General William Westmoreland was buried Saturday at West Point, but the search for the meaning of his life goes on — right in the heart of Columbia.

“We can’t understand what happened in Vietnam and why unless we understand William Westmoreland,” said Lewis “Bob” Sorley, a military historian who, so far, has spent two years researching a biography on Westmoreland.

Westmoreland, the South Carolina-born U.S. commander in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, died last week at 91.

On hearing of Westmoreland’s death, Sorley was hunkered down on the second floor of the University of South Carolina’s Caroliniana Library, wading through a scholar’s treasure — boxes filled with thousands of Westmoreland’s papers.

When Sorley finds interesting information, he enters it into his Apple G4 laptop. “I’m sort of the obsessive type. I don’t just sample. I like to look at every one,” Sorley, author of four previous books on Vietnam-related military history, said of Westmoreland’s papers.

Sorley, 70, from Maryland, is the first scholar to systematically go through Westmoreland’s papers, library officials said.

The review could take him months. The Caroliniana Library has one of the nation’s most extensive collections of Westmoreland personal papers — more than 70 boxes — 100,000-plus pages of letters, memos, clippings, speeches, photos and assorted documents. They were donated by the Westmorelands in the late 1990s.

Sorley is well-known in military history circles.

“He’s tireless in his research,” said retired Gen. John Sloan Brown, the U.S. Army’s chief of military history at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.

Brown said Sorley’s Vietnam books — particularly a 1992 biography of Gen. Creighton Abrams, who succeeded Westmoreland as commander in Vietnam — are valuable contributions to history.

For a 1999 book on the war’s later years, “A Better War,” Sorley found secret military files and got them declassified, Brown said.

In that book, Sorley concluded Westmoreland’s strategy from 1964 to 1968 — requesting more and more U.S. troops to kill more and more of the enemy — was a failure. By the time Westmoreland left Vietnam in 1968, U.S. forces there had grown to 500,000 from 15,000 in 1964, and 40,000 American soldiers had been killed. And the enemy had only grown stronger.

Brown said it will be interesting to see whether Sorley modifies earlier positions on Westmoreland in his new biography.

“Bob is open-minded,” Brown said. “He’s down there trying to come to grips with Westmoreland’s legacy.”

Whatever Sorley comes up with is sure to be widely read, as well as controversial, said Brown.

“He does have folks who disagree with him,” said Brown, adding one Sorley contention is the United States could have won the Vietnam War if politicians and generals had done things differently. That’s a different take from many historians who argue the Vietnam War was not winnable.

It is healthy for historians to advance well-researched points of view, even though they provoke controversy, Brown said. “That’s how the educational purposes of history are served.” And, he added, such matters are relevant today, “now that we are in yet another frustrating insurgency” in Iraq.

‘THE FINAL CHAPTER’

Sorley has the right background to decode Westmoreland’s career for readers.

Like Westmoreland, Sorley is a West Point graduate. Westmoreland graduated in 1936; Sorley, in 1956. After a 20-year career in the Army that included stints in Vietnam, as an English teacher at West Point, as a tank commander in Germany and as an officer in the Pentagon, Sorley spent seven years with the Central Intelligence Agency. He then retired to research and write books.

After more than 20 years researching Vietnam-related topics, Sorley is familiar with the major libraries around the country where Vietnam- and Westmoreland-related documents are found. They include the Vietnam archives at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas; the U.S. Army archives at Carlisle Barracks, Pa.; and the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

One of the most valuable sources — a kind of day-by-day diary kept by Westmoreland during his Vietnam years — is at Fort McNair, Sorley said. Regularly, Westmoreland dictated observations to a stenographer, Sorley said.

More than half of Sorley’s Westmoreland biography will cover the general’s Vietnam years, from 1964 to 1968, and his years as Armychief of staff, from 1968 to 1972, when Westmoreland still dealt with Vietnam. Publication is at least three years off, Sorley estimated.

On Thursday, Sorley interrupted his research at the Caroliniana Library to go to Charleston for Westmoreland’s funeral. Then, he traveled to West Point to attend the burial Saturday.

“It’s kind of the final chapter,” said Sorley.

‘AS LONG AS IT TAKES’

Sorley said he’s keeping an open mind about Westmoreland. Already, he said, he’s found plenty of material in the Caroliniana Library archives to rebut the stereotype that Westmoreland always was stiff and impersonal.

That material includes hundreds of personal letters — including “bread and butter” and congratulatory notes — that Westmoreland sent to family, friends and fellow soldiers over the years, Sorley said.

“He was very aggressive about cultivating relationships,” Sorley said. “You could say it was self-serving. Or you could say he was doing it on behalf of the Army, or you could say he was just naturally friendly.”

Sorley has spent about five weeks in Columbia since last spring. He’s managed to go through 13 out of the 70-plus boxes at the Caroliniana. Much of the material is letters that Sorley hadn’t seen before.

“I’m going to be back two weeks next month, and two weeks the month after that,” said Sorley, who commutes from his home in Maryland. “I don’t know how long it will take. I’m here as long as it takes.”