by Neil Sheehan
Vann was hoping too that Porter would arouse something beyond anger with his final report as corps senior advisor, which Porter was going to submit to Harkins shortly before his departure on February 17 to take up a staff post at Fort Hood, Texas. Vann knew the essentials of what Porter would say, because Porter had discussed them with him and Fred Ladd when he had called them to Can Tho to write a preliminary draft for a section on the views of the division senior advisors. The subsequent drafts and the shaping of the report as a whole were entirely Porter’s work. He wanted to make this record so that he could leave Vietnam and the Army with a clear conscience. He had requested Fort Hood because his hometown of Belton was nearby. He had an elderly mother to take care of there, and he expected the assignment at Hood to be his last before he retired to the place where he had been born.
Porter designed his last report to be more alarming than his commentary on Vann’s chronicle of Ap Bac. He delineated the major fallacies in the entire U.S.-Saigon war effort in the Delta and the provinces of the rubber-plantation country north of the capital. (He had a right to speak of this region too because it had been part of his responsibility under the old III Corps boundaries.) He omitted nothing, including the illusion that the Strategic Hamlet Program was isolating the population from the guerrillas. He took additional care to ensure that the report could not be dismissed as the personal opinion of Dan Porter. Vann and Ladd were not the only advisors he consulted. He also tested his conclusions with the senior members of his staff, the senior advisor to the 5th Division north of Saigon, and with all of the regimental advisors. He said this in the report, stating that the conclusions therefore represented the consensus of the advisors. To translate Porter’s message into Harkins’s World War II terms, the majority of Harkins’s commanders at the most critical sector of the front were warning him that his estimate of the situation was a pipe dream.
Because they were old friends and he knew how General York felt, Porter showed him a nearly final draft. Was he being too blunt? Porter asked. Bob York said that he had encountered a concrete wall in his continued attempts to influence Harkins, but Porter was speaking with the authority of a year in the country and the report was a consensus. No, Porter was not being too blunt, York said. He urged Porter to hurry the report to Harkins.
Harkins was outwardly cordial when Porter stopped by for a short farewell chat. A recommendation to award Porter the Legion of Merit for a year of distinguished service was going forward, the general said. He did not mention Porter’s final report. Several members of Harkins’s staff had not been so evasive before Porter went in to see the general. They told Porter that Harkins was disgusted with him and considered him a disloyal member of the team. Porter could sense the anger beneath Harkins’s politeness. He knew what Harkins was thinking: “Who in the hell does this country bumpkin of a Reserve colonel think he is, telling me how to fight a war?” Being in the presence of a four-star general usually made Porter slightly nervous, even when the general was as friendly as Harkins had been to him in easier days. On this occasion Porter was calm. For the first time in the nearly thirty-one years since he had earned his second lieutenant’s bars in the Texas National Guard, Dan Porter was not worried about the approval of a general. If he had to make Harkins mad to force him to see the truth, then that was the way it had to be. He had done his job and he was going home.
Scrupulous nicety of behavior can be counterproductive in large bureaucracies governed by manipulative individuals. Porter’s honesty cost him the record he wished to leave. He was so afraid that someone might leak a copy of his final report to the press because of the growing resentment among the field advisors over Harkins’s attitude that he typed the last draft himself, destroyed his earlier drafts, had Winter-bottom classify the report Top Secret, and personally delivered it in a sealed envelope to Harkins’s chief of staff. Porter’s scruples also forbade him to retain a copy for himself, as officers of his rank frequently do when they write a report of this moment. As soon as Porter left the country, Harkins checked to see whether he had every copy. He satisfied himself that he did and announced to his staff that if Porter’s final report ever went to Washington, it would go in properly sanitized form. The final report vanished. Porter was also not called to the Pentagon on his way to Fort Hood for a debriefing on his experience as was supposed to be done with senior advisors. Harkins arranged that too.
Winterbottom reported honestly on Vann’s February 8 memorandum. “The only thing wrong with what he wrote,” Winterbottom told the commanding general at a staff conference, “is that all of it is true.” He said he had also seen ample evidence to justify Drummond’s overlay revealing the deterioration in the northern Delta. The information did not change Harkins’s mind, and he still wanted to fire Vann. His relationship with Dam had to be unsatisfactory if he was having so much trouble, Harkins said. This time Brig. Gen. Gerald Kelleher, Harkins’s chief of operations, came to Vann’s defense. Kelleher was a rough-hewn infantryman who had won his single star through bravery and battlefield leadership. (He had twice been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, in World War II and in Korea leading a regiment.) Kelleher was cantankerous and narrow-minded on most subjects, but Vann had recently begun to convert him to Vann’s view of the war. Kelleher was the only senior member of Harkins’s staff ever to adopt it actively. York also defended Vann, and Timmes, who kept lengthening the decent interval he had told Harkins he needed to relieve Vann, again urged forebearance to avoid an outcry. Harkins relented.
By now there was considerable dissent within the middle level of the staffs at Harkins’s headquarters and at Timmes’s MAAG. Vann soon learned the fate of Porter’s report and the outcome of Winterbottom’s trip to My Tho. One of Drummond’s sources also informed him that while Winterbottom might have agreed in My Tho that Saigon’s control was deteriorating in the countryside, “that isn’t what went back to Washington.” Harkins had Winterbottom discard Drummond’s overlay and compose another showing far less red and more blue for a gain in the area Saigon held. A report altered like this was not called a false report in the parlance of the American military of the 1960s. It was called a “directed” report. The commander accepted responsibility, and the subordinate concerned supposedly had the moral burden lifted from him.
Unlike Porter, Vann had a way of rationalizing his actions to fit the exigencies of a fight. He was not going to permit Harkins to stop him from sounding the alarm by manipulating the rules. He made up his mind to violate the rules wholesale, and he made Halberstam his instrument. On Halberstam’s next visit to the Seminary in late February, Vann took him into the operations room, closed the door, and sat him down in front of the map of the division zone that covered most of one wall. “Halberstam,” he announced, “I may be a commissioned officer in the United States Army who’s sworn to safeguard classified information, but I’m also an American citizen with a duty to my country. Now listen carefully.” He briefed Halberstam on his February 8 memorandum to Harkins, using the map to point out the locations of the Viet Cong units and to demonstrate how Cao and Dam exploited the improved intelligence Drummond provided them to go where there were no guerrillas. Vann said his ability to do anything about the problem was exhausted. He told Halberstam of Harkins’s refusal to confront Diem and force Diem to reverse his self-defeating policy and how Harkins got mad himself when anyone attempted to confront him with the facts and provoke him into action. Vann laid out the whole tale of Winterbottom’s trip to My Tho and the reception the truth had received after Winterbottom had brought it back to Saigon. The situation must not be allowed to drift, Vann said. The Viet Cong were becoming more formidable every day. If nothing was done the United States and the Vietnamese on the U.S. side were going to pay dearly for this moral cowardice.
“Jesus Christ, have I got a hell of a story,” Halberstam shouted that afternoon as he burst though the door of the makeshift office we shared in the front room of my apartment on a side street in Saigon. (Halberstam and I ha
d formed a working partnership. A reporter for a wire service, as I was then for the UPI, and a correspondent for a newspaper did not compete with each other because of their differing outlets.) The dispatch he cabled on February 28 began by telling readers of the March 1, 1963, edition of the Times that senior ARVN commanders were using intelligence to fake operations and avoid the guerrillas in the entire stretch of country from the 5th Division zone north of the capital down through the whole of the Mekong Delta. (Vann said the fakery was general, and Halberstam and I were able to confirm this by questioning Ladd and his team and sources in the 5th Division advisory detachment.) As the story went on, it narrowed to specific details that made the source of this unusual dispatch obvious to anyone familiar with the message traffic out of the Seminary. Halberstam gave the precise numbers of the Viet Cong company- and platoon-size units that Vann had stated in his secret memorandum. He wrote that the Americans were unable to get Diem’s army to attack any of these units “even with a 7 to 1 advantage, or greater,” and described the most recent phony assault in Vann’s area: “In one of these operations last week, 2,000 troops were used. One guerrilla was killed; one woman and one child were killed in air strikes, and another woman and child seriously wounded by aircraft fire.
“One American advisor,” Halberstam continued, had become so upset over these murderous farces and the consequences for the future of refusing to fight the guerrillas that he had sent “a sharply critical report” to Saigon. The report had been “so controversial” that an investigation had been ordered. Halberstam then quoted verbatim Winterbottom’s response to Harkins: “The only thing wrong with what he wrote is that all of it is true.” He concluded his story by repeating Vann’s accusation that Harkins was, in effect, more interested in staying on friendly terms with Diem and his family than in winning the war.
Vann would have been fired for this outrage had an instance of the “Vann luck” not occurred. Porter’s recommendation to award Vann the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroism in the spotter plane at Bac had by chance been approved in Washington in late February. Two days before Halberstam cabled his dispatch, Timmes pinned the medal on Vann’s starched khaki shirt in a ceremony at the MAAG headquarters. Firing Vann right after decorating him was awkward and would certainly make the scandal in the press that much worse. With Timmes continuing to counsel restraint, Harkins made the mistake of temporizing once more.
John Vann was not deterred in the least by the narrowness of his escape, and he did not waste the month remaining to him in Vietnam. He maintained his newfound role of principal critic of policy via the news dispatches, continuing to educate us and to shape our reporting, arousing in us ever greater admiration for his moral heroism. To keep him out of trouble for a week, Timmes finally did gingerly follow through on the solution he had originally proposed to Harkins and sent Vann on a tour of the Central Highlands and the coastal provinces on the pretext that Timmes wanted a private assessment. Vann was delighted at the opportunity to see the war in the rest of the country. Timmes then sent him off for a two-day visit to the British Jungle Warfare School in Malaya. Vann came back with a tale of how he had managed to get himself assigned to the Gurkhas on the ambushing side. Perhaps the U.S. Army could use some Gurkha advisors, he said. He made sure he found time for the additional task he had set himself this last month. It was to organize material for a briefing campaign he was planning to conduct at the Pentagon to convince every Army general there who would listen to him that Harkins was deceiving the nation’s leadership and that the radical change in policy Vann wanted had to be adopted to avoid defeat. He was scheduled to begin the full ten-month course at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at Fort McNair in Washington in mid-August 1963. From late May until his classes began he was to be assigned to the Army’s Directorate of Special Warfare at the Pentagon, and it was during this time that he intended to wage his personal crusade.
As a format for these anticipated briefings, he was summarizing his views in a four-and-a-half-page document that was officially his final report to Harkins as division senior advisor. The report was a precisely worded and often witty assault on official policy and optimism. He calculated the level of effort the Diem regime was putting into the war in comparison to the level it could expend if it prosecuted the war seriously: “The counterinsurgency effort in this tactical zone is approximately 10–20% of what could reasonably be expected in view of the personnel and resources available.” One of the documents appended to the report as supporting evidence was an analysis, replete with more statistics, to show that the distribution of regular and territorial troops among the seven provinces of the northern Delta bore no relationship to population density, economic and geographic importance, and enemy threat. Instead the allocation—”misallocation” might be a more accurate term—was governed entirely by Diem’s obsession with anticoup measures and by his personal regard for the province chief concerned. Vann was also carrying home with him a file of his earlier after-action reports, including the Ap Bac account and Porter’s commentary, and other reports he had submitted or that his advisors had sent up to him. He intended to use all of this material to write a thesis someday for a doctorate in public administration, a project that he would always be too busy to undertake in subsequent years.
On the morning of April i, 1963, his first year in Vietnam at an end, Vann turned over command of the advisory detachment to his successor in the same manner that he had received it—without ceremony—and drove out the Seminary gate to spend a couple of days in Saigon before flying home. He had said his goodbyes and shaken hands with Dam and the 7th Division staff the previous day. In mid-March he had also written a farewell message to the division, had it translated into Vietnamese and mimeographed, and distributed it to the division staff, to each of the regimental and battalion commanders, and to all of the province chiefs. There was no reproach for the angry exchanges of the past. The message, a long one that ran four legal-length pages, was warm and tactful, a bit touching in the way he let through some of the emotional attachment that had built up in him toward the country and its people. He wanted to part from these Vietnamese whom he had come to know in a moment of friendliness and hope. He said that he was “proud to have shared with you, even in a small way, a part of the burden of limiting and driving back the spread of communism.” He spoke of “your wonderful children and young people” and said he was certain that they would achieve “peace, prosperity, and freedom” someday. As always, there was purpose behind his diplomacy. Most of his message consisted of polite but forceful summaries of each of the lessons he had spent the last ten months seeking without success to impart. A copy of his English original went to all of his advisors as a précis of what they should strive to teach. (A decade later in the mountains of the Central Highlands, an Army lieutenant colonel who had served as a captain in Vietnam during Vann’s first year, and who was back fighting with an ARVN Ranger group, took a frayed copy of the original mimeographed message from his fatigue shirt pocket and showed it to me. He said that a friend had sent it to him in 1963, and he had been so struck by its distilled knowledge that he had preserved it and always carried it with him, reading it over every once in a while to remind himself of what he had to try to attain.)
Bowers, who was also going home, rode up to Saigon with him in the jeep at Vann’s invitation. He knew that Vann was leaving under a career shadow, but it was not etiquette for a sergeant and a lieutenant colonel to discuss the lieutenant colonel’s dispute with the commanding general, and so they reminisced about their ten months together in the Delta. Vann had said to Ziegler, just before Ziegler’s own departure two weeks earlier, that he was going to have to decide whether he had spoiled his prospects in the Army by defying Harkins so boldly.
Early in the afternoon of April 3, 1963, a small crowd gathered in the second-floor restaurant of the passenger terminal at Tan Son Nhut to say goodbye. There were a number of his captains from My Tho, the commanding officers and a few of th
e pilots from two of the helicopter companies, and Halberstam and I and others from the handful of correspondents who had learned so much from him. We were proud and sad for him, proud for the man and what he had sought to achieve, sad for what we were afraid he was going to have to pay for his patriotism. Halberstam had proposed that we give him a memento to express our gratitude for his lessons and to show our admiration for his moral heroism and professional integrity. Vann did not smoke, but a shop on Tu Do, Saigon’s main street, still called Rue Catinat from its name in French days, sold handsome round cigarette boxes fashioned by Cambodian silversmiths for coffee tables. We all contributed, and Halberstam arranged for the shop to engrave our names on the side of the box under the inscription:
To Lt. Col. John Paul Vann
Good Soldier, Good Friend
From His Admirers in the American Press Corps
Halberstam presented the box to Vann with some emotional remarks about how much we and the public who read our reports owed to him. The Saigon customs and passport-control officers were casual in those years. Everyone walked downstairs and out onto the field to the plane with Vann when it was time to board. Halberstam said he had one last thing to tell him: every time we had cabled a story we had worried about hurting his career. We hoped that Vann would pull through professionally. Vann looked up at him quickly. Halberstam remembered his small, tight smile. “You never hurt me any more than I wanted to be hurt,” Vann said.
