A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (66 page)

The Communist mandarins had strayed from their destiny in the mid-1950s when they had been distracted by the fashioning of their Marxist society in the North and in undoing the damage caused by the disastrous fanaticism of their Land Reform Campaign. The Southern cadres who survived Diem’s terror and disobeyed them in 1957 by rebelling against the Ngo Dinhs and the Americans had recalled them to their destiny. Men like Squad Leader Dung had kept them in the war. By 1964 it was too late to retreat, whatever the Americans threatened, whatever the Americans did. The men in Hanoi knew that if they did order the Viet Cong cadres to halt, they would lose control, because many would defy them and persist in a war that was being won. But they would never issue such an order. To do so would be to deny the central purpose of their lives. “Vietnam is one nation,” their constitution proclaimed.

Their actions were the proof of their refusal to be deterred. They pressed ahead throughout 1964 with the creation of the second Viet Minh to complete the revolution in the South. The heavy weapons the trawlers had brought in on moonless nights made their first appearance in battle that spring. The 12.7mm Soviet-model antiaircraft machine gun was more accurate against helicopters and fighter-bombers than the Browning .50 caliber, because the gun rested on a tall and hefty mount that steadied the weapon and permitted the gunner to swing it more freely. The Viet Cong commanders staged a regimental-size action in April in the southern half of the Delta, a safe place to perform this first test of simultaneously maneuvering three battalions in combat. The fighting and training and organizing went on all through the summer and fall of 1964, and by the end of the year the Hanoi leaders were close to their goal. On January 2, 1963, the Viet Cong had been a hesitant force of approximately 23,000 regular and Regional guerrillas assembled in twenty-five battalions of varying strengths from 150 to 300 men and sundry provincial companies and district platoons. By December 1964, these 23,000 guerrillas had grown twice over and then some into an army of 56,000 confident and well-trained troops. The twenty-five catch-all battalions and assorted companies and platoons had been transformed into seventy-three uniformly strong battalions, sixty-six infantry units, and an additional seven heavy weapons and antiaircraft machine gun battalions. The infantry battalions were formidable task forces of 600 to 700 men each. (The JGS intelligence information had said in the summer of 1963 that the Viet Cong were moving toward 600-man battalions, but Halberstam, feeling so much pressure, had settled in his August 15 dispatch for a more conservative report that spoke of 400-man formations. They had seemed menacing enough at the time.) Most of the battalions had been organized into regiments complete with communications,
engineer, and other combat support units, and the Viet Cong commanders were in the process of forming the regiments into divisions. This army of 56,000 fighters was backed by another 40,000 men in base-echelon training, supply, medical, and related services.

Nearly six years of pain and dying had been necessary to raise the desperate remnant of 2,000 Viet Minh in the spring of 1957 to the 23,000 uncertain guerrillas of the day of Ap Bac. It had taken less than two years, with the help of Diem and the Americans, to form the sledgehammer battalions of December 1964.

The hammers began to break the ARVN into pieces that month. On December 9 an unprecedented ambush occurred on a road in the rubber-plantation country forty miles east of Saigon. An entire company of fourteen M-113s was destroyed, all of the armored personnel carriers smashed into hulks by 57mm and 75mm recoilless cannon. An L-19 and two of the Huey gunships that came to their assistance were shot down. Although no one in Saigon knew it, the ambushers were two battalions from one of the new Viet Cong regiments. At the end of the month the Viet Cong commanders baited the Saigon side into battle in the same area by repeatedly attacking a district center and overrunning the outposts protecting a neighboring hamlet of Northern Catholic refugees called Binh Gia. On December 31,1964, an elite Saigon marine battalion of 326 officers and men was decimated in a giant ambush amid the rubber trees near Binh Gia. Almost two-thirds of the Saigon marines were killed, wounded, or captured. Twenty-nine of the battalion’s thirty-five officers died. Another elite Saigon battalion was operating close by that day, one of the new Ranger battalions Westmoreland had formed to try to strengthen the ARVN. It suffered a worse fate in a second giant ambush and was literally wiped out. Nearly 400 officers and men became casualties. The two guerrilla regiments responsible for the ambushes were part of a still larger unit whose existence was also unknown to Westmoreland and the ARVN generals—the 9th Viet Cong Division, the first division of the second Viet Minh to become operational in the South.

Only the intervention of the regular armed forces of the United States could now prevent the collapse of the Saigon regime and the unification of Vietnam by the men in Hanoi. The alternative that Vann had been convinced was not an alternative—the big American air and ground war in Vietnam—had become inevitable. Ziegler remembered what Vann would say when the subject came up of bringing the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps out to take over the war. It would be the worst possible move, Vann said. They had to find a way to make the ARVN fight,
because waging the war with a Vietnamese army was the only course that made sense. The Viet Cong were so intermingled with the peasantry that the Saigon troops had difficulty distinguishing friend from foe. Think, Vann said, how much more difficult it would be for Americans. The American soldiers would soon start to see the whole rural population as the enemy. The Army and the Marine Corps would create a bloody morass into which they and the Vietnamese peasantry would sink. “We’d end up shooting at everything—men, women, kids, and the buffalos,” Vann said.

There was obviously no satisfaction to be drawn from the catastrophe, but Halberstam and I and Vann’s other friends regretted that he was no longer in the Army to obtain at least the professional vindication he deserved now that the truth was so large some of it would have to be conceded sooner or later. The letter we had received from him in July 1963 had said that he was going to retire at the end of the month to accept a job as an executive with the Aerospace Division of Martin-Marietta in Denver. He said that the Army personnel officers refused to give him the troop-command assignment he was entitled to after his classes at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces ended in June 1964, and that he could not face the three to four years of elevated clerkdom they insisted he would then have to accept in a logistics job at the Pentagon. He wrote us a capsule account of his campaign at the Pentagon and the cancellation of his briefing for the Joint Chiefs three hours before he was to give it. He sent a similar letter to the advisory team at My Tho. His emotion showed at the end of the letter to his captains. He signed it, “Your brother officer, John.” We, and Vann’s Army friends, all assumed that he was retiring in disgust after being refused a hearing before the Joint Chiefs so that he could gain the freedom to speak out about the war in public. He confirmed our assumption in press interviews after he left the Army by saying that this had been the real reason for his retirement.

The failure of his briefing campaign at the Pentagon would not have hurt Vann’s odds at overcoming the clash with Harkins had he subsequently behaved himself by taking up his studies at the Industrial College until ruffled dignity settled and events began to vindicate him. He had gained the disapproval of Wheeler, who was to succeed Taylor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but one of the numerous admirers he had simultaneously gained was Harold Johnson, who was to succeed Wheeler as chief of staff. With the chief of staff as an admirer, one can afford
some ill will in other quarters. Vann’s retirement raised still higher our admiration for his moral courage.

Vann’s moral heroism became the core of his legend. An account of the cancellation of his briefing for the Joint Chiefs first appeared at the end of September 1963, two months after he retired, in a long, frontpage article with a photograph of Vann and Cao in the
New York Journal-American
. Vann provided the details and the photograph to an editor of the paper who had heard rumors about the incident and telephoned him in Denver.

Halberstam, whose reporting was vindicated by a Pulitzer Prize after his return to the United States in December 1963, gave the real life to Vann’s legend by putting it into print prominently, first with his profile of Vann in
Esquire
magazine in November 1964, and then with his book
The Making of a Quagmire
in 1965. When Halberstam flew out to Denver in the spring of 1964 to interview him for the book, Vann recounted his crusade at the Pentagon and how Krulak and Taylor had aborted the briefing. He said that he could not bear to stay in the Army after that disappointment. The denouement was the perfect high-drama ending to the epic of Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, the officer of surpassing career promise, who had renounced a general’s stars to alert the nation to the truth about the war in Vietnam because he was also a man of surpassing principle. The ending appealed as well to Halberstam’s hero-villain style of journalism. While writing the book, Halberstam thought of Vann’s retirement so much in terms of a resignation of protest that he used “retired” and “resigned” interchangeably:

Vann emerged as the one authentic hero of this shameful period. The heroism stayed with him, the heroism of the David who had stood up to the Goliath of lies and institutional corruption. It was repeated in subsequent articles written about him. It was cited in 1969 when the secretary of state, then William Rogers, presented him an award from the Association of the Foreign Service for “extraordinary accomplishment involving creativity, intellectual courage and integrity.” If you asked a friend why he had left the Army, he would reply that Vann had resigned in protest.

The memory of Vann’s moral heroism was the foundation of his reputation in later years in Vietnam for candor and willingness to grasp the brambles of fact however they might hurt. Even though he always drew back from condemning the war itself, this reputation for truth-telling lent credibility to what he had to say about the war to those who might differ with him on the fundamental issue of whether the United States ought to be waging war in Vietnam at all. The memory was in the chapel the day he was buried at Arlington. His old professional enemies and friends like Ellsberg who had since come to oppose his war—all paid homage to a man who had given up what he loved most, the Army, rather than be a party to lies and delusions.

The story wasn’t true. He had not renounced his career and retired in protest in order to warn the country of impending defeat. He did have moral courage. He had defied Harkins, fought to gain acceptance of the truth at the Pentagon, and had his briefing for the Joint Chiefs canceled by Krulak and Taylor just as he was within reach of the hearing he wanted, but these were not the reasons he left the Army. He lied to Halberstam and manipulated him, doing so naturally with the same talent he sought to work on Cao. He had deceived everyone in Vietnam. We had interpreted his career recklessness as self-sacrifice and had worried about our stories hurting him because we had thought that he was sacrificing a general’s stars. He had wanted us to think this. He had wanted his captains like Ziegler and his enlisted men like Bowers to think this too—otherwise he would not have told Ziegler he was worried that he might have spoiled his prospects in the Army by defying Harkins. All the time he was deceiving us he knew that he had no career to ruin and no stars to throw away. He had known before he went to Vietnam in March 1962 that he would probably retire after he came home. He had meant more than Halberstam could have realized when he said at the airport farewell with his small, tight smile: “You never hurt me any more than I wanted to be hurt.” He also said more about himself than he meant to say when he told the Army historian: “We had also, to all the visitors who came over there, been one of the bright shining lies.”

He had left the Army because a dark compulsion in his personality had led him to commit an act that he was convinced would bar him forever from promotion to general. There was a duality in the man, a duality of personal compulsions and deceits that would not bear light and a professional honesty that was rigorous and incorruptible. Two years before he had marched through the swinging doors of Dan Porter’s office in the old French cavalry compound in Saigon, he had nearly been court-martialed because of his secret vice. By maneuvering with cunning
he had managed to get the charges dismissed. The system through which the Army maintained an officer’s personnel record had permitted him to hide the incident from everyone in Vietnam. There was much else about his life that he always kept hidden or repressed.

He had known that he could not hide the black spot from a board considering colonels for promotion to general officer. A promotion board would have access to his entire record, including a file with his name on it that was preserved permanently by the criminal investigation division of the Military Police and a copy of the pre-court-martial proceedings that might still exist in the records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General. He had tried and failed before going to Vietnam to steal those records and destroy them in order to remove the stain. He had been convinced that any promotion board that saw that stain would decide the Army could not afford to risk having an officer accused of his crime among its generals. He had sworn to himself when he was a boy that he would go places and be somebody. He could not stand being relegated to Number Two. He had to be in on the scramble to be Number One. Once he had determined that he was barred from the opportunity to climb to the top in the Army, he told himself that he would have to leave when he was still young enough at thirty-nine to begin another career.