A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (120 page)

Annie became none the wiser about Lee and Lee none the wiser about Annie. Nothing changed that Lee would have noticed. Vann and Wilbur Wilson continued to share the Bien Hoa house, where Lee often slept in Vann’s bedroom. Wilson was an ascetic bachelor who restricted his relationships with women to gruffly polite dealings at the office. Otherwise he shunned their company and would carefully ignore Lee as she traipsed about the house in a dressing gown. It amused her that a man as eager to cavort as Vann would choose to share a house with another man who, as she put it, “lived like a monk” amid the sexual cornucopia of an American’s Vietnam.

Lee was Vann’s public mistress, the one he took to diplomatic receptions in Saigon and to other social occasions as the official attitude toward bringing Vietnamese paramours to these events gradually relaxed. (While Vann had been sufficiently rash in the initial excitement of the affair to fetch Annie at her lycée in Dalat, he had been careful not to flaunt her in Saigon. He had held the restaurant and nightclub outings there to the minimum necessary to seduce her and then to keep her content. After her second pregnancy and the arrangement with her father, he never let himself be seen in public with her. Only his close
friends like Ellsberg and George Jacobson, some of his senior subordinates like Wilson, and his American secretary, Frenchy Zois, knew about her.) Lee’s sophistication and her command of colloquial English rendered her the natural choice for the public role. Vann was reasonably generous to her. She had virtually full-time use of a Toyota sedan he bought in 1967 to replace the little Triumph he had shipped from Colorado. The Toyota turned out to be superfluous, as Vann preferred a livelier Ford Mustang that AID provided him.

Although money was not Lee’s motive, she did profit from the affair. She obtained a concession for a souvenir boutique at the Saigon USO club. Vann did not intervene to get the concession for her or do anything else that was corrupt. Being his mistress brought her the necessary connections. She sold her English-language school and took up the more pleasant livelihood of running the boutique and managing a Saigon restaurant for its Corsican owner. Lee in turn tried to make herself useful to Vann. She constantly did personal errands for him, and on the occasions when he had to entertain a VIP at his Bien Hoa residence she would act as hostess and see that the drinks went around and that the lunch or dinner was properly cooked and served.

Vann spoke to McNamara alone for the first time that July when the secretary flew out to bargain Westmoreland down on his most recent troop request. The day that he saw McNamara was, Vann wrote Ellsberg, “a red letter day” of VIP meetings. Nicholas Katzenbach, who had replaced George Ball as under secretary of state the previous fall, spent two and a half hours questioning him. That evening David McGiffert, the under secretary of the Army, came to Bien Hoa to have dinner at Vann’s house, passed the night talking late, and then traveled around III Corps with him all the next day. Vann spoke to McNamara for only half an hour, but the fact that the secretary would seek Vann’s opinion was an indication of what the war had been doing to McNamara. Robert McNamara had, to his credit, become frightened.

The failure of the air war against the North first opened McNamara’s eyes. The bombs of Rolling Thunder did not stop or substantially reduce the flow of men and equipment from the North into the South any more than they weakened the will of the Vietnamese. Rather, as the bombs hardened Vietnamese will, so they goaded the Vietnamese into building a transportation system that each year could carry more and that each year was less vulnerable to air attack. The Ho Chi Minh Trail that the CIA cartographers sketched at the beginning of 1965 was a faint skein
of Montagnard trails and washed-out dirt roads from the colonial era, only parts of it drivable and then only in the dry season. Eight years later the Agency’s map of the Trail was to show thousands of miles of all-weather roads, surfaced with crushed rock and laterite or corduroyed with logs where the local soil could not be compacted enough to hold, bridged at the creeks and rivers. The roads swirled from the North down through the mountains of Laos and into the South in double loops and triple bypasses, a rain-forest highway grid that the Vietnamese called the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route after their name for the An-namite mountain range.

For the better part of two years during World War II the American and British air forces vainly sought to stop supplies and reinforcements from reaching the German army in Italy through just a few mountain passes. Operation Strangle in Korea, a more ambitious effort to interdict a stream of troops and supplies moving along roads and railways, was a fiasco. Senior aviators are the most unfailingly forgetful of military men, for if they reminded themselves and others of the limits of their flying machines, civilian leaders might be less willing to let them lavish money and blood in the use of them.

U.S. Grant Sharp, Commander in Chief Pacific, might be a seafaring warrior, but he believed in air power, and the air campaign against the North was his war. (Westmoreland did not control air operations outside of South Vietnam.) In the flush of March 1965 the admiral described how aerial interdiction would master the Vietnamese in an “LOC cut program” he and his air staff devised for the “Panhandle” section of North Vietnam from the 20th Parallel down to the DMZ. LOC is the military abbreviation for lines of communication, i.e., roads, rail lines, and waterways. The planes were going to bomb “choke points”—bridges, ferry crossings, and spots where the roads and rails curved around slopes and headed through passes. Repeat strikes and free-ranging “armed reconnaissance” round-the-clock, at night by flares, would prevent the Vietnamese from making adequate repairs. “All targets selected are extremely difficult or impossible to bypass,” Sharp said in a cable to the Joint Chiefs. “LOC network cutting in this depth will degrade tonnage arrivals at the main ‘funnels’ and will develop a broad series of new targets such as backed-up convoys, off-loaded matériel dumps, and personnel staging areas at one or both sides of cuts.”

In 1965, in 1966, in 1967, and in the years of the air war to follow, the planes of the U.S. Air Force and the Navy did not destroy more than 20 to 25 percent of the trucks rolling down the Panhandle and along the Trail through Laos to sustain the battlegrounds of the South.
The Vietnamese also managed to keep their railroads operating, although at times they had to resort to using sections of the lines as cargo shuttles for the trucks. If one decided that this tally of trucks destroyed was too conservative and added another 10 percent, the Vietnamese still got two-thirds of the weapons and ammunition and other provender of war to its destination, a satisfactory “through-put” rate, in the jargon of the logisticians. The average loss to aircraft of troops sent to the South was much less than 20 to 25 percent, because the men marched through the most dangerous areas to better avoid the planes. An infiltration group tended to lose about 10 to 20 percent of its men along the way, but mainly from sickness and desertion.

Airmen have never been able to wage a successful interdiction campaign, because they are confronted with an insoluble dilemma. It is composed of time and distance compounded by weather, antiaircraft defenses, and the ingenuity and determination of those other human beings on the ground whom they are trying to kill. If Italy and Korea exposed the dilemma, Vietnam illuminated it with unprecedented drama, because the dimensions of the challenge were so much greater there. The insurmountability of time and distance starts with the practical consideration that the number of planes is always limited and so is the time they can stay in the air. In 1967, when Admiral Sharp had his war in full flight, the United States could put about 300 strike aircraft over North Vietnam and Laos on an average day and keep each there an average of approximately half an hour. The Vietnamese transportation network ran all the way down from the China border. With a limited number of planes and a limited time to strike, it was impossible to subject enough of the roads and rail lines to surveillance and attack a sufficient number of hours in twenty-four to have a decisive impact. A lot of the trucks escaped simply because no aircraft happened to be overhead while they were moving. Indochinese weather worsened the time and distance problem by forcing planes to sit idle at airfields and on the decks of carriers when they should have been striking, and then often limited what the pilots could see when they were on the attack. The weather hampered the Vietnamese too. For a number of years they lacked enough all-weather roads to keep the Trail open during the Laos monsoon season from May to October.

The Vietnamese further degraded American air power with the superlative air defenses they established with Soviet-supplied early-warning radars, antiaircraft cannons, and SA-2 missiles (surface-to-air, called SAMs by the pilots), and by passing out semiautomatic and automatic weapons to everyone in the countryside able to shoot at a plane. To
survive, the pilots had to bomb and strafe from higher altitudes where they were less accurate. They had to waste precious “time over target” dodging missiles. The defenses also did not have to shoot down fighter-bombers to effectively reduce the number. Planes that might have been hitting transportation targets were instead absorbed in going after the SAM sites and antiaircraft batteries in order to try to protect their bomb-laden fellows. More than 40 percent of the sorties flown over North Vietnam and Laos were consumed in such “flak suppression” missions and other escort duties.

What the Vietnamese did with head and hand was the greatest compounder of the time and distance problem. The Communist leaders marshaled a force of 300,000 men and women to labor full-time at repairing the roads and rails and bridges and at continuously expanding the network. Another 200,000 North Vietnamese peasants worked in what time could be spared from the fields. The Chinese came to the assistance of the Vietnamese with roughly 40,000 engineer and antiaircraft troops to help keep open the two rail lines from the border to Hanoi. The Russians provided bulldozers for the road crews. The principal earth-moving equipment was a type more familiar in Vietnam—pick and shovel, a wheelbarrow that rolls better than the American model because it has bicycle wheels on the sides, and if no wheelbarrow was available to move earth, then two baskets, one slung at each end of a pole balanced on the shoulder.

An American thinks of a road or trail as a line going from Point A to Point B, curving only as necessary to accommodate terrain. The Vietnamese wanted a “chokeproof” road system, so they built six or eight or ten different routes from A to B, often with pontoon bridges at the crossing points which were removed at dawn and towed back into place at dusk. When the planes cut a road by cratering it with bombs or knocked out a bridge, the trucks shifted to an alternate route while repairs were carried out. The multiplicity of routes also permitted the convoys to make themselves scarcer targets by dispersing. The drivers camouflaged their trucks with foliage, of course, and there were pull-off points everywhere in which they could hide at an aircraft alert. The Vietnamese camouflaged long stretches of road too. They tied the trees together overhead or suspended big trellises of bamboo covered with brush and freshly cut boughs.

The pilots exacted punishment. Driving a truck year in year out with 20 to 25 to perhaps 30 percent odds of mortality was not a military occupation conducive to retirement on pension. A man or woman on a road crew could have an assignment as dangerous as an infantryman’s.
To keep the roads open, the crews had to stay close to them, closest of all to the segments most frequently bombed. Bombs that missed trucks and bridges hit people. The crews were caught in the flares of night raids. It was impossible for them to do their job and shift as often as they should have to avoid the carpets laid by the B-52S in Laos and the Panhandle of North Vietnam. The memorial cemetery to those who died for the Ho Chi Minh Trail was to cover almost forty acres and to hold the headstones of 10,306 Vietnamese men and women. Their names had been recorded. Thousands of others who died for the Trail were to remain where they perished, unnoted in the confusion of war.

To punish was not to prevail. Each double loop and triple bypass in this ever enlarging whirligig of roads that must have been difficult to keep track of after a while even at the transport center in Hanoi meant more road mileage the American pilots had to cover. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the best example of the achievement of the Vietnamese. The straight-line length of the Laos corridor from the Mu Gia Pass at the top to the triborder point at the bottom where Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam meet is about 250 miles. The Vietnamese estimated that when finished the Trail comprised about 9,600 miles of all-weather and secondary roadway. The biggest portion of the web work was within this 250-mile corridor.

Oley Sharp and the Joint Chiefs told McNamara and the president that they could stop the trucks by shutting off most of the gasoline. All they had to do was to bomb the principal tank farm at the port of Haiphong and the other bulk POL storage facilities, mainly in the Hanoi-Haiphong area. Walt Rostow, who replaced McGeorge Bundy as Johnson’s special assistant for national security affairs in 1966, was also enthusiastic about the scheme from his World War II experience recommending targets for the strategic bombing of Germany.

The sky was clear over Haiphong on June 29, 1966. The pilots left the receiving facilities and the tank farm in flames. Within a month, nearly 80 percent of the known bulk POL (petroleum, oil, and lubricants) storage capacity of North Vietnam was gone, including a number of small sites that were harder to hit. As far as can be determined, not a single truck ran out of gas. Rather, the number of Russian-model trucks supplied to the Vietnamese by the Soviet Union, the Eastern European countries, and China kept rising through 1966 and by the end of the year there were twice as many as in 1965. The Vietnamese, who produced no oil and refined no gasoline themselves, anticipated the raids and long before had dispersed enough gasoline, diesel fuel, and lubricating oil to meet their needs in underground tanks and in concealed
stacks of barrels. In the future they had the Russians ship them much of the POL poured into barrels ahead of time so that they could disperse it immediately on arrival. To facilitate refueling the trucks, they began the construction of two pipelines down the Panhandle and into Laos, with spur lines branching off as useful. Three of the spurs were eventually to reach into South Vietnam, one down the A Shau Valley in the mountains west of Hue. One of the commemorative statues in the memorial cemetery of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was to be a figure of a woman operating a gasoline pump.