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

by Neil Sheehan

  The next move in the game was for the contractor to have his friend at USOM headquarters send a copy of the letter up the chain-of-command ladder to get Vann transferred out of Hau Nghia. Vann guessed this would be the next play. He wrote the contractor a reply laying out the facts of his thievery, but held back the carbon that would normally have gone to USOM headquarters. He suspected that the bribed AID official would divert it or attempt to discredit it. A summons to Saigon soon came, as Vann had expected, from Wilson’s deputy, a career civilian AID officer. The deputy immediately began to lecture Vann on how to behave toward Vietnamese. When he was unable to restrain himself any longer, Vann asked whether the deputy wanted to hear his side of the story. The deputy said that he did not, that he was merely trying to help Vann. Unless he could give his side of the story, Vann said, they would have to end the meeting. The deputy grudgingly consented to listen. Vann then described the bribed official’s relationship with the contractor and the larger schemes of graft the builder had been running with the last province chief. He gave the deputy a carbon of his reply to the contractor as well as copies of earlier correspondence between them about vanished building materials. Vann could see that Wilson’s deputy was unhappy. He apparently feared a scandal. He did say that Vann’s account and the full correspondence told a story considerably different from what he had heard.

  At noon on June 22, Vann was driving down Route 1 toward Cu Chi, feeling good about his first campaign against corruption in Hau Nghia. The bribed AID official had not stood up well under questioning. Vann had been asked to write a confidential memorandum about the man’s relationship with the contractor. The man was in so much hot water at USOM headquarters that he was subsequently to transfer to another country. Wilson’s civilian deputy was changing his opinion of Vann and was to become one of Vann’s staunchest promoters in AID. Hanh had not yet canceled the last of the builder’s contracts, but he seemed about to do so. Vann had become confident enough of victory a week earlier to announce to Hanh and to one of Hanh’s deputies that no matter what the official finding of the investigation, he was not going to issue the contractor another bag of cement or a single sheet of roofing as long as he was USOM representative in Hau Nghia.

  Vann was alone in the canary-yellow International pickup. He had talked that morning to the district chief at Trang Bang farther up Route 1 about some Self-Help projects and was on his way down to Cu Chi to meet Hanh. The province chief was also out traveling that morning to present some piglets to farmers participating in the USOM pig-raising and corn-growing program. Despite his dislike of convoys, Vann was going to join Hanh’s convoy out of courtesy so that they could drive back to Bau Trai together for lunch there with a touring USIA official. Vann had just passed a dangerous spot at a bridge named for the stream it spanned, Suoi Sau (Sau Creek). The province military advisors had nicknamed the bridge Suoi Cide because so many minings and ambushes occurred nearby.

  He spotted a group of men a short distance off his side of the two-lane tarmac road. Three of them were armed and dressed in the black pa jamalike garb that the peasants, the Viet Cong, and the Saigon militia all wore. They were walking in front of six young men who were stripped to the waist. The three armed men beckoned to Vann to stop. Thinking that they were militia who needed help in some emergency, Vann slowed down. As he did so, one of them raised a rifle and pointed it at him, changing Vann’s mind about who was beckoning to him. He slammed in the clutch with his left foot, shoved the gear stick up into second, and began to accelerate away, smiling and waving out the open door window of the truck in the hope that if these men were Viet Cong with prisoners, they might hesitate long enough for him to get away. The man who had been signaling most vigorously for Vann to stop pushed down his companion’s rifle, smiled, and waved back.

  In a few moments Vann was clear of them and speeding down the potholed tarmac at seventy miles an hour. No guerrillas had ever before signaled to him to stop and behaved so oddly. He was wondering whether they really had been Viet Cong when he heard a volley of shots and the crack of bullets missing the pickup’s cab. He ducked instinctively, just in time to keep his eyes from being filled with fragments of glass as more bullets punched holes through the windshield. The little truck careened off to the left into a graveyard that extended down both sides of the road. Vann jerked himself erect to get control of the vehicle and saw his ambushers—about a dozen guerrillas strung out along the left side of the road for the length of a football field. The pickup was headed right for them.

  Vann kept his foot pressed on the accelerator to retain every bit of power and speed he could. As the truck fishtailed wildly down the edge of the graveyard and Vann fought the wheel to bring it back up on the road he could see the guerrillas closest to him scatter to avoid being run over. Two of the Viet Cong, both armed with Thompson submachine guns, were calmer than their fellows. They stood where they were and continued to shoot. Vann stared at the second of the two submachine gunners after he had wrestled the truck back to the road and was hurtling through the ambush position. The man did not shoot at the engine or the tires. Instead he looked directly at Vann behind the wheel and kept firing short bursts from the Thompson gun to try to kill him.

  The bullets from the last burst as the truck passed the guerrilla came through the open door window in front of Vann’s face, one bullet smashing its way back out through a corner of the windshield on the far side of the cab. The truck plunged off the road again into the cemetery on the right, apparently when the guerrillas shot out a tire. Vann fought the vehicle back to the tarmac once more and thought he was free of the ambush when he heard a new burst of firing from behind. He turned to see three more guerrillas shooting at him. They were probably a second element of the ambush party who had been overconfident about the skill of the main group and had relaxed their readiness enough for him to dash past before they could begin firing.

  He was still going so fast that he had to brake hard at a police checkpoint three-quarters of a mile down the road. One of the policemen came running up to the truck with a first-aid kit, but as far as Vann could tell his only wounds were scores of tiny cuts from the bits of flying glass on his right arm and hand that had been holding the top of the steering wheel and on his head and on his chest where his open shirt formed a V. He indicated fifteen guerrillas to the policemen by flashing his hands. They nodded. From their sentry box they had been able to see the last three guerrillas shooting at him.

  Vann decided to drive the remaining four and a half miles to Cu Chi right away, riding on the rim of the wheel with the blown tire, in the hope of contacting a couple of helicopter gunships that had been over the vicinity late that morning. It took the district advisor half an hour to raise the aircraft on the radio, and the pilots could see nothing when they reached the ambush site. In the meantime Vann described the ambush to Hanh and the district chief and then joined Hanh’s convoy to Bau Trai after putting on the spare tire. The ARVN medic at the province headquarters cleaned the glass from the cuts (there were about a hundred of them) and painted them with disinfectant in time for Vann to have lunch with the visiting USIA official.

  The ambush had obviously not been a happenstance. There was only one vehicle in Hau Nghia painted canary yellow. The smile and the goodbye wave from the guerrilla who decided to leave Vann to the ambush party and the fact that the ambushers opened fire as soon as they sighted the pickup showed that they had been after him or Ramsey. He guessed that he was the target because he was the senior man and Hau Nghia was so overpopulated with informers that the guerrillas would have had little trouble learning about his appointments and guessing his likely route that morning. Although he could never prove it, he suspected he had been set up by the contractor or the Cu Chi district chief, whose graft from building materials he had also begun to pinch. He was sure the two men were involved in contraband dealings with the guerrillas or were paying the Viet Cong a percentage of their graft as protection money, or both. It would have been a simple thin
g for either man to have requested his death. The best surmise is that the request came from the contractor. The man was to play both sides during a subsequent career as a Saigon newspaper publisher and politician and thus probably had better lines to the Viet Cong in Hau Nghia in 1965 than the district chief. He certainly had more reason to want Vann dead. Hanh canceled the last of his contracts the day after the ambush.

  John Vann did not change his driving habits, but he did change the color of the pickup. He had it repainted blue. He also began traveling with a carbine slung across his lap and several grenades on the seat beside him. He had lived, he knew, because of the accidental swerve into the ambushers and because they had been such poor shots. He calculated that they had fired 150 to 200 rounds in all, and he could count only four bullet holes through the metal of the truck, including one through the door on his side. A lot more bullets had come through the windshield. The interior of the cab was damaged from bullets ricocheting off the inner roof and sides. Yet the ambushers’ overall performance had been bad marksmanship. Even the submachine gunners had fired from the hip in gangster-movie style instead of taking aim.

  The little truck had also saved him by proving to be as tough as he was. The mechanics at the USOM motor pool in Saigon discovered while repairing it that every engine mount had snapped in two from the jolt of plunging off the road at high speed, but neither the steering nor the engine power had been affected.

  Vann savored besting the guerrillas as much as he did his encounter with mortal danger. He wrote in his diary that night: “Drove thru the ambush—must have been embarrassing to VC—that many men failing to get one vehicle & driver. Close!”

  His small victory over the ambushers and the contractor seems to have spurred Vann on toward the development of a formal proposal for the strategy he had been discussing with Ramsey and with Bumgardner and Scotton. Most of his writing time went into official reports. The absence of diary entries for the month of July indicates the extent to which he was putting what personal writing time he allowed himself into the shaping of a draft. He was also being spurred on by a White House announcement on July 8 that Henry Cabot Lodge would be returning to South Vietnam later in the summer to replace Maxwell Taylor as ambassador. Vann had great expectations of leadership from Lodge and hopes for himself too because of his political and personal acquaintanceship with the ambassador.

  Vann’s emotions and those of the three other men were also impelling them to try to devise something better than a higher level of violence with no hope of a meaningful conclusion. The war had reached the point, they agreed, where only blind men could claim that continuing it indefinitely was in the interest of the Vietnamese. As bad as a Communist Vietnam would be—and Vann and his friends envisioned it as a place of Maoist agricultural communes where even marital sex would be state-supervised—it would be a lesser evil than torturing these peasants with endless war.

  One incident in particular stood out for Vann and Ramsey. It occurred at the end of April, on the afternoon of the day the Ranger company was overrun at So Do. A young peasant woman and her two children and two of her friends and their children were cutting sugar cane in a field about a mile away. VNAF and U.S. Air Force fighter-bombers had been called out, as they invariably were after such debacles by the Saigon side, and were over the area with spotter planes looking for the long-gone guerrillas. Two fighter-bombers made a pass over the sugarcane field. To try to indicate that they were not Viet Cong, the women and her friends and the children did not run. The planes made several more passes and the women and their children kept cutting cane, hoping that their innocence would be recognized. On the next pass the planes dropped napalm. The young woman was the only survivor of the eight in the field. Vann and Ramsey found out what had happened when she walked into Bau Trai for treatment at the dispensary and they questioned her. Both of her arms were burned so badly they were going to have to be amputated. She would never be able to close her eyes to sleep again because her eyelids had been scorched away. She was eight months pregnant with another child, but she was not going to be able to nurse her baby. The nipples of her breasts had been burned off.

  The Viet Cong were also becoming less discriminating. Discipline was harder to maintain with the recruiting of more and more men, and bigger and more sophisticated weapons entailed less discrimination. When Bau Trai was mortared during the attack on the Ranger company, a shell crashed through the roof of the province jail and exploded in its single large cell, killing eight of the prisoners and wounding twenty-six others. Many of the dead and wounded were captured guerrillas. Near the end of July, when Vann was well into the first draft of his strategy proposal, another of those atrocities occurred that revolted him and Ramsey. Eleven civilians, three of them children, were literally blown to pieces when a triwheel Lambretta minibus in which they were riding on the road from Cu Chi to Bau Trai ran over a new type of antitank mine the guerrillas had started to plant. The old-fashioned Viet Cong mine permitted discrimination because it had to be triggered by a man using a hand detonator attached to control wires. This new type was the sort employed by modern armies. It had a pressure detonator, probably American-made and captured or bought from ARVN stocks, that was set off by the weight of a vehicle passing over it. The Viet Cong had intended to blow up an M-113 armored personnel carrier. They blew up the Lambretta because, loaded down as it was by the weight of the driver and his ten passengers and all of their baggage and farm produce, the vehicle was heavy enough to trigger the detonator. The ferocious twenty kilograms of TNT the guerrillas put into such mines to be certain of demolishing an M-113 ensured that no one would survive. The explosion blasted a crater in the middle of the road seven feet wide and three and a half feet deep.

  Vann saw that Hanh exploited the atrocity for propaganda purposes, including the staging of a rally against the Viet Cong in a village center near the scene. The propagandizing was unnecessary. The relatives and friends of the dead spent days searching the swamp around the site to be certain that no part of a body was left unburied. They picked up the twisted remnants of the Lambretta and placed them beside the road as a temporary memorial, arranging the sandals of the victims around the shards of metal and lighting candles there. Later they returned and built a small shrine at the spot and kept a candle lit within it. In a demonstration of the quality of intelligence the farmers could provide when they wanted to, the culprits were caught. They were five turncoat militiamen stationed at an outpost 400 yards farther down the road. The chief of the outpost was one of the traitors. He had supervised the planting of the mine. Hanh had all five court-martialed and shot by a firing squad in the marketplace of the village center.

  Despite their conclusion that ordinary Vietnamese would benefit most from a quick end to the war and despite the grisly sights they witnessed daily, Vann and Ramsey, and Bumgardner and Scotton as well, did not want the United States to stop the war and give up the country. While they were concerned with reducing pain and suffering as much as possible, they believed with equal firmness that there was no choice but to sacrifice the Vietnamese peasants for the higher strategic needs of the United States. On this point they were in accord with the leaders in Washington whom they served. John McNaughton, a former Harvard law professor who was McNamara’s foreign policy specialist as the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, had summarized the Washington view in a memorandum he wrote for McNamara that March. Writing in the efficiency-expert style that was in fashion, McNaughton quantified the reasons that justified sending American soldiers to wage a war in South Vietnam:

  70%—To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).

  20%—To keep SVN (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.

  10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.

  The sacrifice of another people for one’s own higher strategic aims is a fearful thing when one is living in the midst of those being sacrificed. To Vann and his friends the
sacrifice was too cold-blooded unless the Vietnamese were to receive some benefit in return, some reward to redeem the violence. They also believed wholeheartedly that to disregard the welfare of the Vietnamese peasantry was to disregard the long-term interest of Americans.

  Vann had the first draft of the strategy proposal ready by the second week of August. Ramsey and Bumgardner and Scotton approved it, and he distributed the paper to others for comment. The comments and the results of more late-night sessions in Bau Trai and Saigon were incorporated into a final draft of ten pages that he typed and signed a month later. Although Vann did not name his friends as coauthors, he did not claim sole credit either. He said in the introduction that the proposal had a number of authors with “a wide range of backgrounds and expertise” whose “common bond is a combination of field experience in Vietnam and a continuing belief that a viable, non-Communist, democratically oriented government can yet emerge there.” The final draft was dated September 10, 1965.

  The American ground war in the South was beginning in earnest. The Viet Cong had launched their campaign to finish off the Saigon regime with an offensive in the southern Highlands and along the Central Coast in late spring. By early summer they were annihilating ARVN battalions as a blast furnace consumes coke. By mid-July the survival of the regime had become so precarious that Johnson granted a request from Westmoreland for nearly 200,000 U.S. troops to hold on to the country. McNamara came out to Saigon to learn how many more men the general thought he would need to win a war against the guerrillas and the reinforcements they had begun to receive from Hanoi’s regulars, the NVA. Westmoreland estimated that he would require another 100,000. He reserved the right to ask for additional troops later should further need arise. Johnson said that Westmoreland could have these 100,000 men too. Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force units were arriving as fast as they could be dispatched. More Navy carriers steamed into position off the southern coast to lend the support of their fighter-bombers. They were dubbed the “Dixie Station” carriers to distinguish them from the carriers already on “Yankee Station” in the Gulf of Tonkin above the 17th Parallel to bomb the North. By Christmas 1965, Westmoreland was to have almost 185,000 Americans in South Vietnam.