A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (117 page)

***

Vann was fortunate that the new commander of U.S. forces in III Corps, Maj. Gen. Fred Weyand, worried about being too conventional in his thinking and valued unconventional men who gave him insights he would not acquire on his own. Otherwise Komer might have had to find another corps not of Vann’s choosing where he could serve as Dep/CORDS. Westmoreland indicated to Weyand that Vann was a hair shirt Weyand did not have to accept. Weyand thought differently. He had gained two stars and was about to gain his third by adapting to the world of the U.S. Army; his ease within it sometimes made him feel uncomfortable. Weyand’s conventional side would, in fact, have done him out of stars had he not waked up after a long, slow start.

He had obtained his commission in the Coast Artillery on the eve of World War II through ROTC at the University of California at Berkeley. The Coast Artillery was a branch of the Army that did not understand it had been rendered obsolete by the airplane and modern amphibious warfare. It supposedly protected the nation’s harbors with long-range guns installed in concrete forts. Weyand drifted in this anachronism through the first part of World War II and then volunteered for Combat Intelligence School, hoping to put to good use in Europe a respectable amount of German he had learned in high school and college. Instead the Army posted him to the staff of Gen. Joseph Stilwell in the China-Burma-India Theater as the officer in charge of deriving intelligence from broken Japanese codes. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell was one of the most accomplished infantrymen in the history of the U.S. Army, but despite the experience of working for him, Weyand drifted again in intelligence after the war. Finally, while a thirty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel in Hawaii, he encountered a general who gave him advice he heeded: to move up, move out to the cutting edge.

Fred Weyand transferred to the infantry and graduated from the Advanced Course at Fort Benning as Kim II Sung’s tanks were crossing the 38th Parallel. He found his metier practicing the “Follow Me!” motto of the Infantry School. In January 1951 he was given a battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division, reduced to 162 men by MacArthur’s debacle in North Korea. He built it back up with replacements, many of them KATUSAs, reorganized it, and then trained on the march as he led his battalion in the counteroffensives to drive the Chinese back up the peninsula and reestablish a line along the Parallel. “Those were the days when you commanded your battalion from the lead platoon,” Weyand said with nostalgia. “If you succeeded, it was because you were there.”
He won a Silver Star for Gallantry and the Bronze Star for Valor. Maj. Gen. Frank Milburn, the commander of I Corps, had singled out Weyand’s battalion as the finest in the corps.

His performance in Korea was the flint striking steel to light Weyand’s career. Afterward he was able to get the kind of assignments a non-West Pointer needs to give him an advantage—military assistant to the secretary of the Army, commander of a battle group in Berlin, and for two years in the early 1960s the sensitive post of chief liaison officer to Congress. His physical appearance helped. He was six feet four inches and handsome. So did his manner. He could be reasonably open and honest while also being deft, and he was an informal and friendly man. Weyand shortened his classy name of Frederick Carlton to Fred C. in official correspondence. He did not wait for junior officers and enlisted men to salute him. He saluted them first.

Weyand and Vann had met in Hau Nghia not much more than a year before the formation of CORDS. Vann had been on another of his periodic expeditions to try to get information about where the Viet Cong were keeping Ramsey captive. Weyand had just brought the headquarters of the 25th Infantry Division he was then commanding to Vietnam from Hawaii and was in the midst of setting up a base camp at Cu Chi. Ramsey’s last reports to AID and a comprehensive description he had written of Hau Nghia gave Weyand a lot of practical information, but he lacked anything precise on the Viet Cong forces in the province, what is called order of battle intelligence in the military. The G-2 section at MACV and Seaman’s staff at II Field Force, as the U.S. corps-level command for III Corps was called, had nothing useful.

Fred Weyand considered himself a lucky soldier when a walking intelligence file on Hau Nghia suddenly appeared and introduced himself as John Vann. The two men got to know each other better on Vann’s subsequent expeditions and after he was appointed III Corps director for OCO near the end of 1966. Vann would stop at Weyand’s headquarters on a Saturday or a Sunday for a late-afternoon volleyball game and stay for the night so that he and Weyand could talk over dinner and into the evening.

Some regular Army officers tended in these years to look askance at John Vann as a kind of renegade lieutenant colonel. Weyand tested what Vann told him and noticed that Vann was right far more often than he was wrong. Weyand admired Vann’s moral courage. He was fascinated by the detail Vann gathered from the myriad of friends and acquaintances he had built up among Vietnamese on the Saigon side and from his forays down questionable roads and his nights spent in
hamlets and militia outposts. Weyand was not in a position to do that sort of thing, and he didn’t know anyone else who did it. Bruce Palmer, Vann’s old commanding officer and patron in the 16th Infantry Regiment in Germany, became II Field Force commander in March 1967, after Seaman rotated home. Weyand moved up from the division to be Palmer’s deputy. Westmoreland then decided, to Palmer’s unhappiness, that he needed Palmer to run the main support and administrative command, U.S. Army Vietnam. Weyand got the corps. When Westmoreland indicated to him that Vann might be troublesome as a Dep/ CORDS, Weyand was fully aware that John Vann meant trouble. What he received in exchange was what mattered to Weyand.

Vann did not have to shift his office from the former OCO compound near ARVN III Corps headquarters on the outskirts of Bien Hoa when he became the Dep/CORDS for II Field Force in June 1967. His job simply got bigger, and he added a building in the compound for more staff. After the inaugural session at II Field Force Headquarters at the Long Binh base, Weyand asked if there was anything special he could do for his new deputy. “Yes, I’d like to have a military aide,” Vann said. Did he have any particular young officer in mind, Weyand asked. “No, any lieutenant or warrant officer will do as long as he brings his helicopter with him,” Vann said.

The access Seaman had given Vann to one of the corps’ little H-23 Raven helicopters whenever Vann wished had been a perquisite to cherish (and one that Palmer and Weyand had continued), but a pilot and a helicopter of one’s own made one feel considerably more like a general. Vann’s new “aide” appeared shortly afterward with his two-seater Plex-iglas-bubble flying machine. Vann had concrete helicopter pads laid next to his office compound and beside the house nearby that AID had rented for him as living quarters in Bien Hoa. He arranged for the pilot to live in an aviation compound across the road. No spot in the eleven provinces in the corps was beyond an hour’s flight. Vann now had almost 800 Americans working for him on his staff and in the unified province teams, the majority military men. When he added the Filipino and South Korean help and the Vietnamese employees, he had about 2,225 people under him. American soldiers—lieutenant colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, sergeants—were once again taking orders from John Vann. “I am back in the military fold and I am in command,” he said in a round-robin letter to his friends.

He had read a letter from Ramsey that February. It was written on tissue paper in a minute hand with a ball-point pen and smuggled out
of a jungle prison camp by Pfc. Charles Crafts, one of two captured American soldiers released by the Viet Cong as a propaganda act during the 1967 Tet or Lunar New Year holiday. The letter was from Ramsey to his parents in Boulder City, Nevada. Crafts hid it in his eyeglass case and turned it over to the U.S. Army intelligence officers who questioned him right after his release. Vann was called to the embassy, where the letter went for forwarding. He had stayed in touch with Ramsey’s parents, occasionally sending them whatever fragments of information he could obtain. (At one point he was to offer them financial help, which they thanked him for and said they did not need.) He immediately wrote to alert them and to give them a summary of the letter’s contents. The embassy kept the original for the special file maintained on a prisoner, but sent Ramsey’s parents an exact typescript.

Ramsey, the only child, told his parents, “It is the thought of seeing you again and the memories of home which are keeping me above water at present.” He hoped to survive, “but we must be realistic.” He wanted the letter to serve as testimony that “I was still alive as of the 13th of January [1967],” the day he completed it, so his parents could collect his back pay to that date “without undue difficulty” should he perish. Ramsey tried, nevertheless, to be encouraging. He had endured a bout with ordinary malaria and then come through an assault by the falciparum variety “said to be 90 percent fatal in this region.” (Falciparum is the so-called “killer malaria” that attacks the brain.) “If I can survive something like that I am now completely confident of my ability to survive any of the lesser diseases I have seen in this area—with no sweat,” he said. The Viet Cong “medical treatment is quite good, given jungle conditions… As to protection from U.S. artillery, bombs, rockets, etc., you mustn’t fret yourselves either.” They had deep foxholes in the camp and were in the process of digging underground sleeping quarters. A similarly constructed camp had recently been hit by B-52S and “only one person [was] slightly wounded.”

Vann could read between the lines, and he had the information supplied by Pfc. Crafts and Sgt. Sammie Womach, the other prisoner released, to give him a more realistic vision of Ramsey’s captivity. He still could not imagine it. No one could have imagined Ramsey’s corner of Purgatory.

The two Viet Cong interrogators at the first prison camp to which Ramsey had been taken near the Cambodian border in northwestern Tay Ninh Province had decided right away that he was a CIA agent. In their frame of reference any American with Ramsey’s specialized language training who was traveling around the countryside in civilian clothes armed with an AR-15 and carrying a lot of money had to be
engaged in spying and clandestine operations. He had about 31,000 piastres on him when captured, money owed to a new local contractor for some office construction. The interrogators assumed that he was out paying salaries to the CIA’s assassination teams in Hau Nghia. Ramsey’s denials and his attempts to explain what he really did only angered them. They thought that his AID job was a cover. To the guerrillas, a CIA agent was a loathsome species of American. The Agency’s sponsorship since the 1950s of the Saigon regime’s intelligence and security services, including the Süreté, now called the Special Branch, its involvement in the terror of Diem’s Denunciation of Communists Campaign, and its role in the Strategic Hamlet Program and in so many other acts the Viet Cong considered crimes gave it a mythical aura of evil in their eyes.

Physical torture was apparently regarded by these interrogators as unproductive. Psychological torture was another matter. They turned the guards on Ramsey. To vent their hatred of what they thought he represented and to amuse themselves in the evening, the guards began to compose skits about Ramsey. The skits became elaborate. Ramsey was portrayed as the archetypal U.S. aggressor who “has the blood of thousands of Vietnamese on his hands.” The skit format acquired a triumphant ending: the dedication of a monument to the demise of this CIA agent in humanitarian cloak, “Mr. USOM Ramsey.” The monument was to be dedicated with Ramsey’s blood by executing him and burying him underneath it. Each guard participating in the skit would propose a fitting demise for Ramsey: shooting after a public trial, lynching, beating to death by the peasants. The rain-forest prison compound was small, and Ramsey could not avoid seeing and hearing the skits. His cell was a large wooden cage. He was kept isolated from the three other American prisoners in the compound, prevented from speaking or having any sort of contact with them. A guard lived above his cell to watch him. At night a kerosene lamp inside the cell was lit so that he could also be watched from the nearby guard shack.

The two interrogators soon sensed Ramsey’s guilty conscience over the killing of civilians and the razing of hamlets like the one he had seen at his capture. They harped on these atrocities in the frequent examination sessions. One of his inquisitors was an older Viet Cong officer, irascible and embittered. Ramsey later discovered that the other prisoners had nicknamed him Grandpa. He would rail at Ramsey, accusing him of all sorts of heinous acts, shouting that the crimes of a civilian were far worse than those of a military man because the soldier at least came in uniform with an announced mission. The other inquisitor, a
younger but higher-ranking cadre nicknamed Alex, was quieter and more chilling in his threats. He claimed to have the authority to kill a prisoner. He said that he had selected the prisoners shot in 1965 to avenge the firing-squad execution in the main Saigon marketplace of a young Viet Cong named Nguyen Van Troi who had tried to blow up McNamara’s car during one of the secretary’s trips to Vietnam. He hoped, Alex said, that he would not have to select Ramsey or any of the three other Americans currently in his charge for like retribution on some future occasion.

The interrogation hut was also in the compound, and so the guards heard all of the sessions and the fury of Grandpa and Alex when Ramsey would protest that he could not give them the names of secret Vietnamese agents of the CIA and similar information they demanded. Ramsey’s seeming obstinacy made the guards hate him all the more. They petitioned the regional headquarters, which was apparently adjacent to the prison, for permission to erect the monument and execute him. When the request was denied, they petitioned neighboring commands for support. Some of the skits were broadcast over the Viet Cong’s youth radio frequency for the Tay Ninh area. Couriers and other guerrillas stationed at the headquarters came to see the monster Ramsey in his cage.