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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Prior to leaving Saigon, he and Porter had agreed on a number of goals they saw as the foundation blocks for a strategy to reverse this losing course and win the war. As soldiers, their first priority was to develop offensive operations that would corner and destroy the main striking forces of the guerrillas. The current ARVN operation was appropriately known as “the sweep.” It consisted of marching several battalions across the countryside in dispersed columns. Porter had noted that the scheme of maneuver might be adequate for moving an armored division across North Germany, but it was hardly effective against guerrillas in rice-delta country. He wanted Vann to take advantage of the dexterity that the helicopter offered for landing and shifting assault troops and devise tactics that would stampede the best Viet Cong units into engagements in which they could be annihilated. To initiate these unconventional operations Vann was in turn to persuade Colonel Cao to accept a face-saving ploy that would give the Americans proxy control over the division. The euphemism for the ploy was “joint planning.” Under “joint planning,” Vann and Cao and their staffs would ostensibly plan operations together. In fact, the intent was to persuade Cao to carry out operations that Vann and his staff conceived.

  Vann was supposed to work as Clay’s deputy for a month so that he could fully orient himself to the job prior to Clay’s return home near the end of June. He did not have to wait that long. During an operation on the Plain of Reeds west of My Tho on May 23, 1962, two days after Vann’s arrival, Clay attempted to drive a platoon of about twenty fleeing guerrillas back toward the Saigon troops by strafing them from a pair of helicopters. The Viet Cong paused long enough to shoot up the lead helicopter in which Clay was riding with another lieutenant colonel from Porter’s advisory staff. The pilot received a bullet in the foot; Clay, the other lieutenant colonel, and the copilot were all superficially wounded by fragments of Plexiglás and aluminum sent flying by the bullets that smashed through the cockpit canopy and the control panel. Vann took charge while Clay was flown up to Saigon for treatment and then left for a delayed eight-day rest leave in Hong Kong. Vann was again in acting command through much of June. Clay was off on a tour of the Central Highlands and the central coastal provinces north of Saigon. He had been selected to be the guerrilla warfare specialist on the faculty of the National War College in Washington and wanted to acquaint himself with the differing conditions of the war in these areas.

  When Vann formally took charge toward the end of the month, there was no change-of-command ceremony and trooping of the colors in the courtyard of the Seminary as is the custom at the passing of the baton in the U.S. Army. Clay would have forbidden a ceremony, because he was an emotional man and knew that he embarrassed himself on such occasions by turning misty-eyed. In this case he would not have had a choice. The advisors were forbidden to fly the Stars and Stripes over their compounds in 1962. They were also not authorized any combat decorations. Clay and the others wounded on the helicopter were not even entitled to a Purple Heart, and had they been killed their families would not have been given one. (The medal is routinely awarded for wounds and posthumously for death.) President Kennedy hoped that by keeping the horizon of the American presence in South Vietnam as low as possible he could avoid the political consequences of having the public at home understand that the United States was at war there.

  Clay had brought the detachment by late May to the point where it could begin to function. Vann put his extraordinary energy into the task of turning promise into accomplishment. The battle in which Clay had been wounded on May 23 gave Vann a fortunate start with Colonel Cao in “joint planning.” The success had resulted from Clay’s persistence, luck, and the talent at operational planning of Capt. Richard Ziegler, thirty years old, from the West Point football line of the class of 1954. Clay had become exasperated at Cao’s refusal, always genially stated, to let the Americans have a role in planning operations. He had become further exasperated with the fiascos Cao had planned himself. In mid-May he had denied Cao use of the helicopters until he let the Americans participate. Porter, who had been pressuring Clay all the while to achieve joint planning, had backed his decision, with Harkins’s consent. At that Cao had relented and agreed to a trial. Clay had now needed an officer for the task of drawing up detailed plans. The one officer he had with any experience at the work was Ziegler, who had been training Ranger companies in the countryside since his arrival at the Seminary in early April. Ziegler’s experience had been limited to three months as assistant operations officer for an infantry battalion in Japan. To plan the operation he had been given French Army maps of a 1954 series and an intelligence report that was weeks old and probably no longer valid. The report said that a Viet Cong battalion was training somewhere within a ten-square-kilometer area on the Plain of Reeds.

  Ziegler turned out to have a gift for matching a particular scheme of maneuver to a particular military problem. Moreover, he could distill his ideas into a map overlay, a sketch on tracing paper of broad arrows and other military symbols to show the timing and placement of assault troops and the directions and objectives of their advance. The sketch is drawn to the same scale as a map and then laid over the area of the operation so that the unit commanders can see how to maneuver.

  In this case Ziegler provided the logical answer for ignorance. He decided that the best chance of finding guerrillas in those ten square kilometers lay in an operation that was a sequence of probes, each from a different direction. If one of the probing units struck Viet Cong, the helicopters could land the division reserve troops or shift others already on the ground to drive the guerrillas into what Ziegler’s instructors in the advanced course for infantry officers at Fort Benning had called “the killing zone.”

  The intelligence report was outdated. The guerrillas from the battalion of Viet Cong mentioned in the report had left the area. They returned at 2:00 A.M. on the morning of the 23rd. Guerrillas from a second battalion not mentioned in the report had also been tarrying in the vicinity. Ziegler’s probing task forces flushed an astonishing number of guerrillas out into the open, where the fighter-bombers slaughtered them. Ninety-five Viet Cong were killed and twenty-four captured, including one of the Communist battalion commanders. The other battalion commander was killed. Thirty-three weapons, more highly prized than lives in this guerrilla war, were also seized. Among them was an American-made machine gun, a 60mm mortar, and several Thompson submachine guns. The guerrillas who returned at 2:00 A.M. suffered the worst losses.

  Cao was beside himself with happiness at this first genuine success for his division. With the behind-the-arras approach that the advisory system took, he could claim all of the credit in public.

  Vann was also impressed. He had been looking over Clay’s staff to decide whom to keep in what job. He drew Ziegler aside in the temporary headquarters the division had set up beside a dirt airstrip. “You’re going to be my planner,” Vann said. He described to Ziegler how they would seize on the self-interest this success had aroused in Cao to institutionalize joint planning and gain proxy control over the division. “We’re going to get this thing organized and run it just like an American outfit. We’ll have an American on the ground with every unit. I will work with Cao and you will work with the operations officer and we will get done what we want done.”

  When Vann suggested that Ziegler and the ARVN captain who was Cao’s G-3 (operations) officer plan all future actions together, Cao said he thought it was a good idea. He also consented to other steps that Vann had in mind to stitch his advisors so thoroughly into the structure of the division that the question of who was telling whom what to do would be forgotten. Cao agreed to let Vann’s intelligence advisor, Capt. James Drummond, a self-contained North Carolinian of thirty-four years, who was, like Ziegler, seemingly custom-made for his assignment, work on the same sharing basis with his G-2 (intelligence) officer. Previously Cao had forbidden his G-2 to give the Americans any useful information.

  Vann settled on a bluff extrovert from San Anto
nio, Maj. Elmer “Sandy” Faust, thirty-six, as his chief of staff to supervise the work of Ziegler and the other younger staff advisors and to run the advisory side of the division field headquarters while Vann was off marching with a battalion or up in a helicopter or observation plane. Faust’s husky frame and open, pleasing features matched his temperament. He was attractive to the opposite sex and refused to conform to the Army crewcut, still combing his blond hair up from his forehead in the pompadour wave fashionable in the 1940s. Cao raised no objection to having Faust act as a counterpart to Lt. Col. Bui Dinh Dam, his own chief of staff. He likewise agreed to integrate Vann’s advisors into the other staff sections, G-1 (personnel and administration) and G-4 (logistics). He accepted Vann’s proposal to organize a Tactical Operations Center to monitor military activity in the five provinces, to inform Cao and Vann of any emergency, and to maintain liaison with the military headquarters of each province chief and coordinate requests for fighter-bombers to support beleaguered outposts and similar calls for help. The TOC was manned on a twenty-four-hour basis. The radios and maps were set up in a large office on the first floor of Cao’s two-story house. Because he kept his family in Saigon, Cao had no need for most of the rooms and had turned all of the two stories except for a bedroom and kitchen into a miniature division headquarters. Ziegler and his counterpart used the TOC as a place to plan operations. It became another funnel through which the Americans could gain knowledge.

  A briefing by the staff for the commanding general is a daily ritual at division-level and higher headquarters in the U.S. Army. Vann suggested that they have a joint “command briefing” at 4:00 P.M. on every afternoon the division was not in the field. Cao offered to convene it in what he called his War Room on the second floor of the house. He had furnished this office elegantly in comparison to the one downstairs that was converted into the TOC. It was lined with maps, and he had constructed a podium at the front for the briefer. Ziegler and the division operations officer would report on significant actions anywhere in the zone. Drummond and the G-2 captain would brief on the intelligence outlook and the G-1 and G-4 officers and their advisors would also report whenever they had something worth announcing. Cao would sit in a chair at the front near the podium, with Vann beside him, and Faust and Dam behind. Prior to Ziegler and the operations officer getting together to plan a helicopter assault on the guerrillas, Vann would insist on a session in the War Room at which Cao would give “command guidance” to everyone on what he wanted to achieve.

  In the beginning Ziegler wondered about the usefulness of these daily briefings and command guidance sessions. They were artificial in their formality, like training models of the same at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. He soon saw that Vann was using them to encourage Cao’s ego to flower. Cao liked to forget that he was a colonel and to put on the airs of a general. He enjoyed expounding in broad strategic terms at the command guidance sessions. When he got carried away with himself at one of the first ones, Vann whispered to Ziegler: “Don’t worry about what he’s saying—I’ll tell you what to do after we get back to the Seminary.” That is what Vann did, outlining a plan for a helicopter assault into a guerrilla area on the wall-length map in the Seminary’s combined operations and intelligence office. The map was covered with transparent acetate so that one could write on it with a grease pencil. Ziegler wove Vann’s ideas and his own into the finished plan. Vann approved it; Cao accepted it. They killed more guerrillas; Cao was happier still. Ziegler suspected that the success of the May 23 action had made Cao like a gambler who goes into a casino one day wearing a certain tie and wins big. From that day forward, unless there is some compelling reason not to do so, the gambler is going to wear that tie whenever he goes back to the casino. The plans that Vann had Ziegler draw up were Cao’s lucky tie.

  Cao reacted in the same positive manner to Vann’s proposals for training the Saigon troops in squad and platoon tactics of fire and maneuver, a prerequisite to besting the guerrillas at the small-unit combat characteristic of this war. The state of training of the 10,000 ARVN regulars in the division zone would have sufficed had there been no war. (There were 8,500 regulars in the division and an attached armored regiment and 1,500 in independent Ranger companies.) They could march well enough for a parade. The majority of the 28,000 territorial troops would have had trouble parading. Despite more than $1.65 billion in American military aid between 1955 and mid-1961 and the supposed guidance of a 650-man training mission for most of those years, Vann had discovered that few of the regulars or territorials knew how to adjust the sights of their rifles and carbines well enough to hit a target, let alone a guerrilla. The ARVN and the territorials had been formed by the French. The Americans had then tinkered with their organization. The ARVN was an amalgam of Vietnamese officers and men from the regular French colonial army and a predecessor Vietnamese National Army that France had created in 1948 for Bao Dai, the former emperor who had collaborated with the colonial power. The ARVN was currently organized on the triangle model of the old American infantry division—three regiments to a division, three battalions to a regiment, three companies to a battalion.

  The better of the two territorial forces, the Civil Guard, or Bao An in Vietnamese, had originated in a pre-World War II colonial formation called La Garde Indigene (the Native Guard) and in a militia created under Japanese sponsorship near the end of the world war. It was a province-level force, the rough equivalent in Saigon’s military structure of a state National Guard in the United States, formed into companies and battalions under the control of the province chiefs except when assigned to the division for specific operations. There were approximately 10,000 Civil Guards in the division zone. The second territorial group was a raggedy militia recruited by the French to man the brick watchtowers and mud-walled outposts that the French had built during their war to reimpose colonial rule and that the Saigon government was now trying to defend. It was organized into squads and platoons that operated at the district level and below and was called the Self-Defense Corps, or Dan Ve in Vietnamese, and commonly referred to by the advisors as the SDC. The SDC was the most numerous (about 18,000 men) and the most poorly armed force in the five provinces. The militiamen had to make do with the bolt-action rifles the French had given them. Theoretically the SDC was the equivalent of the early American village and town militia, because the men were local residents who wore no uniform. They dressed in the same pajamalike blouse and trousers of black calico that their fellow peasants wore as work clothes. There was an important difference from the early American militia: the SDC militia, like the Civil Guard, fought for pay.

  Vann moved to remedy the lack of training by laying out a three-week “refresher course” for the division regulars at an old SDC training camp, which Clay had improved, near Tan Hiep village center about six miles up the road toward Saigon. The airstrip for My Tho was located there. Cao agreed to put all of the division’s nine battalions through the course one by one. They were also to conduct marksmanship and small-unit training at their home bases when not out on operations. Clay had already started training courses for the territorials. Vann increased the course capacity to bring the Civil Guard and the SDC up to par more rapidly. To measure progress, he established specific training and operational goals for every division battalion and for the territorials under each province military headquarters. Every advisor had to submit a “Monthly Critique,” with a copy to his Vietnamese counterpart, stating whether the goals were being attained.

  Cao did not listen happily to the arguments Vann made for another priority that Vann and Porter had agreed upon—halting the growth of the Communist-led insurrection by depriving the Viet Cong of the freedom of the night. Cao’s face would go blank or he would frown as Vann explained why they had to teach the troops to patrol and lay ambushes after dark. “It is not safe to go out at night,” Cao would say. Most of the five province chiefs regarded night activity with the same fear that Cao did. They and Cao had their units report night patrol
s and ambushes to fob off the Americans. No one went out, or if anyone did go out he did not go farther than the nearest canal for a nap on the bank. When persuasion failed, Vann turned to bravado. He issued an order requiring all American officers and any sergeant involved in combat training to go out on at least one night patrol or ambush a week. Cao and the province chiefs could have ignored the requirement and made a fool of Vann. The advisors could not, after all, venture out on their own. Cao knew that Porter was behind Vann on the issue, and Harkins had also been preaching the virtue of night activity to Diem. After an outburst the previous November when the Kennedy administration had tried to push him into political and administrative reforms as the price for U.S. military intervention, Diem’s relations with senior American officials had improved. The guidance from the presidential palace was to accommodate the Americans where it would do no harm. Cao and the province chiefs acquiesced. A consistent if limited pattern of night patrols and ambushes began. Vann set the example by traveling to a different regular or territorial unit at least once and sometimes twice a week for a night foray. With his ability to function on a couple of hours of sleep, being up most of the night did not bother him.