The Cold War (48 page)

Despite the hopelessness of the fight, Frenchmen, incredibly, continued to parachute into the fortress. Over the last four nights of airdrops, 383 troopers of the 1st Battalion Colonial Paratroopers jumped into Dien Bien Phu; even more incredibly, 155 of these were Vietnamese, who had to know their fate if they fell into Viet Minh hands. Over the night and early-morning hours of May 6–7, the Viet Minh finally pried the French off the Eliane positions, and the collapse became general. At five-thirty in the afternoon of May 7, with the Viet Minh all over the central position and his own bunker about to fall, de Castries radioed to Hanoi that he was blowing up the ammunition and supply dumps. Cogny replied, “Well then, au revoir, old boy.” To the south, the troops in the isolated Isabelle position soon followed de Castries' surrender. They had rendered crucial artillery support to the end of the battle; moreover, they had
beaten off every attack the Viet Minh had launched on their position and had survived despite being inundated by the monsoon rains. They had held out past the point of any reasonable expectations. The total dead for the siege was well over ten thousand, of which the French and their allies had suffered close to a quarter.

The most direct result of Dien Bien Phu was the end of French rule in Indochina. The Geneva Conference would turn over all of North Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh; within a year the French had, for all intents and purposes, withdrawn from Southeast Asia. The Viet Minh returned about three thousand French prisoners in July and August. But of the rest, close to ten thousand had died on what became a death march to the prison camps, or in the camps themselves. Many who survived would soon be fighting a new guerrilla war in Algeria, one that would put paid to the French empire.

But longer-term results of Dien Bien Phu proved even more far-reaching. For the United States, the French defeat represented a distinct blow to the policy of containment. The failure of the United States to help the dying garrison at Dien Bien Phu would scar Franco-American relations and lead the French to withdraw from the military portion of the NATO alliance. Under Charles de Gaulle's unforgiving leadership, they would chart their own defense course. The strategic significance of the loss of part or all of Indochina hardly should have mattered on the harsh scale of economic and political power that would determine the course of the Cold War over the next thirty-five years. In the larger sense, the United States could have been the winner. Tragically, the strategic wisdom that had characterized the Eisenhowers, the Ridgways, and the Gavins disappeared with the next generation of political and military leaders. In 1964 the French government, recognizing the path on which the United States was so eagerly embarking, made available to American leaders their massive after-action report on the Indochinese war. It was placed by polite American officers in the library of the National Defense University, where it remains to this day, unread and unused.

The French military, however, assiduously studied the “revolutionary war.” In a sense they learned from it, and when the Algerian revolt broke out in November 1954, they applied the lessons to the new conflict. But they had learned only the military lessons. They won the Algerian war in military terms but lost the political war—and Algeria. And the terrible level to which they sank in winning that war came close to breaking their army and their nation.

In the end, it was the Vietnamese who lost the most from the Viet Minh's
victory at Dien Bien Phu. When Bernard Fall visited Hanoi in the early 1960s, he warned his hosts that the Americans were coming; the North Vietnamese reply was that the Americans were just like the French, with a little more firepower. A single incident at the battle of Khe Sanh in March 1968 suggests the extent of Hanoi's miscalculation. In a simple raid on a North Vietnamese bunker 850 yards outside of the perimeter, the attacking marine company received the support of no less than 3,600 rounds of artillery fire—approximately one fifth of all the artillery ammunition expended during the entire siege of Dien Bien Phu. Through 1972 the North Vietnamese were to persist in the pursuit of a decisive victory that would do to the Americans what Dien Bien Phu had done to the French. One can argue that in 1968 they sought not one but two decisive victories over the American military, one at Khe Sanh and the other with the Tet Offensive against South Vietnam's cities. In military terms, the result was a catastrophe for the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. They may have achieved their goal of a united Vietnam, but the cost staggers the imagination: They destroyed virtually every year group of young males from 1962 through 1975. Vietnam's current position as one of the poorest countries in a sea of Southeast Asian prosperity is very much the result of the hubris that the Viet Minh leadership gained from the victory at Dien Bien Phu.

LAURA PALMER

No American commander of the past century, except Douglas MacArthur, has been the center of more controversy—indeed, has received more opprobrium—than William Childs Westmoreland. He headed the U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam (MACV) for nearly four years, from June 1964 (ten years after Dien Bien Phu) until March 1968, and became the chief enforcer of the strategy of containment in Southeast Asia. It was a period that saw the Americanization of a struggle that had begun as a civil war, as our troop commitment rose from 16,000 to 500,000. In Korea, Mark W. Clark may have presided over the first war in our history that did not end in an obvious victory; Westmoreland will be forever associated with our first outright loss, even if he did not exit a loser.

For Westmoreland, Vietnam should have been the pinnacle of a distinguished military career. He had fought with distinction at the debacle of Kasserine Pass and later, in the invasion of Sicily. He had gone ashore at Normandy, had fought his way across France, and had crossed the Remagen Bridge under fire. He had led troops in Korea; had commanded one of the most prestigious of American divisions, the 101st Airborne; and had been superintendent of his alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A brave man who was a methodical planner and a gifted administrator, Westmoreland placed the characteristic American reliance on crushing force—the wielding of overwhelming military power that, he would argue, Washington continually denied him. He was probably right, to an extent. His critics would fault him for a lack of imagination, for an inability to see that he could win all the battles (which he did) and still
lose the war. They argued that he placed too much emphasis on military solutions and not enough on political ones. They were probably right, too.

Instead of adapting to the unconventional methods of Communist revolutionary warfare, Westmoreland chose to emphasize increasingly massive search-and-destroy missions. Unlike the French, who sought to take on and defeat the Viet Minh (now, with their own country, the North Vietnamese) in set-piece battles, Westmoreland had a simpler objective: to kill as many of the enemy as possible. The more casualties he could inflict, the more he could undermine the enemy's will to fight. The insurgency would end once its manpower pool dried up. It was as if, in initiating the Era of the Body Count, Westmoreland had ripped a page out of the 1916 German playbook at Verdun, when the principal object had not been to gain territory but to bleed the French white.

The strategy of attrition was at the heart of a 1982 CBS documentary charging that Westmoreland had ordered that statistics of Vietcong and North Vietnamese strength levels be “cooked,” to show that their force size was diminishing and that the expensive search-and-destroy efforts were achieving potentially war-winning results. The documentary, hosted by the tenacious Mike Wallace, was titled
The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception
. Westmoreland sued for libel. It was a court action that backfired against the plaintiff nearly as much as Alger Hiss's 1948 suit for slander against Whittaker Chambers, which led the defendant to produce the famous “Pumpkin Papers,” documents that Hiss had passed to the Communists through Chambers. Now, in the 1985 trial, the defense called a witness, a retired colonel in army intelligence who testified that Westmoreland had indeed ordered him to reduce estimates of Communist strength. The suit was settled out of court.

The trial was still in the public mind when Laura Palmer, a former journalist in Vietnam, interviewed the general in the summer of 1988 for the first issue of
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History
. Westmoreland, who had retired as chief of staff of the army in 1972, was unbending in his own defense. He may well have had a point in arguing that after the shattering defeat of the Vietcong in their Tet Offensive in the winter of 1968, the U.S. should have provided the men and matériel to launch an overpowering counteroffensive. It didn't. Quite to the contrary, the American public viewed Tet as a defeat, and President Lyndon
B. Johnson, like any good politician, counted heads. Westmoreland was called home soon after.

We may come to regard William C. Westmoreland as a good man trapped in an impossible role, trying to win an increasingly unpopular war, the most unpopular in our history. It was a war that could not be won, no matter what strategy the U.S. pursued.

LAURA PALMER worked as a journalist in Saigon during the Vietnam War. She is the author of
Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Memorial
. She writes and produces for television news.

T
HE BUMPER STICKER
on the back of his blue Buick says simply
, I
AM
A
VIETNAM
VETERAN.
He is General William C. Westmoreland, and with pride resonating behind every word, he'll tell you that he is the nation's number one Vietnam vet.

Westmoreland is perhaps the only American general to fight first for his country and then for the reputation of his soldiers. His message is blunt and succinct. In a speech delivered this summer before the Vietnam Veterans POW Association in Washington, D.C., he said, “Our children must know that we answered our country's call, to fight a war the military was not allowed to win, that we fought on even after our Congress, and indeed our people, lost their will to continue the battle, and we came home to a greeting of hostility or silence.”

During his forty years as a soldier, Westmoreland fought in three wars, including Vietnam, where he served as commander of all U.S. forces from 1964 until early 1968. He then returned to Washington, D.C., and became army chief of staff, a post he held until his retirement in 1972. During his career, he also served for several years as superintendent at West Point, his alma mater. With the exception of World War I, William Childs Westmoreland has lived the military history of this century, and he has the awards and decorations to prove it.

Westmoreland, now seventy-four, is a man at peace with his present and his past. He and his wife, Katherine, known to all as Kitsy, spend part of each sum
mer in Linville, North Carolina, in the gentle grasp of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They have reared three children, and their forty-one-year marriage has both strengthened and nurtured them, and is still an obvious source of joy. Last July we sat down for a chat, and my image of a man with the warmth of Mount Rushmore slowly dissolved. The public Westmoreland is the first man you meet: tough,
proud, tenacious, and smart. He is the four-star general who will always be asso
ciated with two three-letter words: Tet and CBS.

But there is another Westy, a private man who is tender, witty, and kind. Watching and listening to the play between the public and private personas is both fascinating and revealing. Imagine the commander in chief of American forces in Vietnam, sitting alone, late into the night, signing all of the next-of-kin letters by hand, and you'll begin to see what I mean.

How strongly do you identify with these veterans?

Very strongly. They were my boys. And they were boys. The average age, less than nineteen. The first thing that happened in the morning in Saigon was that I received the casualty lists. The whole time I was in Vietnam, and then when I was the army chief of staff, I personally signed the letters to the next of kin. I wouldn't allow the auto-pen to be used.

You signed every one?

I signed every one of them.

You'd do that in the morning?

Sometimes I'd be doing it at midnight. I worked it in. I gave it very top priority. Because of the importance of that letter and the sacrifice that had been made, I felt it was wrong for me to have a mechanical pen. There was a certain phoniness about those pens that I just couldn't accept.

Some of these casualties must have been people you knew.

Let me give you a good example. One day I was sitting in my office with the casualty lists in front of me. It was probably seven o'clock in the morning. On that list was a Pershing—General John J. Pershing's grandson, Second Lieutenant Richard Warren Pershing. I'd known him as a little boy that high.

Did you ever get used to situations such as that?

One of the first events that happened when I became army chief of staff was that Kitsy's brother, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Van Deusen, was killed, at
almost the exact time I was sworn in. I heard the news before the ceremony, but I didn't tell her until afterwards. The date was July 3, 1968.

What went through your mind?

A military man has to be able to accept these tragedies. I mean, you've got so much on your plate. You look and you grieve for about five minutes, and then you think about it the rest of the day; but in the meanwhile, you have people coming in the office, you have decisions to make, and so you set your feelings aside until you have a chance to reflect.

And when did that happen?

That evening with my wife. She loved that kid. He was the baby of the family. Outgoing, happy-go-lucky; everybody liked him. He and I used to play golf together, and we used to jog. He was so enthusiastic about commanding a battalion. I was devoted to him. He left a wife and three children.