Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate who never made it above an Army lieutenant colonel, feels obliged to impale Gen. William C. Westmoreland in his book, “Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam.” Sorley is mistaken. We did not “lose” the Vietnam War. We quit, left, boogied out of there, but we did not lose the war.
In the Jan. 8 story “Westmoreland skewered in bio,” Tony Perry, the Los Angeles Times reviewer of Sorley’s tome, opines that the “Marine generals running the war in Afghanistan have studied the lessons of Westmoreland’s failed command.” Perry’s tiresome comparison of the two wars ignores the fact that the North Vietnamese never attacked the U.S. nor did they issue a holy writ to kill Westerners. We defended a helpless people against what most Americans, during the early ’60s, considered the mother of all evils: Communism, led by Russia and China.
Perry, and probably Sorley (I will waste no time reading twaddle from a second teamer), fails to mention that millions of civilians were massacred when we exited. That slaughter did not happen while Westmoreland and the 58,000 kids on The Wall were on watch.
Bob Ferguson
Vancouver
