A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan

  The third general in dress whites was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for military operations, fifty-five-year-old Lt. Gen. Richard Stilwell. Dick Stilwell had been one of those who had not been sorry to see Vann leave the Army in 1963. He had arrived in Saigon in April of that year just as Vann was departing for Washington and his unsuccessful campaign at the Pentagon to try to persuade the ranking military leadership that the United States was failing in Vietnam and had to change its strategy. In 1963, Stilwell had been a brigadier general and chief of operations for Gen. Paul Harkins, Westmoreland’s predecessor in the Saigon command. Stilwell had applied his high intelligence to rebutting the arguments of Vann and those other field advisors who had also believed that the war was being lost. Stilwell’s behavior in 1963 had been predictable to those who knew him. He had an unwavering trust in authority that led him to place loyalty to superiors above other concerns. He aspired to gain the pinnacle of chief of staff, an aspiration he was to be denied. He had graduated near the top of his class at West Point, two years after Westmoreland and Palmer, and had chosen the traditional route for a graduate of academic stature, a commission in the Corps of Engineers. His ambition and his talent as a staff officer had led him to switch to the infantry during World War II, when he and DePuy, who was sitting in the chapel next to Alsop, had served together in the same infantry division in Europe. Two wars later, in mid-1964, Stilwell had moved up in Saigon and become chief of staff to Westmoreland, the new commanding general. DePuy had arrived to assume Stilwell’s former duties as chief of operations, and Stilwell had then overseen DePuy’s work in planning the war-of-attrition strategy that was to have brought victory. Stilwell had gradually realized that he had been wrong about Vann and had come to admire him. As Stilwell was also a man of sentiment, he had asked to be a pallbearer at Vann’s funeral.

  The pallbearer who walked behind Westmoreland was a civilian, a slim and erect man in a navy-blue suit. He wore glasses with clear plastic frames that added a further touch of plainness to his pinched and undistinguished features. One had to notice the unusual steadiness of the myopic pale blue eyes behind the glasses to sense the sternness in this man’s character. The civilian was William Colby of the CIA, covert warrior, soon to be named the Agency’s deputy director for plans, the euphemism for clandestine operations, and then spy master-in-chief as the director of central intelligence.

  Had William Colby been born in the sixteenth century, his character and mindset might have led him into the Society of Jesus and a life as a Jesuit soldier of the Counter-Reformation. Having been born in the twentieth, he had joined the CIA and become a soldier of the Cold War. A need to serve and a desire to serve in secret were dominant traits in his personality. He had parachuted into German-occupied France in August 1944 as a twenty-four-year-old major in the OSS, schooled in the arts of sabotage and terrorism at an English country estate (Lucien Conein had been one of his classmates there), to lead a French Resistance group against the Nazis. The war had not ended for him with the surrender of Germany nine months later. Godless Communism, a term that meant just what it said to Colby, had replaced Fascism as the menace to humankind. The Roman Catholicism he had inherited from his father, an Army colonel who had been a convert, and from his Irish mother had made him from his student days at Princeton as fervently anti-Communist as he had been anti-Fascist. The question had simply been which menace to fight first.

  In contrast to Lansdale, Bill Colby had been an unsung member of the clandestine service. His way had been quiet and sustained. He had carried out the desires of the U.S. government in Vietnam over much of the previous twelve years, beginning in early 1959 as deputy and subsequently chief of the CIA station in Saigon and then in the same promotion pattern as deputy and chief of the Far East Division of clandestine operations. He had supervised the Agency’s first counterguerrilla programs in the South. On President Kennedy’s order, he had resumed the covert warfare against the Communist North that had been allowed to lapse after Lansdale’s years. He had infiltrated by parachute and boat teams of Vietnamese terrorists and saboteurs trained by the CIA to try to start a guerrilla war against the Hanoi authorities like the one the Viet Cong were waging in South Vietnam. In 1967 he had helped Robert Komer, a former CIA officer and the fifth pallbearer Ellsberg recognized, to set up the Phoenix Program to kill, jail, or intimidate into surrender the members of the secret Communist-led government the guerrillas had established in the rural areas of the South. The program had resulted in the death or imprisonment of tens of thousands of Vietnamese. The antiwar movement had condemned Colby as an assassin and war criminal. “Wanted for Murder” posters with his picture on them had been plastered on the buildings of college campuses in Washington. None of the accusations had unsettled Colby’s faith in his cause and his conviction that the work he was doing was necessary and good. His manner had remained as gentle and as friendly and—not without some calculation—as disarming as it had always been. In 1968, Komer had departed and Colby had taken over the entire pacification program and become Vann’s superior. He had appreciated Vann’s talents. Vann, who sought klieg lights and center stage, and Colby, who preferred to perform in the shadows, had come to respect each other.

  The two soldiers positioned the flag-draped coffin at the end of the center aisle before the altar. The official pallbearers took their places in the pews at the left front of the chapel where William Rogers, the secretary of state, and Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense, were already seated. After the Army chaplain had read from the scripture and given his sermon, Robert Komer rose from the first pew and walked up onto the altar to deliver the eulogy.

  Komer had been the general of the pacification campaign, what the newspapers had called “the other war in Vietnam.” A man of medium height and build, balding in middle age, he had been noticeable among the pallbearers. Unlike the other civilians in suits of dark colors, he was dressed in light gray. His suit had been made for him by a proper London tailor during his CIA years back in the 1950s. He had worn it today because Komer felt that the etiquette of a eulogy demanded a vest and it was the only summer suit he owned that had one.

  President Johnson had once regarded Komer as an extraordinary problem solver. The president had sent him to Vietnam in May 1967 to pull together into a single, cohesive organization the fragmented pacification programs of the military and the various civilian agencies. Komer had created the organization and had done his best to pacify Vietnam. He had a terrierlike personality. He had dashed into the task with spirited confidence and abrasive vigor. He had taken joy in violating bureaucratic decorum and had been pleased with the nickname that friends and enemies alike had applied to him—”the Blowtorch.” Vann had given Komer his most valuable advice on how to build the organization and had been his most accomplished subordinate at translating plans into action.

  The Vietnamese Communists had spoiled Komer’s career in government with their Tet 1968 Offensive. Prior to the offensive he had mistakenly believed that the United States was winning the war, had told the president so, and had publicly predicted that victory was assured and imminent. After Tet he had been something of an embarrassment to the Johnson administration, and he had left Saigon toward the end of 1968. He had continued to coach from Washington, however, making occasional trips to Vietnam and writing upbeat reports which said that Vann and his comrades in the hard core still committed there might just be able to pull it off, might just succeed in keeping South Vietnam going long enough to exhaust the Communists and persuade them to give up. This morning the 300 persons assembled at the funeral heard the reedy, tough-guy voice of the old Komer carry through the chapel as he stood over the coffin and praised Vann.

  He spoke of “the courage, the spirit, the exuberant energy, the earthy vitality, the sheer gutsiness of the John Vann we knew.” He praised Vann in the same unstinting fashion in which the old Komer had given himself to the war.

  “To us who worked with him, learned from him, and were inspired by him, h
e was that scrawny, cocky little red-necked guy with a rural Virginia twang—always on the run like a human dynamo, sleeping only four hours a night, almost blowing a fuse at least twice a day, knowing more than any of us about what was really going on, and always telling us so. And any of us with his head screwed on right invariably listened.

  “That’s the John Vann we remember. He was proud to be a controversial character, a role he played to the hilt.

  “I’ve never known a more unsparingly critical and uncompromisingly honest man. He called them as he saw them—in defeat as well as victory. For this, and for his long experience, he was more respected by the press than any other official. And he told it straight to everyone—not just to them [the press] or his own people, but to presidents, cabinet officers, ambassadors and generals—letting the chips fall where they may. After one such episode I was told, and not in jest, to fire John Vann. I replied that I wouldn’t, and couldn’t; that in fact, if I could only find three more John Vanns we could shorten the war by half.”

  Mary Jane, who had not heard anything the chaplain had said, found herself listening to Komer. His voice and words restored her composure. The meaning of what he said was less important to her than the pleasure of hearing John praised by a man who spoke in the same bold way he had.

  “If John had few illusions,” Komer said, “he also had no torturing doubts about why he was in Vietnam—to help defend the right of the South Vietnamese people, whom he loved, to live in freedom. He probably knew more Vietnamese and worked more closely with them, sharing their trials as well as their joys, than any other American. He was more at home in the hamlets, where he so often spent the night, than in the offices of Saigon.

  “In uniform or out, he was a born leader of men. Personally fearless, he never asked anyone to do what he wouldn’t do himself. To him the role of a leader was to lead, regardless of the risk. He was the epitome of the ‘can do’ guy. And I’ve never met one among the thousands of men who served with or under John who didn’t admire him. He educated and inspired a whole wartime generation of Vietnamese and Americans—as our teacher, our colleague, our institutional memory, our hair-shirt, and our friend.”

  Komer was swept up by the occasion and by what he was saying. His voice rose into a high pitch it acquired whenever he felt great emotion. He spoke his words sharply and distinctly. He said it was fitting that Vann should be buried in Arlington.

  “For he was the highest type of professional soldier, whose last tour fulfilled his secret longing to be back in command of American troops. But John was more than a professional soldier. He understood well that firepower alone was not the answer to Vietnam’s travail.

  “Let us hope,” Komer said, trying to be positive even on this day, “that his real monument will be the free and peaceful South Vietnam for which he fought so well.

  “Yet whether or not this tragic conflict ends with that aim fulfilled, all of us who served with Vann will long remember him. He is not a man who will be easily forgotten. So we salute one of the authentic heroes of a grim and unpopular war, who gave all of himself to the cause he served, finally even his life. No, we shan’t forget you, John. You were the best we had to give.”

  Ellsberg, who had worked with Komer and had once been friendly with him, did not feel any friendship toward him today, even at Komer’s praise of the friend they had shared. He felt alienated from Komer and others in the chapel who still supported the war. “Yes,” he said to himself in an angry play on Komer’s last words, “he was the best we had to give away.”

  The chaplain said the concluding prayers and a benediction, and then the head usher announced: “Everyone please rise.” The assembly stood up. The organist began to play a hymn. The coffin was wheeled back down the aisle, this time preceded by the official pallbearers. They formed two lines of honor, one along each side of the green canvas archway leading out from the center door of the portico, for the coffin to pass through as it followed them from the chapel. The generals and the South Vietnamese Army colonel saluted and the civilians placed their right hands over their hearts when the coffin was lifted off the wheeled frame and placed on the caisson trimmed in black bunting and hitched to the six gray horses that had been waiting in the sun. The drum major raised his silver mace high into the air and brought it down sharply. The band struck up a march for the procession to the grave three-fifths of a mile away through the gate and down the cemetery road.

  The band led the way, playing the march that Mary Jane had requested for Vann because it had been his favorite. It was a tune of unbroken will, “The Colonel Bogie March” from the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. He had bought a record of the march after he had seen the movie and had never seemed to tire of listening to it. The honor guard, the color bearers, the pallbearers in two files, and the chaplain marched in sequence behind the band. Next came the horses drawing the caisson, followed by the family in black Cadillac limousines lent by an armaments and aerospace firm for which Vann had briefly worked as an executive in between his retirement from the Army and his return to Vietnam. Despite the heat and the distance, many in the assembly chose to walk behind the limousines out of respect for Vann rather than to ride in their own cars.

  They passed, most without noticing them, the monuments to the “splendid little war” with Spain in 1898 which had thrust the western frontier of the United States across the Pacific from San Francisco to Manila and inaugurated the American imperial age whose confident enthusiasm this gathering was symbolically laying to rest today. The first monument was the memorial to the 385 men killed in action in the whole of that war, less than a week’s battle deaths at the height of the war in Vietnam. It was a tall memorial, a round column of buff marble topped by a globe, and it conveyed the ambition of that beginning. A bronze band of stars from “Old Glory” ringed this globe of 1898. An eagle sat astride it and surveyed the earth, holding the arrows of war in its talons, ready to loose them at a challenge. As the procession moved along, a second monument rose in the near distance off to the left. It was the mast of the USS Maine, salvaged from the hulk of the battleship that had mysteriously blown up and sunk in Havana harbor, killing 266 of her officers and crew and giving an eager America the opportunity to seize what an old and corrupt Spain was no longer able to defend. A bit farther down the cemetery road the procession passed another monument, this one low and spike-shaped and hewn with deliberate roughness out of gray stone. It was the memorial to the dead of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, the “Rough Riders” Alsop’s granduncle had recruited and helped lead to glory in that all too easy commencement.

  There was no fresh earth at Vann’s grave to remind one of the battlefields in Vietnam. The grave had been dug in a grove of maples on a rise that looked down toward the white marble of the Memorial Amphitheater and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier where the Unknowns of World War I and World War II and the Korean War lay. The succession of wars had made the American military practiced at rites for the living and the dead. When ceremonies were held on the front lawn of the Pentagon in winter, the frost-browned grass was dyed green. The authorities had taken care to make certain that everything here at Arlington was also presentable. The gravediggers had covered the dirt with carpets of what is called cemetery grass, an ersatz grass like the Astroturf that is used for artificial playing fields. Two rows of folding steel chairs with green slipcovers had been set up off to the right side of the grave for the family and close relatives.

  Mary Jane was sitting next to a door in the backseat of the first limousine in the procession. When Edward Kennedy had walked over to the air-conditioned Cadillac in front of the chapel to give her his sympathy, she had opened the door window to let him speak to her. She had forgotten to close the window, and so she heard another tune as soon as the band started to play it after the horses pulling the caisson hailed before the grave. She had not expected to hear this song. During the flight from Denver to Washington two days earlier she had asked the Army liaison officer to have th
e band play it beside the grave. She had repeated the request several times since, most recently this morning on the way to Arlington. She had thought that the authorities would consider the song inappropriate for the state funeral of a hero of the war and would forbid it. But the drum major set the band to playing the song at the moment when eight sergeants in dress blues, four on each side, grasped the handle railings of the coffin and lifted it off the caisson. Mary Jane was moved when she heard it. She wondered if the drum major and the men in the band shared her feelings about the war and what the war had done and if this was why they were fulfilling her wish. She thought that anyone else at the funeral who heard the song and knew it would understand much of the message she was trying to convey.

  The song was called “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” It had originated in the antiwar movement. Then it had caught on among the American soldiers in Vietnam and had eventually become a popular song of the era, perhaps the best-known song of Vietnam, a song that made one think of the war whenever it was played. The verses and refrain were simple and cumulative, and the band played through them while the sergeants carried the coffin to the grave.

  Where have all the flowers gone?

  Long time passing.

  Where have all the flowers gone?

  Long time ago.

  Where have all the flowers gone?

  Gone to young girls every one.

  When will they ever learn?

  When will they ever learn?

  This was Mary Jane’s song, as “The Colonel Bogie March” had been John’s. It was a song of the sadness she felt as a mother for all of the young men who had died in the war; it was a song of the ravaging of her son Jesse by the structure of authority that had made the war, because he had opposed that authority and the war; it was a song of the ruined hopes of the marriage she had dreamed of in her youth; it was a song of the death of a man she had not wanted to die, because she had loved him despite all that had happened between them.