A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (48 page)

Timmes was alarmed at Harkins’s order. The son of a doctor in Queens, Charlie Timmes had always wanted to be a soldier and had repeatedly tried and failed to gain admission to West Point as a youth. He had instead gone to Fordham and unhappily practiced law for a meager livelihood during the Depression until he could turn a reserve commission into active duty as a lieutenant with the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1939, finally transferring to the Army itself three months before Pearl Harbor. Although he had amply proved himself as a para-troop battalion commander during World War II, he tended to be awed by the West Point insiders like Harkins, perhaps because of his rebuffed attempts to enter their fraternity. He was convinced that Harkins’s optimistic
view of the war was the correct one and that Vann’s reports were too grim. Yet as a fighting soldier himself, he liked Vann. Outbursts were part of the man’s character. Timmes was ready to forgive Vann’s flaws in order to profit from his other qualities. It also struck him that if he relieved Vann in these circumstances, he would undermine the morale of the rest of the division advisors. They would conclude that if they took risks to win the war and trouble with the Vietnamese resulted, he and Harkins would discard them and ruin their careers. Above all he wanted to stop Harkins from committing a rash act that would provoke a new scandal in the press.

“You can’t do it,” he said to Harkins. “They’ll crucify you.” He reminded Harkins that the MACV public affairs officers had promoted Vann as the “hotshot” of the advisory effort and that Vann also had a flair for handling the press and that the reporters were fond of him. They would be certain to leap on his dismissal, whether justified or not, as a craven act of surrender to the Saigon regime. It would be a public relations disaster.

Timmes saw that his argument was having the desired effect. Harkins had calmed down and was listening to him. Timmes mentioned the danger of also undermining the morale of the other advisors, but he stressed the certainty of a scandal. “Please, let me handle it,” he urged. Vann had just three months left to serve in Vietnam. Timmes proposed leaving him at My Tho for a decent interval and then relieving him and sending him off to tour the Central Highlands and the Central Coast region on the pretext that Timmes needed an independent estimate of how the war was going there. Harkins agreed.

A few days later, Timmes tested Porter’s attitude by telling him that Harkins was furious at Vann and wanted Porter to dismiss him. Timmes and Porter had known each other for years and were friends. Porter became extremely upset. “I’d fire myself before I fired John Vann,” he said. The implicit threat was that if he was told to relieve Vann, he would ask to be relieved himself. That would give the reporters further grist for a scandal, and as Porter was not scheduled to leave until mid-February, Vann had some protection for the immediate future.

Vann also defused some of Harkins’s anger with the duplicity he could employ convincingly when it suited his purpose. He swore that he had not talked to us. We had overheard his briefings for Harkins and others, he said, but through no fault of his because he did not control access to the command-post area. Access was a responsibility of the Saigon officers, and they had been “too polite” to order us to leave. He claimed that our unwelcome presence had also allowed us to eavesdrop on his
transmissions from the spotter plane by listening to the headquarters radios during the battle. No one in Harkins’s entourage had the wit to call Vann’s bluff by checking to find out if any reporters had been present at the command post during the battle to overhear him on the radio.

Harkins’s displeasure eased. He did not veto a recommendation by Porter to award Vann the Distinguished Flying Cross for braving Viet Cong fire in the spotter plane. (In mid-December 1962, President Kennedy had relented on his fiction of the nonwar in Vietnam to the extent of authorizing combat decorations up to the third-highest award—the Bronze Star for Valor. The Distinguished Flying Cross was the equivalent award for heroism in the air.) Harkins also tried to indicate to Vann that he realized he had not given Vann a band of fearless Gurkhas to advise and that he was willing to forgive Vann’s impolitic behavior. One of Harkins’s staff officers passed him a newspaper clipping of a cartoon on Ap Bac by Bill Mauldin, the creator of the archetypal GIs of World War II, Willie and Joe. In the cartoon an ARVN infantryman was huddled down inside a foxhole. An American sergeant, exposing himself to Viet Cong bullets, knelt beside the foxhole with his hands stretched out in supplication. “When I say attack, don’t just lean forward,” the sergeant said to the cowering Saigon soldier. “Send it to Col. Vann,” Harkins wrote on the memo routing slip, initialed it, and had the slip and the cartoon dispatched to Vann at My Tho.

Had he been able to understand what a complicated man he was dealing with and what grief Vann was to cause him, Harkins undoubtedly would have fired Vann, let Porter go in the bargain, and accepted crucifixion by the news media as the lesser evil. Vann had no intention of behaving himself in the future. He would dissemble only to win. His professional conscience would not permit him to fake the score if he thought that lying would bring defeat for his country.

Vann’s first step was to attempt to turn the Battle of Ap Bac to his advantage. He held up the debacle as proof that this army he had been sent to help guide was ludicrously inadequate to the task of holding South Vietnam for the United States. He put together an after-action report on Ap Bac that was the longest and most detailed report of its kind in the history of the war thus far.

He had each of the advisors write accounts of their experiences to append as testimony to the main body of his report. Scanlon surpassed Vann’s expectations with six and a half pages of single-spaced type.
Together with the reports of Mays and Bowers, Scanlon’s narrative made for unsettling reading. The advisor to Major Tho wrote five pages on the nonperformance of the province chief and attached a copy of a separate two-page letter he had sent to Tho the day after the battle, with Vann’s permission. It amounted to a sarcastic letter of reprimand, enumerating Tho’s acts “for your [Tho’s] further convenience, enlightenment and corrective training.” Prevost produced fourteen pages of observations.

After Ziegler had edited all sixteen of these individual accounts to be sure they were as crisp as possible, Vann topped them with the main body of his report—twenty-one pages of descriptive chronology and analysis. He communicated his “miserable damn performance” feelings without using words like “debacle” or “defeat.” He knew that any display of emotion would weaken his report and permit Harkins and other superiors who did not wish to hear this bad news to point to the emotion as evidence that his judgment was impaired. He wrote in the restrained language mandatory for Army reports. The authenticity of the personal accounts by the advisors and the hour-by-hour recitation of bumble after bumble and wretched act after wretched act in his chronology and analysis broke the bonds of this bland Army language and conveyed what he wished to say. He signed the finished product—ninety-one pages with map overlays of the action—and sent it off to Porter at Cao’s IV Corps headquarters in Can Tho a week after the battle. Army procedure called for Porter to write a memorandum of comment, officially referred to as an indorsement, on the report before forwarding it to Harkins’s headquarters.

Porter’s memorandum to Harkins was an astonishing document for a white-haired colonel of his sobriety. The memorandum read like a charge sheet for a court-martial, to which Porter was attaching Vann’s report as evidence for the prosecution. “The subject after-action report is possibly the best documented, most comprehensive, most valuable, and most revealing of any of the reports submitted … during the past 12 months,” he began. “The conduct of this operation revealed many glaring weaknesses,” he said, and reminded Harkins that Vann and his fellow division senior advisors had already called attention to “most” of these weaknesses on an individual basis in their reports on “the bulk of other operations” by the 7th Division and its two associate ARVN divisions in the Delta and the belt of provinces that ringed Saigon on the north. Porter next abstracted from Vann’s report the worst flaws in the performance of Diem’s forces during the battle and listed them in a string of alphabetized subparagraphs. The list was a quick-step march
through almost every mortal sin known to the profession of arms. It went on in a litany of:

Porter did not have a single redeeming comment to make. He warned in his conclusion that there was no sense fooling themselves about the leadership of the Saigon army. “Many of the weaknesses enumerated above are characteristic of virtually all of the senior officers of the Vietnamese armed forces,” he wrote.

To start the process of reformation, Porter recommended that Harkins obtain Diem’s consent to “a series of joint US/VN conferences or seminars at the national level for all Vietnamese general officers, the key members of the corps and higher staffs, and division and brigade commanders” and their advisors. At these meetings the Americans would “openly and frankly discuss” with their Saigon counterparts what needed to be done. The agenda for discussion and subsequent reform that Porter then laid out again encompassed practically every attribute of a respectable army, from “principles of shock action” to a reform that had immediate application to Cao and Tho—”the necessity to eliminate ineffective commanders.” In short, they would have to begin from scratch.

General York, whose escape from Cao’s “friendly fire” at Bac lent a certain keenness to his estimate of ARVN leadership, obtained the first indication of how Harkins viewed the battle and how he would react to Vann’s report and to Porter’s judgment and recommendation. York had also decided that Ap Bac illuminated so many flaws in the Saigon side and was so portentous of the future that it merited a special report to the commanding general. He assumed that his personal analysis would prove useful to Harkins because it would carry the credibility of his record as an infantry combat leader in World War II and the knowledge of guerrilla warfare, rare among general officers in the U.S. Army, that he had acquired in Malaya. He returned to the Seminary a few days after the battle, questioned Vann again, and interviewed a number of the advisors. His analysis for Harkins made, briefly, many of the same points that Vann and Porter laid out in detail. He had only two copies typed, one for his files and the original, which he personally delivered to Harkins. That same night the two men happened to have dinner
together. Harkins said that he had not yet had an opportunity to read York’s report, but he was looking forward to doing so. Harkins then started talking about Ap Bac. As York listened he began to realize with astonishment that Harkins had apparently been serious when he had claimed, in another encounter with the reporters a week after the battle, that Ap Bac had been a “victory” for the Saigon forces. Harkins seemed to have truly convinced himself that when everything was taken into account, Ap Bac had been a gain for his Vietnamese wards. York said that Harkins was not going to like his report, because he had reached a different conclusion. Harkins looked at him for a moment and passed on to another subject.

We reporters would also have been astonished had we heard what York just had, because none of us thought that Harkins actually believed the Saigon side had won the battle. “I consider it a victory. We took the objective,” he had said to us. We had assumed that his remark was another maladroit attempt to put the best face on things. We took it for granted that he privately viewed the war with a modicum of reality, however flawed with false optimism his vision might be.

We were wrong. Harkins had genuinely believed that the Viet Cong were still in Bac and Tan Thoi hamlets when he said to Halberstam and Arnett, “We’ve got them in a trap and we’re going to spring it in half an hour.” Despite Vann’s having told him that they were gone, he had believed Cao’s lie that they were still there and that Cao was going to snare them. In the same way he now really believed that the battle had not been a defeat for the Saigon troops. He was convinced of the truth of these assertions that angered us because we interpreted them as an insult to our intelligence. All of us—and Vann, Porter, and York—had been profoundly underestimating Harkins’s capacity for self-delusion. He was not the only one of his rank and station whom we had been underestimating.

Harkins was to become an object of ridicule by the time he returned to the United States to retire in a year and a half. To “pull a Harkins” was to become a slang term among younger American officers in Vietnam for committing an egregiously stupid act. Harkins was to be regarded as an aberration among American military leaders, a fatuously optimistic General Blimp. In fact, as the years were to reveal, Harkins was a representative figure of the American military hierarchy of the 1960s, a man whose values and preconceptions were shared by the majority of the armed forces leadership. Harkins only seemed to be an
aberration because he was the first to be noticed. The years were to demonstrate that it was Vann and Porter and York who were members of an atypical minority.

Time
magazine, whose editors, under Henry Luce’s guidance, almost invariably portrayed American generals in heroic dimension in the 1960s, had favorably compared Harkins to George Patton, his World War II patron, in a profile in May 1962. The two men had been outwardly dissimilar—”Patton, a shootin’ cussin’ swashbuckler; Harkins, quiet, firm, invariably polite.” Nonetheless,
Time
continued, quoting an anonymous acquaintance of Harkins, “‘I really think that inside he and Patton were the same.’”

The two men were dissimilar outwardly and inwardly. Patton had not led simply by charging up to the front. The “Old Blood and Guts” image that
Time
was perpetuating was one he had helped the newsmen cultivate (he coined the nickname himself) because it appealed to his neurotic ego and he thought the troops liked it. Patton had been a reflective man, an extraordinarily well-read student of wars and military leaders, ancient and modern, with a curiosity about his war to match his energy. No detail had been too minor or too dull for him, nor any task too humble. Everything from infantry squad tactics to tank armor plate and chassis and engines had interested him. To keep his mind occupied while he was driving through a countryside, he would study the terrain and imagine how he might attack this hill or defend that ridge. He would stop at an infantry position and look down the barrel of a machine gun to see whether the weapon was properly sited to kill counterattacking Germans. If it was not, he would give the officers and men a lesson in how to emplace the gun. He had been a military tailor’s delight of creased cloth and shined leather, and he had worn an ivory-handled pistol too because he thought he was a cavalier who needed these trappings for panache. But if he came upon a truck stuck in the mud with soldiers shirking in the back, he would jump from his jeep, berate the men for their laziness, and then help them push their truck free and move them forward again to battle. By dint of such lesson and example, Patton had formed his Third Army into his ideal of a fighting force. In the process he had come to understand the capabilities of his troops and he had become more knowledgeable about the German enemy than any other Allied general on the Western Front. Patton had been able to command with certainty, overcoming the mistakes that are inevitable in the practice of the deadly art as well as personal eccentricities and public gaffes that would have ruined a lesser general, because he had always stayed in touch with the realities of his war.