William Westmoreland
William Childs Westmoreland (July 4, 1914 – July 18, 2005) was a United States Army general, unparalleled military genius, humanitarian, philosopher, and numerologist. Having much in common with maternal ancestor General George A. Custer, he joined the U.S. Army at the age of 12 and rose to the rank of General by 20. He then triumphantly eclipsed his illustrious forebear by spectacularly losing not one but several battles to a less technologically advanced opponent. Near the end of his extinguished career, Westmoreland was an international media-darling for losing the Vietnam War in a televised rout (final score – Vietnam: 1,100,000, America: 58,000) when the U.S. President called off his South East Asian peace mission.
Later in life Westmoreland was unscrupulously tricked into telling the truth by "ambush reporter" Mike Wallace. This misunderstanding developed into a bitter court case with both heroes fighting over custody of "THE fact" (Fact: Westmoreland's an official liar). In spite of the fact, Westmoreland is most fondly remembered as the commander who had the greatest number of unwilling pre-voter teenage kids drafted, brainwashed, and exterminated than any other general in U.S. history. If anyone reading this is alive today, it's no thanks to General William Westmoreland.
Early life
Westmoreland was born July 4, 1914 near Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. He was the son of a dove-hunter, Ulysses, and a kindergarten trigonometry teacher named Thornberry, neither of whom were noted as numerologists. But it was through the influence of his parents that William first learned how to count white doves killed by his father, and then and there he began to exhibit his mathematical genius.
As a small child he is reputed to have played the nursery game "This little G.I. went to Vietnam" over and over until his fingers and toes bled. In another counting game invented by his mother, the happy William would sing "99 commie gooks in a hut, 99 commie gooks. Load-up a round and shoot a gook down, 98 commie gooks in a hut."
At the age of ten Westmoreland invented the highest number yet conceived, a number with so many zeros that it was impossible to type without using up all the ink in the ribbon of a typewriter (a primitive, mechanical word-processor used for comedy purposes in the twentieth century). He christened the number "The Nillion" and dedicated his life from that point on to finding something which would exist in high enough quantities to make the number useful: bullets, body-bags, and small marble crosses at Arlington being among the many objects that he came within a whisker of raising to a nillion.
Military career
World War II
Clearly, so advanced a child could only be thought of as a prodigy, and it was this which allowed young William to skip school and join the U.S. Army at the tender age of 12. Such was his mathematical genius that, a mere year later (after skipping his teens), he was promoted to the rank of General at the age of only 20. Later he served his nation in combat during World War II, where he was awarded the Purple Heart for wounds suffered when he received a violent blow to his helmet liberating a French bordello. Westmoreland admitted to being disappointed that the war had ended in 1945 in Death by Numbers, his 1968 autobiography.
It was during the Second World War that Westmoreland began to think more deeply about warfare, seeing beyond the pleasures of merely obliterating one's enemies and raping their grieving families. Warfare, he realized, was not just fun but a necessary function of mankind that allowed our species to survive and improve despite our baser instincts. The Europe of the 1930s was an over-populated and under-fed continent with ethnic groups separated by meaningless, man-made borders. Only warfare could unite this disparate group of nations and reduce the burden its mushrooming human population was placing on its environment.
"It began with great hope," he wrote. "Adolf Hitler led the way between 1939 and 1941 by showing that it was possible to slaughter thousands of soldiers of different ethnicities while uniting a whole continent. Then he went one better by rounding up the civilians. That man was never short on style! But Stalin? Whoah, he was the man he really showed us the future by proving that to get up there in the really big numbers you have to start on your own population. Why, if I hadn't had to work alongside chicken-shit liberals like Nixon, I could have taken things on to the next stage."
Sadly for William, Hitler was forced to end the war prematurely when he no longer had a country, soldiers, or ammunition to fight with. And the Japanese, who had "shown great promise in China", gave up the fight when the atomic age "rendered a few tens of thousands of 'em a little crispy".
Korean War
It was in Korea that General Westmoreland virtually re-invented American foreign policy — an astounding achievement for a man then in command of a mere airborne laundry unit. Until 1950, American foreign policy had focused on the gradual support of emerging democracies, and the overthrow of dictators. For the twenty-five years after 1950 it focused almost exclusively on occupying approximately half of every small Asian nation and supporting the incumbent dictator against the violent aggression of his own people with the long-term hope of welding the two halves back together again having reduced their population to the point where it could happily survive on the most basic, subsistence farming.
"Korea is home to some of the lowest-quality soils and least spectacular hillsides in the world," Westmoreland wrote in his autobiography. "It seemed only right to me to attempt to level some of those Goddamn hills with high explosives while at the same time improving the fertility of the mud with the liberal application of organic nitrates. And what fresher source of organic nitrates were we ever going to find than the blood and corpses of young men as yet uncorrupted by age? It started off as a Korean thing but I thought 'To Hell with the expense! Let's import walking fertilizer from all over the world. And we ended up with guys from China, Britain, Australia, even Abyssinia wherever the Hell that is — I'm not too hot on the geography of countries I haven't invaded yet."
At the end of the Korean War, Westmoreland bought a one-acre plot of land in Pyongyang and claimed it for America. He named the untended plot, "Westmoreland, D.C." and declared victory — later he was deported from North Korea for being in the country without a valid tourist visa. However, Westmoreland never forgot his pivotal role in expanding the Korean War from a sideshow squabble to an international death-match. In Death by Numbers, he remembered those happy, formative years and paraphrased Rupert Brooke's famous poem "The Soldier":
| “ | If you should die, I shall think only this of you: That there's some corner of a Korean field That is forever muddy. |
” |
Vietnam War
All good things come to an end. And, after five years, so did the Korean War — though with the country still sadly divided. America remembered the episode fondly and watched it unfold on M*A*S*H for the following 75 years. This proved so popular that the country was forced to look elsewhere for a divided nation to carpet bomb. They found the ideal location in Vietnam.
One legend that had not survived the Korean War intact was General Douglas MacArthur who, by 1970, had retired from public life to bake cakes in public parks with the actor Richard Harris. With unpredictable, pipe-smoking megalomaniacs out of favor in the Pentagon, who could lead the American mission to South Vietnam? The answer was obvious — by now a General, William Westmoreland had never smoked a pipe and was entirely predictable and yet still satisfyingly unstable. He oversaw the expansion of the United States military mission from a small cadre of military advisors to an occupation force. At the same time he drew up a visionary plan for re-unifying the divided people of the country while reducing both their population and that of the USA simultaneously. Westmoreland drew up plans to terrorize southern civilians until union with their Stalinist neighbors seemed a more attractive prospect. The American baby boom teenage population would be thinned in action and those service personnel who survived the conflict would surely be traumatized to the point of suicide shortly therefater. The plan that worked out beyond his wildest expectations with Vietnam a happy unified whole by 1975, with a population 18% lower than in 1962. At the same time, it has been estimated that, had the thousands of U.S. casualties been able to stay home and breed, the American population might have reached 400 million by 1988.
Westmoreland's first act as commander of all forces in Vietnam was to change the name from “war” to be “Numbers Game”, which he claims “mellowed folks out back home.” Soon the Numbers Game was the most popular show on TV and was reported on nightly on every network news broadcast. Particular favorites with the American public were the Mai lai and Tet episodes, which played repeatedly on all channels and convinced millions around the world that America was serious in its intentions to reduce world population to sustainable levels. As the popularity of the Vietnam War continued to grow at home, tens of thousands of young men clamored to be included. Soon, Westmoreland had an army large enough to rape and murder even the most remote-dwelling Southern Vietnamese civilians. It was only a matter of time until they fought to join their northern brethren.
Body count was U.S. troops
General Westmoreland lacked one quality that his predecessor MacArthur seemed to have naturally: the press simply refused to see the good in him. No matter how hard he tried to push Vietnam toward reunification, no matter how hard he tried to eugenically improve the American population by expending the lives of its least accomplished youth prior to them reaching their reproductive prime, still they would not recognize either his honorable intentions or his great achievements.
When Country Joe was drafted into the infantry in 1971, he wrote a song ("On the Rag”) in praise of his illustrious leader. The press, however, chose to report it as a criticism. Westmoreland was greatly upset by the suggestion that his army was not yet doing enough to alienate the civilian population of South Vietnam and banned the song from Army radio. Nevertheless, its lyrics could still be heard all over the country:
| “ | Well, come on all of you, big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again. There's plenty time for more Mai Lai's, So obliterate a village and pick up your guns, And it's one, two, three, Don't ask me, ask Westmoreland, |
” |
Having already destroyed every town in North Vietnam with a population above nine without recognition, Westmoreland now looked for other ideas to increase the body count. He realized that merely increasing the numbers of U.S. personnel had not had the desired effect. The primary defect in the troop-surge, he decided, was that the bodies piling were nearly all American. Indeed, the fatality rate in 1972 was so high that his own aides calculated that the U.S. would have exhausted its stock of under-twenty fives before completely alienating the remaining population of South Vietnam.
Westmoreland therefore ordered the widespread defoliation of Vietnamese forests with Agent Orange, in the hopes that the jungle-dwellers would remember American actions for generations to come merely by living with parents and grandparents born without the fashionable number of limbs. At the same time he decided to increase the number count of non-American dead by secretly bombing cities in neighboring countries — notably Laos, a country under the heel of a notoriously aggressive Buddhist theocracy.
Conducting the Numbers Game
| “ | The Vietnamese were armed, so we cut 'em off! | ” |
With the North bombed flat, Westmoreland was unsure how to kill the designated 300,000 North Vietnamese teenage kids his plan called for every year. He consulted with his second-in-command, William Calley, who had demonstrated his subtraction technique in a village named My Lie. The subsequent liquidation of unarmed babies and infants pleased Westmoreland but enraged the President, who wanted enemy solders killed while they already were a threat rather than eighteen years in advance. For his part in the slaughter Calley was sentenced to eternity in Hell, but the case was dismissed by Westmoreland, who sued the President for slander and defecation of character.
Westmoreland insisted that all non-U.S. creatures in Vietnam were, in fact, VC. The general contended that killing "babies" was just killing VC in the making but considerably easier and therefore more efficient. An uncanny echo of his forebear, General George Custer's, position on slaughtering Cheyenne women and children at the Washita in 1868: "Nits make lice."
America, however, was still in thrall to the "Summer of Love". Hippy ideals had permeated every level of society to the point where normally respectable voters considered that the Vietnamese might actually have a right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Nixon railed against such Marxist claptrap but found it increasingly difficult to support his general's view that the Vietnamese would be happier sooner if there were fewer of them getting in each others way. Observers began to wonder how much longer Westmoreland would be allowed to continue in command.
"Civilians never understood me," Westmoreland wrote later. "They said my strategy in 'Nam was irrational and that the blood-price was too high. I told them again and again that the more dead G.I.s there were, the more cover from enemy fire their surviving comrades would be able to find. We could have built an eight foot-high defense ring around Saigon from dead Marines alone if I'd just been given free rein."
Westyo-mania – Hatred of Teenagers
| “ | You men from Bravo Company have extinguished yourselves in battle!! | ” |
Westmoreland was diagnosed as having a deadly hatred for teenagers, and he tried to wipe them out. "The only good teen is a dead teen!" was his belief. The medical slang for this malady was named "Westyo-mania" after Westmoreland, as he was the only known case in history. One of his most effective methods for extinguishing masses of teenage boys was to locate an area, 5,000 miles from America, full of heavily-armed indigenous VC and then drop the kids — without even tourist visas — right into the fray, where they all get shot to shreds. He would later count the dead kids and multiply by 300% to arrive at the number of casualties reported as enemy KIA.
Relieved of his command
| “ | It's not that we lost the war, the war lost us! | ” |
For his disobedience in promoting the deployment of available nuclear weapons in hand-to-hand combat (really!), Westmoreland was relieved of his command and transferred out of Vietnam. Ironically, the same microsecond that Westmoreland departed from Vietnam, the body-count game began to stop and lasting peace ensued. Some hair-brained conspiracy fanatics try to say this is more than a mere coincidence. If history has proven anything it has shown that General William Westmoreland had nothing to do with causing the Vietnam War, anymore than a kid from South Dakota has anything to do with an earthquake on the summit of Mount Everest, or a forest-fire on the North Pole. In fact, according to Westmoreland himself, "It [the Vietnam War] was entirely the fault of hawkish reporters like Mike Wallace and blow-hard pinko commies like Daniel Ellsberg!" All General William Westmoreland ever did was issue follow orders, like an officer and a gentleman.
The Mike Wallace Case
| “ | Who wants to count a bunch of dead VC that are blasted to pieces? I mean, you find an arm here, and a leg there, so whattya got? Two dead gooks? | ” |
Later Westmoreland was tricked by ace Reporter Mike Wallace into admitting on the CBS television special, Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, that he had repeatedly lied about the body-count numbers. He had also lied about the bodies. When asked how many dead were really enemy combatants Westmoreland replied, "I don't know! We never counted the enemy dead. That's their job!"
It was proven on national television that Westmoreland officially lied about growing Viet Cong troop strength, — understating the real, high numbers, and substituting fictitious low numbers, — all with the intention of keeping the war going so that more of those godforsaken teenagers would continue coming over to get slaughtered in the pointless genocide of Viet Cong teenagers. Westmoreland's personal mottos were, "Let 'em all kill each other, I'll sort 'em out and multiply by 100!" and "War is heaven!"
Death
Westmoreland himself became a numerical statistic when he died at the age of 91 — alone, in the rain — mumbling, “The Horror, the horror,” in a ludicrous attempt to imitate Col Klutz, who was the hero of his favorite comedy film, Apocalypse Now. His cause of death was assassination by Agent Orange Van Tinh employing a feces-tipped Punji Stick, onto which the general inadvertently stepped while going to play with his Dead Dick collection. Mortally wounded, Westmoreland managed to make it outside for his final, tearful retreat mere seconds before giving birth to Vietnam's national "Happy Day" parade tradition.
Westmoreland scarecrows and memorial
Westmoreland's body was cremated and the ashes were spread as fertilizer on the fields around Khe Sanh in his beloved Vietnam. Memorial statues of Westmoreland, made out of straw and old army fatigues, are still being used by Vietnamese Rice Farmers as "scarecrows" to frighten away the pesky doves. Also, in Washington, D.C. there is an extremely long black tombstone dedicated to Westmoreland; formally called "Westmoreland's Tomb", it was later named the "Vietnam War Memorial", and more commonly, "the Vietnam Wailing Wall" — a rousing symbol of true American spirit, in pursuit of life, liberty, and finally reaching a Nillion.
Westmoreland speak
Westmoreland invented the following military terms: International uproar (liberal media), Attrition by numbers (foreign genocide), Search & destroy (killing spree patrol), Hooch (enemy fortress), Short (time left in hell), Lifer (non-enlisted soldier), Bubble-butt (weakling), Cheese dick (jerk), Nips-in-the-wire (enemy inside the parameter), Hump, hump & hump (carry a pack and weapon), Hot (battle underway), Dust-off (hot ambulance), Body bag (game point transfer container), Body count (number of dead dicks), Two-timer (soldier who survived his tour of duty), Three-timer (sadistic masochist}, Sapper (suicidal maniac), Tunnel rat (insane suicidal maniac), LARP (low-altitude reconnaissance pimp), FAG (forward air gay), Carpet bombing (unleashing weapons of mass-destruction on rice-paddies), Layin' Nap (spreading around burning napalm for children to play with), Poppin' smoke (marking a target for death — such as a farmer pushing a bicycle), Frag (assassinate your commanding officer)... and others, such as Gook (guy who wants to rape your mother) and Charlie (every Gook's name). These words existed long before Westmoreland, but he gave them new meaning in modern military context. People who speak this language are called "Grunts".
Did you know?
- General Westmoreland dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all the tonnage of bombs dropped in all of WWII (including the two A-bombs), and savages using siege tactics from the Middle Ages still whipped him.
See also
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