Armed Forces: Slugger's Turn

The job of Chief of Staff of the Army has been coveted by William C. Westmoreland ever since his days as a plebe in West Point's famed Class of '36. Last week, after 46 grueling months of battles and frustrations as the supreme commander of 533,000 American fighting men in Viet Nam, the prize was his. Ironically, General Westmoreland, 54, the jut-jawed epitome of a "straight arrow" soldier to untold thousands of sweat-stained G.I.s in jungles and paddies, will leave Saigon this week a frustrated, disappointed man.

Westmoreland, radiating the virile confidence and irrepressible optimism that gave him the look and sound of a winner, had wanted badly to leave with victory in sight. Yet even as the Senate in Washington was unanimously confirming his appointment, Communist gunners were raking the South Vietnamese capital with Soviet-made rockets and mortar bombs. It is not as the winner that he bows out of Viet Nam.

Invincible on Battlefields. Nor is he by any means a loser. His doughty employment of American heart and muscle dragged South Viet Nam back from abject defeat in early 1965. Fighting all the while, his men hacked from virgin jungle and sand dunes the airfields and bases needed to sustain the conflict at the far end of a 10,000-mile supply line. For two years, Westmoreland's search-and-destroy tactics battered his enemy to a counterpunching crouch along Viet Nam's borders. He built up American strength from some 20,000 men in mid-1964 to today's 533,000, and to the point where U.S. forces were invincible on battlefields. Methodically, Westmoreland laid foundations for victory in a protracted war.

The time that Westmoreland was purchasing with America's blood and treasure was not on his side. As the war dragged on and the toll of American dead rose to 24,364, support for the war shriveled inside the U.S. The influx of G.I.s Americanized the war, and Westy was too busy to engage in the labyrinthine stratagems needed to galvanize the Vietnamese into an effective defense of their own country. Vo Nguyen Giap, Westmoreland's opponent in Hanoi, was able to match every American move, pouring well-armed North Vietnamese troopers into the caldron below the Demilitarized Zone until they now account for better than 70% of the Communists' hard core troops. While South Vietnamese celebrated Tet, the lunar new year, Giap unleashed his general offensive.

New Directions. To Westmoreland, the Tet attacks on 40 cities were Giap's desperate gamble to draw allied troops away from the beleaguered U.S. Marine fortress at Khe Sanh. He still believes the onslaughts on Saigon are in the same pattern of desperation, even though Khe Sanh is now a largely forgotten sector. In a war that has defied every yardstick of progress, Westmoreland's measurements have diminished his estimates of his foe's capacities to the point of overoptimism.