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

by Neil Sheehan

  John Vann was not going to conclude his briefing for the Joint Chiefs with a dirge. He knew this would not help him with these generals, and he did not feel that way in any case. There was still time to win if corrective action was taken. If policy was changed and the Saigon side was forced to accept American advice it would be possible to “break the back of the Viet Cong military forces [in the northern Delta] within six months.” The complete pacification of the region would take years, but a war effort that exploited the full potential of the Saigon side and a hard-fought six-month campaign could reduce “the military capability of the Viet Cong … from battalion-size operations of regular forces to platoon-size harassments by local guerrillas.”

  He had Mary Jane send a uniform to the cleaners especially for the Monday of the briefing. “There wasn’t a wrinkle near him,” she remembered later, as he left for the Pentagon in the morning. He was scheduled to address the Joint Chiefs at 2:00 P.M. He stalled as long as he dared on letting Krulak have a copy of his text, until four hours before the briefing, and then sent one over and walked to the outer office of Gen. Earle Wheeler, the current chief of staff of the Army, to wait there just in case there were any last-minute questions from Wheeler’s aides. They had already been given a copy.

  At about 11:00 A.M., an hour after he had sent the text to Krulak’s office, the phone rang on the desk of one of Wheeler’s aides. Vann heard the aide ask the officer at the other end of the line: “Who wants the item removed from the agenda?” The answer was apparently confusing.

  “Is it the secretary of defense or the chairman’s office?” the aide continued. He seemed to get some clarification. “Is that an order or a request?” he asked. There was further explanation from the other end of the line. “Let me get this right,” the aide said, summing up the conversation to be certain he had it correctly. “The chairman requests that the item be removed.” The aide answered that he would convey Taylor’s request to the chief of staff and call back. He hung up.

  “Looks like you don’t brief today, buddy,” he said to Vann. He walked into the inner office where Wheeler worked, came back in a short time, and telephoned the caller at Taylor’s office. “The chief agrees to remove the item from the agenda,” he said.

  Krulak had clearly alerted Taylor to this incredible briefing as soon as he read Vann’s text, and Taylor acted. Taylor did not bear professional contradiction lightly. He was quick to show irritation when he encountered opposition on military matters. Neither Krulak nor Taylor believed it was possible that Vann could be correct. He was obviously a disgruntled upstart of a lieutenant colonel. They had other reasons to stop him. They did not want to expose all of the Joint Chiefs to dissent of this magnitude and have it go on the record. To attack Harkins was first of all to attack Krulak. He was by this time identified in the eyes of the Washington establishment with Harkins’s position. It was also to attack Taylor. He too had been consistently sanguine in his reports to McNamara and the president. In addition, Taylor was responsible by proxy for the performance of his protégé in Saigon. When the question had come up in December 1961 of a general for the new command in Vietnam, Kennedy had not wanted to entrust the war to Harkins. He had considered Harkins too regular. He had wanted to reach down for a younger man with an unorthodox background in the hope of imaginative performance. Taylor had persuaded the president to accept Harkins, assuring him that Harkins had exactly the talents they needed.

  They would not have encountered any resistance to silencing Vann from Wheeler. He was the prominent Army general who had headed the Joint Chiefs’ mission, the man who had conducted the most important inquiry of the war thus far by submitting himself to a guided tour arranged by the officer he was supposed to be investigating, Harkins, and by listening to Krulak, a like-thinking acquaintance of Harkins. Wheeler had apparently known nothing of the contents of Vann’s briefing before July 8 because Hamlett, the vice-chief whom Vann had briefed, a general at the end of his career and soon to retire, had scheduled it on his own authority. Wheeler also happened to be another of Taylor’s protégés. He owed his position as chief of staff to Taylor, who had influenced the president to name him head of the Army the previous summer. Wheeler was fifty-five years old and lean and urbane in the Taylor image. He was without Taylor’s aloofness and was well liked by his peers in the other services for his genial and even-handed attitude in professional relations. His nickname was Bus. Wheeler was the competent staff officer type who is a benefit to any army as long as he has someone above him to do the original thinking. When he was launched on his own, the limitations of the paperwork soldier showed in his reflex orthodoxy and in a credulity that was easily aroused by documents labeled Top Secret with red borders around the pages and by confident words from another man in stars and gold braid.

  In his rage and despair, Vann blamed Krulak and Taylor for his defeat, but he also blamed himself. He blamed himself for helping Harkins create the myth of imminent victory by staging those “dog and pony show” briefings with Cao for the visiting generals and officials from Washington when he had still thought he could imitate Lansdale and make Cao his instrument to destroy the Viet Cong. “We had also, to all the visitors who came over there, been one of the bright shining lies,” he said to an Army historian in a tape-recorded interview two weeks after the cancellation of his briefing for the Joint Chiefs. The interview was classified Top Secret and the transcript and the tape put away in a locked filing cabinet.

  Krulak could not recall the briefing incident when he was asked about it much later, but he was convinced that he would not have done anything to interfere with Vann. He did not appear to be lying. Rather, he seemed to have genuinely forgotten the role he played, as busy men of affairs often forget such episodes in their pasts.

  They did not succeed in silencing him. The students he left behind in Vietnam spoke for him. He did not have to do any long-distance leaking. We had absorbed his lessons well enough to proceed on our own. Halberstam thanked him for them when Vann wrote in July and remarked on how daringly critical of the regime we had become in our coverage of the Buddhist crisis. “This was the time to go for broke and use all our ammo—while people were really watching,” Halberstam agreed in his letter of reply. “We think and talk about you all the time,” Halberstam said, “and often when we write it is with you in mind. But more important, I think you ought to know that what you taught us about the Mekong Delta remains of crucial importance in covering this story, that it is almost impossible to kid us now, that we … know exactly what to look for and what the heart of the matter is. In the face of the monumental effort here to con us, we have mental flak jackets you gave us.”

  We picked up news of the dimensions of the Viet Cong buildup in the Delta—in retrospect, the first stage in the creation of the second Viet Minh—at the beginning of August. We would have learned about it sooner but we had all been unable to leave Saigon for a look at the war since June because of the Buddhist street demonstrations and the constant threat of another suicide. Mert Perry of Time heard of a big fight in Kien Hoa Province in July in which eleven helicopters had been hit. I knew the captain who was the advisor to the 7th Division battalion involved in the battle from a march through the rice paddies long before. He came to Saigon at the beginning of August for a weekend leave, and I ran into him by chance on the street. The guerrillas his unit had clashed with had been like no Viet Cong battalion he had ever previously encountered. They seemed to outnumber the approximately 300 men his battalion fielded, and they certainly outgunned their ARVN opponent. He had never heard such a drumfire of automatic weapons. The guerrillas pinned down the Saigon troops immediately and kept them pinned down until the Viet Cong broke off the fight at dark, despite the machine guns and rockets of the Huey gunships and half a dozen strikes by the fighter-bombers. Had the guerrillas been daring enough to sally out of their positions in the tree lines and maneuver, they definitely would have overrun all or part of his battalion, the captain said. The ARVN captain
who was his counterpart had been timid before, but the experience with these new Viet Cong had astonished and thoroughly cowed him.

  At around the same time, an ARVN colonel whose professional ability we and almost all of the advisors respected, Pham Van Dong, who bore the same name as the prime minister in Hanoi, returned in alarm from a tour of the Delta. The Viet Cong were starting the cycle against his army and the United States that the Viet Minh had worked against the French, he said. Colonel Dong was from one of the minority peoples in the North. He had earned his commission in the French Army, as distinct from Bao Dai’s Vietnamese National Army, and was one of two officers in the ARVN who had commanded a brigade-size unit in the regular French Expeditionary Corps. (Harkins had inadvertently gotten him dismissed in December as deputy commander of HI Corps by writing a letter to Diem recommending that he be promoted to brigadier general. “Now Diem will fire me for sure,” Colonel Dong had said when he received a carbon of the letter Harkins sent to him, thinking he would be pleased. “Diem will think that if the Americans like me this much, they might use me to make a coup.” A couple of weeks later Diem had appointed Colonel Dong an inspector of strategic hamlets.)

  These portents obviously required a story. Because the Buddhist crisis so monopolized our time and energy, Halberstam and I decided to pool our reporting with Perry’s for the major research effort entailed. Colonel Dong was one of our most helpful informants. He obtained statistics we needed and details of how the Viet Cong were creating their new big battalions through a general at Joint General Staff headquarters who had been one of his subordinates in the North during the French war. I spent an evening at his house transcribing the information. For all of Cao’s lies, the ARVN intelligence officers in the Delta were still managing to push quite a bit of sound information up through their system. The JGS was apparently not passing the data along to the presidential palace because it was not welcome there. Harkins’s intelligence staff was ignoring the information because the U.S. intelligence officers knew that it was similarly unwelcome to their chief. There was a sense of deja vu in Colonel Dong’s comparison of what was happening in the Delta with the French war. Over the year from late 1949 to the fall of 1950 while Giap had been turning his first Viet Minh into full-size divisions and readying an execution ground for the French garrisons along Route Coloniale 4 on the China border—the disaster that was the harbinger of Dien Bien Phu—the French high command had scoffed at reports of “a new Viet Minh” boldly challenging their troops in that limestone-crag country of the far north where Colonel Dong’s ancestors rested.

  We cross-checked and supplemented the JGS information through our other American and Vietnamese sources. Halberstam drove down to the Seminary for an afternoon with several of the captains who were nearing the end of their tours and who had watched the change taking place in the Delta. The CIA and AID men running the U.S. side of the Strategic Hamlet Program were also more candid now because they were worried. The Viet Cong had begun to literally dismantle the hated stockades. The guerrilla technique was to concentrate on destroying the SDC outpost inside or adjacent to the strategic hamlet. Simultaneously, the unpaid hamlet militia were being disarmed, won over, or emerging as what they had been all along—clandestine local guerrillas. The peasants were then told they were free to return to their native hamlets. Before leaving, the farmers would strip off the sheet-metal roofing to use in rebuilding their old homes. If metal roofing had been unavailable and the Saigon authorities had forced them to use thatch to roof the houses in the strategic hamlet, the Viet Cong cadres would have had the farmers pull down the roofs to render the place uninhabitable. The cadres would also have the peasants chop the barbed wire off the posts—the “American spaghetti” as some Saigon wags had taken to calling it—and cut it up into short strips. The roof-tearing and barbed-wire-chopping exercises had psychological meaning and were a visual demonstration that the cause of Ho Chi Minh had triumphed over this scheme of the Americans and their Vietnamese surrogates. The cut-up barbed wire was not being thrown away. It was being put into mines and booby traps as shrapnel.

  As events turned out, Perry and I did some volunteer work for Halberstam, because he was the only one who managed to get our findings into print right away. As a wire-service reporter, I had to cable news as fast as it occurred, because I was reporting for news outlets all over the world rather than for a single newspaper or magazine. There was an outbreak of fiery suicides and more demonstrations right after we finished reporting, and I could not stop long enough to write the Viet Cong buildup story. Halberstam was naturally in a hurry to write and unable to wait. I had to be satisfied with using the material for subsequent analytical articles. Perry’s dispatch to Time was read and filed away. The late Henry Luce and the managing editor of his magazine, Otto Fuerbringer, were as unhappy about the reporting out of Vietnam as Harkins was.

  On August 15, 1963—a little over five weeks after Vann’s day of rage and despair at the Pentagon—an updated version of Vann’s view of the war appeared on the front page of the New York Times under Halberstam’s byline. Halberstam did not dare to state flatly that the Viet Cong were winning the war. None of the resident correspondents dared write this boldly yet. He knew that his editors in New York were already frightened by his reporting. A straightforward assertion that the Viet Cong were winning would make them more nervous and they would say that it was subjective and refuse to print it. He therefore arranged the facts to make the statement for him. The headline writer saw the point and set it over the story: VIETNAMESE REDS GAIN IN KEY AREA.

  “South Vietnam’s military situation in the vital Mekong Delta has deteriorated in the last year, and informed officials are warning of ominous signs,” Halberstam’s dispatch began. He piled fact upon fact to describe the Communist buildup in the artillery-barrage fashion he liked to recommend as good reporting. A year ago, he wrote, the guerrillas had been assembling in formations no larger than 250 men. Now they were massing in groups of “600 and even 1,000,” a reference to reports of two reinforced battalions moving through the countryside together. A year ago the Viet Cong had avoided the ARVN and concentrated on the inferior Civil Guards and SDC militia. Today, because of their “new strength … in captured United States weapons,” they were “picking fights” with Saigon’s regulars. “They are almost cocky about it,” he quoted an unnamed American advisor as saying. Saigon commanders “have sighted battalions in their areas that they cannot identify.” And “what is more ominous,” Halberstam went on, “the Vietcong are creating standardized battalions” of 400 men each in three rifle companies and a heavy weapons unit. “Increasing quantities of Communist-made weapons and ammunition” were being smuggled into the South to supplement the captured American arms of these battalions, and the guerrillas were also acquiring “better [radio] communications than ever.” The objective of these preparations was still more alarming. Halberstam quoted an “expert source” as warning that the Hanoi leadership was building toward a strategy of “fast, hard-hitting mobile warfare” to overwhelm the ARVN.

  Halberstam and I and the other correspondents had seized on the Buddhist crisis as we had on Ap Bac. We had been holding it up as proof that the regime was as bankrupt politically as it was militarily. Harkins had retreated to the argument that although the Buddhist movement had marshaled discontent in the cities and towns, it had not interfered with the successful prosecution of the war against the guerrillas in the countryside. Krulak had endorsed Harkins’s argument in his July report on his latest trip to Vietnam just before sabotaging Vann’s scheduled briefing for the Joint Chiefs. Halberstam’s August 15 story was truth revealed with a hidden motive. The story was meant to be a mine of facts to blow up this newest stage set of Harkins and compel the administration to face the reality that it was losing.

  The dispatch did detonate in Washington with the blast of a mine, but the force of the explosion did not blow away the fantasy as Halberstam, Perry, and I had hoped it would. Kennedy demanded to kno
w if there was any truth in the story. Krulak appealed to Harkins, and Stilwell teletyped a lengthy memorandum rebutting the article point by point. Thanks to Stilwell and Krulak and to their own hubris, Kennedy and the majority of those at the top of his administration retained confidence in the generals. Dean Rusk went out of his way to denounce Halberstam’s article as false at a State Department press conference the day after it was published.

  There was great irony in Krulak’s role in perpetuating Harkins’s fantasy. Krulak’s talent for making war was too large for him to remain forever stupid about the war in Vietnam. In a couple of years he was to see the fatuousness of the attrition strategy that obsessed the Army generals. He was then to attempt to make this system he served behave rationally, and he was then to know the anguish Vann had long felt.

  The claim that young reporters on the scene were inventing bad news had become more ludicrous than ever by the late summer of 1963, because by now the majority of the established correspondents in Asia who regularly visited Vietnam saw the war in essentially the same terms that we did. They included Peter Kalischer and Bernard Kalb of CBS, James Robinson of NBC, Stanley Karnow, formerly with Time and in 1963 with the Saturday Evening Post, Pepper Martin of U. S. News & World Report, and Charles Mohr, Time’s chief correspondent for Southeast Asia. These men were not the sort to be hoodwinked by a bunch of cubs. The embassy, Harkins’s headquarters, and the regime had, in fact, never been happy with the reporting of most of the regular visitors. Diem had expelled Robinson the month after the family had thrown out Frangois Sully of Newsweek and had not let Robinson into the country again for nine months.