A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (97 page)

Wholesale dislocation of the peasantry would only worsen the problems the United States faced in South Vietnam, Vann warned in his strategy proposal, and it was profoundly unjust. “We … have naively expected an unsophisticated, relatively illiterate, rural population to recognize and oppose the evils of Communism, even when it is cleverly masked by front organizations,” he wrote. “We have damned those who
did not give wholehearted support to GVN without seriously questioning whether GVN was so constituted or motivated that it could expect loyalty and support from its people.” As an example of the unthinking cruelty reflected in the American attitude, Vann quoted a remark by one of the 25th Division advisors to justify Chinh’s action in Cu Chi District. “If these people want to stay there and support the Communists, then they can expect to be bombed,” the advisor had said.

With the commitment of the American soldier, such ignorance entailed cruelty to Americans too. To persist in it was to risk the unacceptable, that “a successful military venture will be negated by a continued failure of GVN to win its own people.” The American soldier was merely buying time, Vann warned. “The major challenge now facing the U.S. in Vietnam” was to use that time to break the Communist monopoly on social revolution. The United States therefore had the right to act as a benevolent colonial power and push the current regime aside precisely because the need for change was so imperative. “Every effort should be made to ‘sell’” the Saigon generals and politicians on the wisdom of the program he was proposing and enlist their cooperation in reforming their society, Vann wrote, but “if this cannot be done without compromising the principal provisions of the proposal, then GVN must be forced to accept U.S. judgment and direction. The situation is now too critical and the investment too great for us to longer tolerate a directionless and floundering effort that is losing the population, hence the war.”

Undaunted by the impenetrable fantasies of Paul Harkins, by Maxwell Taylor’s lack of curiosity at the lunch, by the canceled briefing for the Joint Chiefs, John Vann set out once more to persuade those he served to fight the war in Vietnam his way. He got some encouragement this time from men in influential positions. He had come a distance from the Army lieutenant colonel at My Tho. Although he was still a small figure in the world of public men, he was a personality in Vietnam, thanks to Halberstam. He represented forthrightness and integrity even to those in the bureaucracy who also regarded him as an obsessed maverick. His reputation and his continuing exploits naturally attracted the newsmen, and, having learned the advantages of access to the press at 7th Division, he did not turn them away.

I was just one of a number of his reporter friends from My Tho days who had returned to the war. Mert Perry, who had resigned from
Time
in 1963 along with Charlie Mohr, was back in the country reporting for
News week
when Vann was ambushed in June. He went out to Bau Trai shortly afterward. The result was a four-column feature in
News week
in late July captioned “This Is All Bad News Country,” with photographs of Hanh, of a lanky Ramsey striding down the dirt street of Bau Trai, and of Vann in front of a thatched cottage in a hamlet, his features set in an earnest look. The major-league columnists who arrived to write about this new American war began to make Vann a regular stop on their itineraries. Scotty Reston of the
Times
came to spend a day with him in August. Bernard Fall, the Franco-American scholar of Vietnam who was to be killed there two years later, spent three days with him, and they became friends.

Newsmen were drawn to Vann, partly because with him there was always the possibility of the unexpected. Edward Morgan of ABC News was interviewing him on camera one morning in front of a new school at the south end of Bau Trai where a teacher-training program was in progress. Mortar fire and bombing could be heard in the distance. Morgan, harking for action, called attention to the explosions. Vann had just begun to explain that the teachers and pupils weren’t disturbed, because the sounds of war were part of life in Hau Nghia, when three Viet Cong snipers decided to harass the policemen at the road checkpoint 200 feet or so away. Incoming bullets snapped by the school, the policemen and several soldiers fired back, and a howitzer crew at the artillery park farther into town—whose state of nerves was typical of the Saigon soldiery—started wildly shooting off their 105mm gun. Teachers, pupils, Morgan, and Vann took cover. The cameramen took cover too, but filmed all they could without getting shot. Morgan and his crew were delighted at their “good luck” in acquiring some real war footage to enliven a documentary on pacification.

Some of Vann’s superiors in USOM frowned on his freewheeling relationship with the press and let him know it. Their disapproval convinced him to cultivate the relationship all the more. He had decided that he could never again depend on any bureaucracy for his rise as he had depended on the Army. He had made himself an outsider by leaving the Army. His climb would therefore have to be a singular one. He would have to take risks that other men were unwilling to take, because he would have to defeat the system in order to scale it. The news media were an ally in this simultaneous struggle to advance himself and to sell his ideas. His easy access to the reporters might make the bureaucrats jealous of the limelight they were afraid to seek and arouse their distrust for fear that he might leak something embarrassing, but it also intimidated them and gave him the kind of independence and protection he
had unwittingly gained against Harkins. Publicity brought prestige, lent him a certain cachet. It made important people willing to listen to him whether they accepted what he had to say at the moment or not.

He was offered a supervisory post on the staff at USOM headquarters in July. He turned it down and also talked his way out of a promotion to deputy director for the whole of the Mekong Delta that summer, because the jobs would have hidden him behind a desk. “The field,” he wrote to a friend in Denver, “… happens to be the element I am most at home in, and the one place I will attract the most attention.”

Vann hoped to sell “Harnessing the Revolution in South Vietnam” through the contacts he had been building up over the past two years. Westmoreland had been cordial to him, inviting Vann that summer to come to Saigon and pass along his impressions on returning to Vietnam. Vann had done so at the beginning of July, briefing Westmoreland and his deputy, Lt. Gen. John Throckmorton, for well over an hour at MACV headquarters. Nevertheless, Vann decided that, given the radical nature of his proposal, he would be better off if someone high in Westmoreland’s headquarters did his selling for him. He had in mind Westmoreland’s new chief of staff, Gen. (then Maj. Gen.) William Rosson, who had a long acquaintance with Vietnam.

Rosson had first seen Saigon in the year of the French defeat as a lieutenant colonel and principal aide to the head of the MAAG in 1954, Lt. Gen. John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel. He had cooperated with Lansdale when Lansdale had installed Diem as America’s fresh beginning. He and Vann had met at the Pentagon in 1963 while Rosson was concluding an assignment as head of Special Warfare for the Army. Rosson had been one of the generals in the building who had listened to Vann, because he had been incredulous at Harkins’s pronouncements. They had renewed acquaintance when Vann had called on him after briefing Westmoreland in July. Vann had mentioned some of the ideas on pacification he was developing in Hau Nghia. As the new chief of staff at MACV, Rosson was under extreme pressure, but he had promised to take a helicopter out for a visit as soon as he could break away for a couple of hours.

In the second week of August, right after the first draft of his strategy paper was completed, Vann sent a copy to Rosson. He received a note from Rosson at the end of the month. “Be alert to receipt of expressions of interest from important quarters,” Rosson said. Vann took the “important quarters” to mean that Rosson was attempting to sell his ideas to Westmoreland. Rosson also urged him to submit the proposal formally through USOM channels, which Vann did as soon as the final draft was finished on September 10.

For a proposal submitted by a man who was officially just a province representative, the paper also reached some unusually senior people on the civilian side. An acquaintance at AID Washington to whom Vann mailed the first draft for comment passed a copy up to Rutherford Poats, a former United Press International newsman and executive who had become AID chief for the Far East. Poats in turn sent copies to William Bundy, who had succeeded Roger Hilsman as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, and to Leonard Unger, Bundy’s deputy and head of the Vietnam Task Force, the Washington committee to coordinate the work of the various government departments involved in the war. Poats said in a letter, a carbon of which he was kind enough to send Vann, that the paper gave the Viet Cong “more credit for a legitimate social objective than I would” and that he was not recommending “the proposed pilot ‘solution.’” Just the same, Poats said, Vann’s analysis “strikes me as a good description of the problem” and the proposal contained “some useful ideas.” Vann was not discouraged by this kind of reaction. To him it meant that the door was at least not barred.

Of all his high-level connections, Vann was counting most on Lodge, who arrived at Tan Son Nhut on August 20, 1965, to replace Taylor and begin his second round as the president’s representative in Saigon. The Henry Cabot Lodge whom Vann had gotten to know after he organized a “Lodge for President” movement in Colorado was a public man with a highly personal
modus operandi
who delegated unusual authority to a subordinate he trusted. The most recent recipient of that authority had been another brilliant Army officer of Vann’s generation and a friend and classmate at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Lt. Col. John Michael Dunn.

Mike Dunn was an Irishman in the Robert Kennedy image—a smile that is supposed to connote an altar boy and a pair of brass knuckles in his pocket. He was a Harvard graduate who had been drawn to an Army career by the challenge of the post-World War II American adventure. He had won his combat credentials in Korea with a Silver Star for Gallantry and had earned his intellectual credentials at Princeton with a Ph.D in international relations. When Lodge had come to Saigon in 1963 on his first tour as ambassador he had brought Dunn along to be his personal assistant. He had given Dunn power and all the latitude to exercise it that Dunn could handle, which was a great deal indeed, during the maneuvers to overthrow Diem and in the tussles afterward to see that Lodge continued to have his way against Harkins. Dunn had been such a formidable executor of Lodge’s wishes that after Lodge had gone home in 1964 and Dunn had returned to Washington and the Army, Harkins had started proceedings against him for a general court-martial.
Westmoreland had also taken umbrage at a lieutenant colonel feisty enough to unhorse a general for a civilian superior. He had joined Harkins in the accusations. One charge was the equivalent of making false reports. Lodge had stood by Dunn. He had said he would testify that Dunn’s every act had been performed on his authority, and if the proceedings went forward, he was going to insist on bringing the entire matter out in public. Harold Johnson, by then chief of staff of the Army, had summoned Dunn to his office and told him to regard the proceedings, which were being dropped, as a misunderstanding. He was not to think that Harkins and Westmoreland were being vindictive, Johnson had said. They had merely been overzealous in seeking to protect the interests of the Army.

Vann assumed that during his second turn at the ambassadorship, Lodge was going to emulate his first year in Vietnam and take an individual and imaginative approach to the war. Vann wanted to be the Mike Dunn of that enterprise. He had written Lodge in July, shortly after the White House announcement that Lodge would be returning, and given the ambassador a careful summary of his learning experience in Hau Nghia. He had proposed that Lodge create a special Field Liaison Office. Its purpose would be to keep the ambassador accurately informed on pacification and military operations by enabling him to get his information
“without
the interpretations of many intervening echelons.” The office would consist of just one or two men. They would have the authority to go anywhere Lodge designated, observe and ask questions, and report directly to him. Vann proposed that he head the office, citing his “unique combination of both military and civilian experience” in Vietnam and his conviction that he could serve “as a practical sounding board for [Lodge’s] ideas and programs.” The Field Liaison Office would, in short, be John Vann and an assistant.

While noncommittal, Lodge’s reply was friendly and heartening to Vann:

If Lodge did not accept his “Harnessing the Revolution” strategy or some variation of it as the course to be adopted right away, Vann
thought, the ambassador might still offer him the special assistant’s job he had proposed, because he was so well qualified for it. He would then have an opportunity to gradually sell his strategy ideas to Lodge in the course of keeping him informed of what was happening on the battlefield and in the hamlets. He waited for a call from the embassy with great impatience after Lodge’s arrival on August 20.

A bureaucratic ban on Lansdale’s presence in South Vietnam had also been lifted as a result of Lodge’s return, and Lansdale came back at the beginning of September for another attempt to save the country he had brought into being ten years before. He visited Vann in Bau Trai a couple of days after arriving and brought along the team he had assembled to help him in his renewed endeavor. One member was a thirty-four-year-old Defense Department intellectual and former Marine named Daniel Ellsberg. Lansdale’s charter was vague. He and his team were officially supposed to act as a special liaison group between the embassy and the Saigon government’s Rural Reconstruction Council, a body that in theory coordinated the pacification programs of all the ministries.