So has 4 star General William Westmoreland...
Westmoreland was the ramrod straight, tough talking general who assured Congress and the public month after month and year after year that we were winning the Vietnam War and victory was in sight. The truth, unfortunately, was that the war was never winnable and the delay tactics simply doomed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to an early death. Westmoreland has come to symbolize the denial of political and military reality.
"I have no apologies, no regrets. I gave my very best efforts," Westmoreland told The Associated Press in 1985. "I've been hung in effigy. I've been spat upon. You just have to let those things bounce off."
Westmoreland died Monday of natural causes at Bishop Gadsden retirement home, where he had lived with his wife, said his son, James Ripley Westmoreland. He was 91.
The silver-haired, jut-jawed officer, who rose through the ranks quickly during World War II and later became superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., contended the United States did not lose the conflict in Southeast Asia.
"We held the line. We stopped the falling of the dominoes," he said in 1985 at the 20th anniversary of the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade's assignment to Vietnam. "It's not that we lost the war militarily. The fact is, we as a nation did not make good our commitment to the South Vietnamese."
As commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, Westmoreland oversaw the introduction of ground troops in South Vietnam and a dramatic increase in the number of U.S. troops there. In vain, he sought permission to engage enemy forces in their sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam.
American support for the war suffered a tremendous blow near the end of Westmoreland's tenure when enemy forces attacked several cities and towns throughout South Vietnam in the Tet Offensive in 1968. The American public was stunned that the enemy had gained access to the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, even if only for a few hours.
Westmoreland asked for reinforcements in response to the attacks but was recalled to Washington to serve as Army chief of staff, a post he held until 1972.
Later, after many of the wounds caused by the divisive conflict began to heal, Westmoreland led thousands of his comrades in the November 1982 veterans march in Washington to dedicate the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
He called it "one of the most emotional and proudest experiences of my life."
Westmoreland retired from active duty in 1972 but continued to lecture and participate in veterans' activities.
James Gregory, president of the Charleston chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America, said Westmoreland participated in the chapter as an at-large member and remained physically active until about a month ago.
"He got a raw deal in Vietnam. The war was actually run by the White House, not by the leadership in the field," said Gregory, who served with Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970.
In 1982, he filed a $120 million lawsuit against CBS over a documentary "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception," which implied he had deceived President Johnson and the public about enemy troop strength in Vietnam.
At the time, Westmoreland said the question "is not about whether the war in Vietnam was right or wrong, but whether in our land a television network can rob an honorable man of his reputation."
After an 18-week trial in New York, the case was settled shortly before it was to go to the jury.
In Westmoreland v. CBS, Westmoreland sued Wallace and CBS for libel, and a long and arduous trial process began. Westmoreland surprisingly settled with CBS for an apology, about as much as they had originally offered. Research after the trial uncovered the reason: while CBS' internal investigation revealed that they had used shoddy journalistic practices, Judge Leval's instructions to the jury over what constituted "actual malice" to prove libel were so weighted in favour of the defense that Westmoreland's lawyers were certain he would lose.
He never got the new face of war>
In a 1998 interview for George magazine, Westmoreland dismissed the battlefield prowess of his opponent North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. "Of course, he [Giap] was a formidable adversary," Westmoreland told correspondent W. Thomas Smith, Jr. "Let me also say that Giap was trained in small-unit, guerilla tactics, but he persisted in waging a big-unit war with terrible losses to his own men. By his own admission, by early 1969, I think, he had lost, what, a half million soldiers? He reported this. Now such a disregard for human life may make a formidable adversary, but it does not make a military genius. An American commander losing men like that would hardly have lasted more than a few weeks." |
