Viet Militias Key Forces, Veterans Testify : Ex-Officer Shows Jury in CBS Trial How Irregulars Made Mines

As the jury in Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s libel suit against CBS watched with fascination, a former Army captain Monday gave a meticulous demonstration of the way Viet Cong irregulars fashioned hand grenades into mines that killed and maimed thousands of American troops.

“I can teach anyone to do it in 10 minutes,” former Capt. Daniel Embree said, reaching for a dummy “pineapple grenade” lying on the bench in front of U.S. District Judge Pierre N. Leval.

Then, taking a string of wire and the grenade in hand, Embree showed jurors how such grenades were buried or hidden in the grass so that a point man on a reconnaissance patrol would kick the trip wire, pulling the pin and setting off an explosion three to five seconds later.

The result on a typical patrol, he said, was that the fragments from the grenade hit the point man in the back, killing or severely wounding him at the same time it exploded immediately in front of the following troops, killing or wounding some of them as well.

Embree and another Vietnam veteran were called to the stand Monday by CBS to testify first hand that the Viet Cong irregulars, known as self-defense and secret self-defense militias, were an important element of enemy combat strength.

That issue has become a pivotal point in the trial, which will decide whether a 1982 CBS documentary libeled the former Vietnam commander by charging that he produced misleading estimates of enemy troop strength at the height of the Vietnam War, thus deceiving President Lyndon B. Johnson.

During a 1967 controversy between the Army and the CIA, Westmoreland’s command insisted that thousands of members of the enemy’s self-defense and secret self-defense militias be dropped from the formal count of enemy troops.

Embree and former Army Infantryman Daniel Friedman told the jury that land mines and booby traps were a specialty of the self-defense forces.

“Those people were fighting us. And we were trying to fight them,” Embree testified. “That was what we understood our job to be. I’m very surprised that Gen. Westmoreland did not know that’s what we were doing.”

When the general was interviewed for the documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” and when he testified in court last November, he insisted that self-defense forces were militarily insignificant.

During more than a week on the witness stand, he recalled telling his intelligence officer: “We are not fighting these people; they are basically civilians. They don’t belong in any representation, numerical representation of the military enemy capability.”

Moreover, Westmoreland told the jury that, when he visited U.S. and South Vietnamese combat units in the field and received on-the-spot briefings, “I don’t ever recall the word self-defense and secret self-defense coming forth.”

However, Friedman and Embree sided with other defense witnesses who have testified that self-defense forces, members of the enemy militia posing as civilians in supposedly pacified villages, caused a significant percentage of U.S. casualties. Embree told the jury Monday that he believes that half of the casualties suffered by the South Vietnamese battalions he advised during his year in Vietnam were caused by booby traps and land mines fashioned by the irregular forces.

“We were constantly being warned of them. They constantly caused a very high percentage of our casualties. . . . I saw too many of my buddies go down without being concerned about them,” Friedman said.

In other testimony, Westmoreland attorney Dan Burt read the jury excerpts from a recorded telephone conversation in which Howard Stringer, the program’s executive producer, said that he did not believe generals “as a matter of course” and that he thought “Westmoreland should have been fired five years ago.”

Burt contended that the remarks reflected the state of mind that led to the documentary.

But CBS attorney David Boise suggested that the remarks were meaningless because they were made after the documentary was completed and reflected what Stringer thought after the network’s reporting and investigation were completed.