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

by Neil Sheehan

  The CID had been pressing ahead with its investigation. Agents checked details of the girl’s story that could be independently verified, such as a claim that she had visited a doctor in Leavenworth, Kansas, the garrison town next to the fort, at one point in the affair when she had feared she was pregnant. The details checked out. The girl agreed to be questioned about her story with a lie detector. The machine said that she was-telling the truth. The CID agents offered Vann an opportunity to take a lie-detector test to confirm his denials. He refused. When he received his M.B.A. from Syracuse University at the end of July, he was kept in a holding pattern instead of being sent to the Pentagon as scheduled. Two weeks later the CID submitted a lengthy report recommending that he be court-martialed for statutory rape and adultery. The adultery charge was a misdemeanor tossed in to buttress the felony count. It was taken from the catchall article of military law that forbids “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” Mary Jane, who had not been questioned by the agents, was listed as the “victim” under the adultery charge.

  First Army Headquarters, then at Fort Jay, New York, appointed an officer to conduct a second investigation known as an Article 32 proceeding, the equivalent of the grand jury process in civilian law. If the investigating officer found that there was sufficient evidence to convict, Vann would be formally charged and court-martialed. Until his fate could be decided, he was assigned as deputy comptroller at Camp Drum (later Fort Drum), then a training base for reservists and National Guardsmen in the snow belt of northern New York State off Lake Ontario. He rented the first floor of a large farmhouse in a hamlet near the post for Mary Jane and the children.

  Vann knew that Mary Jane would lie for him. She had rallied to him after her initial anger had passed and out of gratitude for what he had done for Peter. She had also seen the threat from the beginning as directed as much at her and the children as at him. What kind of a future would she and the children have with John in prison or ruined? With her potential role as a corroborating witness in mind, he had already created a framework in which she could lie effectively for him. Prior to another interrogation by a CID agent at Fort Jay in mid-July he composed a story of befriending an emotionally disturbed girl who expressed her unhappiness at her home life by having affairs with older men. The girl happened to tell him of her troubles because he was willing to listen. He did not inform her parents because she confided in him and asked him not to betray her. He implied that her parents were too insensitive to understand in any case. In her depression the girl finally turned on him too and falsely claimed to the chaplain that he was having an affair with her. The agent at Fort Jay asked him to write down his story. He did so in a seventeen-page account in longhand. The story was filled with incidents that Mary Jane could witness. In one incident Mary Jane overheard the girl talking to one of her adult lovers on the Vanns’ phone. Vann instructed his wife not to let the girl use the phone anymore. He disposed of incidents from the girl’s story like the visit to the doctor in Leavenworth (the CID had questioned him about this and other details of her account) by writing that the girl’s mother had asked Mary Jane for the name of a gynecologist for her daughter.

  The lie detector seemed a more formidable obstacle to him. Mary Jane’s testimony would be viewed with suspicion. In order to cast serious doubt on the girl’s veracity he would eventually have to accept the CID’s challenge and submit to a lie-detector test. Then he would have to fool the machine. After the Article 32 investigation began in August the regulations entitled him to divert to his defense what time he wished from his duty as deputy comptroller at Camp Drum. He gathered all of the technical literature he could and turned himself into an amateur specialist on the polygraph, the most common form of lie detector and the type that is used by the investigative branches of the military services, the CIA, and other government agencies. The polygraph measures blood pressure, pulse, breathing, and perspiration of the hands. It detects lying if a pattern of change in these vital signs occurs under the emotional tension of trying to deceive.

  Vann finagled tranquilizers and drugs to lower blood pressure. He bought a physician’s instrument for measuring blood pressure. He timed the rate of his pulse beats with his watch. He drew up lists of questions about his affair with the girl. He arranged the questions in the sequence he believed a polygraph operator would follow. He put himself through mock interrogations, changing the questions and the sequence from one interrogation to another so that he would not be surprised. He interrogated himself with and without the various medications. He took notes on his bodily reactions. He finally decided that he seemed best able to slow down his reactions, and not run the risk of appearing to have drugged himself, simply by staying awake for forty-eight hours and answering the questions in a confident manner.

  On the day she appeared before the officer conducting the Article 32 investigation, Mary Jane wore a tweed skirt with a blouse and jacket. The fall had come by then and she knew the outfit made her look her most attractive. The investigating officer was probably also a family man, she thought. He would see that she was a respectable woman and might be tempted to believe her. Although she did not reveal it, showing only a superficial nervousness, she was filled with dread as she put her hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth. Unlike Vann, she was religious. The Bible gave her emotional comfort during the most trying periods in the marriage. During the worst of Peter’s illness she had read the Bible several times every day and at night when she prayed for him to live. She hoped that this blasphemy would be understood and forgiven. She answered the questions as John had rehearsed her to do, corroborating the events in his story. She also told the investigating officer on her own that she and John loved each other and had a happy marriage.

  Vann then volunteered to take the lie-detector test. He fooled the machine. Like a civilian jury, a group of officers sitting on a court-martial must find that the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Vann’s success at beating the lie detector brought the case down to his word against the girl’s. No court-martial would convict on that basis. The investigating officer recommended dropping the charges.

  First Army Headquarters took until mid-December to concur in the finding of the investigating officer. The snow and the cold that blew off Lake Ontario were hard on Mary Jane. She developed a cough and went to the dispensary at Camp Drum after she started spitting up blood too. The tests showed that she had tuberculosis.

  The afternoon they received the news that the charges had been dropped was a warm day for a change. Mary Jane went for a walk with John down the road from the farmhouse, the packed snow soft under their feet from the sun. He talked on and on about how relieved he was. He was ready to do backflips in the snow he was so happy over his victory.

  “I guess you’ve learned your lesson now,” she said.

  “I sure as hell have,” he said. “Next time I’ll make goddam sure they’re old enough.”

  John Vann was assigned to the Army’s antiaircraft missile center at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, as chief of the program and budget section in the comptroller’s office. He resumed his life-style in El Paso, and the marriage took another of its turns for the worse. At the office Vann always appeared enthusiastic, and he received superlative efficiency reports. Privately he was desperate with boredom over his work as a super-accountant. He had never complained to Mary Jane before about his Army job. He complained now. He felt doubly trapped, first by the Army bureaucracy he had thought he was outwitting in agreeing to specialize in logistics so that he could obtain graduate degrees and accelerated promotions and second by this woman and her children. Although he was never to know it, Mary Jane did snare him into the two years and two months he was to spend in El Paso. A friend in Army personnel at the Pentagon had telephoned while they were still awaiting the outcome of the Article 32 investigation and asked if there was anything he could do. Mary Jane described how the Lake Ontario weather was destroying her health. If the charges against John were dropped, woul
d the friend please not give him any choice in his next assignment and send him directly to a warm and dry climate. The friend, who understood the circumstances of the Vanns’ marriage, said that her wish would be granted.

  Vann won early promotion to lieutenant colonel in May 1961, and he knew that he could also look forward to receiving the eagles of a full colonel ahead of his contemporaries. No matter how superlatively he performed in the future, he would always be held back from the leap to general if any mention of the statutory rape charge existed in his records. There are more candidates for stars than stars to give, and the Army does not want its generals to have personal habits that could cause scandal. A promotion board for general officers would feel obliged to hold to the opposite standard of court-martial. The possibility of guilt would suffice to condemn him to rejection.

  Nevertheless, he tried to salvage his career. One of his former superiors in Germany sent him to a mutual acquaintance who had recently retired from the Army to join a missile division of Martin Marietta. The acquaintance was Col. Francis Bradley, who was subsequently to become one of the leading executives of the weapons and aerospace firm. He was a close friend of Vann’s former superior and had also met Vann briefly in Germany. Frank Bradley’s last job in the Army had been as an assistant in the chief of staff’s office. He still had good connections there. When Vann came to see him and told his story, Bradley was struck by his lack of guilt at having slept with the girl. His regrets were confined to getting caught and spoiling his career. He boasted to Bradley of how he had fooled the lie detector. Vann said that unless he could make the evidence of the scandal disappear, he was going to leave the Army in 1963 when he reached twenty years of service and could retire on half pay. He asked Bradley to arrange for him to see his entire personnel file in a room at the Pentagon where he could be alone. He did not say that he intended to steal the records of the CID investigation and the Article 32 proceeding, but his implication was as open as the rest of his conversation. Bradley put Vann off with a vague reply.

  Vann and Bradley met again in El Paso in early 1962 as Bradley was passing through there on business. Vann was preparing to go to Vietnam. He reiterated his intention to retire. Bradley was impressed with what he had previously heard of Vann’s talent and he trusted the praise of Vann’s former superior in Germany. He was also a forgiving man about the personal habits of others. Bradley offered Vann a job with Martin Marietta, and Vann said that he was interested.

  Less than two months later, John Vann walked through the swinging doors of Dan Porter’s office in Saigon to start his first year in Vietnam, to struggle with Huynh Van Cao and the other straw men of Diem’s army, to meet his Viet Cong enemy at Bac, to try to prevent the defeat of the Saigon side and the calamity of a big American war by fighting the battle of truth with Paul Harkins and Victor Krulak and Maxwell Taylor, and to cope with the arrogance and professional corruption of the American military system of the 1960s. A man like John Vann might well have sacrificed a career to fight that larger battle. A might-well-have is still an uncertainty. The only certainty is that Vann fought that battle in the luxury of believing his career was already lost and he was decorated for conspicuous moral gallantry while deceiving Halberstam and me and all his other admirers.

  In the early fall of 1962, before Cao had begun to systematically fake operations against the guerrillas and when Vann was still Harkins’s star advisor, he wrote Frank Bradley to confirm that he planned to retire in the coming year. In May 1963, shortly after his return to the United States, Vann flew to Denver for an interview at Martin Marietta’s main aerospace complex. He accepted a position as the executive in charge of sales presentations. At the end of May, just as Vann was beginning his briefing campaign at the Pentagon to warn of the disaster that Harkins was brewing in Vietnam, he submitted a formal request to be retired on July 31, 1963. When Taylor canceled his scheduled briefing for the Joint Chiefs on July 8, he had three weeks left on active duty.

  In Denver, Vann had barely started his intended climb to the top in the world of industry when he realized what a terrible mistake he had made in leaving the Army. Permanent consignment to second place in the Army was superior to anything he could attain in business. There were no stars to be won in the business world. What happened in business really didn’t matter.

  Bob York, who had recently been promoted to major general, wrote from Vietnam just before Christmas 1963 to say that he was coming home to take charge of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Not knowing the true reason, York had been sickened at the loss to the Army when he had heard of Vann’s retirement. He offered Vann command of a battalion in the 82nd if he would return to the service. Vann was overjoyed.

  The Army wouldn’t let him return. The general in charge of officer personnel at the Pentagon told York that he would not request Vann’s recall to active duty because he knew that Taylor or McNamara would disapprove. Vann appealed to Bruce Palmer, by then a major general senior to York. He could not help either.

  Outwardly, John Vann was an active and successful man. His progress at Martin Marietta was steady, and he went into politics, leading the Colorado movement to draft Henry Cabot Lodge as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964 and then organizing Republican support for Lyndon Johnson after Barry Goldwater became the candidate and split the party. When he was not occupied with business or politics, Vann was traveling to lecture or do newspaper and television interviews on the war in Vietnam. He gave scores of lectures and interviews on Vietnam all over the country between his retirement in mid-1963 and the end of 1964.

  Inwardly, Vann was a man being crushed by the boredom of his job and by the concerns of Mary Jane and the children. She was an embittered woman by now, and she took out her bitterness in constant squabbles with him. He avoided the house he had bought for the family in Littleton, a Denver suburb near the Martin Marietta plant, as much as he could, leaving early in the morning and not returning until late at night. Mary Jane remarked to him one day that the marriage certainly must be finished when he wouldn’t eat her cooking anymore. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re right.”

  In the summer of 1964, after the failure of another attempt by York to persuade the Army to let him return, Vann approached officials at the Far East Bureau of the Agency for International Development in Washington. The White House had assigned AID principal responsibility for the civilian pacification program in Vietnam, and the agency was having trouble recruiting men for the work. Most of its career economic development officers were unsuited to the tasks involved. Many of them also did not want to live apart from their families and get shot at in the Vietnamese countryside. AID was therefore starting to turn toward retired military officers as the most logical source of manpower. The officials at the Far East Bureau were delighted at the prospect of a man with Vann’s experience and talent. At the moment, like almost all Washington agencies every fourth year, AID was in a holding pattern until after the presidential election. Vann was told to come back in November if he was still interested.

  He did, as soon as he had finished making his small contribution to the landslide defeat of Goldwater, and was offered the post of regional director of pacification for the Mekong Delta. He accepted and flew home to tell Mary Jane: “I will never live with you again.” Maxwell Taylor, who had resigned the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in mid-1964 to replace Lodge as the ambassador in Saigon, vetoed the appointment. A cable from the embassy informed AID that Vann was “too controversial.” Vann offered to go as a simple province pacification representative. The embassy replied that Vann was not wanted in any capacity. He said that he would go to Thailand, where a minor insurgency was then underway, if he couldn’t go to Vietnam. The officials at the Far East Bureau said they would think about his offer.

  Mary Jane realized that he had to return to Vietnam for his own survival. She had never seen him as despondent as he became during the winter of 1964–65. He “took to the bed,” as the old Southern expr
ession has it. He lay on the couch in the living room for hours at night and on weekends, staring at nothing. He no longer walked the way her John had always done, swinging a leg forward as he strode into life. He walked more slowly that winter and let his head droop. He was, she could see, losing his self-respect and his faith in himself.

  As usual, he did not give up entirely. He appealed to Lodge and York to intervene for him. He persuaded the officials at the Far East Bureau to ask Taylor to reconsider. He even wrote Taylor a friendly letter describing his efforts to maintain public support for the war with his lectures and interviews on Vietnam.

  He was rescued by a fellow Virginian who admired him—the Sam Wilson who had heard Churchill’s voice over the farmhouse radio in 1940 defying the Nazis and walked seven miles through the rain to join the National Guard. Twenty-five years later Wilson was an Army colonel in Vietnam, detailed to AID as chief of its pacification program. He had been Lansdale’s assistant at the Pentagon during Vann’s briefing campaign there in 1963. Wilson had been amazed then by the brilliance of Vann’s critique, and the two men had immediately liked each other. He did not learn Vann was attempting to return to Vietnam until he saw a copy of the message from the Far East Bureau asking Taylor to reconsider. Wilson went to Taylor and said they could not afford to reject a man of Vann’s qualities. Taylor relented. Vann could come as an ordinary province pacification officer.

  Vann had a cruel encounter with his youth just before he left. While in Washington in February and March for three weeks of processing and orientation lectures at AID headquarters, he stayed with Garland Hopkins at Hopkins’s house in the Virginia suburb of McLean. Hopkins had been destroyed by his pedophilia. The CIA had fired him as head of the American Friends of the Middle East, the pro-Arab lobby that he had built and that the CIA secretly funded. He had then been dismissed as pastor of a prominent church in Arlington and also removed from the Virginia Conference of Methodist ministers, in which his father and grandfather had held honored places. His wife had divorced him because he had taken to beating her and their youngest son under the stress of his disgrace. He still could not control his obsession and molested some boys in his neighborhood. The parents complained to the police, and this time he was going to be prosecuted. He could not bear the shame. He wrote out his will and an obituary listing his accomplishments. He also wrote a note to Vann, and then he took a rat poison containing strychnine, inflicting a painful death on himself—strychnine kills with convulsions. Vann found Hopkins’s body when he returned to the house on a Sunday night. The note asked Vann to distribute the obituary to the newspapers, listed family members and friends for Vann to notify, and also asked him to see to it that Hopkins’s body was cremated. Vann called the police and then did as his boyhood mentor asked. “Let these few chores be a last token of our long and splendid friendship,” the note said. The horror of it made Vann more eager than ever to be gone.