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

by Neil Sheehan

  The commanding general did receive a copy of Vann’s proposal, apparently when Charles Mann, the new head of USOM, circulated the final draft. Westmoreland did not react favorably to Vann’s main argument. “No one better understood the Vietnamese than John Vann,” Westmoreland was to write in his memoirs, “but he had an affinity for sounding off to the press, particularly on the theory that the United States should assume overall command in the manner of the French.” Nor did the general perceive any current usefulness in the individual ideas in Vann’s proposal.

  Westmoreland was fixed like a bore-sighted cannon on the deployment of his U.S. expeditionary force. Men of limited imagination who rise as high as Westmoreland had tend to play blindly to their strength, no matter what its relevance to the problem at hand. Westmoreland’s strength was military action. Political and social action, which Vann was talking about and York had been getting at obliquely and which were the crux of pacification, were areas that did not attract the general, because he did not understand them. His interest in pacification had always been low, and it sank lower after Lyndon Johnson said he could have 300,000 Americans.

  Vann thought he was pushing on a door that was stuck and might be opened. He had his shoulder against a wall. He was appealing to an ethic that most American statesmen and military leaders lacked, and he was asking them to discard an anticolonial myth that they found indispensable. Vann, Ramsey, Bumgardner, and Scotton might be at one with the statesmen and generals who led them in seeing the containment of China and other strategic objectives as a justification for the war. They and their leaders parted over the importance attached to the welfare of ordinary Vietnamese. McNaughton’s 70/20/10 percent quantification for McNamara was more than a mere ranking of the reasons that the leaders of the United States were going to war in South Vietnam. It also accurately reflected the 10 percent priority they assigned, in McNaughton’s words, to bringing “the people of SVN … a better, freer way of life.”

  The British imperial statesman or military leader of the nineteenth century had felt a responsibility to give the native peoples of his empire decent government. His fulfillment of that responsibility had been decidedly imperfect, but what he did achieve was due to the fact that he felt it. The system of spreading empire through surrogate regimes had permitted his American successors to escape this sense of moral obligation. The American wanted to improve the lot of the impoverished populations in his overseas system. Programs like Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Latin America were an expression of this desire. When progress failed to occur because of institutionalized social injustice and the predatory nature of the surrogate regime, the American had no ethic that compelled him to use the many tools of persuasion and coercion at his disposal on behalf of the downtrodden. He overcame what guilt he did feel by sheltering in the myth that he was dealing with a “sovereign state” and that his ideals of anticolonialism and self-determination forbade him to meddle in internal affairs. The myth became a kind of holy water that washed his expediency clean.

  Moreover, the experience in the Caribbean and Central America had created the impression in the American mind that one could employ a surrogate with the vices of the Saigon government and still keep the country in question within the U.S. sphere. The collapse of the Batista regime in Havana in 1958 and the coming of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communists had not changed this attitude. The impression had a basis in reality in the Caribbean and Central America. Spanish colonialism had left a landed class of some vitality which viewed the exploitation of its Indian, and former black slave, and mestizo peasantry as a divine right. The creóle class was willing to cooperate with a big foreign power to maintain that exploitation.

  Vann and his friends were sufficiently steeped in the realities of Vietnam to understand that the Saigonese were a socially depraved group with no capacity to reform or sustain themselves. American leaders in Saigon and Washington saw the generals of the junta and the residue of French collaborators and anti-Communist nationalists through the perspective of their sordid Latin surrogates and assumed that these Tory Vietnamese must have some kind of substance. Henry Cabot Lodge, Dean Rusk, and Lyndon Johnson convinced themselves that Nguyen Cao Ky, who had had himself named prime minister by his fellow generals, really was a prime minister of sorts, and that Nguyen Van Thieu, who had connived his way into being appointed chief of state, represented something besides himself and his title. These people might not be the most attractive of allies, but they would prove a serviceable political tool in the struggle with the Communists. Bolstered by the tool of force that the U.S. military constituted, they would suffice.

  The new year did not begin well. Hanh was fired in February for continued reluctance to satisfy Chinh’s corruption demands. He was made the staff officer for pacification at III Corps headquarters, not much of a job by ARVN standards.

  Before that, something worse had happened. Doug Ramsey was captured by the Viet Cong because he tried to carry on the John Vann image in Hau Nghia. He was caught late in the afternoon of January 17, 1966, shortly before the customary cease-fire at Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year holiday, while attempting to hurry a truckload of rice and other emergency food to refugees created by one of the initial operations of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division. The refugees were located at the village center of Trung Lap in the formidable rubber-plantation area of Cu Chi District. A brigade of the 1st Division had established a command post in the ARVN Ranger training camp there.

  The four-mile access road to Trung Lap, a dirt affair that ran off Route i, was considered the most hazardous stretch of road in Hau Nghia, which probably made it the most dangerous road in the whole III Corps region. Hanh told Ramsey that the shipment could wait until the next morning, when travel would be safer. Ramsey was afraid the refugees might be hungry, and he wanted to get the chore out of the way. He had been working by himself in the two and a half months since Vann had left the province, because USOM headquarters had not yet sent him an assistant, and he was behind in a schedule he tended to overload in Vann fashion. He could have sent the Vietnamese driver alone in the five-ton Chevy cargo truck, as he and Vann had commonly done to expedite deliveries. (The USOM drivers had never been harmed and seemed to pay protection money to the Viet Cong as the commercial truck drivers did.) Ramsey wanted to look into the plight of the refugees at Trung Lap, and he had other considerations he thought pressing at the moment, all of them Vann-like, which persuaded him to “ride shotgun” in the seat beside the driver.

  He was ambushed by four local guerrillas less than a mile from the village center and the U.S. command post. The Vietnamese driver took a bullet in the leg, lost his nerve, and stalled the truck. Ramsey might still have shot his way out of the ambush. He was carrying one of the new fully automatic AR-15 rifles (the commercial version of the M-16 that the Army was then beginning to adopt), two clips of ammunition for it, and a couple of grenades. He didn’t know what to do. He had never had any infantry training. He fired back ineffectively from the window of the truck, wasting critical moments and the clip in the rifle. A bullet from the guerrillas punctured a five-gallon can of diesel oil at his feet and sent a jet of the oil into his face, half blinding him.

  Ramsey grasped at the one thing he knew how to use—his Vietnamese. “Toi dau hang!” (“I surrender!”), he shouted, then dropped the rifle and climbed out of the truck, an overly tall man who looked even taller with his hands stretched high above his head. The driver was released. His leg injury was a simple flesh wound, and he made his way back to Bau Trai that evening to report Ramsey’s capture.

  Doug Ramsey’s captors, farmers in their twenties, were so pleased with their catch they were almost friendly. They asked him how to say dau hang in English. To get Ramsey out of sight behind a tree line, the guerrillas led him to the nearest hamlet. The farm folk there had a different attitude toward him. Their hamlet had been put to the torch by troops from Chinh’s 25th Division who were participating in the operation. Ramsey had seen burned-out
hamlets before. He had always seen them days or weeks after the burning when the places had acquired an archaeological look, abandoned by their disheartened inhabitants, the blackened ruins cold.

  The rubble of this hamlet was still smoking, and it was obvious that these people had returned only a short time before to discover what had happened to their homes. Children were whimpering. A couple of old people were standing and looking, shaking their heads in a trance of disbelief. Women were poking through the smoldering debris of the houses trying to salvage cooking utensils and any other small possessions that might have escaped the flames. Ramsey could tell from the conversations he was overhearing that these peasants had lost virtually everything. They had had neither time nor warning to remove any household furnishings. The soldiers had also burned all of the rice that had not been buried or hidden elsewhere and had shot the buffalo and other livestock and thrown the carcasses down the wells to poison the water supply. Tet, the week-long holiday that to the Vietnamese is Christmas and Easter, New Year’s and Thanksgiving celebrated in one, was a night and two days away. The peasants were asking each other how they were going to celebrate their Tet.

  Had Ramsey still been a free man, the scene might have severed him from this war. His predicament rendered such thoughts of conscience academic, but he thought them just the same. He felt sick and infuriated, betrayed and yet also responsible. During a briefing on the operation two weeks earlier at 25th Division headquarters he had expressed concern about civilian casualties and unnecessary damage to homes. The Army lieutenant colonel who was Chinh’s senior advisor had assured him there would be no wanton destruction of hamlets. Chinh had sat nearby without a word of contradiction. Ramsey had had enough. If this was to be the price of preserving the American way of life, he did not want to be one of those exacting it.

  Ramsey was also frightened. A number of the farmers from the hamlet had gathered around and were demanding the right to kill him. The four guerrillas stopped them. They quoted the National Liberation Front’s announced policy of “lenient and humane” treatment for prisoners. Ramsey sensed that they wanted to protect their prize, but they also seemed to be conscientious men who took seriously the preaching of their movement. They reprimanded an old man who spat at Ramsey. The guerrillas said that Ramsey was not a soldier who might have been involved in the destruction of the hamlet. He was a civilian who had been captured while escorting a truckload of rice to refugees. A middle-aged farmer in the group asked Ramsey what agency he worked for.

  “AID,” Ramsey said. The Vietnamese acronym for the Agency for International Development conveys the same meaning as the initials in English.

  “AID!” the farmer cried. “Look about you,” he said to Ramsey. He pointed, sweeping his finger from one charred remembrance of a home to another. “Here is your American AID!” The farmer spat on the ground and walked away.

  Vann happened to be in the CIA office at the embassy that evening. The job for which he had left Hau Nghia at the end of October, USOM representative to the American forces in the III Corps region, had proved to be a two-month interlude. He had just been given a more important assignment as USOM project manager of a new program to train specialized teams of Vietnamese pacification workers who were to be sent to hamlets all over the country. USOM was to share responsibility for the program with the CIA. He was in the midst of an argument with his CIA counterpart over how to organize the teams and run a national training center when there was a phone call for him. The blood drained from his face.

  He drove to Bau Trai at first light, reconstructed what had happened by interrogating the driver and going to the ambush site to examine the gutted truck (the guerrillas had set fire to it), and then organized the best rescue effort he could under the circumstances. Frank Scotton, whose ability to speak Vietnamese was exceedingly useful in an emergency like this, came out to help. Vann told him there was hardly any chance of success, but he wanted to try, because they might be lucky. Through Charles Mann, Vann arranged to have a helicopter from the CIA’s Air America fleet put on standby alert just in case he found an opportunity to use it. He got Lodge’s authorization to have a Catholic priest in Cu Chi with guerrilla contacts send a letter to the Viet Cong district committee there offering to pay a ransom for Ramsey’s release.

  Once the three-and-a-half-day cease-fire began on January 20, the first day of Tet, Vann and Scotton were able to roam the province seeking information about Ramsey with a recklessness that not even Vann would have dared at any other time. Vann drove his personal car, a little Triumph sedan he had owned in Colorado and that AID had shipped to Vietnam for him (the privilege of a civilian official), because he knew that it would not be recognized as a USOM or military vehicle. He was struck by how the Communists were consolidating their hold on Hau Nghia. Viet Cong flags were flying everywhere, and there were banners along all the roads, including the main Route 1, with anti-American slogans. In many of the hamlets where he and Scotton stopped to inquire about Ramsey, farmers and women and children who had been friendly to Vann in the past looked away and did not respond to his greeting. A number of those who did answer warned him that he and his friend were taking an enormous risk, despite the fact that the cease-fire had been proclaimed by both sides.

  Vann sent one of his appeals to a village chief whom he suspected of conniving with the guerrillas. He and Ramsey had had a fine relationship with the village chief on school-building and other social welfare projects, and Vann was hoping the man might help out of regard for Ramsey. When Vann and Scotton drove to the hamlet where the village center was located to see if the appeal had produced any results, they found the village chief in a restaurant. He was sitting at a table talking to two men who were eating fruit. Scotton was certain that both were Viet Cong cadres. Other men who were unmistakably guerrillas were lounging around outside the restaurant. Vann and Scotton sat down at the table and exchanged Tet pleasantries with the village chief. The two cadres went on eating their fruit. The village chief slid a handwritten note across the table. Vann stuck it in his shirt pocket, and then he and Scotton said goodbye with deliberate slowness and got up and walked briskly to the car, not looking back or sideways in order not to give the guerrillas any second thoughts. Scotton translated the note, which had no signature, as soon as they sped away. “I have heard that the American is alive,” the handwriting said. “He will be released later when it is quiet.”

  Not every guerrilla was as restrained as those with the village chief. Vann made up his mind to drive next to the sugar mill at Hiep Hoa to talk to someone there. On the way he and Scotton passed through So Do hamlet. The Viet Cong had erected a triumphal arch of bamboo and cloth over the road at an open area that served as a hamlet common. Big letters across the top of the arch predicted victory for the National Liberation Front in the Year of the Horse. (Vietnamese and Chinese lunar years follow a cycle in which each year is marked by a different animal symbol.) A group of Viet Cong were taking their ease near the arch. Scotton noticed that two of them were apparently regulars who had been given Tet leave. They were wearing green uniforms and the so-called Ho Chi Minh sandals made by cutting the soles from used tires. Vann and Scotton would have to return to Bau Trai by this same road; there was no alternate route. The contact at Hiep Hoa proved useless, and so Vann decided to stop and question his schoolteacher friend in So Do on the way back.

  When he pulled up to her house she screamed out at him that he was about to be killed. He spun the Triumph back into the road and started down through the hamlet, gathering speed but not accelerating to the full, because he and Scotton wanted to try to spot the ambush. Scotton bet that it would be at the arch. He picked up a grenade from several that Vann had been keeping handy on the seat between them. Scotton won his bet. Four guerrillas were waiting just beyond the arch on Vann’s side of the road, two of them the regulars. They were holding their weapons and motioning to Vann to stop. He gunned the engine, at the same instant bracing himself in the seat and locking his arms
on the wheel so that he could keep it steady longer if he was wounded. The two regulars raised their rifles to fire point-blank. Before they could get off a shot, Scotton reached out his window and looped the grenade over the top of the little car. The surprise of the familiar round missile suddenly sailing toward them scattered the Viet Cong, and Vann and Scot-ton raced free.

  The schoolteacher came to Bau Trai the next morning and warned Vann not to go near So Do for a long time, because the guerrillas there were in a rage for vengeance. None of the four Viet Cong had been hurt. They had managed to run far enough before the grenade exploded to avoid the fragments. Their pride and that of their comrades had been wounded. They had been boasting to the population that they were going to capture or kill the American imperialists when they returned. Now old ladies were laughing at them and making jokes.

  John Vann went back to Saigon the same day, forced to admit that further search was useless for the moment. (The cease-fire also expired late that day.) He was disconsolate, despite his realistic assessment of the prospects at the outset. A few days later he received the response from the NLF to the ransom offer he had made through the Catholic priest in Cu Chi. “The American in question is still in good health,” the letter of reply said, but ransom was not acceptable. “Money, even dollars or anything else cannot redeem crimes if they have been committed,” the letter said. Although the Viet Cong occasionally released American prisoners for propaganda purposes, those let go so far had been Army enlisted men who were considered of negligible value by the Vietnamese Communists. Scotton also observed that the phrase in the note from the village chief—”when it is quiet”—could mean when the war was over. The capture of Ramsey was one of the few episodes in Vann’s life when the guilt would not leave him. He was to show it in years to come by his refusal to be discouraged from the hope of somehow, someday bringing Ramsey freedom.