by Neil Sheehan
For Mary Jane, Parlin was sudden isolation after the closeness of garrison living at Fort Benning and the camaraderie of the 25th Division families in Japan. The house he rented was in a predominantly Polish neighborhood composed of people who had immigrated long before World War II. Most of Mary Jane’s neighbors were elderly couples who did not speak English well and whose children had grown up and moved away. Her next-door neighbor happened to be a widow of Anglo-Saxon heritage who was always cooking and sending over pies and casseroles and offering to help with the children. One kindly neighbor is not a community or a social life. John would leave at 8:00 A.M. after breakfast and Mary Jane would rarely see him until late at night.
Had she wanted to hire a baby-sitter and take a bus to go bowling, or to the movies, or window-shopping in a more prosperous section, she would not have had the money. John bought her a secondhand car for herself and the children, but it was such a jalopy that it did not run most of the time. He used the family’s new car to commute to the university. He controlled all of the money, paying the major bills like the rent himself and keeping Mary Jane on a tight budget. On Saturdays he would drive her to the commissary at an Army installation to buy groceries and then dole out money during the week for whatever additional food she had to buy and for the children’s clothing and other essentials. If she protested to him about rising prices, he would retort that he had gone without shoes when he was a boy and by God his children could make do with a pair that cost no more than such-and-such—citing a price that had prevailed when he was in his teens or during World War II. Because he did not shop for the family himself, he had little idea of the rise in the cost of living.
When Mary Jane complained of her loneliness he said that he did not have time to spare for her and the children at this point in his career. He took the position that he was fulfilling his obligation by supporting the family. He also refused to move them to a house closer to the campus, saying that he could not afford it. He was genuinely busy. He taught ROTC courses, took day and night classes for his own degree, and was the detachment’s supply officer. In his ambitious way he later volunteered to coach the demonstration drill team, called the Scarlet Rifles, and to serve as a physical education instructor. By now Mary Jane knew that he always made time for what he wanted to do and that on nights when he could be at home he was chasing women instead. She also began to realize that he was miserly with her and the children because he wanted money to spend on his extracurricular pastime.
She started checking up on him through acquaintances she made at the few social gatherings of ROTC officers and their wives and friends to which he did take her. She discovered that, among more fleeting adventures, he was having an affair with a secretary. Mary Jane had met the woman at one of the social gatherings. They were about the same age. She was not worried that John was going to leave her to marry the secretary. The woman was the sort of good-time party girl whom men pick up and discard. Yet somehow knowing her made it harder to tolerate his unfaithfulness. After the children were asleep at night she would imagine him making love to the secretary and drive herself into fits of depression and weeping.
Mary Jane refused to consider the possibility of leaving him. Raising three children on what she could expect to earn as an unskilled woman intimidated her, and she regarded divorce as a public admission to her parents and friends that she had failed at the one enterprise in life at which she most wanted to succeed. She told herself that she would not be able to bear the shame of it. She could not even bring herself to take revenge by having an affair.
If he had given her the semblance of the marriage she wanted, she might have learned to accept his promiscuity. She would plead with him to come home for dinner after classes on a given evening. He would promise and she would cook a special meal, put candles on the table, buy some wine—everything just for the two of them and the expectation of making love afterward—and he would fail to show up. She would be hysterical by the time he did return well after midnight, railing at him in tears that she was his wife, that he had taken marriage vows, that it was his duty to come home to her. One evening he promised to return early to eat with her and the children because it was Patricia’s birthday. Mary Jane baked a cake. Midnight came and went without Patricia’s father coming home. Patricia remembered her birthday cake sitting on the table uncut, the candles unlit, and her mother lying on her parents’ bed sobbing uncontrollably.
Mary Jane began to pick fights with him over his stinginess, his lack of attention to the children, his running around, or any grievance that came to mind. The arguments became steadily more vicious. When she had worked herself into a fit she would shriek and throw plates or anything else she had in her hand at him. Her impulses were self-destructive. The fights made the marriage more hellish than it already was and gave John yet another excuse not to come home. He took to staying out all night frequently, saying that he had to study late and would sleep in the car and shave and shower at the gym the next morning. She would deny him her body when he did come home to try to punish him. The denials would not last long because of her desire for him. In the summer of 1953, as the marriage was entering one of its worst stages, she became pregnant again.
During earlier and happier years of the marriage, John had told her more about his childhood than he was ever to tell anyone. He had told her that he was illegitimate and had taken her to meet Johnny Spry during a stopover in Norfolk in 1947 on their first trip to Fort Benning. She was struck by his resemblance to his natural father and listened to him reminisce about riding on kegs of bootleg whiskey as a little boy when Spry had taken him along on delivery runs before Spry’s still had been raided. She heard how Mollie had rescued him from the crib in which his mother had abandoned him, of Frank Vann’s perpetual fried potatoes and biscuits, of how Garland Hopkins had given him an escape by sending him to Ferrum. They had driven over to Ferrum so that he could show her the school and introduce her to his teachers. At the time Myrtle had taken up with a chief petty officer in the Navy for whom she was soon to leave Frank Vann. Mary Jane had gathered from what John said of his mother that she was altogether egocentric, a drinker and a loose woman who had rejected him and her other children. His first memory of his mother, he had said, was of her sitting in front of her dresser brushing her hair.
For every fragment of his childhood John revealed to her, he concealed many more. He was too ashamed of the memories to speak of them even to her, or he suppressed them. At this unhappy time in her marriage she had no way of knowing why John behaved as he did. She had no way of understanding the magnitude of the insecurity that Myrtle had created in him. The boy who had to prove to himself that he had the courage of a male by feats of daring was the man who had to keep assuring himself of his masculinity by a never-ending marathon of seduction. What was a penchant for womanizing in Spry was a hunger that no number of women could satisfy in John. Using women to give himself fleeting assurance was also not enough for him. He had to victimize women too, as he was victimizing Mary Jane in a kind of revenge on his mother.
He also had not told her that Garland Hopkins was another man with a dark side and that Hopkins had exacted a price for liberating him. Hopkins’s tragic flaw was pedophilia, a homosexual attraction to boys. Hopkins did not recite ghost stories around the campfire simply to entertain his Boy Scouts. He would pick out a boy who had been frightened by his tales and crawl into the boy’s sleeping bag later that night saying that he wanted to comfort him. Hopkins’s particular compulsion did not involve sodomy or other advanced acts of homosexuality. It was the fondling of the genitals that little boys commonly engage in with each other as sex play. (He had a normal relationship with his wife and fathered three children.) Men like Hopkins are most attracted to the blond-slip-of-a-youth sort that Vann was at fourteen. There is no doubt there was a relationship between them. It is not unusual in such cases for the sexual relationship to end as the boy grows older and for the two men to wind up being friends. This is apparently what
happened in the case of Vann and Hopkins. Vann admired Hopkins’s qualities as a social reformer and political activist and was immensely grateful to him. The relationship does seem to have aggravated the insecurity that Myrtle created, making Vann even more ferociously heterosexual.
There was so little warmth in the marriage in the spring of 1954 that John abandoned Mary Jane and the children the night that Tommy was born. He took her to the hospital in the afternoon when she had labor pains. She thought he then returned to stay with the children. The kind widow who was her neighbor had come over to watch them while John drove her to the hospital. When she called the house that night to tell him that he had a fourth child and a third son, her neighbor answered the phone. John had not reappeared. Mary Jane was unable to reach him until late the next morning at the ROTC office at the university.
He left for a new assignment with the 16th Infantry Regiment at Schweinfurt, Germany, after his Rutgers graduation that June, promising to send for Mary Jane and the children as soon as he could find a place for them to live. The Army’s family housing project in Schweinfurt was temporarily full. At John’s suggestion they moved in with the Aliens in Rochester to wait. This expedient saved money; Vann lost his Army allowance for food and house rent in New Jersey after he went overseas. His promise seemed sincere when he left. He took with him Mike, the family dog, a friendly blend of cocker spaniel and miscellaneous that he had saved from execution at the Fort Benning pound when he decided that the children ought to have a pet.
Once he was in Germany, the temptation to keep an ocean between himself and the burden of Mary Jane and her brood was too much for him to resist. In his letters John did not say or imply that he wanted a separation or a divorce. He gave officers he met in Germany the impression that he missed Mary Jane and the children, as he was to give David Halberstam the same impression in Vietnam by calling attention to the large colored photograph of his sons that he kept on his desk at My Tho. Mary Jane thought that he wanted the marriage to continue because Army promotion boards were said to look with greater favor on family men. Actually, his motivations were more complicated. He played roles as much to satisfy himself as to impress others. He liked to think of himself as a husband and father and to talk about his children—from a distance.
Months went by as he stalled with the excuse that no housing was available. Mary Jane moved to an apartment that her sister, Doris, and her brother-in-law, Joseph Moreland, found for her in the small upstate New York town where they were living. She was embarrassed to remain with her parents in Rochester as a married woman with four children, and the checks that John was sending the Aliens for room and board were not generous. Her sister and brother-in-law were childless, but her brother-in-law was a big, warm Irishman who loved children. He was Uncle Joe to the young Vanns and was always taking them on excursions. Joe and Doris knew from what they saw and from what Mary Jane admitted that she did not have a marriage. They offered to help her make another life for herself and the children. She thought about divorce again, as she had in New Jersey, and once again, she couldn’t face it. She telephoned John from her parents’ house on Christmas Day, 1954. She and the children were in Rochester to spend the holidays with the Aliens. She was full of emotion at the memories of the day and thought that he might be moved too. She wept on the phone, told him how much she loved and missed him, and said that six months was too long and that he had to let her and the children join him. He gave her hell. There was no family housing open in Schweinfurt yet, he said. She was being her usual emotional self. She would have to be patient and wait. She stopped crying and got tough too. She had heard differently about housing, she said. She was going to borrow money for the tickets and she and the children would be on the first plane to Germany they could get out of New York.
John seemed happy to see his family again when he met the Pan American flight at Frankfurt. Mary Jane had sent him a telegram with their arrival time. His mood was a good omen. The next two and a half years were one of the better periods in the marriage, and they were years when his career filled with promise.
The U.S. Army in Germany in the mid-1950s was an Army that could appreciate a John Vann. It was an Army on the qui vive, honing itself for the clash with the Russians that every man from general to private was certain would come. The John Vann who went to Germany was an officer maturing professionally from the combination of his military and civilian education and lessons learned in the most adverse of circumstances in combat. His performance in an Army actually at peace, but emotionally at war, therefore stood out all the more prominently.
His initial assignment on arrival at the 16th Infantry Regiment in June 1954 was to be acting executive officer of a battalion. Then, for a week, he was acting battalion commander. The bold and astonishingly competent way in which he handled himself caught the attention of a man who was to become one of Vann’s Army patrons, Bruce Palmer, Jr., at that time a colonel commanding the regiment. When Palmer needed a new leader for the regiment’s 4.2-inch mortar company a couple of weeks later, he chose Vann. Heavy Mortar Company, as the unit was called, was the ideal assignment for a captain in an infantry regiment because it was a separate command, the closest a captain could get to a lieutenant colonel’s job of leading one of the infantry battalions. The 4.2-inch is the biggest of the American mortars; it throws a shell approximately equivalent to a 105mm artillery round about two and a half miles. There were twelve mortars in a company. They were carried to position on trucks and served as the regiment’s integral artillery. Palmer selected his subordinates carefully. He had shaped the 16th Infantry into the best of the three regiments in the 1st Infantry Division, which was stationed in central Germany across the presumed main invasion route of the Soviets from East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Heavy Mortar Company reflected the second-to-none attitude of its commanding officer. Palmer noted on an efficiency report that Vann’s inclination to discipline his men severely did not interfere with his ability to gain their loyalty, because “he drives himself at a terrific pace and expects the same standard of performance from his subordinates.” During maneuvers on the plain of Grafenwóhr near the Czech border, Vann had his mortars in position and ready to fire the moment the infantry called for a barrage. The shells landed on target; the mortar fire was meticulously coordinated with that of the artillery; the gun emplacements were so perfect they could have been used as demonstration models. At inspections in garrison the weapons and equipment were in faultless condition; the records were kept precisely according to regulation; the appearance of the company commander and his platoon leaders and men was a perfection of spit and polish.
The mortar company and its commanding officer also excelled at those other activities that keep an army prepared. The company won more athletic awards than any other in the regimental competitions and contributed members to the regimental basketball team, which Vann coached to a victory over the teams from the other two regiments in the 1st Infantry Division championship. “I was particularly impressed with the fighting spirit and will to win evidenced by all members of the team,” Palmer said in his letter of commendation to Vann. “They might have been outplayed at times, but they were never outfought.”
When Vann was transferred to Headquarters U.S. Army Europe at Heidelberg in June 1955, after a year with the regiment (he had been promoted to major that April), Palmer went out of his way to alert future promotion boards and selection boards for schooling to Vann’s potential. He rated Vann on a final efficiency report as “one of the few highly outstanding officers I know.” Palmer urged that Vann be given “an early opportunity” to attend the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a virtual requirement for promotion to lieutenant colonel. To drive home his assessment of Vann’s talent, Palmer added a special letter of commendation to Vann’s file:
You have been an outstanding company commander and all-around leader of men. Under your leadership, I have had the utmost confidence in Heavy Mortar Company to
accomplish any mission assigned.
On all occasions, Heavy Mortar Company has reflected the highly competitive, aggressive, and enthusiastic spirit which you have provided… I feel that much credit for the success of your company is due to your integrity, tenacity, and singleness of purpose.
At the headquarters in Heidelberg, where Vann joined the Logistical Management Section of the G-4 Division, his superiors were soon praising him with similar exuberance. “I consider this officer to be one of the Army’s outstanding young men,” his immediate superior said on his first efficiency report.
Vann’s private life did not affect the esteem in which his superiors held him. These superiors, Palmer among them, uniformly praised Vann’s “high moral character” on his efficiency reports. In professional terms, Vann was a highly moral man. He believed wholeheartedly in the ideals of the American officer—in caring for his troops, in leading by example, in reporting honestly to those above him—because the fulfillment of those ideals was bound up with his sense of self-respect. The Army also does not concern itself with the private lives of its officers as long as the officer avoids scandal and his private life does not include such things as homosexuality, which can easily lead to blackmail. The frequent separations of military life tend to reduce adultery to the mere transaction on a couch that Napoleon claimed it to be. Those marriage partners who remain faithful, as Mary Jane did, do so because monogamy is an emotional preference or need. A number of Vann’s contemporaries knew of his off-duty activity, because he boasted of his sexual prowess. Most found his tales amusing or envied his virility. He also made appearance count in his favor. One of Vann’s friends at Schwein-furt noticed that although Vann quickly acquired a bevy of German girlfriends, he was discreet. He never brought his girlfriends to the officers’ club, even before Mary Jane arrived, as some of the other officers who were away from their wives did. Vann’s superiors undoubtedly heard something about his extramarital activities through the grapevine. They could see that he was being careful, and discretion was equivalent to personal morality in their set of values. Vann also seemed to be an upright man in his other habits. He never drank to excess; in fact, he hardly drank at all. Nor did he run up debts. For her own reasons, Mary Jane did not betray him with tales or scenes outside the family.
