Interview with General Frederick C. Weyand About the American Troops Who Fought in the Vietnam War

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Vietnam: If you had to pick one thing that disturbs you most about the Vietnam War, what would that be?

Weyand: What particularly haunts me, what I think is one of the saddest legacies of the Vietnam War, is the cruel misperception that the American fighting men there did not measure up to their predecessors in World War II and Korea. Nothing could be further from the truth.

VN You saw firsthand the combat soldiers in World War II?

Weyand: Yes, as a young officer I went into Burma in June 1944 to serve as an Intelligence officer on General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell’s staff. And I watched Merrill’s Marauders go into the battle for Myitkyina. Now here was an outfit that had been organized for one mission and ended up taking part in five. By that time they were pretty badly beat up, but those soldiers left hospital beds to rejoin their outfit to take part in the battle. One could not help but be impressed. They set a pretty high standard for others to follow.

VN You’re saying that others did?

Weyand: They did. As a lieutenant colonel I went into Korea in August 1950 with the advance party for the 3rd Infantry Division, then staging in Japan. In January 1951, I took command of the 1st Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed the ‘Cottonbalers’ for their defense of New Orleans under Andy Jackson during the War of 1812. They had just come back from blocking for the 1st Marine Division and 7th Infantry Division during the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir, and the battalion only had 162 Americans. The rest were KATUSAs [Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army-- South Korean civilians press-ganged into military service and used to round out understrength U.S. units], most of whom could not speak English. But the battalion was all that a commander could wish for. Three months after I took over, the Chinese hit the Eighth Army front with nine field armies–some 250,000 men organized into 27 infantry divisions. We were blocking on the Uijongbu­Seoul road and the Chinese hit us head-on. The battalion put up one hell of a fight, especially Captain Harley Mooney’s Able Company and Ray Blandin’s Baker Company. Two soldiers–Corporal John Essebager and Corporal Clair Goodblood–won the Medal of Honor posthumously, and for that rear-guard action the battalion, officially credited with ‘killing over 3,000 enemy troops and wounding an estimated 5,500,’ won a Presidential Unit Citation. The point of all this is that my earlier experiences provided a personal standard with which to measure battlefield performance. And by those standards the soldiers I served with in Vietnam fully measured up to those of Merrill’s Marauders in World War II or the Cottonbalers in Korea. In many ways, they even went them one better.

VN How did they do that?

Weyand: Well, in World War II and Korea an infantryman’s task was straightforward: Close with the enemy and destroy him with fire and maneuver. After a while on the line a kind of numbness took over. I can still remember going up and down those ridges in Korea. A few days of that and it became simply a matter of putting one foot in front of the other until you hit the enemy, and then it was pretty much conventional ground combat. But in Vietnam it was another story. I recall one week where one element of the Wolfhounds [the nickname of the 27th Infantry, two battalions of which served in Weyand's 25th Infantry Division] was in hard fighting in the Boi Loi woods, where they took 15 killed and an even greater number wounded. Another element was conducting a division training program in long-range patrolling. Yet another was conducting training classes for the 25th ARVN Division. Still another was providing security for a medical team in a local village. And finally some were at a local Catholic school the men had adopted, where their donations had bought textbooks, paid teachers’ salaries and provided school lunches for the children. Ten days later the unit that had been in the Boi Loi was conducting training programs, and the unit that had been at the school was beating the bush. One day they were safe, watching little children at school; the next they were in mortal danger, watching for someone to pop out of the ground and try to kill them. It’s hard to put in words what a terrible burden that imposed. You had to go through it to fully understand the incredible psychological strain they were under. It was a hell of a burden our soldiers in Vietnam had to bear. They really had to have their heads screwed on right to survive. Yet throughout it all they performed magnificently. They did everything that was asked of them and more. I have every reason to be proud of their service. And America should be equally proud and grateful to them.

VN You mentioned the local school sponsored by American soldiers. The common perception is that American forces in Vietnam did more to abuse the local population than it did to assist them.

Weyand: I guess that during my five years in Vietnam I paid more than a thousand visits to U.S. units in the field. And in almost every case they would begin their briefing with an account of what they had been doing to help the villagers in their area–medical team visits; help to local churches, schools and orphanages; road building, construction assistance and the like. For every terrible aberration like My Lai, there were thousands of acts of charity and compassion. Yet you would never know that from what was reported here at home.

VN Although the American people may be unaware of those facts, the South Vietnamese people certainly know the truth. When Marine veteran Bill Broyles returned to Vietnam in 1984, he found an enormous reservoir of goodwill toward Americans. So perhaps we planted some seeds there that may someday take root. And speaking of the way things were reported here at home, one of the worst cases has to be the news coverage of the VC’s Tet Offensive of 1968. You commanded II Field Force then and have been credited with frustrating the VC’s plans to capture Saigon. Did you have advance warning of the attack?

Weyand: Not as such. We did know that something was coming, but our intelligence was not good enough to pinpoint exactly what they were up to. And as a former Intelligence officer, I have to admit that lack of proper intelligence has been a grievous inadequacy in our military forces for years. In Korea I’d get orders to attack at 0500, but not a word about what was out there. In fact, I don’t believe I ever went into battle knowing what I was going to run into. To the armchair analysts years after the event, everything looks neat, orderly and predic-table. But that’s certainly not the case at the time. Anyway, our radio intercepts began picking up the movement of units toward Saigon, which caused us to cancel a major multidivision operation we had planned to launch in the northern part of III Corps, about 100 miles north of Saigon. That really proved to be a stroke of good fortune, for if those units had gone north, the VC would have had a field day in Saigon.

VN What other actions did you take?

Weyand: On the basis of this sketchy intelligence I did reposition some units and moved the forces into blocking positions covering the approaches to Saigon. Although all II Field Force units were put on full alert several hours before the VC launched their attack, we really had no precise information on exactly where they would strike. We certainly didn’t know they’d get inside the U.S. Embassy grounds in the heart of Saigon. Although that made for some sensational news photos, from a military viewpoint it really didn’t do them much good. Seizing a position and holding it are two different things. And the VC were unable to hold. They were repulsed everywhere with staggering losses–so much so that, as the North Vietnamese now freely admit, they ceased to be an effective fighting force. The last seven years of the war–from 1968 to 1975–were almost exclusively a North Vietnamese regular army affair.

VN How did the VC fail?

Weyand: I think the VC made two major mistakes. First, by attacking everywhere at once, they fragmented their forces and laid themselves open to defeat in detail. Second, and most important, they believed their own propaganda and thought there would be a ‘great general uprising’ wherein the South Vietnamese people would flock to their banner. There was a great general uprising all right, but it was against them rather than for them. The vast majority of the South Vietnamese people wanted nothing to do with the VC. During the entire course of the war there were never any mass defections by the South Vietnamese. But it is interesting to note that in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, more than 150,000 VC deserters came over to our side.

VN But that’s not the way it was reported here at home. The news media–and especially the television news media–portrayed it as a major defeat. President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said that when the CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite came out against the war, he knew that it was all over and decided not to run for re-election.

Weyand: I can understand the initial reporting. After all the glowing reports that the war was about to wind down, the Tet Offensive came as a terrible shock. But the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 was also a terrible shock. Like the VC’s Tet Offensive, it was a desperate gamble to win the war in a single stroke. And it, too, initially provoked some sensationalist headlines as the U.S. forces reeled back and entire units surrendered to the enemy. But as it progressed, the news media finally got the story straight.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Vietnam War

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