Posted on 07/31/2005 11:21:58 PM PDT by Former Military Chick
WASHINGTON - This is a tale of two men who were -- each in his own way -- icons of America's searing and bitter experience in Vietnam. Both left us this month, one at age 81 the other at age 91, and they left us wondering what it all meant and what they meant to us.
One was a symbol of a nation's failure to succeed in its costly and bloody mission in Vietnam. The other was a symbol of gritty personal courage and simple personal honor while a seemingly helpless prisoner of America's enemies in that war.
Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who was the American military czar in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, died on July 18 in a retirement home in Charleston, S.C. He was 91 years old and he never admitted defeat in his war. "It's more accurate to say our country did not fulfill its commitment to South Vietnam" was Westy's take on things.
From his days as first captain of the West Point Class of 1936 to the day he took off his stars, Westmoreland was the quintessential general -- jut-jawed, brushy browed, steely eyed, always starched and ironed to perfection.
He was not, however, a great military thinker and planner. His vision of victory in Vietnam rested on a massive American force of more than 500,000 soldiers using search-and-destroy tactics that focused on killing people, not taking territory. His over-arching strategic view was that we would defeat the enemy through attrition: We would kill so many more of them than they killed of us that eventually the North Vietnamese would drown in their own blood and sue for peace.
It didn't work. Not even in the best year we had in Vietnam did we ever kill more than the natural birthrate increase of the population of North Vietnam. In other words, the enemy was making babies faster than we could kill them. One of Westmoreland's own aides wrote later of his boss's idea: "A strategy of attrition is proof you have no strategy at all."
It did not help Westmoreland that during all of his time as military commander in Vietnam, President Johnson absolutely forbade American forces from pursuing the enemy into neighboring Laos and Cambodia. LBJ thus created sanctuaries for the North Vietnamese where they could rest, refit and reinforce. He also ceded to them strategic initiative: The North Vietnamese commanders would now decide when and where to fight the Americans and for how long.
Westmoreland salvaged one thing from the wreckage of Vietnam and his own reputation. In 1982 he led a march of Vietnam Veterans to the dedication of their memorial in Washington. He turned up and he was greeted warmly by the boys he had commanded during their season in Hell.
The silver-haired general seldom thereafter missed a chance to march with or visit with "his" Vietnam veterans. It became, his son James R. Westmoreland said, his reason for living.
The other icon of Vietnam who left us this month was Vice Admiral James Stockdale, 81, who spent seven years as the highest ranking American prisoner of war in North Vietnam. He flew 201 missions off the USS Oriskany before he was shot down in September 1965 at the dawn of that war.
Stockdale suffered the agonies of torture in the notorious Hanoi Hilton prison. His back was broken, his leg shattered by angry villagers, his shoulders wrenched from the sockets by a torturer.
Rather than allow himself to be used in a propaganda film, Stockdale smashed his own face with a wooden stool, and that earned him two years in leg irons. When he began to fear he would break under the torture, Stockdale shattered a pane of glass and slashed his wrists. He was near death when his jailers found him. It frightened them, and the treatment of Stockdale finally improved.Throughout his long captivity, Stockdale's wife, Sybil, worked hard on POW issues at home, doing everything she could to get her husband and all his fellow prisoners home safely.
Upon his release Stockdale was awarded the Medal of Honor, America's highest military medal of heroism. When he retired in 1979 he was one of the most highly decorated naval officers in history with 26 combat decorations.
Because of the support Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot gave to POWs and their families, Stockdale allowed Perot to draft him as his vice-presidential candidate in 1992. His Socratic self-questioning -- "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" -- sailed right over the heads of the TV audience during the first vice-presidential debate that year and left an honorable and courageous man something of a national laughingstock. He deserved far better.
Makes you wonder about the outcome of the war if we would have had a president with guts, and and politicians backing him up.
It did not help Westmoreland that during all of his time as military commander in Vietnam, President Johnson absolutely forbade American forces from pursuing the enemy into neighboring Laos and Cambodia.
Johnson also forbade the Air Force from destroying planes on the groud or runways-we had to give them a chance, don't you see. Westmoreland and the military did the best they could but Johnson's restrictions assured there be no victory. Then, when Nixon was elected and shifted towards policies that would prevail, Democrats in Congress, fearing success of a Republican president, cut all funding for the region. They got the failure they wanted and blame the military instead of themselves.
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