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

by Neil Sheehan

  Physical torture was apparently regarded by these interrogators as unproductive. Psychological torture was another matter. They turned the guards on Ramsey. To vent their hatred of what they thought he represented and to amuse themselves in the evening, the guards began to compose skits about Ramsey. The skits became elaborate. Ramsey was portrayed as the archetypal U.S. aggressor who “has the blood of thousands of Vietnamese on his hands.” The skit format acquired a triumphant ending: the dedication of a monument to the demise of this CIA agent in humanitarian cloak, “Mr. USOM Ramsey.” The monument was to be dedicated with Ramsey’s blood by executing him and burying him underneath it. Each guard participating in the skit would propose a fitting demise for Ramsey: shooting after a public trial, lynching, beating to death by the peasants. The rain-forest prison compound was small, and Ramsey could not avoid seeing and hearing the skits. His cell was a large wooden cage. He was kept isolated from the three other American prisoners in the compound, prevented from speaking or having any sort of contact with them. A guard lived above his cell to watch him. At night a kerosene lamp inside the cell was lit so that he could also be watched from the nearby guard shack.

  The two interrogators soon sensed Ramsey’s guilty conscience over the killing of civilians and the razing of hamlets like the one he had seen at his capture. They harped on these atrocities in the frequent examination sessions. One of his inquisitors was an older Viet Cong officer, irascible and embittered. Ramsey later discovered that the other prisoners had nicknamed him Grandpa. He would rail at Ramsey, accusing him of all sorts of heinous acts, shouting that the crimes of a civilian were far worse than those of a military man because the soldier at least came in uniform with an announced mission. The other inquisitor, a younger but higher-ranking cadre nicknamed Alex, was quieter and more chilling in his threats. He claimed to have the authority to kill a prisoner. He said that he had selected the prisoners shot in 1965 to avenge the firing-squad execution in the main Saigon marketplace of a young Viet Cong named Nguyen Van Troi who had tried to blow up McNamara’s car during one of the secretary’s trips to Vietnam. He hoped, Alex said, that he would not have to select Ramsey or any of the three other Americans currently in his charge for like retribution on some future occasion.

  The interrogation hut was also in the compound, and so the guards heard all of the sessions and the fury of Grandpa and Alex when Ramsey would protest that he could not give them the names of secret Vietnamese agents of the CIA and similar information they demanded. Ramsey’s seeming obstinacy made the guards hate him all the more. They petitioned the regional headquarters, which was apparently adjacent to the prison, for permission to erect the monument and execute him. When the request was denied, they petitioned neighboring commands for support. Some of the skits were broadcast over the Viet Cong’s youth radio frequency for the Tay Ninh area. Couriers and other guerrillas stationed at the headquarters came to see the monster Ramsey in his cage.

  Fear, isolation, guilt, and vilification building month upon month pushed Ramsey close to hysteria. The guards taunted him more brutally when they saw that he was losing control, apparently hoping that if they could drive him insane, his potential usefulness would be gone and they could kill him; perhaps he might assist them by committing suicide. Alex and Grandpa were clearly willing to risk killing him on the chance that he might instead break down and give them the CIA secrets they thought he had. If he remained unresponsive, they warned, “it would not be the way to life.”

  The difficulty of sleeping at night further weakened Ramsey’s nerves. The advisors who had lived with ARVN battalions in the Delta in the early 1960s had lost a lot of weight on a good Vietnamese diet. Americans require more calories and protein than Vietnamese. The diet on which prisoners and guards subsisted in these rain-forest camps was usually poor by Vietnamese standards, especially in protein and vitamin Bi. It initially caused Ramsey’s body to break out in boils. His bed was a crude bench fashioned from pole trees with bamboo slats laid on top. These were in turn covered with a woven reed mat. The slats protruded up through the thin mat and irritated the boils. He got painful cramps in his leg muscles from an incipient case of beriberi, a vitamin-Bideficiency disease. The light of the kerosene lamp in the cell sometimes kept him awake. The lamp sat in a big tin can that had been cut open on one side to let the light shine out. Whenever the guards heard an aircraft engine they covered the light by pulling on a vine to manipulate a shutter on the side of the can. The clattering of the shutter back and forth was another robber of sleep. Ramsey started to have nightmares when he did fall asleep and to cry out. The guards threatened to shoot him if he did not keep quiet. He became afraid to fall asleep.

  One night in August 1966, after nearly seven months of torment, Ramsey’s emotions suddenly crested. Some of the guards were saying that he ought be disposed of in any case, because he was too weak to make a difficult march to a new camp. The Viet Cong had decided to move the prisoners because the U.S. Army’s operations in III Corps had started to penetrate the Duong Minh Chau redoubt. Ramsey resolved to fight back. He requested permission, which was granted, to work at milling rice and at the other manual chores the prisoners did around the camp. He began exercising vigorously in his cell. When representatives of the Viet Cong’s “Red Cross” came around soliciting statements against the war for “Liberation Radio,” Ramsey agreed to provide one. He filled the statement with slogans so that it would strike an American as ridiculous and read it into the tape recorder in a tremolo voice in the hope of rendering it useless for broadcast. Alex and Grandpa didn’t seem to notice. They eased up a bit and let him talk to the other prisoners on occasion and do calisthenics with them.

  A fourteen-day trek at the end of October into the jungle of upper Binh Duong Province north of Saigon took Ramsey from psychological to physical torment. The Viet Cong initially regarded the new camp as a bivouac until they could march the prisoners farther north to a hiding place just inside Cambodia in the mountains of the lower Central Highlands. They were instead to stay in this camp for a year, and in their desire for concealment the guerrillas had chosen one of the most inhospitable places in Vietnam. The site was so inaccessible that even the guides got lost during the last part of the trek. The country around it was cut by innumerable ravines that one crossed on log bridges set at crazy angles and covered with slime from the trees. These trails were too rugged for porters to carry in enough food to meet the camp’s needs. Poor soil in the area and early and heavy rains in 1967 prevented the prisoners and the guards from growing much in the way of vegetables. The guards hunted for wild pigs and deer and other game and couldn’t find any. A nest of rats they discovered one day provided a rare bit of fresh meat and protein. Usually there was nothing to eat but manioc boiled in salted water, poor-quality rice, and bamboo shoots, and not a great deal of that.

  The mundane variety of malaria hit Ramsey a week after his arrival and laid him out with nineteen days of fever, 105 degrees or higher. For four days he could eat nothing and could hold down only thin rice soup most of the other days. The falciparum came on Christmas Eve as he was helping his fellow prisoners prepare a service. He fell to the ground with cerebral convulsions. The camp doctor found a weak pulse and injected a heart stimulant, but the Viet Cong then debated whether they ought to deplete their short supply of quinine and chloroquinine on Ramsey. They too were being struck with the malaria, of course. A senior cadre happened to be visiting the camp. Being a CIA agent could also be a saving grace—a valuable prisoner for some possible future exchange. The senior cadre said to try to keep Ramsey alive. Ramsey awoke from the coma sixty hours later in the thatched hut that served as the camp hospital. He noticed that his skin was absolutely white. His superficial blood vessels had closed from the excessive doses of chloroquinine the doctor had been forced to use to bring him back from the shadows.

  The early and torrential rains of the 1967 monsoon raised the water table and flooded the underground bunkers in which the prisoners w
ere supposed to sleep. Nor could they stay dry in their aboveground cells during the downpours, because the thatch roofs got saturated and turned into sieves. The ground became so water-soaked that the roots of several big trees let loose. The trees toppled over and smashed huts in the camp. No one was hurt, but it was terrifying. Thumb-size leeches thrived in the green wetness. They bit into the legs to feed. The bites became infected. Periodically the fever of the ordinary malaria returned and stayed with Ramsey for a week or longer. The doctor had him put on a special diet of chicken broth and protein supplements for a short time after the falciparum. He and the other prisoners received vitamins in pill and injection form fairly regularly, but nothing approaching what they would have needed to compensate for the malnutrition. The beriberi appeared in full viciousness. Ramsey’s skin lost its elasticity. Some of his hair fell out. His left thigh swelled to twice its normal size. Both of his feet and legs also swelled grotesquely. The pain was dreadful.

  One of the prisoners at the Tay Ninh camp, an Army major who had been in captivity longer than Ramsey, had died from the combined effects of beriberi, malaria, and malnutrition. Everyone in the little compound had listened to his death rattle. Ramsey wanted to be encouraged as well as to sound encouraging when he wrote his mother and father at the beginning of the year. He knew as 1967 wore on that his life was like a candle in the wind.

  His captors would have taken him out of this place and measurably improved his chance of survival had he been willing to say publicly and at length and repeatedly what he now truly thought about the war. His honor would not permit him to be used as a tool against his countrymen. The truth he felt could not ease his suffering. He could tell it only in secret to his parents. “We are all hoping that peace will come about soon,” he wrote of himself and his fellow prisoners, “and I personally [hope] that our leaders have no illusions … that they do not entertain ambitions going beyond a minimum face-saving roll-back which will permit our withdrawal without undue loss of military prestige. Anything more is wishful thinking, and any attempt to achieve it would be to compound past folly with future folly.”

  Vann liked Robert Komer a great deal and his affection for Komer as a person was to grow, but by the late summer of 1967 he was writing Ellsberg that “Komer has been a big disappointment to me.” Ellsberg had gone back to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, at the end of May, saved by hepatitis from getting himself wounded or killed. He was discouraged by his inability to persuade anyone in power to adopt the radical measures he and Vann thought necessary and was disheartened by the continued failures of his private life. The trauma of his divorce had been worsened by a complicated and unhappy affair with a Eurasian woman, the mistress of a Corsican restaurant owner in Saigon. A romance with Patricia Marx, a radio journalist who was the daughter of the toy manufacturer Louis Marx, had also come to naught. One of the reasons for the breakup was that they had quarreled over the war, which Patricia Marx opposed. Ellsberg was in such low spirits by the end of 1966 that he conceived a scheme to attach himself as an observer and participate in combat with one U.S. infantry unit after another from the upper Mekong Delta to the DMZ. The hepatitis caught him before a bullet could. He had not given up on the war. He intended to promote more studies on Vietnam at Rand while he recovered his health and tried to sort out his life and to exercise what influence on policy he could through memos and visits to his well-placed network of friends and acquaintances in Washington.

  The amphetaminelike effect on Vann of his elevation to Dep/CORDS for III Corps had worn off over the summer of 1967, and reality was crowding in on him again in the latter days of August. The ARVN would not perform its assigned role of providing security for the pacification teams in the hamlets. The Regional Forces and the militia were everlastingly deplorable despite the better training Vann was now providing for those in III Corps. The pacification teams he and Tran Ngoc Chau had struggled so hard to design and to establish a training course for at Vung Tau were often composed of time-servers and street punks who joined to avoid being drafted into the ARVN. But had the teams been composed of anti-Communist fanatics and saints they could not have offset the damage done by most of the district and province chiefs from whom they had to take orders.

  The trouble with Komer was that he thought the managerial razzle-dazzle he had learned at Harvard Business School had some magical efficacy in itself. He did not realize that its limits would be determined by the worthiness or lack of worthiness of what he was managing. For all of his high and unorthodox intelligence, he was also another believer in the “sheer weight and mass” delusion of his time. “Wastefully, expensively, but nonetheless indisputably, we are winning the war in the South,” he had told the president in February 1967, in a report after one of his earlier periodic trips to Vietnam. “We are grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass.” Despite his subsequent move from the White House to Saigon to shift some of that weight and mass into pacification and to do so with the efficiency on which he prided himself, he had not changed his judgment that the United States would win by might alone. He did not yet understand that one could apply might and doubie the might and “square the error,” as Sir Robert Thompson, the British counterrevolutionary strategist, once observed of American behavior in Vietnam.

  Komer made sorties in the proper direction. Westmoreland caught him trying to send a back-channel message to the president asking Johnson to instruct Westmoreland to force the replacement of incompetent ARVN commanders. Komer’s secretary mistakenly gave the “Eyes Only” message to the special communications officer at MACV instead of sending it over to the CIA station in the embassy for transmission. The back channel to the president got no further than Westmoreland’s desk, and he called Komer in for a chat. Komer soon learned to avoid such quixotic behavior. He had never accepted Vann’s argument that control and reform of the Saigon regime were a sine qua non of victory. He was one more American abroad who could not bear to think of himself as an imperialist in the nineteenth-century sense. He saw virtue in the latitude the U.S. government gave Ky and Thieu and the other Saigon generals and regarded Vann’s “colonialist” bent as a flaw. Komer’s energy and enthusiasm and style, his organizational brilliance, his saber slashes through bureaucratic knots were failing to achieve anything that mattered. The unique civil-military pacification service he had created on the American side was working briskly in a void. Nothing was changing, except for the worse, among the Vietnamese on the Saigon side.

  The intimacy of their friendship and the feeling that he was speaking to someone who truly understood led Vann to write more candidly to Ellsberg than to anyone else of his disillusion with Komer and his despondency over the course the United States was following in Vietnam. “I think we are on the road to doom and that we must change direction and change soon,” he wrote on August 19, 1967. “I have, quite frankly, never been so discouraged as I am now because the American community appears to be operating at cross purposes and flying out in every direction,” Vann said. “What is desperately needed is a strong, dynamic, ruthless, colonialist-type ambassador with the authority to relieve generals, mission chiefs and every other bastard who does not follow a stated, clear-cut policy which, in itself, at a minimum, involves the U.S. in the hiring and firing of Vietnamese leaders.”

  Lodge had relinquished the ambassadorship and gone home in April, escaping a second time before the war could make a serious casualty of his reputation. His successor, Ellsworth Bunker, was less inclined still to behave like the proconsul Vann wanted.

  The president had rebuffed an attempt by Westmoreland to have himself declared a theater commander and a civilian deputy appointed to fulfill an ambassador’s functions. Truman’s confrontation with MacArthur during the Korean War had convinced Lyndon Johnson that it was imprudent to allow a general to become an El Supremo. Johnson did think that Westmoreland was going to drain the will to fight from the Vietnamese Communists with his war of attrition, and the president wanted to achieve the
corollary political success: legitimizing the rule of Washington’s Saigon protégés with the formalities of constitutional government.

  The legitimization process was being facilitated by the blessing-in-disguise concessions that Ky had been forced to make during the political turmoil of 1966—a constituent assembly and then elections for a president and vice-president and a new national assembly. The election for the constituent assembly had been duly held in September 1966, and the delegates had met in Saigon and drawn up another constitution by March 1967. The elections for the presidency and vice-presidency and the upper house of the assembly were to take place in September. The election for the lower house was to follow in October. (Communists and “neutralists,” a category that covered pro-Communists and anyone else suspected of serious opposition to the American presence and the Saigon system, were formally barred from participating.)

  Ellsworth Bunker was the perfect man to oversee the legitimization process. His performance as pacifier in the Dominican Republic crisis in 1965 had been a kind of dress rehearsal for the role now assigned to him in Saigon. He had shown in the Dominican Republic that he could work deftly with the military, as he had with Bruce Palmer, the commanding general there, and use the physical stability and influence American guns gave him to sort out the local political factions and shape a government acceptable to the United States. He had arrived in Saigon just in time to exercise his talent for imposing calm, because in May, Thieu had suddenly upset Ky’s plans by announcing that he was going to run for president. Although some of the civilian fixtures on the Saigon political scene intended to campaign for president too, it was foreordained that the armed forces would continue to run the country and that the president would be a military man.