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

by Neil Sheehan

  Annie got pregnant in late 1966 and wanted to have the baby. Vann said his career would be hurt if it was known that he had fathered an illegitimate child and talked her into an abortion. She reluctantly agreed. The abortion was physically and emotionally painful for her. She told Vann she did not want to go through another one. He did not encourage her to adopt contraceptive measures. Lee had two abortions as a result of their affair before she began to practice contraception on her own initiative. Vann appears to have assumed that he would persuade Annie to have another abortion should she get pregnant again. Pregnancy was the woman’s problem as far as he was concerned. His attitude seems to have been another manifestation of the urge to use and abuse all women that Myrtle had implanted in him.

  Myrtle’s son fashioned a victory of sorts over his mother in the fall of 1966. Late one September afternoon the Norfolk police found Myrtle lying in a semicoherent state down by the beachfront. She was living alone there in a furnished room. She stank of alcohol and was clutching an unopened bottle of wine she had presumably bought earlier in the day. The police assumed she was just drunk again and locked her in the tank, a communal cell for alcoholics. It was 4:00 A.M. the next morning before anyone noticed that she had sunk into a coma and might be suffering from something besides wine. She died in the hospital that evening. A sadist had apparently beaten her while she was drunk, fracturing her skull, breaking her ankle, and inflicting numerous minor injuries. Her alcoholism had worsened as she had grown older, with more frequent and prolonged bouts of drinking. The disease had sufficiently weakened her body at sixty-one years so that the doctors could not save her.

  By the end, except for what she could beg or chisel, the son to whom she had been crudest was Myrtle’s sole means of financial support. Vann had been sending his mother a check every month for years, much to the resentment of Mary Jane, whom he never ceased holding to the tightest of budgets. He raised the payments in the early 1960s when Myrtle divorced the Navy chief petty officer for whom she left Frank Vann. The petty officer was a rough man. He knocked out Myrtle’s left eye by throwing a beer can at her during a fight. She wore a glass eye in its place. Myrtle called her sailor husband Arkie because he was from Gravelly, Arkansas. They went there to live when he retired from the Navy. Arkie was then arrested in his home state for bootlegging and grand larceny. Myrtle took that opportunity to leave him and move back to Norfolk, quickly drinking up the modest property settlement she received in the divorce. By the time she died Vann was sending her a couple of hundred dollars a month.

  He also paid for her funeral. He didn’t want his mother going to her grave in one of those pine boxes they had used to bury their dead back on the farm in North Carolina. When his first brother, Frank Junior, put through an emergency call to tell Vann of Myrtle’s death, he said he was flying home right away and to arrange a respectable funeral and make sure that she had a nice coffin. He would pay for everything.

  The funeral was something of a family reunion. Frank Junior had taken up his father’s trade of carpentry in Norfolk after a stint in the Army as a paratrooper and two combat jumps during the Korean War. Dorothy Lee had also settled there. She lived in the never-ending desperation of trying to be a good mother to five children with a husband, also a petty officer, who was a drinker and a gambler. She had married him when Myrtle and Frank Vann were breaking up. She had wanted a home of her own and had not discerned her sailor’s habits until after they were married. Frank Vann was staying with her. He had retired from his carpenter’s job at the Norfolk naval base at the end of 1963 because of high blood pressure. He had not remarried, and he had not lost his attachment to Myrtle. She would often come to him for money to pay her rent or to buy more liquor when she ran through the check John sent. Frank Vann would give her the money. He also nursed her back to a semblance of health after several bad drunks. Gene had successfully escaped into the military, like the older brother he idolized. He had also made a solid marriage. He was far advanced in his career as a super mechanic in the Air Force, soon to be promoted to senior master sergeant. He was able to fly home from the air base in California where he was currently stationed in time to help Frank Junior and Dorothy Lee with the funeral arrangements.

  They laid Myrtle out in a fine gray metal casket at the Holloman-Brown Funeral Home and scheduled visiting hours in the evening. Dorothy Lee’s two closest friends knew that she could not afford to buy her mother a burial dress, so they pooled their own money and bought Myrtle a lovely blue linen outfit trimmed with lace. The morticians tinted her hair in the color of her prime, a reddish brown, and set it gracefully. When Frank Vann came to see her he said she looked “as pretty as the day I met her.” Mollie came from Long Island. Her younger son, Melvin, who had gone with Vann to the recruiting station at Richmond in 1943 to join the Air Corps and had ended up spending World War II in the Marines, drove her down. At Vann’s request, Mollie, who was now a widow, had tried to give Myrtle a home, but she had been forced to put Myrtle on a bus back to Norfolk. Myrtle had gotten drunk and vomited on the wall-to-wall carpets in Mollie’s large and immaculate house. Dorothy Lee had next tried to keep her mother at her home, with a similar result. Myrtle had then gone alone to the furnished room. Lillian and Roxie, Myrtle’s two other sisters, also came to the funeral. Although not alcoholics like Myrtle, they had both become heavy drinkers. They got tipsy during one evening’s visiting hours, obtained a white-covered Bible from the funeral home, and placed it in Myrtle’s right hand. Frank Junior thought that was going too far. He removed the Bible and put back the lace handkerchief the morticians had originally set in his mother’s hand. The Holloman-Brown firm had broken with tradition and no longer used black hearses. Myrtle was driven to her grave on the afternoon of the burial in a hearse painted baby blue.

  Vann reached Norfolk that morning, in time to see his mother at the funeral home before the casket was closed. He set out to achieve his dubious victory over her soon after the burial. Myrtle had kept the name of her sailor husband after their divorce. Vann’s first move was to bring his mother back into the family. The name he intended to have carved on her headstone (he said he was paying for the headstone too) was one she had not borne for the past seventeen years—Myrtle Lee Vann. Dorothy Lee objected. This was hypocrisy, she said. If their mother had wanted to change her name back to Vann she would have done so. Dorothy Lee was convinced Myrtle had kept the name of her sailor husband because she had still cared for her Arkie, despite having left him. Frank Junior and Gene overruled her by siding with John. They couldn’t bear to have the name of that man on their mother’s grave.

  John then announced what he intended to have inscribed on the headstone. Dorothy Lee thought his inscription even more hypocritical. She did not object again because she realized it was useless. Frank Junior and Gene would have been satisfied with a name and the dates of their mother’s birth and death, but they were willing to go along with whatever John wanted. Vann made Myrtle in death the mother she had refused to be to him in life. He had the stone carver chisel into the gray marble: “Myrtle Lee Vann … Beloved Mother of John, Dorothy, Frank & Gene.”

  As Myrtle moved toward her end, John Vann had been rising in the American bureaucracy in Vietnam, although not without his customary perilous scrapes. His appointment as AID’s manager for the program to create teams of pacification workers got him into a tussle with the CIA station chief and the ranking CIA officer involved in the project that almost sent him home ahead of his time.

  The new program was the biggest single effort to pacify the countryside since Diem’s Strategic Hamlet Program. The core manpower for the teams already existed in mass-produced replicas of the armed propaganda teams Frank Scotton had formed with CIA help in Quang Ngai in 1964. The Agency had been so impressed with Scotton’s innovation that later that year it had built a large camp at Vung Tau to turn out similar forty-man commandos. They were called Political Action Teams, or PATs for short. By the beginning of 1966 the CIA had trained roughly
16,000 Vietnamese as PATs. The Vung Tau camp had sufficient barracks and other facilities to handle 5,000 men at a time. It was now to serve as the national training center for the pacification workers, with the 16,000 Vietnamese already trained there as PATs to be utilized as pacification team members. The goal, which Vann expected to be revised upward, was to field a force of about 45,000 pacification workers, approximately 30,000 of them by the end of 1966. They were to be dressed in the black-pajama garb of the peasants and to be called “cadres,” officially Revolutionary Development (RD) cadres, in yet another American attempt to imitate the Vietnamese Communists.

  The CIA station chief in Saigon, Gordon Jorgenson, and his subordinate officer in charge of the PAT project, Tom Donohue, were under the misimpression that the PATs they had already trained and fielded were doing serious damage to the Viet Cong. In fact, the special quality of Scotton’s innovation had been lost as soon as it was mass-produced. After training, the PATs were also given to the province and district chiefs to employ against the guerrillas. The CIA officers who worked in the provinces usually did not accompany the teams on operations. They depended on the province and district chiefs to tell them how effective the PATs were, and these Saigonese officials, eager for more CIA money and armed manpower to protect themselves, were engaged in the usual confidence game.

  Jorgenson and Donohue viewed pacification as a largely repressive task of identifying and eliminating the cadres of the clandestine Viet Cong government and wiping out the local guerrillas. Their misimpression about the effectiveness of their commandos led them to think the PATs were ideal for this mission. They wanted to keep the PAT training program and forty-man team makeup virtually unaltered and merely give the PATs a new name and use them in a pacification role.

  Vann had no quarrel with the repressive aspect of pacification; he took it for granted. With his newly acquired ideas on social revolution, he did not think it was enough. He felt there had to be an element of social and economic change too in order to gain the cooperation of the peasantry and wanted to expand the teams into eighty-man groups to include enough specialists for better village and hamlet government and for health, education, and agricultural improvement work. Expanding the teams to meet these goals would naturally require altering the training program at the Vung Tau camp as well.

  Ironically, the CIA officials also found themselves embroiled with the Vietnamese officer they had selected to head the Saigon side of the program, Lt. Col. Tran Ngoc Chau. He in turn had been responsible for bringing Vann into the project and was to become Vann’s closest Vietnamese friend.

  Tran Ngoc Chau was one of those extremely rare ARVN officers who had actually fought against the French in the Viet Minh, in Chau’s case for almost four years. He was from a venerable family of Hue mandarins who had shared the common disgrace of their class by collaborating with the colonizers, yet always uneasily. During World War II, Chau and two of his brothers joined the Viet Minh. Chau proved himself an able Viet Minh fighter, rising from squad leader to acting battalion commander. His dilemma was that he was too temperamental to endure the self-effacement and group discipline the Vietnamese Communist Party demanded of its cadres but too ambitious not to want to keep rising in the world. His two brothers had no difficulty making the career progression from member of the Viet Minh to member of the Party. Chau couldn’t bring himself to join the Party. In 1949 he deserted and soon afterward entered Bao Dai’s French-sponsored army.

  Chau’s American friends saw his virtues and never questioned him closely enough to understand why he had parted with the Communists. They interpreted the reasons he did give as politics and principle rather than temperament and character. To Vann, to Dan Ellsberg, who also became his friend, and to Bumgardner and others, Chau was the epitome of a “good” Vietnamese. He had winning qualities. Like Vann, he could be astonishingly candid when he was not trying to manipulate. He was honest by Saigon standards, because though advancement and fame interested him, money did not. He was sincere in his desire to improve the lives of the peasantry, even if the system he served did not permit him to follow through in deed, and his nearly four years in the Viet Minh and his highly intelligent and complicated mind enabled him to discuss guerrilla warfare, pacification, the attitude of the rural population, and the flaws in Saigon society with insight and wit. The difficulty with the Saigonese, he would say, was that they were “Vietnamese-foreigners.”

  Chau and Vann had first met at Ben Tre in mid-1962 when Diem had appointed Chau chief of Kien Hoa, then the most troubled province in the northern Delta. The relationship had been a quarrelsome one during Vann’s first year, because Chau, flattered by the attention and promotions his president was giving him, was an ardent Diemist at the time. Still, the two men had said goodbye with respect, and after Vann’s return in 1965 the friendship grew. In Kien Hoa Chau had also formed his connection with the CIA. While he was no more successful when the results were counted than other province chiefs (it was from Chau’s strategic hamlets that the Viet Cong recruited most of the 2,500 volunteers they raised in Kien Hoa for new battalions in the spring of 1963 after Ap Bac), Chau was an exception in that he seriously tried to pacify his province. The CIA officers involved in pacification had been drawn to him by this attitude and by the same qualities that attracted Vann. The Agency had financed several experimental programs Chau had started, including one to eliminate members of the clandestine Viet Cong government in the hamlets with squads of gunmen akin to the CIA’s assassination squads, the so-called Counter Terror Teams. By the end of 1965, when Gordon Jorgenson, the station chief, and Tom Donohue, his officer in charge of the PATs, needed a Vietnamese director for the pacification-worker project they were supposed to run jointly with AID, Chau was the logical choice. Chau had then brought Vann into the project by requesting that he be appointed Chau’s AID advisor, in effect the manager of the AID side.

  By March 1966, when a compromise was finally reached over the nature and size of the pacification teams and they were set at fifty-nine men each, the dispute had become so heated that Jorgenson and Donohue wondered why they had ever thought so highly of Chau. Vann and Donohue decided they liked each other despite their differences, but Jorgenson had had enough of the pesky Vann. William Porter, Lodge’s deputy ambassador, had just been given supervision over all civilian pacification activities as a result of another strategy conference convened in Honolulu in February by President Johnson. Jorgenson complained to Porter that Vann was a rash empire-builder who was disrupting a marvelous program to try to gain control of it. Porter, fifty-one years old in 1966 and a thirty-year veteran of the Foreign Service, was new to Vietnam and Asia. He was one of the State Department’s senior Middle East specialists. His previous overseas post had been as ambassador to Algeria. He might have taken the word of a CIA station chief had Vann not learned that something unusual was going on at the Vung Tau camp.

  Richard Holbrooke, the fledgling of 1963 who had wanted to hide as Halberstam banged his fist on the restaurant table and shouted for a firing squad for Harkins, had been made an assistant to Porter, because he was one of the few Foreign Service officers with field experience in pacification. He had spent the better part of a year between 1963 and the summer of 1964 as AID representative in Ba Xuyen Province in the lower Delta. Holbrooke couldn’t believe what he was hearing when Vann suddenly appeared in Porter’s outer office one day and started to tell him what was happening at Vung Tau. Porter’s other aide was Frank Wisner II, the eldest son of the famous chief of clandestine operations at CIA. Young Wisner had chosen not to follow his father into the Agency and instead to seek his career with the State Department. He had been assigned to Saigon in 1964 and was by now accustomed to surprises. He also found Vann’s story too fantastic to credit.

  The CIA’s commando training program had been “captured,” Vann said, by an adherent of an obscurantist Vietnamese political sect and was being used as a cover to secretly spread the anti-Communist but also anti-Saigon doctrines of th
e sect. The sect adherent was the commandant and chief of instruction at the Vung Tau camp, a captain in the ARVN signal corps named Le Xuan Mai. He had been an employee of the CIA since the late 1950s. Mai was propagandizing all of the trainees through the political instruction course that was part of the curriculum and was also planting cells of four men indoctrinated with the ideas of his sect in each of the PAT teams graduating from the camp. He was carrying on right under the noses of Jorgenson and Donohue and their subordinates. None of the CIA staff at the camp spoke Vietnamese, and neither Jorgenson nor anyone beneath him had ever been curious enough to have the political lessons translated. Chau had discovered what was occurring and alerted Vann after they had gone to Vung Tau to begin reorganizing the camp for its pacification mission.

  Holbrooke and Wisner checked out the story. When they discovered it was true, they scheduled an appointment for Vann with Porter. A previous meeting they had set up for Vann to explain his side of the pacification team dispute to Porter had not gone well for Vann. The deputy ambassador had heard a great deal about Vann from Jorgenson beforehand, and all of it had been bad. This second meeting was the last appointment of Porter’s day. About half an hour after it started, Porter emerged from his inner office and announced to Holbrooke and Wisner that he was going to his residence. Vann followed the deputy ambassador out the main office door, talking all the while.