A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (67 page)

Yet while he left the Army for his own hidden reasons, he did not want to leave and he regretted leaving as soon as he had done so. He felt rejected in Denver, as if the Army had cast him out. The feeling was one he knew well. He had been born an outcast. His mother had not wanted him, nor had she had a rightful name to give him, nor any love.

  
H
E WAS ILLEGITIMATE
. His father’s name was not Vann, it was Spry, Johnny Spry, and he was named John Paul after him. His mother’s name was Myrtle Lee Tripp. She was just short of nineteen years old when she gave birth to him on July 2, 1924, in a run-down brick mansion that had been cut up into apartments in an old section of the port of Norfolk, Virginia. He was the offspring of one of the few genuine attachments his mother was to have in a lifetime of shoddy liaisons until the effects of alcoholism and a beating when she was drunk one night on the Norfolk beachfront carried her off at the age of sixty-one.

Johnny Spry was in his mid-twenties in 1924 and drove a trolley car. His formal name was John Paul, but everyone who knew him called him Johnny. Even if he had wanted to marry Myrtle Tripp someday, it would have been inconvenient. Johnny Spry already had a wife, a three-year-old son named John Paul, Jr., and another son of nine months when the boy who could not bear his family name was born. This John Paul was a “love child” in the phrase of the South of his birth, a euphemism that was never to help alleviate his shame.

When her son was four, Myrtle Tripp met Aaron Frank Vann, a city bus driver. He had migrated to Norfolk from a farm in North Carolina just as Myrtle and most of her family had done in her childhood. She decided to marry him after she became pregnant with the daughter who was to be Vann’s half sister, Dorothy Lee. The marriage was to endure in form, if not in fact, for twenty years, and Frank Vann, as he was called, eventually adopted the boy Myrtle brought to him.

John Paul Vann was an original white Southerner. His lineage reached back centuries to the beginnings of the South, and his birth was in
keeping with his ancestry: the majority of his forebears had been social illegitimates.

The Puritans who settled in New England to escape religious persecution were a community of farmers, craftsmen, and scholar-preachers. The settlements they founded tended to attract others in their image, skilled and literate people who joined in starting the village-to-town-to-city civilization that was to make America an industrial colossus.

The white settlers of the South were mainly the condemned and the desperate of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Ireland, with a passel of troublesome Scots tossed in for good riddance. Tobacco was the principal reason for their coming. It had been discovered being grown by the native inhabitants of the South, the Indians, who were being exterminated. Britain and the rest of Europe were demanding the new narcotic in such quantities that the slave traders could not bring over those other original settlers of the South, the black men and women of Africa, fast enough to meet the labor needs of the colonial planters along the coasts of what are now Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

Ireland was a garrisoned colony then, with a truculent peasantry kept in check by the gun and the noose. The countryside of England was a battleground of class warfare. The gentry were expanding their estates by gradually expropriating the common lands, ruining small farmers, evicting tenants, and driving down the survival wages of agricultural laborers. The poor and the victimized fought back by organizing strikes and burning barns and mills and with riots to loot grain storehouses during the recurrent famines. The atmosphere encouraged lawlessness of every kind. In the cities there was the added peril of dying from one of the many diseases bred by the filth. Life was so precarious in eighteenth-century London that deaths outnumbered baptisms by two to one.

The gentry of Britain took advantage of the planters’ need for labor to rid themselves of their undesirables. Parliament passed statutes authorizing judges to commute death sentences to exile (the euphemism was “transportation”) to the colonies for life. With men and women being hanged for rioting to get something to eat or stealing half a pound of tobacco (approximately 200 offenses were punishable by hanging), there was no dearth of sentences to commute. Transportation was also made a general punishment for noncapital offenses. The minimum sentence was for seven years, the usual number these unfortunates had to labor in the tobacco fields to repay the planter the cost of having a “convict servant” shipped across the Atlantic in chains.

Except for the chains, the greater part of the other white migrants to the South were hardly distinguishable from the convict men and women. The coast of the colonial South, with its malaria and yellow fever and cholera, was not a place that would attract the settlers who went to New England. The majority of those who came were the orphans, the ruined farmers, the evicted tenants, the destitute rural laborers, and their women and children. After hunger had so bereft them of hope that they were willing to face the terror of the two-to-three-month voyage in the frail sailing ships and the grimness of work in the plantation fields, they sold themselves to a planter to pay for their passage to America. Their bondage was called “indenture.” It was the same as that imposed on the convicts but for a shorter term, normally about four years. They too were chattel property of the planter for the duration of their contract. They could be pursued and returned by force if they ran away, and they could be whipped if they refused to work.

Half to two-thirds of all the white people who came to the South prior to the Revolution were convicts or indentured laborers. Their good fortune was that they were not brought as the black people were to labor in permanent bondage. A few had sufficient ambition and cunning to complete their terms of servitude and go on to acquire large lands of their own, to buy slaves, and to bring more of their compatriots across the Atlantic to cultivate their tobacco. These planter families prospered sufficiently over the generations to gain learning and manners and to mimic the British gentry who had cast out their ancestors. They became the grandees of the old South and the cavaliers of the Confederacy.

The crowd of farmers beneath the planter aristocrats remained more representative of those who got off the ships. These original white Southerners were a distinct people among the many peoples who were to make up America. The social conditions in the mother country that influenced who would be forced to emigrate and the harshness of their introduction to the new world gave them certain qualities that set them apart. They tended to be a hardy people. The weaker among them perished on the ships, in the fields from the long days and bad food, or from the epidemics. They also had a kind of wildness. The Victorian era and industrialization tamed the masses of Britain. Nothing ever quite tamed these people whom Britain had discarded. The hellfire-and-brim-stone fulminating of their Methodist and Baptist and Presbyterian preachers could not burn away a strain of hedonism. There was a strain of violence in them as well. It showed in the value they placed on physical prowess, on a man’s ability to ride and shoot and use his fists, and in their impetuous love of a fight. They followed their planter captains
eagerly into the Civil War, and amid defeat and occupation by a Northern army they drew solace from how bravely they had fought. To outsiders there seemed to be something about them that harked back to what they must have been like in that turbulent Britain of long ago.

John Vann’s ancestors did not go far from the coast where they had landed. Little information is available about the Spry side, from which Vann seems to have obtained most of his physical traits and his high nervous energy. (Johnny Spry rarely slept more than four or five hours a night, and he had to keep himself busy all the time he was awake.) Clarence Spry, Vann’s paternal grandfather, followed the familiar job-seeking route from North Carolina to Norfolk. He married a young woman named Olive Savells, whose people had been farmers and fishermen in the tidewater country just below Norfolk.

His mother’s family, the Tripps and the Smiths, seem to have given Vann much of his character, especially his will to dominate. He appears to have taken after his maternal grandmother, Queenie Smith, and his mother’s older sister, Mollie, both independent and venturesome women. From his Aunt Mollie, a handsome woman with long legs, he also got the two physical traits that gave a hint of his character—his narrow, bird-of-prey eyes and the straight mouth with the firm upper lip.

There have been Tripps and Smiths in the piney lowlands of northeastern North Carolina since the region was first settled during the latter half of the 1600s and the early 1700s. The Tripps and Smiths who were Vann’s immediate forebears had their lands in Pitt County near the modern city of Greenville, where the coastal plain picks up from the swampy tidewater country and stretches out in a level and gently rolling expanse to the foothills of the Appalachians. Their holdings were not large enough to rank them as planters, but they were big farmers, with hundreds of acres and slaves to raise their tobacco and then the cotton that followed as the source of wealth in the South. The sandy loam of the upper coastal plain of North Carolina is one of the finest soils in America. Almost anything will grow well in it, and the Tripps and the Smiths prospered until the Civil War.

Defeat brought Northern exploitation that ground Southern farmers down into poverty. A worldwide depression in agricultural commodities began in the 1880s and continued through the turn of the century. The price of cotton fell from fourteen cents a pound in 1873 to four and a half cents a pound by 1894. The value of tobacco plummeted too. The
North took advantage of the situation to shackle the conquered South into the classic relationship of an agricultural colony to an industrialized power. The Northern-dominated Congress passed prohibitive tariffs to keep competing European manufactures out of the country. Northern industry bought cheap raw materials from the South and then pegged the prices of the manufactured goods it sold there artificially high.

Henry Tripp, Vann’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side, was the last Tripp to know the pride of owning a big farm. He had eight children who needed land, and with crop income so low there was no way he could generate cash to help them buy ground of their own. He began parceling up his farm. In 1902 when Vann’s maternal grandfather, John William “Bill” Tripp, married Inelline Smith, who preferred her nickname of Queenie, Henry Tripp gave Bill forty acres, a mule, and enough timber from the farm woods for a house, a barn, and a hog shed.

Queenie endured the marriage and the existence it entailed for a dozen years and five children—four daughters and a son. They were all born in the iron double bed she and Bill shared in the largest of the four rooms in the pine-plank farmhouse his brothers had helped him build. That room also served as the dining and living room for the family. Everyone gathered there in the evening until it was time to go to sleep. There was no electricity and no plumbing. Light came from kerosene lamps, water from a well in buckets, and there was a privy. Nothing inside or outside of the house was painted: paint was an unnecessary expense. The babies were delivered by a midwife. A doctor cost more money and was reserved for a more serious medical problem than a birth. Myrtle Lee, Vann’s mother, was the third-born child on July 18, 1905. There were no Lees in the Tripp or Smith family lines as far as anyone could remember. Myrtle acquired her middle name for the same reason so many Southern children received it—to honor Robert E. Lee.

Bill Tripp’s tobacco and cotton and corn never brought enough money to pay off the “supply merchant,” as the owner of the local general store was called. Each year Bill would have to borrow again at interest rates never lower than 30 percent for the fertilizer and plowpoints and other necessities of farming. For the family to survive, Queenie also had to have flour and salt and a bit of molasses and sugar, kerosene for the lamps, and bolts of cloth to cut and sew into clothes. As soon as the fresh vegetables from the garden were gone in the fall the Tripps subsisted on the pellagra-and-rickets diet that was one of the curses of the post-Civil War South—hog meat and gravy with biscuits for one meal and hog meat and gravy with corn bread for the next. Myrtle and Mollie and the three other Tripp children were lucky enough not to contract
either disease from the vitamin deficiency. Tens of thousands of white and black children across the South were less fortunate.