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

by Neil Sheehan

  There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan, a retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight until the end. Capture by these people is worse than death itself. We will fight as a team. If some of us must die, we will die fighting together. Any man who gives ground may be personally responsible for the death of thousands of his comrades.

  I want you to put this out to all the men in the Division. I want everybody to understand that we are going to hold this line. We are going to win.

  Walker gave the 25th the worst sector of the line to hold. It was the bottom corner of the southwest, where Michaelis had momentarily stopped the North Koreans from thrusting to Pusan. The enemy now began to batter much harder at this door to victory in the fight to the death between the two armies. The terrain on the southwest, a series of hills, was also more favorable to the North Koreans, because the Naktong offered no obstacle there. The river turns from its southerly course and starts to flow east about fifteen miles above the coast. The battle quickly became a slugging match in which the outcome was as dependent on the supply officers on both sides as on the courage and stamina of the infantry. The North Koreans were at the end of a long supply line. They would build up stocks and assault, but then run low on ammunition after a couple of days and lose momentum. In the meantime the Americans would also have run low on ammunition from having thrown everything they had at their opponents to try to contain the attack. Vann and the other supply officers under Gassett would work frantically to replenish fast enough for the troops to counterattack and regain the hill positions just lost or to hold on to those they had retained when the next assault came in a week or so, as it surely would. The American riflemen were able to hold against the greatly superior odds because of the superb artillery and air support they were receiving by August, but the supply situation was so confused that there was constant danger of an interruption in the flow of shells to the artillery. Gassett gave a lieutenant a further lesson, this one in how to short-circuit the bureaucracy when it gets in the way of winning. Instead of simply arguing with the Eighth Army G-4 officers who were responsible for supplying the shells, Gassett wangled out of their headquarters copies of the cargo manifests and sailing dates of freighters coming from the United States. The length of the voyage to Pusan from the various U.S. ports was known; it averaged sixteen days from the West Coast. Gassett would send Vann or another officer with a convoy of trucks to meet the ship as soon as the freighter docked and seize what the 25th Division needed.

  It was the boy who had leaped in front of the buses and trucks in his street game in Norfolk who kept many of the riflemen in the fight and saved scores and possibly hundreds of lives when the climax of the battle came at the beginning of September. By late August, Kim II Sung and his generals were wild to break down Walker’s Pusan Perimeter and grasp the victory that was so close and yet might be so quickly denied them and replaced by the destruction of their army. Although they did not know where Mac Arthur might stage an amphibious landing, and never guessed that it would be at Inchon, they knew that he had a counterstroke like this in mind, because he boasted of it in interviews with correspondents in Tokyo. They did not have the manpower to prepare to defend the numerous places where MacArthur might land and still pursue their main chance against Walker, and so they concentrated on Walker. They sent every bullet and grenade and shell they could down the peninsula by train and truck, in fishing boats along the coast, and then on A-frame packs on the backs of peasant men and women to the fighting units beyond the roads. This time they intended to sustain the attack until Walker’s troops buckled.

  The offensive began half an hour before midnight on August 31,1950, with the whistling and crashing of the most intense mortar and artillery bombardment of the war thus far against the positions of the 35th Infantry Regiment northwest of the town of Masan. General Kean had set up his division headquarters in Masan in the classrooms of another schoolhouse. The North Korean infantry assaulted by the thousands behind the barrage. By dawn on September 1 an estimated 3,000 enemy troops had surged past the company strongpoints on the hilltops in the front line of the 35th and penetrated through the rest of the regiment six to seven miles into its rear. The only impediment that kept the North Koreans from reorganizing and resuming their advance on September 1 was the refusal of any element of the 35th to budge. The men of the 35th Infantry were resisting with a gallantry that was matched only by the desperate valor of their North Korean opponents. The cannoneers at the artillery batteries became their own infantry, lowering their pieces and firing point-blank into the North Koreans and radioing other batteries to lay barrages around them. There was hand-to-hand fighting at a number of places with grenades and the bayonet.

  Many of the soldiers in the 35th Infantry had initially resented Walker’s order to “stand or die.” They had thought the general was commanding them to “stand and die.” They were veterans now, understood the wisdom of the order, and fought in its spirit. They had learned that when the North Koreans enveloped both flanks and the rear in a favorite tactic to make an opponent panic, the worst option was to try to withdraw. Only a few would escape then. If they held until a relief column could reach them, some would die but some would live and they would avoid having to abandon their wounded comrades to certain death and possibly torture and mutilation beforehand by the enraged North Korean soldiery. The rub was that on this occasion Kean had no way of pushing relief columns through to the surrounded front-line companies of the 35th before some of them would run out of ammunition and perish.

  Vann had been pondering the problem from earlier battles and had come up with an idea for resupply in just such an extremity. Vann’s scheme was for him to toss ammunition to the infantrymen from the back of an L-5 observation plane, the World War II predecessor of the L-19 in which he was to win the Distinguished Flying Cross at Bac a dozen years later. The L-5 had a less powerful engine than its successor but was highly maneuverable and had the same tandem seating arrangement of pilot in front and observer behind. Two days before the offensive, Vann had persuaded Gassett to let him test the idea to resupply a company that was under pressure from a preliminary North Korean move, and the technique had worked.

  On the morning of the offensive the division aviation section refused to provide the planes. The pilots said that Vann’s scheme was suicidal. The American mortar and artillery crews were dropping shells around the encircled riflemen to help them hold off their attackers while the North Koreans were simultaneously bombarding them to weaken resistance. The pilots would have to fly through the trajectories of all these shells as well as expose their aircraft to small-arms fire from the enemy infantry. Vann said the pilots were being too cautious. Gassett appealed to Kean, arguing that the risk was acceptable, given the stakes. Kean agreed and ordered L-5S put at the disposal of Lieutenant Vann. Because of their protest, the pilots were assigned to one mission each in the sequence in which they would normally have come up for duty on the roster that day. A mission consisted of three ammunition drops. One pilot volunteered for a second flight, six drops in all, and then he quit. The other pilots would fly only a single mission.

  Vann flew every mission, and he displayed no nervousness after returning. He was calm as he went about packaging ammunition and loading a plane for the next flight. He selected boxes big enough to hold about 100 pounds in clips of bullets for the M-1 rifles, belts for the machine guns, and hand grenades. After he filled a box he wrapped and tied a blanket around it to prevent it from bursting and spewing out its contents on impact. Although a 100-pound box weighs almost four-fifths of what Vann did at the age of twenty-six, he was strong enough to manhandle one. He wedged two of the boxes into the back of the plane where he sat and held the third in his lap. The locations of the companies were known. Before they took off, Vann spread out his map and briefed the pilot on where they were going to make the drops and how he wanted the approach flown. Three hundred pounds of ammunition overloaded the plane, but Vann’s
lightness compensated somewhat and the dirt airstrip near the Masan schoolhouse was sufficiently long and the engine sufficiently powerful to get the L-5 into the air. Once they were aloft, Vann gave the pilot further directions over the intercom.

  A major from the division intelligence section who was flying over the battlefield that morning to assess the situation and to drop propaganda leaflets on the North Koreans urging them to surrender could hardly believe what he was watching. He saw another L-5 suddenly dive to ground level and start flying right over the heads of the North Korean infantrymen straight for one of the hills where an American company was holding out. The enemy soldiers could shoot at the plane from all sides. There were no clumps of woods or rows of trees the pilot could fly alongside to partially obscure the aircraft on the approach to the hill. The terrain was completely open, either barren or grassy. The plane did gain some concealment from the clouds of smoke and dust rising from the mortar and artillery shells crashing into the ground just beneath it, but this could hardly be comforting, the major thought, given the danger of being blown up by one of the shells. Right before the base of the hill the pilot pulled back on the stick, skimmed up the slope, and clipped over the American position at the top. As the plane cleared the hilltop by twenty to thirty feet the major saw a box sail out and land among the foxholes below. He realized then that Vann was in the L-5. He had seen Vann loading the boxes at the airstrip, had asked out of curiosity what was going on, and had been told about the novel resupply method.

  Vann was ordering the pilots to take this straight, ground-skimming approach to be sure that he did not miss with the box of ammunition. Most of the perimeters had by this time shrunk to only about 100 feet across, a difficult target for an airdrop. The companies had originally been deployed in platoon-size strongpoints—mutually supporting foxhole perimeters fortified with barbed wire and minefields. These had gradually become weaker as the riflemen had been killed and wounded. At some places the platoons had consolidated, the survivors of one platoon moving to a neighboring position during a lull or under the cover of an artillery barrage. They carried the wounded with them. Wounded men who could walk were counted as effectives. One company had been reduced to the equivalent of a platoon. It had twenty-two men capable of resistance.

  After the pilot had climbed up to altitude and was orienting himself for another run at the same position—or at an adjacent one if the platoons were still separated—Vann would grab hold of the next box and prepare to toss it out the door as he had the first. Then he would have the pilot return to deliver his third box of sustenance to the infantry.

  The major from the intelligence section watched in awe as the aircraft made the second and third runs. The little plane sped across the valley floor through the dust and smoke, racing ahead of the bullets of the North Korean soldiers trying to knock it out of the sky. A contour path was actually the most intelligent way to fly in the circumstances, given the tendency of a soldier, unless he is carefully trained to do otherwise, to misjudge the speed of an aircraft flying close by and shoot behind it. If the plane was crippled at this low altitude, however, the pilot would have no margin for maneuver, and if Vann and the pilot survived the crash the North Koreans would kill them anyway. The major could see that the pilot was having trouble holding true for the hill. The blasts from the mortar and artillery shells exploding on the ground jolted the plane and knocked it off course. The pilot would straighten it and keep running for the hill, and each time he cleared the top a box would fly out and down to the foxholes.

  A hundred pounds of bullets and grenades is a lot of ammunition to riflemen who used it as frugally as those American soldiers did in the hills beyond Masan, Korea, on September i, 1950. Vann brought them 100 pounds twenty-seven times that day, persisting until the approach of darkness forced him to stop. Some of the units had almost exhausted their ammunition. The men had started stripping bullets for their rifles from the last of the machine-gun belts.

  Relief columns dispatched by General Kean fought through the North Koreans to the company positions as rapidly as possible over the next several days, reinforced the survivors, and brought out the wounded in armored personnel carriers. Vann kept the surrounded infantrymen in ammunition until a column could reach them. He made forty-two more drops over the three days following September 1. He got in his own thumps too from an extra bag of grenades he carried at his side. He pitched them at the North Koreans on the far slope of the hill as the pilot was pulling away after the drop. There is no record of damage to any of the planes he used. Apparently none took more than a few bullets through the fuselage. The pilots did not know they had “Vann luck” riding in the back. Vann resumed the aerial resupply whenever necessary until MacArthur’s counterstroke at Inchon on September 15 threw the North Koreans into disarray by severing their main line of supply and retreat. John Vann had been promoted to captain two days earlier.

  Vann’s contribution did not, of course, decide the battle for the Pusan Perimeter. Walker had sufficient reserves by the end of August to have stopped a North Korean advance to Pusan even if the 35th Infantry Regiment had broken and the enemy had been able to reorganize and surge ahead again. Walker’s stalwart generalship and the resolution of the soldiers of the 35th and the other fighting units of the Eighth Army won the victory. The lonely battle of the riflemen on the hilltops had been different. Their lives had hung on the fearlessness of one man.

  The war in Korea was a prelude to the war in Vietnam. It was the first war in American history in which the leaders of the Army and the nation were so divorced from reality and so grossly underestimated their opponent that they brought disaster to the Army and the nation. MacArthur now wasted Walker’s achievement in the Pusan Perimeter by sending his army into the mountains of North Korea, and the highest civilian and military leaders in Washington acquiesced in MacArthur’s gamble. Mac Arthur threw away the heroism and resourcefulness of Vann and others who had behaved so nobly, squandering the lives of the thousands of men who had died for the victory and the thousands more who would die in a defeat they did not deserve.

  Vann’s involvement in the disaster in North Korea became part of his legend in Vietnam. He often cited the episode as a lesson in why it made no sense to attempt to fight a war of attrition on the Asian mainland with American soldiers. Vann told me the story not long after I met him at My Tho. He described how he had organized and led the Eighth Army Ranger Company, the first such commando and reconnaissance unit to be formed in the Army since the disbanding of the famous Ranger battalions after World War II, and then how he lost his Rangers to a night of human-wave assaults when the Chinese Army fell on MacArthur’s forces in November 1950 in the mountains below the Yalu. He repeated the story often to others. One person who heard it was President-elect Richard Nixon in a letter Vann wrote in another November in the midst of the war in Vietnam:

  On the night of 26 November 1950,1 commanded a Ranger company which took the brunt of the opening Chinese campaign in the Korean War. By 3:00 A.M. on the morning of the 27th, my 8th Army Ranger Company had received three assaults by Chinese forces employing human-wave tactics. We had excellent artillery support and good fighting positions and killed them by the hundreds. I realized, however, after the third assault, that I was going to lose my company. On the sixth assault just before dawn, I did lose my company. Myself and fifteen men, most of them wounded, were all that were left when the sixth human-wave attack ran through us. We got off the hill by going down the way the Chinese had come up. On the way down the hill, I estimated that there were over five hundred dead Chinese soldiers in front of our positions.

  John Vann did at one point command the Eighth Army Ranger Company while in Korea, but the truth of what happened was different and more interesting than the legend.

  For some time prior to November 1950, Vann had been envious of a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant named Ralph Puckett, Jr. Puckett commanded the Eighth Army Ranger Company attached to the 25th Division. He and Vann were f
ond of each other, because both were crackers and both loved soldiering. Puckett was a Georgia boy, West Point class of 1949, and as innocent as he was gung ho. He had volunteered for Korea right out of the parachute training course at Fort Benning because he thought that going to war was like going to a football game and his only fear was that the war would be won before he got to the fight. Vann liked to tease Puckett whenever he came to the supply section at division headquarters to request something for his company. Puckett still retained enough of the West Point cadet spirit to enjoy the “RA” (for Regular Army) game of saluting briskly, holding himself at attention before a mere captain, and saying “Sir!” in a drill-field voice each time he answered a gibe.

  “What’s with you Rangers and where’ve you been, Puckett?” Vann would ask with a grin.

  “Out operatin’ sir!” Puckett would reply with a grin in kind.

  “Aw, bullshit,” Vann would say. “You guys have been out goofin’ off.”

  When Puckett had stated his request in the crispest Armyese he could summon, Vann would pass him to Gassett, so that Gassett could also have the fun of razzing Puckett before they gave him whatever he wanted.

  Puckett’s Ranger company, the object of Vann’s envy, had been formed the previous summer at the initiative of a colonel on the Eighth Army staff. The colonel had intended to use it to infiltrate and recon-noiter a salient the North Koreans had pushed into the northeastern side of the Pusan Perimeter. The colonel had selected Puckett to organize the Rangers because Puckett’s record indicated that he was aggressive and the colonel thought a lieutenant fresh from West Point might operate with more daring than an officer who had been shot at. Puckett confirmed the colonel’s impression in an interview. The colonel asked if he would like to command a Ranger company. “Colonel, I’ve wanted to be a Ranger all my life,” Puckett said. “I’ll do anything to be a Ranger. You can make me a squad leader or a rifleman if you want.”