by Neil Sheehan
Martin Marietta put him on a leave of absence, because his AID appointment was a temporary one. Washington did not expect the war to last long. His conscience was clear about Mary Jane and the children. He had them settled in the house in Littleton, and his contract with AID entitled him to fly home once a year at government expense to visit them for thirty days.
He took the Pan American jet west out of San Francisco along the route that the nation had followed into Asia in the previous century—to Honolulu, to Guam, then to Manila, and then on to Saigon, this new and contested place. Shortly after 11:00 A.M. on Saturday, March 20, 1965, his plane circled high over the city and then banked down sharply to the runway at Tan Son Nhut to avoid the guerrilla snipers who were now all around Saigon. He walked out of the air-conditioned cabin and down the ramp into the heat and humidity, which were at their worst just before the monsoon season. The discomfort felt good to him. He had been gone almost two years—twenty-three months and two weeks. He would never be away from the war that long again. He was back in Vietnam, where he belonged.
BOOK SIX
A
SECOND
TIME
AROUND
THE VIETNAM to which John Vann returned in late March 1965 was a nation on the threshold of the most violent war in its history. At the beginning of the month, Lyndon Johnson had started Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Two U.S. Marine battalions, the first of many to follow, had landed at Danang to secure the airfield there as one of the staging bases for the bombing raids. At MACV headquarters in Saigon, William DePuy, then a brigadier general and Gen. William Westmoreland’s chief of operations, had taken the first step in the planning that was to bring hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into South Vietnam with artillery and armor and fleets of fighter-bombers for a new American war to destroy the Vietnamese Communists and their followers. “We are going to stomp them to death,” DePuy predicted.
The phone in the room of the Saigon hotel where Vann was temporarily staying rang early on the first day after his return, Sunday, March 21, 1965. It was Cao. In his complicated way, Vann kept friendships with the Vietnamese he got to know, despite the worst of quarrels. Cao was no exception. He was grateful for an offer of financial help Vann had made from Denver in the months immediately after Diem’s demise when it appeared that Cao might be thrown out of the ARVN and lose the means to support his wife and many children. Vann had known that Cao had little in the way of personal savings, because one of Cao’s few professional virtues was relative honesty in the handling of funds. Vann had asked Lodge’s assistant and Bob York to do what they could for Cao and to let Cao know that he could count on Vann for money until he found another livelihood. As it turned out, Cao had not needed the help. He had managed to ingratiate himself with a number of his fellow Saigon generals amid the political turmoil that had set in after Lodge had despaired of the lackadaisical junta that had overthrown Diem and had permitted them to be overthrown in turn by Lt. Gen. Nguyen Khanh, the ambitious graduate of the French Army paratroop school. Khanh too had finally been driven from power (his plane had literally run out of gas over Nhatrang while he was trying to stay aloft to avoid resigning) and forced into exile only a month before Vann’s return. The group currently on top was the so-called Young Turk faction of generals dominated by Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, the commander of the VNAF.
Huynh Van Cao’s principal asset was that he did not threaten any of the other generals. The second-ranking member of the Young Turk faction, Brig. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, also happened to be another Central Vietnamese Catholic. Cao had been serving as director of psychological warfare for the Joint General Staff. He told Vann excitedly that just the day before the council of generals had chosen him to be the new chief of staff of the JGS, the second-ranking position after the chief. He wanted to know if Vann could come out to his house in the JGS compound near the airport for dinner that evening. Vann said he would be happy to come.
Cao spent much of the dinner filling Vann in on the couping and countercouping by the generals and their civilian political allies of the moment and on the street riots by the Buddhist and Catholic factions that had occupied the capital for the last two years while the Viet Cong had grown ever more menacing in the countryside. Despite his elevation the day before by the other Saigon generals, Cao remained Cao. He was fearful that as chief of staff he might be drawn into an intrigue against his will. Absence had not diminished Vann’s capacity to observe his former counterpart. “It is evident that Cao never has and never will participate in a coup,” Vann wrote that night in the diary he kept intermittently for the first six months after his return. “He is deathly afraid and does his best to straddle the fence on all issues.” (Cao was relieved when the military council changed its mind shortly afterward and he was allowed to stay chief of psychological warfare.)
Vann got a contrasting reception on Monday morning at the Saigon office of the U.S. Operations Mission (USOM), as AID was then called in Vietnam. While AID’s Washington headquarters was eagerly recruiting retired military men to staff its pacification program, its civilian bureaucrats in Vietnam were fearful that their agency was going to be taken over by the military. Retired officers like Vann were regarded as infiltrators. The only man to welcome him was the infiltrator on loan from the Army to run the program, Col. Sam Wilson, who had persuaded Taylor to let Vann return. AID Washington had managed to bring Vann into government as a Grade 3 in the Foreign Service Reserve, a rank between lieutenant colonel and colonel in the Army, sufficiently senior for him to be a director of USOM operations in one of the South’s four corps regions. Wilson informed Vann that in addition to Taylor’s instruction that Vann serve as an ordinary province representative, the chief of AID in Vietnam, James Killen, had reserved all of the regional directorships for civilian career men like himself. Vann would have to display his worth in the field and then move upward, possibly to become deputy director of a region in summer. The previous fall, Westmoreland had designated the six provinces surrounding Saigon as the priority area for pacification. With Vann’s talents in mind, Wilson was thinking of sending him to a relatively new province, Hau Nghia, the most insecure of the six.
Hau Nghia, west of Saigon between the capital and the Cambodian border, was approximately 500 square miles of wild reeds, rice paddies, and fields of sugar cane. Nearly a quarter of a million Vietnamese peasants lived there. Diem had established the province as one of his last official acts by putting together the four most troublesome districts of three adjoining provinces. His hope had been to eradicate trouble by consolidating it. The result for his successors had been a whole province that mocked the name Diem had given it—Hau Nghia, a Vietnamese literary term, means Deepening Righteousness. The province was considered strategic because the so-called Parrot’s Beak section of Cambodia thrust into South Vietnam at this point and put central Saigon less than thirty-five air miles east of the border. Hau Nghia was also a natural route of north-south movement for the Viet Cong. It lay between the rice lands and the Plain of Reeds in the Mekong Delta and the rubber-plantation country and the beginning of the rain forest of the Annamite foothills above Saigon.
A week after his initial meeting with Wilson, when his assignment had been confirmed and he had finished his processing, Vann went to the embassy for a political briefing on the province. The political section could not find its sparse file on Hau Nghia, and he left. Ten minutes later, two Viet Cong terrorists arrived under the CIA office on the second floor to retaliate for the bombing of the North. The terrorists had 350 pounds of plastic explosive packed into an old gray Peugeot sedan. Embassy officials had been warned repeatedly over the last couple of years to block the streets around the building to traffic and to take other simple precautions, such as substituting shatterproof Plexiglás for the ordinary glass of the windows. Neither Lodge nor Taylor had done anything effective, afraid that showing fear might cause the United States to lose face. The plastic explosive was th
e best American kind, called C-4, captured or bought from the Saigon side, as was the detonator, a quick-fuse type known as a “time pencil.” The old car became a massive grenade, sending shards of metal in every direction along with bits of concrete from a four-foot hole blown out of the pavement. The windows of the six-story building burst inward in myriads of fragments along with the plaster and the wood and metal fixtures on the walls facing the street.
Vann rushed back at the sound of the explosion to help evacuate the injured. Most of the twenty dead were innocent Vietnamese—passersby and patrons and workers in an open-air restaurant and commercial offices across the street. Another 126 Vietnamese were wounded. (The Vietnamese Communists were now ignoring the carnage such urban terrorism caused among their own people, rationalizing it with warnings they regularly gave the population in leaflets and radio broadcasts to stay away from American buildings.) The two terrorists were killed as well as several of the Saigon policemen guarding the building. One of the two Americans killed was a Navy petty officer; the other was a young woman who was a secretary to the CIA station chief. The station chief himself was gravely hurt and nearly lost both eyes. Two of his CIA officers were permanently blinded. A number of the other fifty-one men and women hurt inside the embassy were also horribly wounded, their faces torn. Vann noticed that one hunk of concrete or metal was hurled up all six stories and ripped a large hole through the American flag on the roof.
John Vann left for Hau Nghia the day after the attack on the embassy. He drove right through the province capital of Bau Trai before he realized that he had missed it and turned around. The place was, he wrote in his diary, “the most unlikely looking province capital in all Vietnam.” The last time he had seen Bau Trai had been during an operation in early 1963. (Two of Hau Nghia’s four districts had been part of Long An Province in the old 7th Division zone.) It had been a Viet Cong-controlled hamlet of about 1,000 people then. Diem had selected it as the province capital because it happened to be at the junction of the dirt roads connecting three of the district centers. The population had nearly doubled with the arrival of soldiers for a garrison and wives and children and camp followers. Bau Trai had also gained a handful of buildings that were used as offices and housing for the province officials and their American advisors. Diem had tried to abolish the plain country name (Bau Trai means Round Farm) by bestowing one of his literary titles, Khiem Cuong, which means Modest But Vigorous. The fancy name had not taken. Everyone continued to call the place Bau Trai. Despite the near doubling in population, Bau Trai was just about 200 yards across at the widest point where it straddled both sides of the road. Vann looked again and recognized the hamlet of two years before.
Closer inspection brought more discouragement. At a small compound in the center of town where the military advisors lived, he asked directions to the USOM office. He was sent down a lane to a long tin-roofed warehouse and walked inside to “a completely disheartening sight.” The warehouse was bursting with “disorderly stacked piles of bulgur wheat, corn, shovels, paint, clothing, medical supplies, cooking oil, cement, dried milk, pitch forks, mattresses, chairs, chests, saws, angle iron lengths, nails, rice hullers, and miscellaneous items I later found came from the salvage yard.” The man he was replacing, William Pye, a fifty-two-year-old Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who had volunteered for AID and who was a brave and decent man, but extremely tense and disorganized, was standing in the midst of this magpie’s delight, pad and pen in hand, “apparently inventorying some item.” The USOM office consisted of a couple of desks in a corner of the warehouse. Vann could see that the papers on the desktops were in as much disarray and covered with as much dust as everything else.
He asked where the living quarters were and walked a short distance to a new bungalow of the inevitable masonry and stucco construction. On the outside, except for some useless barbed wire strung around it, the house was trimly built, with wooden shutters. On the inside, it was the same grubby warren as the warehouse. There was no electricity for lights and fans, just gasoline lanterns that made the house hotter at night. Nor could Vann look forward to relaxing at a meal. He had told himself that to be effective he was going to have to live with the Vietnamese. He had therefore decided not to take his meals with the U.S. military advisors at their mess. But when eating at the one restaurant in Bau Trai, Vann wrote to a friend in Denver, it was “very difficult to stick a bite of food in the mouth without the flies riding in with it.”
Flies were not the primary threat to the health of an American or Saigon official in Hau Nghia. The USOM motor-pool officer in Saigon had grumbled about letting Vann borrow a station wagon to drive to Bau Trai. The man had been worried about getting his vehicle back. Vann was the first Vietnamese or American official to drive unescorted from Saigon in many months. Everyone else traveled to and from Saigon and on all of the roads still open within the province in armed convoys. As the convoys were also frequently mined or ambushed, they traveled above the roads in helicopters whenever possible. The majority of the province was, in any case, no longer in contact with the Saigon side. The four districts had been reduced to three in mid-1964 when the fourth one, the northeast corner of the Plain of Reeds across the Vam Co Dong River, had been abandoned entirely to the guerrillas. (The district chief had been given three villages in another district to administer.) By early 1965 when Vann arrived, the direct roads between Bau Trai and two of the three remaining district centers had also been cut. It was likewise no longer possible to drive directly to Bau Trai from Saigon, even though the place was a mere twenty miles from the city. Vann had been forced to take an indirect way that circled to the northwest up Route 1, the main road from Saigon to Cambodia, and then south down a secondary road from the town of Cu Chi, the third district center in the province.
Hau Nghia was such a “Siberia assignment,” as Vann put it, that the regime was currently unable to find a chief for the province. The last province chief had been jailed for complicity in the most recent abortive coup in February. The job had since been offered to two other ARVN officers, and both had refused it. With the exception of Bau Trai and the district towns, half a dozen hamlets, and the outposts that still existed at the sufferance of the guerrillas, Hau Nghia had been ceded to the Viet Cong.
Although Vann’s job for USOM was to supervise school building, hog raising, refugee relief, and similar civilian pacification projects, a vacuum of leadership and a confrontation were precisely the circumstances in which he thrived. He immediately began scheming to take Hau Nghia back from the Viet Cong. He started organizing on his first night, convening a meeting with the acting province chief, a civilian Saigon official who was the deputy for administration, to work out the province budget requirements for the coming fiscal year. The next morning he was off to begin a tour of the district centers to meet the district chiefs and their American advisors and be briefed. Westmoreland had arranged in mid-1964 for the headquarters of the ARVN 25th Infantry Division and two of its regiments to be transferred to Hau Nghia from Central Vietnam. Vann also stopped at the division headquarters and at one of the regimental command posts on his first morning. He learned that despite Westmoreland’s priority designation, no one had drawn up a pacification plan for Hau Nghia. They had to have one, Vann said, and he initiated the process. He got USOM’s Vietnamese work crew in Bau Trai busy bringing order to the warehouse and told the acting province chief that he had to have a respectable office in the province headquarters. The headquarters building, with a large veranda, was the only structure in town of any vague distinction.
He told the assistant he found waiting for him in Bau Trai, Douglas Ramsey, a thirty-year-old Foreign Service officer who had reached the province a month earlier, that they could not afford to surrender access to the population as the guerrillas wanted by staying off the roads and riding helicopters. Ramsey was a cheerful, gangling Westerner of six feet three inches with black hair and a round-the-clock five o’clock shadow. He was a rarity among Americans in 1965�
�fluent in spoken and written Vietnamese. Convoys would not permit them the freedom of movement they needed either, Vann said, and he thought they would actually be in less danger driving alone. The Viet Cong interdicted all official traffic and, whenever they wished, set up roadblocks to collect taxes from commercial trucks and to kidnap individual soldiers riding civilian buses. Otherwise they permitted civilian vehicles to move freely on the roads that were still open.
All of the USOM vehicles were civilian types. In addition to several large cargo trucks with Vietnamese drivers for hauling supplies, there were two smaller vehicles for Ramsey and Vann to use. One was an International Harvester Scout with armor concealed in the body. The other was an unarmored pickup truck, also an International, painted a canary yellow. Vann preferred the pickup, because it was fast. The weight of the armor slowed down the Scout. He believed they would be able to drive when and where they wanted and have a reasonable chance of staying alive if they kept their pattern as irregular as possible and checked with the local police or militia before starting down a stretch of road. Most of Ramsey’s previous work in Vietnam had not been dangerous, but he had done some operating in the countryside, and he was game.
