A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (89 page)

Inwardly, Vann was a man being crushed by the boredom of his job and by the concerns of Mary Jane and the children. She was an embittered woman by now, and she took out her bitterness in constant squabbles with him. He avoided the house he had bought for the family in Littleton, a Denver suburb near the Martin Marietta plant, as much as he could, leaving early in the morning and not returning until late at night. Mary Jane remarked to him one day that the marriage certainly must be finished when he wouldn’t eat her cooking anymore. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re right.”

In the summer of 1964, after the failure of another attempt by York to persuade the Army to let him return, Vann approached officials at the Far East Bureau of the Agency for International Development in Washington. The White House had assigned AID principal responsibility for the civilian pacification program in Vietnam, and the agency was having trouble recruiting men for the work. Most of its career economic development officers were unsuited to the tasks involved. Many of them also did not want to live apart from their families and get shot at in the Vietnamese countryside. AID was therefore starting to turn toward retired military officers as the most logical source of manpower. The officials at the Far East Bureau were delighted at the prospect of a man with Vann’s experience and talent. At the moment, like almost all Washington agencies every fourth year, AID was in a holding pattern until after the presidential election. Vann was told to come back in November if he was still interested.

He did, as soon as he had finished making his small contribution to the landslide defeat of Goldwater, and was offered the post of regional director of pacification for the Mekong Delta. He accepted and flew
home to tell Mary Jane: “I will never live with you again.” Maxwell Taylor, who had resigned the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in mid-1964 to replace Lodge as the ambassador in Saigon, vetoed the appointment. A cable from the embassy informed AID that Vann was “too controversial.” Vann offered to go as a simple province pacification representative. The embassy replied that Vann was not wanted in any capacity. He said that he would go to Thailand, where a minor insurgency was then underway, if he couldn’t go to Vietnam. The officials at the Far East Bureau said they would think about his offer.

Mary Jane realized that he had to return to Vietnam for his own survival. She had never seen him as despondent as he became during the winter of 1964–65. He “took to the bed,” as the old Southern expression has it. He lay on the couch in the living room for hours at night and on weekends, staring at nothing. He no longer walked the way her John had always done, swinging a leg forward as he strode into life. He walked more slowly that winter and let his head droop. He was, she could see, losing his self-respect and his faith in himself.

As usual, he did not give up entirely. He appealed to Lodge and York to intervene for him. He persuaded the officials at the Far East Bureau to ask Taylor to reconsider. He even wrote Taylor a friendly letter describing his efforts to maintain public support for the war with his lectures and interviews on Vietnam.

He was rescued by a fellow Virginian who admired him—the Sam Wilson who had heard Churchill’s voice over the farmhouse radio in 1940 defying the Nazis and walked seven miles through the rain to join the National Guard. Twenty-five years later Wilson was an Army colonel in Vietnam, detailed to AID as chief of its pacification program. He had been Lansdale’s assistant at the Pentagon during Vann’s briefing campaign there in 1963. Wilson had been amazed then by the brilliance of Vann’s critique, and the two men had immediately liked each other. He did not learn Vann was attempting to return to Vietnam until he saw a copy of the message from the Far East Bureau asking Taylor to reconsider. Wilson went to Taylor and said they could not afford to reject a man of Vann’s qualities. Taylor relented. Vann could come as an ordinary province pacification officer.

Vann had a cruel encounter with his youth just before he left. While in Washington in February and March for three weeks of processing and orientation lectures at AID headquarters, he stayed with Garland Hopkins at Hopkins’s house in the Virginia suburb of McLean. Hopkins had been destroyed by his pedophilia. The CIA had fired him as head of the American Friends of the Middle East, the pro-Arab lobby that
he had built and that the CIA secretly funded. He had then been dismissed as pastor of a prominent church in Arlington and also removed from the Virginia Conference of Methodist ministers, in which his father and grandfather had held honored places. His wife had divorced him because he had taken to beating her and their youngest son under the stress of his disgrace. He still could not control his obsession and molested some boys in his neighborhood. The parents complained to the police, and this time he was going to be prosecuted. He could not bear the shame. He wrote out his will and an obituary listing his accomplishments. He also wrote a note to Vann, and then he took a rat poison containing strychnine, inflicting a painful death on himself—strychnine kills with convulsions. Vann found Hopkins’s body when he returned to the house on a Sunday night. The note asked Vann to distribute the obituary to the newspapers, listed family members and friends for Vann to notify, and also asked him to see to it that Hopkins’s body was cremated. Vann called the police and then did as his boyhood mentor asked. “Let these few chores be a last token of our long and splendid friendship,” the note said. The horror of it made Vann more eager than ever to be gone.

Martin Marietta put him on a leave of absence, because his AID appointment was a temporary one. Washington did not expect the war to last long. His conscience was clear about Mary Jane and the children. He had them settled in the house in Littleton, and his contract with AID entitled him to fly home once a year at government expense to visit them for thirty days.

He took the Pan American jet west out of San Francisco along the route that the nation had followed into Asia in the previous century—to Honolulu, to Guam, then to Manila, and then on to Saigon, this new and contested place. Shortly after 11:00
A.M.
on Saturday, March 20, 1965, his plane circled high over the city and then banked down sharply to the runway at Tan Son Nhut to avoid the guerrilla snipers who were now all around Saigon. He walked out of the air-conditioned cabin and down the ramp into the heat and humidity, which were at their worst just before the monsoon season. The discomfort felt good to him. He had been gone almost two years—twenty-three months and two weeks. He would never be away from the war that long again. He was back in Vietnam, where he belonged.

  
T
HE
V
IETNAM
to which John Vann returned in late March 1965 was a nation on the threshold of the most violent war in its history. At the beginning of the month, Lyndon Johnson had started Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Two U.S. Marine battalions, the first of many to follow, had landed at Danang to secure the airfield there as one of the staging bases for the bombing raids. At MACV headquarters in Saigon, William DePuy, then a brigadier general and Gen. William Westmoreland’s chief of operations, had taken the first step in the planning that was to bring hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into South Vietnam with artillery and armor and fleets of fighter-bombers for a new American war to destroy the Vietnamese Communists and their followers. “We are going to stomp them to death,” DePuy predicted.

The phone in the room of the Saigon hotel where Vann was temporarily staying rang early on the first day after his return, Sunday, March 21, 1965. It was Cao. In his complicated way, Vann kept friendships with the Vietnamese he got to know, despite the worst of quarrels. Cao was no exception. He was grateful for an offer of financial help Vann had made from Denver in the months immediately after Diem’s demise when it appeared that Cao might be thrown out of the ARVN and lose the means to support his wife and many children. Vann had known that Cao had little in the way of personal savings, because one of Cao’s few professional virtues was relative honesty in the handling of funds. Vann had asked Lodge’s assistant and Bob York to do what they could for Cao and to let Cao know that he could count on Vann for money until he found another livelihood. As it turned out, Cao had not needed the help. He had managed to ingratiate himself with a number of his fellow Saigon generals amid the political turmoil that had
set in after Lodge had despaired of the lackadaisical junta that had overthrown Diem and had permitted them to be overthrown in turn by Lt. Gen. Nguyen Khanh, the ambitious graduate of the French Army paratroop school. Khanh too had finally been driven from power (his plane had literally run out of gas over Nhatrang while he was trying to stay aloft to avoid resigning) and forced into exile only a month before Vann’s return. The group currently on top was the so-called Young Turk faction of generals dominated by Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, the commander of the VNAF.

Huynh Van Cao’s principal asset was that he did not threaten any of the other generals. The second-ranking member of the Young Turk faction, Brig. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, also happened to be another Central Vietnamese Catholic. Cao had been serving as director of psychological warfare for the Joint General Staff. He told Vann excitedly that just the day before the council of generals had chosen him to be the new chief of staff of the JGS, the second-ranking position after the chief. He wanted to know if Vann could come out to his house in the JGS compound near the airport for dinner that evening. Vann said he would be happy to come.

Cao spent much of the dinner filling Vann in on the couping and countercouping by the generals and their civilian political allies of the moment and on the street riots by the Buddhist and Catholic factions that had occupied the capital for the last two years while the Viet Cong had grown ever more menacing in the countryside. Despite his elevation the day before by the other Saigon generals, Cao remained Cao. He was fearful that as chief of staff he might be drawn into an intrigue against his will. Absence had not diminished Vann’s capacity to observe his former counterpart. “It is evident that Cao never has and never will participate in a coup,” Vann wrote that night in the diary he kept intermittently for the first six months after his return. “He is deathly afraid and does his best to straddle the fence on all issues.” (Cao was relieved when the military council changed its mind shortly afterward and he was allowed to stay chief of psychological warfare.)

Vann got a contrasting reception on Monday morning at the Saigon office of the U.S. Operations Mission (USOM), as AID was then called in Vietnam. While AID’s Washington headquarters was eagerly recruiting retired military men to staff its pacification program, its civilian bureaucrats in Vietnam were fearful that their agency was going to be taken over by the military. Retired officers like Vann were regarded as infiltrators. The only man to welcome him was the infiltrator on loan from the Army to run the program, Col. Sam Wilson, who had persuaded
Taylor to let Vann return. AID Washington had managed to bring Vann into government as a Grade 3 in the Foreign Service Reserve, a rank between lieutenant colonel and colonel in the Army, sufficiently senior for him to be a director of USOM operations in one of the South’s four corps regions. Wilson informed Vann that in addition to Taylor’s instruction that Vann serve as an ordinary province representative, the chief of AID in Vietnam, James Killen, had reserved all of the regional directorships for civilian career men like himself. Vann would have to display his worth in the field and then move upward, possibly to become deputy director of a region in summer. The previous fall, Westmoreland had designated the six provinces surrounding Saigon as the priority area for pacification. With Vann’s talents in mind, Wilson was thinking of sending him to a relatively new province, Hau Nghia, the most insecure of the six.