A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (129 page)

Tet also made his plan feasible, Vann persuaded himself, because the blow must have shaken many within the Saigon government into realizing that they could not continue to tolerate the extent of the regime’s corruption and incompetence. The Communists had inadvertently created an atmosphere in which American pressure to curb these ills might at last have an effect. A phased reduction of U.S. troops “would provide the necessary stimulus to the GVN” to move seriously in this direction, Vann told Edward Kennedy.

John Vann did not want to withdraw all American military men. He wanted to keep a residual force of about 100,000 in South Vietnam for the foreseeable future, mostly advisors, technical personnel, and helicopter and fixed-wing aviation units to support the Saigon troops. The ARVN was at last receiving M-16 rifles in quantity, and M-16s were soon to be distributed to the RF and PF too. Vann felt that a better-armed, better-led ARVN, backed by B-52S and the fighter-bombers of the U.S. Air Force and the Navy, could handle the NVA.

He failed to convince Dan Ellsberg. They had long discussions about the Tet Offensive and Vann’s new plan when he was in the United States for three weeks in July on regular home leave and to recuperate from abdominal surgery. Lee had found him unconscious in a puddle of blood on the bathroom floor of the Bien Hoa house on the night of May 30. Wilbur Wilson, awakened by her screams, summoned a helicopter to rush him to the Long Binh hospital. The Army surgeons assumed he had a bleeding ulcer and nearly killed him pumping ice water into his intestines through his nostrils for ten hours to try to stop the bleeding before they decided to operate. They discovered he had suffered a rare accident called a Mallory-Weiss syndrome. While vomiting from nausea caused by a series of booster vaccination shots against typhoid and the other nineteenth-century diseases still common in countries like Vietnam, he had torn a gash in his esophagus at the point where it reaches the stomach. The exceptional stomach muscles he had built up from so many years of gymnastics had given him the strength to rip himself apart. The surgeons clipped several of the muscles so that he couldn’t do it again. He lost and received fourteen pints of blood.

Tet had brought despair rather than hope of renewal to Ellsberg. The
shock had provoked him into a reexamination of the war, an intellectual journey complicated by emotions as turbulent as those he had known in Vietnam. He had started psychoanalysis to try to cope with a case of writer’s block that was interfering with his work at Rand, and he was experimenting with the sexual freedom fashionable in California in the 1960s. An Australian pacification specialist working in Vietnam had lectured at Rand in May and spoken of the “opportunities” the grave weakening of the Viet Cong had opened for the United States and the Saigon regime. “My own attitude about such matters now,” Ellsberg had written Vann, “is that the VC are right to bet that the GVN and U.S. will fail to exploit any such ‘opportunities’ and fanatics like you, me (before), [and] our friends were always wrong to imagine otherwise.”

Vann took it as a good omen that important men in Washington did welcome his reasons for being encouraged. He called Harry McPherson, President Johnson’s chief speech writer, soon after reaching the house in Littleton in July. They had met when McPherson visited South Vietnam during the summer of 1967. McPherson was so impressed by Vann’s heartening words over the phone that he typed up a memorandum of their conversation and gave it to the president.

Lyndon Johnson had become immobilized after his March 31 speech, gripped by the same resistance that was affecting Komer and so many others. He was seeking to salvage through his negotiators in Paris, Harriman and Vance, what his general had lost in the field. He let Westmoreland linger on in Vietnam too as a kind of lame-duck commander. Creighton Abrams did not take charge until mid-June. Johnson wanted to negotiate a mutual withdrawal of the NVA and the U.S. forces, persuading himself this was compromise. The Vietnamese Communists were prepared to discuss the conditions of an American withdrawal. Mutual withdrawal did not interest them. They sat down for the years of haggling they had known might ensue until the course of the war and the continued alienation of the American public could settle the issue. At the end of October they were to trade Johnson unwritten, indefinite assurances of de-escalation along the DMZ and around Saigon and the other major cities for an end to all bombing of the North and admission to the talks of a delegation from the National Liberation Front.

This concession by the United States put the Saigon regime and the Viet Cong on an equal footing. While this arranging of the chairs around the table in Paris dawdled along, 14,589 Americans fell in battle in Vietnam during 1968, more than half again as many as in 1967, the highest for any year of the war. Although Lyndon Johnson was not
interested in a withdrawal of American troops during what was left of his administration, because this did not fit into his negotiating strategy, he obviously had reason to be looking for cheer in July when he received McPherson’s memo on the phone call from Vann. He was glad to have someone tell him that time might be on the side of the United States and the Saigon regime. He read the memorandum to a meeting of his cabinet. Vann was thrilled at the compliment.

He then nearly got thrown out of South Vietnam while promoting his strategy. Peter Arnett stopped by his office in Bien Hoa one evening about a month after his return. Arnett was doing an article on the possibility of future U.S. troop withdrawals, what is called a “think piece” in the trade. Vann had known Arnett for six years. He provided lots of thought on the subject of withdrawals. He gave Arnett permission to quote him by name on his optimistic remarks, such as the consequences of what had happened to the Viet Cong at Tet. He assumed Arnett would protect him on everything else by paraphrasing or quoting without attribution. His remarks might be recognized in Saigon as Vann-isms, as they so often were, but he could disclaim them, as he never hesitated to do. This time Arnett changed the rules, without informing Vann. The article was caustic, at times mocking, in its portrait of the U.S. military machine. Among the direct quotes was one in which Vann explained why there would be no difficulty sending home the first 100,000 men:

The Associated Press released the article on its news wire at the end of the first week of September. Komer got a warning call at 7:00 in the morning while he was still at his house. He phoned Vann. “You stupid son of a bitch,” he shouted. “You’re in deep trouble.”

Someone had already called Vann too, because he knew why Komer was shouting at him. “Bob, let me tell you what happened,” he said.

“Don’t bother to tell me how it happened. I keep telling you every six weeks to keep your yap shut,” Komer yelled.

Vann persisted. Komer had never heard him sound so crestfallen. “You’d better listen to me, Bob,” he said. Komer did and then he cursed Vann again and hung up.

At 8:30
A.M.
precisely, the moment each day that General Abrams
reached his desk at MACV headquarters, the intercom in Komer’s office said: “Bob, I’d like to see you right away.” Creighton Abrams was a tanker, according to George Patton the meanest tanker the Germans had faced in the whole U.S. Third Army, and he had a temper that matched the fearsome machines he loved. He assumed that no reporter would quote John Vann without his permission, that the article was a deliberate affront. “Have you seen …” he started to say as Komer walked into his office and shut the door.

Komer interrupted in an attempt to gain the high ground. “I have seen and it’s inexcusable. I’ve called Vann and reamed him out. I read him the riot act,” Komer said.

Abrams’s roughhewn features flushed and his eyes bulged. “I don’t care if you read him the riot act. I won’t stand for it,” he screamed, his voice twisting up into a squeaky pitch as he choked on his words. “It isn’t that Vann criticized the U.S. Army. It isn’t that Vann criticized me personally. It isn’t any of that shit. What gets me is that the dirty son of a bitch did it in quotes.” He raged on while Komer stood silent, assuming it was futile at this stage to try to explain. “I want that man fired,” Abrams said as soon as his rage had sufficiently abated for him to form the sentence.

“Now Abe, we can’t do that,” Komer said.

“Fire that man!” Abrams screeched. “That is a direct order!” He got so red in the face Komer was afraid he was going to asphyxiate himself.

“Look, Abe. He screwed up. He’s screwed up before. I have no doubt he will screw up again. He seems terribly accident-prone on this question of talking to the press, but that goes back to the battlefield of Ap Bac in 1963. There’s nothing we can do about it now. John Vann is the one indispensable man I’ve got in all of the four regions. As a matter of fact, if I had three more John Vanns, we could cut the length of the war in half. I’m not about to give up my best guy because he said something to a correspondent.”

Abrams stared at Komer in disbelief. “You don’t understand. I said fire that man. That is a direct order!” he screeched again.

Komer decided he would need a large bazooka to stop the tank. He knew that Abrams was frightened of newsmen. Abrams had watched the reporters maul Westmoreland after Tet, and he dreaded the possibility that they might turn on him. He had so far enjoyed a friendly press, because he was new in command; he looked like a different general with his short, rugged figure, and events did not contradict his words, because he took a lesson from Westmoreland’s misfortune and rarely said anything of substance to the newsmen.

“If you give me a direct order to fire John Vann, I’m going to fire John Vann,” Komer said, “but I want to tell you what’s going to happen. I will not have been in my office and have talked to John more than five minutes when every correspondent in Saigon will be on the phone to me asking why John Vann was fired. And within an hour, half the reporters in the United States will be calling out here. … When they ask me the direct question ‘Was he fired on your recommendation?’ I will say, ‘No, I was ordered to fire him.’ When they ask, ‘Who fired him?’ I will say, ‘It was General Abrams, personally.’ They will ask, ‘Did you, Bob Komer, concur in the firing?’ I’m going to tell them that you did it over my violent protest. The firing of John Vann is going to be such a
cause célebre
to his friends”—Komer rattled off the name of every reporter he could think of who knew Vann, beginning with Halberstam—”that I am not going to take the rap for it. This is really going to be something, Abe. You’ll be fighting a second war that’s much worse than the one against the NVA.” For maximum effect, Komer spun around and ignored the insult Abrams screamed at him as he cleared the door.

Abrams never mentioned the matter again. Komer punished Vann by letting him hang on the edge for a full twenty-four hours before calling him back. Then he told Vann he might be able to rescue him from the firing squad, but he wasn’t sure. He wanted to keep Vann contrite as long as he could. Not until years later did he regale Vann with the whole tale.

The outcome was worth the scare. Vann discovered he had a new president with whom he was in tune. His taste in American politicians had become somewhat catholic after his return to South Vietnam in 1965. He tended to overlook behavior he would otherwise have found objectionable as long as the politician in question backed the war and promoted John Vann and his ideas.

One of his most enthusiastic supporters was a character named Sam Yorty, whose gift for public relations and appeals to racism were to gain him three four-year terms as mayor of Los Angeles and enough voter tolerance for absenteeism to permit frequent trips to the Far East and other places. He and Vann had met during Yorty’s first visit to the war in November 1965, and they invariably got together on subsequent occasions. Yorty sent a copy of Arnett’s article to his fellow California Republican Richard Nixon, who thanked him for it in a letter dated a week and a half before the 1968 presidential election. By the time Vann
received a copy of the letter from Yorty, Richard Nixon was presidentelect of the United States.

A process of elimination had helped to elect him. Robert Kennedy had been killed in Los Angeles in June by an Arab fanatic. Eugene McCarthy had then been denied the Democratic nomination at the convention in Chicago in August by the party regulars. They conferred it on Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president. Humphrey campaigned with the wound of Vietnam. The wide distrust of Nixon still made it hard for him to defeat the weakest of his potential opponents. He won narrowly by giving the public the impression that he had a secret plan to end the war.

Nixon admitted in his old age that he never had any such plan. His letter to Yorty alerted Vann to the quite different plan he did have. He intended to do what Vann wanted—purchase time from the American public with U.S. troop withdrawals while continuing the war by using the Vietnamese on the Saigon side to fight it. After saying that he found Vann’s ideas “most interesting” and had referred the clip to “my research and policy staff,” Nixon went on to explain the similarity of his own ideas:

Vann immediately composed a six-and-a-half-page letter, addressed to Yorty and written for Nixon. He described his phased reduction plan in detail and made a bid to temporarily join the new administration as a high-level advisor to supervise implementation of the strategy. “The old problems of corruption, nepotism, and nonresponsiveness to rural needs … are as much with us as ever,” Vann said, but he indicated that he had changed his mind about their importance. They did not matter as much because of the altered circumstances brought about by Tet. In one flourish of self-salesmanship he enclosed a copy of Mc-Pherson’s memorandum to Johnson and mentioned how “the memo was read by the President to his Cabinet.” In another he trotted out the glory he had been unable to resist stealing. He put himself once more into Ralph Puckett’s foxhole on the hill in North Korea on the night in November 1950 when the Chinese had attacked. That night, he said,
he had first learned the folly of trading American soldiers for Asian ones “in the overpopulated Orient.” Using Vietnamese soldiers to fight would also help calm the American public, because they were far cheaper in dollars, Vann said. Most of the $33 billion annual cost of the war was being consumed by the U.S. forces. “I think we could be eminently successful in South Vietnam at a cost of around five billion a year by 1975,” he wrote.