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                                                                              ╚January 7, 1966

Man of the Year:General William C. Westmoreland

The Guardians at the Gate



Nothing is worse than war?
Dishonor is worse than war.
Slavery is worse than war.
                 --Winston Churchill


     To the quickening drumfire of the fighting in South Viet
Nam, Americans sensed early in 1965 that they might have to
choose between withdrawal or vastly greater involvement in the
war. By year's end, it was clear that the U.S. had irrevocably
committed itself the nation's third major war in a quarter-
century, a conflict involving more than 1,000,000 men and the
destiny of Southeast Asia.

     It was a strange, reluctant commitment. As the small, far-
off war grew bigger and closer, it stirred little of the fervor
with which Americans went off to battle in 1917 or 1941. The
issues were complex and controversial. The enemy was no heel-
clicking junker or sadistic samurai but a small, brown man whose
boyish features made him look less like the oppressor than the
oppressed. The U.S. was not even formally at war with him. Nor
at first could Americans be sure than divided, ravaged South
Viet Nam had the stomach or stability to sustain the struggle
into which it had drawn its ally.

     The risk and the responsibility for the war were, of
course, Lyndon Johnson's. "We will stand in Viet Nam," he said
in July. Thereafter, the President moved resolutely to make good
that pledge, weathering open criticism from within his own
party, strident protest from the Vietnik fringe, and the
disapprobation of friendly nations from the Atlantic to the
China Sea.

     All No Man's Land. It fell to the American fighting man to
redeem Johnson's pledge. Plunged abruptly into a punishing
environment, pitted against a foe whose murderously effective
tactics had been perfected over two decades, the G.I. faced the
strangest war at all.

     Professing to scorn the U.S. as a paper tiger, Communist
China had long proclaimed Americans incapable of combat under
such conditions -- while prudently allowing North Viet Nam to
fight its "war of liberation." The Americans turned out to be
tigers, all right -- live ones. With courage and a cool
professionalism that surprised friend and foe, U.S. troops stood
fast and firm in South Viet Nam. In the waning months of 1965,
they helped finally to stem the tide that had run so long with
the Reds.

     As commander of all U.S. forces in South Viet Nam, General
William Childs Westmoreland, 51, directed the historic buildup,
drew up the battle plans and infused the 190,000 men under him
with his own idealistic view of U.S. aims and responsibilities.
He was the sinewy personification of the American fighting man
in 1965 who, through the monsoon mud of nameless hamlets, amidst
the swirling sand of seagirt enclaves, atop the jungled
mountains of the Annamese Cordillera, served as the instrument
of U.S. policy, quietly enduring the terror and discomfort of
a conflict that was not yet a war, on a battlefield that was
all no man's land.

   20-Year Problem. In the process, American troops gave an
incalculable lift to South Viet Nam's disheartened people and
divided government. And, important as that was, they helped
preserve a far greater stake than South Viet Nam itself. As the
Japanese demonstrated when they seized Indo-China on the eve of
World War II, whoever holds the peninsula holds the gate to
Asia. Were Hanoi to conquer the South and unify it under a
Communist regime, Cambodia and Laos would tumble immediately.
After that, the U.S. would be forced to fight from a less
advantageous position in Thailand to hold the rest of Southeast
Asia. "If you lose Asia," says General Pierre Glllois, a
celebrated French strategist, "you lose the Pacific lake. It is
an extraordinary problem, the problem of the next 20 years."

     Lyndon Johnson had waited dangerously long before acting
on the problem. Thereafter, for all his repeated declarations
that the U.S. would sit down and talk "with any government at
any place at any time," despite even last week's multiplicity
of peace missions, the President moved swiftly and unstintingly
toward its solution. With all the resources available to the
world's most powerful nation, Johnson established beyond
question the credibility of the U.S. commitment to Asia.

     No Sanctuary. The troops under William Westmoreland did
more. "If the other guy can live and fight under those
conditions," said the general, "so can we." In baking heat and
smoldering humidity of the Asian mainland, the American applied
their own revised version of the guerilla-warfare manual that
Communists from Havana to Hanoi had long regarded as holy writ.
With stupendous firepower and mobility undreamed of even a
decade ago, U.S. strike forces swooped into guerilla redoubts
long considered impenetrable. Like clouds of giant dragonflies,
helicopters hauled riflemen and heavy artillery from base to
battlefield in minutes, giving them the advantages of surprise
and flexibility. Tactical air strikes scraped guerrillas off
jungled ridges, buried them in mazelike tunnels, or kept them
forever on the run. Unheard from the grounds, giant B-52s of
the Strategic Air Command pattern-bombed the enemy's forest
hideaways, leaving no sanctuary inviolable.

     Whatever the outcome of the war, the most significant
consequence of the buildup is that, for the first time in
history, the U.S. in 1965 established bastions across the nerve
centers of Southeast Asia. From formidable new enclaves in South
Viet Nam to a far-flung network of airfields, supply depots and
naval facilities building in Thailand, the U.S. will soon be
able to rush aid to any threatened ally in Asia. Should the
British leave Singapore, as they may do by the 1970s, the new
U.S. military complex would constitute the only Western outpost
of any consequence from the Sea of Japan to the Indian Ocean.

     The U.S. presence will also have a beneficent impact on
the countries involved. The huge new ports that are being
scooped out along the coasts of Viet Nam and Thailand should
permanently boost the economies of both nations. Vast, U.S.-
banked civilian-aid programs are aimed at eradicating the
ancient ills of disease, illiteracy and hunger.

     Small Windows. Recently, Peking has made it a point to
proclaim its delight at the prospect of the U.S.'s depleting its
resources on a major land war in Asia. That prospect may seem
less pleasing today. Where the Communists almost had victory
within their grasp last spring, the U.S. now bars the way and
stands ready to repel any other attempted aggression. Unless
Peking and Hanoi withdraw from South Viet Nam -- and lose face
throughout Asia -- it is the Communists themselves who risk
being bogged down in wars that they can neither afford nor end.

     Plainly, neither China nor North Viet Nam reckoned on full-
scale U.S. intervention in Viet Nam. Their blunder came as no
surprise to Westmoreland. "They look out upon the rest of the
world, and of America in particular, is what they want it to
be."

     A Kill at the Waist. At the beginning of 1965, the view
from Hanoi's windows must have been rosy indeed. From a force
of fewer than 20,000 at the end of 1961, the Viet Cong had grown
to a lethally effective terrorist army of 165,000 whose
supplies, orders and reinforcements flowed freely from the
North. Viet Minh regulars were infiltrating at the rate of a
regiment every two months. From the tip of Ca Mau Peninsula to
the 17th parallel, huge swaths of the South lay under Communist
sway, and with good reason: in that year, the Viet Cong had
kidnapped or assassinated 11,000 civilians, mostly rural
administrators, teachers and technicians.

     Saigon's army, which since 1954 has been trained by U.S.
advisors almost entirely to repel a conventional invasion from
the North, was seldom a match for the guerilla cadres. The
Communists were confident that they could sever the South at its
narrow waist