A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (138 page)

Had the NVA possessed a tradition of pursuit, the course of the war would have been different. The collapse at Tan Canh created the classic moment for pursuit, the moment when one’s enemy is so demoralized he will keep running from anything, and while the might-have-been’s of war can never be more than speculation, the special circumstances of Vietnam posed a unique opportunity. If the NVA commanders had refueled their tanks that night of April 24, 1972, loaded a couple of battalions of infantry into captured jeeps and trucks and armored personnel carriers (they had plenty from which to choose; the ARVN abandoned everything in the Tan Canh area, including more than 200 vehicles), and shot their way down the twenty-five miles of Route 14 to Kontum, the town would have been theirs by morning. If they had not wished to risk a dash, they could have pursued at leisure, pushing down from Tan Canh and Rocket Ridge in a few days, or in a week, or even in ten days, and Kontum “would have fallen apart,” Vann acknowledged later.

If Kontum had fallen in 1972, the panic that was always just waiting beneath the surface on the Saigon side would have burst forth in an uncontrollable contagion in II Corps. The Highlands would have been lost, and much of the Central Coast would have become untenable. The panic would have spread there. Binh Dinh was already teetering, because of the collapse of the northern districts. The Communists could have captured the port of Qui Nhon and started to threaten the other major coastal towns after the B-3 Front divisions from the Highlands had linked up with the Yellow Star Division in Binh Dinh. Lack of supplies need not have halted the Communist units. Their opponents would have abandoned enough to sustain them.

The Nixon administration thought it had hired Hessians to guard the coast. At the cost of additional hundreds of millions of dollars in military and economic aid to South Korea, the administration had persuaded the government in Seoul to leave two ROK divisions in place from Nhatrang up through Qui Nhon. The Koreans would not have held on their own with the Saigon side collapsing around them. They would have demanded evacuation. They were already reneging on their Hessian role because of secret instructions from Seoul to avoid casualties. They
would not even keep open the road that was II Corps’ main supply route from the docks at Qui Nhon to the depots at Pleiku. Two battalions from a regiment of the Yellow Star Division had blocked Route 19 at the An Khe Pass in Binh Dinh in mid-April. Vann had to curse at the Korean generals for two weeks to get them to reopen the road. In the meantime he was dependent on aerial resupply and on a longer overland route from Nhatrang that might also be cut at any moment.

The negotiations in Paris were in the balance too. Nixon had made Kissinger’s secret talks there with Le Due Tho public in January in an attempt to portray the Vietnamese Communists as obstinate. The Vietnamese were obstinate. They had fruitfully waited out Nixon’s withdrawal gamble and now, with the battlefield going their way, were more unyielding than ever in their demand that the United States pull out all of its forces unilaterally and dismantle the Thieu regime as well in exchange for a peace agreement. Nixon had resumed regular air raids on the North in response to the offensive, after years of bombing intermittently to try to intimidate the Vietnamese, and was about to mine Haiphong and the other ports. The outcome in the South was what would matter. Kissinger was attempting to bargain a compromise. If the divisions of the NVA were linked from the mountains to the sea and South Vietnam was split in two there would not be a great deal to bargain about.

Joe Pizzi, Vann’s chief of staff, saw the incipient panic and realized that Pleiku would disappear in an instant should Kontum go. The population of the town shrank to about a quarter of its pre-offensive level as the ARVN officers and everyone else who could shipped their families and belongings to Saigon or to Nhatrang or another of the towns farther down the coast. A seat on a regular Air Vietnam flight acquired a bribery premium equivalent to several hundred dollars. The VNAF helicopters and transport planes were constantly unavailable for military tasks because the pilots and crews were busy ferrying people and goods to the coast for lesser bribes.

Pizzi came to the office one morning and discovered that so many of the VNAF air traffic controllers had deserted it was going to be difficult to continue manning the tower at the main Pleiku airfield. He ordered a secret plan drawn up to evacuate all Americans from Pleiku by helicopter and by C-130 from the airstrip at Camp Hollo way, the U.S. Army helicopter base on the other side of town. Vann accepted the plan because he had no choice. Pizzi immediately began to reduce the number of men who would need to be evacuated by transferring to Nhatrang any American whose presence was not absolutely required in Pleiku.

Vann had Cai smuggle out most of his clothes and other belongings on administrative flights to Nhatrang. He even sent away a wooden footlocker, painted brown, with a padlock on it to which Vann had the only key. He called the footlocker “The Box.” He had never parted with it before. It held albums with photographs of him and his sister and brothers in Norfolk, of Johnny Vann doing a backflip in a sand pile at Ferrum, of himself as an Air Corps cadet and a second lieutenant navigating a B-29 called “Lost Weekend,” of Mary Jane in Rochester, of her and the children in Japan and Germany. The footlocker held his Army officer’s record, his medals and his awards, and the inscribed silver cigarette box Halberstam and I and the other reporters had given him in 1963 for moral heroism and professional integrity, and it held photographs of himself with some of his sexual partners.

“If anything ever happens to me, watch out for that box,” he said with a smile.

“What’s in the box?” a subordinate asked who did not know him well.

“I’m in the box,” Vann said.

Vann’s Vietnamese enemy delayed the attack on Kontum for twenty days after the fall of Tan Canh, giving him the time he needed. Armies, like human beings, are not capable of what is not in them. The entire experience of the NVA militated against pursuit and demanded elaborate planning and positioning for each major step of a campaign. Vann needed every day.

Dzu, his instrument, broke in his hands as Cao had ten years earlier. Worse, Dzu schemed against him, secretly plotting to abandon the Highlands. Thieu summoned Dzu to Saigon two days after the Tan Canh debacle and ordered him to hold Kontum at all costs. That evening, after Thieu had released him from the meeting at the palace, Dzu showed up at the home in Cholon of Cao Van Vien, the chief of the Joint General Staff. He was extremely agitated. Kontum and Pleiku were indefensible, Dzu said. The sole alternative left was to abandon both towns and Ban Me Thuot farther south in the mountains and pull all of the Saigon forces down to the coast. Dzu wanted Vien to help him persuade Thieu of the wisdom of wholesale retreat. Forsaking the Highlands was a new American strategy, he said.

Vien said no one had mentioned it to him. He instructed Dzu to return to Pleiku and find a way to defend Kontum. Dzu did not tell Vann of his conversation with Vien. He started telephoning Thieu and
Vien late at night, apparently when his nerves were most jangled and he could not sleep, pleading for permission to withdraw. Thieu wanted to fire him right away, but Vien could not find another ARVN general to accept his place. He called nearly half a dozen two- and three-star generals without commands and, one after another, offered them II Corps. Some said their astrologers had looked at their horoscopes and advised that this was an inauspicious year to take up a new command. Others said they were in poor health. None admitted that they believed the situation in the Highlands was beyond recall.

In the meantime, Dzu concocted a scheme with the Kontum province chief and several of the senior ARVN officers in the town to precipitate a retreat, and he almost succeeded at it, because Vann was confused and downcast himself in the immediate aftermath of Tan Canh. Then he caught on to the gambit and stopped Dzu.

Vann’s rage renewed his strength. During one of his arguments with Dan Ellsberg after Tet he had acknowledged that if the regime did not change as the United States reduced its military forces in Vietnam “we [could] get ourselves into a damn tenuous situation where we are kind of surrounded and fighting for our lives.” John Vann was surrounded and fighting for his life. The Vietnamese Communists were threatening everything that mattered to him. He had not won his stars to see them become the tarnished stars of a defeated general. He had not prophesied victory to important men to have his prophecies exposed as vainglorious boasting. A cornered man is dangerous; John Vann cornered was dangerous indeed.

Weyand told him he could have any brigadier general he wanted as his deputy to replace George Wear, who had been evacuated. Vann asked Weyand to send Brig. Gen. John Hill, Jr., who was finishing a second tour in Vietnam by closing down the depot at Cam Ranh Bay for lack of something better to do. Hill would fight, Vann said. He and Vann had been contemporaries in the Army. They had met while instructors at ROTC summer camp not long after Korea, where Hill had also served in the Pusan Perimeter and in North Korea as a company commander with the 1st Cavalry Division. A short, slightly stooped man, John Hill was intelligent and resourceful, and liked to fight. He had spent most of his career in mechanized infantry before being selected for helicopter flight school and promotion to brigadier. Vann left Hill free to do what Hill excelled at—organizing the aviation assets and major firepower of a battlefield. Every day, all day, a command-and-control Huey called “the Air Boss ship” began flying over the Kontum area to coordinate Cobras and fighter-bombers on strikes, scout helicopters
seeking NVA assembly points for B-52 targeting, C-130’s and Chinooks hauling in supplies, artillery registering patterns of defensive fire. Hill’s objective was to see that everything meshed and no effort was wasted. The 7th Air Force colonel on Vann’s staff wanted to stay in his office in Pleiku. Hill fired him and got a man who would keep track of jets over Kontum.

In Hau Nghia in 1965 Vann had cursed the leaders of the United States for refusing “to take over the command of this operation lock, stock, and barrel.” Vann now did precisely that. He abandoned pretense of who was running II Corps and overrode Dzu. He had a Vietnamese officer who was willing to try to defend Kontum. The man was Ly Tong Ba, the commander of the M-113 company at Ap Bac and the object of so much of Vann’s wrath on that momentous day. They had been forced to work together during later years of the 1960s when Ba had serve as province chief of Binh Duong in III Corps. Vann had decided that while Ba was hardly a model of combativeness, he was not a crook and was a better soldier than most ARVN officers. Their relationship was a measure of how far Vann had worked himself into the Saigon system, for Ba had no Vietnamese patron. Other ARVN officers referred to him as “Mr. Vann’s man.” At the end of January 1972, Vann had maneuvered Ba, by this time a full colonel, into command of the 23rd ARVN Division at Ban Me Thuot, responsible for the defense of the southern Highlands. One of its regiments had been shifted north to garrison Kontum in April after the JGS had taken away the second airborne brigade. Vann initially hesitated to risk all of the only remaining division he had in II Corps. He wanted Ba to defend Kontum with a polyglot force consisting of this regiment, what was left of the first airborne brigade, understrength and exhausted from the Rocket Ridge battle, and a Ranger group. The plan didn’t make sense, Ba argued. He needed unity to resist. Vann let the airborne and the Rangers go, stripped the southern Highlands of troops, and flew the other two regiments of the 23rd ARVN Division into Kontum.

Vann sent for an advisor whom Ba trusted—Col. R. M. Rhotenberry, a homely, husky Texan. The initials didn’t stand for anything. In the Texas of Rhotenberry’s birth, some people just gave their children initials. “Rhot” and Vann had first met in the spring of 1962 when they had shared a room in a BOQ in Cholon while both were assigned to Dan Porter’s staff at the old III Corps headquarters. Rhotenberry had returned to Vietnam so regularly—four tours as an advisor, one with Ba in Binh Duong, half a tour to command a battalion of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division Vann had obtained for him through Fred Weyand—
that Cao Van Vien called him “Rhotenberry, the soldier of fortune.”

A twin-engine Beechcraft was standing by to fly Rhotenberry to Pleiku when he walked down the gangway of an airliner at Tan Son Nhut on the morning of May 14, 1972. The first assault on Kontum had already begun at 5:30
A.M.
Vann had airlifted Ba’s third regiment into the town only two days before. He was in his Ranger over the battlefield, and so Rhotenberry was able to sleep for a couple of hours at Pleiku before Master Sgt. Edward Black, a Filipino-American NCO who was Vann’s administrative assistant, woke him to say that Vann was returning to pick him up and take him to the command post Ba had established in the bunker of a former Special Forces compound on the west side of Kontum.

With the last major unit in II Corps committed, the stakes could not have been higher, and hardly anyone on the Saigon side and few among the American military thought that Kontum would hold. In expectation of new rulers, Qui Nhon was down to half its normal population. Ba’s own deputy went AWOL for the first twenty-four hours of the battle, hiding out in Kontum in the hope of escaping. Vann was conscious of these stakes, but they were not uppermost in his mind. “My credibility is at stake, Rhot,” he said in the helicopter. “The troop disposition at Tan Canh was mine. I said we could defend there … and they didn’t hold. Now my career is at stake because I’ve said we can defend Kontum. If you don’t hold it, I no longer have any credibility or career.”

The Vietnamese Communist soldiery attacked with an ardor undiminished by the years, but what they faced by the time they assaulted was more than human will could overcome. Kontum is in the valley of the Bla River where it flows west to meet the Poko coming down from Tan Canh and Dak To. To seize Kontum once a defense had been organized, the NVA had to mass in the hills on the edges of the valley and in the valley itself and attack along routes that were under daily observation by the scout helicopters of the air cavalry. Radio intercepts and direction-finding helped follow their movements too.