Advice and Dissent
He is the spit-and-polish image of a career military officer: stocky and silver-haired, he stands straight as a bayonet and has a level gaze. But when former Marine Lieut. Colonel William Corson talks about the injustices done to veterans of the Viet Nam War, there is anger in his voice. Says Corson: "They deserved a hell of a lot more than we gave them. What did we do to facilitate the re-entry of these guys who sacrificed so much? The answer is, damn little."
Corson, 55, knows his subject well: for the past seven years, he has written a Viet Nam Veteran Adviser column for Penthouse, one of the few publications that has aggressively pursued the question of America's treatment of its Viet Nam vets. Son of an accountant, Corson quit the University of Chicago in 1942, at age 17, to join the Marines and served in the South Pacific during World War II. He left in 1946 to earn a master's degree in finance and economics at Chicago, but rejoined three years later to fight in Korea. Corson, who speaks four Chinese dialects, worked for U.S. and allied intelligence throughout Asia from 1954 to 1962. After a stint at the Pentagon, he was thinking about retirement when the call came in 1966 that changed his life. As Corson puts it: "The Marine Corps wanted me to go to Viet Nam. I went."
For 13 months in 1966 and '67 Corson served as commander of 3,500 men in 114 platoons spread out in hamlets across five provinces in South Viet Nam. Corson firmly believed that Americans first had to win the trust of the villagers if the war was to be won. Disillusionment set in when the Pentagon began stressing body counts and adopted what he calls a "strategy of attrition." He was especially incensed over the search-and-destroy missions ordered by General William C. Westmoreland. Corson argues that the missions not only failed to destroy the enemy but devastated the Vietnamese people. "I tried to convince them they were doing the wrong thing," he says. "I felt there was a pox on both houses: the South Viet Nam government and the Viet Cong. They were predators against the people."
In 1968 Corson was reassigned to a desk job at the Pentagon, and proceeded to write The Betrayal, a blistering attack on U.S. military strategy in Viet Nam and the corruption of the Saigon government. Corson was scheduled to retire the day before the book was published, but a task force was convened to comb its pages for security violations; suddenly he was threatened with a court-martial. That threat passed, though Corson got a "nonjudicial reprimand." Since his retirement he has kept his sense of outrage over how the grunt was treated both in Viet Nam and at home. "We barely gave them a pat on the tail and said, 'Go ahead, kid,' " he says. "The greatest mystery for me is why they continued to fight." He points out that unlike U.S. soldiers in other wars, most Vietvets never shared in a major victory. "For most of them, the war was like being on the fringe of a thunderstorm. When they came home, a lot of them began asking, 'What have I been involved in?' "