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

by Neil Sheehan

  Komer warned Kennedy’s successor that he was ignorant on Vietnam. That did not trouble Lyndon Johnson. He subscribed to the notion of the day that a smart American, especially an American with an Ivy League education, could accomplish anything. The cultural inferiority complex of the Texan tended to magnify Johnson’s faith in men with fancy Eastern educations. “You Harvards,” was how he put it to Komer on occasion. Komer also had much more going for him with the president than his Eastern education. The brassy, ruthless, work-and-ambition-driven qualities in him appealed to Johnson. Bob Komer was a man of the system and yet he was not of the system. He would not hesitate to take a hammer to some bureaucrat’s sacred mold.

  Much of what Komer subsequently learned about Vietnam and pacification he learned from Vann and from those who had been influenced by Vann, like Dan Ellsberg and Richard Holbrooke. Komer tapped Ellsberg as a source of information soon after Johnson put him to work on pacification in 1966, because they were acquainted through the fraternity of high-powered government intellectuals. Holbrooke, after leaving Porter’s Saigon embassy staff to return home, had been recruited by Komer to be his civilian assistant at the White House. Ellsberg and Holbrooke had both told Komer how valuable Vann was. Holbrooke then arranged for Vann to come to the White House and talk to Komer while Vann was in Washington on leave in June 1966 to explore the Office of Systems Analysis job at the Pentagon. The talk lasted three hours. Komer found Vann “devastating because he was so knowledgeable” and “terribly embittered” by his years of fruitless preaching. He was struck by the duality in what Vann had said. Victory was a mirage the way the war was currently being run, but “if we did it the right way, we could win.” Ever quick to cultivate a contact who had power or influence, Vann had continued to see Komer on Komer’s frequent trips to South Vietnam and stayed in touch in between with letters and memos.

  Although the limitations common to American statesmen kept President Johnson from reaching for the kind of fundamentally different approach that Vann and Krulak advocated, he did want a pacification program that would complement Westmoreland’s war of attrition. The attempt to achieve it at the end of November 1966 by unifying the civilian agencies in the Office of Civil Operations had proved useful chiefly as an organizing exercise on the civilian side. Vann progressed further than any of the other OCO regional directors in forming his III Corps advisors into a working team, but he too was hampered by continued rivalry between AID, CIA, and USIS and by the decision to leave the province military advisors in Westmoreland’s separate chain of command. In the spring of 1967, Westmoreland’s waiting game paid off. The president decided to formally assign all responsibility for pacification to him. Johnson also decided to send Komer out to South Vietnam that May to manage the effort under Westmoreland. The pacification army that Komer then proceeded to form in the entity known as Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support, or CORDS, lacked Vann’s central concept of an American takeover of the Saigon side and social reform. Otherwise CORDS owed its command system and organizational structure largely to Vann’s thinking.

  Johnson granted Komer the personal rank of ambassador for protocol purposes and he was addressed as Ambassador Komer, but his duties in Saigon were hardly those of a diplomat. He was also not a member of Westmoreland’s staff or a special assistant to the general. Bob Komer was the deputy commander for pacification, officially “Deputy to COMUSMACV for CORDS.” The distinction was important in a military universe, because it meant that Komer had direct authority over everyone who worked for him and direct access to Westmoreland. He ranked third at MACV after Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland’s military deputy. Everyone else at the headquarters had to report to Westmoreland through Dutch Kerwin, the chief of staff.

  Vann had warned Komer that if he arrived with less authority and access, he would be eaten by the chicken hawks. Komer therefore drew up his charter beforehand in a memorandum he showed the president and gave Westmoreland during an earlier trip to Saigon that spring, telling Westmoreland the president approved the deputy commander arrangement. Komer assured the general that Westmoreland had everything to gain. If Komer failed, the president would blame Komer, because he was the president’s choice. “Westy, it’ll be my head,” Komer said. If he succeeded, Westmoreland would succeed at pacification too, because Komer would be his deputy. Komer added a fillip he hoped would appeal to the pride Westmoreland took in his ability as a manager. He reminded the general that they were both graduates of Harvard Business School. (Westmoreland had been sent there for a thirteen-week course while a brigadier general at the Pentagon back in the 1950s.) A direct line of authority and responsibility was the Harvard Business School solution, Komer said.

  The fillip was unnecessary. William Westmoreland wanted to fulfill the wishes of the president when he thought he could do so at no cost to himself, and whereas he might lack astuteness at war, a shrewdness for the politics of bureaucracy was one of the principal reasons he had risen so far. He saw Komer’s point immediately. Furthermore, his empire was being extended to all of pacification and at the same time he was being relieved of the burden of it. He could get on with his big-unit war and leave the problem to Komer. When the question of a staff car later came up he offered Komer the big Chrysler.

  The CORDS structure established below Komer was a unique civil-military command that amounted to a special pacification service within the U.S. forces in Vietnam. A new American deputy commander for pacification was appointed in each of the four corps regions. The corps deputy for pacification had the same relationship with the American commanding general at corps level that Komer had with Westmoreland and bore the same abbreviated title Komer did, Dep/CORDS. The corps deputies also reported to Komer and were, in effect, his corps commanders. Under the corps deputies were the fully unified province teams that Vann had proposed two years earlier in his “Harnessing the Revolution.” The RF and PF and other province military advisors were merged with the civilian advisors into a single team led by a PSA—a province senior advisor.

  Vann’s friend and former superior as chief of AID’s pacification program, Col. Sam Wilson, made a significant contribution to the formation of CORDS by volunteering to go to Long An Province in the fall of 1966 and run an experimental province team unified like this. He proved that military and civilian could work harmoniously together, and his team now became the model for those being created in every province. Some of the PSAs were military men, others were from the civilian agencies. While there was bureaucratic log-rolling to be sure that all agencies got a share, the PSAs were ideally chosen on the basis of talent and experience. The PSA reported directly to the Dep/CORDS in his corps. At Vann’s urging, Komer established an efficiency-report system to help instill discipline, and orders were issued within CORDS just as they were within the military.

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  Vann was fortunate that the new commander of U.S. forces in III Corps, Maj. Gen. Fred Weyand, worried about being too conventional in his thinking and valued unconventional men who gave him insights he would not acquire on his own. Otherwise Komer might have had to find another corps not of Vann’s choosing where he could serve as Dep/CORDS. Westmoreland indicated to Weyand that Vann was a hair shirt Weyand did not have to accept. Weyand thought differently. He had gained two stars and was about to gain his third by adapting to the world of the U.S. Army; his ease within it sometimes made him feel uncomfortable. Weyand’s conventional side would, in fact, have done him out of stars had he not waked up after a long, slow start.

  He had obtained his commission in the Coast Artillery on the eve of World War II through ROTC at the University of California at Berkeley. The Coast Artillery was a branch of the Army that did not understand it had been rendered obsolete by the airplane and modern amphibious warfare. It supposedly protected the nation’s harbors with long-range guns installed in concrete forts. Weyand drifted in this anachronism through the first part of World War II and then volunteered for Combat Intelligence School, hoping to put t
o good use in Europe a respectable amount of German he had learned in high school and college. Instead the Army posted him to the staff of Gen. Joseph Stilwell in the China-Burma-India Theater as the officer in charge of deriving intelligence from broken Japanese codes. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell was one of the most accomplished infantrymen in the history of the U.S. Army, but despite the experience of working for him, Weyand drifted again in intelligence after the war. Finally, while a thirty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel in Hawaii, he encountered a general who gave him advice he heeded: to move up, move out to the cutting edge.

  Fred Weyand transferred to the infantry and graduated from the Advanced Course at Fort Benning as Kim II Sung’s tanks were crossing the 38th Parallel. He found his metier practicing the “Follow Me!” motto of the Infantry School. In January 1951 he was given a battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division, reduced to 162 men by MacArthur’s debacle in North Korea. He built it back up with replacements, many of them KATUSAs, reorganized it, and then trained on the march as he led his battalion in the counteroffensives to drive the Chinese back up the peninsula and reestablish a line along the Parallel. “Those were the days when you commanded your battalion from the lead platoon,” Weyand said with nostalgia. “If you succeeded, it was because you were there.” He won a Silver Star for Gallantry and the Bronze Star for Valor. Maj. Gen. Frank Milburn, the commander of I Corps, had singled out Weyand’s battalion as the finest in the corps.

  His performance in Korea was the flint striking steel to light Weyand’s career. Afterward he was able to get the kind of assignments a non-West Pointer needs to give him an advantage—military assistant to the secretary of the Army, commander of a battle group in Berlin, and for two years in the early 1960s the sensitive post of chief liaison officer to Congress. His physical appearance helped. He was six feet four inches and handsome. So did his manner. He could be reasonably open and honest while also being deft, and he was an informal and friendly man. Weyand shortened his classy name of Frederick Carlton to Fred C. in official correspondence. He did not wait for junior officers and enlisted men to salute him. He saluted them first.

  Weyand and Vann had met in Hau Nghia not much more than a year before the formation of CORDS. Vann had been on another of his periodic expeditions to try to get information about where the Viet Cong were keeping Ramsey captive. Weyand had just brought the headquarters of the 25th Infantry Division he was then commanding to Vietnam from Hawaii and was in the midst of setting up a base camp at Cu Chi. Ramsey’s last reports to AID and a comprehensive description he had written of Hau Nghia gave Weyand a lot of practical information, but he lacked anything precise on the Viet Cong forces in the province, what is called order of battle intelligence in the military. The G-2 section at MACV and Seaman’s staff at II Field Force, as the U.S. corps-level command for III Corps was called, had nothing useful.

  Fred Weyand considered himself a lucky soldier when a walking intelligence file on Hau Nghia suddenly appeared and introduced himself as John Vann. The two men got to know each other better on Vann’s subsequent expeditions and after he was appointed III Corps director for OCO near the end of 1966. Vann would stop at Weyand’s headquarters on a Saturday or a Sunday for a late-afternoon volleyball game and stay for the night so that he and Weyand could talk over dinner and into the evening.

  Some regular Army officers tended in these years to look askance at John Vann as a kind of renegade lieutenant colonel. Weyand tested what Vann told him and noticed that Vann was right far more often than he was wrong. Weyand admired Vann’s moral courage. He was fascinated by the detail Vann gathered from the myriad of friends and acquaintances he had built up among Vietnamese on the Saigon side and from his forays down questionable roads and his nights spent in hamlets and militia outposts. Weyand was not in a position to do that sort of thing, and he didn’t know anyone else who did it. Bruce Palmer, Vann’s old commanding officer and patron in the 16th Infantry Regiment in Germany, became II Field Force commander in March 1967, after Seaman rotated home. Weyand moved up from the division to be Palmer’s deputy. Westmoreland then decided, to Palmer’s unhappiness, that he needed Palmer to run the main support and administrative command, U.S. Army Vietnam. Weyand got the corps. When Westmoreland indicated to him that Vann might be troublesome as a Dep/ CORDS, Weyand was fully aware that John Vann meant trouble. What he received in exchange was what mattered to Weyand.

  Vann did not have to shift his office from the former OCO compound near ARVN III Corps headquarters on the outskirts of Bien Hoa when he became the Dep/CORDS for II Field Force in June 1967. His job simply got bigger, and he added a building in the compound for more staff. After the inaugural session at II Field Force Headquarters at the Long Binh base, Weyand asked if there was anything special he could do for his new deputy. “Yes, I’d like to have a military aide,” Vann said. Did he have any particular young officer in mind, Weyand asked. “No, any lieutenant or warrant officer will do as long as he brings his helicopter with him,” Vann said.

  The access Seaman had given Vann to one of the corps’ little H-23 Raven helicopters whenever Vann wished had been a perquisite to cherish (and one that Palmer and Weyand had continued), but a pilot and a helicopter of one’s own made one feel considerably more like a general. Vann’s new “aide” appeared shortly afterward with his two-seater Plex-iglas-bubble flying machine. Vann had concrete helicopter pads laid next to his office compound and beside the house nearby that AID had rented for him as living quarters in Bien Hoa. He arranged for the pilot to live in an aviation compound across the road. No spot in the eleven provinces in the corps was beyond an hour’s flight. Vann now had almost 800 Americans working for him on his staff and in the unified province teams, the majority military men. When he added the Filipino and South Korean help and the Vietnamese employees, he had about 2,225 people under him. American soldiers—lieutenant colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, sergeants—were once again taking orders from John Vann. “I am back in the military fold and I am in command,” he said in a round-robin letter to his friends.

  He had read a letter from Ramsey that February. It was written on tissue paper in a minute hand with a ball-point pen and smuggled out of a jungle prison camp by Pfc. Charles Crafts, one of two captured American soldiers released by the Viet Cong as a propaganda act during the 1967 Tet or Lunar New Year holiday. The letter was from Ramsey to his parents in Boulder City, Nevada. Crafts hid it in his eyeglass case and turned it over to the U.S. Army intelligence officers who questioned him right after his release. Vann was called to the embassy, where the letter went for forwarding. He had stayed in touch with Ramsey’s parents, occasionally sending them whatever fragments of information he could obtain. (At one point he was to offer them financial help, which they thanked him for and said they did not need.) He immediately wrote to alert them and to give them a summary of the letter’s contents. The embassy kept the original for the special file maintained on a prisoner, but sent Ramsey’s parents an exact typescript.

  Ramsey, the only child, told his parents, “It is the thought of seeing you again and the memories of home which are keeping me above water at present.” He hoped to survive, “but we must be realistic.” He wanted the letter to serve as testimony that “I was still alive as of the 13th of January [1967],” the day he completed it, so his parents could collect his back pay to that date “without undue difficulty” should he perish. Ramsey tried, nevertheless, to be encouraging. He had endured a bout with ordinary malaria and then come through an assault by the falciparum variety “said to be 90 percent fatal in this region.” (Falciparum is the so-called “killer malaria” that attacks the brain.) “If I can survive something like that I am now completely confident of my ability to survive any of the lesser diseases I have seen in this area—with no sweat,” he said. The Viet Cong “medical treatment is quite good, given jungle conditions… As to protection from U.S. artillery, bombs, rockets, etc., you mustn’t fret yourselves either.” They had deep foxholes in the camp and we
re in the process of digging underground sleeping quarters. A similarly constructed camp had recently been hit by B-52S and “only one person [was] slightly wounded.”

  Vann could read between the lines, and he had the information supplied by Pfc. Crafts and Sgt. Sammie Womach, the other prisoner released, to give him a more realistic vision of Ramsey’s captivity. He still could not imagine it. No one could have imagined Ramsey’s corner of Purgatory.

  The two Viet Cong interrogators at the first prison camp to which Ramsey had been taken near the Cambodian border in northwestern Tay Ninh Province had decided right away that he was a CIA agent. In their frame of reference any American with Ramsey’s specialized language training who was traveling around the countryside in civilian clothes armed with an AR-15 and carrying a lot of money had to be engaged in spying and clandestine operations. He had about 31,000 piastres on him when captured, money owed to a new local contractor for some office construction. The interrogators assumed that he was out paying salaries to the CIA’s assassination teams in Hau Nghia. Ramsey’s denials and his attempts to explain what he really did only angered them. They thought that his AID job was a cover. To the guerrillas, a CIA agent was a loathsome species of American. The Agency’s sponsorship since the 1950s of the Saigon regime’s intelligence and security services, including the Süreté, now called the Special Branch, its involvement in the terror of Diem’s Denunciation of Communists Campaign, and its role in the Strategic Hamlet Program and in so many other acts the Viet Cong considered crimes gave it a mythical aura of evil in their eyes.