A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam Read online

  The White House photographer lined up everyone except Alsop for the official photograph. He arranged them in a semicircle in front of the drapes of the bay windows behind the desk where the Stars and Stripes and the presidential flag rested on poles topped by gilded eagles. The president stood between John Allen and Mary Jane. At the moment the photographer pressed the shutter button, he smiled slightly, but he looked a bit queasy in the subsequent photograph.

  After the official photograph had been taken, the president spoke briefly to the family. He said that Vann’s death had been a personal loss to him as well as a loss to the country. He extended sympathy to them on behalf of the entire nation. He had felt friendship toward Vann, he said, and great respect and appreciation for Vann’s work in Vietnam. The last time he had seen Vann had been right here in this office during one of Vann’s home leaves. Nixon said there had been a shared understanding of the war in that meeting and that Vann had given him new insights into the conflict and into the desires of the people of South Vietnam.

  Peter had read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Carnegie recommended sincerity in dealing with others. Peter did not give Nixon a high score for sincerity. Richard Nixon was attempting to be gracious to the Vanns. His apparent nervousness over Jesse and his personal mannerisms got in the way. As he talked, he smiled too much for what was not a happy occasion. His eyes moved constantly, without ever focusing on anyone in particular. John Allen had acquired his father’s habit of wanting to look someone he was meeting directly in the eyes. The president’s eyes seemed to avoid his, sliding off whenever their glances met. The family’s impression of insincerity was heightened by the makeup Nixon was wearing to cover his heavy beard for the television cameras that were shortly to appear. They had never seen a man wearing makeup before except on a stage and were surprised to go to the White House and be greeted by a president with pancake makeup on his face. The family got the feeling that this was some sort of theatrical performance, that Vann’s death had created an opportunity for Richard Nixon to do some public relations work as the bestower of a medal on a war hero.

  The president irritated them most by saying twice in the course of his remarks that he had wanted to give Vann the nation’s highest award, the Congressional Medal of Honor, but that the law prevented this because Vann had technically been a civilian official. Therefore, Nixon said, he was reluctantly limited to bestowing the second-highest honor on Vann, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. No one in the family believed that John Vann rated anything less than the highest award. Peter thought that the president should either have made a special arrangement to give his father the Congressional Medal of Honor or have had the good taste not to mention it.

  The president’s aides let the reporters and television cameramen into the room. John Allen received the medal for his father, because Mary Jane was no longer Vann’s legal wife. He stood in front of the president at the right side of the desk, where the colors and battle streamers of the country’s armed services hung from another row of flag poles crested by gold-plated eagles.

  Scowcroft kept his eyes on Jesse.

  Before handing the medal to John Allen, the president read the citation praising Vann:

  “Soldier of peace and patriot of two nations, the name of John Paul Vann will be honored as long as free men remember the struggle to preserve the independence of South Vietnam.

  “His military and civilian service in Vietnam spanned a decade, marked throughout by resourcefulness, professional excellence and unsurpassed courage; by supreme dedication and personal sacrifice.

  “A truly noble American, a superb leader,” the president read, “he stands with Lafayette in that gallery of heroes who have made another brave people’s cause their own.”

  Mary Jane resented being forced to watch from the side. She resented more the staged manner of the ceremony. She resented most that Nixon was giving Vann a second-best medal.

  “This is a dirty damn shame, John,” she said silently to him now, just as she had told him she loved him when she put a rose on his coffin. “He’s going to bury you second. The whole bag is still keeping you down.”

  BOOK ONE

  GOING

  TO

  WAR

  HE DIDN’T SEEM like a man anyone could keep down when he strode through the swinging doors of Col. Daniel Boone Porter’s office in Saigon ten years earlier, shortly before noon on March 23, 1962. Porter soon had the feeling that if the commanding general were to tell this junior lieutenant colonel in starched cotton khakis and a peaked green cap that he was surrendering direction of the war to him, John Vann would say, “Fine, General,” and take charge. In light of the figure he was to become, it was a small irony that he almost hadn’t made it to Vietnam. The plane he should have taken to Saigon in March 1962, with ninety-three other officers and men, had disappeared over the Pacific. He had missed the flight because, in his eagerness to go to war, he had forgotten to have his passport renewed. A clerk had noticed that the passport had expired during the final document check, and he had been instructed to step out of the boarding line. Shortly after the plane vanished, the Red Cross had telephoned Mary Jane to inform her that her husband had been lost in the Pacific. Mary Jane had said that he was all right, that he had telephoned and was taking a later flight. She must be mistaken, the Red Cross worker had persisted. Her husband was missing. Passenger rosters didn’t lie.

  Everything was in the flux and confusion of commencement then. President Kennedy had just created the new U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) in Saigon in February 1962, and appointed Gen. Paul Harkins to head it. Harkins had made his reputation as the principal staff aide to George Patton, the battlefield genius of World War II. The president was to nearly quadruple the number of American military men in South Vietnam that year, from 3,200 at the beginning of 1962 to 11,300 by Christmas. Far more of Porter’s time than he wanted to spend was being taken up with interviewing and assigning these newcomers. His office was in an old French cavalry compound hidden behind the trees along a wide boulevard, noisy with traffic, that connected downtown Saigon with its Chinese suburb of Cholon. The compound was the headquarters of a corps of the Saigon government’s army, formally known as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and colloquially as the Arvin, following the American military’s penchant for converting initials into acronyms. Porter was the advisor to the Vietnamese brigadier general in command of the corps, and the other officers in his detachment worked with the corps’ staff sections. In Vietnam in 1962, air conditioners were not yet as routine fixtures as typewriters in every U.S. Army headquarters. Porter and the advisors under him had their desks, as the French had before them, in high-ceilinged offices that opened onto verandas erected at each level of the three-story buildings of brick and stucco. The verandas looked out over a neglected parade ground of weeds and dirt, but viewing was not their primary function. They had been designed as walkways and as reflectors to catch any rare freshet of cool air and move it past the swinging louver doors—like the saloon doors in cowboy movies—to the outsized electric fans hanging from the ceilings.

  This short lieutenant colonel standing in front of Porter had an ability to convey self-confidence. He had also managed to keep his khaki shirt and trousers unrumpled, despite the heat, and he gave a brisker salute than most officers would have before he accepted Porter’s invitation to sit down. Otherwise, there was little that was impressive about him. He reminded Porter of one of those banty roosters Porter used to watch darting among the hens in the farmyards around Belton, in central Texas, where Porter’s father had owned a feed and farm merchandise store. When he took off his cap as he sat down one could see better what a homely man he was. His straight-ribbed nose was too large for his narrow face. The nostrils flared over a wide and equally straight mouth. These features were accentuated by a high forehead and by his habit of wearing his sandy hair close-cropped on the sides and on top in the fashion of American military men of the
1950s and ’60s. His gray-blue eyes caught one’s attention and gave an indication of his character. They were the eyes of a falcon, narrow and deep-set under bushy brows. His body was lithe, all muscle and bone, and wonderfully quick. He had been a gymnast and a track star in school and in his early Army years. He prized his body; he did not smoke and rarely drank, and kept fit with basketball and volleyball and tennis. At thirty-seven he could still perform a backflip somersault.

  Vann responded without hesitation to Porter’s questions about his career experience. When he had volunteered to go to Vietnam he had requested one of the sought-after positions as chief advisor to an ARVN infantry division. There were nine divisions in the country, three of them in Porter’s corps region. (A corps is a military organization composed of two or more divisions.) Vann had been a lieutenant colonel only ten months, however, and by date of rank, which could be waived at Porter’s discretion, there were other officers who stood ahead of him.

  He was cocky about his ability to handle the job as he and Porter now discussed it. The cockiness of this bantam did not put off Porter, a senior colonel of infantry, large-boned in build and white-haired at fifty-two, whose restrained manner tended to obscure his knowledge of his profession and the firmness of his own character. Since being commissioned a second lieutenant in the Texas National Guard thirty years earlier, he had learned that cockiness was useful provided the officer also knew what he was doing. He was looking for a bold and unconventional man to replace Lt. Col. Frank Clay, son of the former proconsul in occupied Germany, Gen. Lucius Clay, and the current senior advisor to the most important division in the corps, the 7th Infantry Division in the northern Mekong River Delta. Clay’s tour was due to end that summer.

  Porter had read Vann’s record of previous assignments and schooling carefully. He had noticed that Vann had commanded a Ranger company on behind-the-lines operations during the Korean War and had also displayed a capacity for management in a number of staff assignments. He was a specialist in logistics, unusual for an infantry officer who had proved his ability to lead in combat, and had a master’s degree in business administration from Syracuse University. Porter wanted an officer who was an organizer and a fighter, because both talents were required to put together a coordinated war effort in the northern part of the Mekong Delta. The more they talked, the more Porter thought that Vann might do. His boldness and the likelihood that he would take an imaginative approach counted with Porter. Although Porter had been in South Vietnam less than three months himself, he had traveled widely and had gone out on a number of operations against the Communist-led guerrillas. Everything he had seen had convinced him that if the Vietnamese on the Saigon side were going to prevail, they needed Americans who would show them how to fight their war and also find a way to goad them into fighting it.

  He told Vann that he could consider himself the prospective replacement for Clay, but that Porter was going to reserve a firm decision until shortly before Clay left. In the meantime Vann would be on probation, undergoing seasoning and doing odd jobs.

  After lunch, Porter gave Vann his first odd job. He explained that some idiot who had preceded them—who had mentally never left a Pentagon office and had since probably gone back to one—had set up a computerized supply system for the ARVN divisions and the territorial forces in the corps. The Vietnamese lieutenant colonel who was the corps G-4 (the designation for the assistant chief of staff for logistics) and his officers had no idea of how to send a supply request to a computer. Neither did the American lieutenant colonel who was the current G-4 advisor. Instead of spare parts and other equipment they needed, they had received this large stack of unintelligible paperwork, which Porter proceeded to hand to Vann. Could Vann try to make some sense out of it? He took Vann down to the G-4 advisory section, introduced him to the American officers working there, and arranged for them to give him a desk.

  Toward the end of the afternoon Vann returned to Porter’s office with a memorandum several pages long, which he had typed. It translated the computerese into layman’s language, described the concept of the system simply, and laid out a practical method through which the Vietnamese G-4 officers and their American advisors who were not computer specialists could use the system to order the spare parts and other materiel required. Porter was taken aback. He had no more than a passing knowledge of computerized systems, but he was certain that he had given Vann enough work to keep an ordinary officer with an expertise in logistics occupied for two days. This man was back in half a day with a far better solution than he had expected. What was the next odd job that Porter wanted him to do? Although Porter did not tell Vann then, he decided that afternoon that the rooster was going to the 7th Division.

  For the next two months, Porter took advantage of Vann’s diverse talents and prepared him for his task. Of the three ARVN corps regions, that of Porter’s III Corps (the ARVN used the U.S. Army system of designating a corps by Roman numerals) was the largest in the country, and most of the fighting was taking place within it. The III Corps zone extended from the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula at the bottom of the Mekong Delta up through a belt of provinces that ringed Saigon on the north. To acquaint Vann with as much of this war as he could, Porter sent him on helicopter assault missions with the division stationed in the rubber-plantation country north of the capital, where the teak and mahogany rain forests edged down from the foothills of the Central Highlands. He let Vann range south through the expanse of rice lands nourished by the Mekong, the great river of Indochina. Vann marched on operations with the two divisions there and visited the main province towns and the rural district centers where the district chiefs lived with their families and had their offices in little compounds fortified with bunkers and barbed wire. To familiarize Vann with the weaknesses of the ARVN staff system, Porter also put him to work in the corps G-3 (operations) and G-2 (intelligence) sections.

  On the morning of May 21, 1962, Vann shook hands with Porter and climbed into a jeep. He drove out of the old French cavalry camp and then maneuvered in his impatient way through Saigon’s vehicular extravaganza of trucks and gaudily painted buses coming and going from the countryside, Vespa scooters and Lambretta motorbikes, cyclos (a bicycle version of the rickshaw), motorcyclos (a wildly dangerous motorcycle version of the rickshaw), modest French and British sedans, an occasional and immodest swan-fendered Mercury or Chevrolet from the 1950s; and everywhere tiny yellow-and-blue Renault taxis of a vintage no one could remember, driven with an abandon equal to their durability. At last, at a place called Phu Lam, he cleared the southwestern edge of the city. A construction crew was at work there starting to raise giant antennas over land that had been rice paddies until American bulldozers had recently drained and filled them. A high-frequency radio station at Phu Lam already tied General Harkins’s Saigon headquarters into the communications network that reached out over the globe from the telephones and teletypes of the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon. The antennas, the latest in communications technology, bounced electronic signals off the troposphere through a technique called Troposcatter. They would extend the span of General Harkins’s command into the Southeast Asian mainland—north along the peaks and plateaus of the Annamite chain of the Highlands and up the narrow rice basins of the Central Coast to the other principal ports and airfields of South Vietnam, and then over the mountains to the military air base at Ubon in Thailand, a second ally that America had given its word to protect in this part of the world.

  Vann turned the jeep’s engine loose and sped south down the two-lane tarmac road that was the main route into the Mekong Delta, the wind against his face in the open vehicle an added pleasure. He was on his way to the 7th Infantry Division headquarters at My Tho thirty-five miles away. Porter had given him the best assignment in the country. He was putting Vann in command of the American effort in the cockpit of the war.

  The 7th Division’s zone of responsibility covered most of the northern half of the Delta, where the course of the war
was going to be decided. The 6,000 square miles and five provinces swung across South Vietnam from the swamps of the Plain of Reeds on the Cambodian border on the west to the South China Sea on the east. The division zone held more than 2 million people, a seventh of South Vietnam’s population of 14 million in 1962, who grew more than a seventh of the country’s food. The Saigon government had already forfeited most of the southern half of the Delta to the guerrillas. The northern half was still being contested. Approximately 38,000 of Saigon’s troops faced an estimated 15,000 guerrillas there. The government that the United States was depending on to hold South Vietnam could hardly survive if it lost a region so rich in manpower and resources on the edge of its capital.

  The challenge and the responsibility did not intimidate Vann. Rather, he welcomed them with an exhilaration that held no little arrogance. In his American mental universe of 1962 there were no unknowables and no unattainables. What he did not know, he could discover. He had no experience with guerrilla warfare beyond the unconventional operations with his Ranger company in Korea, but he had spent the past nineteen of his thirty-seven years learning how to make war. A counterguerrilla war was simply another form of warfare, and he would learn how to wage it successfully. The previous year, on instructions from President Kennedy, the Army had begun to publish doctrine for its officers on how to suppress guerrillas. Porter had developed some specific ideas on ways to apply these vague concepts to the context of the war in Vietnam as a result of his observations in the field. Porter’s ideas made sense to Vann on the basis of what he had been able to see over the previous two months.

  Vann also knew nothing of the Vietnamese and their culture and history. He did not consider this ignorance any more of an impediment to effective action than his lack of knowledge of counterguerrilla warfare. He was convinced from his experiences as a junior officer in Korea and Japan that Asians were not inscrutable orientals. Lansdale was one of his heroes for this reason. He had read The Ugly American and liked it. Lansdale knew how to operate in Asia. Lansdale understood that Asians were people, that you could discern their desires and play upon those desires to your advantage. Vann was sure that he would be able to see what motivated the Vietnamese officers with whom he would be working and persuade them to do what was in their best interest and in the interest of the United States. The fact that the French had been defeated in Indochina was irrelevant to him. Americans were not colonialists as the French had been, and the French were, in any case, a decadent people whose time had passed. Their army had never recovered from the humiliation of being beaten by the Germans in World War II. Vann had seen the U.S. Army lose battles in Korea but never a war. History had not shown Americans to be fallible as other peoples were. Americans were different. History did not apply to them.