a. LTC Simpson, William J.—G2—[intelligence chief] . . . Col. Simpson was a fat, disheveled officer without any soldierly characteristics whatsoever who made a bad impression on all those people whom he briefed as a representative of the 1st Division.
b. LTC Dundon, James—Provost Marshal—LTC Dundon is completely without talent of any kind whatsoever. He had no initiative, no imagination and repeatedly performed his duties in a sluggish, unintelligent manner.
And so on. Lt. Col. John Hunt was “Valueless.” Lt. Col. James Koenig, an artillery battalion commander, “did not have the character to stand up and be counted” and to admit responsibility for “gross errors” in the firing of guns that had led to civilian and friendly military casualties. Another artillery battalion commander, Lt. Col. Elmer Birdseye, “was simply a weak officer.” Maj. Ronald Theiss, an infantry battalion commander, “led a verbal existence. He had all the right answers to all the questions” but did not really know what was happening in his unit. “He is a third rate officer who should not be entrusted with command of soldiers in combat.” DePuy also continued to tell subordinates, “I can tell if a commander is competent. He is going to take care of his people or get them killed. I don’t waste any time with that. I replaced them because no person’s career is worth the sacrifice of soldiers.”
Some of DePuy’s subordinates marveled at his combat skills. “When it came to the tactics of small units, DePuy was a genius,” said Alexander Haig, who served under the general as the division operations officer and then as a battalion commander. Paul Gorman, who also went on to become a general and who succeeded Haig as DePuy’s operations officer, concluded that DePuy “was an ideal commander. Above all, I learned to respect his instincts for finding the enemy and anticipating his next moves. He knew the larger aspects of the war and its finest details, right down to the rifleman’s level. I consider him an authentic military genius.”
But others found DePuy too quick to pull the trigger against subordinates, firing them when he should have been counseling them. Frederic Brown served several tours of duty under DePuy, both in Vietnam and at the Pentagon. The general mentored him closely, and the two men’s families dined together on occasion, despite the notable difference in their ranks. Yet Brown, who would retire as a three-star general, came away from his experience in the 1st Infantry Division profoundly ambivalent about DePuy’s handling of subordinates. “There was no question of brilliance of tactical command or of the presence of an exceptional professional standard,” he recalled. “The sun simply did not go down without platoons dug in, fires registered, et cetera.” At the same time, he said, there was “no [time allowed for] learning—immediate exceptional performance expected.” So, he concluded, “I believe the overall effect approached dysfunctional,” especially given that other units were harmed as the Army scrambled to send only its best officers to DePuy. Brown added, “Once he was away from combat he was a superb teacher, trainer, mentor to those who worked for him.”
Frederick Weyand, whose 25th Infantry Division operated just across the Saigon River from DePuy’s 1st Infantry, also disapproved of his colleague’s handling of personnel. “Bill would not accept officers that didn’t meet his standards from the onset. . . . Bill, I think, injured a lot of good officers who had the potential to be good leaders without giving them a chance to show it.”
Oddly, just as Terry Allen had appeared on the cover of Time magazine at around the time of his firing as commander of the 1st Infantry Division, DePuy was featured on the cover of Newsweek as the commander of the 1st ID a few weeks before his confrontation with the Army chief of staff. The parallel is meaningful, because DePuy effectively was the “Terrible Terry” of his time, an anachronism who brought old attitudes to a new war—and ran into trouble with his superiors because of it. The differences in the careers of the two men as commanders of the 1st Infantry underscore just how much the Army changed in the twenty-two years between Allen’s firing and DePuy’s meeting with Gen. Johnson. In World War II, a general so at odds with the system almost certainly would have been relieved, as Allen had been.
Ironically, because of the institution’s growing rejection of relief as a tool for managing generals, DePuy was more secure in his position than he realized. Gen. Johnson would not oust him. Instead, Johnson’s revenge would be to deny him command of the Army’s Infantry School, which DePuy had hoped to attain, nor would he allow him a position on the Army staff at the Pentagon. Rather, Johnson would send him into the Army’s version of exile at the time, expelling him into the uncertain, colder world of joint assignments—where, ironically, given DePuy’s emphasis on “search and destroy” firepower, he became the special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for counterinsurgency, a capacity in which he essentially advised the chairman on Vietnam.
After Gen. Johnson retired, DePuy would be welcomed back into the institutional Army, where his career revived. He would be promoted twice again, to full general, as he went on to lead the post-Vietnam rebuilding of the Army. His focus on tactics, discipline, and firepower likely was exactly what the Army needed in the 1970s and ’80s, and it would pay off in 1991 in the one hundred hours of fighting that forced Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.
In retrospect, relieving DePuy probably would have been the right thing for Gen. Johnson to do, in terms of fighting the Vietnam War. It is far from clear that DePuy’s enemy-focused, firepower-heavy approach was the correct course to take in Vietnam. He had the right answer—but to the wrong question. In World War II, the issue had been how to bring firepower to bear on the enemy, and DePuy had worked hard to become a master of that. “We are going to stomp them to death,” DePuy told a reporter in 1965. He added, revealingly, “I don’t know any other way.” But in Vietnam, killing the enemy was not the right way, or at least not the most important one. CIA veteran Robert Komer—like Westmoreland and McNamara a former Harvard Business School student—had been no shrinking violet in his own prosecution of the war, overseeing the Phoenix Program, which targeted Viet Cong cadres in South Vietnamese villages. But as Komer, whose nickname was “Blowtorch Bob,” put it, “firepower alone was not the answer to Vietnam’s travail.”
Unfortunately, firepower was the only answer the Army knew. As one Army historian wrote, “firepower became the dominant characteristic of American operations in the war.” Army Specialist 5 Donald Graham, who decades later would become chairman of the Washington Post Company, once noted that when one Vietnamese sniper pinned down four American soldiers, the Army used three air strikes, several helicopter rocket runs, and more than one thousand rounds of artillery to extricate them. Carlton Sherwood, a Marine, also saw a battalion commander call in air strikes against a solitary sniper. On one day alone, November 8, 1966, artillerymen in one operation fired more than fourteen thousand rounds.
Not noticed sufficiently in this storm of firepower was the civilian population, which was the real prize in the war but which the American military tended to treat as the playing field. Stuart Herrington, a young Army intelligence officer advising a Vietnamese unit, recalled working for months to pacify a rural area, including building a school and digging wells for an irrigation system. Then a two-man Viet Cong cell began sneaking into the village at night and sniping at a conventional Army unit that was temporarily in the area. The American commander wanted to respond by shelling the village. “With one salvo from his unit’s formidable array of howitzers and other weapons, that American unit could have undone all of the progress we had made,” Herrington said. “It took a lot of convincing and intervention with his chain of command to ‘persuade’ him that he could not do this, that the people living in that hamlet could not be wasted because of something they could not control.”
Such recklessness with weaponry was hardly confined to this instance. When William Fulton took over a brigade in the Mekong Delta in mid-1967, he regarded his predecessor as derelict for not responding to mortar fire, for fear of
hitting villagers. On his first night in command, he recalled, his ground radar system picked up “over 675 sightings, and I shot artillery at every one of them. Whether it was a water buffalo or a farmer clinking around in the bush, I leveled it. After that I never had another mortar round land in Dong Tam.” Fulton did not comment on the effect of the strikes on the loyalties of the villagers, which indicates that he either did not know or did not care. As Army Col. Gregory Daddis wrote decades later, “That the Army never could determine if it was winning or losing goes far in explaining the final outcome of the war in Vietnam.”
DePuy was the foremost proponent of this ham-fisted approach, magnificent in bringing firepower to bear on the battlefield but never seeming to pause to consider whether this might be counterproductive or even irrelevant. In that role, he personified the Army’s approach to Vietnam. It was only years later, after much reflection, that he confessed to some second thoughts. “You only see the things you’ve been doing well, not the big mistakes you’ve made,” he said in 1989. “When I was commanding the 1st Division, I was totally preoccupied with trying to find the 9th VC Division and the other main-force elements in my area.” While he had been tactically sound, he concluded, “I was deficient at the next level up—the operational level. I wasn’t thinking that way in Vietnam also and we paid the price for that.” Had DePuy as a general officer focused less on delivering firepower and more on its larger effects, he would have been a more effective officer, better serving his soldiers, his superiors, his cause, and his country. As his nemesis Harold Johnson would later say, “We got into a firepower war out there, where firepower was not really effective.” Expending enormous numbers of shells and other explosives meant little to an enemy who often was not there. Years later, DePuy’s protégé Donn Starry would come to agree: “The time gap between when the infantry contacted the enemy and engaged him with fire [through calls for artillery or air strikes] was sufficient for the enemy to get away,” he said. “So, in every case, we dumped this enormous load of firepower on an enemy that didn’t exist [at that spot], because he had had time to react.”
In February 1967, not long after his confrontation with Gen. Johnson, DePuy turned over command of the 1st Infantry Division and headed home. A month later, he wrote a letter of thanks to Maj. Gen. Terry Allen, long retired but still eager to help his old division learn to fight more effectively. “I have looked over your training guides and find them both interesting and useful,” DePuy wrote. “I have always hoped to meet you at some time.” Just six months later, Allen’s son and namesake, Lt. Col. Terry Allen Jr., would be killed in an ambush soon after taking command of a battalion in the 1st Infantry Division.
With DePuy’s departure from the 1st ID, the World War II approach to relief ended. Ironically, just as the Army was abandoning the practice of relief, Peter Drucker, the great expert on American management, cited the Army in his book The Effective Executive, first published in 1966 and influential in American business life for several decades:
It is the duty of the executive to remove ruthlessly anyone—and especially any manager—who consistently fails to perform with high distinction. To let such a man stay on corrupts the others. It is grossly unfair to the whole organization. It is grossly unfair to his subordinates who are deprived by their superior’s inadequacy of opportunities for achievement and recognition. Above all, it is senseless cruelty to the man himself. He knows that he is inadequate whether he admits it to himself or not.
The first example Drucker cited in support of his argument came not from the world of business but from the Army of the 1940s: “General Marshall during World War II insisted that a general officer be immediately relieved if found less than outstanding.” But the Army of the 1960s was a long way from the model Drucker highlighted in his book.
CHAPTER 18
The collapse of generalship in the 1960s
a. At the top
Under Lyndon Johnson, the discourse between civilian leaders and top generals that is essential to the conduct of war in the American system of government, already strained under Kennedy, began to break down altogether. President Johnson’s distrust of his generals extended well beyond the possibility of being challenged or misled by Westmoreland. “That’s why I am suspicious of the military,” Johnson told the most intimate of his biographers, Doris Kearns Goodwin. “They’re always so narrow in their appraisal of everything. They see everything in military terms. Oh, I could see it coming. And I didn’t like the smell of it. I didn’t like anything about it, but I think the situation in South Vietnam bothered me most. They never seemed able to get themselves together down there. Always fighting with one another. Bad. Bad.”
Policy is best formulated by using straightforward, candid dialogue to uncover and explore differences. But LBJ was afraid of those differences (“Always fighting with one another. Bad. Bad.”) and used the process designed to formulate policy instead to obscure and minimize differences. A popular myth, persisting even in today’s military, is that senior civilians were too involved in the handling of the war. In fact, the problem was not that civilians participated too much in decision making but that the senior military leaders participated too little. President Johnson, Maxwell Taylor, and Robert McNamara treated the Joint Chiefs of Staff not as military advisers but as a political impediment, a hurdle to be overcome, through deception if necessary. They wanted to keep the Chiefs on board with policy without keeping them involved in making it or even necessarily informed about it.
Under President Johnson, the U.S. government pursued a policy of graduated pressure, summarized thusly by Gen. Westmoreland:
The campaign of escalating pressure through bombing continued in the hope that ground and air action together would prompt Hanoi to negotiate. Appropriate pauses were to be made in the air war to signal American intent and to allow time for a North Vietnamese response.
Had the policy formulation system been working, the wisdom of that approach would have been explored. Instead the White House excluded the senior generals, and the senior generals did not appear to listen to other generals. The Westmoreland-DePuy approach hardly enjoyed universal support among military leaders. “It just seemed ridiculous on the face of it,” said Gen. Weyand, who especially disliked the emphasis on measuring progress by counting the number of enemy dead. “I don’t know what the body count of the 25th Division was, and I didn’t care a hell of a lot.” Attrition, body count, and “search and destroy” were the holy trinity of the Westmoreland approach to the war, Weyand said, and “I didn’t like any of them.”
Weyand was hardly alone. When retired Army Brig. Gen. Douglas Kinnard surveyed Army generals who had served in Vietnam about the conduct of the war, they were fairly evenly divided into three camps about the efficacy of the search-and-destroy concept. Thirty-eight percent said it was “sound,” 26 percent said it was sound at first but “not later,” and 32 percent called it “not sound.” DePuy himself would concede decades later that the strategy of attrition rested on an unexamined premise: “We . . . didn’t know about the redoubtable nature of the North Vietnamese regime. We didn’t know what steadfast, stubborn, dedicated people they were. Their willingness to absorb losses compared with ours wasn’t even in the same ballpark.” Another general, Bruce Palmer, came to a similar conclusion: “We were searching and destroying, and fighting a battle of attrition, and trying to break the will of Hanoi simply by chewing up people. But we underestimated those people. They don’t quit that way.” He added, correctly, that the other crucial factor the generals misunderstood was “how long our people back home would stand for it.” Had the policy formulation system not broken down, President Johnson and those around him might have better understood the military concerns about the conduct of the war, and his top generals might have grasped the domestic political limitations that approach would encounter.
Gen. Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 1962 through June 1964, fu
rther eroded the quality of civil-military discourse by playing down to McNamara the misgivings the other members of the Joint Chiefs had about the policy of attrition. McNamara, in turn, further reduced those concerns when conveying them to the president. The Chiefs, for their part, allowed themselves to be kept in the dark, cut off from the president. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (another graduate of Harvard Business School) and Gen. Taylor actually worked to reduce communication between civilian and military officials, cutting off back channels between the military and the White House. Such alternate lines of communication are important to help fix the policymaking process when it fails to examine key assumptions or bring to the surface lingering differences in views.
No one had asked the American people whether they wanted to engage in a lengthy war of attrition on the other side of the planet, and in fact all the historical evidence at the time suggests that they would not. Nonetheless, Westmoreland would blame them for interfering with his strategy: “One reason they [Hanoi] could not read our signal was that the message was garbled by the loud and emotional voices of dissent on the domestic scene and sensational news reporting by the mass media.” It could be argued that, if anything, the gradualist signals sent were interpreted in Hanoi to mean that the Americans would not launch a full-scale attack.
The Joint Chiefs did not fail utterly in their duty. Irked by the gradualist approach, they came close to rebelling against Taylor near the end of his time as chairman, in June 1964. On May 30 of that year, they met without him present and produced a statement for the defense secretary that expressed their concern over the “lack of definition, even a confusion in respect to objectives and courses of action related to each objective.” They also expressed doubt about the entire approach of using military force to send signals and messages. The Chiefs intended their message to be read by McNamara before he joined Taylor, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and other high officials for a meeting in Honolulu about the war. But on June 1, Taylor directed the memo to be withdrawn from McNamara’s office, on the grounds that he was unsure that its wording accurately reflected the views of the Chiefs. Incensed, the Chiefs met again, revised some of the language, and sent the new version to Hawaii with an explicit request that Taylor give it to McNamara. The Marine commandant also used his own Marine Corps back channels to verify that Taylor had represented the memo accurately. Such suspicions were well founded. “Despite the Chiefs’ urging, Taylor refused to submit their paper to the conferees, and after suppressing the memo, directly opposed the JCS position at the conference,” wrote Maj. Gen. H. R. McMaster.
The Generals Page 24
