A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (90 page)

Hau Nghia, west of Saigon between the capital and the Cambodian border, was approximately 500 square miles of wild reeds, rice paddies, and fields of sugar cane. Nearly a quarter of a million Vietnamese peasants lived there. Diem had established the province as one of his last official acts by putting together the four most troublesome districts of three adjoining provinces. His hope had been to eradicate trouble by consolidating it. The result for his successors had been a whole province that mocked the name Diem had given it—Hau Nghia, a Vietnamese literary term, means Deepening Righteousness. The province was considered strategic because the so-called Parrot’s Beak section of Cambodia thrust into South Vietnam at this point and put central Saigon less than thirty-five air miles east of the border. Hau Nghia was also a natural route of north-south movement for the Viet Cong. It lay between the rice lands and the Plain of Reeds in the Mekong Delta and the rubber-plantation country and the beginning of the rain forest of the Annamite foothills above Saigon.

A week after his initial meeting with Wilson, when his assignment had been confirmed and he had finished his processing, Vann went to the embassy for a political briefing on the province. The political section could not find its sparse file on Hau Nghia, and he left. Ten minutes later, two Viet Cong terrorists arrived under the CIA office on the second floor to retaliate for the bombing of the North. The terrorists had 350 pounds of plastic explosive packed into an old gray Peugeot sedan. Embassy officials had been warned repeatedly over the last couple of years to block the streets around the building to traffic and to take other simple precautions, such as substituting shatterproof Plexiglás for the ordinary glass of the windows. Neither Lodge nor Taylor had done
anything effective, afraid that showing fear might cause the United States to lose face. The plastic explosive was the best American kind, called C-4, captured or bought from the Saigon side, as was the detonator, a quick-fuse type known as a “time pencil.” The old car became a massive grenade, sending shards of metal in every direction along with bits of concrete from a four-foot hole blown out of the pavement. The windows of the six-story building burst inward in myriads of fragments along with the plaster and the wood and metal fixtures on the walls facing the street.

Vann rushed back at the sound of the explosion to help evacuate the injured. Most of the twenty dead were innocent Vietnamese—passersby and patrons and workers in an open-air restaurant and commercial offices across the street. Another 126 Vietnamese were wounded. (The Vietnamese Communists were now ignoring the carnage such urban terrorism caused among their own people, rationalizing it with warnings they regularly gave the population in leaflets and radio broadcasts to stay away from American buildings.) The two terrorists were killed as well as several of the Saigon policemen guarding the building. One of the two Americans killed was a Navy petty officer; the other was a young woman who was a secretary to the CIA station chief. The station chief himself was gravely hurt and nearly lost both eyes. Two of his CIA officers were permanently blinded. A number of the other fifty-one men and women hurt inside the embassy were also horribly wounded, their faces torn. Vann noticed that one hunk of concrete or metal was hurled up all six stories and ripped a large hole through the American flag on the roof.

John Vann left for Hau Nghia the day after the attack on the embassy. He drove right through the province capital of Bau Trai before he realized that he had missed it and turned around. The place was, he wrote in his diary, “the most unlikely looking province capital in all Vietnam.” The last time he had seen Bau Trai had been during an operation in early 1963. (Two of Hau Nghia’s four districts had been part of Long An Province in the old 7th Division zone.) It had been a Viet Cong-controlled hamlet of about 1,000 people then. Diem had selected it as the province capital because it happened to be at the junction of the dirt roads connecting three of the district centers. The population had nearly doubled with the arrival of soldiers for a garrison and wives and children and camp followers. Bau Trai had also gained a handful of buildings that were used as offices and housing for the province officials and their American advisors. Diem had tried to abolish the plain country name (Bau Trai means Round Farm) by bestowing
one of his literary titles, Khiem Cuong, which means Modest But Vigorous. The fancy name had not taken. Everyone continued to call the place Bau Trai. Despite the near doubling in population, Bau Trai was just about 200 yards across at the widest point where it straddled both sides of the road. Vann looked again and recognized the hamlet of two years before.

Closer inspection brought more discouragement. At a small compound in the center of town where the military advisors lived, he asked directions to the USOM office. He was sent down a lane to a long tin-roofed warehouse and walked inside to “a completely disheartening sight.” The warehouse was bursting with “disorderly stacked piles of bulgur wheat, corn, shovels, paint, clothing, medical supplies, cooking oil, cement, dried milk, pitch forks, mattresses, chairs, chests, saws, angle iron lengths, nails, rice hullers, and miscellaneous items I later found came from the salvage yard.” The man he was replacing, William Pye, a fifty-two-year-old Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who had volunteered for AID and who was a brave and decent man, but extremely tense and disorganized, was standing in the midst of this magpie’s delight, pad and pen in hand, “apparently inventorying some item.” The USOM office consisted of a couple of desks in a corner of the warehouse. Vann could see that the papers on the desktops were in as much disarray and covered with as much dust as everything else.

He asked where the living quarters were and walked a short distance to a new bungalow of the inevitable masonry and stucco construction. On the outside, except for some useless barbed wire strung around it, the house was trimly built, with wooden shutters. On the inside, it was the same grubby warren as the warehouse. There was no electricity for lights and fans, just gasoline lanterns that made the house hotter at night. Nor could Vann look forward to relaxing at a meal. He had told himself that to be effective he was going to have to live with the Vietnamese. He had therefore decided not to take his meals with the U.S. military advisors at their mess. But when eating at the one restaurant in Bau Trai, Vann wrote to a friend in Denver, it was “very difficult to stick a bite of food in the mouth without the flies riding in with it.”

Flies were not the primary threat to the health of an American or Saigon official in Hau Nghia. The USOM motor-pool officer in Saigon had grumbled about letting Vann borrow a station wagon to drive to Bau Trai. The man had been worried about getting his vehicle back. Vann was the first Vietnamese or American official to drive unescorted from Saigon in many months. Everyone else traveled to and from Saigon and on all of the roads still open within the province in armed convoys.
As the convoys were also frequently mined or ambushed, they traveled above the roads in helicopters whenever possible. The majority of the province was, in any case, no longer in contact with the Saigon side. The four districts had been reduced to three in mid-1964 when the fourth one, the northeast corner of the Plain of Reeds across the Vam Co Dong River, had been abandoned entirely to the guerrillas. (The district chief had been given three villages in another district to administer.) By early 1965 when Vann arrived, the direct roads between Bau Trai and two of the three remaining district centers had also been cut. It was likewise no longer possible to drive directly to Bau Trai from Saigon, even though the place was a mere twenty miles from the city. Vann had been forced to take an indirect way that circled to the northwest up Route 1, the main road from Saigon to Cambodia, and then south down a secondary road from the town of Cu Chi, the third district center in the province.

Hau Nghia was such a “Siberia assignment,” as Vann put it, that the regime was currently unable to find a chief for the province. The last province chief had been jailed for complicity in the most recent abortive coup in February. The job had since been offered to two other ARVN officers, and both had refused it. With the exception of Bau Trai and the district towns, half a dozen hamlets, and the outposts that still existed at the sufferance of the guerrillas, Hau Nghia had been ceded to the Viet Cong.

Although Vann’s job for USOM was to supervise school building, hog raising, refugee relief, and similar civilian pacification projects, a vacuum of leadership and a confrontation were precisely the circumstances in which he thrived. He immediately began scheming to take Hau Nghia back from the Viet Cong. He started organizing on his first night, convening a meeting with the acting province chief, a civilian Saigon official who was the deputy for administration, to work out the province budget requirements for the coming fiscal year. The next morning he was off to begin a tour of the district centers to meet the district chiefs and their American advisors and be briefed. Westmoreland had arranged in mid-1964 for the headquarters of the ARVN 25th Infantry Division and two of its regiments to be transferred to Hau Nghia from Central Vietnam. Vann also stopped at the division headquarters and at one of the regimental command posts on his first morning. He learned that despite Westmoreland’s priority designation, no one had drawn up a pacification plan for Hau Nghia. They had to have one, Vann said, and he initiated the process. He got USOM’s Vietnamese work crew in Bau Trai busy bringing order to the warehouse and told the acting province chief that he had to have a respectable office in the province
headquarters. The headquarters building, with a large veranda, was the only structure in town of any vague distinction.

He told the assistant he found waiting for him in Bau Trai, Douglas Ramsey, a thirty-year-old Foreign Service officer who had reached the province a month earlier, that they could not afford to surrender access to the population as the guerrillas wanted by staying off the roads and riding helicopters. Ramsey was a cheerful, gangling Westerner of six feet three inches with black hair and a round-the-clock five o’clock shadow. He was a rarity among Americans in 1965—fluent in spoken and written Vietnamese. Convoys would not permit them the freedom of movement they needed either, Vann said, and he thought they would actually be in less danger driving alone. The Viet Cong interdicted all official traffic and, whenever they wished, set up roadblocks to collect taxes from commercial trucks and to kidnap individual soldiers riding civilian buses. Otherwise they permitted civilian vehicles to move freely on the roads that were still open.

All of the USOM vehicles were civilian types. In addition to several large cargo trucks with Vietnamese drivers for hauling supplies, there were two smaller vehicles for Ramsey and Vann to use. One was an International Harvester Scout with armor concealed in the body. The other was an unarmored pickup truck, also an International, painted a canary yellow. Vann preferred the pickup, because it was fast. The weight of the armor slowed down the Scout. He believed they would be able to drive when and where they wanted and have a reasonable chance of staying alive if they kept their pattern as irregular as possible and checked with the local police or militia before starting down a stretch of road. Most of Ramsey’s previous work in Vietnam had not been dangerous, but he had done some operating in the countryside, and he was game.

Within a week and a half, Vann no longer had to do battle with the flies in Bau Trai’s restaurant. He and Ramsey were invited by the province officials and military officers to join the communal Vietnamese mess. (The officials and officers had organized a mess because the lack of decent housing and the insecurity kept them from bringing their families to Bau Trai.) The inclusion of the Americans meant that the Vietnamese would eat better; Vann and Ramsey could purchase food from the commissary in Saigon. The invitation would not have been extended, however, had the Vietnamese decided they did not like Vann. He was delighted, because mealtimes were an opportunity to settle problems and talk up new programs. Vann also did not anticipate any conflict with the senior American military advisor in the province, a young
lieutenant colonel named Lloyd Webb, who knew Vann by reputation and respected his experience.

Near the end of April, a new province chief arrived—Maj. Nguyen Tri Hanh, a Southern Catholic who had previously been a deputy province chief in the rubber-plantation country. He had been promised a quick promotion to lieutenant colonel to induce him to accept Hau Nghia. He was a husky man of forty-five years with a stolid temperament, and he was a surprise. Hanh was straightforward in manner, appeared honest, and seemed sincerely committed to governing the province well. “I’ll have him in the palm of my hand in thirty days,” Vann predicted to Ramsey.

Two nights later the Viet Cong reminded Vann that goodwill and hard work would not by themselves suffice to rescue Hau Nghia or to win the war in the rest of South Vietnam. He had understood this, but in the strongly positive mood in which he approached any new task he had not faced up to the implications of what he had been seeing around him. At 2:30
A.M.
on April 28, 1965, the guerrillas brought him to fuller awareness. They started firing 81 mm mortar shells into Bau Trai to discourage the artillerymen there from supporting an ARVN Ranger company the Viet Cong were assaulting at that same moment at a hamlet two miles away. Radio contact with the company was lost immediately.

When Vann drove to the hamlet early in the morning he found the company annihilated—thirty-five Rangers dead, sixteen missing and captured, and eleven wounded survivors left behind by the attackers. The assault force was one of those armed-by-Harkins nightmares Vann had had at 7th Division, elements of a regional guerrilla battalion rich in American machine guns and other automatic and semiautomatic weapons, its heavier recoilless cannons and mortars smuggled in by sea from the North. (The Viet Cong, who had been fortunate to possess a couple of machine guns for a battalion in 1962, now had three in each platoon, the same as in the U.S. Army.)