Untitled Document

19 July 2005

Westy

I was surprised at the way the ball came off the bat, considering the moist weight of the air. Not many balls make it to the upper mezzanine at RFK stadium. Armas was the starting pitcher for the Nationals, and he seemed to have some remarkable spin on the ball. As the ball continued to soar, I had enough time to think that I might have to do something. I was juggling a soft pretzel and a Blue Moon draft beer and had no hands to spare.

My son started to move, but the ball arced over the railing about eight seats away and several large males plunged for it. The first one to touch it did not succeed in keeping it. My son looked grave. “Never the first one,” he said. “Never.”

That was the excitement for a while. It was almost too hot to drink, so muggy that my shirt was drenched. Our spirits rose a little as the game went on. The Nationals have been in a slump of late, and while having a game to go to is a good thing, it is always nice to have a winner in town.

Neither of us felt that way when we got to the field. My son had been promoted last week and he was feeling pretty good about himself. Today, he was informed that it was a clerical error. I tried to explain that sometimes things happen that you can't plan for, but he was still a little down.

For my part, I paid the wrong mortgage company on the first, and saw the curt note from the real lender right before I went out the door for the stadium. They had sold one of the loans to someone else I had never heard of, and the confusion would take a couple hours on the phone the next day, and I would probably have to come up with another big check two weeks before payday.

We were both a little pensive.

It got progressively more soggy in the stands, and we left with the game tied up. Colorado went ahead in the 6 th , we could hear it walking to the car, and on the radio driving away, I heard the Nationals respond with two in the bottom of the 7 th . I normally can make it at least that far, but with the heat things were moving slowly.

The Rockies scored one in the top of the ninth, and the Nats expired without issue, losing 5-4.

The pool at Big Pink was closed when I got back, and I sat outside and sweated quietly in the darkness. I checked the headlines before collapsing into the Murphy bed. The weather is going nuts this year. Hurricane Emily is reorganizing after smashing the resort at Cancun, and is headed north. Typhoon Haitang is bound for China.

Some say that they might all come together in a perfect storm of unimaginable power. It is a strange year.

But the last thing I heard made me wonder. I had thought the General was already dead, but I was wrong. Part of the war is finally over, not the right war, of course, but the Commander of the Military Assistance Command has passed from the field.

General Westmoreland was 91. He was a striking man in his time, six foot tall and bristling eyebrows. He preferred crisply starched and pressed jungle fatigues, one of those curiosities of the military mind, taking the informal uniform intended for hard use in the field and transforming it into a symbol of grave policy.

I remember commands like Panama that had a uniform policy that made fatigues the uniform-of-the-day. The outfit was arguably more comfortable than shipboard wash khakis, and certainly had more pockets. But since it was after Operation JUST CAUSE, and the arrest of the former president, the choice of uniform was partly a psychological tool.

Seeing the Yankees dressed for combat seemed to keep everyone on their toes.

They call it Battle Dress Uniform now, or BDU for short. You see them in the airports as the kids come home from Iraq . Westy abandoned them when he retired as Army Chief of Staff, disappointed that he had not been picked to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

General Earl Wheeler went home in 1970, and there were still over three hundred thousand Americans in the field. Westy got the numbers up to almost a half million when he was commanding, and he thought that with just a couple hundred thousand more, he would have turned the trick.

It would have meant a wider war, of course, and I think that is about the time Bob MacNamara decided that he didn't have the heart for it.

Westy won a remarkable victory in the all-out Tet Offensive in 1968. The Vietnamese threw everything they had at the South, an offensive in every city. When it was over, the cadres had been shredded. It took the North the better part of a decade to recover. But what he won in the field, Westy lost in the media.

Maybe it was the eyebrows. They made him look like a fierce eagle. The press turned on him, and on his strategy. If you asked someone on the street about the Tet Offensive today, assuming they actually remember it, they would probably say that the Vietnamese were the victors. Maybe that is just more efficient, since it turned out that way. But it might not have been.

President Nixon picked a Navy guy- Tom Moorer- to be the Chairman. Westy thought they needed a firm Army hand on the tiller to complete the victory, but he was clearly out of step with the times. Army did not have the Chairmanship again until John Vessey was tapped in 1982. The Army had a lot to live down.

Westy did not go quietly. He ran for governor of South Carolina at one point, and traveled to all fifty states to talk to veterans groups. He sued CBS for libel when they claimed that he had ordered his intelligence staff to cook the books on North Vietnamese troop strength.

The suit was dropped, eventually, but the bad blood continued between the media and the military and it isn't fixed yet. Dying this year is more than a bit ironic. Don Rumsfeld had his first tour as Secretary of Defense in 1975, as the North Vietnamese Regulars swept into Saigon .

Ever since, Don has been looking for ways for his military to be more agile, and avoid situations like that. When he approved the plans for the occupation of Iraq, he looked for a limited US presence on the ground. The Army Chief of Staff at the time didn't agree, and Eric Shinseki was forced to retire.

Westy would have understood. Sometimes just a couple hundred thousand troops can make all the difference in the world.