A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (86 page)

There was so little warmth in the marriage in the spring of 1954 that John abandoned Mary Jane and the children the night that Tommy was born. He took her to the hospital in the afternoon when she had labor pains. She thought he then returned to stay with the children. The kind widow who was her neighbor had come over to watch them while John drove her to the hospital. When she called the house that night to tell him that he had a fourth child and a third son, her neighbor answered the phone. John had not reappeared. Mary Jane was unable to reach him until late the next morning at the ROTC office at the university.

He left for a new assignment with the 16th Infantry Regiment at Schweinfurt, Germany, after his Rutgers graduation that June, promising to send for Mary Jane and the children as soon as he could find a place for them to live. The Army’s family housing project in Schweinfurt was temporarily full. At John’s suggestion they moved in with the Aliens in Rochester to wait. This expedient saved money; Vann lost his Army allowance for food and house rent in New Jersey after he went overseas. His promise seemed sincere when he left. He took with him Mike, the family dog, a friendly blend of cocker spaniel and miscellaneous that he had saved from execution at the Fort Benning pound when he decided that the children ought to have a pet.

Once he was in Germany, the temptation to keep an ocean between himself and the burden of Mary Jane and her brood was too much for him to resist. In his letters John did not say or imply that he wanted a separation or a divorce. He gave officers he met in Germany the impression that he missed Mary Jane and the children, as he was to give David Halberstam the same impression in Vietnam by calling attention to the large colored photograph of his sons that he kept on his desk at My Tho. Mary Jane thought that he wanted the marriage to continue because Army promotion boards were said to look with greater favor on family men. Actually, his motivations were more complicated. He played roles as much to satisfy himself as to impress others. He liked to think of himself as a husband and father and to talk about his children—from a distance.

Months went by as he stalled with the excuse that no housing was available. Mary Jane moved to an apartment that her sister, Doris, and her brother-in-law, Joseph Moreland, found for her in the small upstate New York town where they were living. She was embarrassed to remain with her parents in Rochester as a married woman with four children, and the checks that John was sending the Aliens for room and board were not generous. Her sister and brother-in-law were childless, but her brother-in-law was a big, warm Irishman who loved children. He was
Uncle Joe to the young Vanns and was always taking them on excursions. Joe and Doris knew from what they saw and from what Mary Jane admitted that she did not have a marriage. They offered to help her make another life for herself and the children. She thought about divorce again, as she had in New Jersey, and once again, she couldn’t face it. She telephoned John from her parents’ house on Christmas Day, 1954. She and the children were in Rochester to spend the holidays with the Aliens. She was full of emotion at the memories of the day and thought that he might be moved too. She wept on the phone, told him how much she loved and missed him, and said that six months was too long and that he had to let her and the children join him. He gave her hell. There was no family housing open in Schweinfurt yet, he said. She was being her usual emotional self. She would have to be patient and wait. She stopped crying and got tough too. She had heard differently about housing, she said. She was going to borrow money for the tickets and she and the children would be on the first plane to Germany they could get out of New York.

John seemed happy to see his family again when he met the Pan American flight at Frankfurt. Mary Jane had sent him a telegram with their arrival time. His mood was a good omen. The next two and a half years were one of the better periods in the marriage, and they were years when his career filled with promise.

The U.S. Army in Germany in the mid-1950s was an Army that could appreciate a John Vann. It was an Army on the qui vive, honing itself for the clash with the Russians that every man from general to private was certain would come. The John Vann who went to Germany was an officer maturing professionally from the combination of his military and civilian education and lessons learned in the most adverse of circumstances in combat. His performance in an Army actually at peace, but emotionally at war, therefore stood out all the more prominently.

His initial assignment on arrival at the 16th Infantry Regiment in June 1954 was to be acting executive officer of a battalion. Then, for a week, he was acting battalion commander. The bold and astonishingly competent way in which he handled himself caught the attention of a man who was to become one of Vann’s Army patrons, Bruce Palmer, Jr., at that time a colonel commanding the regiment. When Palmer needed a new leader for the regiment’s 4.2-inch mortar company a couple of weeks later, he chose Vann. Heavy Mortar Company, as the unit was called, was the ideal assignment for a captain in an infantry regiment
because it was a separate command, the closest a captain could get to a lieutenant colonel’s job of leading one of the infantry battalions. The 4.2-inch is the biggest of the American mortars; it throws a shell approximately equivalent to a 105mm artillery round about two and a half miles. There were twelve mortars in a company. They were carried to position on trucks and served as the regiment’s integral artillery. Palmer selected his subordinates carefully. He had shaped the 16th Infantry into the best of the three regiments in the 1st Infantry Division, which was stationed in central Germany across the presumed main invasion route of the Soviets from East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Heavy Mortar Company reflected the second-to-none attitude of its commanding officer. Palmer noted on an efficiency report that Vann’s inclination to discipline his men severely did not interfere with his ability to gain their loyalty, because “he drives himself at a terrific pace and expects the same standard of performance from his subordinates.” During maneuvers on the plain of Grafenwóhr near the Czech border, Vann had his mortars in position and ready to fire the moment the infantry called for a barrage. The shells landed on target; the mortar fire was meticulously coordinated with that of the artillery; the gun emplacements were so perfect they could have been used as demonstration models. At inspections in garrison the weapons and equipment were in faultless condition; the records were kept precisely according to regulation; the appearance of the company commander and his platoon leaders and men was a perfection of spit and polish.

The mortar company and its commanding officer also excelled at those other activities that keep an army prepared. The company won more athletic awards than any other in the regimental competitions and contributed members to the regimental basketball team, which Vann coached to a victory over the teams from the other two regiments in the 1st Infantry Division championship. “I was particularly impressed with the fighting spirit and will to win evidenced by all members of the team,” Palmer said in his letter of commendation to Vann. “They might have been outplayed at times, but they were never outfought.”

When Vann was transferred to Headquarters U.S. Army Europe at Heidelberg in June 1955, after a year with the regiment (he had been promoted to major that April), Palmer went out of his way to alert future promotion boards and selection boards for schooling to Vann’s potential. He rated Vann on a final efficiency report as “one of the few highly outstanding officers I know.” Palmer urged that Vann be given “an early opportunity” to attend the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a virtual requirement for promotion
to lieutenant colonel. To drive home his assessment of Vann’s talent, Palmer added a special letter of commendation to Vann’s file:

At the headquarters in Heidelberg, where Vann joined the Logistical Management Section of the G-4 Division, his superiors were soon praising him with similar exuberance. “I consider this officer to be one of the Army’s outstanding young men,” his immediate superior said on his first efficiency report.

Vann’s private life did not affect the esteem in which his superiors held him. These superiors, Palmer among them, uniformly praised Vann’s “high moral character” on his efficiency reports. In professional terms, Vann was a highly moral man. He believed wholeheartedly in the ideals of the American officer—in caring for his troops, in leading by example, in reporting honestly to those above him—because the fulfillment of those ideals was bound up with his sense of self-respect. The Army also does not concern itself with the private lives of its officers as long as the officer avoids scandal and his private life does not include such things as homosexuality, which can easily lead to blackmail. The frequent separations of military life tend to reduce adultery to the mere transaction on a couch that Napoleon claimed it to be. Those marriage partners who remain faithful, as Mary Jane did, do so because monogamy is an emotional preference or need. A number of Vann’s contemporaries knew of his off-duty activity, because he boasted of his sexual prowess. Most found his tales amusing or envied his virility. He also made appearance count in his favor. One of Vann’s friends at Schwein-furt noticed that although Vann quickly acquired a bevy of German girlfriends, he was discreet. He never brought his girlfriends to the officers’ club, even before Mary Jane arrived, as some of the other officers who were away from their wives did. Vann’s superiors undoubtedly heard something about his extramarital activities through the grapevine. They could see that he was being careful, and discretion was equivalent to personal morality in their set of values. Vann also seemed to be an upright man in his other habits. He never drank to excess; in
fact, he hardly drank at all. Nor did he run up debts. For her own reasons, Mary Jane did not betray him with tales or scenes outside the family.

Life in Germany was much happier than she could have anticipated after her ordeal in New Jersey. John’s good mood at being in an overseas unit tended to make him give her a semblance of the marriage she wanted. He showed an interest in the children and on Sundays frequently took the family on bicycle trips along the dirt roads through the evergreen forests. Mary Jane would put the newest baby, Peter, who was born at Heidelberg in November 1955, in the basket of her bicycle. John carried little Tommy in the basket of his bicycle, and five-year-old Jesse rode in a seat on the back. Patricia, who became nine in the fall of 1955, and John Allen, who became eight that Christmas, followed on their small bikes. Mary Jane packed a lunch, and she and John strapped badminton rackets and poles and a net to their bicycles to set up a game at a picnic clearing. Every six months or so John went on leave and loaded the family into the car for a vacation. They drove to the Bavarian Alps on one occasion, toured Holland on another, and visited West Berlin, which bustled with a freedom that defied the Soviets, who kept it isolated.

Patricia remembered that Christmas was always the best time of the year, because her father made such a fuss about it. One year he even painted a panorama of Santa Claus and his reindeer across the picture window in the living room of their apartment in Patrick Henry Village, the Army housing complex at Heidelberg. He insisted that they have a big tree and helped decorate it lavishly. A couple of days before Christmas he bought everyone lots of presents at the PX. Mary Jane later told Patricia that he would not let her go along, that he wanted to do all of the Christmas shopping by himself. John and Mary Jane would wrap the presents after the children had gone to sleep on Christmas Eve. They would then rouse Patricia and her brothers at 4:00
A.M.
or
SO
and watch the children rush to the tree and whoop as they tore open their gifts.

One afternoon in Heidelberg when Mary Jane was home and Peter and Tommy were having their naps, the door buzzer sounded. She opened the door to a German girl who spoke English. The girl said that she wanted to speak to Mary Jane about a private matter. Mary Jane took her into the living room and offered her a cup of coffee. The girl’s hand shook. She spilled some of the coffee on her dress as she tried to sip it. She started to sob and told Mary Jane a long tale of how John had seduced her by saying that he loved her and was going to divorce his wife and marry her. After a few weeks he suddenly dropped her;
he was having his secretary at the office tell her that he was out whenever she telephoned, and he would not answer her letters pleading to see him. At first she had not wanted to confront Mary Jane, the girl said, but then she had decided it was the only way to learn the truth. She was so much in love with John that she had to know. He had seemed so sincere, and that was why she had gone to bed with him. Was it true that he and Mary Jane no longer loved each other and were going to be divorced?

Mary Jane felt pity for the girl. John had probably used this same technique on dozens of girls, she thought; for all she knew, perhaps hundreds, at the rate he went through women. She told the girl that she believed John still loved her in his own way and there had been no discussion of divorce. If there was, she would fight a divorce, she said. She advised the girl to be more careful with men in the future. Mary Jane gave her a handkerchief to blow her nose and wipe her eyes and said that she would have to leave now because the older children were about to return from school. The girl did not mention her age, but was clearly still in her late teens.