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

by Neil Sheehan

  As his “overall evaluation … the best chance of achieving our stated objectives,” he recommended a threefold course of action. Hanoi should be given another opportunity to yield. If Ho and his associates again proved stubborn, the air war against the North should then be escalated and Westmoreland should be sent the 400,000 men. The new opportunity to yield would be proffered in “a three- or four-week pause” in the bombing of the North. Johnson had suspended Operation Rolling Thunder for five days in May 1965 and nothing had happened. McNamara’s feeling was that five days had been too short a time for Hanoi to reflect. The longer pause he was now recommending was also designed to further the campaign of public relations and diplomacy he had mentioned in his July memorandum. Before taking any more escalatory steps, he told the president, “we must lay a foundation in the minds of the American public and in world opinion for such an enlarged phase of the war and … we should give NVN a face-saving chance to stop the aggression.”

  On Christmas Eve 1965, Johnson suspended the bombing as Mc-Namara wanted. Hanoi was as unyielding after thirty-seven days as it had been after five. The president resumed the bombing on January 31, 1966. By this time Westmoreland’s troop requirements for his war of attrition had risen to 459,000 men. At Johnson’s instruction, McNamara was engaged in a complicated game of bureaucratic haggling to hold down Westmoreland’s demands while giving him most of the American soldiers he wanted.

  The men of the Air Cav who had fought in the wilderness of the mountain valley were sent next to the rice-growing hamlets of the Bong Son Plain on the coast above Qui Nhon, one of the most densely populated sections of Central Vietnam and another of the Viet Minh strongholds during the French war. The operation began near the end of January 1966 and was code-named Masher. (Lyndon Johnson bridled at the taste of his generals and soon had the name changed to White Wing after the white-winged dove.) Tim Brown’s term as 3rd Brigade commander had ended in December. Hal Moore, who had been promoted to full colonel, was rewarded with command of the brigade for his victory at the Chu Prong. The brigade’s hard-luck battalion, the 2nd of the 7th Cavalry, caught the worst of the battle again, especially its third company, which had been rebuilt since the massacre with replacements from the United States.

  The countervailing monsoon season was far advanced on this eastern side of the Annamites, and the paddies were flooded. The stretch of sand the battalion commander chose as a landing zone for the third company was zeroed in by NVA machine gunners reinforced by Viet Cong and hidden in fortified positions within groves of coconut palms on two flanks. The company was pinned down as soon as the men jumped from the helicopters and was progressively savaged through a long day of dying. The troops of another company from the battalion managed to fight their way across the paddies and close to their stranded comrades during the night, but it took a larger relief force led by Moore to complete the rescue the next morning. The dead, wrapped in their ponchos, looked forlorn on the rain-beaten sand.

  A North Vietnamese regiment from the NVA’s 3rd or “Yellow Star” Division had marched down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Bong Son Plain earlier in 1965 and had also infiltrated by sea. The Northerners had joined up with a regiment of Viet Cong regulars who had previously cleansed the area of almost all vestiges of the Saigon regime. With the help of the peasants the Communist soldiery turned every hamlet into a bastion. The approaches across the paddies and other open spaces were meticulously covered by interlocking fields of fire from automatic weapons housed in bunkers that had layers of packed earth for protection overhead. The bunkers were constructed by tearing up the abandoned railroad along the coast and using the steel rails and stout wooden ties as supports for the layers of earth. The camouflaged foxholes in the canal dikes had a thoughtful improvement—a little chamber hollowed out off to one side in which a soldier could huddle during an air or artillery bombardment and get the same kind of protection as the fighters in the bunkers. There were also zigzag communication trenches so that the Communist commanders could reinforce, resupply ammunition, and evacuate wounded in the midst of battle. They had plenty of time to arrange their dispositions before the men of the Air Cav arrived. Had their spies in the ARVN not kept them informed, the preparatory movements of their opponents would have done so. Masher had been in planning for forty-five days. It was the southern wing of an offensive involving more than 20,000 American, Saigon, and South Korean troops, the largest action on the Central Coast since the ambitious offensive by the French high command, Operation Atlante, in the winter and spring of 1954.

  Moore and his subordinates and the leaders of the ARVN airborne battalions that were the other strike element of the southern wing could hardly be blamed for conserving the lives of their men by calling on every bit of firepower at their disposal. The valley of the Drang had shown that in spite of the unprecedented technology behind him, the American soldier was still subject to the rain forest and the ridges, the elephant grass and the other equalizers of Vietnam’s mountains, the moment he got out of his helicopter. This battle on the Bong Son Plain illustrated that he was also not exempt from the equalizers of the lowlands that the ARVN had encountered once the Viet Cong had been allowed to grow strong in the Mekong Delta. Brig. Gen. Howard Eggleston, an odd-man-out engineer who had been one of Charlie Timmes’s deputies in 1963, had an engineer’s appreciation for water and mud. He observed that no matter how many helicopters an army possessed, “you don’t have much mobility in a full rice paddy.” To have taken these hamlets chiefly by infantry assault across the flooded paddies would have meant massive casualties. The punishment of the first couple of days (the ARVN paratroops were also initially hurt trying to show the Americans they were not cowards) had a sobering effect. The commanders began to settle for pummeling a hamlet with shellfire and air strikes until the enemy abandoned it.

  At the end of four days the Viet Cong regulars and the NVA gave up their last bastions and retreated over the nearest mountains into the narrow An Lao Valley to the west and then further into the Annamite range, generally refusing to give battle when the Air Cav pursued. The Communists left behind several hundred dead and fifty-five weapons. It was impossible to determine from the American side how many of the dead were Viet Cong regulars and NVA and how many were local guerrillas whose surviving comrades had gone to ground temporarily in hideouts in the vicinity. Whatever the precise Communist casualties, they were not serious enough to keep either regiment out of action for long.

  While the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies had done a lot less dying on this occasion than the NVA had in the valley of the Drang, Operation Masher had been appropriately named. The peasants were mashed. Fifteen hamlets were torn up. About 1,000 houses were blown apart or burned down in the three hamlets I was able to reach most easily, because they were along the main coastal road, Route 1. The Army captain who drove me to them was the advisor to the nearest district chief at the town of Bong Son about ten miles away at the southern end of the plain. Bong Son town had been the only community remaining in Saigon’s hands at the start of the operation. The captain had seen most of the other dozen hamlets fought over, and he and the officials at the district headquarters said these had been savaged just as badly. Bomb craters—the ones from the 500-pounders were ten feet deep by twenty feet across—pockmarked the hamlets and the landscapes around them.

  The U.S. Army, like the ARVN, would accept no responsibility for the civilian wounded. The casualties had been substantial among the civilians, if not nearly as severe as the physical damage indicated. The old people and the women and children had for the most part fled or been saved by the bomb shelters the Viet Cong had taught them to dig under their houses. At least 100 people were estimated to have died, however, in Tarn Quan, a town near the northern end of the plain that had formerly been a Saigon district headquarters and then the Communist one at the time of the battle. The Air Cav medics and field surgeons and the ARVN airborne medics treated and released hundreds of lightly wounded civilians who came
to them. The seriously wounded who lived long enough to be brought to someone’s attention were another matter. The Cav medical personnel would do nothing for them other than to give them preliminary treatment and have them evacuated to the province hospital at Qui Nhon. As Saigon government military hospitals were reserved for the ARVN, so U.S. military hospitals were for American soldiers and civilians and so-called third-country nationals, such as the Koreans and Filipinos who were working for the United States in Vietnam. (Exceptions were sometimes made for Vietnamese, but the number was small.)

  About ninety seriously injured civilians from the Bong Son hamlets were evacuated to the Qui Nhon hospital. The Humane Society would have had the place closed down had it been an animal hospital in the United States. USOM had started renovating the old French-built hospital in 1963. The usual corruption had prevented the work from ever being completed. The latrines were unfinished. There were no showers or tubs. Patients who could walk relieved themselves in the yard. The hospital was understaffed, and the majority of the Vietnamese doctors and nurses theoretically on duty were lazy and venal. They looked after patients who paid. The poor depended on their families to nurse them and to fan away the flies. Most of the surgery and skilled medical care was performed by two New Zealand surgeons and an anesthetist on a medical mission financed by their government. What two doctors and a medical technician can accomplish when their sense of duty is high can be heroic, but it cannot be miraculous. The scenes as the wounded old people and the women and children were crowded in from Masher were ghastly even by the standard of the Qui Nhon hospital.

  I asked Maj. Gen. Stanley Larsen, the commander of the U.S. Army corps that was being formed for the Central Coast and the Highlands, what plans he had to follow up the operation and pacify the Bong Son Plain. “Swede” Larsen was an affable man whose ideas fit him comfortably into the Army hierarchy of the day. He was about to be awarded the third star of a lieutenant general. We talked when I hitched a ride back down the coast on his plane. He said that he had no pacification plans. After the pursuit phase of the operation was completed, he was going to pull out the Air Cav and look for another battlefield. The ARVN airborne would also be withdrawn.

  His answer astonished me. It had never occurred to me that an American general would get so many of his own soldiers killed and inflict such horror simply to walk away. Why had he gone into those hamlets in the first place if he had not intended to stay and achieve something permanent? I asked. Larsen said he did not have enough American troops to tie any down protecting pacification teams. The best he could do was to keep the Viet Cong and the NVA off balance by mauling them in “spoiling attacks,” as Masher had been, while the American buildup went forward as fast as possible. Then what about using the ARVN? Larsen said he had spoken to his counterpart, Brig. Gen. Vinh Loc, the ARVN II Corps commander at Pleiku. Loc said he had no troops to spare either. All Loc would agree to shift to the Bong Son area was a regiment.

  I discovered later that the real explanation for Larsen’s attitude was that he was not interested in pacification. Like most Army generals, he subscribed to the attrition theory of Harkins and Westmoreland that repeated confrontations would wear down and eventually consume the guerrillas and the North Vietnamese. I had heard these American generals speak of a war of attrition, but its meaning for the people and the country of South Vietnam had not registered with me. Did Larsen realize that the Viet Cong and the NVA were going to move right back into those hamlets? I asked. “Then we’ll go back and kill more of the sons of bitches,” he said.

  The Bong Son Plain was noted for its fine groves of coconut palms. Many of the farmers depended on selling the dried meat, called copra, from which coconut oil is extracted, and on peddling fresh coconuts as produce. Moore’s 3rd Brigade and the ARVN airborne had drawn part of their fire support from Seventh Fleet destroyers. Naval shells are shot in a relatively flat trajectory. In just one of the hamlets I walked through along Route 1, hundreds of coconut trees had been snapped in half by the 5-inch projectiles. The district chief and the U.S. Army captain advising him said that the regiment Vinh Loc was sending would be fortunate to be able to defend its compound. The previous hostility of the population in the area was going to seem mild in retrospect. Hardly any of the children in Tarn Quan would smile, and when questioned they stared at one in silence. Vinh Loc might not know how to find troops for pacification, but he and a relative he had recently appointed province chief did know how to take advantage of the temporary security along Route 1 bought by the sacrifice of more of Moore’s soldiers and the ARVN paratroops. The corps commander and his relative had Chinese middlemen buying copra from the farmers and running it down to Qui Nhon by the truckload to sell there. Although Vinh Loc regularly traded in copra, he could make more money while the security lasted. Normally, he had to share his profit with the Viet Cong.

  Thousands of refugees were camped in the open beside the road and in Bong Son town. Other thousands who had lost their homes were still in their hamlets living on the temporary charity of relatives or friends. These newly homeless of the Bong Son Plain were one of the brooks feeding a river of the uprooted in South Vietnam. There were well over half a million refugees in the country, and the number was rising each month. The USOM representatives from Qui Nhon and their Vietnamese staff and some workers the district chief provided were passing out emergency supplies of bulgur wheat and cooking oil. They also had some bolts of cloth and sewing kits to give away. These ran out quickly, because there were only a few hundred in stock. During a handout of bulgur wheat and cooking oil in one of the hamlets, several psychological-warfare representatives distributed leaflets on Viet Cong bomb atrocities in Saigon. An old lady wailed that the planes had demolished her house and the big guns had cut down forty-seven of the fifty coconut trees she needed for her livelihood. The captain advising the district chief had Vann’s sense of irony. He opened a leaflet. Some of the photographs showed American victims of Viet Cong terrorism. “I’ll bet these people look at those pictures and think, ‘Bully for the Viet Cong,’” he said.

  BOOK SEVEN

  JOHN

  VANN

  STAYS

  THE FIRST Vietnamese peasant homes to be burned by U.S. troops were put to the torch by the Marines in several hamlets near Da Nang on August 3, 1965. Morley Safer of CBS filmed the burnings and shocked millions of Americans who watched the network’s evening news. “If this is to be our policy,” Vann wrote Bob York, “then I want no part of it and will not be associated with such an effort. Am waiting until Lodge arrives and indicates the direction we go.”

  About a year later John Vann had a chance to leave Vietnam. He was offered the post of chief of the Asian Division in McNamara’s brain trust in the Pentagon—the Office of Systems Analysis. Dan Ellsberg helped him get the offer, and McNamara approved his appointment. The job had a future. It was an opportunity to enter the elite world of intellectuals and military men who form a subgovernment within the executive branch. In the year since the first outrage, the Marine generals had, with some lapses, enforced a ban on informal house burnings. Westmoreland and most of the Army generals had taken a more permissive attitude. “Zippo jobs” on Vietnamese hamlets by American soldiers had become so common that television audiences in the United States were no longer scandalized by them. Vann was also no longer writing to York about them. He used the Pentagon job offer as leverage to ensure his promotion to a post he wanted—director of the whole civilian pacification effort for the III Corps region.

  Ellsberg had taken the place in Vann’s life that Ramsey had held, and he and Vann became more intimate friends than Vann and Ramsey had been. Vann and Ellsberg were the odd couple, difficult men from different worlds satisfying complementary needs in each other. When Ellsberg was five his mother had set out to make him a renowned concert pianist. She started him practicing four hours every day after school and eight hours on Saturday. To keep him from hurting his hands she prevented him from playing any sport, even p
ickup baseball. If she found him interested in a book she would take it away and hide it to keep him from being diverted from music. When he was fifteen his father, a structural engineer of Russian-Jewish heritage who earned a modest living, first in Chicago where Ellsberg was born and then in Detroit, apparently fell asleep at the wheel of the family car. Ellsberg suffered a head injury that put him in a coma for thirty-six hours and a broken knee. His father was not injured seriously. His mother and sister were killed in the crash. His mother’s regimen kept Ellsberg at the piano for a time after she died. Then he stopped. Later when he became a famous man his entry in Who’s Who in America was to show an extraordinarily rare omission. He listed his father’s name; he left out the name of his mother.

  He arrived at Harvard in 1948, the year the Cold War became a grim morality play as the Czech Communist Party seized power in Prague and Stalin staged the Berlin Blockade. The Harvard that Ellsberg entered was a place where ambitious intellectuals were beginning to see scholarship as a road to high office in the new American state. World War II had given intellectuals a turn in the action-oriented atmosphere of government, and many liked it. The Cold War perpetuated a cause and a crisis and encouraged the rationale that intellectuals could provide an expertise lacking among the corporation lawyers, investment bankers, and businessmen who had traditionally monopolized the senior appointive posts. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, and John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist, both to serve in the Kennedy administration, were teaching at Harvard when Ellsberg entered. McGeorge Bundy, the first academic to hold the office of special assistant to the president for national security affairs, initially to John Kennedy and subsequently to Lyndon Johnson, was on his way to Harvard after a stint as a foreign policy advisor to Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate in 1948. The intellectual who was to outclimb all of his peers, Henry Kissinger, had had his education delayed by Army service during World War II. He was a junior at Harvard when Ellsberg enrolled as a freshman. Ellsberg majored in economics and graduated third in his class. After his year of postgraduate study in England at King’s College, Cambridge, he did something that spoke of Ellsberg.