Westmoreland in Vietnam, and After
August 19, 2005
In 1965, Time Magazine named General William Westmoreland “Man of the Year,” as a measure of how popular the U.S. commander and his strategy for Vietnam had become. America had fallen for Westmoreland’s get-tough philosophy, but his “body counts” showing Vietnamese casualties was having more of an effect for showing American casualties. By mid-1966, American troop levels reached 300,000 and continued to climb to over half a million in 1967. Then the Tet Offensive changed everything.
In 1968, a disillusioned Lyndon Johnson called it quits. A divided, discouraged country no longer had the stomach for a protracted and seemingly losing war. Westmoreland was recalled, promoted to Army Chief of Staff where he languished until retiring in 1972. He never reached the pinnacle as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Pointedly, his successor and fellow member of the West Point Class of 1936, Gen. Creighton Abrams, pursued an opposite strategy: He pulled the American troops back to protect the cities and pushed the Vietnamese troops to do more fighting. In Washington, the Nixon-Kissinger team called it the “Vietnamization” of the war, while they negotiated with the enemy, reaching an agreement to withdraw from Vietnam in 1973. South Vietnam fell in April 1975. Under Westmoreland, with his aggressive “search and destroy” strategy from 1964 to 1968, the U.S. lost 46,000 troops killed in action. But numbers and politics are for history books. Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam, while fighting side by side, and sometimes killed by the same bombs, lived in parallel universes. For this Vietnamese American living in Saigon in the ‘60s, Westmoreland’s legacy has long condensed into two impressions: how the country was changed and how the white men saw the brown-skinned people. After the Marines landed in 1965, Saigon became a militarized city with checkpoints, sandbags, barbed wires and waves of bombings that would be called “terrorist” in today’s lingo. The countryside became dangerous, the politics more corrupt and a whole post-WWII generation lost faith in both its elders and its hope in the future. One of the few heroes of that dark age was Trinh Cong Son, a poet and songwriter who lamented against the war and prayed for peace. One of the few times that the parallel tracks converged was Westmoreland’s perception of what he called the “value” of life. Hearts & Minds, a documentary film by Peter Davis, recorded the general saying: “The Oriental does not put the same price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.” Now that he is buried in the ground of his beloved West Point, may he rest in peace. But may his career remain a lesson for today’s leaders waging a war among brown-skinned people, in a far away place, without a clear purpose, without a plan and increasingly without the support of people back home.
Vu-Duc Vuong is a teacher and writer in the Bay Area. Contact him at vuduc.vuong@gmail.com.
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