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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Where have all the young girls gone?

  Long time passing.

  Where have all the young girls gone?

  Long time ago.

  Where have all the young girls gone?

  Gone to young men every one.

  When will they ever learn?

  When will they ever learn?

  Where have all the young men gone?

  Long time passing.

  Where have all the young men gone?

  Long time ago.

  Where have all the young men gone?

  Gone to soldiers every one.

  When will they ever learn?

  When will they ever learn?

  The chaplain led the way to the grave now, walking before the eight sergeants carrying the coffin. The sergeants turned in step after they had lifted the coffin from the caisson, the steel plates on the toes and heels of their pristine black imitation-leather shoes clicking on the pavement until they reached the grass. The lieutenant in command of the honor guard stood at attention with his saber unsheathed, the blade held out at an angle from his side, the tip pointing toward the ground. The troops behind him held their rifles high and straight before their faces at present arms. A color bearer dipped the Army flag and the battle streamers in salute to the coffin as the band played.

  Where have all the soldiers gone?

  Long time passing.

  Where have all the soldiers gone?

  Long time ago.

  Where have all the soldiers gone?

  Gone to graveyards every one.

  When will they ever learn?

  When will they ever learn?

  Peter Vann received the flag from the coffin. The sergeants folded it into a triangle with the stars showing. Peter had asked his mother if he could be the one to accept it, and she had consented, because, at sixteen years, he was the youngest child. He stood up to receive it. The chaplain handed it to him at the end of the graveside service, after the firing party had fired three volleys, the bolts of the rifles working harshly, metal on metal, in the stillness between each volley; after the bugler had sounded the taps; after the chaplain had said the last prayer and a final benediction.

  Peter had been six years old when his father had first gone to Vietnam. He had not felt any genuine grief until the moment he accepted the flag, because he had hardly known his father and knew even less about what his father had done. Peter was not an intellectual. His interest was tinkering with cars. The war had been going on so long that he had forgotten which side was the enemy. When the family had been driven to the South Vietnamese Embassy the previous day to receive the posthumous award to his father of the Saigon government’s highest honor, Peter had wondered whether it was the South Vietnamese or the North Vietnamese Embassy. He hoped, as he took the flag and started to cry, that his father had not died hating him for all of the arguments they had had when Vann was home. He also hoped that his father would not be ashamed of him for crying. His father had always ridiculed his sons when they had wept, telling them it was a sign of weakness.

  John Allen, twenty-four, Vann’s oldest son, deliberately did not stand at the end of the service, as was customary, to receive the condolences from Rogers, the secretary of state, who was representing President Nixon at the funeral; from Laird, the secretary of defense; from Westmoreland and the rest of the official pallbearers; and from several other dignitaries who filed by the front row of chairs where the family was seated. He knew that if he remained seated the rest of the family would. His acquaintance with these men was limited to television and newspapers. He had agreed to the state funeral at Arlington because he thought that the occasion would vindicate his father. He felt that his father would have taken satisfaction from this pomp and circumstance. Some of these men, or others like them, he said to himself, had probably been involved in forcing his father to retire from the Army in 1963. He thought he would even the score a bit by letting them bend over to shake his mother’s hand, and his, and those of his brothers, and thus make amends to his father in death.

  Ellsberg had been standing to the right front of the grave near the family. His position was as conspicuous as it had been in the chapel. The pallbearers and the dignitaries had to pass close by him after they shook hands with the family. Rogers glanced over at him out of curiosity. Laird ignored him, looking straight ahead. Ellsberg did not see either of them. He was staring at the coffin, thinking of a night in early March 1971. Vann had been in Washington on leave, and Ellsberg had waited vainly until well after midnight for Vann to return to his hotel so that they could talk. Ellsberg had finally despaired and come to my house to spend the night. I had been a reporter then for the New York Times. We had stayed up into the predawn hours talking for the first time about the Pentagon Papers he had clandestinely copied. The conversation had led to my obtaining a copy of the papers, to their publication by the Times, and to Ellsberg’s being put on trial and his life changed forever.

  Jesse had been thinking about the war again since his father’s death. His father’s death had made him realize that the war was as alive as ever and that he and the other people had started to accept its existence. Passively accepting the war was wrong, Jesse thought, and he was not going to tolerate this complicity in himself any longer. Jesse was the son most like his father in his refusal to endure anything that denied him the freedom to live life as he wanted to live it. He stood out at the funeral, with his blond hair falling defiantly over his shoulders, unfurled from the ponytail in which he customarily wore it. He had learned how to put his hair up into a hairnet and hide it under a wig when he had to in order to find a job and earn a living. Today he flaunted its length. Jesse’s beard was also unkempt. A year or two earlier his father had mailed him a blue polyester suit from Hong Kong. His elder brother, John Allen, had asked him to wear the suit to the funeral, but Jesse disliked suits, regarding them as uniforms. He was wearing only the coat of the suit, with a pair of purple knit slacks he had selected in a Denver store and his mother had paid for before they had flown to Washington. His shoes were a two-tone white-and-black pair that had been his late grandfather’s golf shoes. His grandmother had supplied them as a substitute for the dirty brown canvas crepe-soled shoes that he normally wore.

  Jesse decided he would give his father a parting gift, the gift of his own honesty and his willingness to take a stand for what he believed to be right. He would leave half of his draft card on the coffin with his father as a token of the gift. Then he would complete the gift by handing the other half of the card to Richard Nixon when the family drove to the White House in a little while for a ceremony at which Nixon was to honor his father with a posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jesse had always refused to accept the draft, but there was no longer any need for him to go to jail because of his refusal, other than to be honest and to take a stand. He was immune now from actually being drafted. Several years earlier, he had been in danger of going to prison for draft resistance. Jesse’s draft board in Colorado had classified him as delinquent then for his refusal to cooperate. Delinquent status meant that he would shortly have been faced with the choice of prison or induction into the Army. (He had ruled out fleeing to Canada.) John Allen had put on his college ROTC uniform, gone to the draft board office, and told the middle-aged woman who was the clerk that their father was serving in Vietnam in an important position. He had talked her into changing Jesse’s status to 1-Y, temporarily unfit for service, because Jesse was seeing a psychiatrist. John Allen had acted without consulting either Jesse or their father. He had by then assumed the role of the man in the family because of Vann’s absence. John Allen had known that Jesse would continue to resist the draft and that their father was unsympathetic to Jesse’s argument that his conscience forbade him to serve in Vietnam. A few months before his father’s death, Jesse had received a new draft card in the mail. The board had reclassified him as 4-F, permanently unfit for service. Jesse didn’t know why the board had exempted him in this way. He ha
d stopped seeing the psychiatrist after a few months in 1969, and he had no physical or mental disability.

  Someone handed Jesse a rose to leave on the coffin. He took out his draft card, ripped it in half, put Nixon’s half back into his pocket, and tucked the half he was giving his father under the rose, between the bloom and a branch of the stem, to try to conceal what he was doing. He laid both on top of the silver-gray coffin alongside the other roses his mother, his brothers, and his father’s relatives had placed there. “Here, this is all I can give you now; this is all I can do,” he said to his father. He turned away and went over to talk to Dan Ellsberg for a few minutes before it was time to leave for the White House. Jesse thought of what he would do when the family walked into the Oval Office for the ceremony and Nixon put out his hand to shake Jesse’s. Instead of shaking hands, Jesse would silently present Nixon with his half. Half of a draft card would speak for him. It was a crime to refuse to carry one’s draft card and an additional crime to mutilate one. Jesse wondered if it was a third crime to present a mutilated half to the president. He did not look forward to going to jail, but he believed his act of protest would be worth it. One of his friends had already gone to a federal prison for refusing to be drafted.

  Jesse’s younger brother, Tommy, eighteen, saw him tear the draft card in two and asked him what he was doing. Jesse reluctantly explained what he had in store for Nixon. Tommy could not keep Jesse’s exciting plan to himself and told Peter about it on the way to the White House. The sirens of two police motorcycles cleared the way for the limousines to run the red lights, because the ceremony was scheduled to begin at noon and the men in charge of the funeral did not want to keep the president waiting. Tommy approved of Jesse’s scheme. He had a theory that Nixon was not bothered by the dying and the maiming and the other suffering of the war because none of it had ever personally touched Nixon or anyone close to him. Nixon had never experienced the war as the Vanns and other families Tommy knew had felt it, families who had lost a son or a father to death, or feared for one wounded, or grieved over a son who had made the opposite choice of resistance and jail or exile. Neither of Nixon’s sons-in-law had gone to Vietnam to fight as Johnson’s sons-in-law had done. He was anticipating the expression on Nixon’s face when Jesse handed him half of a mutilated draft card. The war might at last come home to Richard Nixon, Tommy thought.

  Peter said that Jesse’s plan was stupid. Peter had been looking forward to this opportunity to meet the president.

  At the White House the family was shown to the Roosevelt Room, about five paces across the hall from the Oval Office, for what was supposed to be a wait of a few minutes. Nixon was finishing a high-level discussion of welfare reform begun while the funeral was taking place at Arlington. Vann’s half sister, Dorothy Lee, a housewife from Norfolk, Virginia, and his half brothers, Frank, a carpenter and construction supervisor, and Eugene, a senior master sergeant in the Air Force, had also ridden over from Arlington to witness the award of the medal.

  Jesse tried to ease the strain within himself by inspecting the rust-colored wall-to-wall carpet. He was currently earning his livelihood on his knees laying carpets in Texas. He was observing that the Roosevelt Room carpet had been shoddily installed and that he could have done a better job when John Allen confronted him. Jesse’s older brother had also noticed him doing something odd beside the coffin. The conversation between Tommy and Peter in the limousine, which John Allen had overheard, had given him the explanation.

  “Don’t do it, Jesse!” he said.

  “Why not?” Jesse asked.

  “This day is not for you, Jesse,” his brother said, keeping his voice low and controlled to try to prevent anyone else in the room from overhearing them. “This is for Dad. This is what Dad lived for and what he died for. Don’t belittle him by doing this.”

  The day that John Allen saw as the vindication of their father would be destroyed. The White House press corps would be covering the ceremony. The spectacle of the long-haired son of a legendary American warrior in Vietnam handing the president half of his draft card, after leaving the other half with his father on top of the coffin, would make quite a story.

  Tommy guessed what they were arguing about and came over to defend Jesse. “But this is what Jesse believes in,” he said. The three of them began to argue over whether Jesse’s right to express his opposition to the war took precedence over the public vindication of their father’s career. Jesse’s uncles overheard the argument and joined in the attempt to dissuade him.

  “If you’re thinking of doing that, I won’t go in there,” his Uncle Frank, a balding, stocky man, said.

  “Well, you do what you want,” Jesse replied. “I have to do what I have to do.”

  His Uncle Eugene, the Air Force senior master sergeant with the seven stripes of his rank on the sleeves of his tunic, resembled Jesse’s father in the way his face got red when he was angry. He was called Gene in the family. “Jesse,” he said, “your father was my brother and I’ve known him a hell of a lot longer than you have. He believed so strongly in what he was fighting for that to do this to him would be a slap in his face.”

  “Leave me alone,” Jesse said to them all. “I have my own conscience to obey.”

  John Allen walked over to his mother. After a trip to the powder room, Mary Jane had been chatting in another corner of the Roosevelt Room with Dorothy Lee. She had taken a small dose of Valium at the hotel before the funeral to try to control her emotions. The drug was having only a partial effect. She looked composed in a simply tailored slate-blue dress. She was wearing her glasses, however, to hide her red-rimmed eyes.

  “Mom,” John Allen said, “Jesse wants to give Nixon half of his draft card. We can’t let this happen.”

  Mary Jane started sobbing again as she had in the chapel when they wheeled in the coffin. She went to Jesse and pleaded with him. “Please Jesse, please, for your father, don’t do this. This is your father’s day, not yours, or mine, or anybody else’s. You would disgrace him.” His mother’s pleading troubled Jesse, but he would not relent.

  The Department of the Army civilian official who was supervising the funeral and a captain assisting him rushed out of the room to find someone on the White House staff. They met Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, an Air Force officer who was then a brigadier general and the president’s military assistant, in the hallway. He was heading toward the Roosevelt Room to see if the family was ready, because one of his duties was to supervise such ceremonies. He had known Vann slightly and liked him. They warned Scowcroft what was happening and then one of them brought out John Allen to relate what Jesse intended.

  “That’s impossible,” Scowcroft said.

  “We really don’t know how to stop him,” John Allen said. “He’s determined to do it.”

  Scowcroft walked into the Oval Office, gave the president the briefest possible explanation of what was occurring, and said there would be a slight delay while he handled the problem. A career staff officer, Scowcroft was known for his businesslike approach to crises large and small.

  He went into the Roosevelt Room and drew Jesse aside from the group that was haranguing him. Scowcroft spoke to Jesse in a calm voice.

  “Listen,” he said, “whatever you think about the war and whatever you want to do about it, this ceremony is to honor your father. There is no way you can do this and not ruin the ceremony. Unless you promise us you won’t give your draft card to the president, unless you promise us you won’t do this, we’ll have to cancel the ceremony.”

  Jesse had already begun to weaken under his mother’s continued pleading and because his Uncle Frank, in contrast to the others, had quieted down and tried to reason with him in similar fashion. The calm tone of this man made a further impression on him. He decided that he might be exploiting for his own ends a situation in which he was present only because of his father. He might not have a moral right to do that. Since he couldn’t act with a clean conscience, he wouldn’t act at all. Anyway, he wa
sn’t being given much choice. “Okay, okay,” he said to Scowcroft, “I promise not to do it.”

  Scowcroft squeezed Jesse’s forearm and gave him one of those “Good boy!” looks. He turned to John Allen. “Will he or won’t he?” Scowcroft asked.

  “If he says he won’t do it, he won’t do it,” John Allen answered. Scowcroft returned to the Oval Office and told the president that the ceremony could go forward.

  John Allen escorted his mother into the Oval Office, followed by his brothers and his aunt and two uncles. As the family entered, the president was sitting at his desk, which had been cleared of work except for a single looseleaf folder he had been reading. He closed the folder, rose, walked around the desk, and met them halfway into the room. The cleared desk, the last bit of work put aside to give full attention, the rising and the meeting halfway were Richard Nixon’s ritual for greeting visitors to the president’s office. He expressed his sympathy to Mary Jane and John Allen and then shook hands with each in turn. Tommy overheard Nixon say “Thanks” to Jesse when the president shook his hand. Jesse was so disturbed by the sensation of actually touching the hand of Richard Nixon that he did not hear this word of presidential gratitude. He noticed only that Nixon had a large hand.

  Rogers and Laird followed them into the president’s office. Mary Jane was surprised to see Alsop with them and wondered, because she did not understand Alsop’s position in the Washington constellation, why a newspaper columnist was being treated like family. Knowing of Alsop’s affection for Vann, Nixon had invited him to join the ceremony ahead of the ordinary press and to hear Nixon’s private remarks to the family.