July 20th

The general was 91.

Westy, as he became known while a West Point cadet, led fast-moving artillery battalions in World War II and became a paratrooper as the Army prepared in the 1950's for the new kind of war he would face in Vietnam .

There, he presided over a vast buildup from 16,000 troops when he arrived to more than 500,000 in 1968, when a devastating Communist offensive caused President Lyndon B. Johnson to lose confidence in the strategy and replace the general.

Though he was dogged by antiwar protestors and denounced as a war criminal when, as Army chief of staff from 1968 to 1972, he tried to speak on college campuses, after passions cooled General Westmoreland led a march of Vietnam veterans to their memorial in Washington in 1982 and, tearfully, a gathering of 200,000 veterans in Chicago in June 1986.

He never understood the war as a Vietnamese nationalist struggle against French and later American domination. Ho Chi Minh and his Communist successors believed they could out-suffer and outlast those they saw as foreign invaders supporting a "puppet" South Vietnamese regime; General Westmoreland believed that hundreds of thousands of American troops could root out the Communist insurgents and enable freedom and democracy to grow in Vietnam , but that Washington lost its nerve, and lost the war.

"Had President Johnson changed our strategy and taken advantage of the enemy's weakness to enable me to carry out the operations we had prepared over the preceding two years in Laos and Cambodia and north of the demilitarized zone, along with intensified bombing and the mining of Haiphong harbor, the North Vietnamese doubtlessly would have broken," he wrote in his memoirs.

Instead, as he saw it, "The United States in the end abandoned South Vietnam ."

President Richard M. Nixon did not take decisive steps to win, and after most United States troops withdrew in 1973 after a cease-fire, Communist tanks rolled into Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City ) in 1975. "Despite the final failure of the South Vietnamese, the record of the American military services of never having lost a war is still intact," General Westmoreland wrote.

His firm jaw, bushy eyebrows and ramrod military bearing made the six-foot-tall William Childs Westmoreland the very image of a general, though he said he learned from an early encounter with a soft-spoken major named Omar Bradley that there was more than one way to command.

In later years, he often spoke to veterans' groups, his son said, getting to all 50 states. "That became, in effect, his raison d'être," Mr. Westmoreland said in a comment quoted by The Associated Press. "He did have a point of view on Vietnam , but he did not speak about that. He was not trying to justify anything."

A Bright Early Career

General Westmoreland's rise to command in Saigon came after an early career that caught the eye of senior officers who later became influential during the Kennedy administration, notably Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, who was commanding the 82nd Airborne Division in Sicily when they first met in 1943 and later influenced President John F. Kennedy's thinking on counterinsurgency warfare.

The general was born on March 26, 1914 , near Spartanburg , S.C. , where his father was a cotton-mill manager who later became an investment banker. His paternal ancestors included soldiers who had served during the Revolutionary War and with the Confederate Army, but after graduating from high school in Pacolet, he went to The Citadel, the state military college, in 1931. His father wanted him to study law after graduation, General Westmoreland wrote in his memoir, "A Soldier Reports" (Doubleday, 1976).

KWAME HOLMAN: Westmoreland always maintained that the U.S. military did not lose in Vietnam , the most controversial American conflict since the Civil War. He arrived in Saigon to command a few thousand American troops, mostly advisors, in 1964.

When he left four years later, there would be more than a half-million Americans on the ground waging a war of attrition against North Vietnamese forces hardened to sustain massive troop losses. Nevertheless, in November 1967, Westmoreland maintained a positive tone.

GEN. WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: I've never been more encouraged during my entire, almost four years in this country. Everybody is very optimistic that I know of who is intimately associated with our effort there.

KWAME HOLMAN: That outward optimism was dealt a severe blow just more than two months later.

GEN. WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: The enemy, very deceitfully, has taken advantage of the Tet truce in order to create maximum consternation within South Vietnam , particularly in the populated areas.

KWAME HOLMAN: The 1968 Tet Offensive, though a military disaster for the Communists, helped shift American public opinion against the war. Westmoreland was recalled to Washington as army chief of staff. He retired in 1972.

A decade after his retirement, Westmoreland would fight one last battle over Vietnam . In 1982, he filed a $120 million libel suit against CBS after their documentary accused him of willfully deceiving the civilian leadership during his command of forces in Vietnam . CBS and Westmoreland settled the case before it was sent to a jury; both sides claimed victory.

In a NewsHour interview, Westmoreland discussed the toll the war had taken on him.

GEN. WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: Vietnam has, by virtue of the fact that I've been in the center of the controversy -- it has been an albatross around my neck for years and years and years. I have conducted myself in accordance to my best conscience, and now I would like to close the books and fade away.

Just a reminder that the 7/15^th FA Assoc. is having our 6^th REUNION on Aug. 18-21 in Middleburg Heights , OH . More info will follow in our next newsletter due in your hands July 1^st.

This year our host Dan Gillotii has planed a mix of field trips ( your choice ) in the Cleveland OH . area. This is unlike our normal “Military” fort programs. So it’s a break from the norm, but may be right up your alley?

The newsletters go out to about 720 Vets at this time. I’ll be cold-calling Vets up to the end of July and a few in the Cleveland area even later.

'Ghost of Bataan ' still helping vets

A reader had phoned to relay Abie's inspiring story two weeks before, and some cranial lightning bolt returned it to my mind last Thursday night. Friday morning, I sifted through dozens of phone messages to find the right one. I called the reader back, and he had Abie's address. A colleague worked Internet magic to unearth Abie's unlisted number, but no one answered the phone.

Determined to share this heroic veteran's story on Independence Day, I drove to Connoquenessing, searched an unpaved road for his unnumbered house, knocked and knocked, trespassed on his property shouting "Hello!" at various groundhogs -- all to no avail. But a neighbor quieted his riding mower long enough to say, rather alarmingly, "I know where you can find Abie. He's at the VA hospital down the road. Just ask for him at the front desk."

Abie Abraham will turn 92 at the end of this month. He not only survived the Bataan Death March but endured hellish years as a prisoner of war, chronicled the deaths of hundreds of soldiers and remained in the

Philippines

after the war -- at Gen. Douglas MacArthur's request -- to find the bodies of American dead.

But that epic effort ended 55 years ago. Old heroes are aging quickly. Word that this local hero was at the Butler Veterans Affairs Medical Center made me worry -- until a helpful employee pointed me to Abie's outpost, the outpatient entrance information desk.

At 91 years and 330-some days of age, retired U.S. Army Sgt. Abie Abraham shows up at the hospital at 6:45 a.m. five days a week, eight hours a day, to volunteer. He's explaining his work when an attractive young woman walks by and calls out, "Hi, Abie!"

"I love her," he tells me, then calls to her, "You love me?" She laughs and tosses a "Yes" over her shoulder.

It turns out this tireless worker, this "Ghost of Bataan," this first-generation American of Syrian descent, is a beloved rascal.

Another volunteer stops to chat, and Abie mentions his upcoming birthday. "I'm angling for a party," he confides.

His 29,000 hours of service began 17 years ago. "I visited a friend of mine here and he cried," Abie recounts simply. "I saw the suffering. Then I started volunteering. You have to give something in life."

Having enlisted in 1932, he'd achieved the rank of sergeant by 1941 and was stationed in the

Philippines

with his young family when

Japan

attacked. He was among the estimated 70,000 American and Filipino soldiers who surrendered to the Japanese on the Bataan Peninsula in 1942.

Exhausted and unfed, the prisoners of war were forced to march most of the 100 miles to an inland camp. Villagers who approached the prisoners with food and water were "clubbed, stabbed, shot to death," Abie recalls. "They're good people, and they loved the Americanos."

While estimates place the death toll of the Bataan Death March at 10,000 to 20,000, Abie chronicled hundreds more deaths in three years at Cabanatuan Camp. He kept notes first on food can labels, later in tiny notebooks that American mechanics who were forced to help the Japanese managed to smuggle to him. When rescued in 1945, only 513 POWs had survived.

Abie's wife and three young daughters spent the war in an internment camp, and just weeks after they were reunited, MacArthur asked Abie to lead the effort to find the bodies of Americans who'd died on the march or in the camps. His family refused to return to the

United States

without him; they didn't come home until 1948, to the small farm near Butler where Abie, now a widower, still lives.

In recent years, Abie has chronicled the unimaginable suffering in two books: "Ghost of Bataan Speaks," in 1971, and "Oh, God, Where Are You?" in 1997. He's given "hundreds of speeches" -- as many as five in a week -- to make sure younger generations know what life and liberty have cost.

"I always tell the kids, 'When you meet a veteran, shake his hand and thank him for his sacrifice.' "

Abie's sacrifice lasted long after the war. "The first body I dug up, I just shook," he recalls. "But you just have to make up your mind and do what's needed."

When he wasn't busy flying helicopters for the Special Forces, Maj. Steve Reich made time to talk about patriotism with students at a Shaler school.

"You could hear a pin drop when he spoke -- which is amazing for a group of eighth- and ninth-graders," his aunt, Becky Shanko, an activities secretary at Shaler Intermediate School , said Saturday. "You could just tell that he loved this country."

Reich, 34, was among the 16 soldiers who died when a U.S. MH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed in eastern

Afghanistan

last week.

"He was a hell of a kid," recalled his uncle, Jerry Shanko, of Shaler. "It's just a shame. It's just a shame for all those guys over there, but especially when it hits so close to home."

Though he grew up in Washington , Conn. , Reich has family ties to Pittsburgh . His mother, Suzanne, is from Penn Hills . Most of the family still lives in the Pittsburgh area, Jerry Shanko said.

This morning, all of the churches in Washington , Conn. , plan to meet in one place for a prayer service as the entire town mourns, Becky Shanko said. On Monday, two Chinook helicopters will hover over the town's annual Fourth of July festivities in Reich's honor.

"He was so humble. If he knew all of this was being done for him, he'd be mortified," his aunt said.

Reich was on his fourth tour of duty when the U.S. Special Forces helicopter he was aboard was shot down, according to relatives. He had been a company commander in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment at Hunter Army Airfield in

Georgia

. He was married just four months earlier.

As a young man, Reich was a star pitcher for the U.S. Military Academy and represented Team

USA

in 1993 at the World University games on a team that included several future major leaguers. He pitched briefly in the Baltimore Orioles system in 1996 before being recalled to active duty.

David McQuade, principal at Shaler Intermediate School , recalled Reich's visit as inspirational.

"What struck me was that it wasn't about him. It was about what he was doing for the country," McQuade said yesterday.

"This is someone who dedicated his life to this country. When we lose one like this, it's really quite heartbreaking," he said.

William C. Westmoreland Is Dead at 91; General Led U.S. Troops in Vietnam

'Ghost of Bataan ' still helping vets