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

by Neil Sheehan

  In the latter half of August, a week after Vann completed his initial draft, the Marines fought the first battle of this new American war. They took on the 1st Viet Cong Regiment in a warren of fortified hamlets and rice paddies boxed by hedgerows and bamboo thickets on the Central Coast in northern Quang Ngai, the home province of Ho’s disciple, Pham Van Dong. The guerrilla regulars had moved into the area to attack an expeditionary airfield the Marines had built on a stretch of beach just across the border in adjacent Quang Tin Province. (Victor Krulak, now wearing three stars as commanding general of the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, had picked the site for the airfield the previous year in a bit of forethought. He had also given it a name after discovering that the beach had none. He had named it with a souvenir of his years as a lieutenant in Shanghai, calling it Chu Lai, the phonetics of the Chinese characters for his name.) Two battalions of Marines assaulted from the sea and landed behind the guerrillas from helicopters. They went after the Viet Cong with tanks mounting conventional cannon and flamethrowers, armored amphibian tractors, and another tracked killer known as the Ontos with four 106mm recoilless cannon on its armored hull.

  At a word over the radio, the 5-inch guns of the Seventh Fleet destroyers Orleck and Prichett and the 8-inchers in the turrets of the cruiser Galveston shattered the horizon. The Marine howitzers and the big mortars ashore also responded to the calls. The barrels burned from hurling thousands of shells. The air overhead was never empty of fighter-bombers from five Marine squadrons, because Marine riflemen, the “grunts” as they called themselves in these Vietnam years, do not depend for air support on the vagaries of the Air Force or on the regular Navy planes from the carriers. The Marines have their own air force, and Marine aviators are masters at blasting a way for the infantry. The A-4 Skyhawks and F-4 Phantom jets flashed in “on the deck”—Viet Cong machine guns be damned—the pilots laying the bombs and napalm on target and rocketing and strafing within 200 feet of their brothers in need.

  Most of those guerrillas who could still do so slipped out between the Marine positions after dark on the first day. All organized resistance ceased by the evening of the second. One battalion of the 1st Viet Cong Regiment had been reduced to a frightened remnant and another battalion badly hurt. The Marines claimed to have killed 614 guerrillas and to have captured 109 weapons. The price was 51 Marines dead and 203 wounded. Three amtraks (armored amphibious tractors) and two tanks were knocked out by recoilless cannons and grenades, and a number of others were damaged. The helicopters had lots of bullet holes.

  I got back to South Vietnam in time to fly up to the battlefield the day after the fighting. I had left the UPI after my first two years in Vietnam, gone to work for the New York Times, and been sent to Indonesia as the paper’s correspondent there. Charlie Mohr, who had resigned from Henry Luce’s Time magazine in 1963 after it attacked the resident Vietnam correspondents, had become Saigon bureau chief for the Times in the summer of 1965. He asked me to return to cover the war with him. R. W. “Johnny” Apple, Jr., joined us later. The Marines spoke with amazement of the stamina of their new enemy. There was a brigadier general at the battlefield command post, a short man with a pencil mustache named Frederick Karch, a veteran of Saipan and Iwo Jima and other islands of World War II. I asked him if he had been surprised. “I thought that once they ran up against our first team they wouldn’t stand and fight,” he said. “I made a miscalculation.”

  Vann thought that with the blood of American soldiers about to be shed in large quantities, their leaders in Saigon and Washington might feel compelled to face up at last to the failings of the Saigon regime and to the U.S. “mistakes of the past twenty years,” as he said in his proposal for a new strategy. He entitled the ten-page proposal “Harnessing the Revolution in South Vietnam.” The idea was to gain the sympathy of the peasants by capturing the social revolution from the Communists and harnessing it to the American cause. The short-range goal was to utilize this peasant support to destroy the Viet Cong. The long-range goal was to foster the creation of a different kind of government in Saigon, “a national government … responsive to the dynamics of the social revolution,” a South Vietnamese government that could endure after the American soldiers had fought and the living had gone home.

  U.S. policy in South Vietnam had been blind and destructive, Vann said, because, ironically, Americans had been inhibited by their image of themselves as a people who opposed colonialism and championed self-determination. “Apparently, for fear of tarnishing our own image, we have refused to become overtly involved in the internal affairs of governing to the extent necessary to insure the emergence of a government responsive to a majority of its people,” he wrote. “It is a scathing indictment of our political awareness that we have sat idly by while many patriotic and non-Communist Vietnamese were literally forced to ally themselves with a Communist-dominated movement in the belief that it was their only chance to secure a better government.”

  Vann then laid out a program to start an American-stimulated process of social change, a “positive alternative” that could appeal to the majority of the peasantry and gradually split off from the guerrilla movement “the true patriots and revolutionaries now allied to it.” He presented the program as an experiment, because he hoped that moving into the strategy with a step rather than a leap might help overcome resistance to the thought of behaving like a colonial power.

  The experiment would begin in January 1966, when three or more provinces would be selected and isolated from the warlordism of the Saigon side. A separate chain of command would be set up directly from Saigon to the chiefs of the experimental provinces, bypassing the corps and division commanders. The province chief would become supreme in his domain. The civilian ministries and the armed forces would send him qualified personnel to serve as district chiefs and to staff the province and district governments, but he could dismiss anyone at any time and choose a replacement. He would control all funds and material aid that entered the province and administer them through flexible and simplified procedures that would be drawn up for the experimental provinces. He would also control all military units stationed in his province, including regular ARVN. The division and corps commanders could give him orders only during interprovincial operations, and care would be taken to see that these did not disrupt pacification programs.

  The chiefs of the experimental provinces were to be granted independence from the Saigon warlords so that their American advisors could direct them from behind the scenes. The advisory effort was to be drastically reorganized, too, in order to be certain that the direction given was effective. The confusion and lack of common sense in the pacification programs of the Saigon ministries were mirrored in the behavior of the different American agencies in South Vietnam. In theory, AID had primary responsibility for the civilian pacification program. In fact, the CIA and USIS ran their own uncoordinated programs. Westmoreland’s MACV headquarters in turn administered a separate military pacification effort. Vann wanted a unified advisory structure in the test provinces. All of the American advisors, whether civilian or military, were to be pulled together into a team under a team leader who would be the senior American advisor for the province and the counterpart of the province chief. He could be either a civilian or a military man, Vann said, but he should be selected with a care equal to the importance of his position. Given the control he would exercise over the province chief, the senior American advisor would be the real governor of the province.

  In another ploy to try to gain acceptance by promoting his scheme as an experiment, Vann suggested a three-year test for the strategy in the three or more provinces selected “with the hope that highly successful results might dictate expansion sooner.” He was personally convinced progress would be so rapid that the program would soon be applied all over South Vietnam. With the material benefits it could offer, the United States could generate an astonishing reaction from the peasantry once corruption was eliminated and the American millions were getting down
to the poor instead of being siphoned into the feeding trough of the Saigon hogs.

  Vann and his friends thought there was still time for the United States to steal the social revolution from the Communists because they had been struck by how shallow Viet Cong domination was in many parts of the countryside. This “thinness of control,” as Vann referred to it, was the major reason he and Ramsey were able to move around Hau Nghia with such relative freedom. Bumgardner and Scotton had often been surprised by the same thing elsewhere. The guerrillas had progressed so rapidly since 1963 that in large areas they had not yet had an opportunity to train enough village and hamlet administrators and to indoctrinate the population sufficiently to solidify their rule. Vann and Ramsey noticed the difference when they went into the old rubber-plantation sections of Cu Chi District, where there had been Communist organizing among the plantation workers before World War II and the Viet Minh had found a ready base against the French. No children laughed and shouted for gum and candy in these hamlets. Everyone, adult and child, had a cold look. Vann and Ramsey never dared to stay more than a few minutes. These peasants were as sensitive to Americans being their enemies as they had been to the French. As Ramsey was to put it, the pattern of struggle under Party leadership had gone on “long enough for what was in the mold to set.”

  In much of the rest of Hau Nghia, the population did not seem so strongly bonded to the Viet Cong that they could not be weaned away with the right program of opportunity and material incentives. However antagonistic they might be to the Saigon soldiery and other representatives of the regime, and whatever they might think of the United States as a nation, they were friendly to individual Americans. They seemed to regard Americans as decent people of good intentions. At a minimum they were ambivalent, like the schoolteacher at So Do. Vann and Ramsey had sometimes found this to be true even of young men they knew were local guerrillas.

  Vann made a plea in his paper to leave the Vietnamese peasants in their homes and on the land they cherished so that their allegiance could be won by bettering their lives and the countryside reconquered through them. His experience with the Strategic Hamlet Program in 1962 and 1963 had taught him that forced relocation was a cruel folly. He was alarmed by a tendency among the American military to think, like Colonel Chinh, the commander of the 25th Division in Hau Nghia, that a quicker and more certain method was to empty the countryside by driving the peasants into refugee camps around the district towns, in effect simply to blow away Mao Tse-tung’s sea of the people in which the guerrilla “fish” swam.

  To Vann’s dismay, Chinh, with the support of the 25th Division advisors, had declared several populated sections of Cu Chi District “free-bombing zones” in August. A helicopter equipped with a loudspeaker flew over them telling the peasants to move out or face the consequences. Vann called the action “idiocy” in his monthly report to USOM headquarters. There were already 8,200 refugees in Hau Nghia surviving on handouts from USOM because the Saigon authorities would do nothing substantial for most of them.

  Rollen Anthis had devised the free-bombing-zone system in 1962 as yet another way to generate targets and keep his pilots busy. The corps and division commanders and the province chiefs were encouraged to delineate specific zones of guerrilla dominance in which anything that moved could be killed and anything that stood could be leveled. (The zones were also called “free-strike zones” and “free-fire zones,” because they were open to unrestricted artillery and mortar fire and strafing by helicopter machine gunners once they had been marked for free bombing.) By the summer of 1965 the system was being exploited to achieve a measure of destruction Anthis had probably not imagined, expanding constantly as more and more Viet Cong-held regions were marked off with red lines on the maps. Anthis had usually contented himself with sparsely populated areas. Now, as in Cu Chi, well-populated sections were among those being condemned.

  Moreover, the free-bombing zones were only an indication of what was occurring. Many other guerrilla-controlled areas were being treated in virtually the same way, even though they had not yet been officially condemned, through the “preplanned strike” system for “interdiction” bombing that Anthis had also put in place. At the end of August 1965, the U.S. Air Force announced it had destroyed 5,349 “structures” in South Vietnam that month and damaged 2,400 others. In August, USOM headquarters had transferred Ramsey temporarily to Binh Dinh, the most heavily populated province on the Central Coast, to help with the mass of refugees flowing out of the countryside there. Of an estimated 850,000 people in the province, about 85,000 had fled their homes, primarily to escape the bombing and shelling. Ramsey had written Vann that he was running into stories of air strikes in Binh Dinh “which make anything in Hau Nghia pale into insignificance.”

  The official explanation in Washington was that the homeless were “refugees from Communism” who were “voting with their feet.” Some, mainly Catholics and the families of militiamen, were fleeing the Viet Cong. The talk in the upper levels of the embassy and MACV and USOM was that while the flow of refugees was a temporary embarrassment, the refugees were a long-term “asset” because they were now under Saigon’s “control.” They could be cared for and indoctrinated and someday sent back to rebuild their homes as loyal citizens, or given vocational training and jobs in small industrial parks that could be built on the sites of the shanty-town camps that were springing up. Ramsey had written Vann that he disagreed. “No one is about to convince me that such conglomerations of demoralized people are an asset under any conditions of amelioration USOM has brought itself to accept,” he said.

  Wholesale dislocation of the peasantry would only worsen the problems the United States faced in South Vietnam, Vann warned in his strategy proposal, and it was profoundly unjust. “We … have naively expected an unsophisticated, relatively illiterate, rural population to recognize and oppose the evils of Communism, even when it is cleverly masked by front organizations,” he wrote. “We have damned those who did not give wholehearted support to GVN without seriously questioning whether GVN was so constituted or motivated that it could expect loyalty and support from its people.” As an example of the unthinking cruelty reflected in the American attitude, Vann quoted a remark by one of the 25th Division advisors to justify Chinh’s action in Cu Chi District. “If these people want to stay there and support the Communists, then they can expect to be bombed,” the advisor had said.

  With the commitment of the American soldier, such ignorance entailed cruelty to Americans too. To persist in it was to risk the unacceptable, that “a successful military venture will be negated by a continued failure of GVN to win its own people.” The American soldier was merely buying time, Vann warned. “The major challenge now facing the U.S. in Vietnam” was to use that time to break the Communist monopoly on social revolution. The United States therefore had the right to act as a benevolent colonial power and push the current regime aside precisely because the need for change was so imperative. “Every effort should be made to ‘sell’” the Saigon generals and politicians on the wisdom of the program he was proposing and enlist their cooperation in reforming their society, Vann wrote, but “if this cannot be done without compromising the principal provisions of the proposal, then GVN must be forced to accept U.S. judgment and direction. The situation is now too critical and the investment too great for us to longer tolerate a directionless and floundering effort that is losing the population, hence the war.”

  Undaunted by the impenetrable fantasies of Paul Harkins, by Maxwell Taylor’s lack of curiosity at the lunch, by the canceled briefing for the Joint Chiefs, John Vann set out once more to persuade those he served to fight the war in Vietnam his way. He got some encouragement this time from men in influential positions. He had come a distance from the Army lieutenant colonel at My Tho. Although he was still a small figure in the world of public men, he was a personality in Vietnam, thanks to Halberstam. He represented forthrightness and integrity even to those in the bureaucracy who also regarded him a
s an obsessed maverick. His reputation and his continuing exploits naturally attracted the newsmen, and, having learned the advantages of access to the press at 7th Division, he did not turn them away.

  I was just one of a number of his reporter friends from My Tho days who had returned to the war. Mert Perry, who had resigned from Time in 1963 along with Charlie Mohr, was back in the country reporting for News week when Vann was ambushed in June. He went out to Bau Trai shortly afterward. The result was a four-column feature in News week in late July captioned “This Is All Bad News Country,” with photographs of Hanh, of a lanky Ramsey striding down the dirt street of Bau Trai, and of Vann in front of a thatched cottage in a hamlet, his features set in an earnest look. The major-league columnists who arrived to write about this new American war began to make Vann a regular stop on their itineraries. Scotty Reston of the Times came to spend a day with him in August. Bernard Fall, the Franco-American scholar of Vietnam who was to be killed there two years later, spent three days with him, and they became friends.

  Newsmen were drawn to Vann, partly because with him there was always the possibility of the unexpected. Edward Morgan of ABC News was interviewing him on camera one morning in front of a new school at the south end of Bau Trai where a teacher-training program was in progress. Mortar fire and bombing could be heard in the distance. Morgan, harking for action, called attention to the explosions. Vann had just begun to explain that the teachers and pupils weren’t disturbed, because the sounds of war were part of life in Hau Nghia, when three Viet Cong snipers decided to harass the policemen at the road checkpoint 200 feet or so away. Incoming bullets snapped by the school, the policemen and several soldiers fired back, and a howitzer crew at the artillery park farther into town—whose state of nerves was typical of the Saigon soldiery—started wildly shooting off their 105mm gun. Teachers, pupils, Morgan, and Vann took cover. The cameramen took cover too, but filmed all they could without getting shot. Morgan and his crew were delighted at their “good luck” in acquiring some real war footage to enliven a documentary on pacification.