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

by Neil Sheehan

  The lieutenant had a long wait for the whiskey. Krulak’s diversion worked a bit too well. As he and his approximately 600 Marines made their last raid they found several thousand Japanese whom they had attracted from Bougainville waiting for them. It was nip and tuck getting back into the landing craft. Krulak was wounded twice. He was awarded the Navy Cross for refusing to relinquish command and accept treatment until the evacuation was completed. During a lengthy recovery at hospitals in the United States, he forgot about his promise of the bottle of whiskey.

  He remembered it when the lieutenant was elected president of the United States. Not long after John Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, Krulak, by then a major general, bought a fifth of Three Feathers and left it at the White House with a note that said, as well as he could recall years later:

  Dear Mr. President,

  You’ve probably forgotten about this, but I’ve remembered it and here is the bottle of whiskey I promised you.

  The president was delighted. Kennedy remembered the promised whiskey and the heroic Marine lieutenant colonel he had looked up to when he was a junior naval officer with the same nostalgia he recalled all his experiences in World War II. He was fond of talking about those adventures and would do so at any opportunity. He came home a war hero himself. He was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal after another torpedo boat he commanded, PT-109, was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer and Kennedy pulled one of his injured sailors four miles through the water to safety, gripping the ties of the man’s life jacket with his teeth so that he could swim. The story of PT-109 and her brave skipper helped elect him to Congress during his first campaign in Massachusetts in 1946, but these adventures meant much more to John Kennedy than grist for political advancement. World War II had also been his formative experience. Those simple and glorious years were a time when he had tested his manhood and the values of the Anglo-Saxon culture of the Northeastern United States in which he had grown up. The PT boats were the roughest riding vessels in the U.S. Navy and Kennedy had volunteered for them despite a chronically bad back that lesser men would have used to avoid the war altogether. He was the first of the junior officers of World War II to rise to commander in chief. He brought to the presidency the attitudes toward life and the world molded by that war and he tended to hold in special regard those who had shown their mettle in the same test. He invited Krulak to the White House. They enjoyed a ceremonial drink of the Three Feathers while they reminisced. Kennedy then screwed the cap back on the bottle and put the whiskey away as a keepsake.

  In February 1962, when a general had been needed for a Kennedy innovation, a counterguerrilla warfare specialist on the staff of the Joint Chiefs, the president instructed his brother Robert, his attorney general and also his overseer of the government, to see that the post went to Krulak. Most generals would have been disappointed at the assignment, because guerrilla warfare is out of the mainstream and unlikely to further their careers over the long run. Krulak was not unhappy. He understood how much the president feared a wave of Communist-led “wars of national liberation,” and he knew that he had been chosen for the job because he was the president’s favorite Marine general. Performing well at a task of particular interest to the president could lead to other things.

  During the year since Krulak had been appointed special assistant for counterinsurgency he had also become the favorite Marine general of Robert Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy and Brute Krulak hit it off easily because the two men admired in each other qualities that they esteemed in themselves. Krulak was struck by what a “quick study” Bobby Kennedy was, and he liked the iron the president’s brother could display when a situation called for it.

  As the four-engine jet transport carrying Krulak and the other members of the Joint Chiefs’ mission set down at Tan Son Nhut on the morning of January 18, 1963, Krulak was conscious that the president and his brother would expect him to assure them if they were still on the right course, or, if they had gone wrong, to warn them of what they ought to do differently in order to win. McNamara, who had also come to value Krulak, had not hidden his concern. He was troubled over the press reports of how the Saigon forces had behaved at Bac, and the downing of five helicopters in one battle had shaken him. Before the team left the Pentagon, he told Krulak that the administration had to have a fresh appraisal of the war. Krulak had noted to himself that if McNamara was worried, he could be certain that the president and Bobby Kennedy were worried too.

  The four-star Army general who was the team leader followed the custom of the era and let Harkins and his staff arrange the itinerary in South Vietnam. Harkins knew the team’s purpose from the cables that preceded it. Most of the fighting was taking place south of Saigon. Harkins had the team spend most of its time in the capital or north of Saigon in the mountains of the Central Highlands and in the coastal provinces of Central Vietnam. He believed that he was making progress more rapidly there because, except in some sections of the Highlands, he was encountering less resistance. Harkins was encountering less resistance in Central Vietnam because the Viet Cong already held clandestine control of so much of the peasantry there that they did not feel the same need to contest the population. They preferred to concentrate their effort in Vann’s area, where the issue was still in doubt.

  One day out of the eight the team spent in the country was allotted to the Delta. That day did not include a visit to My Tho or anywhere else in the 7th Division zone to question Vann and his advisors about the events that had provoked the Joint Chiefs, with encouragement from the White House, to send this august group to Vietnam. The Delta portion consisted instead of briefings at Cao’s IV Corps headquarters at Can Tho and then a visit to Fred Ladd’s 21st Division area in the southern half of the Delta, which had largely been lost to the Communists. There is no indication in the records that any member of the mission, including Krulak, felt that this was perhaps not the best way to conduct an investigation. (Nor could anyone afterward remember feeling uneasy.) It was not lack of time that kept the group from visiting My Tho or that limited them to one day in the Delta. Their stay in Vietnam was doubled from an originally projected four days because the prominent Army general heading the team came down with the flu. He was still too ill to go to Can Tho on the appointed day. His senior aide, a highly regarded colonel who had spent a year in Vietnam as an advisor at the Saigon command level from 1958 to 1959 and who was one day to attain three-star rank himself, went as the team chiefs representative. Krulak and the lieutenant general who was then chief of operations for the Army also flew down for briefings by Porter and Cao.

  Asked about his briefing many years later, Porter could not recollect details. He was certain he would not have hidden anything from these generals. His commentary and recommendation to Harkins had already put him into more professional disfavor than he had ever previously dared to incur in his career. There would have been no reason for him to be coy. Two days before the team’s arrival in Vietnam he had forwarded to Saigon Vann’s report and his summing up of all that was wrong with Diem’s armed forces. He would have assumed at the time of his briefing that Harkins would not conceal the report from a mission like this. He was sure he must have spoken frankly, believing that these generals were familiar with his views and would question him on anything they wished to explore further. He was able to recall that no one interrogated him to any degree. The issues were so emotional that if anyone of this rank had questioned him closely, he would have remembered it.

  Bob York also happened to be at Can Tho then. To the best of his memory, no one on the mission asked him on that day or on any other the main question the Joint Chiefs had posed: “Are we winning or are we losing?” York had previously briefed the team on the experimental work with weapons and tactics that he was supervising for the Pentagon. He had described the role of the Hueys at Bac because they were in his domain. Otherwise he had not elaborated on the battle. York had the strength and weakness of Porter. He was an individualist with an inquiring mind,
and his character was beyond reproach. He was also a man molded by his institution who put faith in its mores. He was not the sort to violate the chain of command by starting to preach out of turn to these senior officers. He had provided Harkins, who was responsible as the commanding general, with his confidential analysis of the battle and his warning of what it portended. The choice of whether to share this analysis with the members of the team belonged to Harkins. For York to have made copies and distributed them on his own would have been going behind Harkins’s back. York did not behave that way. He would have been free to give his opinions had any of the visitors asked for them. None did. He recalled that the conversation at the luncheon after the briefings by Porter and Cao was nonchalant. These generals from the Pentagon were not anxious about anything.

  After lunch Fred Ladd took Krulak, the team leader’s aide, and the general who was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations into the southern Delta to view an operation by his 21st Division and to visit an SDC outpost on the coast of the South China Sea. Ladd’s diary entries indicate the trip was what is called a “look-see” in the military. He took a photograph of the outpost and pasted it into the diary. Ladd could not remember being questioned at any length about the state of the war.

  Porter was correct in assuming that Harkins would not conceal from the mission Vann’s after-action report and his catalogue of the flaws in the Saigon forces. Harkins made both available to the members of the team. The team leader’s aide, a considerably more perceptive officer than the starred man for whom he worked, read them carefully and showed them to his general. He also called Vann up to Saigon and had Vann brief him on the battle and on Vann’s assessment of the war. He remembered that Vann’s estimate was the antithesis of what they were hearing from Harkins. Krulak did not talk to Vann, but he recalled reading the after-action report and Porter’s indictment. In addition, the colonel probably filled him in on what Vann said in the private briefing because it had already been decided that the colonel and Krulak would draft the mission’s written report to the Joint Chiefs.

  These generals were therefore confronted with the truth in Vietnam, despite wasting most of their time on Harkins’s tourist excursions. They received more than the fallible opinions of Vann and Porter. They were given, in the appendices to the main report, eyewitness accounts by sixteen of the advisors who witnessed the shambles. Their minds rejected what their eyes read. Krulak, for example, had only a vague memory of the report. He recalled deciding that Vann and his field advisors and Porter were being unduly harsh in their appraisal of the performance of the Saigon army because they were comparing it to the standards of their U.S. Army model. One could not expect such standards of Diem’s forces, he remembered thinking, and the important thing was that the Saigon troops were out in the field.

  To conclude that any army could behave as badly as Diem’s forces had in the Battle of Ap Bac and win a war against a competent and dedicated opponent was manifestly absurd. Yet this was precisely what the Joint Chiefs’ mission, urged on by Harkins and Krulak, concluded.

  At a top-secret “debrief” (military jargon for an oral report) convened shortly after the group landed in Hawaii for the admirals and generals at the headquarters there of Commander in Chief Pacific, the Army general heading the team was enthusiastic about the course of the war in Vietnam. Admiral Felt was away, but his chief of staff attended for him, and a transcript was made from a tape recording for the benefit of other senior officers who might be absent. ‘There is no question,” the team leader said in summarizing the mission’s findings, “that in the military field in the past year we have established what I would call the human and matériel infrastructure which can be the basis for a successful military operation.” He attributed this encouraging state of affairs to inspired generalship by Harkins. “If it were not for General Harkins things would not be in the state we found them by any manner of means,” he said. “It would be pretty deplorable. His own attitude and leadership have permeated the whole command…”

  The head of the team was also impressed with the man Lansdale had installed in Saigon. “Mr. Diem struck me as being both an energetic and knowledgeable man, and most articulate.” If anything, the general went on to explain, Diem was too articulate. Harkins had taken him to a two-and-a-half-hour meeting with Diem, and the four-star visitor from the Pentagon had found it difficult to say much himself. “The great problem with the president is getting an opportunity to say something to him, because he is a pretty fast man with the words.” Nevertheless, the team chief concluded that Diem “certainly knows his country and I think knows his people. He is a leader in the same sense that we think of political leadership to a high degree of success.” Diem’s government was “immature” and “fumbling in carrying out significant programs,” but the general suspected that these shortcomings were due primarily to the social and intellectual backwardness of “the Asiatic or the Vietnamese character,” rather than to any lack of capability by Diem.

  One device the regime was using for population control fascinated this Army general because he had been told it had the side benefit of gaining the goodwill of the peasantry. It was the requirement that everyone in a strategic hamlet carry an ID card with the person’s photograph and thumbprint on the card. Having to obtain and carry an ID card “certainly would not be appealing … to the American population,” the general said, but Vietnamese peasants were different. “The people think that this is the finest thing since canned beer because it indicates to them that the government loves them, has an interest in them. … They don’t regard this as harassment or as a means of keeping tabs on them, which, of course, it is; but here you are.”

  Krulak kept any doubts from entering the discussion after a general at CINCPAC headquarters asked when Harkins was going to start his Operation Explosion offensive to reduce the Viet Cong to remnant bands. The team leader said that Harkins had been “pretty cagey on this one,” that when he had asked about it Harkins had replied: “I’m not going to tell anybody when I start this campaign.” (Harkins had reason to be cagey. He had apparently not informed the team chief that Diem was stalling him. He and his staff had drawn up a plan and had had it translated into Vietnamese, but he was unable to persuade Diem to have the Joint General Staff issue the plan as their own. Although Diem thought he had Harkins well tamed, his painfully suspicious nature still led him to worry that Harkins might be trying to entice him into big engagements with the Viet Cong. Ap Bac exacerbated his fear. Despite continued pleas from Harkins, the paper offensive was not to begin on paper until July i, 1963.) “It might be useful to approach it [Harkins’s offensive] from the viewpoint that it’s already begun—and it has,” Krulak said. “They are doing so very much more than they were a year ago that I think you might lay the ‘Explosion’ ghost [to rest] by saying that there is no beginning. It is a natural outgrowth of what has been going on for a year.” The team leader underscored Krulak’s logic. “I had them [Harkins and his staff] give me a rundown the other day of operations going on in Vietnam the length and breadth of the country … and Harkins told me an average of four hundred and fifty a month. … Now this is a step in the right direction, you see. It’s an offensive operation.”

  “Even if they don’t find them it’s good,” said the CINCPAC general.

  (In an ironic footnote to this parody of high strategy, the meeting was being held in a headquarters named Camp H. M. Smith in memory of Krulak’s World War II patron and idol. The place had once been the Pearl Harbor naval hospital. The Navy had abandoned the hospital back in the 1950s and wanted to sell it to a developer who would tear it down and build a tourist hotel. Krulak had persuaded his superiors to rehabilitate the place for headquarters use and dedicate the installation to Holland Smith.)

  After the session at Camp Smith the group moved over to several VIP cottages at Fort de Russy, a small military enclave that existed at the time on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, to give Krulak and the team leader’s aide tranquillity i
n which to write the report. The aide’s contribution naturally reflected the views of his general. The other members of the team approved the draft before the final typing.

  The report of the Joint Chiefs’ mission provided an unequivocating response to the question of whether the United States and its Saigon surrogate were winning or losing. “The situation in South Vietnam has been reoriented, in the space of a year and a half, from a circumstance of near desperation to a condition where victory is now a hopeful prospect.” There was no need for any drastic alternatives. “We are winning slowly on the present thrust, and … there is no compelling reason to change.” The specifics of the report were as cheerful as its broad statements. Where Harkins’s Explosion offensive was concerned, Krulak managed to get in his opinion that it had “already begun” and “offers reasonable prospects for improving greatly the military situation.” The separate three-years-to-victory plan that Harkins’s staff had composed at McNamara’s request was also “a generally sound basis for planning the phase-out of United States support” by the end of 1965. The newspaper reports the president and Robert Kennedy and McNamara had been reading of advisors’ complaints that the Saigon officers ignored their advice were at best exaggerations and at worst false. “United States advice will be increasingly followed as Government of Vietnam confidence in themselves and their advisors continues to grow.”