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

by Neil Sheehan

  Unlike Vann, Krulak was prominent enough in the system to appeal to the highest tribunal. He did have to wait months for his audience with the president, until Greene could arrange it in the summer of 1966. Krulak sent a copy of his paper over to the White House ahead of time for Johnson to read and carried another in his hand into the Oval Office to refer to while he briefed. Johnson’s opening question indicated that he had not read the paper. “What is it going to take to win?” he asked. Krulak proceeded to tell him. Johnson did not rush Krulak. He gave him forty minutes. He asked few additional questions, and Krulak had the impression that everything he was saying was going “seven leagues” over the president’s head. When Krulak finally switched from pacification to mining Haiphong, Johnson suddenly “looked like he’d sat on a tack.” He stood up, put his arm around Krulak’s shoulder, and told him he was a great general as he escorted him to the door.

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  Brute Krulak was not accustomed to being stymied. He was determined to have the Marines demonstrate the merits of the strategy. Westmoreland might then have no choice but to accept it for the whole of South Vietnam. The I Corps region assigned to the Marines was also a geographical model for Krulak’s plan. There were about 2.6 million people in the five northernmost provinces of the Central Coast from Quang Ngai up to Quang Tri at the Demilitarized Zone. More than 98 percent of them lived within twenty-five miles of the sea (most considerably closer) and on less than a quarter of the land, on the coastal littoral of small rice deltas pressed between the Annamites and the South China Sea. The remaining three-quarters of the territory provided formidable rain-forest and mountain redoubts for the Main Force Viet Cong and the NVA troops who had infiltrated into the South, but barely enough rice to feed the sparse numbers of tribal people who normally inhabited it. The Marines had established three base zones: around Chu Lai on the border of Quang Ngai and Quang Tin provinces, in and around the port and air base at Da Nang, and north across the Hai Van Pass around the airfield at Phu Bai just below Hue. The idea was to reach out in both directions from the three base zones, slowly bringing more and more of the population under control until the whole of the littoral was joined into one pacified zone. It would not matter then how many thousands of Viet Cong regulars were out in the mountains. Their battalions would wither without the sustaining flow of food, recruits, and intelligence from the peasantry, and Hanoi would have to truck down food for every NVA soldier who marched into I Corps.

  Krulak had no operational authority over the Marines in Vietnam. As chief for the theater, he controlled directly only the Marine reserve troops and support units in the Pacific. His formal responsibility toward Vietnam was to see that the Marines there in the III Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF) were adequately supplied, equipped, and trained. He nevertheless had an enthusiastic collaborator for a while in the man Greene had selected to lead the Marines in Vietnam, Lewis Walt, the most junior major general in the Corps at the time of his appointment in mid-1965.

  Walt did not collaborate out of diffidence to Krulak. He was every bit his own man. Greene had chosen him over half a dozen more senior candidates because he considered Walt the premier fighter and finest troop leader in the Marines. Lew Walt had won the Navy Cross twice. He had started in the first Marine counteroffensive of World War II at Guadalcanal, gone to Cape Gloucester on New Britain Island, where a ridge he had wrested from the Japanese had been named after him, then to Peleliu to help clear the route for MacArthur’s reconquest of the Philippines. The son of a Kansas rancher, he had played football and worked his way through Colorado State University before joining the Marines. At fifty-two years of age in 1965 he still looked the lineman, tall, with brawler hands and arms, sturdy shoulders, and a big head. In the formal chain of command, Walt and the Marines of III MAF were under the operational control or “opcon” of Westmoreland; Walt was theoretically one of Westmoreland’s corps commanders. In practice, no Marine is beyond the Corps, and Walt shared the belief in pacification of Krulak and Greene. Krulak was in Vietnam constantly to observe and pass along ideas. He was to make forty-five trips there during his four years as Commanding General Fleet Marine Force Pacific. He and Walt also talked frequently over the secure telephone connection between Da Nang and Pearl Harbor. Both kept Greene informed, and he gave them moral encouragement.

  Lew Walt devoted about a third of his effort to fighting the Main Force Viet Cong and the NVA in order to chase them out of the populated deltas and to punish them by joining battle in the hinterland whenever the intelligence indicated he could do so on advantageous terms like those Krulak had described in his plan. Walt’s principal effort, fully half the time of the Marine battalions, was invested in a painstaking campaign to rid the hamlets of the guerrillas and the political cadres, and not merely by killing or capturing them. A year and three months before AID and the other civilian agencies made a start toward a unified field arrangement and Vann was appointed III Corps director of the Office of Civil Operations, Walt used his authority to bring the sundry pacification programs in I Corps under Marine guidance. He formed a coordinating council of the regional heads of the civilian agencies and the senior Army advisor to the ARVN, now one of Walt’s subordinates, and persuaded the Saigon corps commander, Brig. Gen. Nguyen Chanh Thi, to lend the council his authority by appointing a Vietnamese representative. Walt’s deputy became the council chairman.

  To acquire armed Vietnamese manpower and expand control at the village and hamlet levels, Walt began integrating Marine rifle squads into PF platoons. The Marine sergeant commanding the squad became the militia platoon leader, and the Vietnamese platoon leader became his deputy. The pattern of a Marine in charge and a Vietnamese deputy was repeated in the squads of the platoon. Several of these Combined Action Platoons would then be pulled together into a Combined Action Company under a Marine officer and a Vietnamese deputy. The plan was to gradually integrate Marines into virtually every militia platoon in the five provinces. The regular Marine battalions combined their thousands of day and night patrols and ambushes (they were conducting 7,000 platoon- and squad-size patrols and 5,000 night ambushes a month by April 1966) with a full-scale civic action program among the peasantry.

  Walt and Krulak were soon as embattled with the powerful of Saigon and Washington as the Marine riflemen were with the Vietnamese enemy. Westmoreland harried Walt to leave the pacification business and the local guerrillas and political cadres to the civilians and the ARVN. He wanted the Marine battalions out in the foothills and the mountains on a search-and-destroy campaign of attrition every day possible. The pressure came in talks with Walt, in suggestions for specific operations followed by threats to issue orders if they were not performed, and in the rebound effect of complaints to McNamara and other important men in Washington that coddling peasants was not going to win the war, that the Marines were behaving timidly and letting the Army carry the burden of combat. The pressure extended to bureaucratic needles. One of the statistical devices Westmoreland used to measure the efficiency of his commanders was called “Battalion Days in the Field.” The Marine battalions got credit only for days spent on search-and-destroy operations. Days and nights on pacification were not acceptable to the MACV computer.

  Krulak was driven into a defensive struggle to try to relieve the pressure on Walt and stop Westmoreland from coercing the Marines into fighting the war his way. During a trip to Washington at the beginning of May 1966 he found McNamara willing to listen, as McNamara always did out of respect for Krulak, but no longer even fleetingly open to Krulak’s main argument. The Marine strategy was too slow, McNamara told him. It would take too many men too long to win the war. Back in Hawaii, Krulak wrote the secretary a five-page, single-spaced letter attempting to explain that the Marines were not “bemused with handing out soap or bushwhacking guerrillas at the expense of attacking the main force units.” The question of who held what in the mountains was “meaningless because there is nothing of value there,” Krulak said. He cited for McNamara safer
roads and more secure hamlets and other signs that the Marines were beginning to obtain some hold where it mattered. These signs, while “harder to quantify,” were a better measure of progress than Westmoreland’s body count. “The raw figure of VC killed … can be a dubious index of success since, if their killing is accompanied by devastation of friendly areas, we may end up having done more harm than good.”

  As Vann had already discovered, the men who directed American policy were not overly concerned with devastation. Two months later, in July 1966, Paul Nitze, then secretary of the Navy, visited South Vietnam. He got an earful from Westmoreland, whom he admired, and on his way back through Hawaii gave Krulak an earful. Krulak seethed at the lecture. He had just returned from another trip to Vietnam himself and had said in a letter of thanks to Walt: “Everywhere I turned in III MAF I saw progress.” He called Walt’s attention to a remark by an Army general that the United States was “winning militarily” in Vietnam, noting how “meaningless” the statement was. “You cannot win militarily,” Krulak said. “You have to win totally, or you are not winning at all.”

  The Marines had not made as much progress in pacification by the summer of 1966 as Krulak thought. The clandestine Viet Cong organization had been hurt but remained intact deep within Marine lines. Saigon village and hamlet officials were still being assassinated on occasion in the outskirts of Da Nang. Lodge had set Walt back substantially in the spring and early summer of 1966 with the mistake of permitting Ky to oust the I Corps commander, Nguyen Chanh Thi, in a political squabble. Thich Tri Quang, the most ambitious of the Buddhist leaders who had brought down Diem, had leaped at the opportunity to assert himself, and three months of turmoil followed—demonstrations, strikes, and a week of civil war in Da Nang between ARVN units loyal to Tri Quang and Thi and paratroops and South Vietnamese marines Ky flew up from Saigon. (Vann’s old acquaintance, Huynh Van Cao, redeemed himself during the crisis. The other generals forced him to accept command of I Corps because none of them wanted the job. Ky’s police chief then demanded that Cao assault the pagoda the Buddhists and ARVN dissidents were using as their headquarters in Da Nang. Attacking a Buddhist pagoda was a sacrilege Cao declined to commit. He refused to issue the order. The police chief had one of his thugs put a pistol to Cao’s head. Cao prepared to die. An American advisor walked into the room and saved him before the thug could pull the trigger. Ky threw Cao out of the ARVN by forcing him to retire. Cao subsequently went into politics as a representative of the Catholic community, a calling to which he was better suited than soldiering in any case.)

  Nevertheless, despite the setback, Walt had started to see the dimensions of the task before him, and he was increasing his control in the countryside with the Combined Action militia units and other techniques like the organization of hamlet and village intelligence networks.

  While the majority of the peasantry in Central Vietnam supported the cause of Ho Chi Minh, the Communists had plenty of enemies there too, and not every Vietnamese peasant cherished independence enough to resist forever the combination of coercion and blandishment the Marines were applying. With time and persistence Walt might well have subdued the populated coastal strip, at least temporarily. However many regulars Hanoi was able to maintain in the mountains through supply from the North could not decide the issue then. The regulars would be crushed by the Marines when they exposed themselves by venturing into the lower ground. Walt, who had been awarded the third star of a lieutenant general, had 55,000 men in his III Marine Amphibious Force in mid-1966. They were formed into two reinforced divisions, the 1st Marines with a command post at Chu Lai and the 3rd Marines operating out of Da Nang. He had a Marine air wing in support. His strength was to rise to about 70,000 men by the end of the year, when he would begin to approach the limit of Marine manpower. Lew Walt would never have enough Marines to fight both a war of attrition against the big Communist units and a pacification campaign.

  The men in Hanoi settled the argument, with Westmoreland in the role of their unwitting cat’s paw. They thrust a division, the 324B, across the Demilitarized Zone in the summer of 1966. Marine reconnaissance teams began to encounter the NVA troops in June near the large district center of Cam Lo northwest of the province capital of Quang Tri, where the old French road that traverses the Annamites into Laos, Route 9, starts to climb up into the foothills. By July, Marine intelligence officers had learned from prisoners and captured documents that their patrols were skirmishing with the advance elements of a force of at least 5,000 and perhaps the entire division of 10,000 to 12,000 men. Westmoreland ran for the lure as eagerly as Moore’s lieutenant had in the valley of the Drang. He flew to Da Nang and encouraged Walt to go after the North Vietnamese with 8,000 Marines. The NVA held long enough to engage vigorously, then withdrew. In August they came back and challenged from a bit farther west in the mountains. Westmoreland sent Walt after them again.

  The Demilitarized Zone and northern I Corps were an ideal battleground for the Vietnamese to bring to bear against the Americans the process of wearing down that their ancestors had worked to grim effect on the Mongols and the Ming and that they had previously brought to bear against the French. Their lines of supply and reinforcement were obviously shortest along the Demilitarized Zone, and whenever a Vietnamese unit needed to break off a fight it could easily gain sanctuary across the DMZ or over the adjacent border in Laos. The land lent itself perfectly to the Vietnamese strategy. It is broken even along the coast, with hills, stretches of sand dunes, and swamps interspersed among the rice fields. The foothills and the jungle start within about a dozen miles of the sea, and the mountains beyond are among the wildest on earth—a primeval confusion of lonesome peaks, steep ridges, winding valleys, and hidden ravines. One can conceal an army in just a bit of this immensity. Where there are no thickets of bamboo and fields of elephant grass, there is broadleaf, evergreen rain forest with canopy trees sixty feet high, pole trees in a second layer, and undergrowth so dense that visibility is often limited to five to ten yards.

  The rainy season in the northern I Corps region brings chills and influenza when the temperature falls to 45 degrees in the dankness of the night, but the weather was another rough friend to the Vietnamese soldier on the Communist side. The northeast monsoon that sweeps into Central Vietnam from October to May has a different pattern than does the southwest monsoon that reaches the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands from May to October. The rainy season in the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands normally means an afternoon downpour and days at the height of the monsoon when fog is heavy but usually patchy. The northeast monsoon blows a light, steady, cold rain at its height called the crachin from the French word for “drizzle.” The rain often lasts two to three days at a time and is frequently accompanied by a blanketing fog that stops close air support and also makes artillery hard to adjust when the fog is thick enough. Northern I Corps happens to be the place where the northeast monsoon is most intense. It is the rainiest place in Vietnam. The average rainfall for Hue is 128 inches, compared to 77 for Saigon.

  Lew Walt became the man in the middle, caught between Westmoreland pushing him into the NVA and Krulak hammering at him to continue to resist. Wally Greene tried to help during another trip to Vietnam that August. As always, he and Westmoreland did their serious talking alone after dinner in the villa on Tran Quy Cap that Westmoreland had inherited from Harkins. For Greene to have argued with Westmoreland in front of any of the MACV staff would have been unseemly. On this occasion, Greene remembered, he pointed out to Westmoreland that the tactics of attrition made no more sense than the strategy. He had read a report of an Army unit fighting its way to the top of a jungled ridge only to have to fight its way back down again. This was not a sound expenditure of American soldiers, Greene said. He got no further than he had on past occasions. These Marine generals forgot that for Westmoreland to have conceded they were right would have been to deny himself the war he wanted to wage of mass troop movements, artillery barrages, skies f
illed with helicopters and fighter-bombers, and the thunder of B-52S.

  In September 1966, Westmoreland announced that he was ordering the Seabees to turn a little dirt airstrip in the far northwest corner of South Vietnam into an aluminum-matted field capable of handling C-130 transports. He told Walt to put a battalion of Marines there. In another of the lesser ironies of this war, Krulak had first heard about the spot twenty-nine years earlier. His battalion commander in Shanghai had gone to Indochina to hunt tiger and had returned with tales of a picturesque mountain valley called Khe Sanh and with photographs, which Krulak still had, showing the Bru tribal people and some of the French planters of coffee who lived there. The tribal people and the Frenchmen had crowded around the slain tiger in the photographs in order to have their picture taken too.

  Krulak flew to Vietnam to try to talk Westmoreland out of his plan. They arranged to meet at Chu Lai aboard Westmoreland’s twin-engine executive jet. One battalion of Marines would not suffice, Krulak argued. At least another battalion would have to be sent to occupy the hills that dominated the small plateau in the valley where the French had built the airstrip. A major helicopter commitment would then have to be made to supply the troops on the hills. Men and resources would be withdrawn from the pacification campaign to no useful purpose.