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

by Neil Sheehan

  After Dzu had been in command for a month, Vann pointed out that if he wished to keep the corps, he would have to do more than supervise a charge into Cambodia. He was going to have to make a name for himself quickly by demonstrating that he could get on with the pacification of the Mekong Delta and do so with style. Dzu had met Vann and learned to respect him back in 1967 when Dzu had been the JGS staff officer for pacification. Vann had a scheme to crack one of the remaining Viet Cong strongholds in the northern Delta, a section of Kien Hoa Province, by putting a regiment right into the middle of it. Dzu accepted the scheme without a quibble. Vann had another scheme to break up the Communist bases in the rugged Seven Mountains region in the far-western Delta. It combined B-52 strikes with air-dropped tear gas and night infantry assaults. Dzu bought that idea too.

  Vann and Dzu began spending their evenings laying out the details at the corps commander’s house in Can Tho and the next day in the field executing their plans. Dzu’s wife and eleven children had stayed in Saigon, and he appreciated having something with which to keep busy at night. Aside from the benefits he hoped to derive, he liked working with an American who was direct and informal and who treated him as an individual. Dzu was passing most of his time with Vann rather than with the officer who was officially Dzu’s senior advisor—Dzu’s counterpart and Vann’s superior, Maj. Gen. Hal McCown, the commanding general of the Delta Military Assistance Command. This was precisely what Vann wanted, because there was a motive behind his campaign to capture Ngo Dzu.

  A civilian official had never in American history assumed the position of a general and commanded U.S. military forces in the field in wartime. Komer had been a civilian general, but he had not controlled U.S. Army and Air Force units. Vann intended to become the exception. His game was to have Dzu request that he become Dzu’s senior advisor when McCown’s tour ended in the spring of 1971. Vann then hoped to convince Abrams that as senior advisor to the ARVN commander he should have authority over all American activities in IV Corps, including the U.S. aviation and other support elements assigned to the Delta Military Assistance Command, with the chief of DM AC serving as one of his deputies. Vann’s objective encompassed more than control of the dwindling number of U.S. military men in IV Corps. He planned, through the hold he was acquiring over Dzu, to also exercise behind-the-curtain control of the Saigon forces there. In effect, John Vann would become the commanding general of the Mekong Delta.

  The plan went awry when Thieu shuffled corps commanders in late August 1970. Vann had made Dzu look good enough so that Abrams was after Thieu to let him keep IV Corps, but for reasons of his own, Thieu did not want to leave Dzu in the Delta. He sent him to Pleiku to be the II Corps commander. Now Vann had to contrive a way to get himself transferred to the Central Highlands and the Central Coast provinces of II Corps and take the place of the U.S. Army general who was Dzu’s counterpart and senior advisor there.

  The return to the war in the fall of 1970 of Vann’s friend and admirer Fred Weyand made Vann’s audacious scheme possible and gave him an opportunity for glory he would never have had in the Delta. Weyand had himself twice escaped professional oblivion in the two years since he had completed his tour at II Field Force and gone home in August 1968. Westmoreland, as Army chief of staff, had not rewarded him with the position others like Bunker thought Weyand had earned for saving Saigon at Tet. Rather than giving Weyand one of the mainline Army staff positions that lead to advancement, Westmoreland had designated him chief of the Office of Reserve Components, the active-duty general who oversees the National Guard and the Army Reserve. Lodge had rescued Weyand after he had been appointed Nixon’s negotiator at the peace talks in January 1969. Philip Habib, Lodge’s deputy in Paris and former political counselor in Saigon, had suggested they bring Weyand to Paris to serve in the newly created post of military advisor to the delegation. That job had played out too after Lodge resigned in frustration. Nixon was offering the Vietnamese the same proposition Johnson had, mutual withdrawal, and Lodge got no further than Harriman and Vance did. The death of Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 caused no weakening in the Vietnamese stance. The collective leadership Ho had spent so many years preparing to succeed him carried on as if he were still among them. For public relations purposes, Nixon eventually replaced Lodge with another elder statesman, David Bruce, but began to rely on the secret talks Kissinger started in Paris with Le Due Tho, Hanoi’s chief negotiator. By the summer of 1970, Weyand was back in Washington in another post of no promise. Unlike Westmoreland, Abrams had taken due note of Weyand’s performance at Tet, perhaps in part because it in no way reflected on his own. The two men had also discovered they liked each other during the year when Abrams had been Westmoreland’s deputy. The personalities were complementary, the calm Weyand looking up to and yet not easily thrown off balance by the quick-tempered Abrams. Creighton Abrams needed a new deputy in a hurry in the fall of 1970. To his surprise, Weyand suddenly found himself with orders for Saigon, and Vann had a patron among the kingmakers in his time of need.

  Vann met Dzu secretly in Dalat in early 1971. The Army general who was Dzu’s counterpart in II Corps was scheduled to end his tour in May. Vann told Dzu to simply confirm, if anyone asked, that Dzu wanted Vann to be his new senior advisor. Vann said that he would handle the rest from his end. Dzu could think of nothing better and was delighted to be in on the plot.

  Weyand was not a man to tilt at bureaucratic windmills. That he agreed to act as Vann’s advocate was a measure of how much Vann’s stature had grown and of how much the circumstances of the war had changed. As Weyand presented Vann’s case to Abrams in April 1971, the moment was approaching with disquieting swiftness when the Saigon side would have to stand and hold against a full-scale NVA offensive and American help would be limited to advisors, Army helicopter units, and the fixed-wing airpower of the Air Force and the Navy. Nixon’s withdrawals had reduced the number of U.S. military men in South Vietnam by half, to about 270,000, from the April 1969 peak of 543,500.

  The thrust into Cambodia had bought some time. This widening of the war had lit such a bonfire of antiwar protest, however, that Nixon had had no choice but to accelerate the rate of withdrawal. By April 1972, there were to be fewer than 70,000 Americans in the South, virtually all advisors and aviation and support personnel. The Vietnamese Communists were rebuilding and enlarging their Cambodian border bases. The antiwar protests had forced Nixon to pull the American troops out of Cambodia after a couple of months, and the NVA and the newly created Khmer Rouge guerrillas had chased Lon Nol’s little army into the interior.

  Hanoi was also overcoming the loss of Sihanoukville as a supply port by lengthening the road webwork of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Johnson’s 1968 halt in the bombing of the North had not affected raids on the southeast Laos corridor where the Trail ran, and air attacks on it had intensified during 1969 and 1970. The Air Force had raised the “truck kill” in the corridor by combining a system of sensors McNamara had created with C-119 Stinger and C-130 Spectre gunships carrying 40mm Bofors cannons and extremely rapid-fire 20mm Vulcan guns that spewed out 2,500 rounds a minute. The planes still could not get enough trucks to make a difference. In the hope of postponing the showdown for at least two more years, Abrams sent the ARVN into Laos along Route 9 from Khe Sanh in February 1971 to seize the road center at Tchepone and sever the Trail. The result was ominous, a debacle in which more than 3,000 Saigon soldiers died. The showdown could not be put off much longer.

  All of these circumstances were auspicious for Vann. He would not be ruffling cocky major generals who had just got a division and were playing for a third star. The number of Americans in II Corps had been drawn down to the point where the U.S. Field Force headquarters for the region was being reduced to a military assistance command under a two-star general. Abrams’s opinion of Vann had sufficiently altered and he was open-minded enough to listen when Weyand spoke up for his friend, but the question arose of how military men would react to taking orders from a reneg
ade lieutenant colonel turned civilian. Weyand remembered that the question had arisen in III Corps in 1967 when CORDS was established and the military and civilian advisors were merged. He had noticed then that the doubt disappeared as soon as Vann took charge as Dep/CORDS. The good officers responded to his leadership. Weyand assured Abrams that the same thing would happen in II Corps.

  The most important argument Weyand could make for Vann was his influence over Dzu and his unparalleled experience with the Saigon forces. Abrams and others at the top believed the forthcoming NVA offensive would have two focal points. The first would be the natural one of the DMZ region. The second would be the Central Highlands where Dzu now commanded, because the Highlands were far up the Communist supply network at the original terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Everything possible had to be done to pacify II Corps and ready the ARVN units there for the big battle. What American had better prepared himself for this task than John Vann?

  On May 15, 1971, the renegade lieutenant colonel left Can Tho to become Creighton Abrams’s general over the mountains of the Highlands and the old Viet Minh redoubts in the rice deltas of the Central Coast. In keeping with his new dignity he added a tie to the short-sleeved sport shirt and slacks that were his working uniform. He could not literally be called a general, even though he held a major general’s place and had two metaphorical stars on his shoulders, and so he was called director. The Second Regional Assistance Command (SRAC) he was to direct was redesignated Second Regional Assistance Group (SRAG). The change was necessary to avoid controversy and to get around the legal question of whether a civilian official can exercise command. Only a military man can wield court-martial authority, the legal power to enforce orders. For the same reasons, Vann was given a “deputy for military functions” who bore the title of Commanding General U.S. Army Forces Military Region 2. (Military Region 2 was the alternate designation for II Corps.) Vann initially hoped to acquire a major general as a deputy. He could then have awarded himself a third star. He had to settle for a brigadier.

  However many stars Vann possessed, he was the boss at last. He had a letter of instruction from Abrams saying that he was. The language was a bit vague, once more for bureaucratic reasons, but John Vann would see that it was interpreted his way.

  The civilian general was to be tested before he had long to enjoy his stars. When he went home for Christmas in mid-December 1971, he arranged with Weyand and George Jacobson, who had come into his own reward by succeeding Colby as head of CORDS, to send him an alert message in January so that he would have an excuse to cut short his leave. He expected the NVA to attack in February, and he wanted to be ready.

  For the first time in his six years of coming home to visit he did not sleep at the house in Littleton. He ate his meals there with Mary Jane and the family and naturally went there for the Christmas celebration, but he slept at the nearby home of Mary Allen and Doris Moreland, Mary Jane’s mother and sister, who were both widows by this time and had moved to Littleton some years before.

  Vann and Mary Jane had been divorced, at her request, in October 1971. Logically there was no more reason for Mary Jane to want to divorce John Vann in 1971 than there had been in most other years of their quarter century of marriage. He had never ceased to support her and the children, if always stingily, and her prospects of remarriage were not good. She had also known about his Vietnamese daughter since 1968, when he had, probably deliberately, left a letter from Annie which mentioned the child at the Littleton house. Mary Jane’s response had been to offer to adopt the little girl if he would give up the war and return. The accumulated weight of anger and frustration and a feeling that divorce was the only way she could lash out at him had finally driven her to demand one. He had opposed the divorce at first, because the form of a marriage he had with Mary Jane suited him so well. He had then decided he would be better off with his legal freedom from her in exchange for his share of the house, modest alimony, and child-support payments for Tommy, seventeen, and Peter, sixteen, who were still living at home.

  He remained a man who wanted a wife. He was planning to marry Annie. He did not, however, intend to give up Lee. She was shamed and disappointed when he told her of his new marriage plans and of the existence of the child. He was gradually taming her to accept second place as a permanent mistress. He continued to succeed in keeping Annie ignorant of Lee.

  His relationship with Dan Ellsberg had become increasingly complicated. He had been enraged at Ellsberg after the publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971, cursing him to mutual acquaintances and shouting that Ellsberg, who was being prosecuted by the Nixon administration for conspiracy, theft, and a violation of the espionage statute, ought to be thrown into jail for treason. Vann was not angry at Ellsberg’s wholesale breach of security regulations. He was incensed at the assault Ellsberg was attempting on his war. Yet he did not want to forsake the friendship. “Can’t say I’m in agreement with your way of making your point—but you sure as hell created a stir,” he wrote Ellsberg that fall. Six different investigators from four agencies had come to his headquarters in Pleiku to question him, he said, and he had seen to it that none of them “made his trip worthwhile.” He was lying. He apparently cooperated with the investigators. He also passed tips to Kissinger on how the administration ought to proceed against Ellsberg.

  On his way home to Littleton for this Christmas of 1971, he landed in Los Angeles so that he could see his brother Gene, who was living in nearby Redlands, California. He called Ellsberg on the phone from Gene’s house, and they had a long talk. Ellsberg described for Vann in confidence the defense strategy his lawyers had developed for Ellsberg’s forthcoming trial in Los Angeles. Later in this holiday leave, when Vann flew from Colorado to Washington for his usual round of calls, he stopped at the Pentagon office of J. Fred Buzhardt, then the general counsel of the Defense Department and subsequently one of Nixon’s lawyers in the Watergate affair. Buzhardt was gathering information for the prosecution of Ellsberg. Vann spent an hour and a half passing along Ellsberg’s defense strategy and suggesting how the administration might defeat it.

  Vann did not intend the game to end as the betrayal of a friend. After the message from Weyand and Jacobson came in January and Vann was on his way back to South Vietnam and to battle, he stopped in San Francisco. He and Ellsberg met there for several hours to talk about the war and Ellsberg’s trial. Ellsberg asked Vann to testify for him, because Vann would carry such credibility with a jury. “I’ll say anything you want,” Vann replied. The promise was one he undoubtedly meant to keep, but he would not have known what he was going to say until just before he sat down in the witness chair.

  John Vann planned to defeat his enemy as he had seen Walton Walker defeat the North Koreans in the Pusan Perimeter. He would not throw away infantry as Westmoreland had done in sending men against fortified positions in the wilderness. The roles had been reversed. To win the war, the Vietnamese Communists had to come to him, and when they advanced out of the mountains, he would break them on his strong-points. The apparent objective of the NVA offensive in II Corps was Kontum, a garrison and trading center with a population of about 25,000, the capital of the province of the same name and the northernmost town of substance in the Highlands. Kontum was guarded to the north by the regimental base at Tan Canh on a plateau near the district headquarters of Dak To twenty-five miles up the ascending asphalt ribbon of Route 14. Just below Tan Canh and to the west of it, a series of ridgelines ran in a north-south direction, parallel to Route 14 and back down toward Kontum. These were known collectively as Rocket Ridge because they had been the recipients over the years of so many of the NVA’s 122mm rockets. The U.S. Army had built a string of fortified artillery positions, called fire support bases or fire bases for short, down Rocket Ridge to shield the road and the northwest approaches to Kontum and had bequeathed these to the ARVN. Before the Vietnamese Communists could attack Kontum, they first had to overrun Tan Canh or crack the fire-base line along Rocket Rid
ge.

  Hanoi gathered about 35,000 men for the showdown under one of its best generals, Hoang Minh Thao, a protégé of Giap’s who was destined to become chief of staff of the Vietnamese Army. Thao had commanded the B-3 Front, the NVA corps for the Highlands, since 1966. He was given two regular infantry divisions, one of which had just infiltrated from the North at the turn of the year, and he had the equivalent of a third infantry division in independent regiments. The infantry were assisted by other regiments of sappers and combat engineers and backed by artillery regiments equipped with captured American 105mm guns, Soviet-model 130mm guns, 120mm mortars, the formidable rockets, and an array of antiaircraft weapons.

  Thao marshaled his troops in the triborder area beyond Tan Canh and Rocket Ridge where Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam meet. The region was another of those primeval fastnesses of the Annamites that the NVA had transformed into a bastion they called Base Area 609. It was a place of dread for the Saigon soldiers, as it had become for their American predecessors. On Hill 875 and neighboring precipitous ridges in Base Area 609, 287 men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 4th Infantry Division had died and more than 1,000 had been wounded in a gruesome border battle in November 1967 while Westmoreland was proclaiming victory in Washington. The Plei Trap Valley farther south had been the scene of so many ambushes that only an intrepid few from the Special Forces and the long-range patrols of the ARVN Airborne would venture there anymore.

  When the offensive did not begin in February, Vann mistakenly thought he might have forestalled it with dozens of B-52 strikes he was laying along the approach routes and by incessant bombardment with tactical jets. The Hanoi leadership wanted to coordinate the attacks in II Corps with the focal points of the offensive in other corps regions, and the preparations for all required time.