The following interview by Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. originally appeared in our premier issue of Vietnam Magazine in 1988. Their discussion remains as thought-provoking today as it was more than a decade ago.

That the Vietnam War was one of the most complex wars in our history was little understood at the time, and it is even less understood today. Many still believe, for example, that the war was lost to black-pajama-clad VC guerrillas, armed only with primitive weapons and revolutionary fervor.

Their attitudes evidently fixed in the early 1960s, when the VC were at their height, such critics fail to appreciate–as the North Vietnamese now freely admit–that the VC guerrillas were virtually annihilated during their abortive 1968 Tet Offensive, and from that time on the war was primarily an North Vietnamese regular army affair. It was a NVA 22-division, cross-border blitzkrieg, supported by tanks, missiles and heavy artillery–not VC guerrillas–that finally overwhelmed South Vietnam in the spring of 1975.

Then there is the notion that the war was lost because of the failure of American arms. Again, there is little realization that American ground combat forces began to withdraw from Vietnam in 1969–not because of enemy pressure but because of political decisions made in Washington. By the end of 1971, most of the Army and Marine combat divisions had left, and in August 1972 the last American ground-combat unit, the 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry, departed Vietnam. With the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in March 1973 (more than two years before the fall of Saigon), all remaining American naval, air and logistics support forces were withdrawn.

The 1975 North Vietnamese spring offensive, which finally conquered South Vietnam, did not defeat the American military for the simple reason that by that time there was no American military there to defeat. Not only had American forces been withdrawn years earlier, Congress had categorically and unequivocally prohibited their reintervention.

Vietnam was a defeat for American foreign policy and for its political goals of containing Communist expansion and maintaining a free and independent South Vietnam. And it was a defeat for the ill-conceived plans and strategies of the Pentagon’s senior military and civilian leaders.

But America’s fighting forces did not fail us. ‘You know, you never beat us on the battlefield,’ I told my North Vietnamese counterpart during negotiations in Hanoi a week before the fall of Saigon. He pondered that remark a moment and then replied, ‘That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.’

In a narrow strategic sense, he was right. Whether they defeated us on the battlefield or not, they did win the war. But in another sense he was dead wrong, for that fact was relevant indeed to the almost 31/2 million Americans who served in Southeast Asia during the war. Many of them still bear a burden they do not deserve and blame themselves for what went wrong there.

No one is better qualified to set that record straight and put the fighting abilities of American combat forces in Vietnam in historical perspective than General Frederick C. Weyand. A 1938 graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, he entered military service in 1940 and served as an Intelligence officer in the China-Burma-India theater in World War II. During the Korean War he received the Combat Infantry Badge and Silver Star for gallantry in action while commanding the 1st Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment. Under his leadership the battalion received a Presidential Unit Citation for its part in turning back the 1951 Chinese spring offensive.

In March 1966, then a major general, he brought his 25th Infantry Division to Vietnam. Headquartered at Cu Chi in War Zone C, his ‘Tropic Lightning’ division saw hard fighting in areas west and northwest of Saigon and along the Cambodian border. His battlefield successes led to command of II Field Force, a corps-level headquarters responsible for military operations in III and IV Corps (i.e., the southern third of South Vietnam from the southern boundary of the Central Highlands through the Mekong Delta).

During the Viet Cong’s 1968 Tet Offensive, General Weyand’s timely and effective maneuver of II Field Force’s combat elements–including the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, 9th Infantry Division, 25th Infantry Division, 101st Airborne Division, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the Australian Task Force–was instrumental in saving Saigon from capture and in the subsequent rout of the VC attackers.

Later that year, after 2 1/2 years in-country, General Weyand was reassigned to Washington as chief of the Army’s Reserve components, then to Paris as an observer at the Paris peace talks. Returning to Vietnam in 1970, first as deputy commander and then commander of MACV, he supervised the U.S. military withdrawal and was America’s last military commander in Vietnam.

In 1975, by then Army chief of staff, General Weyand was sent back to Vietnam by President Gerald Ford to assess the military situation there. Although his recommendations fell on deaf ears in the administration and in Congress, he did not allow himself–or the Army–to become embittered. Named ‘Man of the Year’ at the University of California at Berkeley in 1976, he left office later that year and returned to civilian life, but not before being credited by Congress for his leadership role in preventing a’stab-in-the-back’ syndrome from developing in the American Army after Vietnam.

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