The War: A Marine's Protest

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Lieut. Colonel William R. Corson would be an unusual soldier in any man's army. He speaks Malay, Vietnamese, and three dialects of Chinese, reads Russian, French and German. He is completing a doctoral thesis on China's finances. A slum kid who dropped out of high school, he won a university scholarship at 15, studied as a mathematician under the late Nobel prize winner Enrico Fermi. He fought the Japanese as a World War II Marine, won a master's degree in economics and political science, and fought in Korea and Viet Nam as a tank commander. He has frequently turned up in Asian hot spots on assignment for the CIA. As commander of the Marines' Combined Action Program in Viet Nam, he led 13-man squads of feisty young leathernecks who gave fresh heart to local ragtag village guards by living and fighting beside them in ex posed hamlets.

Corson is about to retire after 25 years as' a Marine — but his departure will be no less unusual than his career. He has written a blistering, 317-page indictment of U.S. methods in Viet Nam, which he neglected to get cleared by top Marine brass. To be published on July 1, the day after Corson retires from the corps, The Betrayal (W.W. Norton & Co.; $5.95) is an angry book that derides the search-and-destroy strategy devised by Army General William C. Westmoreland and scorns U.S. diplomats and politicians for trusting "corrupt" Vietnamese generals who rule in Saigon. At first, Marine Commandant Leonard F. Chapman Jr. contemplated a court-martial for Corson, but he was prompted to milder punishment by second thoughts about publicly airing the long-festering quarrels between the Army and Marines.

Bedraggled Familiarity. Official silence cannot, however, heal the sores laid raw by Corson. Because he is an insider, his strictures will galvanize critics of the war. To Corson, the pacification strategy of the Marines was correct, and victory in Viet Nam is being thwarted by the Army's blind reliance on hardware and explosives. Corson's chosen weapons are the type of security his tiny teams afforded, coupled with social justice and an attempt to free the peasant from both Saigon's tyranny and Viet Cong terror. "I don't want to see wars of national liberation become viable, exportable commodities," says Corson, who views the escalation from about 650 U.S. advisers in 1959 to today's 534,000 troops as a gambler's compulsive urge to multiply his stake on a losing number. As requisites for victory, Corson wants U.S. troop strength halved and all bombing over North Viet Nam halted.

There is a bedraggled familiarity and truth in the moral landscape limned by Corson. The betrayed are the widows of Vietnamese whose pay is stolen by the district chief, the civilians fleeing the war's fury who are left hungry while officials fatten on their rice rations, the people of hamlets pillaged by South Vietnamese soldiers there to "liberate" them. Also betrayed, as Corson sees it, are the U.S. fighting men killed by an enemy in arms against Saigon's injustices while the U.S.'s Vietnamese allies idle in barracks or wax rich as laundrymen, garbage collectors and pimps for the G.l.s.