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

by Neil Sheehan

  While the promotion was flattering, Vann was sad to leave Hau Nghia. The struggle for the province and its people had become an unfulfilled commitment. He found himself hoping that he could someday return and finish what he had started during the seven months since he had arrived. He had also formed ties of affection. Ramsey was no longer an assistant and interpreter with impressive educational credentials. He was a fondly regarded companion and protégé. Vann’s friendship with Hanh had grown into a friendship with Hanh’s family too. Whenever he was driving back from Saigon, Vann would offer Mrs. Hanh a ride to Bau Trai so that she could visit her husband. The Hanhs had invited him to meals at their home in the city. He brought candy and trinkets from the PX to the Hanh children so often that they called him Uncle John. The homely schoolteacher at So Do was another of the figures attaching him to Hau Nghia. The school building, the stopping of the unobserved shellfire, the progress so far in his war on corruption had all given him a sense that his perseverance was beginning to result in tangible gain.

  Ramsey remembered Vann’s last day as province representative. It was November 1, 1965, the anniversary of the overthrow of Diem, which the succeeding Saigon governments had adopted as the country’s National Day. Vann had been in Saigon for meetings to prepare for his new job. He drove to Bau Trai for the National Day ceremonies. Ramsey was surprised to see him appear in the white summer dress uniform of a lieutenant colonel. Because the day was a special one, Vann said, he had obtained permission to take the uniform out of his old Army foot-locker that he used as a storage trunk. He had his medals pinned on too. Ramsey recalled a few evenings at the office when they had not been lost in a discussion of the war. Vann would find a tape he had of Douglas MacArthur’s farewell address to the corps of cadets at West Point and play it on a portable recorder. He would sit and listen reverently as MacArthur spoke of “faint bugles” and “far drums,” of “the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield,” of “Duty, Honor, Country.” MacArthur’s rhetoric and the dress whites said to Ramsey that John Vann would never leave the U.S. Army. Vann had arranged for Ramsey to be designated acting province representative rather than fully succeeding to his job just in case he might be able to return in a few months. That afternoon he packed his belongings, exchanged the white dress uniform for jeans and a sport shirt again, and set off for the 1st Infantry Division’s temporary encampment in a city of tents beside the highway near Bien Hoa.

  His gains of seven months started to fade within weeks of his departure. The first to go was Hanh’s self-respect. When no action had occurred to block the graft demands by the generals, Vann had sent a copy of his memorandum directly to Lodge. But Lodge, apparently after raising the matter with Ky and getting no response, had taken the attitude that this sort of venality was to be expected in South Vietnam and was not worth a ruckus with a government that continued to be fragile. Ramsey and Vann had agreed that if Vann was unable to get the demand stopped, they would have to let Hanh embezzle the money. Ramsey was accordingly on the lookout for a suspicious appropriation. Not long after Vann left the province, a supplemental request for 750,000 piasters for the education program, an amount that matched the graft scheme, came across Ramsey’s desk from Hanh’s office. The program for the current fiscal year was already fully funded, because of the special effort they had been putting into it. Hanh had also not mentioned to Ramsey that he would be submitting a supplemental. Ramsey picked up the request and walked over to ask Hanh about it. He encountered the province chief on the way. He waved the paper suspiciously and moved it across Hanh’s line of vision slowly so that the province chief could read it. Hanh lowered his eyes. Neither man said a word. Ramsey allowed the supplemental to go through without objection. He felt that he and Vann and the U.S. government had let Hanh down and there was nothing else to be done. “We failed him,” Ramsey said.

  Chinh then succeeded in getting the ban on unobserved shellfire in Hau Nghia lifted. Vann tried to use his connections to have it reimposed and failed. The U.S. commanders wanted to shoot unobserved artillery in Hau Nghia, so-called harassing and interdiction fire, and the privilege could therefore not be denied to the ARVN. The sole permanent result of the ban was to weaken Hanh’s position by giving Chinh another grudge to hold against him. Chinh also continued to be irritated with Hanh’s performance on kickbacks. Despite having embezzled the 750,000 piasters, Hanh was still refusing to steal enough to satisfy the 25th Division commander.

  Worst of all, Vann did not get the promised “lengthy chat” with Lodge, nor could he interest anyone else in high authority in his strategy. “Harnessing the Revolution in South Vietnam” was to become an important document in the history of the war. Many of the individual ideas it contained, such as drawing all the advisors in a province, whether civilian or military, into a single province team under one senior advisor, were to be slowly accepted and incorporated into the pacification effort over subsequent years. The men with the power to set policy showed no interest in Vann’s central concept—to behave like a benevolent colonial power and win the war by winning the Vietnamese peasantry through an American-sponsored social revolution.

  Vann had misread the note from Lodge that had heartened him. He did not understand the strengths and limitations of Henry Cabot Lodge. He had also misinterpreted the complimentary remarks on his proposal by Rutherford Poats and Poats’s move in sending copies of the paper to men like William Bundy and Leonard Unger. He had read things General Rosson had not intended into Rosson’s encouraging words. He and Ramsey and Scotton and Bumgardner had a flawed perception of the priorities of those who led them and had altogether miscalculated the effect of full-scale U.S. military intervention. Instead of creating urgency for political and social action, sending American soldiers removed whatever incentive the U.S. government might have had for reform of the Saigon regime.

  To Vann and his friends, the resort to American ground combat units was a fateful but inconclusive act in a conflict of steadily diminishing alternatives. They saw it as an opportunity to start a process of political and social change that had to be seized before time and events diminished and then foreclosed it. As U.S. casualties grew, the American public would tire of this war as the public had tired of Korea. Domestic pressure for a negotiated settlement with the Communists would mount. International pressure for negotiations would increase too, they felt, as the level of destruction rose in South and North Vietnam and Washington’s allies became less tolerant of American conduct. Accepting the political and social status quo at this point might make it far more difficult, if not impossible, to undertake a subsequent program of radical reform when the lives of many thousands of American soldiers had been spent and reform was most desperately needed for the long-term survival of the South.

  To Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and almost every other major figure of the day, the dispatch of the American infantryman was a conclusive step, a solution in itself. Johnson had approached this step with utmost reluctance, delaying it as long as he dared because of the cost in blood and money and the economic competition a war would entail for the social welfare measures of his Great Society program. Once the step had been taken, however, he and the men whose judgment he relied on had no doubt that the invincibility of American arms on the ground in the South, coupled with the air war against the North, would ensure the destruction of their Vietnamese enemy. (The eloquent secret warning to the contrary of George Ball, the under secretary of state, seems ironically to have confirmed the president in the belief that his judgment was correct. Johnson told himself he had heard the most intelligent argument possible against what he was doing and that Ball was wrong.) Even Lodge, who had reason to be wiser, was carried away during the critical opening phase of his second turn in Saigon by the euphoria that all problems would yield to the arrival of the U.S. Army.

  The statesmen of the Kennedy-Johnson years had written off the Korean experience as a combination of rashness by MacArthur and unpreparedness. They did not consider t
hemselves rash men, and the nation’s armed forces had never been better prepared in a time of technical peace than they were in 1965. These American statesmen could not conceive of going to war and then being forced into negotiations against their advantage. “U.S. killed-in-action might be in the vicinity of five hundred a month by the end of the year,” McNamara had told the President in his July 1965 memorandum, but “United States public opinion will support the course of action because it is a sensible and courageous military-political program designed and likely to bring about a success in Vietnam.”

  As the Pentagon Papers were to reveal, what McNamara meant by political action was a campaign of public relations and diplomacy unrelated to political and social conditions in South Vietnam. The public relations element was designed to maintain support for the war at home and among Washington’s allies by giving them the impression that the U.S. government was interested in negotiating a compromise “political settlement.” In the meantime, behind-the-curtain diplomacy was to convince Ho and his associates that the United States would not stop bombing North Vietnam and killing Vietnamese Communists and their followers in the South until the Viet Cong laid down their arms and went to the North and all North Vietnamese Army elements sent to reinforce them were withdrawn too.

  Westmoreland and his generals reflected still more markedly this attitude of “Worry no longer, the American soldier has come.” Vann had deliberately confined the military aspect of his strategy paper to the handling of forces within a province, omitting his ideas for a “joint command” and other steps to transform the Saigon military as a whole. He was not alone in holding these ideas, of course, and he assumed Westmoreland might listen more receptively if they came from a respected figure like General York, whom Vann was encouraging to promote them. York had written Vann in June from the Dominican Republic, where he was leading the 82nd Airborne Division in the U.S. intervention under Bruce Palmer, to say he agreed that a “joint command or something similar to what we had in Korea” was “our only hope now” of turning the Saigon troops into an effective force. By the time of Vann’s home leave in the fall, York had finished his tour at the head of the 82nd and become commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning. They discussed the subject further when York invited Vann down to tell the class of captains, many of them bound for Vietnam as company commanders, what he had learned in Hau Nghia.

  As soon as York could, in early 1966, he flew out to Saigon and attempted to persuade Westmoreland to impose a joint command, integrating U.S. officers into all of the Saigon echelons from JGS to the field. In this fashion Westmoreland could achieve quick control over the hundreds of thousands of men Saigon possessed, start to employ them usefully, and multiply his fighting power rapidly. York was worried that if Westmoreland relied solely on American soldiers, Hanoi would checkmate the United States by putting in enough men from its regular army in the North to offset them. The Saigon regime claimed to have 679,000 men under arms, including the RF and PF, in 1965. Allowing an average of a third off for “ghost soldiers” and “potted-tree” warriors still meant roughly 450,000 potential fighters who were currently being squandered.

  York also urged Westmoreland to form mixed American-Vietnamese units. He took the idea from an expedient MacArthur had resorted to at the outset of the Korean War. Because trained men from the United States had simply not been available, MacArthur had fed South Korean conscripts, known as KATUSAs (for Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army), into several of his divisions. Each KATUSA had been assigned to an American “buddy.” The language barrier had been overcome relatively quickly, because a soldier needs to know only about 100 words of whatever language is spoken in the army in which he is serving to function as an infantryman. The Army in Korea had developed a pidgin of English, Korean, and Japanese. (A few words of it carried over into Vietnam. For example, any building from a wattle hut to a modern frame structure was called a “hootch,” a derivative of a Japanese word for “house,” uchi.) After seasoning, the units with KATUSAs, some up to 50 percent Korean in the rifle squads, had done nearly as well as the all-American ones.

  The acquisition of cheap Asian cannon fodder was not the purpose of York’s variation on the KATUSA system. His objective was to lay the basis for a Saigon armed forces worthy of the name by producing Vietnamese officers, noncoms, and soldiers molded in the professionalism of the U.S. Army. He suggested that Westmoreland start with mixed companies in which one of the three platoons would be Vietñámese. The deputy company commander might also be a Vietnamese officer. Keeping the Vietnamese together in a platoon, rather than spreading them through the company as individuals, had the advantage of permitting their officers and noncoms to learn while leading their own troops. Mixed units would be tangible evidence of Vietnamese and Americans fighting side by side against a common enemy, York said, and they would lessen abuse of the peasantry because the Saigon troops could be taught the importance of treating their people properly. The U.S. Army could have an important moral effect on the Saigon soldier and young officer, York felt, an effect that might help to reduce the corruption pervading the Saigon side. For the first time these Vietnamese would live and fight in an army free of graft. They might be different people with different attitudes when they were eventually formed into units all their own.

  Westmoreland listened and disregarded everything York said. In his memoirs Westmoreland was to say the major reason he did not create a joint command was that “in the final analysis, I had the leverage to influence the South Vietnamese and they knew it, and both sides exercised a rare degree of tact.” Westmoreland did have this potential leverage over his Saigon allies, and he exercised a rare degree of tact. He refrained from using his influence to correct incompetence and corruption so gross that even he acknowledged their existence. He did virtually nothing about these evils for the same reason he did not form a joint command or organize the mixed units York urged him to create. He and nearly all of his generals wanted as little as possible to do with the Vietnamese on their side. Rather than taking over the ARVN and the RF and PF and reforming them, as Vann had hoped he would, in order to have Vietnamese fight a Vietnamese war in the countryside, Westmoreland was intent on shunting the Saigon forces out of the way so that he could win the war with the U.S. Army.

  The institutional habits and motivations of the Army of the 1960s were at work. Westmoreland showed them in his response to a further suggestion by York that he economize on American manpower by employing Vietnamese soldiers in such service roles as truck drivers. No, Westmoreland said, he had to have American truck drivers; a U.S. Army unit could not depend on Vietnamese to move its supplies. The draft had been a fixture of American life since the Korean War brought it back in 1950. Generals like Westmoreland were accustomed to an uninterrupted flow of healthy and patriotic American conscripts, or young men who volunteered for the Army because they were going to be drafted sooner or later anyway. Why invest time and energy in dealing with Vietnamese when one had a readily available source of manpower whose quality could be trusted?

  There was another motivation too. Unlike his French and British predecessors in Asia, a U.S. Army officer could not win acclaim at the head of native troops. For him, glory and professional fulfillment could come only by leading American soldiers in war. The one Army organization in Vietnam that employed a large number of native troops was the Special Forces. Significantly, the commander of the Special Forces was always a colonel rather than a general, even though he controlled the equivalent in riflemen of two infantry divisions while the Special Forces were at peak strength—42,000 local mercenaries led by approximately 2,650 American officers, sergeants, and other U.S. enlisted specialists. (Fred Ladd, Vann’s friend and colleague in the Mekong Delta, was to command the Special Forces at the height of the war from mid-1967 to mid-1968.) In regular Army formations a brigade of 3,500 men required a colonel to lead it.

  Westmoreland’s intention was to gradually return the country to the Saigon regime after he had
wiped out the Viet Cong and decimated the NVA units sent to the South. He felt no great need for his Saigon allies to accomplish this task. He wanted to use the best of the Saigon soldiery, the paratroops and the marines, and occasionally one of the ordinary ARVN divisions, as adjuncts to the operations of his U.S. troops. Otherwise he cared little about them.

  Rosson had not been attempting to sell “Harnessing the Revolution” to Westmoreland. He was a reserved man who distinguished carefully between his personal opinions and what he considered his duty. The chief of staff responds to the wishes of the commander. Westmoreland had instructed Rosson to concentrate on building a logistic structure to support a U.S. expeditionary corps, and that was what Rosson was doing. Although he did not say so to Vann, Rosson considered Vann’s central thesis of taking over the Saigon system beyond the possible. He thought the paper valuable just the same, because of the ideas it contained for pacification. Rosson assumed that Lodge was going to use Lansdale to design and launch a major new pacification program. They were the “important quarters” to whom he had been referring when he told Vann to be alert for “expressions of interest.”