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

by Neil Sheehan

  The NVA made their preparations boldly on this occasion. Sound travels far in the mountains at night, and light can be seen a long way off. The advisors on the fire bases could hear the bulldozers of the NVA engineers widening the old French tracks and cutting new roads, and they could see the headlights of the trucks hauling food and ammunition and towing artillery into position. The 2nd NVA Division closed on Tan Canh from the northwest while the 320th Division maneuvered from the west against Rocket Ridge, the Communist infantry sheltering as they came in the great massif of Chu Mom Ray (Mom Ray Mountain) that the American soldiers had named, not with affection, Big Mama.

  On March 30, 1972, in the general assault the Americans called the Easter 1972 Offensive because Easter Sunday came three days later, NVA troops led by tanks surged out of the Demilitarized Zone against Camp Carroll and the other positions the Marines had won in I Corps and turned over to the ARVN there. By that time several of the fire bases in Vann’s area along Rocket Ridge were under siege. A few days later, there was an assault where no one expected an attack. Vann’s old acquaintances in III Corps, the 5th and 9th VC divisions and the 7th NVA, appeared out of Cambodia, overran the district headquarters of Loc Ninh in the rubber-plantation country at the top of Route 13, one of the main roads to Saigon, and moved down on the province town of An Loc sixty miles from the South Vietnamese capital. They too were led by tanks.

  Vann’s plan worked to perfection in the beginning. Hoang Minh Thao tried to unhinge the Rocket Ridge line by knocking out the strongest position near the bottom of it, Fire Base Delta, manned by a battalion of ARVN paratroops from one of two airborne brigades Dzu had obtained from the Joint General Staff as reinforcements. Thao encountered the lieutenant who had kept the riflemen in the fight on the lonely hilltops beyond Masan, Korea, in September 1950. “Rogue’s Gallery” (Vann’s radio call sign in II Corps) happened to arrive over Delta at the break of dawn on April 3, 1972, with a flight of three slick-ship Hueys and two Cobra gunship helicopters. The NVA attackers had just overwhelmed the paratroops in the northern part of the base and were battling their way down trench lines to conquer the rest of it. The Cobra was a slimmed-down advance on the Huey, roughly twice as fast and built to carry firepower. Pods on stubby wings held dozens of rockets, an extremely rapid-fire 7.62mm “Minigun” shot streams of bullets, and an automatic launcher hurled 40mm grenades. Vann had come to rescue the crew of a Chinook that had been shot down while resupplying Delta four days earlier. In an instant he turned rescue of crew into rescue of fire base.

  He sent the Cobras slashing into the follow-on groups of Communist infantry who were running through the wire to help their comrades already inside. He took charge of the artillery at the brigade command post back at Vo Dinh on Route 14, of the Stinger and Spectre fixed-wing gunships with the Bofors cannons and Vulcan guns, and of the fighter-bombers arriving from the carriers off the coast and from the Air Force squadrons that had been shifted to fields in Thailand. While the Saigon paratroops counterattacked, Vann destroyed every attempt by the NVA to reinforce the couple of hundred assault troops who had fought their way inside.

  Lt. Huynh Van Cai, Vann’s ARVN aide who was flying with him, had seen combat. He had been an infantry platoon leader with the regiment at Tan Canh for eight months. He had never seen a battle from a helicopter before. He was fascinated by the scene below of men rushing forward and being tossed into the air by bombs and shells, and falling as the bullets cut them down.

  The NVA inside Delta were wiped out by the afternoon, but the base was still going to have to be abandoned soon for lack of ammunition, water, and medical supplies. Vann announced that he personally would resupply it. The paratroop battalion commander, despite his need, radioed that Vann would be killed. The NVA had sited 12.7mm and electrically rotated 14.5mm antiaircraft machine guns around Delta and had a flak cannon whose shells burst in the air with a black puff. That Vann’s helicopter had not been shot down while dancing high above the base since dawn to direct the artillery and air strikes was already a sufficient miracle for the day. The airborne brigade commander at Vo Dinh and his advisor, Maj. Peter Kama, the tall Hawaiian who had been one of Vann’s captains at My Tho, told him he was being foolhardy. “I’m experienced at this,” Vann said.

  The model helicopter Vann now used was the latest Scout type the Bell Aircraft Corporation had produced for the Army, officially designated the OH-58 Kiowa and commonly known as the Ranger from its commercial name, JetRanger. The Ranger was a sleek little craft with a swept-back fuselage and a nose shaped like the snout of a shark, the perfect helicopter for Vann because it combined the speed of a Huey with the agility of a small machine. There were two seats in front for pilot and copilot and a space behind, with separate side doors, for cargo or two passengers. Vann always rode in the copilot’s seat so that he could fly when he wanted or take the controls if the pilot was hit. The pilot flying him that day was a brave Cajun from Louisiana, Chief Warrant Officer Paul Arcement. Vann also had Cai to help with the resupply. Vann had decided when he came to II Corps that an ARVN aide who spoke English would be more appropriate than a U.S. Army aide and he could then dispense with an interpreter. Dzu had selected Cai, the son of a shopkeeper in Due Hoa in Hau Nghia. The post-Tet mobilization had caught him because he had flunked out of the Saigon College of Pharmacy in grief over the death of his mother and he was too poor to buy false exemption papers. Cai was honest, without fear, and devoted to Vann. Where Vann went, he went too.

  Vann supervised the loading of the supplies into the Ranger at the airborne brigade command post at Vo Dinh. He had noted the positions of the NVA machine guns earlier in the day. He showed Arcement a path to take in and out across the treetops that would present the most elusive target. As soon as the Ranger flashed over the barbed wire of the perimeter, Vann and Cai pitched out the cases of M-16 ammunition, grenades, claymore mines, flares, canisters of water, and medical supplies for the scores of wounded paratroopers. Then Arcement tossed the helicopter into a steep climbing turn and twisted away back over the trees to Vo Dinh for another load.

  When the duty officers in the II Corps Tactical Operations Center down at Pleiku figured out what was going on, they alerted Dzu and Vann’s staff. The underground bunker next to the headquarters building on the hill above the town filled with officers listening to the voices over the radio as the little Ranger loaded again and again at Vo Dinh and ran the gauntlet of machine guns to the fire base, six times before dark. “No Vietnamese general would do that,” Dzu said. “Not even a U.S. general would do that.” Fire Base Delta had enough sustenance to hold out through the night, and the next day relieving airborne battalions broke the siege.

  Vann’s continuing ability to manage Dzu was a major source of his confidence that he would defeat the NVA. He had put Dzu in unique debt to him the previous summer by rescuing Dzu from an accusation of heroin trafficking. The ARVN general whom Dzu had replaced had sought revenge for losing his job by concocting a dossier purporting to prove that Dzu was a narcotics smuggler. He palmed the dossier off on a visiting American congressman, who subsequently announced at a congressional hearing in Washington that Ngo Dzu was one of the heroin lords of South Vietnam. The accusation came at a time when narcotics peddling to American soldiers had burst into a notorious scandal and Thieu was being squeezed by Bunker to take some action. He decided Dzu would make a fine goat to sacrifice to the American public and its politicians and was going to relieve and disgrace him.

  John Vann had not been about to part with his investment. Dzu also swore to him that dope was not among his sources of graft. Vann believed him. As Vann explained to George Jacobson, narcotics was such a jealously guarded racket that the senior generals and their Chinese businessmen partners would never have let anyone as far down the ladder as Dzu chisel in on the profits. Vann saved Dzu by organizing a press campaign for him to refute the charges. He drafted a statement for Dzu to issue and coached him on how to answer questions. He set up a televised press
conference, arranged subsequent interviews to keep up the momentum, and made statements on Dzu’s behalf himself. Dzu was astounded at Vann’s ability to assemble reporters and amazed that any American would protect him like this. “He acted as if he was my brother,” Dzu said. His feeling of obligation to Vann tended to reinforce his original belief that he could promote himself through Vann’s talents. Dzu did not always do what Vann wanted, but he did so enough of the time that members of Dzu’s staff who did not like him mocked him as “the slave of John Paul Vann.”

  Vann’s victory at Fire Base Delta raised his confidence to a sense of near infallibility. He dictated a four-and-a-half-page “Memorandum For: My Friends” to Frenchy Zois and had her make copies and mail them to Sir Robert Thompson and Joe Alsop, to other important men in Washington like Melvin Laird, and to friends elsewhere. He prophesied disaster for the NVA on all fronts in South Vietnam, not just on his own, and said that by the time the offensive was over the position of the Vietnamese Communists would be weakened in Laos and Cambodia too. In his December 1969 meeting with Nixon he had been prudent enough to warn that the Saigon side might “have to give up some territory and some population” in the face of an all-out offensive. He eschewed caution now, publicly committing himself not to give ground. The struggle on his front in II Corps was “going to be a difficult fight and a lot of soldiers are yet to die,” he said, but “we expect to hold our major positions, to include Dak To District… and Tan Canh.” The Saigon side would also retain “the hard-won pacification gains in Binh Dinh” on the Central Coast, where Vann had concentrated since the summer of 1971 on liquidating the Viet Cong and firming the regime’s hold over the unruly northern districts. “I stand ready to be challenged on the foregoing analysis by the events that take place subsequent to this date,” he said in conclusion. His memorandum was dated April 12, 1972. The challenge had begun three days before.

  The trouble started in that other battleground of II Corps over on the Central Coast, in those old Viet Minh strongholds in the narrow rice deltas of northern Binh Dinh that Vann boasted of pacifying in his memorandum. The place seemed insignificant, and Vann thought he had the situation under control. The spot was a former fire support base of the Air Cav called Landing Zone Pony near the western end of the serpentine Hoai An Valley that coils back into the mountains about forty miles northwest of Qui Nhon. Pony was garrisoned by a battalion of RF. The base came under bombardment and ground assault on April 9 and fell the next day. The attackers, not yet fully identified by Vann, contradicted his belief that North Vietnamese troops would find themselves as alien in South Vietnam as American soldiers had been. They were a regiment of the 3rd NVA or “Yellow Star” Division, the same amalgam of NVA infantry and Viet Cong regulars that Hal Moore’s 3rd Brigade of the Air Cav had fought in 1966 on this same battleground. The Yellow Star Division was the real phoenix of Binh Dinh, destroyed and risen more times than the intelligence officers on the Saigon and U.S. side would have wanted to know.

  First one and then two battalions of the 40th ARVN Regiment from Landing Zone English near Bong Son town to the north, reinforced by a company of M-113s, were sent down to recapture Pony and prevent the NVA from advancing up the valley to Hoai An District headquarters. Vann flew to Hoai An on April 11 and spent the night in the district compound. In January he had managed to have an acquaintance of many years, Col. Nguyen Van Chuc, an eccentric ARVN engineer who practiced yoga and went about his work with the vigor of an ambitious American, installed as province chief of Binh Dinh. Chuc flew up from Qui Nhon, the province capital. Vann liked the 40th Regiment commander, Col. Tran Hieu Due, who set up a command post in the district compound to direct the counterattack. Due had been an enthusiastic participant in the pacification campaign and seemed a good organizer. General Dzu had just obtained a promotion for him in March at Vann’s urging. There were briefings that night and a planning session. Vann encouraged the ARVN officers and their American advisors and left the next morning feeling good.

  Due would not fight. He made no attempt to regain Pony or to hold any of the high ground farther down the valley. Instead, he let his battalions keep falling back toward the district center. His advisor, Lt. Col. David Schorr, could put no spine into him. Chuc, who had been given control over all ARVN and territorial troops in the province at Vann’s insistence on unity of command, could do nothing with Due either. Vann returned to Hoai An twice, landing under mortar fire, each time to no avail. There were twenty-nine PF platoons in the district. They were deserting.

  Nor was there tranquillity in other parts of Binh Dinh. This province in which pacification had supposedly progressed so far suddenly became hostile. Two and possibly three battalions of NVA sappers moved down from Quang Ngai and raised havoc under the guidance of the local Viet Cong. The northernmost district headquarters of Tarn Quan was struck. Bridges were blown up hither and yon, two right outside Qui Nhon, and outposts were attacked and harassed everywhere. RF and PF began to desert in other districts besides Hoai An.

  On April 18, a week after the encouraging council of war, Due had no more high ground to give away to the NVA. He announced that night that he was abandoning Hoai An. “Friendly troops may bug out at any time. Request guidance. If friendlies bug out before guidance arrives, will bug out with them,” Maj. Gary Hacker, the acting district advisor (he was filling in for another officer on leave), radioed to Qui Nhon. During the day, Due had let the Communist soldiery have the district police station on a hill about 500 yards from the hill where the headquarters compound was located. With the compound under full observation, the NVA were belting it in leisurely fashion with mortars and recoilless rifles. The place stank of dead ARVN soldiers no one would bury.

  When every attempt to persuade Due to stay failed, Vann had Dzu authorize a withdrawal for noon on April 19. He preferred to have Due leave in organized fashion rather than bolt. The NVA were interdicting the secondary road from the district center back to Route 1, but not enough to prevent a breakout. The plan was to have the armored personnel carriers lead the column, with the trucks and jeeps and marching infantry behind. There were about forty wounded from the two battalions and the district forces. They were to be carried out in the M-113s. A pair of Cobra gunships would orbit the column, strafing and rocketing, while a command-and-control Huey would hover higher overhead to guide protective artillery and fighter-bomber strikes.

  Vann could not come down from the Highlands to supervise the evacuation, because he was starting to have trouble with Rocket Ridge. The NVA had switched from attempting to unhinge the fire-base line to cracking the middle of it and had partially succeeded. They had conquered a position called Fire Base Charlie by alternating artillery barrages with infantry assaults until the ARVN paratroops had run so low on ammunition they had been forced to break out, leaving their seriously wounded behind in the bunkers as they went. Of the 471 ARVN officers and men in the defending airborne battalion, only about half got back to Vo Dinh, and half of these were walking wounded. Vann explained the Hoai An withdrawal plan over the radio on the morning of the 19th to Lt. Col. Jack Anderson, who was to fly the command and control Huey.

  About half an hour before the noon departure time, a couple of mortar rounds exploded near the convoy assembly point below the district compound. Most of the wounded had still not been loaded into the armored personnel carriers. Due jumped into the nearest APC with his staff and took off up the road. The rest of the M-113s and trucks and jeeps raced after him. The district chief, an ARVN major, raced off in his jeep too after kicking his deputy for administration out of the vehicle to make room for his refrigerator. Some NVA were waiting in ambush in a nearby hamlet, but Due’s M-113 and the district chiefs jeep were among the vehicles that crashed through.

  Colonel Schorr could have left with Due, but he did not want to abandon Major Hacker and Lt. Thomas Eisenhower, the assistant district advisor, who had been conscientiously burning their classified documents and destroying the radio and other equipment
up at the compound. He waited for them to run down the hill. They fled east over the paddy dikes toward Route 1. All around them, ARVN soldiers were reverting to instant peasants, tossing away M-16 rifles and helmets and combat web gear and stripping off boots and uniforms to run across the paddies in bare feet and undershorts. The advisors had not gone far when Schorr fell with a bullet in the leg from the NVA who were chasing them. While Eisenhower gave him first aid, Hacker and two Kit Carson Scouts, Viet Cong defectors who had originally been hired as mercenaries by the U.S. Army and were now serving as bodyguards for the advisors, tried to fend off their pursuers. With so many ARVN undressed, Hacker had difficulty telling friend from foe. He began shooting at any Vietnamese approaching him with a weapon who was not wearing an ARVN uniform. Some of the NVA soldiers started to crawl forward while their companions laid down covering fire.

  Colonel Anderson in the command-and-control Huey had been listening to what was happening on the ground; as he flew toward Hoai An up a neighboring valley, he had tuned his radio to the frequency of the portable radio Schorr was carrying. The Cobra gunships would not arrive until noon, too late for the advisors. If Anderson attempted a rescue and was shot down, he and his copilot and crew would also be killed or captured.

  The aviation units were the sole combat element of the U.S. Army that did not come apart under the stress of the war in Vietnam. Nearly 6,000 helicopter pilots and crew members perished, but the Army airmen never cracked. Whether it was the oneness of man and acrobatic flying machine, whether it was the equally shared risk of officer pilot and enlisted crew member, whatever the reason, the men of the helicopters kept their discipline and their spirit. As the French parachutists became the paladins of that earlier war, so the U.S. Army aviators became the dark knights of this one. Almost all career aviators served two tours in Vietnam. Anderson was on his second. He was a tall, big-boned Westerner, the commanding officer of the 7th Squadron of the 17th (Air) Cavalry, and his radio call sign befitted him: it was Ruthless Six. He raised Schorr on the radio and asked for the advisors’ position. He told his copilot and gunners over the intercom that they were going down.