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Put Westmoreland On Trial

By VVAW

HOW MANY DIED FOR HIS LIES AND CAREER

If even half the evidence presented on the January 23rd issue of "CBS Reports" is true, ex-general William Westmoreland should be shot or worse. Certainly he should not be allowed to parade around the country drawing huge honorariums for talking his trash and should certainly not be allowed to collect a military retirement paid for by U. S. taxpayers.

The Mike Wallace program, titled "The Uncounted Enemy" showed interviews with a number once high-ranking officers and ex-CIA members, all of whom made it clear that U.S. intelligence had a pretty good sense of how many North Vietnamese troops were moving into South Vietnam in preparation for the Tet Offensive of 1968. Intelligence sources came up with a figure of 20,000 infiltrators a month; the figure that got back to the U.S. government was 5,000 a month. And it is clear that Westmoreland was the one who stopped the accurate figure and supplied a far lower figure.

Westmoreland and his little bunch of high-ranking assistants had their careers on the line. If the government and the American people had the correct figures, the movement to get the U.S. out of an unsinkable war would have been almost irresistible.

But Westmoreland and his cronies were not the ones who were fighting the war—just the ones lying about it. They could afford to worry about their careers while the rest of us were worrying about saving our tails. They could trump up figures about how their military expertise and tactical brilliance had almost defeated the enemy, but we were out there facing an enemy that was three to four times greater than intelligence led us to believe.

Only the weirdest of commanders (and there were some of them) would have sent out a squad or even a platoon if he thought his position or area was threatened by an NVA Regiment instead of a VC Company. Yet during the Tet Offensive of 1968, American troop were chewed up all over Vietnam because lower level commanders were basing their plans on knowingly falsified intelligence figures. Straight from the office of MACV commander in chief, William Westmoreland.

After Tet—which was a great American "victory" according to Westmoreland—there were, based on his lying figures, a total of 24,000 enemy left in Vietnam. And, in part as a result of the figures that he fed to President Johnson, the war kept going for another 5 years and another 27,000 U.S. deaths and the wounded and the Agent Orange victims and the post-traumatic stress victims, and on and on.

And this same slimy ex-officer, having built his career on misleading his commander and his troops went on, after 4 years as Army's chief of Staff in Washington, to talk about how he was "stabbed in the back" by the politicians and the media. It's clear that there was a whole lot of stabbing going on—and it's now clear exactly who was doing the stabbing.

Westmoreland was interviewed at length on the program, even admitting some of the figures which he falsified at the time. Several days after the program, when it must have finally sunk in that the facts presented indicted him as the murderer of 27,000 American troops, he popped up in a press conference to protest his innocence and say that he just didn't have his papers in order of the interview (thought he didn't explain why he granted the interview under those circumstances). Well, it's clear that he lied once and there's no reason to think he won't lie as often as he thinks necessary.

As a beginning the military should put Westmoreland on trial. VVAW promises to produce Gold Star Mother whose sons died because of Westmoreland's career plan and plenty of vets who would never have been in Vietnam, would have all their limbs, their jobs, their health if not for him.