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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Vann had no moral qualms about killing Vietnamese Communists and those who fought for them, nor was he troubled by the fact that he would be getting Vietnamese who sided with the United States killed to achieve American aims in Vietnam. He had been trained to kill Germans and Japanese in World War II, although the war had ended before he could. During the Korean War he had killed Koreans on the Communist side and, with a clear conscience, had helped send Koreans who were fighting with him to their deaths in his cause. He assumed that he and his fellow Americans had a right to take life and to spend it, as long as they did so with discretion, whenever killing and dying were necessary in their struggle. His assumptions were buttressed by his pride in being one of the best officers in the U.S. Army, the finest army that had ever existed, but he was also conscious that he and the Army represented a greater entity still, an entity in which he took even more pride. He was a guardian of the American empire.

  America had built the largest empire in history by the time John Vann reached Vietnam in 1962. The United States had 850,000 military men and civilian officials serving overseas in 106 countries. From the combined-services headquarters of the Commander in Chief Pacific on the mountain above Pearl Harbor, to the naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, to the shellproof bunkers along the truce line in Korea, there were 410,000 men arrayed in the armies, the fleets, and the air forces of the Pacific. In Europe and the Middle East, from the nuclear bomber bases in the quiet of the English countryside, to the tank maneuver grounds at Grafenwóhr on the invasion route from Czechoslovakia, to the attack aircraft carriers of the Sixth Fleet waiting in the Mediterranean, to the electronic listening posts along the Soviet frontier in Turkey and Iran, there were another 410,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen deployed. When the diplomats from the State Department, the agents from the CIA, and the officials of the sundry other civilian agencies were counted, together with all of their wives and children, the United States had approximately 1.4 million of its servants and their families representing it abroad in 1962. John Vann saw himself as one of the leaders of the expeditionary corps of infantry advisors, helicopter crews, fighter-bomber pilots, and Special Forces teams whom President Kennedy had decided in November 1961 to dispatch to South Vietnam, the threatened Southeast Asian outpost of this empire. With the wind in his face on the road to My Tho, he did not intend to let the Communist-led guerrillas win the battle for the northern half of the Mekong Delta.

  The Mekong Delta was a deceptive place in late May 1962. It had the appearance of a land of milk and honey. The onset of the monsoon early in the month had quickened the rice seeds into shoots that were pushing green from the seedbeds and would soon be ready for the second event in a Vietnamese peasant’s year—the transplanting of the seedlings into the earth waiting beneath the gray water of the paddy fields that stretched out in an expanse from both sides of the road. The landscape looked flat, but it kept the eye busy. Narrow dikes to trap the water for the rice plants checkered the paddy fields. The checkerboard of the paddy fields and the dikes was in turn crisscrossed by the straight lines and sharp angles of canals for irrigation and transport. The lines and angles of the canals were occasionally interrupted by the wide bend of one of the rivers that fed them. Stands of bamboo and a species of water palm whose fronds stood twenty feet high edged the canals and rivers. Taller coconut palms also grew in profusion, singly and in clusters, along the banks. There were large groves of the most common Vietnamese fruit trees—bananas and papayas. There were smaller groves and separate trees of mangos, grapefruits, limes, tangerines, oranges, peaches, and jackfruit. The list of others was so various that a horticulturist would have puzzled at trying to identify all of the local subspecies. Peasant boys wearing conical straw hats to ward off the sun rode the backs of the buffalos that pulled the plows and harrows to prepare the paddy fields for the rice. Rangy black hogs rooted among the thatched houses in the hamlets. Although the houses seemed insubstantial, they were adequate for this climate. They were made by erecting a frame of logs and bamboo poles over a pounded earth floor. Dried and split fronds of the water palm were then used to thatch the fairly steep ridge roof and the sides and to partition the interior into rooms. The roof overhung the sides so that its thatch carried off the monsoon torrents and also shaded the house against the sun. Chickens shared the yards with the hogs. The ducks were usually kept in flocks, with their wings clipped so that they could not fly. They were herded by children or by landless agricultural laborers to keep them out of the paddy fields and vegetable gardens of neighbors. The canals and the rivers knew no limit of fish, shrimp, crabs, and eels. When the monsoon reached its height in July and August, and the fish could swim into the paddy fields, these too became fish ponds.

  Every once in a while a soldier stopped Vann’s jeep at a bridge to let a line of traffic from the opposite direction cross over. The bridges were one-lane structures erected by the French out of Eiffel steel beams that arched overhead. Peasant children posted at these checkpoints would come up to hawk, for the equivalent of a few pennies in Saigon government piasters, chunks of coconut meat and sugar cane, and slices of fresh pineapple sprinkled with large grains of salt to contrast with the sweetness. Material want seemed to be the least of concerns in this land.

  The concrete blockhouses at the bridges were the warning that this was not a land of contentment. While he bought a piece of pineapple from one of the insistent children, Vann had time to study the blockhouses, encircled with rusting barbed wire, and to observe the soldiers walking guard along the sides of the bridges. He had time to think that the green line of water palm fronds along a canal bank he had passed five minutes earlier might suddenly have quickened with the muzzle flashes of an automatic weapon reaching at the jeep. He could see that the rains would make the fields of sprouting sugar cane high and dense enough in a few months to conceal a battalion. He had time to wonder if a guerrilla might be waiting, across the river and farther down the road, for a jeep such as his. Jeeps were the most satisfying targets, because they usually carried officers. If a guerrilla was waiting he would probably be squatting behind a tombstone in one of the small peasant graveyards set on mounds among the paddy fields. He would be a patient man, not one to waste an opportunity if he could avoid doing so. He would be keeping himself alert, his hands over the detonator connected by wires to a mine dug into the road the night before—the cut tarmac set carefully back into place to conceal the explosive—ready to send the jeep and its occupants twisting into the air.

  This land had known war for most of the seventeen years prior to Vann’s arrival. The older children among the groups selling coconut and pineapple at the checkpoints could remember the final years of the first war. It had begun in 1945 when the French had attempted to reimpose their colonial rule on Vietnam and the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos. There had been only three years of intermittent peace after the first war had ended with the humiliation of the French and their Vietnamese troops in the mountain valley of Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam in 1954. Then war had resumed in 1957 between the guerrillas and the Saigon regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the mandarin whom Lansdale had secured in power. By 1961 the guerrillas had become so strong that President Kennedy had had to commit the arms of the United States to prevent Diem’s government from being overthrown. The Americans and the Saigon government called the guerrillas the Viet Cong, an abbreviation of the words for Vietnamese Communists. (The advisors had shortened the term to VC for everyday usage, except in the lingo of field radio traffic, in which the VC became Victor Charlies.) The guerrillas referred to themselves as the Liberation Army and called this second war the Liberation War. They said that both wars were part of the Vietnamese Revolution—this second war a renewal of the struggle to achieve the original goals of the war against the French.

  There was no guerrilla with a mine on the way to My Tho on May 21, 1962. Vann reached the new quarters of the 7th Division Advisory Detachment on the main road half a mile north of the town without inci
dent. The Saigon soldier guarding the iron grillwork gate swung it open and let his jeep into the courtyard. The place had been a school for aspiring men of God and then briefly an orphanage before its recent conversion to the profane work of war. The advisors called their quarters the Seminary because of its original purpose, and two white masonry crosses atop the former chapel at the far end of the courtyard still proclaimed this holy intent to passersby. The American military authorities, who had become the major renter and bankroller of construction in the country, had leased the building from a Roman Catholic diocese in exile from North Vietnam and in need of funds. When Frank Clay, whom Vann was to succeed, had arrived in My Tho the year before, the detachment had consisted of only seven officers and a sergeant, with three of the officers living with the division’s component regiments in other provincial towns. A large house in My Tho had been more than sufficient. After Clay had learned that the detachment was to multiply twentyfold in the spring of 1962 and to keep growing (it would slightly exceed 200 officers and men by the end of 1962), he had arranged for the leasing and renovation of the Seminary as the best available building in the area.

  The main two-story structure was pleasant if undistinguished French colonial architecture of brick sheathed in white stucco and roofed with red tile. It was roughly L-shaped, with the long back of the L running down beside a narrow river. The first floor at the base of the L had been remodeled into an office section. The rest of the ground floor had then been renovated into sleeping rooms for the officers, a mess hall, showers and toilets, and a bar and service club. The mess hall doubled as a theater for the movies every second night that, with charcoal-broiled steaks on Sunday and bargain-priced liquor every evening, were among the privileges of American military life overseas. Vann and a few of the senior officers rated small bedrooms on the second floor above the office section. The remainder of the second floor was divided into dormitory bays for the enlisted men. The advisors used the courtyard as a parking lot for their jeeps and three-quarter-ton trucks. The courtyard was also the scene of the volleyball contests that Vann started right after his arrival. He had a net erected over a basketball court the seminarians had laid out there.

  The Viet Cong had come a few nights after the advisors had first moved into the Seminary in early May to tell the Americans they were not beyond the guerrillas’ reach. A group had sneaked through the banana groves across the road and started shooting at the mess hall in the middle of a movie. The sergeants, some of whom were old enough to have been through World War II or Korea, had been amused at the sight of captains who had never before been under fire running around in undershorts, T-shirts, and steel helmets, waving .45 caliber service pistols, with which it is difficult to hit a man in the daytime. Periodically the guerrillas would repeat the exercise, usually from the concealment of a stand of water palm on the opposite bank of the river behind the building. Several guerrillas would fire a string of shots at the generator or water-purification equipment and withdraw into the night. No damage was ever done beyond some pockmarks on the stucco. The next morning the advisors would see a Viet Cong flag, a gold star on a horizontally split field of red over blue, flying from a tree.

  A determined guerrilla company could probably have overrun the Seminary in a few minutes. The two dozen territorial troops from the province, called Civil Guards, who were responsible for defending the compound were friendly but seemed to take a casual attitude toward safeguarding the foreign advisors. The Americans could not protect themselves, because there were not enough men to do the job of advising the 7th Division during the day and also mount a guard each night sufficiently strong to hold off the attackers while the rest snatched up their weapons and ran to their stations. Nearly half of the officers and men did not live full-time at the Seminary. They were instead dispersed throughout the division zone with the battalions and regiments, stayed in the province capitals advising the province chiefs and their staffs, or worked at the training centers for the territorial forces. Vann chose to take what precautions he could without interfering with advisory duties and to accept the risk of an attack in order to fulfill the detachment’s mission. The behavior of the guerrillas indicated to him that they did not actually intend to shoot the advisors in their beds. He guessed correctly. The Americans were privileged people in South Vietnam in the early 1960s. The Vietnamese Communists limited terrorist attacks against Americans in these first years because they did not wish to provoke greater intervention. They were hoping that forbearance would elicit sympathy for their cause from the American public.

  The 7th Division headquarters was in the former French Army caserne in the safety of My Tho. The place was a community of about 40,000 people in 1962, the major population center for the northern Delta, a provincial city by Vietnamese standards, a large town by American ones. Like most of the important Delta towns it was located beside a big canal or river for easy access by sampan or barge. This one was a spur off the upper branch of the Mekong as it flowed to the sea, appropriately called Tien Giang for Upper River. My Tho had been founded in the latter half of the seventeenth century by Chinese refugees fleeing the collapse of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu conquest of their homeland. The Vietnamese, who were completing their centuries-long migration by conquest down the Indochinese Peninsula by seizing the Delta from the original Cambodian inhabitants, had welcomed these immigrant allies. The French had enlarged My Tho after they had in turn conquered the Delta in the 1860s. The town had become a garrison and administrative center and a place of commerce to process rice for the export trade to China and other rice-deficit countries of East Asia, and to Europe and Latin America. The plantations of thousands and tens of thousands of acres organized out of the fertile soil and landless peasantry of the Delta, first with the encouragement of the Vietnamese emperors and then on a grand scale by the French and upper-class Vietnamese who had benefited from colonial rule, had been broken up during the first war and its aftermath. My Tho had otherwise changed little physically from the French era by the time Vann arrived. The town was still a busy community that battened off the labor of the peasantry in the surrounding region. Most of the rice produced in the Delta was now consumed within South Vietnam. The warehouses and mills kept occupied storing and processing it for shipment to Saigon and the provinces to the north.

  For the Americans the town could be a diversion on an evening or a Sunday afternoon. Groups of advisors occasionally came to the Chinese restaurant beside the river for a meal, or sat and drank at the open-air tables set up around kiosks that sold beer and soft drinks, enjoying the breeze that cooled the Delta landscape at dusk, comparing the merits of the girls on the street, and watching the boats haul produce to the riverfront dock. The enterprising Chinese still ran the small shops that offered everything from bolts of cheap cotton cloth, out of which the peasants sewed the pajamalike blouses and pants called ao babas, to aphrodisiacs. There was a central market with all of the pungent smells of this land. Among the stalls of the fish and fruit sellers were those of the acupuncture artists, whose needles promised an end to pain, and the sorcerers, who peddled ancient herbal medicines and the ancient and modern hokum of magic cures. The Vietnamese and Chinese merchants and landowners lived in solid masonry houuss. The poor made do with wooden shacks. One of the more impressive houses in the town was the villa that the French had built for their provincial governor. It was on the main avenue, with handsome if somewhat neglected gardens around it and a tennis court that the American officers were permitted to use. The villa was occupied by an ARVN major who had been appointed province chief by President Diem. Vann’s counterpart, Col. Huynh Van Cao, the commander of the 7th Division, was forced for want of an established prerogative of office to occupy a more modest whitewashed house, carefully guarded, in a small compound behind a row of flame trees on a side street a few blocks away. He lived there alone and kept his wife and seven children in Saigon.

  Vann felt it urgent to reverse the trend of the war in the northern Delta. As m
atters stood in May 1962, the Viet Cong had the strategic and tactical initiative. It was the Communists who were determining the course of the war by deciding when and where and on what terms to fight. The Saigon side was on the defensive, reacting to guerrilla moves rather than carrying the war to the enemy. Only the main road that went south from Saigon to My Tho and then split into two roads that ran west and south into the lower Delta could be traveled in the daytime in a single jeep and at night by a pair. In large areas of the five provinces the guerrillas had rendered the secondary roads impassable to vehicles by organizing the peasants to dig ditches across them and to dismantle the bridges. They had not yet gotten around to removing the roads entirely by having the peasants dig up the beds bit by bit and scatter the dirt across the rice paddies, as they had in much of the lower Delta. They would get around to it if they were not stopped in time. On those secondary roads that were usable, an escort of at least a reinforced platoon was considered a necessity by the Saigon officers, and then there was no guarantee that the vehicles would not be ambushed. While all of the peasantry in the northern Delta did not sympathize with the guerrillas, the majority either favored the Viet Cong cause or tacitly aided the Communists through the silence of a neutrality that worked against the Saigon government. Whether the neutrality was created by fear of guerrilla terrorism or by sympathy made no practical difference: the Saigon government lacked the cooperation of the peasantry, and cooperation was necessary to suppress the Communist-led insurrection. South Vietnam in 1962 was an overwhelmingly rural society; 85 percent of the population dwelt in the countryside. With his training in statistics, Vann was struck by the potential for the growth of the Communist guerrilla power in a society with this sort of profile. All of the 2 million people in the division zone, except for the 15 percent who lived in My Tho and the other towns, were currently or potentially within the reach of the Viet Cong. There was no question of who still had the raw military power. Vann estimated that two companies of ARVN regulars, about 180 men, with their American infantry weapons and artillery and fighter-bombers at their call, could go anywhere in the five provinces. In a metaphor he drew for one of his staff officers that summer, however, he observed that the passage of Saigon’s troops through the countryside was like the movement of a ship through the sea. While the ARVN troops were in a given area, their presence pushed the guerrillas into hiding or flight, in the way a ship displaced water. The moment they departed, the guerrillas flowed back.