A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (94 page)

The war was also reaching a juncture that Vann saw as an opportunity to implement a new strategy. By early June 1965, Westmoreland had more than 50,000 American military men in South Vietnam, including nine battalions of Marines and Army paratroops. Although the Johnson administration was being vague in public about the decisions it was reaching, more U.S. battalions were clearly on the way. They were arriving just in time. The Saigon government had been preparing to evacuate all five northern provinces along the Central Coast—the whole of the I Corps zone where the Marines now held the airfield at Phu Bai near the former imperial capital of Hue as well as the port and air base at Da Nang below it. The Saigon generals had even developed a secret plan to move JGS headquarters from the handsome compound de Lattre de Tassigny had built next to Tan Son Nhut to the old French Army school for military orphans on the Vung Tau peninsula (Cap St. Jacques) forty miles southeast of the city. The peninsula was easy to defend, and the generals would be a few minutes from ships and the open sea there. They were uncertain whether they would be able to defend the remnants of the Central Highlands they still held long enough to shift the burden to the Americans. The principal mountain towns of Kontum, Pleiku, and Banmethuot had become fragile islands accessible only by air.

In Hau Nghia there were signs everywhere that the regime would not see 1966 without an American rescue. Minings and ambushes had become so frequent along the main road to Saigon, Route 1, that Vann and Ramsey would pass smashed jeeps and trucks from which no one
had yet bothered to remove the bodies. Worse, they occasionally spotted part of a body beside a wreck. On some mornings the guerrillas blew up military vehicles within 200 yards of the police checkpoints at each end of Bau Trai. The policemen stationed in the sentry boxes the night before had probably heard the guerrillas digging the mines into the road or had watched in the moonlight as the Viet Cong had strung the wires to the detonators in the brush nearby, yet they had said nothing. Desertions were also becoming more significant. The chiefs of two hamlets right next to Bau Trai, two of the six supposedly “pacified” hamlets in the province, were no longer willing to depend on the insurance they purchased by assisting the Viet Cong covertly. They deserted openly to the guerrillas. One took his deputy and almost all of the militia platoon in the hamlet with him. Vann and Ramsey had been fond of this PF platoon. Most of its members were local teenagers who would cheer whenever the Americans brought them bulgur wheat or cooking oil to supplement their ridiculous salaries. The happy-go-lucky teenagers shocked their American friends by wiping out part of a pacification team stationed in the neighborhood before deserting.

The nerves of those on the Saigon side who did not desert were so frayed that panic was a flash away. The village center of Due Lap along the road two miles north of Bau Trai had been attacked several times in recent months. One morning the place was swept by a rumor that a squad of guerrillas—a single squad—was about to arrive. First the regular police, then the heavily armed Combat Police, then a Ranger battalion headquarters and one of its companies fled in terror. They all straggled back after the rumor proved false. Vann and Ramsey would have taken less notice if the panic had occurred at 2:00
A.M.
in the predawn darkness when some sort of attack might have been developing. The time had been 10:00
A.M
.

Vann had never changed the views he had expressed to Ziegler back in 1962 on the folly of trying to fight the war with American troops. “If the war is to be won,” he had written Lodge’s assistant from Denver in the spring of 1964, “then it must be done by the Vietnamese—nothing would be more foolhardy than the employment of U.S. (or any other foreign) troops in quantity. We could pour our entire Army into Vietnam—and accomplish nothing worthwhile.” He felt the same way roughly a year later as the Marines and Army infantrymen started to arrive.

Not that he was unhappy to see them come. Without them South Vietnam would, he remarked, have “gone down the drain.” Their arrival meant an end to the much-feared danger that, as the regime neared collapse, some group of neutralist or pro-Communist politicians would
form a government in Saigon and demand that the United States withdraw. Ky and his fellow generals could hold on as long as they had American guns to protect them. The Vietnamese Communists obviously lacked the capacity to eject a large U.S. force that could be supported by sea and air. What troubled Vann was that these American soldiers would now be sent out to fight the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regulars of Hanoi’s Vietnam People’s Army (called the NVA, for North Vietnamese Army, by the U.S. military), who had started to march down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to reinforce the guerrillas. Given the inability of American troops to distinguish friend from foe, the potential for mindless carnage was enormous.

The sensible course, Vann believed, would be to use the American troops to secure Saigon and the ports and airfields and those inland cities and towns that could not, as a matter of prestige, be lost to the Communists. The U.S. soldiers would serve as a garrison and an emergency reserve. They could be employed offensively in those rare instances when a large Viet Cong or NVA unit had been well located, the circumstances favored the Americans, and there was little danger of civilian casualties. The primary if unspoken mission of the American troops would be political. They would provide the muscle to stop the bacchanal of coups and recoups and bring the Saigon generals to heel. Behind the shield of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, the United States would take over the regime and gradually turn it into a government whose leaders were not fundamentally corrupt men. The Vietnamese soldiers of the ARVN and the Regional and Popular Forces would do most of the fighting in the countryside, not the American troops. The Saigon forces would have to be reorganized and reformed as they carried the burden of defeating the Viet Cong and beginning the pacification of the hamlets. This goal could be accomplished, Vann felt, by creating a “joint command” in which Americans would issue the orders. He recognized by now that the rank and file of the Saigon forces were as disgusted with their leadership as he was. He was convinced that they would respond to competence and discipline and the success these would bring. Vann began to focus his late-night talks with Ramsey and their discussions in Saigon with Bumgardner and Scotton on the core of a new strategy—the details of a program to attract the peasantry and change the nature of Saigon society.

In the meantime, Vann decided, the place to start changing things was Hau Nghia, and he would begin with an example of corruption he could do something about—the thieving contractor. Vann had been fighting
a private guerrilla war with the contractor since his discovery that the man had corrupted another AID official with women. He had a weapon he could use against the crooked builder. USOM regulations required Vann to sign a release before the contractor could be paid for a completed project. Vann made a point of catching the contractor in the theft of aluminum roofing sheets. He drove to a recently finished maternity clinic and to a school, climbed up and counted the number of sheets in the roofs, and checked the records to see how many sheets had been issued to the contractor for the buildings. Vann then refused to sign payment releases until the contractor agreed to reimburse the U.S. government for the missing sheets.

The conflict escalated in the latter part of May when the contractor visited Hanh to offer him the same 10 percent kickback arrangement on contracts that the builder had had with the last province chief. He advised Hanh not to take Vann seriously. The AID official corrupted by the contractor now occupied a staff position at USOM headquarters in Saigon. The contractor said his American friend had informed him that Vann was considered a troublemaker and would be replaced soon. Hanh did not react. That evening he tipped Vann off to what the contractor had told him. Vann asked Hanh to cancel every contract the crooked builder had in the province. Hanh would not commit himself to such drastic action, but he did not seem unwilling if Vann could sufficiently discredit the builder.

A week later the contractor was back to see Hanh. He enlarged his proposition to make it more attractive. The Resources and Population Control program that was supposed to deny the Viet Cong useful commodities required export-import certificates for goods and raw materials, such as sugar, entering or leaving the province. The certificates were commonly sold for graft. The builder had handled the sales for the last province chief. He offered to perform the same service for Hanh, for a percentage, of course. Hanh explicitly declined the offer this time and again repeated the conversation to Vann.

By this point the contractor had learned that Vann was attempting to expel him from Hau Nghia, and he correctly assumed that the new province chief would not be acting so strangely were it not for Vann’s encouragement. The Saigonese had become practiced over the years at striking a pose of innocence and injured national pride whenever a genuine interest like corruption was threatened by Americans. The contractor, a member of a prominent Southern Catholic family, was adept at the game. He wrote Vann a letter upbraiding him for behaving like “the French colonial bosses when they dominated our country.”

The next move in the game was for the contractor to have his friend at USOM headquarters send a copy of the letter up the chain-of-command ladder to get Vann transferred out of Hau Nghia. Vann guessed this would be the next play. He wrote the contractor a reply laying out the facts of his thievery, but held back the carbon that would normally have gone to USOM headquarters. He suspected that the bribed AID official would divert it or attempt to discredit it. A summons to Saigon soon came, as Vann had expected, from Wilson’s deputy, a career civilian AID officer. The deputy immediately began to lecture Vann on how to behave toward Vietnamese. When he was unable to restrain himself any longer, Vann asked whether the deputy wanted to hear his side of the story. The deputy said that he did not, that he was merely trying to help Vann. Unless he could give his side of the story, Vann said, they would have to end the meeting. The deputy grudgingly consented to listen. Vann then described the bribed official’s relationship with the contractor and the larger schemes of graft the builder had been running with the last province chief. He gave the deputy a carbon of his reply to the contractor as well as copies of earlier correspondence between them about vanished building materials. Vann could see that Wilson’s deputy was unhappy. He apparently feared a scandal. He did say that Vann’s account and the full correspondence told a story considerably different from what he had heard.

At noon on June 22, Vann was driving down Route 1 toward Cu Chi, feeling good about his first campaign against corruption in Hau Nghia. The bribed AID official had not stood up well under questioning. Vann had been asked to write a confidential memorandum about the man’s relationship with the contractor. The man was in so much hot water at USOM headquarters that he was subsequently to transfer to another country. Wilson’s civilian deputy was changing his opinion of Vann and was to become one of Vann’s staunchest promoters in AID. Hanh had not yet canceled the last of the builder’s contracts, but he seemed about to do so. Vann had become confident enough of victory a week earlier to announce to Hanh and to one of Hanh’s deputies that no matter what the official finding of the investigation, he was not going to issue the contractor another bag of cement or a single sheet of roofing as long as he was USOM representative in Hau Nghia.

Vann was alone in the canary-yellow International pickup. He had talked that morning to the district chief at Trang Bang farther up Route 1 about some Self-Help projects and was on his way down to Cu
Chi to meet Hanh. The province chief was also out traveling that morning to present some piglets to farmers participating in the USOM pig-raising and corn-growing program. Despite his dislike of convoys, Vann was going to join Hanh’s convoy out of courtesy so that they could drive back to Bau Trai together for lunch there with a touring USIA official. Vann had just passed a dangerous spot at a bridge named for the stream it spanned, Suoi Sau (Sau Creek). The province military advisors had nicknamed the bridge Suoi Cide because so many minings and ambushes occurred nearby.

He spotted a group of men a short distance off his side of the two-lane tarmac road. Three of them were armed and dressed in the black pa jamalike garb that the peasants, the Viet Cong, and the Saigon militia all wore. They were walking in front of six young men who were stripped to the waist. The three armed men beckoned to Vann to stop. Thinking that they were militia who needed help in some emergency, Vann slowed down. As he did so, one of them raised a rifle and pointed it at him, changing Vann’s mind about who was beckoning to him. He slammed in the clutch with his left foot, shoved the gear stick up into second, and began to accelerate away, smiling and waving out the open door window of the truck in the hope that if these men were Viet Cong with prisoners, they might hesitate long enough for him to get away. The man who had been signaling most vigorously for Vann to stop pushed down his companion’s rifle, smiled, and waved back.

In a few moments Vann was clear of them and speeding down the potholed tarmac at seventy miles an hour. No guerrillas had ever before signaled to him to stop and behaved so oddly. He was wondering whether they really had been Viet Cong when he heard a volley of shots and the crack of bullets missing the pickup’s cab. He ducked instinctively, just in time to keep his eyes from being filled with fragments of glass as more bullets punched holes through the windshield. The little truck careened off to the left into a graveyard that extended down both sides of the road. Vann jerked himself erect to get control of the vehicle and saw his ambushers—about a dozen guerrillas strung out along the left side of the road for the length of a football field. The pickup was headed right for them.