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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Porter did not have a single redeeming comment to make. He warned in his conclusion that there was no sense fooling themselves about the leadership of the Saigon army. “Many of the weaknesses enumerated above are characteristic of virtually all of the senior officers of the Vietnamese armed forces,” he wrote.

  To start the process of reformation, Porter recommended that Harkins obtain Diem’s consent to “a series of joint US/VN conferences or seminars at the national level for all Vietnamese general officers, the key members of the corps and higher staffs, and division and brigade commanders” and their advisors. At these meetings the Americans would “openly and frankly discuss” with their Saigon counterparts what needed to be done. The agenda for discussion and subsequent reform that Porter then laid out again encompassed practically every attribute of a respectable army, from “principles of shock action” to a reform that had immediate application to Cao and Tho—”the necessity to eliminate ineffective commanders.” In short, they would have to begin from scratch.

  General York, whose escape from Cao’s “friendly fire” at Bac lent a certain keenness to his estimate of ARVN leadership, obtained the first indication of how Harkins viewed the battle and how he would react to Vann’s report and to Porter’s judgment and recommendation. York had also decided that Ap Bac illuminated so many flaws in the Saigon side and was so portentous of the future that it merited a special report to the commanding general. He assumed that his personal analysis would prove useful to Harkins because it would carry the credibility of his record as an infantry combat leader in World War II and the knowledge of guerrilla warfare, rare among general officers in the U.S. Army, that he had acquired in Malaya. He returned to the Seminary a few days after the battle, questioned Vann again, and interviewed a number of the advisors. His analysis for Harkins made, briefly, many of the same points that Vann and Porter laid out in detail. He had only two copies typed, one for his files and the original, which he personally delivered to Harkins. That same night the two men happened to have dinner together. Harkins said that he had not yet had an opportunity to read York’s report, but he was looking forward to doing so. Harkins then started talking about Ap Bac. As York listened he began to realize with astonishment that Harkins had apparently been serious when he had claimed, in another encounter with the reporters a week after the battle, that Ap Bac had been a “victory” for the Saigon forces. Harkins seemed to have truly convinced himself that when everything was taken into account, Ap Bac had been a gain for his Vietnamese wards. York said that Harkins was not going to like his report, because he had reached a different conclusion. Harkins looked at him for a moment and passed on to another subject.

  We reporters would also have been astonished had we heard what York just had, because none of us thought that Harkins actually believed the Saigon side had won the battle. “I consider it a victory. We took the objective,” he had said to us. We had assumed that his remark was another maladroit attempt to put the best face on things. We took it for granted that he privately viewed the war with a modicum of reality, however flawed with false optimism his vision might be.

  We were wrong. Harkins had genuinely believed that the Viet Cong were still in Bac and Tan Thoi hamlets when he said to Halberstam and Arnett, “We’ve got them in a trap and we’re going to spring it in half an hour.” Despite Vann’s having told him that they were gone, he had believed Cao’s lie that they were still there and that Cao was going to snare them. In the same way he now really believed that the battle had not been a defeat for the Saigon troops. He was convinced of the truth of these assertions that angered us because we interpreted them as an insult to our intelligence. All of us—and Vann, Porter, and York—had been profoundly underestimating Harkins’s capacity for self-delusion. He was not the only one of his rank and station whom we had been underestimating.

  Harkins was to become an object of ridicule by the time he returned to the United States to retire in a year and a half. To “pull a Harkins” was to become a slang term among younger American officers in Vietnam for committing an egregiously stupid act. Harkins was to be regarded as an aberration among American military leaders, a fatuously optimistic General Blimp. In fact, as the years were to reveal, Harkins was a representative figure of the American military hierarchy of the 1960s, a man whose values and preconceptions were shared by the majority of the armed forces leadership. Harkins only seemed to be an aberration because he was the first to be noticed. The years were to demonstrate that it was Vann and Porter and York who were members of an atypical minority.

  Time magazine, whose editors, under Henry Luce’s guidance, almost invariably portrayed American generals in heroic dimension in the 1960s, had favorably compared Harkins to George Patton, his World War II patron, in a profile in May 1962. The two men had been outwardly dissimilar—”Patton, a shootin’ cussin’ swashbuckler; Harkins, quiet, firm, invariably polite.” Nonetheless, Time continued, quoting an anonymous acquaintance of Harkins, “‘I really think that inside he and Patton were the same.’”

  The two men were dissimilar outwardly and inwardly. Patton had not led simply by charging up to the front. The “Old Blood and Guts” image that Time was perpetuating was one he had helped the newsmen cultivate (he coined the nickname himself) because it appealed to his neurotic ego and he thought the troops liked it. Patton had been a reflective man, an extraordinarily well-read student of wars and military leaders, ancient and modern, with a curiosity about his war to match his energy. No detail had been too minor or too dull for him, nor any task too humble. Everything from infantry squad tactics to tank armor plate and chassis and engines had interested him. To keep his mind occupied while he was driving through a countryside, he would study the terrain and imagine how he might attack this hill or defend that ridge. He would stop at an infantry position and look down the barrel of a machine gun to see whether the weapon was properly sited to kill counterattacking Germans. If it was not, he would give the officers and men a lesson in how to emplace the gun. He had been a military tailor’s delight of creased cloth and shined leather, and he had worn an ivory-handled pistol too because he thought he was a cavalier who needed these trappings for panache. But if he came upon a truck stuck in the mud with soldiers shirking in the back, he would jump from his jeep, berate the men for their laziness, and then help them push their truck free and move them forward again to battle. By dint of such lesson and example, Patton had formed his Third Army into his ideal of a fighting force. In the process he had come to understand the capabilities of his troops and he had become more knowledgeable about the German enemy than any other Allied general on the Western Front. Patton had been able to command with certainty, overcoming the mistakes that are inevitable in the practice of the deadly art as well as personal eccentricities and public gaffes that would have ruined a lesser general, because he had always stayed in touch with the realities of his war.

  Harkins lacked curiosity about his war. He had not refrained from going to Bac because he was a physical coward: he never walked through the rice paddies. When Horst Faas, the German photographer for the Associated Press, asked to take pictures of him in the field with ARVN troops, Harkins said: “I’m not that kind of a general.” The fact that he did not go down into the muck to learn what was happening reinforced his aversion to bad news. His habit of seeing the Vietnamese countryside from the air was symptomatic of his attitude. His mind never touched down in Vietnam.

  Harkins’s laziness and complacency and chronic staff-officer habits did not, however, explain similar attitudes toward the war by generals who did not share his personal characteristics. These were the fighting generals with combat records who were to come to Vietnam after him. They were to exhibit abundant energy and to venture constantly into the field. They were to shoot guerrillas and get shot at themselves, and a few of them were to be killed, but most of them were to operate from assumptions that were essentially the same as those of Harkins. They were always to see what they had thought they would se
e before they ever got near a battlefield in Vietnam.

  By the second decade after World War II, the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the American armed forces had become professional arrogance, lack of imagination, and moral and intellectual insensitivity. These are the kinds of traits that cause otherwise intelligent men like Harkins to behave stupidly. The attributes were the symptoms of an institutional illness that might most appropriately be called the disease of victory, for it arose out of the victorious response to the challenge of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The condition was not limited to the armed services. It had also touched the civilian bureaucracies—the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the lesser civilian agencies—that joined the armed services in managing American overseas interests for the president. The attitudes had spread as well to the greater part of the political, academic, and business leadership of the United States. World War II had been such a triumph of American resources, technology, and industrial and military genius, and the prosperity that the war and the postwar dominance abroad had brought had been so satisfying after the long hunger of the Depression, that American society had become a victim of its own achievement. The elite of America had become stupefied by too much money, too many material resources, too much power, and too much success.

  In February 1943, the U.S. Army of World War II had met the Germans for the first time at the Kasserine Pass in the mountains of western Tunisia. The Americans had run. A British general had had to take charge to stop the rout. Eisenhower had telephoned Patton, who was in the occupation backwater of Morocco, to fly over and meet him at Algiers airport. Their conversation at the airport had been hurried. Eisenhower had told Patton to rehabilitate the demoralized troops and prepare to counterattack the Germans. He had scribbled a note in pencil giving Patton authority to assume command of the four American divisions in Tunisia the moment he landed there, and Patton had taken off again directly for the front. Eisenhower had followed up his note with a memorandum of instructions. Patton was not to keep “for one instant” any officer who was not up to the mark. “We cannot afford to throw away soldiers and equipment … and effectiveness” out of unwillingness to injure “the feelings of old friends,” Eisenhower had written. Ruthlessness of this kind toward acquaintances often required difficult moral courage, Eisenhower continued, but he expected Patton “to be perfectly cold-blooded about it.” The first old acquaintance to go had been the general who had commanded at Kasserine, a man whom Eisenhower had rated, prior to the start of the serious shooting, as his best combat leader after Patton. This general had been shipped home to spend the rest of the war exercising his top-notch paper qualifications as an elevated drill instructor.

  The Eisenhower who had written that memorandum was a general with four new stars who had been a lieutenant colonel three and a half years earlier in the army of “a third-rate power,” to quote the description of its newly appointed chief of staff, Gen. George Marshall. It had been an army inferior in numbers to the army of Portugal, its best armor twenty-eight obsolescent tanks built between the wars. The Eisenhower who had written that memorandum had also been a nervous man, because if Patton did not restore Eisenhower’s damaged reputation for selecting able subordinates by winning a victory for him against the Germans, General Marshall was going to take back Eisenhower’s freshly issued title of Commander in Chief of Allied Forces. The recipient of the memorandum, Patton, was an amateur boxer who had trained superbly, but who had yet to fight his first professional match. That first match was going to be in the ring at Madison Square Garden against the world heavyweight champion: the Afrika Korps of “the Desert Fox,” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Field Marshal Rommel was succeeded by another German general as commander of the Afrika Korps just before Patton fought it, but Patton did not know that at the time. Eisenhower and Patton and their United States Army of 1943 had been small men in a world of big men. Their personal survival, the survival of their army, and the survival of their nation had been at stake. And they had been afraid that they might lose.

  Twenty years after the debacle at the Kasserine Pass, it was hard to find a general in the U.S. Army who worried that he or his colleagues might squander resources and waste the lives of soldiers. The junior officers of World War II, now the generals of the 1960s, had become so accustomed to winning from the later years of that war that they could no longer imagine they could lose. (The failure in Korea they rationalized away as the fault of a weak civilian leadership which had refused to “turn loose” the full potential of American military power against China.) They assumed that they would prevail in Vietnam simply because of who they were.

  By telling Harkins the truth about what had happened at Bac and urging him to demand that Diem reform his army before Diem’s regime and the United States were defeated, Vann and Porter and York were asking Harkins to submit a “fail report.” No such form existed among the tens of thousands printed by the U.S. armed forces. A Vietnamese Communist leader could report that he was failing to attain success without necessarily jeopardizing his position, as long as he was seeking alternative means to overcome his problems. His system encouraged self-criticism, criticism of colleagues and subordinates, and analysis of what the Party called the “objective conditions” that confronted the revolution in any given situation. The Vietnamese Communists were fighting a war of national independence and survival. They had to be able to record dark hours and to learn from them if they were to live to see sunny ones. The post-World War II American system was receptive only to the recording of sunny hours. All reports were by nature “progress reports.” Harkins’s weekly report to the Joint Chiefs and McNamara, for example, was entitled “Headway Report.” He had no “Lostway Report” for a contingency like Ap Bac.

  In keeping with this mentality Harkins had, long before Ap Bac, devised a strategy that he was convinced was bringing him victory in Vietnam. It was an attrition strategy that relied on a plentitude of American-supplied resources and firepower. Harkins thought that he was building the Saigon forces into a killing machine that would grind up the Viet Cong the way Patton had minced the Wehrmacht in Europe. He was monitoring the effectiveness of his strategy with measurements the Army had evolved out of World War II and elaborated in Korea. Numbers that Vann regarded as meaningless or indicators of counterproductive activity had great significance to Harkins. Harkins focused on the body count for this reason, deriving it from an older measurement the Army continued to use in Vietnam called the “kill ratio,” the number of friendly versus enemy killed in action. He focused for the same reason on the total number of operations reported launched, on the number of aircraft sorties flown and the tonnage of bombs dropped, and on the training and equipping of additional troops to increase the momentum of this drive to victory that he imagined he had set in motion. The generation of Eisenhower and Patton had not fought World War II simply by building a killing machine and turning it loose in the expectation that it would bring them victory. They had been generals of maneuver. Attrition had been only one component of their strategy. Time and the bureaucratization of the officer corps had distorted the memory of how World War II had been won. Harkins’s strategy was a fantasy of the past, but the fantasy was real because it had been institutionalized and he and most of his fellow generals had faith in it.

  Harkins had described his strategy to Maxwell Taylor in a briefing at his Saigon headquarters during Taylor’s September 1962 visit. Had Vann been present at the briefing he would have understood why Harkins overrode everything he attempted to say at the subsequent luncheon for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Harkins stressed in the briefing what he called his “Three M’s”—men, money, and matériel. Lots of all three were being fed into the war. The ARVN was being expanded by nearly 30,000 men and would soon be fielding two new infantry divisions. The Civil Guard and the SDC were undergoing similar expansions. The United States was currently spending $337 million a year in military and economic aid, not counting the cost of it
s expeditionary corps, in contrast to $215 million the year before. The quadrupling of the fighter-bomber sortie rate, which so upset Vann because of the concomitant rise in civilian casualties, was another statistic that Harkins boasted about. There was no doubt that the Communists were feeling the weight of his Three M’s, Harkins assured Taylor. He pointed to the steadily increasing body count.

  By the end of 1962, Harkins said, all of these programs he had set in motion would mature. He described how he would then mesh them into a coordinated campaign to achieve final victory over the Communists. Harkins’s plan was code-named Operation Explosion. Phases I and II, Planning and Preparation, were in the process of completion, and he had presented the concept to Diem. The detonation date was mid-February 1963. This was when “Phase III—EXECUTION” would begin: a nationwide offensive by these sharply honed Saigon forces and their reinforcing American elements, an offensive that would continue nonstop until the Viet Cong had been broken as an organized force and ground down to a fraction of their current size. “Phase IV—FOLLOW-UP AND CONSOLIDATION” would end the war by mopping up the guerrilla remnants and restoring the authority of Diem’s regime throughout the country.

  The adjunct of Harkins’s attrition strategy, the Strategic Hamlet Program, was also going well, Taylor had been told at the September briefing. The isolation of the guerrillas from the peasantry that the Strategic Hamlet Program was achieving would enable Harkins’s killing machine to mince the Viet Cong faster when Phase III of his nonstop offensive began in February. More than 2,800 strategic hamlets had been built by the date of the briefing. The senior embassy officer overseeing the plan said that the Country Team, an American executive council consisting of Harkins, Ambassador Frederick Nolting, Jr., the CIA station chief, and the heads of the other U.S. agencies in Vietnam, was confident that the program had progressed too far for the Viet Cong to interfere with it successfully.