conflict. What counted was security for the people, and search-and-destroy operations were contributing little to that.
Abrams was Army Vice Chief of Staff when PROVN was conducted, and the results were briefed for his approval. As would become clear when he took command in Vietnam, they subsequently formed the blueprint for his fundamental revision of how the war was fought.
While the PROVN study was in progress, General Johnson made one of his many trips to the war zone, meeting in the field with a group of colonels. "We just didn't think we could do the job the way we were doing it," recalled Edward C. Meyer, then one of those colonels and later Army Chief of Staff, and that's what they told Johnson. Another officer, who said he had pleaded with Westmoreland to "end the big unit war," told Johnson, "we're just not going to win it doing this."
Even the American public sensed the effects of Westmoreland's having shouldered the South Vietnamese armed forces out of the way. "At a highest level meeting today," General Wheeler cabled Westmoreland in late October, "a major subject concerned the deteriorating public support in this country for the Vietnamese war. One of the problems cited by a number of persons is the fact many people believe that the ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] is not carrying its fair share of the combat effort."
Richard H. Moorsteen, a White House staffer assigned to the pacification program, reported from Vietnam that "chasing after victory through attrition is a will-o'-the-wisp that costs us too much in dollars, draft calls and casualties, makes it too hard to stay the course." Similar views were expressed in early December by a group of prominent Americans, including General Matthew Ridgway, meeting under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The emphasis should not be on the military destruction of Communist forces in the South but on the protection of the people of South Vietnam and the stabilization of the situation at a politically tolerable level," their report held. "Tactically, this would involve a shift in emphasis from 'search-and-destroy' to 'clear-and-hold' operations."
McNamara's Systems Analysis office in the Pentagon, run by Dr. Alain Enthoven, concluded that "small patrols were much more effective and much less costly in casualties than big sweeps" and recommended "expanded use of small-unit operations, particularly patrols." Enthoven also accurately characterized the task at hand. "I see this war," he wrote to McNamara in May 1967, "as a race between, on the one hand, the development of a viable South Vietnam and, on the other hand, a gradual loss in public support, or even tolerance, for the war. Hanoi is betting that we'll lose public support in the United States before we can build a nation in South Vietnam. We must do what we can to make sure that doesn't happen. ... Our horse must cross the finish first."
Even S. L. A. Marshall, a military columnist usually very supportive of the senior leadership, raised the key question: "Do the big sweeps such as the envelopment of the Iron Triangle or the attack on War Zone C really have a payoff justifying an elaborate massing of troops and mountains of supply? Many of the generals doubt it and the statistics of what is actually accomplished gives some substance to these doubts. "Surveyed after the war, Army generals who had commanded in Vietnam confirmed those doubts. Nearly a third stated that the search-and-destroy concept was "not sound," while another 26 percent thought it was "sound when first implemented — not later." As for the execution of search-and-destroy tactics, a majority of 51 percent thought it "left something to be desired," an answer ranking below "adequate" in the survey instrument.
"These replies," observed the study's author, Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard, "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." Meanwhile, neglect of other aspects of the war continued to be costly. Late in the year Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker reported "very little overall gain in population security."
Finally even General William E. DePuy, Westmoreland's closest tactical advisor as his Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, conceded that their chosen methods had been flawed. "Our operational approach was to increase the pressure on the other side (size offeree, intensity of operations, casualties) in the belief that it had a breaking point," he wrote after the war. "But the regime in Hanoi did not break; it did not submit to our logic."
At a "Tuesday Lunch" at the White House in early December 1967, Secretary of Defense McNamara told Lyndon Johnson and their most senior colleagues of his conviction that "the war cannot be won by killing North Vietnamese. It can only be won by protecting the South Vietnamese." In this same season William Bundy pressed the President to conduct a comprehensive review of ground strategy for the war at the "highest military and civilian levels," pointing out that "if the strategy was not wise or effective, the work of the field commander 'must be questioned.'"
Despite this barrage of criticism, Westmoreland survived, for he retained one very important patron, ultimately the only one who mattered. "Aware as I am of the mistakes Generals have made in the past," LBJ told Dean Rusk at that same Tuesday Lunch, "I place great confidence in General Westmoreland." But even LBJ recognized the problem. "We've been on dead center for the last year" in Vietnam, he told the Wise Men in early November.
During 1967, however, very important augmentations of the American leadership in Vietnam took place, beginning in March with the appointment of Ellsworth Bunker as ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam. Bunker was a consummate gentleman and an unusual diplomat, having come to diplomacy professionally after a long and successful business career. The Bunkers were descendants of French Huguenots; the name, anglicized from Boncoeur (good heart), fit him well. Bunker had the qualities Creighton Abrams admired most — integrity, fortitude, loyalty, dedication, selflessness, and wit — and those would soon form the basis for an enduring friendship between the two men.
That same month Lieutenant General Bruce Palmer, Jr., had been ordered to Vietnam, where he soon became deputy commander of the Army component of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Palmer, like Westmoreland and Abrams a 1936 West Point graduate, had gone initially into the horse cavalry and then, as had Abrams, migrated to the armored force when World War II was imminent. Known throughout the Army as a man of fine intellect and rock-solid integrity, Palmer led American forces deployed to the Dominican Republic in 1965 and there, while demonstrating sound judgment and a cool head in a confused and confusing situation, had come to know and respect Ambassador Bunker and in turn had earned the respect and liking of the older men.
In May, pursuant to Lyndon Johnson's public commitment to strengthen U.S. leadership in Vietnam and to deploy the first team, Robert Komer was dispatched to take charge of American support for pacification, newly brought under control of the military headquarters. Komer was a professional bureaucrat who had begun as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, then moved to the White House staff during Lyndon Johnsons presidency. At the same time General Creighton Abrams was assigned as deputy to Westmoreland.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Better War"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Lewis Sorley.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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