WEST POINT, N.Y. — "What Are the Lessons of Vietnam" was scrawled across the board, and at the end of the hour, the professor — who had sternly told the class that "Vietnam did not just happen, it was the clear result of decisions made by men" — thumped the board and demanded:
"I want each of you to tell me: Who was responsible for this debacle?"
The 16 students shifted uneasily in their chairs.
"Westmoreland," said the first, naming one of the American commanders in Vietnam, "It was his theater and he expended a lot of effort on search and destroy." Down the row it went: "I blame Richard Nixon for why we got out of Vietnam." LBJ and his advisers; Kennedy; Nixon; LBJ; the joint chiefs of staff; even John Foster Dulles, the Cold War secretary of state, until finally the lone young woman ventured in a
frustrated voice, "I don't think it's anybody in particular."
A common scene, perhaps, on campus these days, where the Vietnam War and the tumultuous 1960s have become among the most popular courses.
But this professor, Cole Kingseed, had the eagles of a full Army colonel on his shoulders and the students wore the uniforms of cadets at the United States Military Academy, whose graduates commanded, fought and bled in the war in Vietnam that ended in defeat 25 years ago, before any of them were born.
"I might as well be teaching the Peloponnesian Wars," sighed Kingseed, who was a junior at the University of Dayton and an honor cadet in its rapidly diminishing ROTC program in the spring of 1970 when, on the other side of Ohio, Kent State erupted and four students were killed in a volley of National Guard fire.
The required military history survey course, the backbone of the curriculum preparing the cadets to be Army officers, wound up its section on Vietnam Thursday with the students pulling out their maps and pondering how, as Kingseed and other instructors in the course put it bluntly, "could the most powerful nation on the face of the earth be defeated by a second-rate agricultural Third World country?"
It is a question being faced here at West Point with a critical frankness, startling to an outsider who might expect a more hidebound military approach. And the instructors — soldiers first before they became scholars — are constantly aware these days that their young charges, as lieutenants and captains commanding platoons and companies, might soon be plunged into ambiguous, perhaps ill-conceived missions in the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East or elsewhere.
"My real feeling is, I don't know how we could have won that war," reflected the chairman of the history department, Col. Robert Doughty, West Point class of '65 and an adviser to a Vietnamese armored cavalry unit in 1968-69.
"It was the nature of the war itself, a people's war waged by the North Vietnamese," he said. "You're fighting an enemy who is willing to take those kind of casualties. Lord, I saw them die by the hundreds.
"We can only begin to suggest the complexity," he said, hoping the courses would spur more reading and an appreciation for ambiguity and independent thinking.
"They're going to be caught in something just as bad, sometime, somewhere," he said of the future officers. "When or where, I can't predict, but they will be."