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

by Neil Sheehan

  When Porter jumped from the helicopter with the assault troops he did not meet any guerrillas on whom to expend the adrenaline he had built up for the attack. Instead he found the corpses of several older men and women among the houses that the napalm had set ablaze. He then heard a sound he thought he recognized amid the snapping of the burning wood and thatch. He followed it and found a baby lying in the mud, crying hysterically for his mother. Porter was unable to locate her. She was apparently dead or hiding somewhere. He had the baby flown out to an orphanage. No guerrillas were contacted in the vicinity, and there were no foxholes or other evidence that they had been in the hamlet recently. The place probably had been under Viet Cong control, because of its location in a guerrilla-dominated region and the fact that young men were nowhere to be seen. Just as obviously there had been no Viet Cong in the hamlet when the fighter-bombers had struck, or the guerrillas had been experienced enough to sidestep harm as soon as they spotted the L-19 of the forward air controller overhead. The planes had killed the people whom Porter thought he had come to South Vietnam to protect from the Communists.

  Vann shared Porter’s ideal of the soldier as the champion of the weak. A soldier who valued his honor and understood the purpose of his profession did not deliberately kill or wound ordinary people. His trips around the corps region prior to taking charge at the Seminary and his experience with the division taught Vann that Porter had not been exaggerating. On at least fifteen occasions during his first year in Vietnam, Vann was to see old men, women, and children killed by air and artillery bombardments. In each case their deaths were unnecessary.

  Captain Binh, Drummond’s counterpart, remembered an incident one day during an operation in Kien Hoa Province south of My Tho. A number of peasants had been killed in an air strike, and an elderly woman had been gravely wounded. Vann radioed for a helicopter to evacuate her to the province hospital. Binh watched him pick her up and carry her to the aircraft, cradling her in his arms and lifting her carefully into the door for the two crewmen to take her from him and lay her on a stretcher. As the pilots opened up the engine’s throttle for takeoff and Vann turned and jogged out from under the rotor blades, Binh noticed that his fatigue shirt and pants were smeared with blood from the woman’s wound. “That American really cares,” Binh said to himself. “No Vietnamese officer would do that.” He walked over to Vann to tell him that he too was sorry, but when he reached Vann they looked at each other and Binh was unable to say anything.

  The willy-nilly killing and maiming enraged Vann, not only because it contradicted his ideal of his profession, but also because it struck him as the worst conceivable way to fight this war. A counterguerrilla war surely required the strictest possible controls on air and artillery. He wondered how any American could think that Vietnamese peasants who lost family members and friends and homes would not be as angry as American farmers would have been, and these Vietnamese farmers had an alternative army and government asking for their allegiance and offering them revenge.

  Vann had initially found it difficult to believe the utter lack of discrimination and capriciousness with which fighter-bombers and artillery were turned loose. A single shot from a sniper was enough to stop a battalion while the captain in charge called for an air strike or an artillery barrage on the hamlet from which the sniper had fired. Vann would argue with the captain and later with Cao that it was ridiculous to let one sniper halt a whole battalion and criminal to let the sniper provoke them into smashing a hamlet. Why didn’t they send a squad to maneuver around the sniper and scare him off or kill him while the battalion continued its advance? If they did that they would lose a soldier to a sniper every once in a while, but death was the risk of an infantryman’s trade. People hired an army to protect them, not to blow them up.

  The province and district chiefs kept their 105mm artillery pieces and large 4.2-inch mortars, the equivalent of artillery, positioned freely so that they could rotate them 360 degrees and shoot in any direction. During one of his first operations in another division area, Vann had stayed late in the command-post tent to work on some notes of the day’s events and had been alone with the Vietnamese duty officer and a few enlisted men. A voice came up on the radio. The duty officer picked up the microphone and, after a brief exchange with whoever was calling, walked over to the map, checked something on it, and then returned to the radio to give a quick reply.

  “What’s going on?” Vann asked.

  “That was the district chief. He wanted to know if we have any troops in this hamlet over here,” the duty officer said, pointing at the place on the map. “He says he’s got a report from an agent that VC are in the hamlet and he wants to shoot at them.”

  “What did you tell him?” Vann asked.

  “I told him we don’t have anybody out there,” the duty officer replied.

  “But what about the people who live in that hamlet?” Vann asked. The duty officer shrugged. Several miles away a howitzer began to sound in the night.

  Vann discovered that the same practice held throughout the 7th Division zone. A province or a district chief was liable to start tossing artillery shells in any direction at any hour of the day or night. They did not even need an unverified report from a clandestine agent that yesterday or the day before some guerrillas had gathered in a neighboring hamlet. (Vann noticed that these agents, whom the province and district chiefs recruited with their secret funds and paid for each report, did not provoke shellings or air strikes on hamlets where their families lived.) The Saigon officers supplemented these agent reports with their own version of an artillery tactic called harassment and interdiction fire, or H&I as it was commonly known, which had originated in the static trench fighting of World War I. As the spirit moved them day or night, the province and district chiefs and the major ARVN unit commanders would pick out places on the map—the ford of a canal or stream, a crossing of trails, a clump of water palm jungle, any place they guessed some Viet Cong might conceivably be at that particular moment—and would shoot at these spots. No air or ground observer zeroed the guns beforehand or adjusted the shelling after it started. The gunners calculated the direction and range from the grid coordinates on the map. The fact that the firing was done by the map, without being observed and adjusted, was a small gain for the peasantry. It is difficult to shell effectively from map coordinates alone, and the copies of French Army maps that the ARVN used were so outdated that the hamlet or other target might no longer be located where the map showed it. The irrationality of shooting artillery this way also did not seem to bother the Saigon officers, because nothing was done after a puzzled Vann pointed out this failing too.

  With the exception of a few men like Binh, there was no remorse when, as so frequently happened, the shells and bombs hit noncombatants instead of guerrillas. Vann had managed to persuade Cao to forgo preliminary air or artillery bombardments before helicopter landings with the argument that they gave away surprise and were unnecessary because of the shock effect of the helicopters on the guerrillas. Otherwise, all of his reasoning and pleading and cursing went for naught. Cao and the other officers would tell Vann that the victims were bad people—the families of guerrillas. The battalion commanders whom Vann shouted at for tearing up a hamlet and its inhabitants would lead him over to a tree and show him a Viet Cong flag nailed to it or a propaganda slogan on the wall of a house that was still standing. John Vann had come to Vietnam to wage war on other men, not on their mothers and fathers or on their wives and children. That these people were relatives of guerrillas, and undoubtedly did sympathize with the Viet Cong and helped them, did not strip them of their noncombatant status and make them fair game in his mind. Rather, they were people whom the Saigon government ought to be seeking to win over by fair treatment so that they would talk their sons and husbands into deserting the Communist ranks.

  Cao and the other Saigon officers, Vann concluded, wanted to kill these people and destroy their homes and slaughter their livestock, not on a systematic b
asis, but often enough to intimidate them. Their theory of pacification apparently was to terrorize the peasants out of supporting the Viet Cong. For this reason Cao and the province and district chiefs also did nothing to stop the torture and murder. They thought it useful. Their attitude was: “We’ll teach these people a lesson. We’ll show them how strong and tough we are.” The only coherent reply he could ever get out of Cao when they argued about the air strikes and shellings was that the planes and the artillery flaunted the power of the government and made the population respect it. Vann had also been puzzled at first as to why Cao and most of his fellow Saigon officers did not feel any guilt over this butchery and sadism. He had come to see that they regarded the peasantry as some sort of subspecies. They were not taking human life and destroying human homes. They were exterminating treacherous animals and stamping out their dens.

  When Porter and Vann appealed to Harkins to stop this self-defeating slaughter, he turned out to be as dense in his own way as the Saigon commanders. Instead of using his influence to put a halt to the bombardments, he was furthering them. It had been dismaying for Vann to watch himself and Porter lose the argument.

  The general came to the Delta reasonably often, on flying trips with stops for briefings at major headquarters and a couple of the province capitals. His favorite plane was one of those executive aircraft that were assigned to high-level officers, a twin-engine Beechcraft. The fuselage was painted tastefully in white and contrasting Army green. The cabin seated eight at folding desks for work or lunch and had a little coffee bar at the back. Harkins was punctilious in observing military courtesies. Porter was almost always invited along as the ranking American officer for the area. Harkins would also normally bring a senior Vietnamese officer from Saigon, and if he was visiting the 7th Division zone, Vann and Cao would be asked to join him.

  As they flew across the countryside and passed over a Viet Cong-controlled area, Vann and Porter would call Harkins’s attention to the marks of recognition—the ditched roads, the dirt barriers blocking the canals, the ruins of an outpost. When they stretched out the map between the seats on the plane or during the briefing at the stop ahead, Cao and the Vietnamese officer from Saigon would point to a “Viet Cong hamlet” here and a “VC arms factory” there. “We must bomb it,” Cao would say.

  Having heard so many complaints from Vann and Porter, Harkins would ask if the place was not filled with ordinary people.

  “No, no, they are all Viet Cong,” Cao would answer.

  “Absolutely, all of them have been corrupted by the Communists,” the officer from Saigon would add.

  The moment they were alone afterward, Porter and Vann would explain to Harkins that the “Viet Cong hamlet” was just like many other peasant hamlets in the Delta. The Viet Cong occasionally used it to stay in overnight, and it had a pesky squad of local guerrillas who gave the district chief trouble. The squad would probably escape unscathed if the place was bombed. They had hideaways into which they would jump as soon as the planes appeared. The several hundred other inhabitants would not be so well prepared, and some of them might also panic and get killed out in the open. The Viet Cong taught the peasants to dig cave shelters under the sleeping platforms rural Vietnamese cover with mats of woven straw and use as beds. This expedient gave the peasants a handy shelter right inside the house, unless that house happened to be one of those set afire by the napalm or the white phosphorus, called Willy Peter in U.S. military idiom. The family inside the little cave would not have the time or the battle training to evacuate the shelter. They would be asphyxiated. As for the “VC arms factory” Cao had also put his finger on, Vann and Porter would explain that they had intelligence reports that the Viet Cong were fabricating shotguns out of galvanized pipe in that particular hamlet. The “factory” consisted of one house indistinguishable from those of the peasants. Whether it would be one of the houses hit if the hamlet was bombed was a roll of the dice.

  Harkins would resist accepting what they had to say. He would look at them with disbelief when they said that Cao and the senior Saigon officer were not telling him the truth. They got the impression that the words “Viet Cong hamlet” and “VC arms factory” conjured up in his mind World War II images of a German barracks and a munitions plant. Harkins’s trips out of Saigon did not extend to marching with the infantry. He therefore never saw anything to contradict these preconceived images. Nor could Vann and Porter get Harkins to agree that, as Vann summed up for Ziegler, the bombing and shelling “kills many, many more civilians than it ever does VC and as a result makes new VC.” Vann and Porter would usually be overruled and the hamlets would be bombed. Harkins also did not stop the abuse of artillery. He could have forced restrictions on the Saigon officers by rationing shells.

  The senior advisors to the other two divisions in the corps agreed with Porter and Vann that the bombardments were politically damaging and militarily useless. One of them was the sort of lieutenant colonel whose opinion a general customarily notes, Lt. Col. Jonathan “Fred” Ladd, forty-one, the senior advisor to the 21st ARVN Infantry Division in the southern half of the Delta. His father, the late Brig. Gen. Jesse Ladd, had been a well-liked if not prominent figure in the small officer corps of the old Regular Army, a friend and former superior of Eisenhower, and was remembered by some of the men who wore stars in the Army of 1962. Maj. Gen. William Westmoreland, one of the Army’s most promising generals in the freshness of the early 1960s, had briefly served as Jesse Ladd’s chief of staff when Jesse Ladd had commanded the 9th Infantry Division near the end of his career. Fred Ladd was expected to go far in the Army because of his own exceptional record. He had been an aide to Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur at the outset of the war in Korea, won a Distinguished Flying Cross there while working for Mac Arthur’s chief of staff, and later served in the infantry. His captains at the 21st ARVN Division were the same high-spirited crowd as Vann’s. Among them was Paul Raisig, Jr., who, years later as a colonel, was to play a major role in the reorganization of the Army.

  Harkins had shown some interest in Ladd’s judgment on other matters, but not on this issue of civilian casualties from artillery and air strikes. The discussions had acquired a way of ending with Harkins giving his de facto consent when Cao or another Saigon officer would raise the subject of a “VC arms factory” or some similar “target.” The general would ask with a tone more of decision than inquiry: “Then why don’t you blast it off the map?” He indicated to Porter and Vann that he was tired of hearing about civilian casualties. He did continue to listen to their complaints with civility.

  Not so Brig. Gen. Rollen “Buck” Anthis, the handsome pilot who led the U.S. Air Force component of Harkins’s command. The name Porter was a bad word at the headquarters of Anthis’s 2nd Air Division at Tan Son Nhut. The Air Force had gained more influence than any of the other services over its Saigon counterpart and had formed what amounted to a Vietnamese-American air force with the VNAF. The Joint Air Operations Center at Tan Son Nhut, which controlled fighter-bomber missions throughout South Vietnam, was staffed and run, for all practical purposes, by American officers. General Anthis had answered Porter’s first complaints by saying that Porter must be exaggerating or seeing isolated incidents. Porter had been unacceptably direct with a general officer. He had invited Anthis to come down and take a look at the corpses of the women and children his pilots were killing. Porter renewed the invitation every time Vann’s harping on the issue moved him to protest to Anthis again. Anthis reacted with irritation to the first invitation and with increased hostility each time Porter renewed it. They went round and round over the same arguments. Well, perhaps some innocent people were getting hurt, but this was an inevitable tragedy of the war, Anthis would concede in the time-tested “War is hell” theme. It was not a question of some noncombatants, it was a question of mostly noncombatants, and this was not an ordinary war, Porter would counter. Porter had to be exaggerating, Anthis would say; the commander of the VNAF and the ARVN officers he met
told him that most of the casualties were guerrillas and that the bombing was hurting the Communists a great deal. He was being deceived, Porter would tell Anthis, and try to set him straight with the latest report from Vann on how the bombing was driving “these people right into the arms of the Viet Cong.” Anthis would refuse to accept the possibility that his bombs could be a boon to the Communists. Porter would challenge again, if Anthis wasn’t afraid of the truth, why didn’t he come down and see for himself who his planes were hitting? Anthis would fall back on a legal argument. He and his people didn’t initiate any of the bombings. The air strikes were all conducted at the request of the country’s legal authorities—the responsible ARVN officers and the province and district chiefs.

  “But you wouldn’t honor the request for the strike if you thought you would kill women and kids and old folks, would you?” Porter would ask.

  “No, but we don’t request the strikes, the Vietnamese do,” Anthis would reply. He would stay in this circle of legal absolution, refusing to budge as Porter tried to force him out of it, until he got angry enough to end the argument. He had yet to accept Porter’s invitation.

  Porter had enough seniority as a full colonel and a corps advisor to take on an Air Force general and get away with it. Vann did not. He was fortunate never to have had an opportunity to confront Anthis or he might not have remained at 7th Division long enough to become Harkins’s star advisor. He understood what Porter was up against with Anthis. Every service wanted as big a role as possible in Vietnam as soon as Kennedy committed the United States to the war. The more the Air Force bombed, the bigger its role. If air power was restricted the way it ought to be, the Air Force would not have much to do in Vietnam. It was in Anthis’s personal interest and the interest of his institution to believe that the bombing furthered the war effort, and so he believed it. Letting himself be confronted with the corpses of women and children would inhibit his ability to bomb with enthusiasm. Vann did not blame the Air Force for being the institutional creature it was. The fault lay with Harkins for not grasping the nature of the war and curbing institutional proclivities.