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

by Neil Sheehan

  He then nearly got thrown out of South Vietnam while promoting his strategy. Peter Arnett stopped by his office in Bien Hoa one evening about a month after his return. Arnett was doing an article on the possibility of future U.S. troop withdrawals, what is called a “think piece” in the trade. Vann had known Arnett for six years. He provided lots of thought on the subject of withdrawals. He gave Arnett permission to quote him by name on his optimistic remarks, such as the consequences of what had happened to the Viet Cong at Tet. He assumed Arnett would protect him on everything else by paraphrasing or quoting without attribution. His remarks might be recognized in Saigon as Vann-isms, as they so often were, but he could disclaim them, as he never hesitated to do. This time Arnett changed the rules, without informing Vann. The article was caustic, at times mocking, in its portrait of the U.S. military machine. Among the direct quotes was one in which Vann explained why there would be no difficulty sending home the first 100,000 men:

  “The first 100,000 Americans to leave would be for free,” Vann declared. “They are the clerks, the laundrymen, the engineer battalions building officers’ clubs throughout the country. So many extraneous things are soaking up people not essential.”

  The Associated Press released the article on its news wire at the end of the first week of September. Komer got a warning call at 7:00 in the morning while he was still at his house. He phoned Vann. “You stupid son of a bitch,” he shouted. “You’re in deep trouble.”

  Someone had already called Vann too, because he knew why Komer was shouting at him. “Bob, let me tell you what happened,” he said.

  “Don’t bother to tell me how it happened. I keep telling you every six weeks to keep your yap shut,” Komer yelled.

  Vann persisted. Komer had never heard him sound so crestfallen. “You’d better listen to me, Bob,” he said. Komer did and then he cursed Vann again and hung up.

  At 8:30 A.M. precisely, the moment each day that General Abrams reached his desk at MACV headquarters, the intercom in Komer’s office said: “Bob, I’d like to see you right away.” Creighton Abrams was a tanker, according to George Patton the meanest tanker the Germans had faced in the whole U.S. Third Army, and he had a temper that matched the fearsome machines he loved. He assumed that no reporter would quote John Vann without his permission, that the article was a deliberate affront. “Have you seen …” he started to say as Komer walked into his office and shut the door.

  Komer interrupted in an attempt to gain the high ground. “I have seen and it’s inexcusable. I’ve called Vann and reamed him out. I read him the riot act,” Komer said.

  Abrams’s roughhewn features flushed and his eyes bulged. “I don’t care if you read him the riot act. I won’t stand for it,” he screamed, his voice twisting up into a squeaky pitch as he choked on his words. “It isn’t that Vann criticized the U.S. Army. It isn’t that Vann criticized me personally. It isn’t any of that shit. What gets me is that the dirty son of a bitch did it in quotes.” He raged on while Komer stood silent, assuming it was futile at this stage to try to explain. “I want that man fired,” Abrams said as soon as his rage had sufficiently abated for him to form the sentence.

  “Now Abe, we can’t do that,” Komer said.

  “Fire that man!” Abrams screeched. “That is a direct order!” He got so red in the face Komer was afraid he was going to asphyxiate himself.

  “Look, Abe. He screwed up. He’s screwed up before. I have no doubt he will screw up again. He seems terribly accident-prone on this question of talking to the press, but that goes back to the battlefield of Ap Bac in 1963. There’s nothing we can do about it now. John Vann is the one indispensable man I’ve got in all of the four regions. As a matter of fact, if I had three more John Vanns, we could cut the length of the war in half. I’m not about to give up my best guy because he said something to a correspondent.”

  Abrams stared at Komer in disbelief. “You don’t understand. I said fire that man. That is a direct order!” he screeched again.

  Komer decided he would need a large bazooka to stop the tank. He knew that Abrams was frightened of newsmen. Abrams had watched the reporters maul Westmoreland after Tet, and he dreaded the possibility that they might turn on him. He had so far enjoyed a friendly press, because he was new in command; he looked like a different general with his short, rugged figure, and events did not contradict his words, because he took a lesson from Westmoreland’s misfortune and rarely said anything of substance to the newsmen.

  “If you give me a direct order to fire John Vann, I’m going to fire John Vann,” Komer said, “but I want to tell you what’s going to happen. I will not have been in my office and have talked to John more than five minutes when every correspondent in Saigon will be on the phone to me asking why John Vann was fired. And within an hour, half the reporters in the United States will be calling out here. … When they ask me the direct question ‘Was he fired on your recommendation?’ I will say, ‘No, I was ordered to fire him.’ When they ask, ‘Who fired him?’ I will say, ‘It was General Abrams, personally.’ They will ask, ‘Did you, Bob Komer, concur in the firing?’ I’m going to tell them that you did it over my violent protest. The firing of John Vann is going to be such a cause célebre to his friends”—Komer rattled off the name of every reporter he could think of who knew Vann, beginning with Halberstam—”that I am not going to take the rap for it. This is really going to be something, Abe. You’ll be fighting a second war that’s much worse than the one against the NVA.” For maximum effect, Komer spun around and ignored the insult Abrams screamed at him as he cleared the door.

  Abrams never mentioned the matter again. Komer punished Vann by letting him hang on the edge for a full twenty-four hours before calling him back. Then he told Vann he might be able to rescue him from the firing squad, but he wasn’t sure. He wanted to keep Vann contrite as long as he could. Not until years later did he regale Vann with the whole tale.

  The outcome was worth the scare. Vann discovered he had a new president with whom he was in tune. His taste in American politicians had become somewhat catholic after his return to South Vietnam in 1965. He tended to overlook behavior he would otherwise have found objectionable as long as the politician in question backed the war and promoted John Vann and his ideas.

  One of his most enthusiastic supporters was a character named Sam Yorty, whose gift for public relations and appeals to racism were to gain him three four-year terms as mayor of Los Angeles and enough voter tolerance for absenteeism to permit frequent trips to the Far East and other places. He and Vann had met during Yorty’s first visit to the war in November 1965, and they invariably got together on subsequent occasions. Yorty sent a copy of Arnett’s article to his fellow California Republican Richard Nixon, who thanked him for it in a letter dated a week and a half before the 1968 presidential election. By the time Vann received a copy of the letter from Yorty, Richard Nixon was presidentelect of the United States.

  A process of elimination had helped to elect him. Robert Kennedy had been killed in Los Angeles in June by an Arab fanatic. Eugene McCarthy had then been denied the Democratic nomination at the convention in Chicago in August by the party regulars. They conferred it on Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president. Humphrey campaigned with the wound of Vietnam. The wide distrust of Nixon still made it hard for him to defeat the weakest of his potential opponents. He won narrowly by giving the public the impression that he had a secret plan to end the war.

  Nixon admitted in his old age that he never had any such plan. His letter to Yorty alerted Vann to the quite different plan he did have. He intended to do what Vann wanted—purchase time from the American public with U.S. troop withdrawals while continuing the war by using the Vietnamese on the Saigon side to fight it. After saying that he found Vann’s ideas “most interesting” and had referred the clip to “my research and policy staff,” Nixon went on to explain the similarity of his own ideas:

  As you undoubtedly know, it has been my position that the de-Amer
icanization of the war must proceed with all deliberate speed. The [Johnson] Administration appears to have recognized this only as a consequence of the Tet Offensive, and even now does not seem to place the necessary trust in the Vietnamese and their capacity to assume a greater share of the war’s burden.

  Vann immediately composed a six-and-a-half-page letter, addressed to Yorty and written for Nixon. He described his phased reduction plan in detail and made a bid to temporarily join the new administration as a high-level advisor to supervise implementation of the strategy. “The old problems of corruption, nepotism, and nonresponsiveness to rural needs … are as much with us as ever,” Vann said, but he indicated that he had changed his mind about their importance. They did not matter as much because of the altered circumstances brought about by Tet. In one flourish of self-salesmanship he enclosed a copy of Mc-Pherson’s memorandum to Johnson and mentioned how “the memo was read by the President to his Cabinet.” In another he trotted out the glory he had been unable to resist stealing. He put himself once more into Ralph Puckett’s foxhole on the hill in North Korea on the night in November 1950 when the Chinese had attacked. That night, he said, he had first learned the folly of trading American soldiers for Asian ones “in the overpopulated Orient.” Using Vietnamese soldiers to fight would also help calm the American public, because they were far cheaper in dollars, Vann said. Most of the $33 billion annual cost of the war was being consumed by the U.S. forces. “I think we could be eminently successful in South Vietnam at a cost of around five billion a year by 1975,” he wrote.

  Yorty forwarded the letter to the president-elect, but Vann received no inquiries about joining the Nixon administration as a high-level advisor. Exuberance and his search for his star occasionally led him to flights of fancy about his eligibility for exalted Washington office. He dreamed of one day being rewarded for his Vietnam service with the post of secretary of the Army so that he could settle scores with the institution he felt had rejected him. Vann nevertheless did contribute to the formulation of the Nixon strategy through the letter, the Arnett article, and the fact that Henry Kissinger, who was chosen that November to be Nixon’s special assistant for national security affairs, was familiar with his ideas. Vann managed to convey them to Kissinger during an earlier attempt in 1968 to further himself and his war. He had offered to join Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign as its Vietnam expert. His overture became moot with Rockefeller’s defeat by Nixon at the Republican National Convention, but in the meantime Kissinger had received copies of Vann’s letters to Edward Kennedy and others.

  The Nixon strategy was soon to emerge under a catchier term than the de-Americanization one Nixon had used in the letter to Yorty. It was to be called Vietnamization. Kissinger was to pay Vann an exaggerated compliment on the extent of his contribution. “It’s your policy,” he was to say. Despite the lack of an invitation to come to Washington, John Vann was content for the moment. He believed he had at last found a way to win the war that put him at one with the men of power who made victory and advancement possible.

  He became a touchstone of optimism and progress for his fellow seekers of this other way. Komer passed Vann to his successor, William Colby, when Komer decided to accept Johnson’s farewell gift of the ambassadorship to Turkey and left Vietnam in November 1968. Colby had returned to Saigon from CIA headquarters shortly after Tet at Komer’s behest to serve as his deputy. By the time Komer left, Colby held Vann in the same regard. CORDS did seem to be pacifying the South Vietnamese countryside. Under pressure from Johnson, the Saigon regime widened the military manpower pool in 1968 by lowering the draft age with a new General Mobilization Law. The law was to bring an additional 200,000 Vietnamese into uniform by the end of 1969 and to permit a major expansion of the ARVN and, more important for pacification, of the RF and PF.

  Komer and Colby, with Vann encouraging them, also persuaded Thieu to put his authority behind a special program to capture or kill the cadres of the clandestine Viet Cong government, the so-called VCI, for Viet Cong Infrastructure. The program was given the English name Phoenix, a compromise translation for the Vietnamese name Phung Hoang, a mythical bird that could fly anywhere. The rival intelligence and police agencies on the Saigon side were forced to pool their information so that dossiers and blacklists could be drawn up and cadres targeted. The CIA’s assassination squads, the former Counter Terror Teams that were now known as Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), constituted the action arm, with the RF and PF employed too when convenient. Technically, no cadres were marked for assassination, only for arrest, because a prisoner led to others when he or she talked. In practice, the PRUs anticipated resistance in disputed areas and shot first. People taken prisoner were usually men and women denounced and arrested in Saigon-held zones, picked up at checkpoints, or captured in combat and later identified as VCI. Cadres who did not wish to risk the PRUs or jail had the choice any guerrilla had of defecting. Komer set a quota for all of South Vietnam. He wanted 3,000 VCI “neutralized” every month. He launched the first Accelerated Pacification Campaign just before he departed.

  Tet had drained the Viet Cong of the armed strength the guerrillas needed to shield their cadres and to contest the Saigon side for physical control of the hamlets. Vann confirmed this supposition during the final months of 1968 in III Corps and after he was transferred to Can Tho in February 1969 to be chief of pacification for the Mekong Delta (IV Corps). Komer had wanted to shift him there during the summer of 1968, because he felt Vann had set standards and built a CORDS team in III Corps that could be passed on to someone else and because the Viet Cong had traditionally drawn so much of their manpower, tax revenues, and other resources from the Delta. Vann had resisted surrendering the III Corps position and all that it meant to him, sending Wilbur Wilson to Can Tho in his place. He had eventually given in to pressure from Colby.

  He discovered that many of the 2,100 hamlets the HES listed as under Viet Cong ownership in IV Corps in February 1969 (another 2,000 hamlets were listed in varying degrees of Saigon control) were actually held by half a dozen guerrillas. The district companies and regional battalions that had once been on the qui vive to back up the locals and punish intrusions by the Saigon side had more dead heroes than keen-for-battle fighters on their rolls. Moreover, those on the Saigon side sensed the change. The atmosphere was the reverse of the days of panic and intimidation in Hau Nghia in 1965 when Viet Cong commandos could barge into Cu Chi town and chase recalcitrant members of the district intelligence squad down dirt lanes and across rooftops for hours undisturbed. The province and district chiefs were willing to tackle their enemy when prodded to do so by Americans like Vann. His methodical recruiting of more RF and PF to form garrisons and his establishment of hamlet and village administrations through the RD Cadre teams enabled him to quickly penetrate reaches of the Delta that had known no Saigon presence since Diem.

  Saigon officialdom saw the glitter of extortionist gold in the Phoenix Program, blackmailing innocents and taking bribes not to arrest those they should have arrested. In the rush to fill quotas they posthumously elevated lowly guerrillas killed in skirmishes to the status of VC hamlet and village chiefs. The Phoenix bird was a predator nonetheless. After all of these years, the identity of many hamlet, village, and district cadres was common knowledge in their neighborhoods. Thousands died or vanished into Saigon’s prisons. Colby was to state in 1971 that 28,000 VCI had been captured in the whole of South Vietnam under the program, 20,000 had been killed, and another 17,000 had defected.

  The Viet Cong did not disappear, of course, nor did the fighting cease, but the guerrillas were forced into a period of relative quiesence. They managed to retain strongholds south of the Bassac in the U Minh Forest of Ca Mau, in Kien Giang and Chuong Thien provinces, and in Chau Doc along the Cambodian border, and they clung to smaller bases in the northern Delta. To accomplish this, Hanoi had to infiltrate four NVA regiments into IV Corps. A lot of the cadres who survived had to hide in the swamps and jungles or pos
e as Saigon officials. Large sections of the Delta acquired a tranquillity that was spoiled only once in a while by shooting. Bridges were repaired and long-closed roads and canals reopened. The farmers who had stayed on the land or who returned to it thrived. Television was one of the gifts of a technological civilization that the U.S. military had brought in its baggage train, to broadcast tapes of American programs for the troops and to create a Saigon network that could propagandize for the regime. From his helicopter Vann noticed television antennas appearing on the roofs of the bigger farmhouses.

  He acquired friends he would not have made before. “You and I … such unlikely companions,” Joseph Alsop, the Establishment newspaper columnist who was one of them, remarked in a letter to Vann in the fall of 1969. Alsop and Vann had met once before, in the fall of 1967, at Alsop’s request and under duress from Komer. Vann had at first refused to see Alsop, because he looked on him then with the scorn of Halberstam and Vann’s other reporter friends. Komer had said that one could not refuse to talk to Joe Alsop, that Komer would order Vann to do so if Vann persisted. Vann had relented, and Alsop had satisfied his curiosity. “I am not at all sure that we see the Vietnamese situation from the same angle of vision,” Alsop had said afterward in a rare instance of understatement in his note thanking Vann for the meeting. Vann got no mention in Alsop’s column. Two years later, Alsop’s hope in Westmoreland was a memory, but he was as much in search as ever of proof that the United States could achieve victory in Vietnam. With Vann’s new angle of vision, he was the touchstone Alsop needed.