The War: A Marine’s Protest

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.

To Corson, the culprits are the U.S. diplomats, politicians and generals who are afraid to admit that the cheap victory they originally sought over Communism in Viet Nam is impossible. He charges that they tolerate corruption, excuse cowardice and deceive the public at home with glowing reports and phony statistics. U.S. Pacification Chief Robert Komer, Corson notes, proudly cited as progress in the “Other War” the distribution of 150,000 tons more fertilizer in five northern provinces in 1967, failing to mention that the region’s rice production fell by 150,000 tons during the same period.

Major Flaw. To the detriment of his arguments, many of them valuable, Corson goes too far in his protests. His book is hastily compiled and his advocacy of parceling out American troops in small units for pacification has already been partially outdated by the Communists’ massive Tet offensive. The book’s major flaw is that it lays Vietnamese sins on American shoulders. To win for the peasant the minimum terms of social equity he deems essential would require relentless pressure on Viet Nam’s present and future rulers or even a full American takeover—a political escalation far exceeding what Americans are now prepared for. To effectively ensure that orders from a chastened Saigon regime were obeyed would require American overseers with powers to correct abuses. Such an arrangement was once called colonialism. It is no answer to the morass in Viet Nam today.