A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (52 page)

The head of the team was also impressed with the man Lansdale had installed in Saigon. “Mr. Diem struck me as being both an energetic and knowledgeable man, and most articulate.” If anything, the general went on to explain, Diem was too articulate. Harkins had taken him to a two-and-a-half-hour meeting with Diem, and the four-star visitor from the Pentagon had found it difficult to say much himself. “The great problem with the president is getting an opportunity to say something to him, because he is a pretty fast man with the words.” Nevertheless, the team chief concluded that Diem “certainly knows his country and I think knows his people. He is a leader in the same sense that we think of political leadership to a high degree of success.” Diem’s government
was “immature” and “fumbling in carrying out significant programs,” but the general suspected that these shortcomings were due primarily to the social and intellectual backwardness of “the Asiatic or the Vietnamese character,” rather than to any lack of capability by Diem.

One device the regime was using for population control fascinated this Army general because he had been told it had the side benefit of gaining the goodwill of the peasantry. It was the requirement that everyone in a strategic hamlet carry an ID card with the person’s photograph and thumbprint on the card. Having to obtain and carry an ID card “certainly would not be appealing … to the American population,” the general said, but Vietnamese peasants were different. “The people think that this is the finest thing since canned beer because it indicates to them that the government loves them, has an interest in them. … They don’t regard this as harassment or as a means of keeping tabs on them, which, of course, it is; but here you are.”

Krulak kept any doubts from entering the discussion after a general at CINCPAC headquarters asked when Harkins was going to start his Operation Explosion offensive to reduce the Viet Cong to remnant bands. The team leader said that Harkins had been “pretty cagey on this one,” that when he had asked about it Harkins had replied: “I’m not going to tell anybody when I start this campaign.” (Harkins had reason to be cagey. He had apparently not informed the team chief that Diem was stalling him. He and his staff had drawn up a plan and had had it translated into Vietnamese, but he was unable to persuade Diem to have the Joint General Staff issue the plan as their own. Although Diem thought he had Harkins well tamed, his painfully suspicious nature still led him to worry that Harkins might be trying to entice him into big engagements with the Viet Cong. Ap Bac exacerbated his fear. Despite continued pleas from Harkins, the paper offensive was not to begin on paper until July i, 1963.) “It might be useful to approach it [Harkins’s offensive] from the viewpoint that it’s already begun—and it has,” Krulak said. “They are doing so very much more than they were a year ago that I think you might lay the ‘Explosion’ ghost [to rest] by saying that there is no beginning. It is a natural outgrowth of what has been going on for a year.” The team leader underscored Krulak’s logic. “I had them [Harkins and his staff] give me a rundown the other day of operations going on in Vietnam the length and breadth of the country … and Harkins told me an average of four hundred and fifty a month. … Now this is a step in the right direction, you see. It’s an offensive operation.”

“Even if they don’t find them it’s good,” said the CINCPAC general.

(In an ironic footnote to this parody of high strategy, the meeting was being held in a headquarters named Camp H. M. Smith in memory of Krulak’s World War II patron and idol. The place had once been the Pearl Harbor naval hospital. The Navy had abandoned the hospital back in the 1950s and wanted to sell it to a developer who would tear it down and build a tourist hotel. Krulak had persuaded his superiors to rehabilitate the place for headquarters use and dedicate the installation to Holland Smith.)

After the session at Camp Smith the group moved over to several VIP cottages at Fort de Russy, a small military enclave that existed at the time on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, to give Krulak and the team leader’s aide tranquillity in which to write the report. The aide’s contribution naturally reflected the views of his general. The other members of the team approved the draft before the final typing.

The report of the Joint Chiefs’ mission provided an unequivocating response to the question of whether the United States and its Saigon surrogate were winning or losing. “The situation in South Vietnam has been reoriented, in the space of a year and a half, from a circumstance of near desperation to a condition where victory is now a hopeful prospect.” There was no need for any drastic alternatives. “We are winning slowly on the present thrust, and … there is no compelling reason to change.” The specifics of the report were as cheerful as its broad statements. Where Harkins’s Explosion offensive was concerned, Krulak managed to get in his opinion that it had “already begun” and “offers reasonable prospects for improving greatly the military situation.” The separate three-years-to-victory plan that Harkins’s staff had composed at McNamara’s request was also “a generally sound basis for planning the phase-out of United States support” by the end of 1965. The newspaper reports the president and Robert Kennedy and McNamara had been reading of advisors’ complaints that the Saigon officers ignored their advice were at best exaggerations and at worst false. “United States advice will be increasingly followed as Government of Vietnam confidence in themselves and their advisors continues to grow.”

Ap Bac was mentioned only once in the twenty-nine pages of the report. This was to warn that the resident newsmen in Vietnam had become unwitting saboteurs of a fruitful policy:

“The principal ingredients for eventual success have been assembled in South Vietnam,” the report concluded. “Now, perseverance in the field, and at home, will be required in great measure to achieve that success.”

A few of the men who counted in Washington—W. Averell Harriman, then assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, was one—were skeptical of this reassurance. President Kennedy and his counselor-brother believed it, and so did McNamara, and Dean Rusk at the top of the State Department, and most of the rest of the civilian and military hierarchy. John Kennedy had confidence in the system that had given him a world to guide. Brute Krulak had also been on that mission, and Kennedy had seen Krulak lead in war and knew he was a man to be trusted.

Another Marine general who had watched Krulak rise reflected long afterward that ambition might explain his behavior. He had a reputation for the flair at self-promotion he exhibited in sending John Kennedy the note and the bottle of Three Feathers. He wanted, of course, to consummate his career by adding the name Krulak to the roll of commandants of the Corps. The current commandant, Gen. David Shoup, who had won his Congressional Medal of Honor at Tarawa, was due to retire at the end of 1963. There was a chance that the president, out of esteem for Krulak, might pass over more senior candidates and name Krulak as the new commandant. The addition of Robert Kennedy to Krulak’s admirers had raised his prospects. If he could not attain his goal on this occasion because he was still too junior within the Marine hierarchy, the favor of the Kennedy brothers could give it to him on the next one. John Kennedy’s defeat of Richard Nixon had been extremely close in 1960, but by January 1963 he was a popular president. The common assumption was that he would easily win a second term. In 1967, it would again be time to select a commandant of the Corps, and by then Krulak would have seniority to his credit as well. Krulak’s colleague therefore thought he had probably not wanted to risk his career at this moment by challenging the established optimism and bringing down on himself the wrath of Maxwell Taylor, the fashionable military savant whom the Kennedy brothers and McNamara considered the ultimate source of wisdom on war, and that of Harkins, Taylor’s protégé. (Robert Kennedy named one of his sons Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.)
“Brute Krulak is too smart not to have seen what was happening in South Vietnam,” his colleague said. “He could think circles around those Army and Air Force generals.” Ambition may have influenced Krulak’s behavior, perhaps unconsciously, but ambition alone was not an adequate explanation. For all of his ambition and gift for self-promotion, Krulak was not a cynical man and he did not lack moral courage. He was later to take a stand on the war that was to seriously jeopardize his chance of fulfilling his ambition.

The mission of inquiry the Joint Chiefs sent to South Vietnam in January 1963 demonstrated that the military institutions of the United States were so overcome by their malady of victory that they could not respond to events and adjust themselves to reality even when reality took them by the shoulders and shook them. That a thinker and fighter of Krulak’s stature had also been so affected by the arrogance that he could not free himself when he knew that the president, the president’s brother, and the secretary of defense wanted him to find the truth and bring it back to them told, as only personal example can, the true dimension of the change in the once superbly led armed services of the United States. When John Kennedy had had Krulak appointed special assistant for counterinsurgency, Krulak had said to himself that he would learn this new kind of war by applying logic and imagination as he had in the past. He had instead taken the word of another big man, Paul Harkins, during his earlier trips to Vietnam and had allowed Taylor’s faith in Harkins to reinforce illusion. Despite the warning flares of Ap Bac, he clung to his preconceptions and helped to implant them in the other members of the Joint Chiefs’ mission. This was not difficult to do. They were inclined to listen to him anyway because of who he was and who he knew.

President Kennedy would have been better served if he had remembered from his days as a junior officer in the Navy that the closer one gets to a fight, the more one learns of its essence. He could then have spared the public purse the expense of carrying this distinguished mission 20,000 miles round trip in a four-engine jet transport and simply sent for one of the helicopter men who had flown into the guns of the Viet Cong regulars at Bac. Any pilot or crewman would have done. His one qualification would have been an ability to sing, on or off key. After the battle a pilot or crewman—later no one could recall the author’s name—had composed a ballad about the fight. It was being sung in the evenings over gin and whiskey and vodka and cold beer in the clubs at Soc Trang,
and at the Seminary, and at Tan Son Nhut. Ziegler first heard a sergeant singing it and made the man repeat it slowly while he wrote down the words for his diary. The verses were flawed by a number of factual inaccuracies. Ballads of battles composed by the men who fight them often do suffer from factual inaccuracies because of the confusion of war, but the inaccuracies do not detract from truth. The ballad—called “Ap Bac” and sung to the tune of “On Top of Old Smokey”—would have told the president what he needed to know:

One of the vestiges of the Geneva Agreements of 1954 was a tripartite organization called the International Commission for Supervision and Control. The commission had been created to monitor observance of the accords by all parties and had therefore been balanced by delegations from Communist Poland, anti-Communist Canada, and then neutral India, which held the chairmanship permanently and was supposed to referee. By 1963, the ICSC had long ceased to serve any purpose, but the delegations still maintained offices and living quarters in Hanoi and Saigon, commuted back and forth on a special plane, and, because of their diplomatic status, circulated with relative freedom in both capitals. The delegates were thus thought to be informed about opinion on both sides of the war.

The senior Polish delegate in 1963 was an inquiring man, a Jewish intellectual named Miecyslaw Maneli, who taught international law at the University of Warsaw when he was not on diplomatic assignment. He had helped the Vietnamese as a member of an ICSC inspection team in 1954, and they liked him. At a reception in Hanoi one evening he was taken aside by another man of inquiring mind with rough, homely features, the sort one would expect in a rice-paddy Vietnamese and not in the son of the chief secretary to the last of the Nguyen emperors to be deposed and exiled by the French—Pham Van Dong, Ho Chi Minh’s prime minister. There was no need for an interpreter; both men spoke French.