A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (17 page)

His seeming success tended to buffer him against his worries, but not to eliminate or even diminish them. While he could and did hope that
he would destroy the Viet Cong regular and provincial battalions in spite of Cao, it would have been irresponsible of him to count on doing so. The likelihood was that the guerrillas would sooner or later learn not to panic and to fight more intelligently, and when they did the days of easy killing would end. In the meantime he was not accomplishing the minimum tasks he and Porter had agreed on. After an initial show of enthusiasm, Cao was not cooperating in a matter as elementary as training the division’s battalions in marksmanship and infantry tactics. He never allowed any of the battalions to complete the three-week refresher course that Vann had set up at the SDC training center at Tan Hiep, and none of the battalions did anything fit to be called training at their home bases. The “Monthly Critiques” by the advisors were monotonous in reporting that the battalions spent most of their time “resting.” When a battalion did get to Tan Hiep and had been training for a few days, Cao would pull it out, often to pursue a guerrilla band that had overrun an outpost or staged an ambush. Vann was certain Cao knew as well as he did that it was impossible to catch the Viet Cong after such attacks; they planned their withdrawal in advance. Cao would never acknowledge this. Vann suspected Cao sent the battalions chasing long-gone foxes because he wanted to give the presidential palace the impression he was on the alert. Afterward he would order the battalion back to its base to “rest” instead of returning it to the training center. Training his men for combat was not one of Cao’s priorities. He pretended they were already well trained.

Cao was also thwarting Vann’s effort to foster night patrols and ambushes that would hinder the growth of the insurgency by denying the Viet Cong the freedom of the night. Cao had only acquiesced in night operations in the first place because of Diem’s instruction to get along with the Americans where it cost nothing and because he had wanted to show generosity to his new advisor. Having demonstrated that he was amiable, Cao had become intent on returning to what he considered sanity. He had just finished breakfast one recent morning when his staff had informed him that Vann had been out all night with less than half a squad this time—a five-man patrol. Cao had sent for Vann in a fury and had shouted that unless Vann stopped this madness he, Cao, was going to request another advisor. Didn’t Vann realize that if an American officer as senior as a lieutenant colonel were captured or killed on an adventure like this, President Diem would hold Cao responsible and never forgive him the embarrassment to the government? Cao’s career would be ruined. Diem might even throw him into jail. Vann had said that he was under orders from Porter to provoke night actions and
someone had to push the troops. He had reminded Cao that he was not an amateur and had learned in Korea that one was safer at night with a small group than with a large one. Cao had been so angry and fearful that Vann had decided he would have to compromise in order to retain any ability to employ American officers and sergeants as a possible catalyst for night patrols and ambushes. He had let Cao argue him into an agreement that he and the other field-grade officers in the detachment would not go out at night with less than a company. The junior officers and sergeants could continue to go out with small groups. Once Cao had Vann and the senior Americans reined in, he had begun to squeeze. Vann’s junior officers and sergeants were finding it increasingly difficult to round up men willing to accompany them. Cao had passed the word.

Vann had much more on his mind than training and night patrols and ambushes. He was troubled by the resilience the Viet Cong were demonstrating against the battering he was giving them. He had heard from Drummond that some of the battalions they had decimated were already receiving replacements to start rebuilding. Drummond had also discovered that despite all of the Viet Cong reported killed in the division zone since the beginning of the year, the total number of Main Force and Regional Viet Cong in the five provinces remained unchanged. Those units Vann had not yet caught up with had increased in size and offset the numerical losses in the ones he had crippled. Worse, Drummond had learned that there were a lot more local—that is, village and hamlet—guerrillas in the region than the 10,000 they had originally estimated. He did not yet know how many more existed, but the difference was substantial. This meant that the Communists had a much wider manpower base in the Guerrilla Popular Army from which to replace their casualties in the Main Force and Regionals than Vann had thought at the beginning.

During the jeep drive from My Tho to Saigon on the morning of September 11,1962, Vann rehearsed, with the intensity he had rehearsed his first briefings for VIPs at U.S. Army Europe headquarters in Heidelberg in 1956, how he was going to grasp Taylor’s attention at the luncheon table and keep the conversation focused while he made his points. He was going to be careful not to sound alarmist to Taylor. One did not influence generals by talking like a Cassandra. They concluded that you were unprofessional. Vann could truthfully say to himself that he did not feel alarmist. He was both encouraged and worried, and he intended to convey this balance of hope and apprehension to Taylor. Once Taylor knew the truth, he would tell Kennedy the truth, and once Kennedy understood what was happening in Vietnam, he would exert
the necessary pressure on Diem, and Taylor would simultaneously exert it on Harkins, and Vann’s worries would end.

When he walked up the front steps of the commanding general’s residence a couple of minutes before 12:30
P.M.
, he was the same spiffy figure in starched cotton khakis, peaked green cap, and glass-shined shoes who had reported to Porter that first day in March. His invitation was handwritten on a card embossed with a general’s flag of four white stars on a field of red. The residence was a white mansion in the best quarter of Saigon, where the French dignitaries had formerly lived. It had an elegantly kept lawn and a circular drive in front. The butler was an American sergeant. The lesser servants were Vietnamese. The mansion and grounds were encircled by a high wall for privacy and security, but there was company to be had not far away at the pool and tennis courts of the Cercle Sportif, the gathering place of Saigon’s foreign community and the Vietnamese upper class.

Two days after the lunch, Maxwell Taylor returned to the United States. He gave a press conference in the VIP lounge at Tan Son Nhut on the morning of his departure. He dismissed questions by some of the correspondents about reports of tension between American advisors and their Saigon counterparts.

“One has to be here personally,” he said, “to sense the growing national character, the resistance of the Vietnamese people to the subversive insurgency threat. My overall impression is of a great national movement, assisted to some extent, of course, by Americans, but essentially a movement by Vietnamese to defend Vietnam against a dangerous and cruel enemy.”

Vann had driven back to My Tho with his worries intact. He explained why in a summary of the luncheon discussion he wrote with a ball-point pen on the back of his invitation card before he filed it among his papers:

His gravest immediate worry was that although the Viet Cong were being killed in unprecedented numbers, the United States was at the same time removing the basic limit on the expansion of the guerrillas—the availability of captured weapons. The advisory mission was inadvertently equipping the Viet Cong with U.S. arms. Since the spring of 1962 the 28,000 Saigon territorials in the division zone had been turning
in their bolt-action French rifles for fast-firing American weaponry as quickly as they could be trained to shoot the U.S. arms. The 10,000 Civil Guardsmen were being equipped with a full bristle of infantry weapons from M-1 rifles to machine guns and mortars. The 18,000 Self-Defense Corps militiamen were being armed more selectively but still quite handsomely with semiautomatic .30 caliber carbines, Thompson submachine guns, and the BAR, the clip-fed light machine gun. What Harkins and his staff had failed to foresee prior to ordering the program full speed ahead was that no weapons should be handed out until the little outposts garrisoned by the territorials had been dismantled and consolidated. Otherwise the Saigon territorials would serve as a conduit to channel this American arms largess to the Communists, which was exactly what was happening. The Civil Guards and the SDC were the troops most frequently ambushed, and they manned the 776 outposts in the northern Delta which were the prime targets of the guerrillas. The great majority of these outposts inherited from the French (there were about 2,500 in the whole of III Corps) were easy marks, because the masonry watchtowers, which Vann called “brick coffins,” were garrisoned by half a dozen SDC and the little triangular-shaped forts of mud walls surrounded by a moat were held by no more than a reinforced squad. The elimination of most of these “VC supply points,” as Vann and his advisors referred to the outposts in general, had been another of the priorities that Vann and Porter had agreed on. Vann had ordered a survey done that had entailed an inspection of every post in the zone by his province advisors. He had checked out many himself on his jeep forays. Afterward he had recommended to Cao and the province chiefs that they consolidate the 776 outposts into 216 camps of company size or larger capable of defending themselves until help could arrive. These defensible posts could then function as bases from which to patrol and initiate local operations. Cao and the province chiefs had all replied that it was impossible to eliminate the outposts, that they were symbols of the government’s authority and Diem would never permit their removal. Vann had argued that they ought to tell the president it was irrational to hold on to symbols that were undermining his government, and that in addition to being militarily stupid the outpost system was cruel. Many of the militiamen kept their families in the little forts because they could not house them outside where the guerrillas could capture them and blackmail the garrison into surrendering. The dead or mangled bodies of women and children caught in the crossfire during attacks made propaganda material for the Vietnamese photographers employed by the U.S. Information Service (the U.S. Information Agency was called
the U.S. Information Service overseas), but surely there were enough genuine atrocities by the guerrillas so that no one needed to generate them. Neither of Vann’s arguments got him anywhere. He could see that Cao and the province chiefs had the same irrational attachment to the outposts that Diem did. The only posts dismantled were those the guerrillas overran and had the peasants tear down before they withdrew, and the province chiefs rebuilt these as fast as they could.

The Vietnamese Communists were clearly able to recruit all of the peasant guerrillas for whom they could obtain arms. Substituting newly captured automatic and semiautomatic American weapons for the previously captured French bolt-action rifles that were still the standard weapon of the regular and provincial guerrillas would also mean a manifold improvement in Viet Cong firepower. That the guerrillas were attempting such a quantum upgrading was evident in the M-is, carbines, and Thompson submachine guns which were starting to show up in arms seized from Main Force and Regional units. If nothing was done to stop this drain of American arms through the outposts—and Harkins and his representatives were always prodding the training advisors to hand out weapons faster despite the warnings from Vann and other division senior advisors—then Vann would encounter increasingly better-armed Viet Cong in his shakily led campaign to destroy the Main Force and provincial guerrilla units. If his campaign was ever interrupted or lost momentum for some reason and the Communists were able to fully reconstitute their striking force and go on the offensive with impunity, the guerrillas would capture many more American weapons, build their strength far beyond current numbers, and become a foe more formidable than Vann cared to imagine.

There was an ugly side to this war and to his Vietnamese allies that went far beyond the everlasting problem of the Saigon troops treating their peasantry like an occupied population, stealing the chickens and ducks and rice and molesting the women. Vann had learned about beating and murder of prisoners in Korea. During the first months of that war the North Koreans had often killed Americans they captured. The American troops had taken revenge when they could. Vann had considered it stupid to beat or kill a man who might have information that one could exploit to kill or capture a lot more of the enemy if the prisoner was interrogated skillfully, but he had understood how infantrymen, angered beyond reason by combat or the loss of friends, could commit such atrocities. Nothing he had seen or heard of in Korea would have prepared him for the cultivated sadism with which the Saigon troops treated captives.

The worst offender he knew was, oddly, a brave officer, a captain of Cambodian descent named Thuong who led the division’s Ranger company. Thuong’s troops, the majority of whom were also ethnic Cambodians, were the one competent group of soldiers the 7th had. Thuong’s position was equivalent to that of a battalion commander, because his company served the division and he was often given a second Ranger company to control on operations. The Ranger companies were designed to operate alone, but most were simply ordinary infantry companies that had been renamed Rangers and detailed to the province chiefs. Cao showed his special confidence in Thuong and his men by sending them off on their own without hesitation, which Vann could never persuade him to do with any of the division’s regular companies.

Captain Thuong meant his appearance to be menacing, and it was. Ziegler, who had initially worked with Thuong’s company on Ranger training and who continued occasionally to go out with him on operations, remembered how husky and relatively tall he was for a man of his race. His skin was the dark one of a Cambodian, his nose flat and wide and the lips beneath it pronounced. He wore prescription sunglasses in thick frames of black plastic and silver-colored metal. He carried his Colt .45 in a leather shoulder holster with a string of extra bullets in loops up the strap that ran across his chest. Thuong had been taught how to soldier in the French colonial paratroops long before the Americans had persuaded Diem to form Ranger companies to fight the guerrillas, and he was proud of his antecedents. The snarling tiger’s face that the Americans had invented as the Ranger insignia was sewn in a patch on the left shoulder of his shirt, but on the right above his breast pocket were his French parachutist’s wings. He often wore the distinctive reddish-brown camouflage fatigues of the French airborne, and he was never without the red beret or the small-brimmed forage cap of
les paras
. In a scabbard on his belt, however, Thuong carried a distinctly American weapon that was his favorite instrument. It was a Bowie knife, a heavy, fifteen-inch blade made famous in knife fighting by James Bowie, the frontiersman who was killed at the Alamo.