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

by Neil Sheehan

  The minister’s name was Garland Evans Hopkins. He was a man of charisma and contradictions, and he became the closest figure to a father Vann ever knew. Hopkins was a scion of one of those antique Virginia families—the Evanses on his mother’s side—who were rich in pedigree and short in coin. He saw himself as an aristocratic champion of the downtrodden. He was to attain a reputation of sorts before his premature death twenty-seven years later. The Methodist Church sent him to Palestine in 1947 to assess the conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and the Zionist Jews who were creating the state of Israel. Hopkins came away from the experience convinced that the victims of Hitler’s Holocaust were in turn victimizing the Palestinian Arabs. He became the principal American advocate of Palestinian rights in a period when it was fashionable to sympathize only with Israel and built the first major organization to lobby for the Arab cause and to promote relations with the Arab states—the American Friends of the Middle East. The CIA clandestinely financed the organization but Hopkins ran it.

  When Gene Crutchfield brought his troubled friend to Hopkins in 1938, Hopkins was twenty-four years old and in charge of LeKies Memorial, the Methodist church in the Atlantic City neighborhood. He had taken over the parish the year before and wore a mustache to try to make himself look older. It complemented his horn-rimmed glasses and added a bit of distinction to an otherwise unimpressive medium height and build. Hopkins’s father and grandfather had been Methodist ministers, but tradition was not the reason he had dropped out of law school and entered the ministry. He had been attracted by the ideas then being promoted within the Methodist Church in Virginia. They were ideas of the kind that are now taken for granted in American life—nutrition and welfare support for dependent children; free medical care for the impoverished and the aged; the right of workers to organize a union, to receive a minimum wage, to strike; interracial cooperation. In the Virginia of Hopkins’s youth all of these ideas were new and “liberal,” and they were radical where labor and race were concerned. His first assignment in the ministry had been as social-work director at a church in a Richmond slum which was being used as a center to experiment with relief and welfare programs. He had then been sent to LeKies to put his experience to work in Atlantic City.

  The Depression had fostered receptivity to change at the lower level in the urban South. The working-class congregations of the period liked having a minister who was “progressive.” The content of Hopkins’s sermons was not the only innovation that had made him so popular at LeKies. His dynamism suffused every aspect of church life from worship to social work, and he led in whatever he did. The choir improved, because Hopkins was an accomplished pianist and taught its members to sing better. The church did not have a Boy Scout troop, and so he started one, made himself the scoutmaster, took the boys on camping trips, and joined them in earning merit badges for lifesaving and other skills. He told terrifying ghost stories around the campfire. The boys were as enthusiastic about him as their parents were.

  It is apparent from what Crutchfield saw and from the subsequent relationship between Hopkins and Vann that the fourteen-year-old boy unburdened himself to the young minister as he had not done to any other man. Crutchfield had been struck by the high intelligence Vann displayed in understanding the relationship between Myrtle and Frank Vann and wanting to break free. Another boy caught in his predicament might not have been able to perceive the source of his troubles so clearly. Hopkins saw that this was not only a boy who wanted to be rescued, but one whom it would be particularly sad to lose. In a letter written not long after they met he spoke of what “an exceptionally bright boy” Vann was. He brought Vann into his congregation toward the end of 1938 by having him join eleven other young people and adults who stood up at a Sunday service and professed Christian faith. Hopkins also persuaded him to enter the LeKies Boy Scout troop. Vann’s troubles had led him to drop out of the first troop he had joined at his grammar school.

  The question of whether he would survive emotionally until Hopkins could separate him from Myrtle hung in the balance for a while. Crutch-field recalled that in his roller-coaster emotional state John would appear at a Scout meeting one week and then fail to show up for the next and have some irrational excuse. Hopkins’s counseling summoned up more of the strength within him, and Hopkins held out the possibility of going away to a Methodist boarding school the following fall if he successfully completed ninth grade at the junior high in Norfolk. Vann’s prowess at athletics also helped bring him through his trial. In the spring of 1939 he won first place for his age and weight class in the junior high sports carnival, a medley of track and tumbling events. He brought home his gilded cup and ribbons. Myrtle kept them. She was beginning to take pride in her eldest son. She photographed the cup for her album. Under the picture Vann proudly lettered the words MY CUP.

  That fall Hopkins turned into Vann’s genie from the magic lamp. He lifted his hand and a rich Norfolk oyster dealer who shared his wealth with the church because he believed in its good works took the boy down to the Hub, the city’s most prestigious men’s clothing store. Young John was outfitted with a sport coat and slacks, shoes, shirts, ties, and a sweater. Hopkins lifted his hand again and the businessman wrote a check for a scholarship that sent the boy to Ferrum Training School and Junior College in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwestern Virginia. Ferrum was a Methodist-run school that had been founded just prior to World War I as a “mountain mission” to bring basic education to the children of the isolated Blue Ridge communities. The same World War I prosperity that had briefly revived the economy of the South and given Norfolk a public education system from which poor children like Vann could benefit had also enabled the Methodist Church in Virginia to expand Ferrum into a small coeducational preparatory school and junior college. In mid-September 1939, two weeks after Hitler invaded Poland, Vann entered the tenth grade of the training school, Ferrum’s high school division.

  His four years at Ferrum were the first good years of his life. He had occasional lapses into despondency, and these showed in slumps in his grades. Most of the time he was happy, because Ferrum was a different world, a world that gave him hope of permanent escape into a life of respectability and accomplishment. The school was built in a bowl amid the foothills south of Roanoke. The beauty of oak and maple forests surrounded him. The classroom buildings and dormitories were red brick in that imitation Georgian style that is commonplace and yet appealing. He slept in a room that was warm with steam heat in winter; the sheets on his bed were clean; he had eggs for breakfast and fresh milk to drink, rolls and bread warm from the oven and butter to put on them, and meat and vegetables every day.

  There were few of the class distinctions among the students at Ferrum that had made him feel inferior at the junior high in Norfolk. Most of the thirty-five other boys and girls in his class were on full or partial scholarship. Norfolk was also the most sophisticated place anyone could call home. The majority of his classmates were from the inland towns and hamlets of Virginia and North Carolina. Each of the students was also assigned a job fifteen hours a week so that the school could keep overhead costs to a minimum by dispensing with clerical help and labor. Only a few supervisors were needed. The students did the cooking, waited on tables, mopped floors, washed clothes, clerked in the offices, and milked the cows and fed the chickens and shoveled the manure at the school farm that provided much of the food. Vann was put to work in the laundry for the first couple of years until the lady who was the guidance counselor discovered that he liked to lead and could teach. She gave him a job as a teacher’s assistant at a country elementary school in a nearby hamlet. Ferrum was still running several of these for the mountain children of the region.

  His happiness showed in his disposition. The Johnny Vann his teachers and classmates at Ferrum saw was not the same youth Crutchfield had known. He was like a bowstring that has been eased. When the dean described him she wrote that he was “a pleasing personality … very likable … makes fri
ends easily … an ‘all-round’ man.” His classmates remembered how much fun he was, how quick he was to joke. One of the girls recalled that he had a mischievous smile and used to tease her about another boy she dated. He gave no hint of what he had endured. He never discussed his family or home life, and when he returned from summers in Norfolk and Christmas and spring vacations he did not speak of how he had spent them.

  Nothing changed at home. In fact, things got worse. Myrtle became infatuated with an alcoholic taxi driver, spent her earnings and Frank Vann’s on her boyfriend, and kept him at the house for extended periods. Frank Vann would then sleep in another bedroom. Her son was now buffered against her by the prospect of flight each fall, and he stayed busy during his summers. Johnny Spry was by this time in a position to help him earn spending money for school. Spry had risen to chief shipping clerk at the bakery and could assign young John to a truck as a helper. The boy and his natural father became better friends. Hopkins saw to it that the wealthy businessman who was paying the scholarship kept him in proper clothes with a new suit or sports outfit and shoes and other accessories each September. Hopkins also tutored him in European history and in English composition and literature during his first summer at home in 1940 so that he could skip the eleventh grade and complete three years of high school in two. He had Vann do the reading prescribed by the Ferrum curriculum and write the term papers and gave him exams at the parsonage where Hopkins and his family lived a couple of blocks from LeKies Memorial Church. He graded his protégé generously in a letter to the school certifying that Vann had passed both courses: a 96 in history and a 94 in English. Vann graduated from Ferrum Training School in June 1941 and entered the junior college that fall.

  Myrtle finally allowed Frank Vann to adopt John in June 1942, two weeks before his eighteenth birthday. John Paul LeGay became John Paul Vann by order of the Circuit Court of Norfolk. He had warned his mother that if she stopped the adoption proceedings, he would change his name to Vann himself as soon as he reached his twenty-first birthday. He was registered at Ferrum as he had been at public school under the makeshift name John LeGay Vann. Myrtle was becoming proud enough of him now to be willing to give him his way. She told Mollie that she had arranged the scholarship to Ferrum. Twenty-eight years later Myrtle’s son had to mention his adoption in the autobiographical section of a government security-clearance form. He moved the adoption date back ten years to 1932.

  He had not wanted to wait to finish junior college after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Garland Hopkins seems to have persuaded him to do so. Vann wanted to go to war right away. No one he knew regretted that the Japanese had at last given the United States just cause to enter the fight. In his part of the country there was little of the isolationism that had forced Woodrow Wilson to take the nation tardily into World War I and that made Franklin Roosevelt maneuver Japan into striking the first blow of this war, not realizing it would fall as close as Hawaii. While the majority of the country was opposed to going to war again, much of what World War II historians were to interpret as isolationism was not a reflection of George Washington’s admonition to stay out of Europe’s quarrels. It was rather the ethnic factor in American politics—the resistance of German-Americans who continued to remember the Fatherland as the advanced and mildly authoritarian Germany of the Kaisers and the hatred of Britain among the Irish. The latter were especially strong in the cities of the Northeast that Roosevelt needed. Their memories of the five-year revolution that had rewarded centuries of struggle and gained southern Ireland its independence after World War I were vivid. Their politicians railed against spending American blood a second time to save the British Empire.

  In Vann’s Virginia, with its predominantly English stock, sympathy for Britain had been the popular attitude long before the dive bombers and torpedo planes of the Japanese Navy settled the argument for everyone. The voice of Winston Churchill rallying his people and reaching across the sea to other free men and women through the still-fresh miracle of the radio aroused Americans of all backgrounds who understood the threat to civilization. Those of Vann’s Virginia felt more than a stirring. The sentimentalizing of their roots in the mother country gave them a feeling of kinship with Britain as an island alight with hope and defiance off a continent darkened by the barbarism of the Nazis.

  One of Vann’s contemporaries in Vietnam, Samuel Vaughan Wilson, grew up in a family that had raised tobacco and corn from the red earth of southern Virginia since the 1700s. Over the radio at the family farmhouse one day in June 1940, Wilson heard Churchill’s address to the House of Commons as Britain awaited invasion and its army had just been forced to abandon almost everything except the rifles and machine guns the soldiers could carry to escape Hitler’s panzer divisions in the epic evacuation at Dunkirk. The static of the shortwave heightened the drama of the words and the gruff majesty of the voice: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets … we shall never surrender.”

  The local unit of the Virginia National Guard met on Monday nights in a drill hall at the town of Farmville seven miles away. The next Monday night, Sam Wilson, who was to fight with Merrill’s Marauders in Burma, to see the war in Vietnam too, and to retire from the Army as a lieutenant general, walked seven miles through rain over the dirt roads to raise his right hand in the oath of enlistment.

  The Depression had also readied the people of Vann’s Virginia for a war. They were as bored as they were hungry after a dozen years of famine. The war swept away boredom and destitution. Suddenly the humblest among them, who had had to work before at wasting time, were making lots of money and participating in a holy cause. In early 1942, Frank Vann got his first steady job since 1930 as a carpenter helping to build the biggest amphibious assault training base in the country at the Little Creek inlet on the seaward side of Norfolk. No one would have wanted to start a war to make money. That prosperity and foreign wars went together was an accident, but who could be upset when the fountain of money was erupting in another gusher after having stood dry for so many years?

  Young John’s summer job in 1942 was hustling cold drinks and sandwiches at his Aunt Mollie’s share of the gusher. His grandmother, Queenie, had been proud of the stake she had made with her boardinghouse during the base-building boom of World War I. Mollie, to her greater pride, outdid Queenie. She met an old boyfriend while in Norfolk on a brief visit from New York in the spring of 1942. He had become a contractor and had a portion of the massive construction project underway at the Little Creek inlet. He asked her how much she was earning a week as a hostess in the tearoom at the Hotel Menger. Mollie told him.

  “Hell, you could make that in an hour if you came out and ran a canteen for my men,” he said. He explained that his workers had no place to buy sandwiches and milk and soda for lunch.

  “Well, I’ll try it,” Mollie said.

  The next morning she bought cold cuts, bread, and pies. She made sandwiches and cut up the pies into pieces. She drove out at noon and sold everything as fast as she could hand out the sandwiches and pieces of pie and take in the money from the men who flocked around her car. Her contractor friend had been right. She counted the money when she got back to town and discovered that she had made a profit of $38. She telephoned the handsome Italian headwaiter she had divorced her Norfolk husband to marry in New York, Terzo Tosolini, and told him he was going to have to watch over her two sons by her first marriage, Vann’s cousins Joseph and Melvin Raby, while she stayed in Norfolk to try the venture for a couple of weeks.

  The following day she doubled the number of sandwiches and slices of pie and her profit. The contractor had his carpenters convert an old shack that fishermen had once used to store bait into a canteen, putting a counter and flap window in the front to serve the white workers and a smaller counter and flap window at the rear for the “colored.” Mollie sold sandwiches, pie, soda, milk, cigarettes, and other odds and ends. She used fifty
-five-gallon drums filled with water and ice to keep the bottles of soda and half-pints of milk cold. As a barracks was completed, sailors and Marines would move in and they would buy at her canteen too. Her volume rose to about 1,000 half-pints a day in milk alone. She remembered she had to work so fast that the bills would get wadded up into balls and she wouldn’t have time to unfold the money until she got back to Norfolk at night. “I didn’t have a cash register,” she recalled thirty-three years later. “I had a cigar box for change and the bills went under it and your hands were wet from gettin’ the sodas out and the milk—cuz we had no refrigeration, cuz it was fast-turnover stuff. The bills would be so wet and when you were tryin’ to put ’em in your pocket they’d get pushed in there, so when you’d go home you’d carry a bag of money. You really had a bag of money, I’m tellin’ you! You wouldn’t want to walk around with it today.”

  Every few weeks Mollie would drive up to New York to spend a weekend with Tosolini and her boys, driving through the night in her Buick to get there by dawn, with $6,000 to $7,000 in bills of large denominations pinned into her underclothing. She stashed the money away in a house in Jackson Heights that she and Tosolini had bought with a mortgage when times were still hard. Her contractor friend (“He put me wise”) told her: “Now don’t put too much money in the bank.” That might attract the curiosity of the Internal Revenue Service.

  After eighteen months, the Navy decided to open an official post exchange. The admiral in command ordered Mollie to shut down. She refused. He had to send the Shore Patrol to close her canteen shack. By that time Mollie had felt her profits crinkling in her lingerie often enough on the road to New York to be content. She invested the money in a luncheonette in Jackson Heights. She and Tosolini then sold their house there and Mollie bought another one in Great Neck, Long Island. It was a large house, the sort that only mill managers had been able to afford in the South when Mollie had stood on a box to reach the long Johns and flip them for Queenie to sew faster.