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

by Neil Sheehan

  The tonnage of high explosive and shrapnel detonating from howitzers and mortars roughly equaled that of bombs, for whereas the ARVN fired thousands, the U.S. Army fired tens of thousands of shells on its “search-and-destroy operations” against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regulars. The rates of expenditure far exceeded those the logisticians had established on the basis of experience in World War II and Korea. DePuy was rewarded by Westmoreland in the spring of 1966 with command of the 1st Infantry Division, and a second star for his work in planning the war of attrition. He shot off so much artillery in the rubber-plantation region that Seaman (1st Division was part of his corps) started rationing the supply of shells to him. ‘The solution in Vietnam is more bombs, more shells, more napalm … till the other side cracks and gives up,” DePuy told Ellsberg over lunch at his tent command post.

  Army Field Manual 27-10, “The Law of Land Warfare,” which interprets the Hague and Geneva conventions that are legally binding on the U.S. military, enjoins officers to “conduct hostilities with regard for the principles of humanity and chivalry.” As in Operation Masher at Bong Son, the American leaders in Vietnam looked away. The peasant victims were left to what AID might provide. A compassionate Air Force surgeon, Maj. Gen. James Humphreys, on detail to AID as its chief of public health in Vietnam, tried. He asked for two transport planes and five helicopters to evacuate civilian wounded to the province hospitals and to transfer patients in need of more specialized treatment to the better civilian hospitals in Saigon. Gravely injured victims who did not have the good luck to be put on a military helicopter were dying before they could reach help, and a long, bumpy ride in an ambulance to a Saigon hospital was sometimes enough to finish off a severe head-wound case. In a country that was to hold squadrons of U.S. transport planes, 2,000 helicopters by the end of 1966, and more than 3,000 by the end of 1967, General Humphreys was told that military necessity precluded sparing any for regular evacuation of civilians.

  Humphreys devised a plan to have three U.S. military hospitals built for the treatment of civilian wounded. He calculated that the toll of wounded civilians might soon rise to about 75,000 a year. (It was to approximate 85,000 during 1968.) Senator Edward Kennedy, the only political figure in Washington to take a consistent interest in the plight of the Vietnamese civilians through his Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees, arranged for Humphreys to brief the president on his plan at another strategy conference at Guam in March 1967. Lyndon Johnson approved.

  The hospitals could have been built in ninety days. The Army medical bureaucracy did not want the responsibility and sought to sabotage the proposal by delay. A medical survey team of distinguished American physicians headed by the executive vice-president of the American Medical Association, sent to South Vietnam in the summer of 1967 by AID, also opposed the idea. Among other objections, the team was afraid the Army would draft more doctors to staff the hospitals. Under badgering from Kennedy, the Army allotted 300 beds in its existing hospitals to civilian casualties in October 1967, adding another 200 in December. The first two of the three military hospitals to treat civilians finally opened in the spring of 1968 and the third in the middle of that year. They handled roughly 10 percent of the civilian casualties before they closed in 1971. Humphreys and his successor gradually obtained surgical teams for all of the province hospitals from the U.S. military and from allies of the United States in Vietnam like Australia and South Korea. AID also sent out volunteer American physicians recruited by the AMA for two-month tours. None of these efforts ever raised the province hospitals above the level of charnel houses.

  Vann was convinced that this “generating” of refugees and its concomitant toll in civilian casualties was not an accidental outgrowth of an attempt to bludgeon the enemy, but a policy deliberately fostered by the high command. Whenever we talked about it he would get as mad as he had at the 25th Division advisor who had reasoned that if the peasants were willing to live with the Communists “then they can expect to be bombed.” His neck and face would redden to that hue of rage peculiar to Vann, and his side of the conversation would become a staccato of curses.

  In all probability, Westmoreland had not set out with the intention of causing a massive movement of population and civilian casualties on the scale that was occurring. Rather, he apparently began with the thought that came as a reflex to him and DePuy to “stomp” the enemy to death. There appears to be no doubt that once he saw the collateral effects of his strategy, he decided to reap what seemed to him an advantage and that he was conscious—as were those in authority above and below him—of what he was doing. Westmoreland is a courteous man, and he was forthcoming with the press during these early years of the American war. Before a resident correspondent left for reassignment elsewhere he was given the privilege of a day in the field with the commanding general on one of Westmoreland’s regular trips by helicopter to visit American units. I took advantage of the privilege shortly before leaving for the Washington bureau of the Times in August 1966. At one point in the trip I asked the general if he was worried about the large number of civilian casualties from the air strikes and the shelling. He looked at me carefully. “Yes, Neil, it is a problem,” he said, “but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”

  The destruction was not confined to the physical. The building of the killing machine had become an end in itself. In this small country with a simple agrarian economy, Westmoreland proceeded to construct as fast as he could four new jet air bases (the Air Force soon pressured him into making it five) to add to the three he had at Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa, and Da Nang before the buildup started (he was enlarging these as well); six new deep-water ports with twenty-eight deep-draft unloading berths for freighters to end his dependence on the port of Saigon and the single pier then in existence at Cam Ranh Bay; four central supply and maintenance depots; twenty-six permanent base camps for combat and support troops; seventy-five new tactical airfields long enough to handle four-engine C-130 Hercules transports (he already had nineteen such airfields in 1965, but the objective was to put as many points as possible in South Vietnam within quick reach of a good runway); twenty-six hospitals with 8,280 beds; and a new two-story, prefabricated headquarters for himself next to Tan Son Nhut with air-conditioned office and work space for 4,000 people. Everything was to be connected by the latest in secure electronic data and teletype circuits and by a direct-dial telephone network called the Southeast Asia Automatic Telephone System—220 communications facilities in all, with 13,900 circuits.

  Each of the jet air bases was a panoramic installation. There was a 10,000-foot runway, a parallel taxi way, high-speed turnoffs, and tens of thousands of square yards of apron for parking and moving aircraft—initially laid with aluminum matting that was later replaced by concrete—along with hangars, repair shops, offices and operations buildings, barracks, mess halls, and the sundry other structures that go with airfields of this size. Many of the base camps were small cities. Long Binh, Seaman’s headquarters just northeast of Saigon and down the road from Vann’s office compound, was literally to grow to the status of a city. It was selected as the site of one of the four central supply and maintenance depots and then additionally as the headquarters for U.S. Army Vietnam, USARV, the chief administrative and support command under Westmoreland’s MACV. Long Binh covered twenty-five square miles and was inhabited by about 43,000 Americans at its height.

  Another arsenal city rose on the peninsula that forms the upper reach of Cam Ranh Bay on the Central Coast 185 miles northeast of Saigon. Cam Ranh is considered the finest natural harbor in the world after Sydney, Australia, but the region has always been sparsely populated, because the dark green of the rain-forested Annamites touches the emerald green of the South China Sea there and what level land exists around the bay is either sand or sandy. The French had built a small naval station and airstrip that the Saigon navy had kept up. Big floating piers were now towed from the E
ast Coast of the United States around the tip of South America and across the Pacific to create the largest of the new ports, with ten unloading berths for deep-draft vessels. The empty sands in the middle of the Cam Ranh peninsula were suddenly occupied by warehouses, ammunition storage areas, and tank farms filled with aviation fuel and other petroleum supplies, called POL, for petroleum, oil, and lubricants, by the military: Cam Ranh was the logical place to construct the second of the four central supply and maintenance depots. (The third and fourth depots were located farther north at Qui Nhon and Da Nang.) A 10,000-foot runway of gray aluminum matting for one of the new jet air bases cut across the upper end of the peninsula where the neck begins to narrow and curve back toward the mainland.

  The construction program Westmoreland set in motion with maximum speed all over South Vietnam entailed 10.4 million square feet of warehousing, 5.4 million square feet of ammunition storage, enough tank-farm capacity to hold 3.1 million barrels of POL, 39 million cubic meters of dredging, about 2,550 miles of new hardtop road, and 434,000 acres of land clearing.

  The panoply included transporting to South Vietnam the amenities of American civilization. These began for the enlisted men with base camps that had well-ventilated wooden barracks on concrete-slab foundations, hot water in the showers, and flushing toilets, and for the generals and colonels at Long Binh with courts of air-conditioned trailers that had lawns and flower beds tended by Vietnamese. To serve hundreds of thousands of men in a tropical country 10,000 miles away three meals a day of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy products nearly identical to those on the Army’s U.S. Continental Master Menu requires an extraordinary number of cold-storage lockers, but the Army quartermasters began accomplishing the feat by early 1966. The task of furnishing dairy products eased as early as December 1965 when Foremost Dairy opened a milk-recombining plant the Army had paid the company to build and operate in Saigon. Meadowgold Dairies was subsequently given a contract to construct and run two other plants at Cam Ranh Bay and Qui Nhon. To be sure the troops got enough ice cream, the Army also installed forty small ice cream plants at less accessible locations. Although the men of the fighting units still had to face C rations along with the hardship and danger of campaigning, they frequently ate “A ration” meals cooked at the kitchens in the base camps, placed in insulated containers to keep the food hot, and flown to them by helicopter.

  With the senior officers at the higher headquarters setting an example of climatized living, everybody else who could do so put air-conditioners in their living quarters, mess halls, and offices. Given the other electricity demands of the U.S. military, the local generating capacity was immediately overwhelmed. Power had to be shut down on alternating days in different sections of Saigon. Tactical generators proved inadequate. The Army bought more than 1,300 commercial generators in the U.S. and Japan and rushed them to South Vietnam while it withdrew World War II tankers from the Maritime Reserve Fleet and hired the Vinnell Corporation to convert the ships into floating generator barges and to build high-voltage central systems at the inland bases.

  The amenities were completed by constructing an additional air-conditioned world of PXs, movie theaters, bowling alleys, and service clubs generously supplied with soft drinks, beer, whiskey, plenty of ice cubes to keep the drinks cold, milk shakes, hamburgers, hot dogs, and steaks, all at giveaway prices. The PXs were not mere canteens where a soldier could buy cigarettes, shaving articles, and candy. They were emporia that offered him a proper assortment of the fine things to which Americans have become accustomed—radios, tape recorders, hi-fis, watches, slacks and sport shirts to wear on his rest-and-recreation leave (R&R) if he survived the first six months of his one-year tour, and cosmetics to help raise the living standard of Vietnamese women. (It was difficult for the PX managers to keep hair spray in stock.) Should the soldier want an electric fan, a toaster, a percolator, a television set, a room air-conditioner, or perhaps a small refrigerator that the PX did not have in stock, he could pick it out of a catalogue and have it sent to him by a mail-order service. The official theory was that giving the American military man access to this consumer’s paradise would reduce spending on the local market and thus hold down inflation in South Vietnam.

  The theory may have had some validity. Inflation was held to between 50 and 60 percent a year, mainly by more than doubling the commodity imports AID financed for the South Vietnamese economy ($650 million in 1966) and by shipping millions of tons of American rice to a country that had been able to export rice as recently as 1964. Given the magnitude of the social and moral catastrophe, what points the theory gained against the inflation index could not have made much difference. The Vietnamese of the South found themselves in a world turned upside down. Hundreds of thousands started to earn their livelihood by serving the profligate foreigners. When one counted the families of these Vietnamese, other hundreds of thousands began to live off the Americans by proxy. The sanitation services collapsed in Saigon, because the workers quit en masse and rushed away to labor at the base construction sites for much higher salaries than the municipality could pay.

  Prior to 1965, two prominent American construction firms, Raymond International and Morrison-Knudsen, had formed a partnership to build bases in South Vietnam under the military assistance program. To take advantage of the cost-plus-a-fixed-fee windfall, they subsequently pooled resources with two other big firms in the industry, Brown & Root and J. A. Jones, and created a consortium known as RMK-BRJ. In mid-1966, during the most labor-intensive phase of the base-construction program, RMK-BRJ had about 50,000 Vietnamese on its payroll. The Army engineers, the Navy Seabees and Marine engineer battalions, and the Air Force developed their own Vietnamese labor forces. The Army Engineer Command, for example, had 8,500 Vietnamese workers in 1967. Pacific Architects and Engineers (PA&E), another big company that the Army paid on a cost-plus-a-fixed-fee basis to maintain facilities once they were completed, employed many thousands more. The U.S. military also required domestic help. There were Vietnamese “housemaids” and “houseboys” to do laundry, shine boots, and clean the barracks, waitresses for the clubs and mess halls, and scullery workers to perform the menial chores in the kitchens. (Enlisted men were freed of KP duty at most base camps.) Counting the PA&E staff, more than 20,000 Vietnamese were to work at Long Binh alone.

  Other Vietnamese among these hundreds of thousands were employed in the business of amusing the foreigners. The Saigon newspapers published cartoons of a new social hierarchy ranked by its importance to the Americans. The prostitutes stood at the top, followed by their pimps, and then by the taxi drivers who carried the Americans to and from their pleasures. (The drivers no longer wanted Vietnamese passengers, because they could not overcharge them.) GI culture in bars with names like A-Go-Go and Chicago and The Bunny (after Hugh Hefner’s creation), cheap tailor shops, and “Turkish Bath” and “Massage Parlor” bordellos proliferated in Saigon, Qui Nhon, Da Nang, and the other cities and in the shanty towns thrown up overnight outside bases in the once sparsely populated regions like Cam Ranh Bay. Saigon itself was to acquire 56,000 registered prostitutes; this figure did not, of course, include the amateurs. The bar girls were the elite among the prostitutes. They received a percentage from the drinks of colored water, called “Saigon tea,” that the soldiers had to buy them to enjoy their company and dance to the rock ‘n’ roll music that blared from the bars. After-hours sex cost extra. The bar girls and their less fortunate sisters who worked the brothels and the streets were pathetic creatures. They flaunted themselves in makeup and clothes they did not know how to wear and swelled their Vietnamese breasts with injections of silicone to attract the bosom-conscious Americans. Some had their eyelids Westernized by cosmetic surgery, an operation that was also becoming popular among young upper-class Saigonese women.

  Many of the prostitutes were farm girls, for another collateral effect of the physical destruction in the countryside was to help fulfill American needs for labor and entertainment. Refuge
es crowded into the already crowded warrens of shacks that were the working-class quarters of Saigon and the other cities and raised new slums around towns and urban centers everywhere. One noticed the new slums quickly, because some of the shacks had a novel construction that reflected the Vietnamese talent for coping. The refugees scavenged empty beer and soda cans discarded at the American dumps, cut the cans open, pounded them flat, and nailed them to strips of scrap wood to make metal sheets for walls.

  Not everyone could find a job serving the Americans, or live off someone who did; not everyone had a daughter old enough to sell herself. South Vietnam had always had some beggars. On Saigon’s Rue Catinat a small number of regulars, most of them crippled unfortunates, had occupied the same sidewalk spots day after day, nodding a greeting to regular passersby and seeming to subsist on many tiny handouts. Widows, orphans, and amputees begging from Americans now became a ubiquitous element of urban life. The children, filthy in a nation where the poor traditionally valued personal cleanliness, their legs covered with sores, would call “Hey, you!” or “Hey, GI!” and shout obscenities if they were not given money. They formed gangs to pick pockets and steal.

  The garbage, rarely collected because the municipal workers had deserted to the higher salaries at the base sites and the regime did not care enough to recruit replacements from among the refugees, piled up in Saigon until the stacks were half a block long. Late at night after curfew when the streets were still, the tops of the stacks would move as one walked by. The feeding rats would be disturbed by the sound of approaching footsteps and scurry about. One day I saw words in Vietnamese chalked in large letters on the pavement in front of a pile of garbage. I asked a Vietnamese reporter who was with me to translate them. The words said: ‘This is the fruit of American aid.”