Air University Review, November-December 1976

At a ceremony unveiling my official superintendent's portrait at West Point, the master of ceremonies asked [Mrs. Westmoreland] to say a few words. 'This is the second time I have seen Westy unveiled,' said Kitsy. 'The first time was on our wedding night.'" As a reader you may conclude that Mrs. Westmoreland is one up on you.

Certainly anyone trying to uncover what drove the man will find little help in A Soldier Reports.* The book tells a lot about the war--particularly the Army side of it--but only by indirection does it vaguely outline the man. It says little about his great passions (or his peccadilloes), or his highs, his lows, who his friends are, what he reads for pleasure (or if he does), if he goes to the movies, or has ever gotten drunk at a party, or knelt in prayer. In short, you feel unsatisfied, you wanted him to tell you more about himself.

*General William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Report (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976, $12.95), x and 446 pages.

His wife Kitsy comes across as a person of great warmth, full of joie de vivre. But the image left of General Westmoreland is a disturbing one. It appears that little else of substance could crowd with him into the stiff mold of "Duty, Honor, Country."

The book begins with the briefest of references to the General's pre-Vietnam career and ends with a valedictory entitled "Looking Back." Between are twenty-one neat chapters that average about twenty pages each. Though the reader occasionally has to leaf through the pages to pin down the exact year of a particular discussion, the chronological layout generally permits easy following. Unfortunately, the book is almost without documentation. Therefore, it is impossible to determine the source materials General Westmoreland used. This shortcoming would be regrettable in a book about any war. It is particularly unfortunate in a book about a war as divisive and contentious as the one in Vietnam.

The pomposity of the writing style of A Soldier Reports will tickle "M.A.S.H." enthusiasts, but just as surely it will disappoint anyone who expects a general's prose to be simple and clear--if not euphonious. (Surely, there is a less-complicated way, for example, to say the following: "As I had noted when escorting other civilian visitors, it was hard for the casual observer to comprehend the primitive countenance of insurgency warfare.")

And like many another toiler in the literary vineyard, the General is not above getting so entangled in what he is saying as to reveal more than he realizes: "Having directed my Deputy for air, General Momyer, to plan a two-part SLAM operation coordinating all available firepower, I gave it the code name NIACARA to invoke an image of cascading shells and bombs." Later in the book the reader may find himself wondering just how closely General Westmoreland did actually work with his Deputy for Air, particularly when the General makes this observation: "Unlike the American Air Force, the South Vietnamese Air Force had responsibility for helicopters " (The rescue heroes of the USAF may take umbrage at this.)

Although A Soldier Reports takes considerable pains to underline how politics and the public undercut the overall impact of U.S. military strategy in Vietnam, the author is uncomfortable enough at leading the "nonwinners" to cavil about the success of his North Vietnamese counterpart, General Giap. He particularly likes to dismiss as strategically unpraiseworthy those enemy successes he felt were owed largely to the failures of the French and the American bodies politic.

Time tends to obscure the fact that a tactical defeat for the French was turned into a strategic victory for the Vietminh not so much by what happened on the battlefield as by a lack of support in Paris for a seemingly interminable war . . . and also . . . following seven and half years of controversial war, cracks developed in the American will.

Somehow, though, it seems unfair to thrust the entire blame for the unfortunate outcome of Vietnam upon shoulders other than military shoulders. A portion of it, yes, but not all. For it is quite likely that the American will would not have developed cracks had American military actions been more successful than they were. Possibly some of the war's limitations foredoomed any tactics and strategy. But, as with all possibilities, the other considerations do exist. And just a hint of mea culpa on the part of any of our commanders would be refreshing. There is no arguing the fact that both the French and the American populace supported their armies in Vietnam for the better part of a decade. As a footnote, it is difficult to read the promises and the requests for more troops and a few more years without idly wondering if a point is reached in wars where challenges become more personal than national.

Immured in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, involved in the countless obligations inherent in commanding there, General Westmoreland probably had neither the time nor the inclination to understand the reasons behind the deteriorating support of the public. That he had little sympathy for anything other than a hawk's position seems apparent from his comments about some of those who did change their attitudes during the war:

"The cut and run people had apparently gotten to McNamara."

"Clark Clifford had turned dove and defeatist."

"The will of American politicians was faltering."

But at least his hawkishness has a constancy about it which a reader may balance by simply mixing in his own prejudices. The lack of constancy in other parts of the book often does not offer the reader this option, and they may leave him puzzled as to the author's real feelings. The following comments, for example, appear in different parts of A Soldier Reports:

One cannot read this book--look at its many pictures of General Westmoreland parachute jumping, or riding in cars with presidents, or looking down pensively at Vietnam from a helicopter--without being reminded that often the squeaking wheel really does get the grease, and that most important men are very capable publicists. Acknowledging that, what is the flaw that makes them commit gaffes such as Romney's, concerning his brainwashing in Vietnam, or the following by General Westmoreland as he explains his main reason for locating a 2000-man Filipino civic action group near the Cambodian border? "Knowing that the Cambodian commander across the border had a Filipino mother, I positioned the Filipinos near the border in the hope that some meaningful contacts might develop with the Cambodians." (Those who think we should not add militarization to the already commercialized honoring of the materfamilias can heave a sigh of relief: the tactic didn't work.)

And should poet/politician Eugene McCarthy ever read this book, he will doubtless be amused and slightly puzzled at the author's interpretation of the significance of the 1968 New Hampshire primary. General Westmoreland opines that it was" . . . erroneously interpreted by political pundits as it turned out, for time showed that most of those who voted against the President wanted to do more in Vietnam, not less."

Concerning the barely concealed disdain in which President Eisenhower held Richard Nixon, General Westmoreland says:

"The political campaign of 1968 was in full swing with President Eisenhower pulling for his former Vice-President, Richard Nixon. Knowing of the former President's close relationship with Nixon . . . etc." The slight feeling of distress aroused by this is not laid to rest when the General comments on his prescience: "Early in 1969 I developed an intuitive feeling that racial tensions were building throughout the army."

In Toto the varied impressions left by these disparate extracts from A Soldier Reports may create some doubt as to how well prepared General Westmoreland was to deal with the nonmilitary aspects of the problems that appeared on his desk. This doubt is not dispelled, moreover, by his occasional sojourns into the history of the country where he was the major U.S. military figure for four years.

For instance, concerning the two cynosures Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese nationalism, the General has far too little to say. He writes that Vietnamese hatred of the French" . . . enabled Ho Chi Minh to rise at the conclusion of World War II and forge a military arm called the Viet Minh." Later he notes that" . . .a frame-work on which to hang an insurgency was present when in 1956 the South Vietnamese Government--which had refused to accede to the Geneva Accords --declined to go along with a proviso of the accords for nationwide elections."

Before proceeding, one must admit that in some circumstances a commander's knowledge of the history of his area of operations falls into the "nice to have but hardly essential" category. Considering the volatility of Vietnam, however, with religious, political, and military groups all homing-in on nationalism as a rallying point for their particular interests, it would appear to have been prudent to arm General Westmoreland better than he apparently was concerning what actually had occurred in Vietnam during the critical post-World War II years.

To use an example, when the General briefly refers to the emergence of Ho Chi Minh, he makes it" . . . at the conclusion of World War II . . . . " In reality, as Jean Accoutered has noted, "Ho Chi Minh

was one of the founders of the Comintern and even seemed to be the possible leader of Asiatic Communism in the years 1925-1928." Furthermore, General Westmoreland notwithstanding, the Vietminh was principally a political not a military grouping; and it was hatred of the Japanese occupation, not the French, that."... became the focal point for nationalist resistance."

A Soldier Reports refers to the aborted 1956 national elections in a single paragraph, then offers no explanation as to why South Vietnam refused to participate. By sidestepping this, the author obscures one of the most critical phases of recent Vietnamese history. He also adds, unintentionally, to the divisive imagery of good guys and bad guys.

In 1956 the people of South Vietnam and the people of the United States probably had the best chance they ever would have to share in the establishment of a regime friendly to democratic interests. This could not be perceived, however, by a United States that had created its own iron curtain—containment--which separated it from Communism so effectively that it lost sight of the likelihood that Communism would splinter in development just as capitalism had, and that we would be able to accommodate to this. Though Tito would break with the Soviet Union during the same year that the national elections were to be held in Vietnam, the impact of this was not foreseen in the U.S., and the best way our government felt it could influence the growing strength and ambition of North Vietnam was to cast a proxy vote against the 1956 elections. As President Eisenhower said in his memoirs" . . . . possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai." This was equally apparent to the regime in Saigon.

Perhaps because of American hubris or the intransigence of John Foster Dulles's anti-Communism, insufficient importance seems to have been attached to the actual, as opposed to the imagined, positions of the two Vietnamese camps in Geneva in 1954. The South Vietnamese had the French doing much of the speaking for them, while the Vietminh went to Geneva in triumph. They had beaten the French, and though they gave up territory and initiative at the conference, they did so only because they were certain they could achieve their aims through the proposed national election:

. . . this promise of elections . . . constituted an essential condition insisted upon by the Vietminh at Geneva. France was prepared to pay the political price of that condition in order to get the armistice that she so urgently wanted. Her successor would be obliged to abide by that condition or face the certain resumption of hostilities.¹

Ironically, A Soldier Reports also makes this last point in referring to the 1973 cease fire, North Vietnamese violations, and U.S. obligations: " . . . under accepted practices . . . when one side violates a treaty, the other is no longer bound by it and can take punitive action . . . "

Some may disagree in the comparison of the 1956 and 1973 instances, since neither South Vietnam nor the U.S. signed the 1954 accords, but this is to quibble. The South Vietnamese government was represented and signed for by its proprietor, France, and the U.S. delegation at Geneva was under tremendous home pressure to avoid giving" …. the impression of approving a surrender to communism."² Hence it became an observer rather than a participant. Few lawyers, however, would argue that a contract had not been entered into.

Perhaps, it may be argued, most of the aforementioned is an overreaction to comments in A Soldier Reports that sin only in their brevity. But truth, not brevity, is at the heart of the issue. In a war characterized more by official duplicity than any other in our history, a war in which presidents blatantly lied and generals were reprimanded for falsifying reports, the truth cannot be taken for granted.

In this context the following statement by General Westmoreland unwittingly stresses the need for censoriousness and emphasizes the subtle pervasiveness of deceit in a painful, frustrating war.

To my mind the American people had a right to know forthrightly, within the actual limits of military security, what we were calling on their sons to do, and to presume that it could be concealed despite the open eyes of press and television was folly.

What if the good General had concluded otherwise? What if he had thought it possible to deceive the press?

1. George McTurnan Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (New York: The Dial Press, 1967), p. 57.

2. Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, editors, The VietNam Reader (New York; Random House, 1965).