The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Peers listed thirty soldiers, among them two generals and three colonels, who appeared to have committed offenses in the cover-up. This was on top of the criminal charges that would be brought for the massacre itself. Of the accused, the Army for legal reasons chose not to prosecute those who had left the service. William Eckhardt, a career Army lawyer, was tapped to be the lead prosecutor. He flew to Atlanta to begin reading the investigative files. By the end of his first day of work, he recalled, he was nauseated. “I threw the files against the wall and went and ran about five or six miles.” His horrified conclusion resembled that of Gen. Peers: “The facts are worse than are reported. There are over five hundred [dead]. They didn’t report to you the sexual abuse, the rapes, the sodomy, the looting.”

  The Army ultimately brought charges against sixteen men, but the charges were dropped against twelve of them after the initial trials went badly. Of the five soldiers who were tried, only one, Lt. William Calley, was convicted. Ernest Medina, the company commander, and Oran Henderson, the brigade commander, were acquitted. (Frank Barker, the battalion commander, had died in combat.) “This prosecutorial record was abysmal,” conceded Eckhardt, the prosecutor, who noted that his efforts were subjected to a series of unusual political pressures. Even the punishment of Calley, the lowest-ranking officer in the chain of command, was reduced by President Nixon, who ordered that he be released from jail and allowed to live under house arrest in his Army apartment while his case was appealed. Calley’s sentence of life in prison was eventually commuted to ten years, and he was paroled well before that was served, in November 1974.

  Despite Peers’s efforts, the Army also protected Koster, the division commander. Peers believed that Koster had been derelict in his duty, had given false testimony, and had conspired to cover up what had happened. As the general who presided over the My Lai massacre, Koster had brought more disrepute upon the Army than any general in American history since Benedict Arnold. Westmoreland ordered Koster to step aside as superintendent of West Point and replaced him with William Knowlton, who was surprised to find that Koster would not vacate Quarters 100, the superintendent’s official residence. “Poor Sam Koster, once the fact hit him that he was no longer the superintendent, really went into kind of a state of shock and just continued to live in the house for another month or two,” Knowlton recalled.

  Yet Lt. Gen. Jonathan Seaman, the officer selected to decide the disposition of the case against Koster, chose not to send Koster’s case to a court-martial and instead gave him the minimum punishment possible: a demotion to brigadier general and a letter of reprimand. “My opinion was that there was insufficient evidence . . . for obtaining a conviction,” Seaman later told an Army historian. “I wrote Koster a strong letter of censure. He had failed to carry out a division commander’s duties. Failed to send anyone to the battlefield to investigate.” This was an extraordinarily lenient interpretation that ignored Koster’s role in the cover-up and his lies to investigators. Koster nevertheless protested that even this lightest of punishments was “unfair and unjust.”

  Koster was allowed to stay in the Army, wearing the uniform he had disgraced, until January 1, 1973. Peers, disturbed by Seaman’s light hand, told Gen. Westmoreland that it was “a travesty of justice and would establish a precedent that it would be difficult for the Army to live down.”

  Seaman’s decision had the ripple effect of poisoning the cases against subordinate officers. If the commanding general was not going to prison, soldiers on court-martial juries were likely to reason, then those he commanded should not, either. Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hodson, the Army’s top lawyer and its judge advocate general during this period, said that charges had to be dropped against most of those involved, because military juries simply were not going to hold the soldiers responsible. In his official oral history, recorded just months after he retired in 1972, Hodson seemed remarkably detached from the entire affair, not only unable to remember the number of officers charged (“I think it was in the neighborhood of about 12”) but also getting the date of the massacre wrong (“Along about the latter part of February 1968”).

  One of the soldiers who suffered most after the revelations was Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had intervened to stop the killings and had repeatedly tried to get his superiors to look into what had happened that day in the village. Some of his comrades called him a traitor. When he appeared before a congressional committee in April 1970, he was treated as a hostile witness. When Thompson hesitated in one response and said “I think,” he was blasted by Rep. Edward Hébert, the Louisiana Democrat, who asked, “What has blunted your memory so dramatically between December and April? At that time you were vocal and articulate. . . . This is almost the end of April, and I find a different man on the stand. The man I find on the stand today has a hard time remembering. He is not positive. He halts.” Thompson defended himself simply, even humbly. Asked if he had charged that “indiscriminate firing” had occurred, he responded, “No sir, I didn’t use those words, because I stay away from big words.”

  Thompson found little peace. For years he would endure, in his own words, “death threats at three o’clock in the morning, mutilated animals on your doorstep, and I’m sitting here confused as hell.”

  Peers’s core conclusion about the affair was that Army leadership had been wanting. “It appeared to the Inquiry that at all levels, from division down to platoon, leadership or the lack of it was perhaps the principal causative factor in the tragic events before, during, and after the My Lai operation.” This was the third great sin of My Lai. The first had been the crime itself, the second was the chain of command’s cover-up, and now we come to the last: the failure of Army leaders to react properly to all of it. “Thus,” Peers wrote, “the failures of leadership that characterized nearly every aspect of the My Lai incident itself had their counterpart at the highest level during the attempt to prosecute those responsible.” In other words, the Army failed in its response to My Lai.

  This was the low point of the U.S. Army in the twentieth century. In contrast to the extreme accountability practiced by George Marshall during World War II, the Army of the Vietnam era failed to hold its generals accountable. Instead it went into a defensive crouch, letting the general responsible for the affair off the hook and blaming others for its problems. In sum, the generals who were running the Army acted less like stewards of their profession and more like the keepers of a guild, accountable only to themselves. This posture would have long-lasting pernicious effects on American generalship.

  A stunning Army study of Army officers

  My Lai held one more surprise for Gen. Westmoreland. When Gen. Peers finished his report on the cover-up, he delivered a separate, confidential memorandum to Westmoreland. My Lai, Peers warned, was not just a matter of a criminal platoon leader or even a rotten battalion. Rather, Peers had come to believe that the Army officer corps had drifted far from its stated values. It had become an organization in which lying and hypocrisy were widespread and tolerated, perhaps encouraged and required. What concerned him most was that “so many people in command positions—perhaps as many as fifty—had information that something most unusual had occurred during the My Lai operation and yet did nothing about it. . . . Had any of these persons made their knowledge known to the proper investigative authorities, the whole blanket of obscurity covering the incident would have been rolled back and the true facts brought to light.” Why had so few Army officers done the right thing? Why had a helicopter pilot been the only one to speak up on the day of the killings, and why was an enlisted soldier the one to write the letter that triggered the investigation? Where was the officer corps? Peers recommended that the chief of staff order a review of the state of Army ethics and morals.

  One of the most striking paragraphs in Peers’s lengthy memo to Westmoreland addressed this failure of leadership:

  Because men’s lives are at stake in combat, there can be no acceptan
ce of mediocre leadership nor mediocrity in performance of other duties relating to the support of combat. Failures in leadership or in the performance of duty in combat are due cause for and should demand the removal or reassignment of the officer concerned to positions of lesser responsibility.

  What was most extraordinary about this statement was that it needed to be said at all. Removing poor combat leaders had been a long-standing Army practice, as seen in the two world wars. But it had been lost in the previous twenty years, and now the chief of staff of the Army had to be told that failures should not be left in positions of command.

  Westmoreland did not mention this memo in his memoirs, but it, along with Peers’s evidence of lying up and down an entire division chain of command, led to perhaps the most memorable act of Westmoreland’s four years as chief of staff. “The memo shook Westy to the core,” recalled Maj. Gen. Franklin Davis. Exactly one month later, Westy ordered the commandant of the Army War College to conduct an analysis of the “moral and professional climate” of the Army officer corps. He asked that it be given to him by July 1.

  The report was compiled and written in just ten weeks, by Col. LeRoy Strong, Lt. Col. Dandridge Malone, and Lt. Col. Walter Ulmer. When it landed on Westmoreland’s desk, it startled him. “He said that we should use it, but we should keep it close hold because the Army had just been beaten over the head and this was just another reason to be beaten over the head,” recalled Ulmer. Westmoreland likely was right about how the report might be used. Yet he missed an opportunity, because he cast a shroud over a work that showed three Army officers—Strong, Malone, and Ulmer—at their best, being clear-sighted and doing their utmost to serve the country as they candidly examined the flaws of their institution.

  “The traditional standards of the American Army officer may be summarized in three words: Duty—Honor—Country,” the report began. But, it continued, “officers of all grades perceive a significant difference between the ideal values and the actual or operative values of the Officer Corps.” One of the report’s authors, Col. Malone, an Army infantry officer turned social psychologist, later concisely condensed the report into one sentence: “Duty, honor and country” had been replaced by “Me, my ass and my career.” This perception held true across the service, with 450 officers surveyed, from the combat arms to support functions and from junior officers to senior ones, the report noted. If that were not enough, it also pointed toward a new model of officer that was emerging. This, it said, was

  an ambitious, transitory commander—marginally skilled in the complexity of his duties—engulfed in producing statistical results, fearful of personal failure, too busy to talk with or listen to his subordinates, and determined to submit acceptably optimistic reports which reflect faultless completion of a variety of tasks at the expense of the sweat and frustration of his subordinates.

  Close to half the officers surveyed described a lack of honesty in reporting data, in everything from body counts to the number of soldiers going AWOL. If there were too few of the former or too many of the latter, a commander might well fear for his chances of promotion. “Nobody out there believes the body count,” one officer stated. “They couldn’t possibility believe it. . . . We had one lad even tell us of an experience where he almost had to get in a fist fight with an ARVN adviser over an arm, to see who would get credit for the body, because they were sorting out pieces.” One of the dismaying lessons that soldiers took away from My Lai, reported one officer, was that they should always carry an AK-47 rifle, the Communists’ weapon of choice, “so that if they did kill someone they’ve got a weapon to produce with the body.” Another officer reported being ordered by a major general “that there will be no AWOLs.” He concluded that “dishonesty is across the board.”

  The Army as an institution was all too willing “to accept mediocrity,” said one colonel, who added that “with few exceptions what I feel to be the most serious problems stem from this prevalent attitude.” But that was not the worst of it, the respondents reported. Senior officers, “including generals,” showed a “moral laxness,” yet this did not stop them from being promoted, added a major. “Ratings are solely on results, no matter how obtained.” Maintaining one’s integrity had become a career impediment in the Army, said one major: “The honest commander who reports his AWOLS, etc., gets into trouble while the dishonest commander gets promoted.” Another major reported that he had been under the command of a colonel who “led by fear, would double-cross anyone to obtain a star, drank too much and lived openly by no moral code. He is now a BG!”—that is, a brigadier general. The Army forced officers into acting immorally, said another officer: “Unless you are willing to compromise your standards . . . you will not survive in the Army system.” A captain agreed that “it’s necessary today to lie, cheat and steal to meet the impossible demands of higher officers.”

  The Army’s leaders did not see the problem, younger officers believed, because they were “isolated, perhaps willingly, from reality.” “Senior officers appear to be deluding themselves and actually talking themselves into believing these false statistics, all the way up the line,” said one officer, in an accusation that must have given pause to Westmoreland, in his position at the head of the line. Senior leaders were portrayed by survey respondents as a cause of the problem, offering a “poor example” in both competence and ethics. A third major spoke of a superior who would “ ‘bleed’ his troops dry to make a good impression—and then stab his subordinates in the back when they were no longer useful.” A lieutenant told the Army War College study group that he saw a behavioral pattern of “cover your ass.” A colonel agreed that “endless CYA exercises create suspicion.” Nor did senior officers show much loyalty to subordinates, in part because they rotated through their billets so quickly. “True loyalty among men is not developed overnight,” one captain said.

  Because the people who thrived in this system naturally did not see a need to change it, it would be difficult to fix the problem, the report warned. That “the leaders of the future are those who survived and excelled within the rules of the present system militates in part against the initiation of any self-starting incremental return toward the practical application of ideal values,” it read, in a somewhat cautious, Latinate style that might have reflected the trepidation the authors felt in labeling the Army’s general officers as a group of bad apples. All the more worrisome was that the respondents in this study were “winners in the system,” as one expert on the modern Army put it, top-half officers who had been selected for the staff and war colleges.

  When the report was briefed to Westmoreland in July 1970, “he kept shaking his head,” as if to disagree, recalled Col. Malone, who had helped compile it. “But the facts started backing each other up.” In the following week, Westmoreland spent more than twenty-five hours with his staff, weighing the conclusions and implications of the report, as well as whether to follow its recommendations. One reaction was almost immediate: Within a few weeks, the six-month command tour, that characteristic personnel policy of the Vietnam War, was eliminated.

  Westmoreland eventually decided to handle the report in a contradictory manner. He ordered its findings briefed across the Army but ordered that the document itself be kept “close hold.” “I mean close,” wrote Malone. “Locked it up. And that’s how it was for about two years.” As Ulmer put it, “We put a couple of hundred copies in some bathroom up at the War College and locked the door.” The unfortunate effect of that decision was that a consequent series of policy changes ordered by Westmoreland appeared unrelated and even confusing, rather than what they were: part of a considered strategic response to a stated problem that was being seriously studied.

  CHAPTER 21

  The end of a war, the end of an Army

  T he history of the Vietnam War is far more complex than what is rendered in popular culture. Even now, almost four decades after it ended, it is probably the least understood of America�
�s wars. No authoritative military history of the Vietnam War exists. There is no narrative that captures the ebb and flow of the war tactically and strategically, showing both battlefield actions and the deliberations of senior officials. Existing histories of the war give a taste of combat and thereafter tend to concentrate on the political and diplomatic discussions among senior American officials in Saigon and Washington.

  The Vietnam War certainly was not one long, steady descent into a quagmire, as some books, films, and songs would have us believe. Rather, it was a series of complicated interactions between four major military forces: the South Vietnamese forces, the American military, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese Army. By late 1968 and early 1969, each of those forces had been altered by its experience in the conflict. The Viet Cong had been decimated and demoralized by the Communist offensives in February and May of 1968, which also had brought to the surface the VC’s clandestine network in the South and shown its face to local officials, making it far more vulnerable. In 1965, Communist forces in the South were about three-quarters Viet Cong, while by 1970 they were about three-quarters North Vietnamese Army, according to a comment made by Gen. Creighton Abrams in the latter year. (However, some contemporary historians caution against accepting the notion that the Viet Cong had only a small role in the war after Tet, noting that it has been in the interests of the Hanoi government “to minimize the role of local forces in the conquest of South Vietnam.”) “By winter of 1969 the VC were just sort of running around like a bunch of chickens and it really was no contest,” said Lt. Gen. Julian Ewell, who commanded the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta in 1968 and then was promoted to lead a corps-level headquarters.