Schwarzkopf Returns to Vietnam

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf returned from the Persian Gulf War as a conquering hero. His reception after two tours of duty in Vietnam was quite different.

“I think all of us who served over there and came back home felt a sense of betrayal,” the retired Army commander recalled during a recent interview. “We didn’t start the war. We were simply doing what our country asked us to do. I ran into several occasions where people looked with disgust upon the fact that I was wearing a uniform based upon my service in Vietnam, accusing me of all sorts of horrendous things I had never done. There was somehow a blame that was being placed on me simply because I was doing what I’d been taught to do all my life--and that’s serve my country and go to their call when they ask me to.”

For many Americans, from privates to generals, from Presidents to protesters, the war in Vietnam remains a psychic wound that will not heal. In an evocative documentary, Schwarzkopf and CBS anchor Dan Rather, a former war correspondent, return to Vietnam, each for the first time in more than 20 years. The one-hour program, “Schwarzkopf in Vietnam: A Soldier Returns,” airs at 10 tonight (Channels 2 and 8).

Schwarzkopf, who hosted a documentary on Pearl Harbor with CBS’ Charles Kuralt last December, returned to Vietnam this spring with mixed feelings, he said.

“I thought to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing this for?’ ” he recalled. “My jaw was set when we got off the plane in Saigon. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to receive all of this.”

Expecting Vietnam to be the way it looked when he left in 1970, Schwarzkopf said, he found a country with battlefields now overgrown, a Saigon “a little meaner and uglier” than he remembered it, and a people trying to put the war behind them.

Schwarzkopf and Rather never met during the Vietnam War but were there at the same time. Schwarzkopf served first as an adviser to the South Vietnamese from 1965 to 1966, then as the commander of a U.S. battalion from 1969 to 1970. Rather reported from Vietnam for CBS from 1965 to 1966 and returned several times later.

During their trip, Schwarzkopf visited battlefields where he was wounded and where he saw young soldiers under his command lose arms and legs. Some of the men from his battalion are interviewed in the documentary, and there are also interviews with some former American soldiers who have returned to Vietnam in recent years.

Apart from a brief scene in which tie-wearing students in Hanoi smilingly tell Schwarzkopf and Rather that they want to become businessmen and women, there is little of the Vietnamese viewpoint in the documentary. Among those who are interviewed, little bitterness toward the United States is expressed.

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“There was not a vindictive dwelling on what happened,” Schwarzkopf said. “. . . You had the sense that this is a country with 3,000 years of culture behind it and, although the war was a momentous event for us and for them, it was a small part of the history of that nation, and they seem to have gone on with their lives.”

Schwarzkopf made it plain that he blamed politicians in Washington at the time for the failure of the United States to win the war in Vietnam. “I think our strategy in Vietnam was an incorrect strategy, a bankrupt strategy,” he declared.

Public support also was lost--a lesson that Schwarzkopf said he believed affected decisions during the Persian Gulf War. “I think there’s been a maturing on the part of the American people since Vietnam in the realization that when you send your troops to war, you must support them,” he explained.

Asked about the differences between press coverage during the Vietnam War--where reporters were able to travel with the troops and gathered information that conflicted with the official version of the war effort--and the Persian Gulf War, where travel and access to information was strictly limited, Schwarzkopf cited technology, not politics, as the principal reason.

“The criticism that the military went too far (with press restrictions during the Gulf War) generally comes from the press,” Schwarzkopf said. “During the Gulf War there were 2,060 reporters ‘in country.’ During the Tet offensive, the single most important battle in the Vietnam War, there were 80 reporters in country--and not all of them, I can assure you, were out with the troops.”

With the instant availability of CNN, he said, “We have a management problem--and that is how we manage the huge number of reporters that have this near-instantaneous capacity of reporting in such a way that they can get what they need but, at the same time, we protect the troops from information that could cause them to lose their lives.”