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

by Neil Sheehan

  The crowding of so many people in and around the cities and towns was deceptive. It gave an appearance of increased Saigon government control while, in reality, there was less control than ever because of the social and economic chaos and the unprecedented corruption. The police had no desire to venture into the new slums that had risen in response to American needs. They feared the gangs of hoodlums and ARVN deserters in these warrens. With everyone so busy at the feast of loot there was scant security in many better sections. The official ARVN history of the Tet Offensive, by and large an intellectually honest account, was to acknowledge that assassinations and other acts of terrorism had been common in the northern Saigon suburb of Go Vap during 1967 and that the guerrillas had frequently established roadblocks on outlying streets in Cholon and attacked police posts there and in adjacent Phu Lam. “Enemy soldiers had reached the doors of the city,” the history said.

  Annie and her grandmother became friendly with several of the neighbors around the house AID had rented for Vann in the other Saigon suburb of Gia Dinh. The neighbors pointed to the homes of a number of families who were known to be guerrilla sympathizers or who had family members or close relatives in the Viet Cong. Vann’s new daughter was five weeks old by the end of January. When Annie woke early on the morning of the 31st to feed the baby she heard shouts of “Let’s get out of here!” from the street. She and her grandmother ran outside and saw people hurrying from their houses with as many of their belongings as they could carry to flee the shooting that was about to begin. A group of Viet Cong had taken up positions in a Buddhist pagoda a few hundred yards away. Weeks before with the collusion of the monks the guerrillas had dug a bunker under the pagoda and stashed weapons and ammunition there.

  The majority of the Viet Cong battalions that penetrated the western side of Saigon to attack Tan Son Nhut and other targets came through Tan Binh District. Vann had learned the previous summer that the district chief of Tan Binh was collecting pay for 582 RF and PF troops when he actually had 150. One of the RF battalions presumed to be defending the west side of Saigon was called “the Chinese Battalion.” The names on its roll were mostly shopkeepers and other Chinese who never left their businesses in Cholon. William Westmoreland thought that he possessed South Vietnam. What he owned was a lot of American islands where his soldiers stood.

  Vann woke at the first thunderclaps of the 122mm rockets and 82mm mortars slamming into Bien Hoa Air Base almost exactly at 3:00 A.M. He dressed in a frenzy, telling Lee that he had to go to the CORDS compound and she could not come with him. The house was the safest place for her, he said. She should stay in the bedroom and hide in the wardrobe if any Viet Cong broke inside. He ran out the door to his car with Wilbur Wilson, his deputy, who had also awaked and dressed in an instant.

  The concussion from an ammunition dump at Long Binh detonated by sappers who sneaked into the base blew the fluorescent light bulbs out of their fixtures and tossed furniture around the Quonset hut where Fred Weyand had his Tactical Operations Center. Weyand wasn’t hurt. He put on his helmet and flak jacket as the duty officers and enlisted staff recovered from the shock and lit emergency gasoline lanterns. Weyand hadn’t been able to sleep and had gotten out of bed and gone to the TOC an hour earlier to wait. The helicopter gunships he had placed on strip alert were taking off, some to search for the rocket and mortar positions, others to wait for the Communist infantry. The night was confusion, flash, and din. More 122mm rockets and mortars crashed around Weyand’s headquarters as the Viet Cong sought to knock out his command post with a bombardment rather than a ground assault. The generators kept feeding power to the radios and teletypes and the phones kept working fine, and Weyand was amazed at the reports coming in from Saigon and the ring of installations around the capital.

  A U.S. unit near the TOC began wildly shooting .50 caliber machine guns. The big bullets cracking through the Quonset hut were at the least a hindrance to concentration. Weyand sent the colonel who was his G-1 off in a jeep with two MPs to tell the unit to cease fire. The man was back in a few minutes. He was in a daze. “The VC are right across the street,” he said. The jeep had been shot to pieces.

  Weyand’s G-1 and the MPs had encountered the two companies of Viet Cong assigned to liberate the POW camp. The Viet Cong had been told they would find the camp in a rubber plantation, and when they couldn’t find the plantation, because Weyand had removed it, they got lost. They were milling around in a hamlet of ARVN widows and orphans opposite Weyand’s headquarters.

  Fred Weyand gave an order. M-113s from the 9th Division and infantrymen from the 199th Light Infantry Brigade laid the bodies of these guerrillas out in windrows.

  The lead Viet Cong assault groups from another battalion had penetrated the bunkers around the eastern end of Bien Hoa Air Base and were dashing for a line of hangars. The pilots of the helicopter gunships swooped, scattering the running figures with machine guns and rockets. More M-113s from the 9th Division drove into guerrillas farther back who were still trying to fight their way through the bunkers. Other Viet Cong attacking the ARVN III Corps headquarters near Vann’s CORDS compound soon found themselves in a similarly unequal struggle with still more armored personnel carriers and American infantry.

  Weyand rescued Tan Son Nhut with a flying column of tanks and APCs from the armored cavalry squadron of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division at Cu Chi. To skirt possible ambushes and the shooting at Hoc Mon, where the Viet Cong were endeavoring to block Route 1, the squadron commander circled above the column in a helicopter, dropping flares and guiding it along cross-country detours.

  Throughout the night and into the morning, as Weyand set thousands of U.S. fighting men in motion, he was a fire chief afraid he was going to run out of engine companies. He never did. He had prepared better than he could have known for a battle he could never have anticipated. He kept the air and land lines to Saigon open, and he delivered or readied enough counterblows to deprive the Communists of the momentum they needed to win the city.

  Vann became so preoccupied with rallying his CORDS teams in the provinces that he did not take his helicopter to Gia Dinh to rescue Annie and his infant daughter until the afternoon. By that time the house was ringed with shooting between the Viet Cong from the pagoda and the province RF. He had the pilot circle low over the house. Annie did not signal to him. Vann assumed she was hiding inside. The pilot dropped him at the province headquarters, and, armed with an M-16, Vann slipped through the guerrillas. He instructed the pilot to orbit above the house and be prepared at his signal to plummet down and snatch up Annie and her grandmother and the child. Vann found the house empty. No one answered his shouts. Stray bursts from automatic weapons were ripping through the windows on the second floor. On his way back to the province center he and a guerrilla bumped into each other. Vann killed the man.

  Annie’s parents had beaten Vann to the rescue. Frightened for their daughter and granddaughter and for the grandmother, they drove to Gia Dinh at first light, were forced to leave the car at a roadblock the police and RF had thrown up near the central market, and walked the further mile and a quarter to the house. They arrived as Annie, her grandmother, and the maid were about to flee on their own. Annie had prepared an extra bottle for the baby and wrapped her in a blanket while her grandmother and the maid were gathering a few belongings.

  It took the family most of the day to reach her parents’ home in Saigon. Many streets were mobbed with others attempting to escape the fighting. They were stopped at one roadblock after another by police and RF fearful of more infiltrators and had to show their papers and permit the car to be searched. The troops fired their weapons into the air to try to control the crowds.

  Vann learned that Annie and the child were safe when he reached her parents’ home shortly after the family got there. He was relieved to know they were all right, but Annie could tell he was also miffed that she and the baby had not been in Gia Dinh to be saved. “I tried to rescue you and I almost got shot,” he said, tellin
g her what had occurred.

  “Well, John, I had a baby to worry about, I couldn’t wait,” she said.

  As with Peter at the Children’s Hospital in Boston nine years before, Vann wanted to be the hero of the hour, and so he was. In the story he told to friends, he spirited Annie and the baby away amid guerrilla gunfire. Annie did not contradict him when she heard the tale.

  Although Weyand was not given to boasting, he was convinced afterward, as was Vann, that Saigon would have fallen had he not objected to sending his troops up to the Cambodian frontier. “It would have been absolute disaster, because there’s no doubt in my mind Saigon would have been taken,” Weyand said. There were only eight ARVN infantry battalions in the metropolitan area at the time of the attack, none at more than 50 percent strength because of Tet leaves and some considerably weaker. The best two, paratroop battalions, were still in the city merely by chance. A staff officer at JGS had become so absorbed in a holiday game of mah-jongg the day before that he had forgotten to request transport planes to fly them to northern I Corps. The paratroopers were supposed to have been flown there on the 30th as part of the ARVN contribution to Westmoreland’s buildup over Khe Sanh. The closest approximation to an American combat unit in the city was a battalion of MPs. In his mood of confidence, Westmoreland had handed responsibility for the defense of Saigon to the ARVN in December, withdrawing the U.S. 199th Light Infantry Brigade from the Capital Military District and giving the brigade back to Weyand.

  The fifteen Viet Cong battalions assigned to the initial assault, most of them local force battalions, because they knew the vicinity of the capital best (one was a sapper battalion of 250 men who had been living in the city, working at such lowly jobs as taxi and pedicab drivers), had orders to seize their objectives and hold in place until additional regular battalions could join them from outside. Many of the assaults went awry. To safeguard surprise, the precise attack orders were not issued to the battalions until seventy-two to forty-eight hours before, insufficient time for reconnaissance, particularly for a rural army operating in an urban environment for the first time. The thinly manned ARVN battalions reacted bravely after overcoming dismay. Their backs were to the wall; a lot of the soldiers had wives and children in Saigon. The RF troops scattered around the city and its suburbs also acquitted themselves well in many instances. Nevertheless, had American fighting units not been available to intervene right away, the Communist regulars would have arrived on the heels of the local force battalions and the outnumbered and outclassed defenders would have faced more than they could have withstood. The thousands of U.S. and ARVN staff officers and enlisted staff and support troops in the city, unorganized, untrained, lightly armed, could not have constituted more than an annoyance.

  Fred Weyand, and John Vann to the extent he had encouraged Weyand to hold back his troops, might have saved Saigon from capture. What could not be saved was the war. Westmoreland had lost it. The ultimate result of Weyand’s generalship in crisis was, ironically, to prolong an unwinnable conflict. More than 20,000 Americans had died in Vietnam and more than 50,000 had been wounded seriously enough to be hospitalized by the time a small Peugeot truck and a battered little taxicab turned the corner of Mac Dinh Chi Street onto Thong Nhat Boulevard about 2:45 A.M. on January 31, 1968, and a platoon of sappers leaped out and blew a hole through the wall of the new U.S. Embassy compound.

  “The Green Machine,” as the American soldier had come to so aptly name the Army of this war, had demanded and been given 841,264 draftees by Christmas 1967, and the draft call in January 1968 was for 33,000 more young men. The financial cost of the war had reached $33 billion a year, provoking an inflation that was beginning to seriously disturb the economy of the United States. The college and university campuses were in turmoil. Prior to 1967 the sons of the white middle class had largely avoided the war through the escape hatch of a college deferment. By 1967 the needs of the Green Machine were such that the draft had begun to take significant numbers of them as they graduated. The threat of being conscripted for a war that was the object of widespread moral revulsion made marchers and shouters out of young men who might otherwise have been less concerned over the victimization of an Asian people and the turning into cannon fodder of farm boys and the sons of the working class and the minorities. The appeal of the cause aroused women students in equal number and with equal passion.

  The majority of Americans, as credulous as other peoples, were tolerating this pain only because the authority figures in whom they had faith had assured them it was necessary for the safety of the nation and that victory and an end to the pain were at hand. American society had been stressed to the point where its will could be snapped. The financial and human costs of Westmoreland’s war of attrition were so high that when the Tet 1968 Offensive exposed it as a fiasco, the inevitable result was a psychological collapse and a domestic political crisis of historic proportions. Westmoreland had brought about the kind of catastrophe MacArthur had perpetrated when he had sent an American army into the mountains of North Korea in the winter of 1950, but on a scale magnified many times by the extravagance of the failure in Vietnam.

  It did not matter to the American public that the platoon of sappers did not actually break into and seize the embassy building, although they had plenty of B-40 rockets and explosives with which to do so. The sappers apparently became confused after their leaders were killed in an opening exchange and simply occupied the interior of the compound around the building and shot it out for nearly six and a half hours until they were all killed or wounded. Toward the end of the battle an MP tossed a gas mask and a pistol through a window to George Jacobson so that he could shoot a wounded sapper who was climbing the stairs inside his house to get away from tear gas. Jake, who had retired from the Army, thought that as a diplomat he would not need a weapon and had been trapped all night on the second floor of the house with just a grenade he found in a desk drawer.

  It did not matter in the United States that the Vietnamese Communists failed to topple the Saigon regime and foment a rebellion by the urban population. The Hanoi leadership miscalculated the rapidity with which American military power could bolster the regime, as Weyand did with his counterstrokes, and they did not understand the tumble weed mentality of the new “forced-draft” urban dwellers. While some did actively assist the Communist forces and the majority were sufficiently antagonistic to the Americans and the regime to give no warning as tens of thousands of armed men moved through their midst, they were people too confused by loss of home and place and the corrosion of family and social values to be committed to any cause or to rebel against anyone.

  What mattered to the American public was that this defeated enemy could attack anywhere and was attacking everywhere more fiercely than ever before. The winning of the war was not coming “into view.” The war in Vietnam was never going to be won. Nothing had been achieved by the outpouring of lives and treasure and the rending of American society. The assurances the public had been given were the lies and vaporings of foolish men.

  Everything Americans saw as the offensive unfolded reinforced this impression. The Viet Cong holed up in the Phu Tho section of western Saigon and in Cholon and Phu Lam and resisted block by block. They did the same in other cities and towns where they could. To have prohibited the use of heavy weapons and aircraft would have meant a high cost in the lives of U.S. and ARVN soldiers (the infantry was to pay dearly in any case), but not even minimal restrictions were imposed, and the saving of the soldiers’ lives was not the principal reason for the lack of restraint. It was more in the nature of a reflex to turn loose on the urban centers the “stomp-them-to-death” firepower that had brutalized the Vietnamese countryside.

  Serious fighting went on in Saigon for two weeks. Americans watched the country they were supposed to be rescuing being burned down and blown apart on television—in color. “Although no accurate statistics are available,” the official ARVN history said of the toll throughout South Vietnam, “ther
e were approximately 14,300 [civilians] killed, 24,000 wounded, 72,000 homes destroyed, and 627,000 persons made homeless.” In Saigon and its suburbs, approximately 6,300 civilians died, 11,000 were wounded, 206,000 became refugees, and 19,000 houses were smashed. The spectacle broadened opposition to the war and made it a profoundly moral concern, not just for students and intellectuals, but also for a large segment of the middle class who had no sons of draft age. The mad logic seemed to be epitomized by the remark of an American major to Peter Arnett after much of Ben Tre had been turned into broken bricks and cinders: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

  Westmoreland contributed by playing as ever into the hands of his enemy. He drove to the embassy on the morning of the 31st, inspected the damage, and then gave a press conference amid the bodies of the sappers and the MPs, announcing that this raid and the whole offensive was a diversion for an intended main thrust at Khe Sanh and across the DMZ. The man who thought he was baiting was unable to understand that he had been baited. He kept shipping American fighting men north until he had fully half of his maneuver battalions in I Corps. He had a cot set up in the Combined Operations Center at Pentagon East so that he could watch over Khe Sanh day and night. He personally approved B-52 strikes. Dutch Kerwin, his chief of staff, became so concerned about Westmoreland’s lack of sleep that he asked Katherine “Kitsy” Westmoreland to get on a medical evacuation plane returning to Saigon from the Philippines so that the general would have to spend a few nights in his own bed at his villa.

  While the Vietnamese Communists held Westmoreland mesmerized by Khe Sanh, they prolonged the struggle for the prize of Hue, quietly withdrawing a regiment from each of the two divisions encircling the Marines and sending them over the mountains to join the battle for the former imperial capital. Unlike Saigon, Hue is a small city, with a population in 1968 of about 140,000. The least harmful alternative where a place of so much historic and political significance was concerned would have been to regain the initiative immediately by driving the NVA troops out before they could consolidate. Westmoreland had the force available in two brigades of the Air Cav standing by about fourteen miles north of the city, but he was afraid to commit them because he thought he might need the Cav to relieve Khe Sanh. He abandoned the battle to the ARVN and a couple of reinforced battalions of Marines.