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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Ap Bac was mentioned only once in the twenty-nine pages of the report. This was to warn that the resident newsmen in Vietnam had become unwitting saboteurs of a fruitful policy:

  The unfortunate aftermath of reports of the fight at Ap Bac on 2 January 1963 is a prime instance of the harm being done to the war effort [by the resident correspondents]. Press members … insist that the stories were derived from United States sources. The latter is true, but only to the extent that the stories were based on ill-considered statements made at a time of high excitement and frustration by a few American officers.

  “The principal ingredients for eventual success have been assembled in South Vietnam,” the report concluded. “Now, perseverance in the field, and at home, will be required in great measure to achieve that success.”

  A few of the men who counted in Washington—W. Averell Harriman, then assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, was one—were skeptical of this reassurance. President Kennedy and his counselor-brother believed it, and so did McNamara, and Dean Rusk at the top of the State Department, and most of the rest of the civilian and military hierarchy. John Kennedy had confidence in the system that had given him a world to guide. Brute Krulak had also been on that mission, and Kennedy had seen Krulak lead in war and knew he was a man to be trusted.

  Another Marine general who had watched Krulak rise reflected long afterward that ambition might explain his behavior. He had a reputation for the flair at self-promotion he exhibited in sending John Kennedy the note and the bottle of Three Feathers. He wanted, of course, to consummate his career by adding the name Krulak to the roll of commandants of the Corps. The current commandant, Gen. David Shoup, who had won his Congressional Medal of Honor at Tarawa, was due to retire at the end of 1963. There was a chance that the president, out of esteem for Krulak, might pass over more senior candidates and name Krulak as the new commandant. The addition of Robert Kennedy to Krulak’s admirers had raised his prospects. If he could not attain his goal on this occasion because he was still too junior within the Marine hierarchy, the favor of the Kennedy brothers could give it to him on the next one. John Kennedy’s defeat of Richard Nixon had been extremely close in 1960, but by January 1963 he was a popular president. The common assumption was that he would easily win a second term. In 1967, it would again be time to select a commandant of the Corps, and by then Krulak would have seniority to his credit as well. Krulak’s colleague therefore thought he had probably not wanted to risk his career at this moment by challenging the established optimism and bringing down on himself the wrath of Maxwell Taylor, the fashionable military savant whom the Kennedy brothers and McNamara considered the ultimate source of wisdom on war, and that of Harkins, Taylor’s protégé. (Robert Kennedy named one of his sons Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.) “Brute Krulak is too smart not to have seen what was happening in South Vietnam,” his colleague said. “He could think circles around those Army and Air Force generals.” Ambition may have influenced Krulak’s behavior, perhaps unconsciously, but ambition alone was not an adequate explanation. For all of his ambition and gift for self-promotion, Krulak was not a cynical man and he did not lack moral courage. He was later to take a stand on the war that was to seriously jeopardize his chance of fulfilling his ambition.

  The mission of inquiry the Joint Chiefs sent to South Vietnam in January 1963 demonstrated that the military institutions of the United States were so overcome by their malady of victory that they could not respond to events and adjust themselves to reality even when reality took them by the shoulders and shook them. That a thinker and fighter of Krulak’s stature had also been so affected by the arrogance that he could not free himself when he knew that the president, the president’s brother, and the secretary of defense wanted him to find the truth and bring it back to them told, as only personal example can, the true dimension of the change in the once superbly led armed services of the United States. When John Kennedy had had Krulak appointed special assistant for counterinsurgency, Krulak had said to himself that he would learn this new kind of war by applying logic and imagination as he had in the past. He had instead taken the word of another big man, Paul Harkins, during his earlier trips to Vietnam and had allowed Taylor’s faith in Harkins to reinforce illusion. Despite the warning flares of Ap Bac, he clung to his preconceptions and helped to implant them in the other members of the Joint Chiefs’ mission. This was not difficult to do. They were inclined to listen to him anyway because of who he was and who he knew.

  President Kennedy would have been better served if he had remembered from his days as a junior officer in the Navy that the closer one gets to a fight, the more one learns of its essence. He could then have spared the public purse the expense of carrying this distinguished mission 20,000 miles round trip in a four-engine jet transport and simply sent for one of the helicopter men who had flown into the guns of the Viet Cong regulars at Bac. Any pilot or crewman would have done. His one qualification would have been an ability to sing, on or off key. After the battle a pilot or crewman—later no one could recall the author’s name—had composed a ballad about the fight. It was being sung in the evenings over gin and whiskey and vodka and cold beer in the clubs at Soc Trang, and at the Seminary, and at Tan Son Nhut. Ziegler first heard a sergeant singing it and made the man repeat it slowly while he wrote down the words for his diary. The verses were flawed by a number of factual inaccuracies. Ballads of battles composed by the men who fight them often do suffer from factual inaccuracies because of the confusion of war, but the inaccuracies do not detract from truth. The ballad—called “Ap Bac” and sung to the tune of “On Top of Old Smokey”—would have told the president what he needed to know:

  We were called into Tan Hiep

  On January 2,

  We would never have gone there

  If we’d only knew.

  We were supporting the ARVNs,

  A group without guts,

  Attacking a village

  Of straw-covered huts.

  A ten-copter mission,

  A hundred-troop load,

  Three lifts were now over

  A fourth on the road.

  The VC’s start shooting,

  They fire a big blast,

  We off-load the ARVNs

  They sit on their ass.

  One copter is crippled,

  Another sits down,

  Attempting a rescue,

  Now there are two on the ground.

  A Huey returns now

  To give them some aid,

  The VCs are so accurate

  They shoot off a blade.

  Four pilots are wounded,

  Two crewmen are dead,

  When it’s all over

  A good day for the Red.

  They lay in the paddy

  All covered with slime,

  A hell of a sunbath

  Eight hours at a time.

  An armored battalion

  Just stayed in a trance,

  One captain died trying

  To make them advance.

  The paratroops landed,

  A magnificent sight,

  There was hand-to-hand combat,

  But no VCs in sight.

  When the news was reported

  The ARVNs had won,

  The VCs are laughing

  Over their captured guns.

  All pilots take warning,

  When tree lines are near,

  Let’s land those damn copters

  One mile to the rear.

  One of the vestiges of the Geneva Agreements of 1954 was a tripartite organization called the International Commission for Supervision and Control. The commission had been created to monitor observance of the accords by all parties and had therefore been balanced by delegations from Communist Poland, anti-Communist Canada, and then neutral India, which held the chairmanship permanently and was supposed to referee. By 1963, the ICSC had long ceased to serve any purpose, but the delegations still maintained offices and living quarters
in Hanoi and Saigon, commuted back and forth on a special plane, and, because of their diplomatic status, circulated with relative freedom in both capitals. The delegates were thus thought to be informed about opinion on both sides of the war.

  The senior Polish delegate in 1963 was an inquiring man, a Jewish intellectual named Miecyslaw Maneli, who taught international law at the University of Warsaw when he was not on diplomatic assignment. He had helped the Vietnamese as a member of an ICSC inspection team in 1954, and they liked him. At a reception in Hanoi one evening he was taken aside by another man of inquiring mind with rough, homely features, the sort one would expect in a rice-paddy Vietnamese and not in the son of the chief secretary to the last of the Nguyen emperors to be deposed and exiled by the French—Pham Van Dong, Ho Chi Minh’s prime minister. There was no need for an interpreter; both men spoke French.

  “Tell me something,” the prime minister said. “The American generals are always boasting of how they are winning the war in the South. Do they believe it?”

  “Yes,” Maneli replied. “As far as I can discover they do.”

  “You’re joking,” Pham Van Dong continued, his eyes studying Maneli. “Perhaps they boast for propaganda, but the CIA must tell them the truth in its secret reports.”

  “I don’t know what the CIA tells them,” Maneli said. “All I can find out is that they seem to believe what they say.”

  “Well, I find it hard to believe what you say,” the prime minister said. “Surely the American generals cannot be that naive.”

  When the Vietnamese Communist leaders proceeded to exploit Ap Bac as a catalyst to transform the revolution in the South, they were to discover that Ambassador Maneli was correct. They were to discover more. They were to learn that their American opponents were supplying them with the wherewithal to fundamentally alter the balance of military force in South Vietnam, that virtually everything the United States and its Saigon ally were doing would facilitate their task.

  By January 1963, the United States had potentially furnished the Vietnamese Communists with enough weapons to create an army in the South capable of challenging and defeating the ARVN. The Americans had distributed more than 130,000 firearms—carbines, rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, BARs, machine guns, mortars, and recoilless cannon, along with copious quantities of ammunition and grenades and thousands of radios—to Saigon’s Civil Guard and Self-Defense Corps militia and to a menagerie of irregular units financed and equipped by the CIA. As the training and equipping programs for the Civil Guard, the SDC, and these irregular units were carried forward, the number of weapons potentially stocked for the Communists in the countryside was to nearly double by mid-1963, to approximately 250,000. The ARVN was another possible source of captured arms, of course, but its weapons were not conveniently arrayed in the outposts that Diem refused to dismantle and in vulnerable hamlets.

  With a modest portion of this quarter of a million American arms, Ho Chi Minh and his confederates could double or triple their main striking forces in the South, the regular and provincial guerrillas, estimated in January 1963 at about 23,000 men. With a more generous share of this weapons bonanza, the Vietnamese Communists could formidably enhance the Guerrilla Popular Army, the roughly 100,000 village and hamlet guerrillas who were the local enforcers and intelligence gatherers for the clandestine Viet Cong government and the reserve manpower pool for the regular and provincial units. The local guerrillas would have no further need for the homemade shotguns of galvanized pipe that were as much a threat to the user as to the target. For the first time in the war, every local guerrilla could be armed with a modern weapon. The end result could be an immense expansion of Communist control in the countryside and the turning of the Main Force and Regional guerrillas, now organized into units no larger than companies and battalions, into regiments and divisions.

  The basic infantry weapons for this second Viet Minh army were not all that was in place or was unwittingly being prepared. The soldiers to fill its ranks and the political climate within the rural population to sustain it with vigor were also being created by the constant bombing and shelling and by a still more enraging act: the forced relocation of millions of peasants into the new strategic hamlets. A peasantry already alienated by the exactions and indignities inflicted on it by the regime was being roused into a fury by an abuse beyond any it had previously experienced from this foreign-rooted government.

  Cao had shown the common sense to oppose the Strategic Hamlet Program. The religion of the majority of the Delta peasants was a meld of Buddhism, ancestor worship, and animism—devotion to the spirits that were thought to dwell in the streams, rocks, and trees around their hamlets. Cao pointed this out to Vann and explained that many of the Delta farmers had comfortable homes by their standards. His government would profoundly anger the peasants, he said, if it systematically destroyed their houses and made them leave their fields and the graves of the ancestors they worshiped. He was bold enough to tell Robert (subsequently Sir Robert) Thompson, the British pacification specialist who had played a major role in suppressing the Chinese insurgency in Malaya and had come to Saigon to be the brain truster of pacification in this war, that the scheme would not work in South Vietnam. (Cao then, in character, became one of the most enthusiastic herders into the barbed wire after Diem and Nhu informed him that the program was the centerpiece of their strategy and they expected him to support it.) The forced relocations were particularly massive in the Delta, not simply to move peasants out of guerrilla-dominated regions, but also to reduce many hamlets to a physical area small enough to be encircled with barbed wire and fortified. The larger Delta hamlets sprawled out along the canals and streams, often on both banks, for the best part of a mile or more. This meant that roughly half of the houses—starting at both ends and squeezing in toward the middle—had to be demolished in order to shrink the area to the desired size.

  Two groups of peasants were infuriated. The first consisted of the farm folk who had seen their houses torn down or burned and been forced to build new ones, inferior to their former homes, with their own labor and at their own expense. Those relocated to entirely new hamlets to take them out of areas controlled or contested by the Viet Cong were often subjected to the further indignity of having their homes blown up and burned down by bombs and napalm. Although the technique was an expensive way to destroy thatched housing, Anthis liked it because it kept up the sortie rate of his fighter-bombers and added more “structures” to the statistics reported to Washington. The corruption endemic to the regime worsened the relocation ordeal. The local officials customarily “sold” the peasants the galvanized sheet-metal roofing and other building materials provided free by the United States. Vann sent a report to Harkins on the entrepreneurship one province chief was exhibiting with the most common item provided gratis by the U.S. government—the barbed wire. “He was putting a price on it and then charging each peasant for the amount of barbed wire that was strung in front of his quarters,” Vann said, using the military term, “quarters,” for the new homes of the peasant families. (The practice turned out to be common.) The second group of angry peasants were those who were permitted to keep their original homes, but now lived in crowded conditions they found distasteful, with neighbors squatting in houses built on their land. Both groups shared a common anger at the long days of compulsory labor they had to put in digging a moat around the place, erecting the barbed-wire fence, raising a firing parapet for the militia, and cutting and planting sharpened bamboo stakes—the “pungee stakes” the Viet Minh had taught them to set out for the French and which the Viet Cong had had them conceal in foot traps to impede the Saigon troops. The more prosperous peasants paid bribes to evade the work. This placed a larger burden on the poor farmers. The prosperous ones still resented having to pay the bribes. What little the peasants received in the way of free medicine, Yorkshire hogs, and other amenities in exchange for this misery was hardly likely to persuade them to forgive their tormentors.

 
In the competition to kowtow to the palace, the province chiefs were erecting strategic hamlets willy-nilly everywhere. The regime had no priority as to which section of the country should be pacified first. The CIA and AID, which were financing the program, and Robert Thompson had wanted to pacify areas of strategic and economic value and then proceed to less important ones in the “spreading oil spot” (tache d’huile) method of pacification originated by the French. Diem and Nhu had decided to proceed simultaneously all over the South. Harkins’s staff believed that about half of the thousands of strategic hamlets reported constructed by January 1963 had gone beyond the rudiments of fortification to become functioning communities.

  The rub was for whose benefit the strategic hamlets were functioning. The Americans and Diem and Nhu were not gaining the communities of controlled peasants they sought. They were instead fostering temporary encampments of peasants motivated as never before to support the Viet Cong. By day the hamlet might appear to be controlled by the regime. The outward calm reinforced in Americans their false conviction that the Vietnamese peasants were essentially passive, seeking security above all else. The appearance of control existed because the Vietnamese had learned to be devious in combating the French and because officials on the Saigon side from hamlet chief to province chief lied to those above them on what they controlled in order to keep their jobs. The CIA and AID officials involved also fooled themselves with devices of constraint like the plastic-covered identity cards they encouraged the regime to issue to everyone. What actual control existed during the day was tenuous. The farmers, their wives, and the older children had to be released in the morning to go back and cultivate their fields, a walk of a mile to half a dozen miles from the strategic hamlet. They were out of sight and hearing until they returned at sunset. As soon as darkness came, the garrison of Self-Defense Corps militiamen retreated with the hamlet chief into their mud-walled fort at one corner of the place. The Viet Cong cadres would then often emerge to take charge. The new “volunteer” hamlet militia would also have taken shelter in the outpost for the night, or they might turn out secretly to be local guerrillas who were pleased with the five-shot pump shotguns and carbines and grenades the CIA had presented to them.