Westy On a lower level, I’m sure the importation of several hundred thousand white and black boys with money, which bought favor with Vietnamese women, turned more than one young Vietnamese man into Viet Cong. I have no objective proof of that except that were positions reversed, I’d have taken a very dim view of “me.” Recall the retaliation wreaked on French women who consorted with Nazis; they had their hair chopped off, and worse. Male umbrage at interloping foreign males with a monetary or military power advantage can be considered a universal male predilection. We exclusively enriched the South Vietnamese military elite and beguiled Vietnamese women with our dollars, two of the worst things we could have done. Our final disadvantage would be the timeline. The Vietnamese had all the time in the world; we did not. We could get away with an ineffective war strategy for a few years, but eventually the country would ask why we were not winning against a bunch of water buffalo farmers. General Westmoreland, the commander of the war, could rationalize our supposed success until the Tet Offensive in 1968 that saw Viet Cong penetrate the American Saigon command compound. Even though the Viet Cong lost decisively militarily during Tet and never recovered from the carnage, they obliterated the falsely positive progress reports from General Westmoreland and set in motion antiwar sentiment in America that effectively won the war for the North Vietnamese. To digress for a moment, General Westmoreland seems a caricature of our problem in Vietnam. He presented himself as the command general from central casting—tall, trim, immaculately groomed with a very short tapered haircut, impossibly starched and pressed khaki uniforms, and an impressive command presence. Observing his public briefing demeanor, one might wonder how he could possibly lose to the buffalo farmers. We should have suspected Westmoreland’s seeming invincibility. I had seen this phenomenon before, as I thought back to my high school wrestling days. Before the contest began, we would line up across the mat from the other team progressively by weight class. This meant you would be staring directly at your upcoming opponent. Distressingly, it seemed I always drew the captain of the other squad at my midlevel weight. But I noticed something else about my opponents. Those who were physically sculpted and over-muscled turned out not to be a significant worry. They often could not wrestle very well and had no choice but to pump iron to become selectively strong, in a narrow weight room sense. What struck terror in me was an opponent with a physique that did not inspire confidence, being very thin and rangy, or even slightly pudgy. This meant he had succeeded because he probably possessed cat-like quickness and a high level of skill in wrestling moves and did not need to overcompensate with muscles. From this perspective, Westmoreland proved a muscle-bound klutz. He could lift heavy weights, that is, military maneuvers, but could not seem to blend them with any appreciation of the necessary societal and political moves to succeed. The false confidence he inspired turned out to be disastrous for our country. He presented another example of the Starship Trooper conundrum; how could someone who appeared so terrifyingly competent and invulnerable ever be wrong? The history majors in President Johnson’s administration failed to successfully question why we were going to march off the cliff that was Vietnam. (Excerpt from Flying the Line, an Air Force Pilots Journey.)
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 15:29:19 +0000
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