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

by Neil Sheehan

  Joe Pizzi, Vann’s chief of staff, saw the incipient panic and realized that Pleiku would disappear in an instant should Kontum go. The population of the town shrank to about a quarter of its pre-offensive level as the ARVN officers and everyone else who could shipped their families and belongings to Saigon or to Nhatrang or another of the towns farther down the coast. A seat on a regular Air Vietnam flight acquired a bribery premium equivalent to several hundred dollars. The VNAF helicopters and transport planes were constantly unavailable for military tasks because the pilots and crews were busy ferrying people and goods to the coast for lesser bribes.

  Pizzi came to the office one morning and discovered that so many of the VNAF air traffic controllers had deserted it was going to be difficult to continue manning the tower at the main Pleiku airfield. He ordered a secret plan drawn up to evacuate all Americans from Pleiku by helicopter and by C-130 from the airstrip at Camp Hollo way, the U.S. Army helicopter base on the other side of town. Vann accepted the plan because he had no choice. Pizzi immediately began to reduce the number of men who would need to be evacuated by transferring to Nhatrang any American whose presence was not absolutely required in Pleiku.

  Vann had Cai smuggle out most of his clothes and other belongings on administrative flights to Nhatrang. He even sent away a wooden footlocker, painted brown, with a padlock on it to which Vann had the only key. He called the footlocker “The Box.” He had never parted with it before. It held albums with photographs of him and his sister and brothers in Norfolk, of Johnny Vann doing a backflip in a sand pile at Ferrum, of himself as an Air Corps cadet and a second lieutenant navigating a B-29 called “Lost Weekend,” of Mary Jane in Rochester, of her and the children in Japan and Germany. The footlocker held his Army officer’s record, his medals and his awards, and the inscribed silver cigarette box Halberstam and I and the other reporters had given him in 1963 for moral heroism and professional integrity, and it held photographs of himself with some of his sexual partners.

  “If anything ever happens to me, watch out for that box,” he said with a smile.

  “What’s in the box?” a subordinate asked who did not know him well.

  “I’m in the box,” Vann said.

  Vann’s Vietnamese enemy delayed the attack on Kontum for twenty days after the fall of Tan Canh, giving him the time he needed. Armies, like human beings, are not capable of what is not in them. The entire experience of the NVA militated against pursuit and demanded elaborate planning and positioning for each major step of a campaign. Vann needed every day.

  Dzu, his instrument, broke in his hands as Cao had ten years earlier. Worse, Dzu schemed against him, secretly plotting to abandon the Highlands. Thieu summoned Dzu to Saigon two days after the Tan Canh debacle and ordered him to hold Kontum at all costs. That evening, after Thieu had released him from the meeting at the palace, Dzu showed up at the home in Cholon of Cao Van Vien, the chief of the Joint General Staff. He was extremely agitated. Kontum and Pleiku were indefensible, Dzu said. The sole alternative left was to abandon both towns and Ban Me Thuot farther south in the mountains and pull all of the Saigon forces down to the coast. Dzu wanted Vien to help him persuade Thieu of the wisdom of wholesale retreat. Forsaking the Highlands was a new American strategy, he said.

  Vien said no one had mentioned it to him. He instructed Dzu to return to Pleiku and find a way to defend Kontum. Dzu did not tell Vann of his conversation with Vien. He started telephoning Thieu and Vien late at night, apparently when his nerves were most jangled and he could not sleep, pleading for permission to withdraw. Thieu wanted to fire him right away, but Vien could not find another ARVN general to accept his place. He called nearly half a dozen two- and three-star generals without commands and, one after another, offered them II Corps. Some said their astrologers had looked at their horoscopes and advised that this was an inauspicious year to take up a new command. Others said they were in poor health. None admitted that they believed the situation in the Highlands was beyond recall.

  In the meantime, Dzu concocted a scheme with the Kontum province chief and several of the senior ARVN officers in the town to precipitate a retreat, and he almost succeeded at it, because Vann was confused and downcast himself in the immediate aftermath of Tan Canh. Then he caught on to the gambit and stopped Dzu.

  Vann’s rage renewed his strength. During one of his arguments with Dan Ellsberg after Tet he had acknowledged that if the regime did not change as the United States reduced its military forces in Vietnam “we [could] get ourselves into a damn tenuous situation where we are kind of surrounded and fighting for our lives.” John Vann was surrounded and fighting for his life. The Vietnamese Communists were threatening everything that mattered to him. He had not won his stars to see them become the tarnished stars of a defeated general. He had not prophesied victory to important men to have his prophecies exposed as vainglorious boasting. A cornered man is dangerous; John Vann cornered was dangerous indeed.

  Weyand told him he could have any brigadier general he wanted as his deputy to replace George Wear, who had been evacuated. Vann asked Weyand to send Brig. Gen. John Hill, Jr., who was finishing a second tour in Vietnam by closing down the depot at Cam Ranh Bay for lack of something better to do. Hill would fight, Vann said. He and Vann had been contemporaries in the Army. They had met while instructors at ROTC summer camp not long after Korea, where Hill had also served in the Pusan Perimeter and in North Korea as a company commander with the 1st Cavalry Division. A short, slightly stooped man, John Hill was intelligent and resourceful, and liked to fight. He had spent most of his career in mechanized infantry before being selected for helicopter flight school and promotion to brigadier. Vann left Hill free to do what Hill excelled at—organizing the aviation assets and major firepower of a battlefield. Every day, all day, a command-and-control Huey called “the Air Boss ship” began flying over the Kontum area to coordinate Cobras and fighter-bombers on strikes, scout helicopters seeking NVA assembly points for B-52 targeting, C-130’s and Chinooks hauling in supplies, artillery registering patterns of defensive fire. Hill’s objective was to see that everything meshed and no effort was wasted. The 7th Air Force colonel on Vann’s staff wanted to stay in his office in Pleiku. Hill fired him and got a man who would keep track of jets over Kontum.

  In Hau Nghia in 1965 Vann had cursed the leaders of the United States for refusing “to take over the command of this operation lock, stock, and barrel.” Vann now did precisely that. He abandoned pretense of who was running II Corps and overrode Dzu. He had a Vietnamese officer who was willing to try to defend Kontum. The man was Ly Tong Ba, the commander of the M-113 company at Ap Bac and the object of so much of Vann’s wrath on that momentous day. They had been forced to work together during later years of the 1960s when Ba had serve as province chief of Binh Duong in III Corps. Vann had decided that while Ba was hardly a model of combativeness, he was not a crook and was a better soldier than most ARVN officers. Their relationship was a measure of how far Vann had worked himself into the Saigon system, for Ba had no Vietnamese patron. Other ARVN officers referred to him as “Mr. Vann’s man.” At the end of January 1972, Vann had maneuvered Ba, by this time a full colonel, into command of the 23rd ARVN Division at Ban Me Thuot, responsible for the defense of the southern Highlands. One of its regiments had been shifted north to garrison Kontum in April after the JGS had taken away the second airborne brigade. Vann initially hesitated to risk all of the only remaining division he had in II Corps. He wanted Ba to defend Kontum with a polyglot force consisting of this regiment, what was left of the first airborne brigade, understrength and exhausted from the Rocket Ridge battle, and a Ranger group. The plan didn’t make sense, Ba argued. He needed unity to resist. Vann let the airborne and the Rangers go, stripped the southern Highlands of troops, and flew the other two regiments of the 23rd ARVN Division into Kontum.

  Vann sent for an advisor whom Ba trusted—Col. R. M. Rhotenberry, a homely, husky Texan. The initials didn’t stand for anything. In the
Texas of Rhotenberry’s birth, some people just gave their children initials. “Rhot” and Vann had first met in the spring of 1962 when they had shared a room in a BOQ in Cholon while both were assigned to Dan Porter’s staff at the old III Corps headquarters. Rhotenberry had returned to Vietnam so regularly—four tours as an advisor, one with Ba in Binh Duong, half a tour to command a battalion of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division Vann had obtained for him through Fred Weyand—that Cao Van Vien called him “Rhotenberry, the soldier of fortune.”

  A twin-engine Beechcraft was standing by to fly Rhotenberry to Pleiku when he walked down the gangway of an airliner at Tan Son Nhut on the morning of May 14, 1972. The first assault on Kontum had already begun at 5:30 A.M. Vann had airlifted Ba’s third regiment into the town only two days before. He was in his Ranger over the battlefield, and so Rhotenberry was able to sleep for a couple of hours at Pleiku before Master Sgt. Edward Black, a Filipino-American NCO who was Vann’s administrative assistant, woke him to say that Vann was returning to pick him up and take him to the command post Ba had established in the bunker of a former Special Forces compound on the west side of Kontum.

  With the last major unit in II Corps committed, the stakes could not have been higher, and hardly anyone on the Saigon side and few among the American military thought that Kontum would hold. In expectation of new rulers, Qui Nhon was down to half its normal population. Ba’s own deputy went AWOL for the first twenty-four hours of the battle, hiding out in Kontum in the hope of escaping. Vann was conscious of these stakes, but they were not uppermost in his mind. “My credibility is at stake, Rhot,” he said in the helicopter. “The troop disposition at Tan Canh was mine. I said we could defend there … and they didn’t hold. Now my career is at stake because I’ve said we can defend Kontum. If you don’t hold it, I no longer have any credibility or career.”

  The Vietnamese Communist soldiery attacked with an ardor undiminished by the years, but what they faced by the time they assaulted was more than human will could overcome. Kontum is in the valley of the Bla River where it flows west to meet the Poko coming down from Tan Canh and Dak To. To seize Kontum once a defense had been organized, the NVA had to mass in the hills on the edges of the valley and in the valley itself and attack along routes that were under daily observation by the scout helicopters of the air cavalry. Radio intercepts and direction-finding helped follow their movements too.

  The circumstances rendered the NVA vulnerable to the B-52S at a moment in the war when experience and technology had perfected the employment of the bombers. The Strategic Air Command had learned during the siege of Khe Sanh that three B-52S provided enough destructive effect to satisfy most ground commanders. SAC now launched the planes in flights of three rather than the original six in order to double the number of Arc Lights. A new radar system named Combat Skyspot made it possible to place the strikes within five-eighths of a mile of friendly positions. (Rhotenberry and Ba did not hesitate to call a strike within 700 yards.) The location of the “box,” the target zone that was five-eighths of a mile wide by approximately two miles long, could be changed up to three hours before the bombs were scheduled to fall. Rhotenberry kept a list of every B-52 strike allotted to the battle with the drop time and change time marked in order to switch the box to a new location and catch the NVA in it when an assault was imminent or underway against a sector of the perimeter.

  The virtually three-week delay also cost the NVA the advantage of their T-54 tanks. Ba was able to give the tank-killer teams he formed some psychological preparation by having them practice firing the M-72 LAW at junked ARVN tank hulls. The Pentagon had time to respond to an appeal from Abrams and rush out an experimental helicopter-mounted system for the American wire-guided antitank missile, called the TOW for tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided. Two Hueys in which the system had been installed were loaded into C-141 jet transports at the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona and flown directly to Pleiku. Jeep-mounted versions of the TOW also arrived, but they were not to prove useful. The NVA commanders could use their tanks to lead an assault that began at night. The dimensions of the battle forced them to continue the assault into the day with the tanks maintaining a spearpoint role. Hill would have the Hueys with the TOWs over Kontum at first light, and any T-54 in sight was doomed. One tank crew backed its behemoth into a house to try to hide. The TOW team got the tank by shooting a missile through a window.

  Vann made the bombers his personal weapon. He could have left the B-52 targeting to Hill and Rhotenberry and the efficient officers in his G-3, air operations section, but he wanted to do it himself. Brig. Gen. Nguyen Van Toan, whom Cao Van Vien finally recruited to replace Dzu, and the Vietnamese staff at the Pleiku headquarters nicknamed Vann “Mr. B-52.” (Toan had been sidelined for excessive graft and a scandal over a girl. Vien had proposed to him that he redeem his career and gain another star by volunteering to take II Corps, and, being a personally courageous man, Toan had accepted. Vien admonished him to listen to Vann.)

  The Strategic Air Command was sending Creighton Abrams three-plane flights of B-52S at roughly hourly intervals around the clock from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and the B-52 base at Sattahip in southern Thailand. By mid-May, when the struggle for Kontum began, the siege of An Loc on the Cambodian front had crested, and it was apparent that the ARVN garrison there would survive. In I Corps, after overrunning all of Quang Tri Province and pressing toward Hue from the west too, the NVA thrusts had also started to falter under the weight of U.S. air power. Hue looked like it was going to stand. Kontum was the last opportunity the Vietnamese Communists had to transform an offensive with important but limited objectives into a spectacular achievement, and it was Abrams’s last big worry. He could let Vann have the bombers. Capt. Christopher Scudder, the B-52 control officer on Vann’s staff, recalled that on some days at the height of the battle Vann lobbied hard enough to obtain twenty-one of the twenty-five B-52 flights coming into the country every day.

  Between May 14 and the end of the first week of June, John Vann laid the best part of 300 B-52 strikes in the environs of Kontum. To increase the safety margin in strikes close to friendly positions, SAC had instructed the bombers to fly one behind the other down the center of the box. This formation didn’t give sufficient bomb coverage to satisfy Vann. He persuaded SAC to place the three B-52S in echelon. The first bomber flew right along the safety line to get as close as possible to the ARVN positions and plaster the inner third of the box, the second B-52 flew just behind and beyond it to devastate the middle, and the third came right behind and beyond it to obliterate anything left in the target zone. Vann would circle in his Ranger off a scheduled strike a few minutes before the B-52S arrived and then low-level around the box as soon as the smoke and dust had cleared enough for him to see how many NVA he had killed. He would fire bursts from his M-16 into the bomb craters. There was no danger, he explained to two reporters riding with him one day. Anyone “still living in there is in such a state of shock that he couldn’t pull a trigger for thirty minutes.” On another day he found forty to fifty NVA who had survived staggering around among the craters. He radioed for Cobra gunships to finish them off.

  Larry Stern of the Washington Post had met Vann in the mid-1960s through Frank Scotton. He came to Pleiku to interview him and was astonished by the man he found. He had never seen a person so suffused with rage and exaltation. Stern remembered the way Vann’s eyes “burned” as he described how he was wielding the bombers. “Anytime the wind is blowing from the north where the B-52 strikes are turning the terrain into a moonscape, you can tell from the battlefield stench that the strikes are effective,” Vann said. “Outside Kontum, wherever you dropped bombs, you scattered bodies.”

  The NVA endured the B-52S. Four regiments of infantry, reinforced with sappers, antiaircraft machine gunners, and the ten or so T-54S that remained of the forty that had come from the North, broke into the east side of Kontum from the north and south ends of the town on the 25th, 26th, and 27th of
May. Their goal was to link up, turn west, and crush Ba’s reserve and overrun his command post. They almost won. At the height of the battle all that prevented them from linking was two lines of bunkers, one on the upper and the other on the lower edge of the airfield inside the town. The men in the bunkers were Vietnamese too, and on this occasion they upheld the tradition of their people. Ba and Rhotenberry were able to regroup and counterattack, and slowly, despairingly, the Communist soldiers had to give way and withdraw, leaving thousands of their comrades on the battlefield in and around Kontum.

  Thieu came on a morale-raising visit on May 30, even though serious shooting was still going on in parts of the town and there was sporadic shelling. Vann carried the president of the Saigon Republic to Ba’s command post in his Ranger and flew Thieu back to Pleiku afterward. Ba briefed his president, and Thieu then pinned single stars on the collar tabs of his fatigues. The ARVN had devised a one-star rank to imitate the American insignia for brigadier. The Vietnamese title was “candidate general,” but being a general under any title is satisfying. Vann had been told that Ba was to be rewarded and had a pair of stars in his pocket in case Thieu forgot to bring them.

  Vann did not see the fallacy in his victory. He did not see that in having to assume total control at the moment of crisis, he had proved the Saigon regime had no will of its own to survive. Nor did it occur to him that he might be playing the role he and Fred Weyand had played at Tet—postponing the end. He had once again been the indispensable man. John Hill had been struck by how necessary Vann was to the victory. Any competent American general could have done what he himself accomplished, Hill said, unfairly denigrating his contribution, but without Vann there would have been no battle at Kontum, because Ba and the other Vietnamese on the Saigon side would not have stayed to fight. The man who had become so skilled at manipulating Vietnamese for the U.S. government would not have approved the use to which the men he served would put his triumph. Nixon was to take advantage of the respite bought by the victory at Kontum to have Kissinger negotiate a settlement that would doom the Saigon regime when the next crisis occurred. The Paris Agreement of January 1973 removed the advisors and the residual U.S. military forces propping up the Saigon side, while leaving the NVA in the South to finish its task. The exigencies of American domestic politics demanded the settlement. The president was facing reelection, and he had exhausted his capacity to manipulate public opinion on the war. The Vietnamese Communists would not give him a settlement until he agreed to withdraw the last of his forces and leave theirs in place. The farce of mutual withdrawal was at an end. Nixon and Kissinger convinced themselves they were not condemning their Saigon surrogate. They reasoned that they could hold Hanoi at bay with the threat of American air power.