A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (81 page)

Vann was ordering the pilots to take this straight, ground-skimming approach to be sure that he did not miss with the box of ammunition. Most of the perimeters had by this time shrunk to only about 100 feet across, a difficult target for an airdrop. The companies had originally been deployed in platoon-size strongpoints—mutually supporting foxhole perimeters fortified with barbed wire and minefields. These had gradually become weaker as the riflemen had been killed and wounded. At some places the platoons had consolidated, the survivors of one platoon moving to a neighboring position during a lull or under the cover of an artillery barrage. They carried the wounded with them. Wounded men who could walk were counted as effectives. One company had been reduced to the equivalent of a platoon. It had twenty-two men capable of resistance.

After the pilot had climbed up to altitude and was orienting himself for another run at the same position—or at an adjacent one if the platoons were still separated—Vann would grab hold of the next box and prepare to toss it out the door as he had the first. Then he would have the pilot return to deliver his third box of sustenance to the infantry.

The major from the intelligence section watched in awe as the aircraft made the second and third runs. The little plane sped across the valley floor through the dust and smoke, racing ahead of the bullets of the North Korean soldiers trying to knock it out of the sky. A contour path was actually the most intelligent way to fly in the circumstances, given the tendency of a soldier, unless he is carefully trained to do otherwise, to misjudge the speed of an aircraft flying close by and shoot behind it. If the plane was crippled at this low altitude, however, the pilot would have no margin for maneuver, and if Vann and the pilot survived the crash the North Koreans would kill them anyway. The major could see that the pilot was having trouble holding true for the hill. The blasts from the mortar and artillery shells exploding on the ground jolted the plane and knocked it off course. The pilot would straighten it and keep running for the hill, and each time he cleared the top a box would fly out and down to the foxholes.

A hundred pounds of bullets and grenades is a lot of ammunition to riflemen who used it as frugally as those American soldiers did in the hills beyond Masan, Korea, on September i, 1950. Vann brought them 100 pounds twenty-seven times that day, persisting until the approach of darkness forced him to stop. Some of the units had almost exhausted their ammunition. The men had started stripping bullets for their rifles from the last of the machine-gun belts.

Relief columns dispatched by General Kean fought through the North Koreans to the company positions as rapidly as possible over the next several days, reinforced the survivors, and brought out the wounded in armored personnel carriers. Vann kept the surrounded infantrymen in ammunition until a column could reach them. He made forty-two more drops over the three days following September 1. He got in his own thumps too from an extra bag of grenades he carried at his side. He pitched them at the North Koreans on the far slope of the hill as the pilot was pulling away after the drop. There is no record of damage to any of the planes he used. Apparently none took more than a few bullets through the fuselage. The pilots did not know they had “Vann luck” riding in the back. Vann resumed the aerial resupply whenever necessary until MacArthur’s counterstroke at Inchon on September 15 threw the North Koreans into disarray by severing their main line of supply and retreat. John Vann had been promoted to captain two days earlier.

Vann’s contribution did not, of course, decide the battle for the Pusan Perimeter. Walker had sufficient reserves by the end of August to have stopped a North Korean advance to Pusan even if the 35th Infantry Regiment had broken and the enemy had been able to reorganize and surge ahead again. Walker’s stalwart generalship and the resolution of the soldiers of the 35th and the other fighting units of the Eighth Army won the victory. The lonely battle of the riflemen on the hilltops had been different. Their lives had hung on the fearlessness of one man.

The war in Korea was a prelude to the war in Vietnam. It was the first war in American history in which the leaders of the Army and the nation were so divorced from reality and so grossly underestimated their opponent that they brought disaster to the Army and the nation. MacArthur now wasted Walker’s achievement in the Pusan Perimeter by sending his army into the mountains of North Korea, and the highest civilian and military leaders in Washington acquiesced in MacArthur’s gamble. Mac Arthur threw away the heroism and resourcefulness of Vann and others who had behaved so nobly, squandering the lives of the thousands of men who had died for the victory and the thousands more who would die in a defeat they did not deserve.

Vann’s involvement in the disaster in North Korea became part of his legend in Vietnam. He often cited the episode as a lesson in why it made no sense to attempt to fight a war of attrition on the Asian mainland with American soldiers. Vann told me the story not long after I met him at My Tho. He described how he had organized and led the Eighth Army Ranger Company, the first such commando and reconnaissance unit to be formed in the Army since the disbanding of the famous Ranger battalions after World War II, and then how he lost his Rangers to a night of human-wave assaults when the Chinese Army fell on MacArthur’s forces in November 1950 in the mountains below the Yalu. He repeated the story often to others. One person who heard it was President-elect Richard Nixon in a letter Vann wrote in another November in the midst of the war in Vietnam:

John Vann did at one point command the Eighth Army Ranger Company while in Korea, but the truth of what happened was different and more interesting than the legend.

For some time prior to November 1950, Vann had been envious of a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant named Ralph Puckett, Jr. Puckett commanded the Eighth Army Ranger Company attached to the 25th Division. He and Vann were fond of each other, because both were crackers and both loved soldiering. Puckett was a Georgia boy, West Point class of 1949, and as innocent as he was gung ho. He had volunteered for Korea right out of the parachute training course at Fort Benning because he thought that going to war was like going to a football game and his only fear was that the war would be won before he got to the fight. Vann liked to tease Puckett whenever he came to the supply section at division headquarters to request something for his company. Puckett still retained enough of the West Point cadet spirit to enjoy the “RA” (for Regular Army) game of saluting briskly, holding himself at attention before a mere captain, and saying “Sir!” in a drill-field voice each time he answered a gibe.

“What’s with you Rangers and where’ve you been, Puckett?” Vann would ask with a grin.

“Out operatin’ sir!” Puckett would reply with a grin in kind.

“Aw, bullshit,” Vann would say. “You guys have been out goofin’ off.”

When Puckett had stated his request in the crispest Armyese he could summon, Vann would pass him to Gassett, so that Gassett could also have the fun of razzing Puckett before they gave him whatever he wanted.

Puckett’s Ranger company, the object of Vann’s envy, had been formed the previous summer at the initiative of a colonel on the Eighth Army staff. The colonel had intended to use it to infiltrate and recon-noiter a salient the North Koreans had pushed into the northeastern side of the Pusan Perimeter. The colonel had selected Puckett to organize the Rangers because Puckett’s record indicated that he was aggressive
and the colonel thought a lieutenant fresh from West Point might operate with more daring than an officer who had been shot at. Puckett confirmed the colonel’s impression in an interview. The colonel asked if he would like to command a Ranger company. “Colonel, I’ve wanted to be a Ranger all my life,” Puckett said. “I’ll do anything to be a Ranger. You can make me a squad leader or a rifleman if you want.”

Puckett found kindred spirits among the cooks, clerk typists, and mechanics of the Eighth Army. He was forbidden to recruit trained riflemen, because the fighting in the Perimeter was at its height and there was a severe shortage of replacements for the regular line companies. He therefore went around the service units back in Japan asking for volunteers to go to Korea for “a secret and dangerous mission involving operations behind enemy lines.” Puckett was surprised at how quickly he gathered the seventy-four enlisted men he was authorized. He enrolled two of his West Point classmates to be his platoon leaders. By the time he finished training the company near Pusan, the Inchon landing had dissolved the reason for its creation, and the North Korean Army was attempting to flee back across the 38th Parallel with the Eighth Army in pursuit. Puckett’s Rangers were then attached to the 25th Division. General Kean employed them on searches for North Korean stragglers trying to escape through the countryside as the Eighth Army moved north rapidly during the fall, seized Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and then regrouped on the edge of the mountain range below the Yalu River border with China. Puckett’s Rangers had been in a few skirmishes, but they had not seen any serious action prior to MacArthur’s order on November 24, 1950, to drive through the mountains to the Yalu and end the war.

In retrospect, Inchon was the sign that MacArthur’s egomania had grown beyond tolerable bounds. An amphibious landing far in the enemy’s rear was an act of sound generalship taken from his World War II experience. His insistence on Inchon as the site was a grave and needless risk, a gamble with lives and the nation’s interest prompted by vanity. He chose Inchon because it was the port for Seoul, but a preliminary examination of the place showed, as one of the officers on the naval planning staff remarked, that Inchon had “every conceivable and natural handicap” to an amphibious assault. The approach channels were twisting and narrow and had a number of “dead-end” points where a ship disabled by shore batteries or a mine would block all those behind and
trap all those in front. The Marines would be storming a city whose buildings and quays and high stone seawall made it more defensible than an open beach. Before they could seize the city they would have to secure a fortified island that fronted the harbor. The rise and fall of the tides is so severe at Inchon (approximately thirty-two feet on September 15, 1950) that the Marines would have to take the island at dawn and then wait until dusk before the water rose high enough again to carry their landing craft to the city. They would thus lose tactical surprise, and the attacking regiments would have just two hours of daylight to get ashore. The tides would then prevent reinforcement until the following dawn. If Inchon happened to be well garrisoned, or the North Koreans learned of Mac Arthur’s target and prepared a trap, the landing could be repulsed in a spectacular shambles.

The Navy and Marine commanders involved and the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued with MacArthur to select an alternate site. The Marines found a place about thirty miles south of Inchon that had none of its risks, and the possible delay of a few days in reaching Seoul would be militarily insignificant. MacArthur would not yield. Having put his finger on Inchon, Inchon it had to be. He dismissed risks and obstacles with a theatrical mysticism. “I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny,” he said as he neared the end of a forty-five-minute soliloquy to a war council in Tokyo in August that included two members of the Joint Chiefs. “We must act now or we will die. … Inchon will succeed. And it will save 100,000 lives.” The success of the gamble on September 15 increased his sense of infallibility and inhibited those who might contradict him.

The second hand of destiny was ticking again in November 1950. MacArthur could not hear it this time because it was ticking for him. He had long ago lost interest in the details of the battlefield, that compass by which all military leaders must guide themselves. His mind was on loftier things. Dean Acheson later observed that MacArthur had become “practically a chief of state … the Mikado of Japan and Korea.” The description was almost accurate. When Truman summoned him to a meeting at Wake Island that October, MacArthur did not salute his commander in chief as military courtesy said he should. Instead he shook hands as between equals. He was not simply the ruler of Japan, he was a ruler venerated by the Japanese people. There were other Mac Arthurs within this haughty five-star general of the Army. The MacArthur the Japanese saw was the civil libertarian and missionary for the American way of life. They had expected harshness in 1945 and he had given them magnanimity and wisdom, introducing the democratic government and
social reforms they were eager to accept after the horrors that militarism had brought them. At seventy, he was determined to bring his life of glory to a culmination worthy of previous achievements. He was going to fulfill Acheson’s description by winning total victory and extending his beneficent rule to the whole of Korea right up to the frontiers of China and Russia.

The men in Washington were willing to settle for four-fifths of Korea. They did see the country as an important way station now, and they wanted to repulse the challenge they perceived from the Soviets. Yet their main concern was Europe, where they had an unrealistic but genuine fear of a big military adventure by Stalin. The Korean War was providing the rationale for a huge rearmament program. By early 1951, aircraft production was to start returning to the World War II peak of 1944. The benefits of the program were going to a buildup of the NATO alliance rather than to Korea. MacArthur was warned that he would have to win his war with the equivalent of the eight divisions he had received by the time of Inchon. The Joint Chiefs instructed him to avoid provoking the Chinese and Stalin by halting at a line about fifty miles above Pyongyang. The northernmost fifth of the country, the mountainous provinces along the Yalu and the section on the northeast corner where Korea borders the Soviet Union, was to be left as a buffer zone.