Did you know about the spat between General Westmoreland and the Marine Corps?

American involvement in Vietnam was riddled with controversy from beginning to end. It was a war fought on debated geopolitical principles, using strategies of dubious value, involved incidents of despicable morality, and went against the will of the American populace. One small controversy in the tangled mass was the bad blood between General William Westmoreland (Westmoreland), the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to ’68, and the United States Marine Corps. 

The first U.S. ground troops to be deployed to Vietnam were Marines, who landed on March 8, 1965. Their first job was to protect a U.S. airbase against Viet Cong attacks, and they went on to provide security for other locations as well. 

It didn’t take long, however, to expand the Marines’ responsibility with the Combined Action Program (CAP). The Marine Corps acquired a great deal of institutional experience with pacification and counterinsurgency operations during the late 19th and early 20th century, the period known as the Banana Wars, when the U.S. was aggressively meddling in the affairs of numerous Central American and Caribbean countries. The Marines knew how protect pro-U.S. settlements and train the local militias to fight against anti-U.S. guerillas. The CAP followed the same idea: Marines lived and fought alongside South Vietnamese militia forces in what turned out to be one of the few reasonably successful programs in the war. CAP patrols occurred in the northern parts of South Vietnam close to the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South, where the Marines also manned important bases to deter North Vietnamese attacks. 

One man who wasn’t a fan of CAP was General Westmoreland, who was fixated on large-scale battles against North Vietnamese forces. In January 1968, just before North Vietnam embarked on the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Khe Sanh Combat Base, (the latter manned by Marines), Westmoreland decided to establish a new, northern sub-headquarters to MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) called MACV Forward, headed by his deputy and later successor, Creighton Abrams. The Marine unit in the area, III Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF), balked. They felt that putting a brand-new headquarters, staffed by the Army, in their area and operationally superior to them was a sign that Westmoreland had no faith in their ability to handle the situation. General Cushman, commander of III MAF, complained “when Abrams came north, oh Christ, we got messages all night long, in the middle of the Goddamned night and everything else.” MACV Forward staff started constantly interposing themselves between III MAF and its subordinate units, giving orders to the latter directly, while not keeping III MAF staff informed of their actions.

Marine outrage got so bad that Westmoreland held a press conference to expressly deny he had lost faith in them. Meanwhile, he sent a cable to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earle Wheeler in which he stated the exact opposite. Leadership conflicts between the Army and the Marines in Vietnam had already existed previously to the incident and became even more strained afterwards, leaving another black mark on Westmoreland’s record. 

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