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

by Neil Sheehan

  By chance I flew home with Vann, and he was not discouraged about his future in the Army in all of the talking we did during a long flight to San Francisco. I had decided to spend a month’s leave in the United States, because I had not been back to Massachusetts to see my parents in three years. Neither Vann nor I had thought to bring a book, so there was not much to do except talk and sleep. Vann said he would not permit himself the luxury of letting what had happened during his ten months in the Delta get him down. He had done his best and he had learned a lot. He was looking forward to his year at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and then to promotion to full colonel early in his next assignment. (The Industrial College is in the topmost rung of institutional schools that a career officer can attend, the equivalent of the National War College or the Army War College for officers with the logistics speciality that Vann had adopted seven years earlier while a major in Germany to obtain accelerated promotion.) He showed me his farewell message to the division and let me have a copy; I asked for it because I was impressed at what a catechism it was. At the end of the message he conveyed the same intention of persevering in the Army. He invited any of the advisors or Vietnamese officers who wished to do so to write to him at Fort McNair and to visit him and Mary Jane and their family if they happened to pass through Washington. Normally, he said to me, an officer who was marked as a troublemaker never went beyond a full colonel’s eagles. He was game to see if he could become an exception. The Army was his life, he said, and he was not about to let Harkins push him out of it. Time and events, he thought, would vindicate him. In the meantime, he was going to convert every general he could to his point of view in the hope of gaining high-level allies to discredit Harkins.

  In mid-May 1963, after six weeks of leave in El Paso to let the children finish the school term, he and Mary Jane sold their house there, packed and shipped their furniture as they had in so many previous Army moves, and took the family off to Washington. Patricia and John Allen, the eldest, had the treat of flying ahead to Baltimore to meet Mary Jane’s sister and her husband for a week of sightseeing in Virginia at Williamsburg and Jamestown. The three youngest, Jesse, Tommy, and Peter, had to ride all the way from Texas in the family station wagon. Vann initially put the family up in the Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia, with a Methodist minister who had been his boyhood patron in Norfolk. They then crowded into an apartment in Alexandria until he rented a house on the Chesapeake Bay shore about twenty-five miles east of the capital. He had a long commute to the Pentagon, but the rent was low and the area was semirural, with lots of room for the boys to play and to fish and net crabs.

  I got back to Vietnam in time to watch the regime provoke rebellion in the cities and towns with the same abuse and arrogance that had maddened the population of the countryside. On May 8, 1963, the Ngo Dinhs set off what was to become known as the Buddhist Crisis. A company of Civil Guards, commanded by a Catholic officer, killed nine persons, some of them children, and injured fourteen others in a crowd in the former imperial capital of Hue. The crowd was protesting a new decree that forbade the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddha’s birthday, his 2,587th. The edict had been issued by Diem at the instigation of his elder brother, Thuc, archbishop of Hue and the South’s leading Catholic prelate in 1963. When Thuc had celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his elevation to bishop a few weeks earlier, the Catholics of Hue had flown Vatican flags all over the home city of the Ngo Dinhs. After the killings, Diem and his family behaved in character. They did not attempt to mollify the chief monks, who were antagonized by nine years of discrimination. Instead, they maneuvered to crush the Buddhist leaders as they had crushed the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects and the Binh Xuyen organized crime society in 1955.

  The monks fought back in a Vietnamese way. On the morning of June 11, 1963, a seventy-three-year-old monk named Quang Due sat down in the middle of a Saigon intersection a few blocks from Ambassador Nolting’s residence. He crossed his legs in the lotus position of meditation while another monk poured gasoline from a five-gallon plastic container over his shaven head, soaking his orange robe. The old monk’s hands moved swiftly when he lifted them from his lap to strike the match, lighting his body into a symbol of anger and sacrifice and setting ablaze the tinder of resentment in the urban centers of the South.

  The Buddhist movement became a rallying point for all of the discontent that had been accumulating against the ruling family among urban Vietnamese since 1954. While the monks were able to draw on the ill will against Catholics as a foreign-serving minority that was a reflex in Vietnamese society, the Ngo Dinhs had made themselves so repugnant by early 1963 that some Catholics clandestinely aided the Buddhist leaders. A photograph of Quang Due’s suicide taken by Malcolm Browne, the Saigon bureau chief of the Associated Press, astonished the American public and international opinion and embarrassed the Kennedy administration.

  The Ngo Dinhs applied tear gas and billy clubs and attempted to seal off the pagodas with barbed wire barricades in the streets. They spurned appeals to compromise from Nolting, who cut short a vacation in Europe to try to persuade Diem to see reason, and from Kennedy himself. “If the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue,” Nhu said at the end of a dinner with Nolting and a number of other senior American officials in July, “I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match.” Madame Nhu said in press interviews that the monks were all Communists and dupes of the Communists, that the demonstrators “should be beaten ten times more” by the police, and that “I shall clap my hands” at another suicide. She preempted Richard Nixon by nearly a decade in the use of a term that he was to make famous. The family was supported by a “silent majority,” she announced. The Ngo Dinhs assumed that the Americans would gradually acquiesce in the crushing of the Buddhist leaders as Washington had welcomed the suppression of the sects and the Binh Xuyen in 1955. The one member of the family who argued for a settlement, Ngo Dinh Can, another younger brother of Diem who lived in Hue and was the overlord of Central Vietnam, was deprived of much of his authority by Diem for his common sense. The police swung the truncheons harder, as Madame Nhu wished, and threw more tear-gas grenades and stretched more barbed wire, but the monks instigated more self-sacrifices by fire, the anger against the family grew fiercer, and the demonstrations spread from the cities to the smaller towns.

  John Mecklin, a career foreign correspondent who had taken a leave from Time for the experience of a stint in government and who was chief of the USIS in Vietnam in 1963, had a nightmare. In his nightmare he went to a play in which the members of the U.S. Embassy gradually discover that the local government they have been dealing with for years is composed of madmen, whose words are meaningless, and everything the Americans thought had happened in this strange dream country has actually never occurred. He woke up before he found out how the play ended.

  Vann had his campaign at the Pentagon going within a few days of reporting for duty to the Directorate of Special Warfare on the morning of May 24, 1963. He looked up the “debriefing officer” responsible for interviewing returned advisors for the “Lessons Learned” program on Vietnam. Vann said that he wanted to be debriefed. The officer replied that at “Saigon’s wish” he was not going to be interviewed. Vann had been expecting that response. (Kelleher, his one senior convert on Harkins’s staff, had returned in April to retire, and he, like Porter, had also not been debriefed at “Saigon’s wish.”) Vann began to brief on his own. He started out by just talking to fellow officers in the directorate and showing them copies of his final report, his February 8 message, the Ap Bac account, and like documentation to substantiate his arguments. His official job at the directorate was to devise new procedures to handle financing and procurement for the worldwide counterinsurgency mission of the Special Forces, a small chore for a man with Vann’s training in fiscal management. He therefore had lots of time for his serious task. Over the next month he gradually worked his way up through the Army hierarchy; his conversations formalized into briefi
ngs for senior officers and their staffs, complete with statistical charts and maps he would cast on a screen with a slide projector, and anecdotes of his experiences in Vietnam for authenticity and a human touch. Vann’s dramatic briefing techniques helped him put his arguments across, but they did not gain him his listeners. What attracted Vann’s audience was that he had so much of substance to say and that he was saying it in 1963. A U.S. Army officer in Washington then could still regard the war as a foreign affair and look upon the performance of the Saigon forces with a certain amount of objectivity generated by distance and his feeling that they were not his own army.

  By late June, Vann had briefed several hundred officers in the Pentagon, almost all Army men, including half a dozen generals in staff positions. One of the few officers he briefed from another service was an Air Force major general named Lansdale. It was the first meeting between Vann and his hero. Lansdale listened and did not react, because there was nothing he could do. He was in disfavor with the circle of power. After his enemies in the bureaucracy had sabotaged a proposal to name him ambassador to South Vietnam in late 1961—Diem had requested his return and Kennedy had told him he would be going—the president had put him in charge of an ultrasecret project that was of intense emotional concern to John Kennedy because of his humiliation at the Bay of Pigs. The project was called Operation Mongoose. The task was to get rid of Fidel Castro, coiled in defiance and threatening to breed other Communist reptiles in the Caribbean and Latin America, by fomenting a revolution against him or by some other, more direct means. The president and Robert Kennedy were not particular about propriety. They wanted results. The pressure had risen after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Lansdale had failed to fulfill his reputation as a magician of clandestine operations and conjure up a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi to dispose of the cobra in Havana. He was about to be driven into retirement. His Filipino friend Ramon Magsaysay had died prematurely in a plane crash in 1957, without instituting the social and economic reforms that might have brought a lasting peace to the Philippines.

  Toward the end of June, Vann finally reached an officer who did have influence, Maj. Gen. Harold Johnson, the Army’s assistant deputy chief of staff for operations. (Johnson was to be made chief of operations and then to be promoted to full general and appointed chief of staff within a little over a year.) He listened to Vann and sent him to Gen. Barksdale Hamlett, the vice chief of staff. Hamlett found Vann’s presentation sufficiently upsetting to arrange for him to brief the assembled Joint Chiefs of Staff on July 8, 1963.

  Vann was thrilled and awed that he was at last coming within touch of victory in his battle to get the truth about the war to those with the power to make use of it. Hamlett’s response reaffirmed a conviction that Vann had held to in Vietnam despite all of his frustrations with Harkins—the conviction that Harkins was an aberration, that bad strategies came from ignorance and misguided intentions, that in the final analysis his system was founded on reason.

  When Vann briefed the Joint Chiefs on July 8 he was going to cross paths again with Victor Krulak, who returned at the beginning of July from another inspection trip to South Vietnam. Krulak briefed McNamara and Taylor and the other members of the Joint Chiefs on his week-long visit. The distribution list for copies of his 129-page report has been lost, but documents such as this were widely distributed at the top in Washington. In all likelihood Krulak’s report went up to his admirer at the White House through McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s special assistant for national security affairs, and to his other admirer in the attorney general’s office.

  “The shooting part of the war is moving to a climax,” Brute Krulak announced. The boys would be coming home on McNamara’s three-year schedule with another war behind them. “General Harkins considers that a reduction of 1,000 men could be accomplished now, without affecting adversely the conduct of the war.” Had the report not been classified Secret because of its intelligence data and discussion of Hanoi’s use of Cambodia and U.S.-Saigon forays into Laos, it would have qualified as an immediate press release. Krulak had personally written only the fifteen-page introduction. The remainder consisted of questions submitted by Krulak and answers prepared under the guidance of then Brig. Gen. Richard Stilwell, who had arrived in Saigon in April to replace Kelleher as chief of operations. His habitual confidence in authority had immediately led him to start promoting the views of the commanding general and suppressing dissent within Harkins’s staff and anywhere else in the command he could find it. Krulak made Stilwell’s answers his own by ornamenting them with the enthusiasm of his introduction.

  The Viet Cong were not proliferating and growing into a more formidable foe, as Vann said. On the contrary, Harkins’s attrition strategy was turning them into an endangered species of Vietnamese. “Captured documents have revealed that many Viet Cong are already on short rations and are in dire need of drugs. … Prisoners of war have also stated that Viet Cong morale is deteriorating due to lack of logistics and popular support,” one of Stilwell’s answers read. The latest intelligence data showed that the total number of Communist-led insurgents in the country had declined from a peak of 124,000 guerrillas of all types in January 1963 to a “reasonably reliable” estimate of 102,000 to 107,000 Viet Cong by June.

  What made the Communist-led guerrillas so vulnerable to this attrition process? It was the Strategic Hamlet Program, “the heart of the counterinsurgency strategy,” Krulak said. By mid-June 1963, 67 percent of the rural population of the South was living in the 6,800 strategic hamlets built since the first had been erected in Operation Sunrise in April 1962. Most of the peasantry “appears favorably disposed” to the program. By the end of 1963, when the United States and the Diem regime had constructed all 11,246 strategic hamlets planned for the South, the Viet Cong would be complete outsiders. Although the United States had persuaded Diem to permit an amnesty program for the guerrillas, the number of defectors was going to fall off dramatically because “there will actually not be a very great number of people available for the amnesty program to attract,” Krulak wrote.

  (The intelligence section of Krulak’s report did contain some significant information. The Viet Cong were creating regiments in skeletal form in the rain-forest war zones north of Saigon. The numerical designation the guerrillas had given one regiment was mentioned. “Artillery specialists” were also being grouped into “heavy weapons battalions.” Other and unconfirmed information said that the Viet Cong had received 75mm recoilless cannon and 12.7mm antiaircraft machine guns which “allegedly are to be kept ‘secret’ until the proper time arrives for their employment.” Neither Krulak nor Stilwell understood the importance of these details, apparently assuming, as Harkins did, that guerrillas in regiments would be bigger and easier targets.)

  Several days before July 8, Krulak’s staff began calling the Army’s Directorate of Special Warfare for a copy of Vann’s briefing. The Pentagon grapevine had apparently alerted Krulak to Vann’s campaign to discredit Harkins’s version of the war. As Vann was now to brief the Joint Chiefs, the normal course was being followed of leaving nothing to chance. Vann was preparing a text of what he would say, along with slides of the statistical charts and maps he was going to display on the screen in the “Tank,” the irreverent nickname for the conference room of the. Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon. He rehearsed the briefing before his colleagues in the directorate, editing his text at their suggestion so that it wo:ild startle his august audience into attention and yet not put them off by sounding too radical or seeming to attack Harkins personally. Vann’s immediate superior, Lt. Col. Francis Kelly, a onetime New York policeman who was later to command the Special Forces in Vietnam, and others advised him to stall Krulak as long as possible.

  Vann’s briefing would strike anyone who was enthralled by Harkins’s illusion as outrageous. His twelve-page narrative and his accompanying charts and maps might well impress someone whose mind was not made up as a deftly crafted presentation of the war by a man who had spent most of a y
ear at its center in the struggle for the northern Delta. Vann was confining the briefing to his experience and specific area of responsibility so that his personal knowledge could not be challenged.

  The Joint Chiefs would first see a map of South Vietnam cast on their screen with the northern Delta colored to stand out in relation to the rest of the country. Vann would explain to them what was at stake in the people, the geography, and the economic resources of the half of the South’s rice bowl that touched Saigon itself. Then he would display some statistical charts while he sought to dispel myths and attempted an education in “the fundamentals of guerrilla warfare” as John Vann had learned them and passed them on to the newsmen. For example, he would display a chart showing a total of 9,700 Viet Cong “reported killed” in the 7th Division zone during the ten months that he had been senior advisor. (He would not mention the body-count figures in Harkins’s “Headway” reports. The Joint Chiefs were familiar with these.) “I use the term ‘reported killed,’” he would say. “Actually the number [9,700] is highly misleading. With over 200 advisors in the field, we estimate, and I stress this can only be an estimate, that the total number of people killed was less than two-thirds of those claimed. Additionally, we estimate that from 30 to 40 percent of the personnel killed were merely bystanders who were unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of a combat action.” The Joint Chiefs would be told that “we never had intelligence that was good enough to justify prestrikes by air, artillery, or mortars” but that as weapons went “a rifle … is the last one that was preferred for use.” They would tour the outposts in the 7th Division zone where the garrisons were “shot in their beds,” follow Cao’s campaign of the fall of 1962—”plans so prudently made that we had only three friendly troops killed”—and see the tree lines of Bac and Tan Thoi as Vann cast a colored sketch on the screen and gave a brief account of the disastrous consequences to which make-believe leads in war.