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

by Neil Sheehan

  A study of fifty-six representative engagements in 1966 from platoon-size to multibattalion showed that the Viet Cong and the NVA had initiated the action in about 85 percent of the clashes, either by attacking the American unit or by choosing to stand and fight from fortified positions. The enemy also had an element of surprise in his favor nearly 80 percent of the time. In only about 5 percent of the cases did the U.S. commander have “reasonably accurate knowledge of enemy positions and strength” before the shooting started. Thayer had confirmed his results by checking them against the mass of after-action reports submitted by the field commanders and against an earlier study of a different set of engagements in late 1965 and the beginning of 1966. This earlier study had found that the Viet Cong and the NVA started the shooting 88 percent of the time.

  To make attrition work in his favor, a military leader must be able to force his enemy to fight, as Grant could force Lee to fight when he had Lee locked into a defense of the Confederate capital of Richmond in the last year of the Civil War and as the American and British armies could make Hitler’s Wehrmacht do after the landing at Normandy in 1944. Thayer’s findings proved that Westmoreland was unable to force his enemy to fight, because the Vietnamese had an overwhelming grasp of the initiative. The Vietnamese controlled their own rate of attrition. Furthermore, because of Westmoreland’s insistence on giving battle whenever and wherever the Vietnamese appeared, they controlled his rate of loss to a significant degree as well. They could raise or lower U.S. casualties by their willingness to sacrifice their own people.

  Even if one set aside this determining factor of who held the initiative, and if one gave Westmoreland all the American soldiers he wanted and accepted the most indulgent projections, Thayer’s analysis showed that the general’s strategy still did not make sense. With 678,000 Americans to do the killing and the Vietnamese getting themselves killed at roughly twice the average rate, Hanoi would be losing about 400 men per week beyond what its manpower pool enabled it to replace. “In theory, we’d then wipe them out in ten years,” Enthoven wrote McNamara.

  Robert McNamara, the technocratic manager extraordinary who had run out of solutions, performed an act of abundant moral courage in May of 1967. He gave the president of the United States a memorandum saying that the president could not win the war in Vietnam and ought to negotiate an unfavorable peace.

  John McNaughton, who shared McNamara’s anguish because he shared his high responsibility for the bloodshed, drafted the memorandum for him. They did not state baldly that the war could not be won; that would have been too impolitic in the circumstances of the moment. McNamara and McNaughton let this conclusion become apparent from the actions they proposed and the peace they described. They wanted the president to abandon the officially engraved goals of defeating the Vietnamese Communists and establishing “an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam” and to issue a secret policy directive setting out new “minimum objectives.” These amounted to a fig-leaf political settlement in the South that would enable the United States to gradually disengage from Vietnam. This “circumscription of the U.S. commitment … may cause a ‘rush for the exits’ in Thailand, in Laos, and especially inside South Vietnam,” the memorandum acknowledged, but its pains were “fewer and smaller than the difficulties of any other approach.” McNamara and McNaughton urged the president to start moving toward this settlement by holding Westmoreland to another 30,000 troops and no more and by halting the bombing of North Vietnam above the 20th Parallel, i.e., confining the air raids to the infiltration routes that ran down the Panhandle.

  What McNamara had done so much to set in motion he could no longer influence. Lyndon Johnson had invested close to 11,000 American lives and his place in history in the Vietnamese war by the time of McNamara’s awakening, and he was listening to other men like Komer and Rostow and Rusk who did not see what McNamara saw. The president continued to employ McNamara as a foil against the military. He had no intention of providing the 678,000 men for Westmoreland’s “Optimum Force,” because this would require mobilizing the reserves, an act that would destroy Johnson’s Great Society legislation and profoundly exacerbate domestic dissent over the war. Nor did he intend to provide all of the 550,500 men for the general’s “Minimum Essential Force,” because Westmoreland did not convince him during a trip to Washington in April that this many Americans were essential to win. The president had come to see Westmoreland’s troop demands more as bargaining parameters than genuine needs. He sent McNamara to South Vietnam again in July, when Vann saw him alone for the first time, to haggle the general down. Westmoreland finally agreed that he could make do with an additional 55,000 troops beyond the previous ceiling to give him 525,000 men by the middle of 1968.

  Running an errand for the president was not to be confused with enjoying his trust. Lyndon Johnson began to put Robert McNamara at a distance.

  McNamara lost his friend and confidant John McNaughton to a midair collision between a small private plane and a commercial aircraft over a North Carolina airport that July. McNaughton’s wife and an eleven-year-old son also died on the airliner. The loss must have been difficult for McNamara, because he had started to show his emotions. He had let the President glimpse them in a description of the bombing of the North in the memorandum in May. “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

  More troubled him than bloodshed. Another associate who worked closely with him in 1967 remembered how ashamed McNamara had become of all the bad advice he had given two presidents in earlier years, ashamed of what he saw as his failure at the most important task of his life. In June he commissioned the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret inquiry into U.S. involvement in Indochina from its origins in the French era, an inquiry that was to burgeon into a forty-three-volume archive of the war, more than 7,000 pages and two and a half million words of classified history and documents. He gave Leslie Gelb, who was to direct the project, a list of about a hundred questions he wanted the study to answer. One of the first questions on McNamara’s list condemned as unnecessary everything he had brought to pass: “Was Ho Chi Minh an Asian Tito?”

  Perhaps in part because he paid so little attention before, he was now willing to subject himself to the details of the killing and destruction. In the fall of 1967, Jonathan Schell, then a twenty-four-year-old writer for The New Yorker, had just finished an account of what Task Force Oregon, the provisional Army division Westmoreland had formed and sent to Chu Lai in the spring to replace the Marines, was doing in Quang Ngai Province and in the southern end of Quang Tin. Schell had spent several weeks during the summer observing the operations of the division, most of the time from a vantage that gave him a panoramic view of the havoc—the rear seat of one of the Air Force L-19 spotter planes that controlled the air strikes.

  The damage to rural society and the killing of civilians in Quang Ngai had become serious two years earlier, as I had learned in November 1965, when I found the five hamlets on the coast in which hundreds had perished under bombs and naval gunfire. During 1966 the Marines had staged a number of operations in Quang Ngai that turned brutal because of the resistance they encountered from the Viet Cong, an unyielding peasantry who stood behind the guerrillas, and NVA troops who infiltrated down the Annamites to reinforce. The pacification strategy Krulak and Walt had been attempting to implement acted as something of a checkrein on the local Marine commanders. The inhibition disappeared in the spring of 1967 with the arrival of Task Force Oregon. The Army, with its corpse-exchange strategy, was not interested in securing hamlets and protecting ground. The machine was freed of all restraint, and the ravaging expanded geometrically.

  Where I had learned that at least ten other hamlets had been flattened as thoroughly as the five along the coast and a further twenty-five heavily damaged, Schell discovered that fully 70 percent of t
he estimated 450 hamlets in Quang Ngai had been destroyed. Except for a narrow strip of hamlets along Route 1, which was patrolled after a fashion, the destruction was proceeding apace. Day after day from the back of the spotter plane Schell watched the latest smashing and burning in bombings and shellings and rocket runs by the helicopter gunships and in the meandering progress of flames and smoke from houses set afire by the American infantry. He tallied up the previous destruction from the traces of the houses and, going to the military maps, carefully checked his estimates with the L-19 pilots, officers of Task Force Oregon, members of the CORDS team in Quang Ngai, and several local Saigon officials.

  A lot of the peasants had returned to the shards of their homes, even though many of the communities had been officially condemned in free-fire zones, and were living in underground bomb shelters. They preferred to chance an existence from their cratered rice fields and to endure the peril of being frequently blasted and shot at rather than accept the certainty of hunger and filth and disease in the refugee camps. The province hospital had been admitting an average of thirty wounded civilians a day since Task Force Oregon had arrived. A volunteer British doctor who had been working in Quang Ngai for more than three years gave Schell an estimate that put the total civilian casualties for the province, including the dead and the lightly wounded, at a current annual rate of about 50,000. (A conservative formula worked out by Tom Thayer of Systems Analysis from hospital admissions throughout the country would have given a figure of about 33,000 civilian casualties a year for Quang Ngai.)

  Schell happened to tell Jerome Wiesner, the provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, what he had witnessed. Wiesner was a scientist who had lent his talent to the U.S. military ever since he helped to perfect radar at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory during World War II. He had been Kennedy’s science adviser and was a friend of McNamara’s. He arranged for Schell to see the secretary in his big office over the River Entrance to the Pentagon.

  Jonathan Schell had gained considerable notoriety from an earlier New Yorker article on the forced evacuation by the Army in January 1967 of 6,100 guerrilla family members and sympathizers from the so-called Iron Triangle northwest of Saigon and the razing of Ben Sue and several other hamlets in which they had lived. Although Vann did not believe in forced relocation, because of his experience with the Strategic Hamlet Program, he had handled their resettlement in his first major task as OCO Director for III Corps and had gotten into a spectacular row with DePuy, who wanted his 1st Infantry Division to have complete charge. Vann had thought Schell’s reporting of the event accurate, despite Schell’s personal opposition to the war.

  McNamara had not turned away visitors like Schell when friends sent them in the past. He liked to give the impression that he had an open mind. In a short time the visitor would notice that the secretary was fretting and glancing at the clock on the wall opposite his desk. An assistant would walk in and hand him a message or there would be a telephone call of overriding importance and the visitor would have to leave the office so that the secretary could speak freely. When the visitor returned, McNamara would be on his feet beside his desk, and who could continue to impose on such a harried public servant?

  Schell was not interrupted. He still got the impression that he was imposing on a bristlingly busy man, but McNamara made no attempt to hurry Schell. He listened intently with a poker face, asking few questions. When Schell was through, McNamara took him over to a map and asked him to point out the districts of Quang Ngai he had been describing. “Can you put something in writing? We’ve got to have something in writing,” McNamara said. Schell said that he had a manuscript in longhand. McNamara summoned an assistant and told him to arrange for Schell to dictate the manuscript. Schell thanked the secretary for listening to him and left.

  McNamara did not ask Schell how long his article was. It was the length of a short book. Schell spent the next three days reading it into a dictaphone in the office of a general who was away. A secretary sent the recordings one after another down to the Pentagon typing pool. McNamara’s assistant also arranged for Schell to eat his meals in a Pentagon mess reserved for high-ranking officers and civilian officials. Schell had several conversations there that struck him as “weird.” He left at the end of three days with a typed copy of the manuscript he could submit to The New Yorker. McNamara never contacted him afterward to let him know what happened to the copy left at the Pentagon. When Schell next encountered McNamara in an airport fifteen years later, McNamara seemed “a haunted man” and Schell thought it unkind to ask.

  Robert McNamara sent the manuscript straight to Bunker. The ambassador showed it to Westmoreland and, with the general’s consent, ordered a secret inquiry. “The descriptions of destruction by the author are overdrawn but not to such a degree as to discredit his statements. … Mr. Schell’s estimates are substantially correct,” the report of the investigation said. “There are some very important political and military reasons for the scope of the destruction in this area,” the report continued. “The population is totally hostile towards the GVN and is probably nearly in complete sympathy with the NLF movement.” The Viet Cong also refused to accept American rules and insisted on fortifying hamlets and organizing the entire population to resist. “For the Viet Cong there isn’t any distinction; the Viet Cong are the people.” (The emphasis is in the original report.) In a display of the moral obtuseness that had become so characteristic of U.S. officialdom, the report tried to explain away everything Schell had written.

  Less than four months after this exercise in exculpation was submitted, on the morning of March 16, 1968, a massacre occurred in the village of Son My on the South China Sea about seven miles northeast of Quang Ngai town. The largest killing took place at a hamlet called My Lai and was directed by a second lieutenant named William Calley, Jr., a platoon leader in the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal), which Task Force Oregon had been formally designated. The criminal investigation division of the Military Police subsequently concluded that 347 people perished at My Lai. The CID reports indicated that about another ninety unarmed Vietnamese were killed at a second hamlet of the village by soldiers from a separate company the same morning. The monument that was erected to the victims after the war was to list the names of 504 inhabitants of Son My.

  Some of the troops refused to participate in the massacre; their refusal did not restrain their fellows. The American soldiers and junior officers shot old men, women, boys, girls, and babies. One soldier missed a baby lying on the ground twice with a .45 pistol as his comrades laughed at his marksmanship. He stood over the child and fired a third time. The soldiers beat women with rifle butts and raped some and sodomized others before shooting them. They shot the water buffalos, the pigs, and the chickens. They threw the dead animals into the wells to poison the water. They tossed satchel charges into the bomb shelters under the houses. A lot of the inhabitants had fled into the shelters. Those who leaped out to escape the explosives were gunned down. All of the houses were put to the torch.

  Lieutenant Calley, who herded many of his victims into an irrigation ditch and filled it with their corpses, was the only officer or soldier to be convicted of a crime. He was charged with personally killing 109 Vietnamese. A court-martial convicted him of the premeditated murder of at least twenty-two, including babies, and sentenced him to life in prison at hard labor. President Nixon intervened for him. Calley was confined for three years, most of the time under house arrest in his apartment at Fort Benning with visitation rights for a girlfriend.

  The officers of the court-martial acted correctly in seeking to render justice in the case of Calley, and Richard Nixon shamed himself in frustrating them. Calley appears to have been a sadist, but his personality alone does not explain the massacre. What Calley and others who participated in the massacre did that was different was to kill hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese in two hamlets in a single morning and to kill point-blank with rifles, pistols, and machine guns. Had they killed just as man
y over a larger area in a longer period of time and killed impersonally with bombs, shells, rockets, white phosphorus, and napalm, they would have been following the normal pattern of American military conduct. The soldier and the junior officer observed the lack of regard his superiors had for the Vietnamese. The value of Vietnamese life was systematically cheapened in his mind. Further brutalized by the cycle of meaningless violence that was Westmoreland’s war of attrition, and full of hatred because his comrades were so often killed and wounded by mines and booby traps set by the local guerrillas and the peasants who helped them, he naturally came to see all Vietnamese of the countryside as vermin to be exterminated. The massacre at Son My was inevitable. The military leaders of the United States, and the civilian leaders who permitted the generals to wage war as they did, had made the massacre inevitable.

  McNamara tried again to convince the president at the beginning of November 1967. He stated his case fervidly at the weekly White House planning session on Vietnam on October 31, called the Tuesday Luncheon because Johnson always held it during the Tuesday noon meal. The next day he gave the president a memorandum elaborating his dissent. The memorandum predicted the course of the war over the next fifteen months if Johnson held to the strategy they were pursuing until the end of his current term of office on Inauguration Day in late January 1969. By that time, McNamara said, Lyndon Johnson would have on his conscience “between 24,000 and 30,000” Americans killed in action. (The number was to exceed 31,000.) The president would have nothing of substance to show for the dead. The public would be crying out for withdrawal from Vietnam. Simultaneously, the military leaders and the hawks in Congress who supported them would be pushing hard to mine the ports and bomb the population centers of the North and to widen the ground war by thrusting into the Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos, and invading North Vietnam above the DMZ.