A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (85 page)

General Kean had asked all of the officers’ wives to work either as nurse’s aides and Red Cross volunteers at the hospital or in helping sort the wounded at the airfield when they were flown in from Korea. Mary Jane had chosen to work at the airfield, because she lived closer to it. The walking wounded were escorted into a hangar and sat on benches while a doctor and several medical corpsmen assigned them to buses that took them to different sections of the hospital, depending on their wounds. The serious cases with shattered limbs and grave intestinal, chest, or head injuries were carried directly from the planes to ambulances. Before they served coffee and cocoa to the walking wounded and assisted them onto the buses, Mary Jane and the other wives would go into the ambulances and try to comfort the badly wounded men. The sight of this human wreckage coming off the planes stunned her. She had never imagined such brutality. For the rest of her life she was to recall the faces of these young men and the way their bodies were broken. After she overcame her initial reaction, the dread that one of the figures on a stretcher might be John, she could not help seeing the wounded as boys. At twenty-three she was not much older than most of these soldiers of eighteen and nineteen and twenty, but she was a mother with two sons of her own. It seemed so wrong to her that this should be happening to these boys. They should be in college, or working at their first jobs, or out on a date, not getting mangled. She wondered if someday one of her sons would be taken and torn apart like this in some other war. She was struck at how naive she had been to think that
the Army was like Coca-Cola or some other big corporation that periodically sent husbands and families to pleasant overseas stations. Now she realized that the business of the Army was making war.

John’s resentment at being forced to leave the war would pass, Mary Jane felt, but there was something else between them that time did not seem to change, despite their physical attachment. It was John’s sexual compulsion. She had learned of it before he left for Korea. It was another of the unsettling discoveries she had made in the house on the hill. He was making love to the two Japanese housemaids. At first she was outraged that he would betray her and magnify the indignity by doing so in her home. Then she became fearful because she thought that if she confronted him openly, it might destroy their marriage, and every action she took to show her disapproval silently only brought firmer resistance from him. The maids, who were sixteen to eighteen years old, could hardly refuse him, with jobs and food so scarce for Japanese in 1949–50 She nevertheless decided to fire the maid he seemed most actively involved with and hoped that he would get the message. He ignored it and took up with the new maid she hired. When Mary Jane fired her and did not replace her, he hired another second maid himself without informing her. She could tell that he had selected this latest girl and brought her into the house in order to make love to her. When Mary Jane fired this girl too, he got still another. His activity with the maids did not seem to affect his ability or desire to make love to her. It seemed that John had plenty of sexual energy to spare. Mary Jane had remained silent, but for the first time in the marriage there had been tension between them. He made clear that he was going to have his harem and that he expected her to accept his behavior. He showed no sign of guilt.

At Fort Benning, which the Vanns reached in early May 1951 after the voyage home and a long visit with the Aliens in Rochester, John substituted American women for the Japanese maids. The family lived in one of the new garden-apartment complexes the Army had constructed on the post with funds flowing from the Korean War. John often went out in the evening after dinner, saying that he had a basketball game or had to study at the post library. Mary Jane continued to say nothing. Instead she retaliated by becoming bitchy with him when she could not contain her anger, but she usually controlled herself and endured his infidelities. The parachute jumping and other rigorous exercise at the Ranger Training Command and then the eight months of studying his profession in the Advanced Course at the Infantry School kept him in
good humor. He was attentive to her need for diversion from the children and took her to parties and bridge games with fellow officers and their wives. They frequently got together with Ralph Puckett and his fiancée to charcoal-broil steaks while the men talked about the war. (Puckett’s shoulder and feet were being rebuilt by the surgeons at the Fort Benning Hospital.)

On many evenings when John was off pursuing women, Mary Jane was also preoccupied with nursing Jesse through bouts of pneumonia, which kept recurring during his first three years. To relieve the congestion in Jesse’s lungs the doctors had her improvise a steam tent by draping a sheet over his crib and putting a vaporizer underneath. Afraid to leave him, she would sit for hours by the crib. His head was too big for his little body. His eyes still bulged from the pressure on the brain, and the doctors had to tap the skull cavity once to remove fluid. The meningitis also caused lesions on the brain. They gradually scarred over, but the constant illness delayed Jesse’s mental and physical development. He walked late and did not speak his first word until he was two.

When Vann finished his course at the Infantry School in the spring of 1952 and was assigned to Rutgers University as an ROTC instructor, a crueler time began for Mary Jane. He requested the assignment so that he could take his bachelor’s degree in business administration through spare-time and night classes. He needed at least a bachelor’s degree for career purposes, and given his talent at mathematics and statistics and his earlier year at Rutgers in economics, business administration was a logical subject. He drove to New Jersey ahead of time and rented a house for the family in Parlin, a small town east of New Brunswick where the university is situated. The location made sense to him, because the rent for a house large enough for a wife and three children was cheaper in Parlin than in other communities nearer the campus and yet he was still within commuting distance.

For Mary Jane, Parlin was sudden isolation after the closeness of garrison living at Fort Benning and the camaraderie of the 25th Division families in Japan. The house he rented was in a predominantly Polish neighborhood composed of people who had immigrated long before World War II. Most of Mary Jane’s neighbors were elderly couples who did not speak English well and whose children had grown up and moved away. Her next-door neighbor happened to be a widow of Anglo-Saxon heritage who was always cooking and sending over pies and casseroles and offering to help with the children. One kindly neighbor is not a community or a social life. John would leave at 8:00
A.M.
after breakfast and Mary Jane would rarely see him until late at night.

Had she wanted to hire a baby-sitter and take a bus to go bowling,
or to the movies, or window-shopping in a more prosperous section, she would not have had the money. John bought her a secondhand car for herself and the children, but it was such a jalopy that it did not run most of the time. He used the family’s new car to commute to the university. He controlled all of the money, paying the major bills like the rent himself and keeping Mary Jane on a tight budget. On Saturdays he would drive her to the commissary at an Army installation to buy groceries and then dole out money during the week for whatever additional food she had to buy and for the children’s clothing and other essentials. If she protested to him about rising prices, he would retort that he had gone without shoes when he was a boy and by God his children could make do with a pair that cost no more than such-and-such—citing a price that had prevailed when he was in his teens or during World War II. Because he did not shop for the family himself, he had little idea of the rise in the cost of living.

When Mary Jane complained of her loneliness he said that he did not have time to spare for her and the children at this point in his career. He took the position that he was fulfilling his obligation by supporting the family. He also refused to move them to a house closer to the campus, saying that he could not afford it. He was genuinely busy. He taught ROTC courses, took day and night classes for his own degree, and was the detachment’s supply officer. In his ambitious way he later volunteered to coach the demonstration drill team, called the Scarlet Rifles, and to serve as a physical education instructor. By now Mary Jane knew that he always made time for what he wanted to do and that on nights when he could be at home he was chasing women instead. She also began to realize that he was miserly with her and the children because he wanted money to spend on his extracurricular pastime.

She started checking up on him through acquaintances she made at the few social gatherings of ROTC officers and their wives and friends to which he did take her. She discovered that, among more fleeting adventures, he was having an affair with a secretary. Mary Jane had met the woman at one of the social gatherings. They were about the same age. She was not worried that John was going to leave her to marry the secretary. The woman was the sort of good-time party girl whom men pick up and discard. Yet somehow knowing her made it harder to tolerate his unfaithfulness. After the children were asleep at night she would imagine him making love to the secretary and drive herself into fits of depression and weeping.

Mary Jane refused to consider the possibility of leaving him. Raising three children on what she could expect to earn as an unskilled woman
intimidated her, and she regarded divorce as a public admission to her parents and friends that she had failed at the one enterprise in life at which she most wanted to succeed. She told herself that she would not be able to bear the shame of it. She could not even bring herself to take revenge by having an affair.

If he had given her the semblance of the marriage she wanted, she might have learned to accept his promiscuity. She would plead with him to come home for dinner after classes on a given evening. He would promise and she would cook a special meal, put candles on the table, buy some wine—everything just for the two of them and the expectation of making love afterward—and he would fail to show up. She would be hysterical by the time he did return well after midnight, railing at him in tears that she was his wife, that he had taken marriage vows, that it was his duty to come home to her. One evening he promised to return early to eat with her and the children because it was Patricia’s birthday. Mary Jane baked a cake. Midnight came and went without Patricia’s father coming home. Patricia remembered her birthday cake sitting on the table uncut, the candles unlit, and her mother lying on her parents’ bed sobbing uncontrollably.

Mary Jane began to pick fights with him over his stinginess, his lack of attention to the children, his running around, or any grievance that came to mind. The arguments became steadily more vicious. When she had worked herself into a fit she would shriek and throw plates or anything else she had in her hand at him. Her impulses were self-destructive. The fights made the marriage more hellish than it already was and gave John yet another excuse not to come home. He took to staying out all night frequently, saying that he had to study late and would sleep in the car and shave and shower at the gym the next morning. She would deny him her body when he did come home to try to punish him. The denials would not last long because of her desire for him. In the summer of 1953, as the marriage was entering one of its worst stages, she became pregnant again.

During earlier and happier years of the marriage, John had told her more about his childhood than he was ever to tell anyone. He had told her that he was illegitimate and had taken her to meet Johnny Spry during a stopover in Norfolk in 1947 on their first trip to Fort Benning. She was struck by his resemblance to his natural father and listened to him reminisce about riding on kegs of bootleg whiskey as a little boy when Spry had taken him along on delivery runs before Spry’s still had been raided. She heard how Mollie had rescued him from the crib in which his mother had abandoned him, of Frank Vann’s perpetual fried
potatoes and biscuits, of how Garland Hopkins had given him an escape by sending him to Ferrum. They had driven over to Ferrum so that he could show her the school and introduce her to his teachers. At the time Myrtle had taken up with a chief petty officer in the Navy for whom she was soon to leave Frank Vann. Mary Jane had gathered from what John said of his mother that she was altogether egocentric, a drinker and a loose woman who had rejected him and her other children. His first memory of his mother, he had said, was of her sitting in front of her dresser brushing her hair.

For every fragment of his childhood John revealed to her, he concealed many more. He was too ashamed of the memories to speak of them even to her, or he suppressed them. At this unhappy time in her marriage she had no way of knowing why John behaved as he did. She had no way of understanding the magnitude of the insecurity that Myrtle had created in him. The boy who had to prove to himself that he had the courage of a male by feats of daring was the man who had to keep assuring himself of his masculinity by a never-ending marathon of seduction. What was a penchant for womanizing in Spry was a hunger that no number of women could satisfy in John. Using women to give himself fleeting assurance was also not enough for him. He had to victimize women too, as he was victimizing Mary Jane in a kind of revenge on his mother.

He also had not told her that Garland Hopkins was another man with a dark side and that Hopkins had exacted a price for liberating him. Hopkins’s tragic flaw was pedophilia, a homosexual attraction to boys. Hopkins did not recite ghost stories around the campfire simply to entertain his Boy Scouts. He would pick out a boy who had been frightened by his tales and crawl into the boy’s sleeping bag later that night saying that he wanted to comfort him. Hopkins’s particular compulsion did not involve sodomy or other advanced acts of homosexuality. It was the fondling of the genitals that little boys commonly engage in with each other as sex play. (He had a normal relationship with his wife and fathered three children.) Men like Hopkins are most attracted to the blond-slip-of-a-youth sort that Vann was at fourteen. There is no doubt there was a relationship between them. It is not unusual in such cases for the sexual relationship to end as the boy grows older and for the two men to wind up being friends. This is apparently what happened in the case of Vann and Hopkins. Vann admired Hopkins’s qualities as a social reformer and political activist and was immensely grateful to him. The relationship does seem to have aggravated the insecurity that Myrtle created, making Vann even more ferociously heterosexual.