“Even now, the easiest way to get into an argument at a VFW (or an American Legion) bar is to mention Vietnam. Seared into all who fought it – and many who merely lived through it – that conflict remains a bitter stew of second-guessing and recriminations”
– Time magazine’s Mark Thompson talking with author Lewis Sorley
Sorley, also a military historian, intelligence hand, and on the Vietnam staff of General William Childs Westmoreland 1963-’66, has written a new book about “The General Who Lost Vietnam,”
Divisions about that war are many. Designed to be a short, veiled intervention to halt a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, it ballooned into something vast and calamitous. Exacerbating divided opinion is the costly U.S. defeat of the Tet Offensive launched by the North Vietnamese Army January 31, 1968. That was just as American public patience was wearing down, and the official lies were wearing out. Some still blame the U.S. media for the war’s collapse. But the earliest critical on-the-ground reporting about war in Vietnam came from a Frenchman, Francois Sully, who had fought Nazis in World War II. He had emigrated to Indochina in 1949, reported on his country’s Vietnam misadventures for French publications. Time/Life hired him as a reporter-photographer to cover the 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. He barely escaped from behind Viet Minh lines. He next was hired by United Press International, then Time, then Newsweek wanted him. Sully had sources inside the Viet Minh and Viet Cong, inside the Saigon Palace in and in every province in the North and South. A polyglot, he was fluent in French, English, Vietnamese and Lao. All this made him an irritant to American officialdom. As a Newsweek reporter in 1962, he had a run-in with U.S. ambassador Frederick Nolting, Jr. at a dinner party. Nolting sarcastically asked, “Why, Monsieur Sully, do you always see the hole in the doughnut?” Sully nodded politely. “Because Monsieur l’Ambassador, there is a hole in the doughnut.” Sully was expelled by the South Vietnamese government that September as that hole was getting larger. David Halberstam of the New York Times, spending as much time as possible with grunts in the field and little time on the U.S. military’s daily briefings, early on reported that the war was very different than John Kennedy’s ambassador and his generals reported. Despite Kennedy’s pressure on The Times, Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize before being assigned elsewhere. Gloria Emerson, also early in Nam, sent out early warning signs. Oddly, an affecting and jarring report from an unexpected source grabbed American civilian attention. It’s sweeping, hip, no-holds-barred style woke them up. “Hell Sucks,” August 1968, was the first of Michael Herr’s scorching, funny, sad articles for Esquire magazine. It outraged both the doctrinaire right and left. At that, “I offended everyone,” Herr said of “Dispatches,” the famous book he wrote from those reports. The savagery of Nam could not be told in any way that was “pleasing” to either the right or the left. It was what it was. Sorley, author of “Westmorland: The General Who Lost Vietnam,” is the son and grandson of Army officers who also were graduates of West Point. Sorley was invited to remain at the Academy as an instructor and assistant professor. An executive officer on Westmoreland’s Vietnam staff 1963-’66, he then served as assistant secretary of General staff, Office of the Chief of Staff, commanded a tank battalion in Germany until 1972. He taught at the U.S. Army War College, attended the U.S. Naval College. He was a military intellectual. On retiring, he became chief of the CIA’s Policy and Plans Division, then worked with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Today, he is a member of the advisory council of National Defense Intelligence College and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Besides his own experience and that of associates, Sorley interviewed numerous former Westmoreland associates and had access to recently released documents. “Westy” was a complex man, Sorley writes. His ambition, determination and ability to charm influential people allowed him to rise quickly up the ranks. When Sorley speaks of the errors that lost Vietnam, not only on Westmoreland’s part, he speaks calmly, quietly deploying knowledge gathered from documents, military history and records, from officers and officials.
Westmoreland wedded himself to a war-of-attrition strategy before he got to Nam: Large sweep-and-destroy deployments which, he declared, would inflict so many casualties on the enemy that he would give up. It hadn’t worked for his swagger-stick and cigarette-holder flourishing predecessor, Paul Harkins, who one reporter noted, was aloof – he viewed everything from a helicopter. “His mind never touched down in Vietnam.” Westy was never flexible enough to reconsider when results showed that his strategy wasn’t working. Sorley documents Westmoreland’s juggling numbers to fit his strategy and evade reality. (Anyone insisting on reality was shipped out.) The number of forces facing U.S. troops in Vietnam were falsely minimized, the body count of enemy killed maximized. Body counts, Westy convinced Washington, was the only relevant measurement. He persuaded President Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (whom Westy scorned), and everybody else that his strategy was working, victory was inevitable. A fantasy. Body counts didn’t count. The North Vietnamese just kept sending more troops south. Large-unit sweeps in the deep northern jungle were possible “only with enemy cooperation, since they could break contact and limit casualties as they wished by withdrawing into sanctuaries across the border,” Sorely says.
LBJ, under the mounting pressure of several military advisers, the media and public opinion, appointed General Creighton W. Abrams as deputy to Westy, May, 1967. Creighton, along with General Harold K. Johnson (“a true battlefield hero”), envisioned a sharp change in strategy. Instead of Westy’s search-and-destroy tactics, Creighton pushed a clear-and-hold strategy, breaking U.S. forces into smaller units that would live with and train South Vietnamese civilians to defend their villages from guerrillas and conventional North Vietnamese incursions with heavy weapons. When Abrams took over from Westy in June, 1968, he fully implemented this doctrine, also that of expanding, training and equipping the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) and launching a counterinsurgency campaign. A similar, updated, version of the Abrams strategy was implemented by General David Patraeus in Iraq, including the controversial, yet often applauded, 2007 military “surge.” Sorley’s 1999 book, “A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of American’s Last Years in Vietnam” read by many high-level politicians and military leaders, influenced the troop surge. The book explained how policy changes, from Westmoreland’s rigidity to Creighton Abrams’ experiment, won the war on the battlefield, though the U.S. was to pull out due to lack of support by American citizens and Congress.
LBJ’s greatst error, Sorley suggests, was backing a flawed general too long, sacrificing too much in the process.