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

by Neil Sheehan

  Frank Vann seemed to be a responsible man. He was thirty, seven years older than Myrtle was, when he married her in 1929. His home country on the Carolina coastal plain was the Murfreesboro region close by the Virginia line. His father was an unusually clever and industrious tenant farmer who had raised nine children and, with help from the Baptist Church and what they could earn on their own, sent a number of them to teacher-training colleges. Frank Vann had completed high school and clerked in a country store prior to moving to Norfolk. He was a well-meaning man, kind and gentle in his dealings with others. It was his weakness and passivity that hurt those who depended on him.

  The first four years of the marriage were probably the most tolerable, despite Frank Vann’s recurring unemployment. He was laid off by the city bus company, found a job on the assembly line at the Ford plant in Norfolk, and then lost that too as the Depression worsened. He and Myrtle had two more children following the birth of Dorothy Lee in 1929. Vann’s first half brother, Aaron Frank, Jr., or Frank Junior as he was called, was born at the end of 1931. Eugene Wallace came in the spring of 1933. Frank Vann moved the family down to North Carolina shortly after Gene’s birth, because he was able to obtain work in a zipper factory at a place called George not far from his father’s farm. Myrtle made him quit and bring them back to Norfolk in a few months. She did not like living in the country, and she did not get along with his family. Grace was said before every meal at the farmhouse table of Frank’s father, and his sisters and their families were also active in the local Baptist church. They were shocked by Myrtle’s contempt for housekeeping and child-rearing and they wondered about her morals.

  In the Norfolk to which they returned, Johnny and his sister and brothers were subjected to a level of deprivation that made Myrtle’s childhood in Pitt County seem comfortable by comparison. Frank Vann worked at the Ford plant when there was a spate of production in between layoffs. He also drove a taxi now and then. The Works Progress Administration started by Franklin Roosevelt gave him occasional employment at building parks and other public projects. Most of the time he was out of a job. There was no unemployment compensation in those years, and no welfare payments worth mentioning. The family moved constantly for failure to pay the rent, and yet they moved nowhere. They simply shifted to one more dark and grimy house within the dingy world of two white working-class sections—the Lamberts Point area behind the coal-shipping piers of the Norfolk and Western Railroad at the mouth of the Elizabeth River and a former cotton and lumber mill district nearby called Atlantic City—where someone else was also going to be evicted and Frank Vann could talk his way into another house.

  The neighborhood where the family lived in Lamberts Point in 1936 at the height of the Depression, when Vann was twelve, and the house they occupied there were typical of their other neighborhoods and houses. The city had paved the streets, laid sewers and strung electric lines on poles overhead, and built a large elementary school of brownish-red brick beyond a vacant lot across the street. Then everything had stopped. There were no sidewalks, only dirt paths in front of the houses and more dirt paths and alleys in between. Here and there at odd intervals a tree, like the big locust before the Vanns’ house, had been left for shade. Few of the families bothered to cultivate the small front yards and plant grass for lawns. They were content with the patches of weeds that remained where the children and the dogs did not wear the ground bare. All of the buildings, including the school, were low-lying, and many of the wooden ones had not been painted for so long that they had acquired the dun color of naturally weathered wood.

  The Vanns’ house fell into the dun-colored category and was of a construction so common to the poor districts of pre-World War II Southern cities that it might be called Southern urban working class. It was two stories high under a peaked roof. The siding was clapboard. The house was narrow, gaining its space by running back to the rear. There was no basement. The roofed porch across the front was only about a foot and a half above the ground. The porch railing had fallen away for want of repair, and no one bothered to build a new one, as it was more convenient to step directly off the porch and into the yard. The narrow design contributed to the dark interior of the house by reducing the amount of light that could penetrate. Age and accumulated filth added to the darkening effect. Someone had once painted all of the interior doors black. The wooden floors were barren of carpets or linoleum and had dips worn into them from use and grit. They stayed dirty, because Frank Vann, who did what cleaning was done, wasn’t fussy about them.

  The first room off to the left of the entrance hallway was the living room. It was furnished with a sofa of considerable age and unknown origin, a wooden rocker as scratched as another rocker on the porch, and a couple of straight-backed wooden chairs. An empty Prince Albert pipe tobacco can rested on the floor beside the rocker. Frank Vann used it as a spittoon. He chewed tobacco at first and then switched to another country habit called “dipping snuff.” He would put a pinch of snuff between his lip and his front teeth and let it sit there to melt. A potbelly stove in the living room also served him as a spittoon. The stove was the principal heating system for the house in winter. Vents had been cut into the ceilings to let the warm air drift upward to the bedrooms above. Frank Vann burned coal in the stove when he could pick some up around the Norfolk and Western loading piers, otherwise scrap wood, and when neither was available the rooms stayed cold. The kitchen was at the end of the hallway. The wood-fired cooking stove there, square and of black iron like Queenie’s in North Carolina, made the kitchen and the bedroom above it the last rooms in the house to go cold. A single light bulb hung from a wire in the ceiling over the table and chairs in the center of the kitchen. The sink had one brass spigot that gave cold water. Hot water had to be heated on the stove. If anyone wanted a bath the hot water had to be carried in pails to the bathroom upstairs and poured into the old-fashioned tub that stood on legs.

  Frank Vann did the cooking too, as Myrtle also refused to do any of that. He was an early riser and would get up at 5:00 A.M. to wash and make breakfast for himself and the children, whistling and singing hymns as he heated water with which to shave. (He was not religious. He and Myrtle sometimes sent the children to Baptist Sunday school but never went to church themselves.) In the most empty-handed months of winter on Bill Tripp’s farm, Myrtle had always had some hog meat and gravy to eat with the biscuits or cornbread Queenie baked. The basic diet of Myrtle’s children was biscuits for breakfast, fried potatoes and biscuits for lunch (it was called dinner in country fashion), and more fried potatoes and biscuits for supper. They drank coffee with their meals, although milk would have been more nourishing, because coffee is a Southern taste and Frank Vann seemed to find money for it no matter how hard times became. Potatoes were the cheapest vegetable he could buy. He carried them home on his shoulder in fifty-pound burlap sacks.

  He was not a bad cook. He tried to make the potatoes as tasty as possible by peeling them carefully and slicing them across and extremely thin like potato chips. He would also buy a few onions to dice and toss in with the potatoes for flavor. He varied the biscuits with something he called “flour bread,” biscuit dough spread out in the frying pan and baked into unleavened bread. He also frequently served something he called “tomato gravy” to pour over the biscuits or unleavened bread. Tomatoes were the cheapest canned vegetable at three or four cents for a large can. Frank Vann turned the canned tomatoes into a gravy by whipping some flour into them in the frying pan. On rare occasions he brought home cans of salmon, which he mixed with flour to bake salmon cakes, and on those still rarer occasions when his pocket was flush he appeared with eggs to scramble with the salmon, or served fried pork brains and scrambled eggs. His most common good supper, one the children looked forward to with anticipation, was “cheese biscuits.” He would buy a small portion of cheese, cut it up, and bake the biscuits with a piece of cheese hidden inside every third one. Frank Junior learned to watch for a biscuit that had revealed its priz
e by leaking a bit of melted cheese in the oven so that he could snatch it from the pile on the platter before somebody else spotted it. Johnny’s cribmate, George Dillard, came down to Norfolk every year with his parents during his father’s vacation from security-guard work at Irving Trust on Wall Street. He chummed around with his cousin and often spent the night at Johnny’s house. He recalled the whooping at the table whenever anyone grabbed a biscuit with a piece of cheese in it. “Then you got the treat,” he said. “Otherwise you were out of luck. You got the plain biscuit.” At most meals the Vann children were out of luck with plain biscuits and fried potatoes. Dorothy Lee sprinkled salt and pepper on a biscuit one evening to try to make it taste better.

  This urban variation of the pellagra-and-rickets diet was more dangerous than the rural one, because Frank Vann did not plant a garden in the backyard to provide the children with fresh vegetables in the spring and fall. Gene became its victim. He was the most vulnerable to vitamin deficiency as the youngest, just three in the spring of 1936. He developed a severe case of rickets, which causes defective bone growth. The disease left him grotesquely bowlegged. “That boy could have stepped around a keg of nails and never known it,” Frank Junior reflected.

  A charity hospital in Norfolk sent a public health nurse around periodically to examine children in poor neighborhoods. The Vann children knew her as a kind and imposing lady who arrived in a chauffeur-driven car wearing a blue uniform and spoke with an accent that sounded German or Scandinavian. Her name was Miss Landsladder, and she rescued Gene from a cripple’s life. She arranged for the surgeons at the hospital to see him. They first broke and set the left lower legbone, and when it healed well, they brought him back and broke and properly aligned the rest of the major bones in both legs in a single operation. For eight months afterward he was encased in a plaster cast that began at the upper half of his chest and extended over his thighs and down each leg to his feet. His legs were held apart in a wide V by a splint set into the plaster at knee level. Among the many things he could not do was to turn over in bed, but his brother Johnny made that problem fun once the bones had fused and Gene was no longer in pain. He would put his arms under the cast and flip Gene over in the bed. Johnny also did not abandon Gene at home when there were ballgames and other excursions. He toted Gene on his back, carrying him on and off the trolley cars that way and joking with the conductors so that they would not be asked for the fare they did not have. The surgeons gave Gene a pair of straight legs. In that era of primitive skin grafting they did not attempt to repair the wide scars they created from his thighs to his shins. The disease also stunted the growth of his legs, making Gene the shortest in the family at a shade under five feet seven inches in adulthood, and the long-term effects of the operation caused painful osteoarthritis in his hips in later years.

  Shame accompanied the hunger and pain and raggedy clothes. The Vann children knew the neighbors knew that Myrtle sold herself and had plenty of money. She was clever about it. She did not walk the streets. The police would have arrested her right away if she had. Prostitution was regulated in Norfolk until the 1950s by an unofficial arrangement that profited politicians, police, and organized criminals and kept moral ugliness from the eyes of children. There was a red-light district in old Norfolk, with bordellos in a spectrum of amenities and prices. One was a tourist attraction. A visitor could bed down with a whore in the same room in which Lafayette was supposed to have slept when he visited Norfolk in 1824.

  Myrtle discovered an unoccupied niche. She specialized in middle-class men who would have been embarrassed to be seen going to a brothel. As a professed amateur, Myrtle was less intimidating, and she soon had a string of regulars. She had her clients come to the house or met them at some other spot where they felt secure. One of her customers was a lay leader and Sunday-school superintendent at a Norfolk church. Dorothy Lee remembered another of her mother’s clients because he met Myrtle every week outside the same hot dog stand downtown to arrange the time of their rendezvous. He was a well-dressed man in late middle age. He would smile and hand Dorothy Lee some coins. “Go into the hot dog stand,” Myrtle would then say, and Dorothy Lee would buy herself a hot dog while her mother and the gentleman talked. When he subsequently appeared at the house, normally on a Wednesday afternoon, Myrtle would order Dorothy Lee to play outside. She seems to have taken Dorothy Lee along to the meetings because the child was protection. A woman who had her daughter with her was unlikely to be arrested for soliciting. (Myrtle was apparently known to the police, but there is no record of her having been prosecuted, probably because the police did not want to expose her clients.)

  Had she sold herself for the sake of her children, they might have been less troubled by shame, given the grimness of the times. Except for Dorothy Lee’s weekly hot dog treat, the only sight of the money they ever had was on Myrtle. She spent it all on herself—for stylish clothes, for jewelry and makeup, and for whiskey. A wardrobe in the bedroom she shared with Frank Vann was full of pretty dresses and suits, and she had hats and shoes and silk stockings and handbags to match. One of her suits was in black velvet with a fox-fur collar. At a time when rent for a whole house was $6 a month, its cost would have paid the rent for several months. She also had an evening gown and enough jewelry to have kept the family in rent and groceries for many months—a solitaire diamond ring (the stone was large, almost a carat), a diamond-studded wristwatch and band to go with the ring, a gold-and-diamond bracelet for her other arm, and a white-gold dinner-ring set with diamonds and contrasting black stones. Eventually she completed her outfit with a fur coat and hat of gray squirrel. More money went to the hairdresser to keep her hair in a permanent wave. She did not want to be bothered setting it herself. She painted her fingernails and toenails while sitting in the rocker on the porch. She would also move the rocker into the front yard to tan herself in the sun. The porch and front-yard sitting had another purpose; she was attracting more clients. A woman posed in fancy clothes before a shabby house is an advertisement that requires no caption.

  Frank Vann not only acquiesced in what Myrtle did, he also gave her most of the money he earned when he was working, and she spent it too. This and his passive pattern of behavior helped to explain why the Vann children suffered so grievously. There was more and better food available from charity organizations than he brought home, and there was more work to be had than he found. One of Johnny’s acquaintances whose father was also often without a job wondered why the Vanns didn’t have more food until it struck him that his father was constantly foraging at the relief centers and searching for work of any kind, while Frank Vann could usually be found at home. He liked to sit and read in his rocker in the living room. The explanation was not that he was physically lazy. He would work when work was offered to him. (During the manpower shortage of World War II he held down two jobs simultaneously—as a carpenter at the Norfolk Naval Base by day and a city fireman by night—and Myrtle managed to spend both salaries as fast as he could hand her his paychecks.) What he would not do was aggressively seek work. He never attempted to use his education to better himself with a white-collar position, instead gravitating to manual labor and ultimately retiring in the mid-1960s with a medical disability from his carpentry job at the naval base. He did seem to have a craving to be humiliated, and Myrtle satisfied that.

  She would curse him for not finding more work and bringing her more money and taunt him with her promiscuity. She ordered him about like a servant, and he obeyed. She addressed him as Vann rather than Frank. For a wife to call her husband by his last name was a custom in the South of the period. Myrtle’s tone when she said “Vann!” was what made the difference. Dorothy Lee was given to nightmares and leg cramps. If she woke her mother with her cries at night, Myrtle would call to her husband from her twin bed: “Vann, get up and see what’s the matter with Dorothy Lee.” She never nursed the children when they were ill. Frank Vann was a compassionate nurse. He turned Myrtle’s empty whiskey bottles into hot-wat
er bottles, wrapping them in cloth and placing them next to Dorothy Lee’s legs to ease the cramps. The children feared Myrtle’s rages; her temper and tongue were also of the gutter. Frank Vann normally sat silent while she cursed him. His silence enraged her further. Her voice became shriller and her language viler as she tried to provoke him into reacting. Only rarely did he fight back. Once he picked up a hatchet and shouted at her to get out. She left, but returned in a couple of days and the relationship resumed. She apparently strengthened her hold on him by letting him make love to her once in a while.

  Frank Vann’s passivity exposed Johnny and his sister and brothers to the full extent of Myrtle’s cruelty. The Vann children grew up without ever having a Christmas tree. Frank Junior and Gene found a discarded tree one year about a week after Christmas in an alley where another family had left it for trash. They dragged it home, determined to put it up in the living room. The tree still had bits of tinsel the other family had not bothered to remove amid the green needles on the boughs. Myrtle caught them while they were trying to figure out how to get the tree to stand up on the floor and shouted and cursed and made them drag it back to the alley. The boys in other families kept the street noisy with their new cap pistols on Christmas morning and paraded in their new cowboy suits. The girls had dolls to show off. Christmas morning for the Vann children was four stockings Frank Vann hung behind the potbelly stove, each holding an apple, an orange, some nuts, and a few pieces of hard Christmas candy. Not until the end of the 1930s when he began working more did the boys get a cowboy suit and Dorothy Lee a doll.