Adventures in Two Worlds: Vietnam General and Vermont Professor

By Douglas Kinnard

In Part I the author discusses his experiences as Chief of Operations Analysis for Westmoreland during the 1966-67 phase of the Vietnam War. In 1969 he returns to Vietnam as Commanding General Force Artillery and Chief of Staff of Second Field Force, where his final action involves planning the 1970 Cambodian incursion. Turning down further promotions, in Part II he pursues a Ph.D. at Princeton on a campus alive with antiwar protest. We follow him to a tenured professorship at the University of Vermont, where his polling of U.S. generals who had served in Vietnam results in The War Managers, considered a classic book that sets forth their conflicting views on the conduct of that war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465309990

Douglas Kinnard

Douglas Xinnard graduated from West Point in the D-Day Class of 1944 and served in combat 1n World War II (Europe), the Korean War, and twice in the Vietnam war – the latter time as a Brigadier General. He retired in 1970 to pursue an academic career. After receiving the Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 1973, he became a professor of political science at the University of Vermont. While there he took a leave of absence to serve as the Army’s first civilian Chief of Military History. After becoming Emeritus at Vermont he became a Visiting Professor at a number ot universities and war colleges. President Clinton appointed Kinnard as a Commissioner on the American Battle Monuments Commission. That position included participation in plann1ng and supervising the funding and construction of the World War II Memorial located on the Washington Mall. This is his eighth book.

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Copyright © 2012 by Douglas Kinnard.

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CONTENTS

Preface

PART I

VIETNAM GENERAL

1 Westmoreland’s and McNamara’s War: The View from Saigon

2 1968: The Way the Ball Bounced

3 East of Rang Rang and into Cambodia

PART II

VERMONT PROFESSOR

4 Wonder Years

5 Gaudeamus Igitur

Epilogue

Appendices

Chronology

Acknowledgments

TO WADE

après soixante ans

Other Books by Douglas Kinnard

The War Managers

President Eisenhower and Strategy Management:

A Study in Defense Politics

The Secretary of Defense

Ike 1890–1990: A Pictorial History

The Certain Trumpet:

Maxwell Taylor and the American Experience

in Vietnam

From the Paterson Station:

The Way We Were

Eisenhower:

Soldier-Statesman of the American Century

Preface

My earlier memoir (From the Paterson Station) ended in the summer of 1947, when I returned home from the European war and the subsequent occupation of Germany. Shortly before leaving Europe I received the following message:

Captain Kinnard has been selected to attend a one-year civil schooling program at Princeton University, which has accepted him for admission to the graduate school, Department of Politics, beginning September 1.

From my boyhood in New Jersey, I could conjure up Princeton images: F. Scott Fitzgerald and all that jazz; Richard Halliburton strolling near Lake Carnegie on a lilac evening before heading out on his Royal Road to Romance; and strong-jawed sons of Old Nassau singing in the quad. Of course, I knew the reality; my colleagues would be veterans on the GI Bill, and all of us would have to work like hell.

The year at Princeton was enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. Quite by chance, my living arrangements were in the Nassau Club, a gentlemen’s club just off the campus. Though members of all ages ate there, I was the youngest of the dozen residents by a couple of decades. Most of the others were retired, and over half merited a New Yorker article in the Evelyn Waugh mode.

As time went by, I began to envy my Politics Department civilian colleagues as they pursued their Ph.D.s and academic careers. When the year ended, I was assigned back to my Army branch, Field Artillery, specifically to the faculty of the Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

An army post in Oklahoma, after two and a half years spent in Heidelberg and then Princeton, was a culture shock. By spring I began to adjust, thanks largely to an across a crowded room experience at a social event—a local lawyer’s daughter, Wade Tyree, a blonde beauty whose picture I had seen in the newspaper not long before being crowned Miss Oklahoma University Freshman.

Two and a half years later we were married, and in the summer of 1952 our son, Frederick, was born. Later that same month I headed to the airport in Oklahoma City en route to a wartime assignment in Korea, the conflict then beginning its third year. They are not long, the days of wine and roses.

Upon arrival in Korea, by now a major, I was assigned as Operations/Intelligence officer of the IX Corps Artillery, a force of about fifteen battalions. Our primary mission was to coordinate and control fire support, including air, on the west-central portion of the Eighth Army front. My own work involved visiting some of our thirty-six or so observation posts along the front each day, fire planning and coordination, and evaluating the effectiveness of our firepower in disrupting and destroying the opposing Chinese forces. In a strange ending to a strange war all action ceased on July 27, 1953, with an armistice. I returned home about a month later.

After commanding an artillery battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington, and attending the Army’s Command and Staff College in Kansas, I ended up as a staff officer in the bowels of the Pentagon. Things changed dramatically for me in the spring of 1957 when, along with a number of Army majors, I was selected for promotion ahead of my contemporaries. Reassigned to the office of the Army Chief of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, I had as my immediate boss Major General William Westmoreland.

During my two years there the central issue for the Army Chief was the policy-strategy-budgetary battle with the Eisenhower administration (and the Air Force) over Ike’s nuclear-heavy New Look strategy. The Army wanted what Taylor called a strategy of flexible response, putting greater emphasis on ground forces. After losing this battle, at least for the time, Taylor retired in 1959.

By the end of my Washington assignment I had learned much about the world of defense politics. I also observed at first hand the senior civilian and military leadership in the Washington milieu.

After the Pentagon came another command, this time a surface-to-surface missile battalion in Colorado, followed again by a student year, this time at the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1961 I returned to Europe for an interesting assignment in a great location: Special Assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) in the Paris area.

The commander was then Air Force General Lauris Norstad, the fourth person to have held that position, and, as it turned out, the last to play the role of proconsul. In 1961 NATO and Norstad had plenty of problems: the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the spring; Khrushchev’s confronting President Kennedy in Vienna in June; the Berlin wall in August. The following year brought the Cuban Missile Crisis. None of this, though, caused Norstad’s forced retirement at the end of 1962; rather, it was his struggle with the Kennedy administration over NATO’s nuclear strategy. Again, I had a truly educational experience watching the interaction between the Supreme Commander and Washington. As for social life, who wouldn’t want to live in Paris at an international headquarters with representatives of fifteen nations as colleagues?

I was already acquainted with Norstad’s successor, General Lyman Lemnitzer (who had been Taylor’s vice chief), and the second half of my tour at Supreme Headquarters turned out to be even more rewarding because of the projects assigned to me.

In the summer of 1963, when the Army selected a number of officers to be promoted to colonel ahead of their contemporaries, I was one of them. As a result, I was assigned in 1964 to command the 24th Division Artillery in Munich, Germany. One year before, this had been a brigadier general’s job; my doing it as a lieutenant colonel on the colonel’s promotion list required plenty of chutzpah. At the end of my year in command my orders returned me to the Army War College, this time as a member of the faculty.

Part I

VIETNAM GENERAL

Given the nature of the enemy, it seems to me that the strategy we are following at this time is the proper one, and that it is producing results. While he obviously is far from quitting, there are signs that his morale and his military structure are beginning to deteriorate. Their rate of decline will be in proportion to the pressure directed against him.

                                              General William Westmoreland

                                              Address to Joint Session of Congress

                                              April 27, 1967

1

Westmoreland’s and McNamara’s War:

The View from Saigon

Saigon Summer 1966

Arriving at Travis Air Force Base, California, en route to Vietnam, I found it alive with activity, with jets taking off all times of day and night. For the first time I began to feel the tempo of the war: returning casualties debarking from planes, large numbers of enlisted men and officers, many of whom I knew, leaving for Vietnam in one hour, two hours, three hours. This fast and moving operation was predicted to be even more so as the summer progressed. After an evening to rest up, I left early afternoon Friday, July 15. Seated between two other colonels, a chaplain and a line officer, for the next twenty-one hours and 9,600 miles, I endured their very active smoking.

To pass the time I fell into reviewing the events that had led up to this one-year journey I had now started. When I had returned from Europe the previous July I found myself back in a country that had changed dramatically since my departure four years earlier. Camelot was gone and Lyndon Baines Johnson was ensconced in his own right in the White House. Though I was not then aware of it, LBJ was on the eve of making some far-reaching decisions on America’s role in Vietnam—decisions that would alter many lives, including my own.

After a weekend with my brother and his wife in northern New Jersey, Wade and our son, Kip, and I were off on the first of two New England tours. One of my hobbies during the Paris and Munich days had been to study various parts of the United States to determine where I wanted someday to end my nomadic existence. New England always won out. Now we could trek to places there that seemed most appealing, while also viewing some prep schools that our son might attend in another year. Our first stop was Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, home of the University of Vermont (UVM).

After Paris and Munich the town itself seemed scruffy to me, but the campus, on a summit overlooking Lake Champlain, was attractive. Little did I realize the prominent part that Burlington and UVM would play in my life in another decade. New Hampshire, the next step, had great scenery, but the most interesting part of the trip proved to be the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts, which included Amherst and Deerfield. The well-known academy at Deerfield was still being run by Frank Boyden, who had been headmaster since 1902! Touring the school with our son, we ran into Boyden, whom we found as fascinating as his description in John McPhee’s book The Headmaster. The school seemed to have great appeal to young Kinnard.

A second New England trip featured the coast of Maine and its usual star attractions—such as Kennebunk and Camden. The real treat, though, came way down east on a foggy Sunday morning when we came across the quaint village of Castine on Penobscot Bay. Like Burlington and Amherst, this village was fated to play a major part in our lives later, but on this day we recorded it merely as a place to return to.

After our New England trips it was time to take up my new position in Pennsylvania at Carlisle Barracks, which I had left in 1961 as a student. Now I would be on the faculty of the Army War College. I knew that it would seem like a narrow world compared to the one I had left in Europe, particularly Paris.

The most significant national news event that summer was LBJ’s famous press conference of July 28 concerning Vietnam. Because American involvement there had not intruded into my four years in NATO Europe, I spent the morning before the press conference refreshing myself on the events that had led up to this day. I was able to reconstruct some milestones:

— In 1945, with the agreement of the United States and other powers, the French had returned to Indochina. Subsequently, the U.S. began to provide financial and military assistance to the French, particularly after the Korean War broke out.

— In early 1954 the French engaged in a major battle with the Vietminh at the isolated outpost of Dien Bien Phu. Though France pressured the United States for bombing and other support, Eisenhower did not intervene. Then the Geneva Conference in the summer of 1954 partitioned Vietnam into North and South at the 17th parallel, followed by the eventual withdrawal of the French. At this point the U.S. took over from the French and supported the new South Vietnamese government with aid and advisers.

— During the Kennedy administration we became increasingly enmeshed in Vietnam, particularly after JFK increased the number of American advisers.

— By the winter of 1962–1963, the situation in Vietnam had obviously deteriorated as evidenced by the assassination of President Diem, whom the United States had, in effect, installed as our man in 1954.

— In August 1964, when the North Vietnamese allegedly attacked two U.S. destroyers off the coast of North Vietnam, Congress passed what was known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This authorized the President to take all necessary steps to defend South Vietnam. In February 1965 the Communists attacked the American base at Pleiku in the central highlands, and at that point our air war, Rolling Thunder, began.

— The spring of 1965 saw a substantial build-up of American personnel in Vietnam. By the time I left Europe in June, the newspapers were reporting some 80,000 American troops in that country.

At his press conference LBJ announced that the United States intended to use its forces to defend South Vietnam. From what I could determine, he gave two reasons: the growing power of Communist forces, and the need to show that America was serious and credible about its worldwide commitments. LBJ went on to say that he was sending 50,000 more troops to raise the total to 125,000; more would be sent as requested. What he did not announce (but which came out later) was that he had actually approved up to 175,000 troops, and that another 100,000, for a total of 275,000, were scheduled to be deployed in 1966. As a military professional, I knew as I walked away from the television set that I, too, would be involved in Vietnam before long.

After four years’ experience in NATO Europe, I was surprised at my first assignment at the Army War College: Director of Communist Chinese studies! This probably happened because, about four and a half years earlier while a student at Carlisle, I had written a short thesis recommending that the United States recognize Communist China. My first actual task now was to prepare a student seminar on Communist doctrine that would be taught later in the course and around which I would conduct a faculty briefing session. All this pleased me, since I already knew NATO but knew relatively little by comparison about Communist doctrine and the Far East. It thus gave me a welcome opportunity to expand my own knowledge.

Two students with whom I became acquainted, through involvement in my son’s Boy Scout activities and also through seminars and lectures, later became well known. One was Bob Rheault, made famous in 1969 when arrested as head of the Green Berets in Vietnam in connection with the so-called Green Berets murder case. Rheault was a very intelligent, hard-working, rather somber individual. The other interesting student was a lieutenant colonel named Alexander Haig. During one of our occasional chats between lectures, he mentioned how disappointed he was in not getting an early promotion to colonel, on a recent listing. Since he had just come from Secretary McNamara’s office, I opined that he had not yet had a chance to command a battalion, but that everything would work itself out in the future. Of course, I did not know that I was talking to the future National Security Advisor to the President, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Secretary of State, and would-be presidential candidate.

Events in Vietnam definitely affected instruction at the Army War College that fall—much of it informal, some of it formal. What became clear was that American troops were streaming into South Vietnam from August and September on, according to General Westmoreland’s (COMUSMACV) operational plans. A favorite expression of the Washington-based speakers was that we were going to grind down the enemy and simultaneously build up the South Vietnamese militarily and politically while developing our own bases to support more American troops.

Even before hearing all the scuttlebutt about Vietnam, I had decided that at an appropriate time—but soon—I would volunteer to go there. Accordingly, in September I sent to Washington through channels a very brief request for an assignment to Vietnam. I stated that my request was made solely for professional reasons. This was not well received at the Army War College—particularly by the commandant, Major General Eugene Salet (who had the habit of referring to Carlisle Barracks as the Emerald Isle). Fearing that I would be the first of many such volunteers, with consequent decimation of the faculty, he sent a lengthy letter recommending the turndown of my request. Everyone at Carlisle told me that Salet’s intervention meant that I would be going nowhere. Meanwhile, I received a call from a classmate in Washington who lived near a brigadier general whose office was handling my case. He asked if I was serious about going to Vietnam; if so, he said, this general was going to endorse my request. I indicated that I was indeed serious. I heard no more until early November, when word came that General Salet’s recommendation had been disapproved. At the completion of one year on the faculty sometime in the summer of 1966 I would be proceeding to Vietnam.

The fall of 1965 saw the beginning of a movement in American society that was to become more and more insistent—opposition to the Vietnam War. As elements of the public objected to the American role there, protests and teach-ins increased. In November about thirty thousand protesters marched on Washington, calling for peace.

Meanwhile in Vietnam the initial test for the embryonic American strategy came in November. Units of the recently arrived 1st Air Cavalry Division clashed with the North Vietnamese in a bloody battle at the Ia Drang River in the central highlands. The 1st Air Cavalry’s mission in that region was to guard against possible entry from Cambodia by North Vietnamese regiments into South Vietnam, where they might capture Pleiku and cut across the narrow neck of Vietnam.

That battle demonstrated that our mobility and firepower were more than a match for the enemy’s manpower and terrain. This significant win for American forces derailed Hanoi’s hope for an early victory. Moreover, according to the speakers and others at the War College, the battle gave us a feeling of assurance. Now we were going from a strategy of holding the country together to one of defeating the enemy by devising a winning strategy. Winning, of course, is not the same as not losing, which had been our principal concern up until Ia Drang. The North Vietnamese learned another lesson: not to engage our forces head-on except at times and places of their own choosing—in short, to retain the initiative and to make maximum use of sanctuaries across the border in Cambodia.

In January 1966 I received orders to report to the Military Assistance Command (MACV) in Saigon, effective mid-July. That raised the immediate question as to where my family would be located during my absence. With the hope that my son’s application to Deerfield Academy would be accepted, we thought that Wade could locate somewhere in that general area—perhaps Amherst, which we had visited the previous summer.

In mid-February I was informed by the commandant of the War College—who apparently had been looking forward to an opportunity like this since my volunteer statement—that I would be placed on temporary duty in Washington for about six months. The assignment would be to the Chairman JSC Study Group, but all I knew about it before arriving in Washington was that it concerned China. Every decision maker in government had to consider from time to time what the American reaction would be if or when China intervened in the Vietnam War. The analogy in people’s minds (the China syndrome, if you want to call it that) went back to the fall of 1950 when the Chinese crossed the Yalu River, thus changing the nature of the Korean War.

The study group operated under Lieutenant General Bert Spivey, an old acquaintance from Fort Sill and Paris days. My role, though, was far below his level. While the study group had a small permanent cadre, most of us had been brought in on temporary duty. Now I learned the exact nature of the problem: to design a U.S. counteroffensive under the hypothesis that the Chinese might attack through North Vietnam in response to our actions in Vietnam. This theoretical attack and counteroffensive might take place either in Hainan or on the mainland itself. In setting up the problem, we had to make certain assumptions about the international and domestic context during the next year or so.

I decided early on in the project that we were being asked to deal with a fantasy. Vietnam was not Korea; I could not believe that the Chinese would intervene, and, if they did, I thought it unlikely that we were going to be placing ground troops on Hainan or on the mainland of China.

The thought also occurred to me that I did not want to spend six months on this study, thus delaying my Vietnam tour. Most important, I wanted to get back with my family as soon as possible before leaving for the Far East. When my efforts through channels to get out of Washington proved fruitless, I turned elsewhere. An old friend, Bernie Rogers, special assistant to the Chairman JCS, intervened with Bert Spivey for my release from temporary duty, and I returned to Carlisle Barracks in mid-April. The following week I went on house-hunting leave to the Amherst area, my son having been accepted at Deerfield.

Of longer-range import for the future were events on the American home front. Public support for the war began to show signs of weakness in 1966. As these public doubts began to grow, so did the antiwar movement, epitomized not only by demonstrations in various cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago but also on the campuses. In the town where I was moving my family, for example, some students at Amherst College walked out of June graduation ceremonies at which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara received an honorary degree.

The house that Wade rented was located on the northeast side of Amherst, looking toward the Pelham Hills. We spent some time settling her arrangements and generally getting to know the town. Wade had been accepted at both Smith College and the University of Massachusetts for her remaining college year, which she had interrupted years before when we were married. She elected UMass because she could graduate in one year rather than in the two that Smith required.

We also took advantage of our location to make some trips back to Castine. Staying at the Pentagoet Inn, we got to know the owners, the Odenwallers, who talked a good deal about their son, a lieutenant then in Vietnam commanding an infantry platoon in our 25th Infantry Division. Sadly, at the very moment that we were there, he was killed in Tay Ninh province north of Saigon, as we heard a few days after our return home.

It was time for me to leave for Vietnam. On Thursday, July 14, Wade and Kip took me to Bradley Field south of Springfield, and I was en route to my Asiatic adventure via Travis Air Force Base northeast of Oakland.

My thoughts of the past ended abruptly when my seatmate next to the window said, Look at all the artillery firing going on below. Then came the voice from the cockpit: Be certain your seat belts are fastened; we will be descending rapidly to Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon.

Arriving a little after midnight on Sunday morning I was met by a lieutenant colonel who headed one of the activities in my branch at MACV. He was able to escort me—without going through customs—to my temporary billet at the Majestic Hotel. Arriving in my room in the dark, I was advised not to turn on the light because of the hour and because other people were sharing this room. (It turned out to be three other colonels.) Though tired, I slept only fitfully, but I managed to stay in bed for about six hours. Eventually, out of curiosity and a sense of confinement, I dressed in the dark and went to the lobby to see what was going on.

I looked out, fascinated, at this French-Oriental world. Next to the hotel was the Saigon River and Tu Do Street, a famous, rather wide French avenue down the center of Saigon, which at that time provided in the evenings Oriental versions of baby you and me famous in Paris after World War II.

The weather struck me as very humid, but no worse than in Amherst at the time I left. Looking around the French-Oriental hotel lobby, I saw a large poster on the wall advertising Azay-le-Rideau, a sixteenth-century chateau on the Loire, which we had visited in our Paris days. On a reading table was Paris Match dated April 1.

Soon my escort arrived and we were off down Tu Do Street in a car that later would be for my use. Saigon at that time was a city of more than two million, overpowered by the American presence, but still truly the Pearl of the Orient with its tree-lined boulevards, French architecture, and at least some appearances of Occidental culture. I could see why, with a slight stretch, it reminded visitors of Paris.

Shortly we came to the building at No. 5 Tran Quy Cap that housed my new office. There I met various people who worked with me and for me. It truly was a joint headquarters: my boss was an Air Force colonel, his deputy a Marine colonel, and my associates a mixture of Navy, Army, and Air Force personnel. One of the other branches was headed by my West Point classmate and good friend Harry Grace. Both of us were in the Field Artillery, and over the years we had had remarkably similar assignments: Field Artillery School, 71st Infantry Division in the European War, Third Army Headquarters in the occupation, Princeton Politics Department 1947–1948, Advanced Artillery Course 1952–1953, and the Pentagon 1956–1959.

Most of that day was spent in orientation on my new job as chief of the Operations Analysis Branch of J-3. In the afternoon, I called on Colonel Sam Karrick, a Paris colleague now working for General Edward Lansdale. Lansdale was the officer after whom the character Colonel Hillendale had been modeled in The Ugly American. After many experiences in the Philippines and as an adviser to Diem back in 1955, Lansdale had returned to South Vietnam in 1965. Now an assistant to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, he worked on matters of psychological warfare.

My initial impression of Lansdale was that he was very tired. I mentioned that I had just come from a New England college town and observed that support for the war was waning there. He seemed, to my surprise, to take exception, assuring me that American public support was behind LBJ and the war. Obviously, it was time for him to take home leave.

The next couple of days were spent getting to know both the people