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

by Sheehan, Neil

  The bombing was worsening with each month as Anthis and his staff steadily built the power of their hybrid Vietnamese-American air force. At the end of 1961 the VNAF had owned about seventy aircraft. By September 1962, Saigon’s air force had twice that number of planes, although the pilot was as likely to be an American as a Vietnamese, and the U.S. Air Force itself had more than a third again as many Farm Gate aircraft, about sixty, in the air commando squadron at Bien Hoa and other units. The number of American airmen in the country had increased apace. There had been 400 Air Force personnel in South Vietnam in December 1961. By September 1962 there were more than 2,000, bringing the U.S. Air Force contingent to a third the size of its Saigon protégé, which had about 6,500 officers and men in 1962. The subterfuges of painting the B-26s and the T-28s of Farm Gate with VNAF insignia and of keeping the correspondents off the main military airfield at Bien Hoa by claiming that it was a “Vietnamese air base” and that the Saigon government did not want them entering it had kept the growth of this American-injected air power from being as publicly noticeable as it might have been. Vann had been watching it rise in the rapidly expanding number of attack sorties (a sortie is a round-trip flight by a single aircraft) and thus the rapidly increasing tonnage of bombs, rockets, and napalm the planes were releasing on the countryside. The sorties had nearly quadrupled, from 251 in January 1962 to 985 by August, and the upward curve gave no indication of leveling off.

  In predictable bureaucratic fashion, Anthis and his staff had been inventing targets to keep the growing number of planes busy. With opportunities for air strikes against positively identified groups of guerrillas limited because of the nature of the war, an expandable category of “preplanned targets” had been devised to accommodate the multiplying air raids on “known VC concentrations, headquarters, storage areas, communications and control centers, arms manufacturing facilities”—the official terminology for Cao’s “Viet Cong hamlets.” All buildings were called “structures” in the reports of the raids. This term removed the distinction between a hut that had been erected by the guerrillas and the home of a peasant family or, for that matter, a pigsty. At the same time the term fulfilled the bureaucratic need to demonstrate that the air strikes were achieving tangible results, i.e., “structures” blown up or burned down. The official reports naturally presented all “structures” as guerrilla “structures.” By September the fighter-bombers were blasting away an average of more than a hundred “structures” a week, and as far as Vann could determine from the evidence in his area the majority of them were peasant homes.

  The Rules of Engagement, the regulations governing what, where, and when the aircraft could attack, permitted the Vietnamese forward air controllers in the L-19S to decide that anyone on the ground who ran was a Viet Cong. The threatening sensation of a spotter plane buzzing them for a look caused many peasants of both sexes and varying ages to run. Few of the FACs had ever seen a guerrilla dead or alive from the proximity of the earth. The FAC would radio the fighter-bombers that he had “VC in sight” and guide them in for the kill. After the strafing runs the FAC and the fighter-bomber pilots would tally a score sheet of how many “KB As” the planes had dispatched. The initials stood for “killed by air.” Once dispatched, or reported as having been dispatched, a KBA was ipso facto a dead guerrilla for Harkins’s headquarters to add to the body count that was the fundamental measure of progress in the war. Vann coined a term of contempt for the forward air controllers. He called them “Killer Kings.”

  He and everyone else on his side could benefit from studying the Viet Cong, Vann felt. The Vietnamese Communists seemed to him cruel and ruthless. He had initially been told that they tortured and murdered prisoners with the same caprice the Saigon forces did. He had discovered this was not true, that while they were hypocritical enough to frequently violate their own doctrine forbidding torture, they were selective. The guerrillas’ philosophy on prisoners was simple. They shot seriously wounded men, as Vann warned the terrified straphangers on his predawn rides to Ben Tre, because their medical facilities were limited. Unharmed or lightly wounded prisoners were marched off and divided by interrogation into two groups: those whom the Viet Cong thought they could convert to their cause or at least neutralize, and those who they decided would always oppose them. The latter, generally officers and noncoms, were killed. These prisoners were also the ones who might be tortured before being put to death. The Viet Cong “reeducated” the other prisoners at clandestine prison camps in remote areas with indoctrination courses that consisted of work, lectures, political study, and primitive diet. The average confinement was three to six months, after which the prisoners were released.

  The guerrillas also dispensed terror with relative discrimination. They could be indiscriminate—tossing grenades into crowds watching propaganda films the U.S. information Service provided the Saigon government, killing and wounding bystanders when they blew up village offices, deliberately shooting wives and children of militiamen during an attack on an outpost. The main pattern of Viet Cong terrorism, however, was the selective assassination of rural officials and active sympathizers of the regime. Again the Viet Cong were sufficiently hypocritical to often break their rule that no one was to be killed in the ways that Thuong made people die. It was “forbidden to execute the accused savagely,” one typical Viet Cong directive on terror specified. All death sentences were to be “carried out correctly,” that is, by shooting or beheading. Police agents and spies, whether men or women, nevertheless ran the risk of dying from multiple stab wounds, or being beaten to death, or disemboweled. The Viet Cong were consistent in attempting to explain all killings to the population. They would pin a “death notice” to the body which listed the alleged “crimes” of the victim and stated that in the course of committing these crimes the victim had “amassed many blood debts to the people” and therefore had to be condemned. The notice would be in the name of some legal-sounding entity that was unmistakably the Viet Cong and at the same time untraceable: “The People’s Court of Cai Lay District.” Guerrilla propagandists would later elaborate on the reasons for the death at night meetings in the hamlets and in leaflets and local mimeographed news sheets. The Vietnamese Communists sought to convince the peasants that they, rather than the Saigon government, represented the true force of law and order. The killings were intended to look like executions, not assassinations. This main pattern of Viet Cong terrorism had the dual aim of demoralizing their Saigon opponents while simultaneously making it appear that the Communists would not harm those who did not oppose them, that they were judicious men who resorted to killing when persuasion was of no avail. The code of behavior of the guerrilla fighting men tended both to form a bond with the farmers and to give the peasants a sense of security when the Viet Cong were present. Whenever a Main Force or Regional unit stayed in a hamlet, the troops conducted themselves impeccably, never stealing or molesting the women as the Saigon soldiers did, paying for their food and helping in the rice fields.

  John Vann wanted his country to denounce the cruelties of the Viet Cong but to adopt their restraint. He had urged Herb Prevost and Prevost’s three captains working as air liaison officers at province capitals in the 7th Division zone to walk through the countryside on operations. As a result, Prevost and his captains had become perhaps the only Air Force officers in South Vietnam who knew “where it was necessary to have air strikes and where we were losing money,” as Vann phrased his combination of principle and pragmatism. They were trying to help Vann inhibit air strikes in the northern Delta. A major and three captains were not the Air Force. The number of bombing missions they could stop without being fired was small indeed.

  Vann had thought prior to the lunch with Taylor that Harkins would let him speak honestly about the bombing and shelling, even though Harkins had virtually said he considered the issue settled, and about the loss of weapons through the outposts, and about the dilemmas Vann was encountering in trying to make the ARVN fight. Vann’s after
-action reports had been candid to the point of irritation, bordering at times on dissent, yet Harkins had still invited him to the lunch. Vann had schemed to take advantage of the general’s goodwill toward him, but he had not, of course, intended to criticize Harkins personally. He had simply assumed that Harkins felt an obligation to expose the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a range of views and meant the lunch to be a serious discussion, not one of those “dog and pony shows,” as they were called in service parlance, which Vann put on with Cao for guided tours through My Tho.

  Paul Harkins was Maxwell Taylor’s man. At fifty-eight, he was only three years younger than his mentor, but he had graduated from West Point seven years behind Taylor, in the class of 1929, because he had flunked out of Boston Latin School and entered West Point late. A cavalryman and former polo player, Harkins was a tall officer with a distinctive profile. Porter, who was somewhat in awe of Harkins, thought that he resembled John Wayne. Harkins had established himself as one of Taylor’s protégés soon after the death of his World War II patron, George Patton, and ever since he had been lofted upward by Taylor’s rise. In December 1961, Taylor had obtained for Harkins the fourth star of a full general by urging Kennedy to name him head of the new Saigon military command that was about to be created.

  By the code of the Army as Vann understood it, Harkins owed Taylor a particular forthrightness in all of their dealings. Vann had therefore been surprised when Harkins had transformed the lunch into a dog and pony show. He had been more surprised at Taylor, because Taylor had a reputation for having such an incisive mind. Taylor had allowed Harkins to pull rank and monopolize the conversation. He could have stopped Harkins and handed Vann an opening at any point merely by asking him a question and not letting Harkins interfere with the answer.

  Vann had misjudged Harkins’s intent in sending him the invitation. He had misjudged the extent of Taylor’s curiosity about the details of the war. Vann had not been invited to the lunch in order to disturb the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with problems. He had been invited to sit at the table on September 11, 1962, as an animated exhibit for General Taylor of how General Harkins was killing Communists in Vietnam.

  The following month, Vann’s ability to kill Communists for General Harkins was curtailed. The trouble began on October 5, 1962, three weeks after Taylor had returned to Washington, duly impressed with progress over the year since he had helped send the United States to war in Vietnam. The division launched an operation that day into a guerrilla-dominated district near the edge of the Plain of Reeds west of My Tho to search for the Viet Cong’s 514th Regional Battalion. The 514th was the home battalion for Dinh Tuong Province, of which My Tho was the capital.

  The helicopter landings occurred without incident. A forty-man platoon from the division Ranger company of Captain Thuong was advancing across flooded paddies toward a suspicious hamlet. The company was one of Ziegler’s probes in the larger scheme of maneuver to try to panic the guerrillas into running out into the open once more. Thuong had broken the company down into platoons to search as wide an area as he could. The hamlet in front of the platoon was a typical Delta settlement, built behind a large irrigation ditch that fed water to the rice fields. A substantial dike ran along the outer edge of the ditch to wall it off from the flooded paddies. There was a strip of trees and dense shrubbery growing on top of the dike. When the lead squad of the Ranger platoon got within about thirty yards of the dike, a fusillade crashed out. The Rangers could not see the guerrillas who were shooting them. The Viet Cong were firing from foxholes dug into the dike amid the shrubbery under the trees. The foxholes were camouflaged so that they were not visible from the rice field in front or from the spotter planes above.

  The majority of the forty Rangers were killed or wounded by the initial fusillade. The guerrillas then sortied out of the tree line along the narrow little dikes that crisscrossed the paddies to finish off the platoon. Only the bravery of the American advisor to the company, Capt. James Torrence, the twenty-nine-year-old son of an Army colonel, a husky officer who had played goalkeeper on the West Point varsity lacrosse team in the class of 1955, saved the platoon from being wiped out. Thuong happened to be with another platoon that day. Torrence rallied the survivors and the wounded who could still fire a weapon behind a low paddy dike and beat back several attempts to outflank them.

  Vann flew in with reinforcements right away, but other elements of the 514th Battalion in the vicinity of the hamlet supported the group who had ambushed the Rangers by shooting up the helicopters. Two of the aircraft were hit so many times while making their approach that they were forced to crash-land. One was the helicopter in which Vann was riding. His machine was torn by bursts of automatic-weapons fire that killed the U.S. Army crew chief who was manning the machine gun at the front exit and also killed or wounded most of the dozen ARVN infantrymen aboard. Vann escaped with a nick from a fragment of metal spun through the air by a bullet. He emptied the clip in his Armalite at the guerrillas and, shouting at the few soldiers who were unhurt, got them to help him pull the wounded from the helicopter. He then had to climb back inside—a Viet Cong rifleman was trying to kill him, the bullets were ripping through the aluminum shell of the fuselage around him again—to shut down the engine because the inexperienced pilots had lost their heads and abandoned the aircraft without cutting it off. He later sent Mary Jane a clipping of the front-page story from Pacific Stars & Stripes, the armed forces newspaper for the Far East. “31 bullets. I was in the 1st one shot down,” he scribbled next to the paragraph on the helicopters. When he reached the platoon he discovered that Torrence and six Rangers were the only men who had come through unscathed. Fourteen of the Rangers were dead and twenty others wounded. (Vann’s initial recommendation to award Torrence the Bronze Star for Valor was denied because of President Kennedy’s prohibition against combat decorations in 1962. It took Vann nearly three years to obtain for Torrence the medal he rightfully won that day. Torrence was to die as a lieutenant colonel, nine years after the ambush and once more working for Vann, in a helicopter crash in this same Mekong Delta.)

  The fighter-bombers struck with bombs, napalm, and rockets. The guerrillas did not panic on this day. They stayed in the shelter of the foxholes until they could withdraw in good order. They used other tree lines for concealment along their route of retreat. They carried their dead and wounded with them and picked up the expended cartridges around the foxholes so that they could reload the brass cases with fresh powder and bullets.

  Their performance seemed ominous to Vann. Some of the Viet Cong leaders were teaching their troops not to let fear overcome judgment, to maneuver, and to take advantage of the terrain. The time of easy killing was coming to an end. The 7th Division would have to begin to fight an infantry war. David Halberstam, who had just arrived in Vietnam as the correspondent for the New York Times, had been with a division battalion close enough to hear the shooting and to see the planes dive-bombing. Back at the Seminary that night Vann explained to him that the engagement showed how the guerrillas were learning to reduce the advantage American technology gave to the Saigon side. The most recent deserters from the Viet Cong had said the officers were stressing that if every man took the helicopters under fire, they could knock them down. The officers had made their point. The rank-and-file guerrillas would start to look at the helicopters with less awe in the future, Vann said. The incident would also raise the prestige of the Viet Cong with the peasants in the area of the battle. The peasantry called the helicopters “the great iron birds.”

  In all about twenty men from the division were killed in the fight and another forty wounded. The casualties were light by the measure of subsequent years of the conflict and were not grave by the standards of infantry combat in any war. They were serious in comparison to the negligible casualties the division had taken on previous operations when the guerrillas had conveniently run to the slaughterhouse.

  Cao reacted better than Vann anticipated he would
. He assured Vann he would not permit the incident to interrupt the pace of offensive operations. They would simply have to be “more prudent” in the future. Vann agreed on the need for caution where tree lines were concerned. From now on, every unit would have to keep skirmishers out in front to probe them. Vann told himself that Cao would learn from the incident and be less nervous the next time they got into a rough fight. He would remember that his career had survived this one. It would also be a while before the rest of the Viet Cong battalions learned to fight as well as the 514th clearly could. The massacre by the M-113s on September 18, only two and a half weeks before this ambush, would retard the learning process because it was bound to have worsened the general morale problem the guerrillas had been having.

  Three days after the ambush of the Rangers a Civil Guard company in another province ran into a company of guerrillas from a Main Force battalion and suffered eighteen killed. The Civil Guards gave as good as they took and counted the bodies of eighteen Viet Cong afterward. Cao was not upset. The action had not occurred during a division operation and thus he was not responsible.

  Then the calamity came. Cao suddenly called Vann to his house the next day. He was frightened. He said that he had been summoned by Diem to appear at the palace in the morning and explain the losses in both engagements. Vann had him briefed that night by Torrence and the advisor to the Civil Guards. They prepared explanations that Cao rehearsed before he flew up to Saigon at daybreak. Vann assumed that Cao would be able to defend himself adequately. The ambush had been the sort of lesson that soldiers have to learn the hard way in war. Cao had done nothing for which Diem could reproach him in the case of the Civil Guards.