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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Ap Bac came at the most propitious moment and was a drama ready-made for the purposes of Ho Chi Minh and his disciples. It was exactly the sort of event they needed to infuse the building of a Viet Cong army with the patriotic emotion they had aroused and poured into the creation of the original Viet Minh. In March, with their assessment completed and their preparations made, they seized on the battle and turned Ap Bac into the rallying cry of the revolution in the South. Posters, professionally printed in color, began to appear in the Delta extolling the victory and the fighters who had attained it. The Hanoi Politburo had the Central Committee of the National Liberation Front announce the first three-month round of “the Ap Bac Emulation Drive” that was to continue for the next two years. Everything started to move ahead full speed. Harkins’s intelligence section thought that infiltration from the North during the 1962–63 southwest monsoon dry season was running at approximately the same level as the 1961–62 season, about 6,000 infiltrators on an annual basis. (The southwest monsoon dry season extends for seven months from October, right after the rains end and the trails through southern Laos and the Highlands become passable once more, until the monsoon returns in late April or early May.) Subsequent evidence showed that in an act of faith rewarded by Ap Bac, Hanoi had doubled the flow from an average of 850 men coming down the trails each month during the 1961–62 season to about 1,700 a month during the current season. The infiltrators were more former southern Viet Minh who had gone to the North in 1954, more “autumn cadres” to join the “winter cadres” who had survived Diem’s terror and launched the rebellion in 1957. Almost all of the infiltrators were military personnel who had been serving since 1954 in the Vietnam People’s Army, the regular army of the North. They would provide additional officers and noncoms for the second Viet Minh army; specialists in communications, intelligence, heavy weapons and other fields; and training groups like the one Cao had permitted to escape. A minority were civilians who had been in the Northern administration and who would now assist in expanding the secret Viet Cong government or practice specialties for which they had been trained like propaganda, mass organization, counterintelligence, and terrorism. The distinguishing characteristic of the infiltrators was that all of them were skilled. They and the veteran cadres awaiting them in the South were akin to the steel beams that form the framework of a modern building. The southern peasants being recruited as fast as possible were the concrete to raise the walls. Every cadre would be needed. In Kien Hoa Province, for example, just south of My Tho across the upper branch of the Mekong (Ben Tre was its capital), 2,500 young farmers volunteered in the spring of 1963. Diem’s province chief there was a favorite of the CIA officials involved in the Strategic Hamlet Program, because he had fought the French with the Viet Minh for almost four years before deserting, could talk the language of guerrilla warfare, and took pacification seriously. The Viet Cong cadres recruited most of the 2,500 volunteers they needed from Kien Hoa right out of his strategic hamlets.

  Skilled manpower was not all that was secretly entering the South at a quickened pace. Hanoi also decided after Ap Bac to begin smuggling in earnest the heavy weapons for a Viet Cong army. Prior to 1963, Ho and his colleagues had kept the smuggling of all weapons to a minimum because experience had taught them that to become viable a guerrilla movement must learn to sustain itself with captured arms. What was happening to the American arms illustrated a social truism that tends to confound an imperial power intervening in the affairs of a smaller nation: resources put into a society at odds with itself do not necessarily benefit the intended recipient, but rather end up aiding the faction best organized to profit by them. Crew-served heavy weapons could not be captured in the quantities needed, however, and so Hanoi had always intended to supply these. The second Viet Minh would need 12.7mm antiaircraft machine guns, the Soviet-designed equivalent of John Browning’s .50 caliber, to further intimidate the helicopter pilots and to force the fighter-bombers to fly higher and become less effective than they already were; 81 mm mortars to unnerve its Saigon opponents, who were not accustomed to being shelled (the 81 mm and an 82mm Soviet variant hurl seven and a half pounds of shrapnel and high explosive more than two miles); and 57mm and 75mm recoilless cannon to break open outpost bunkers and turn tanks and armored personnel carriers into hulks.

  There was a standing joke among American staff officers in Saigon about the Viet Cong porter who spends two and a half months toting three mortar shells down the mountain and rain-forest tracks of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He finally reaches a battle and hands them to a mortarman, who fires them off faster than the porter can count and says: “Now go back and get three more.” The joke was on those who told it. The trails through Laos were useful for marching men into the South; they were an inefficient way to smuggle heavy weapons and the ammunition for them. The efficient way was by sea in ocean-going fishing trawlers—one can handily transport 100 tons of arms and assorted munitions in a 120-foot steel-hulled trawler—that sailed to night rendezvous with guerrillas at any of the hundreds of small bays, lagoons, and river outlets along the South’s 1,500 miles of coastline. Prior to Ap Bac, the trawlers had made a few voyages to the South. After the battle, they started sailing a regular schedule.

  The voyage was often difficult and required superlative seamanship, because the coast of the Delta, where many of the landings were made, lies flat against the horizon with no identifiable promontories. There was the further handicap that the landings were made on moonless nights to reduce the risk of detection. Smuggling has always been a sophisticated profession in Asia, and the Vietnamese Communists had had a lot of practice at arms smuggling during the nine years of war against France. The trawlers loaded at one of the southern Chinese ports if China was supplying the arms and ammunition. (Chinese arsenals were retooled after 1949 to manufacture copies of Soviet weapons like the 12.7mm machine gun, and China had large quantities of American arms captured from the Nationalists and in Korea.) The skipper would sail down past Hainan Island and then tack toward the Vietnamese coast, staying out to sea yet close enough to gain anonymity among the thousands of fishing craft and coastal freight junks. The steel-hulled trawlers were of local manufacture and looked the same as the trawlers of the seagoing fishermen from the South. These smugglers also had removable registration plates. As soon as they got below the 17th Parallel the crew slid in a plate with numbers matching those of a similar trawler registered with the Saigon authorities. On the day of the landing the skipper, with only a compass to steer by, would set a course timed to take the trawler to a predesignated point near the shore in the middle of the night. A sampan carrying a pilot would be waiting there. The pilot would climb on board and guide the trawler into a bay or lagoon or up one of the river mouths to a spot where teams of Viet Cong porters were standing by. The trawler would be camouflaged while it was unloaded. On the following night—or a night later if the unloading took longer—the pilot would guide the skipper back out to sea and then switch to the sampan again while the trawler sailed free, to make another trip on the next moonless night. The antiaircraft machine guns, mortars, and recoilless cannon and the ammunition for them were transported inland and hidden carefully. Hanoi gave orders that they were not to be issued until units yet to be formed had been trained to employ them properly. Their first appearance was intended to come with surprise at the commencement of the next phase of the war.

  Ho and his followers were not alone in seizing on Ap Bac. The resident newsmen in South Vietnam also seized on it. We reacted as if we had been waiting for it because, beleaguered as we felt, we had been waiting for it. The contradiction between the press reporting of the war and the official version being propounded by Harkins and Ambassador Nolting had grown into an embittered confrontation.

  The controversy was another issue of these years that had its origin in World War II. There had been little to argue about once the shooting had started in that war. The threat to national survival was beyond question, and the generals and admirals
were sometimes brilliant and normally capable—or they were dismissed. Reporters became habituated to a role that was characterized more by support than skepticism. With some exceptions, the ability to stand aside and exercise independent and critical judgment of basic policy and of authority was lost as a result. In the postwar period the American press remained the most vigorous on earth, but where foreign affairs was concerned the reporting, while often gifted, was weighted toward the furthering of the anti-Communist crusade. When the press did cause trouble the argument was over detail, not substance. The news media were also being manipulated by government to an extent they did not realize.

  At the outset of the 1960s, the relationship was essentially unchanged. The military institutions, and those associated with the military in the running of American overseas interests like the State Department, were continuing to receive credit for a competence and perspicacity they no longer possessed. The reporters of the period were not accustomed to thinking of their military leaders and diplomats as deluded men, and the military leaders and diplomats were not accustomed to reporters who said that they were consistently wrong. The secrecy that shielded the meetings and written communications of the men at the top helped to perpetuate the false impression that they sought and weighed facts in their discussions. The secrecy that in the 1940s had protected the nation was by the 1960s concealing the fact that the system was no longer rational.

  The resident correspondents in Vietnam were also questioning detail, not substance. We thought it our duty to help win the war by reporting the truth of what was happening in order both to inform the public and to put the facts before those in power so that they could make correct decisions. (Our ignorance and our American ideology kept us from discerning the larger truths of Vietnam beneath the surface reality we could see. Professionally, we were fortunate in our ignorance. Had any reporter been sufficiently knowledgeable and open-minded to have questioned the justice and good sense of U.S. intervention in those years, he would have been fired as a “subversive.”) The confrontation had occurred because of the unprecedented consistency with which we were questioning details.

  Our critical faculty did not come from any genius. One of the regular complaints Harkins and Nolting made about us was that we were “immature and inexperienced.” Our youth and inexperience made it possible for us to acquire what critical faculty we were displaying. Vietnam was our first war. What we saw and what we were told by the men we most respected and most closely identified with—the advisors in the field like Vann—contradicted what we were told by higher authority. We were being forced at the beginning of our professional lives to come to grips with a constant disparity between our perception of reality and higher authority’s version of it, the opposite of the experience of the World War II generation of journalists.

  The contrast between what we saw and what authority saw was caught succinctly in an exchange in early 1962 between Nolting and Frangois Sully, a Frenchman who was then the correspondent for News week. The American war was not Sully’s first. He had emigrated to Indochina in 1949 and covered the French war as a stringer (a press term for a local correspondent without staff status) for Time. The errors of his own country gave him a sharp perspective on the errors the United States was making, and his reporting was considerably bolder than that of the other correspondents in early 1962. He enraged the ambassador with an article he did on Operation Sunrise, the first forced relocation for the Strategic Hamlet Program, accompanied by photos he took of the peasants’ homes being burned. Nolting sallied into him about it at a dinner shortly afterward.

  “Why, Monsieur Sully, do you always see the hole in the doughnut?” the ambassador asked sarcastically.

  “Because, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, there is a hole in the doughnut,” Sully replied.

  (Diem expelled Sully in September 1962, to the ambassador’s public protests and private relief.)

  Harkins and Nolting never ceased complaining about the rest of us, hoping that our editors would fire us and replace us with more cooperative types. They claimed that our articles were bizarre snapshots that did not reflect the wider reality of the war, as they could prove with the “big picture” they were able to assemble from the information flowing to them from a multitude of sources.

  Ap Bac was a big picture that discredited the big picture Harkins and Nolting were projecting. We exploited the battle as much as we dared for this reason, and when Vann, out of his anger and a shared interest, tacitly offered an alliance afterward, we entered it eagerly. Vann did not offer the alliance without pausing and calculating. Prior to Vietnam, he had never dealt with the press on a regular basis, and all of his institutional conditioning was to use the news media in the service of his superiors, not against them as he had been doing since the battle. He did not realize that the words of his after-action report and Porter’s commentary had run off the minds of the generals of the Joint Chiefs’ mission as rapidly as rain off a steep roof. He did know, from his sources on the Saigon staff, what Harkins was telling Washington, and he decided he was not going to let Harkins bar his way any longer. In his urgency to alert authority and prevent the catastrophe, he made up his mind to reach over Harkins’s head by influencing the reporters to speak with his voice.

  There were other American advisors and Vietnamese on the Saigon side who taught us important lessons about the war. We learned much from our own observations. Vann taught us the most, and one can truly say that without him our reporting would not have been the same. Because of Vann, Ap Bac had been, for better or worse, a decisive battle. Looking back at the other dramatic events that were to follow in 1963, one can see his will at work in the impact of our dispatches. He gave us an expertise we lacked, a certitude that brought a qualitative change in what we wrote. He enabled us to attack the official optimism with gradual but steadily increasing detail and thoroughness. He transformed us into a band of reporters propounding the John Vann view of the war.

  Vann was a natural teacher. He enjoyed the role. Indeed, he found it difficult not to impart something he had learned to others when he knew they were interested in his subject. He had already been providing us before Ap Bac with an education in “the essentials of guerrilla warfare,” as David Halberstam was to call Vann’s early lessons in his 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire. One of Vann’s most famous maxims, often quoted down the years, came from those first lessons: “This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle—you know who you’re killing.”

  The most prominent graduate of the Vann school on the war and the reporter with whom Vann formed his closest relationship in these early years was Halberstam of the New York Times. Through Halberstam, Vann was to achieve his greatest impact on events during this opening phase of the American war. What Halberstam learned from Vann was to help make him one of the famous journalists of his time. Halberstam was in turn to create Vann’s public legend with a long profile in Esquire magazine in November 1964 and the following spring with The Making of a Quagmire. (The magazine article was an excerpt from the book manuscript.)

  The two men were attracted to each other because they were uncommon spirits with uncommon backgrounds, but Vann’s singling out of Halberstam for special attention was also no more of an accident than his original decision to use the reporters to go over Harkins’s head. Halberstam’s dispatches were his surest means of reaching President Kennedy and everyone else in Washington. There were reporters and then there was the correspondent of the Times. Like The Times of London when a quarter of the globe had been tinted red with the scarlet tunics of a British monarch’s soldiery, the New York Times was the most prestigious newspaper in the world in this bright era of the American empire. President Kennedy read Halberstam’s dispatches with as much care as he did cables from Nolting and Harkins. He did not expect to find more truth in Halbe
rstam’s reports. He had faith in his ambassador and his general. Although the popular belief was that “sooner or later everything comes out in the New York Times,” anyone living within the secret world of the upper reaches of the American state in 1963 could not help but be aware of how much he and those around him regularly kept hidden from the Times. This did not lessen Kennedy’s concern with what the Times published. The reporters and editors of the paper tried to keep the Times honest. They did not knowingly allow themselves to be manipulated. Most of the paper’s readers believed that what the Times printed was the truth or a reasonable approximation of the truth. Halberstam’s reporting influenced domestic and international opinion, and no American government could afford to ignore it.

  The friendship between Halberstam and Vann grew quickly. Both were outsiders trying to become somebody in a society dominated by the WASP culture of the Northeast. Vann was conscious of his whitetrashy origins in Norfolk. Halberstam had been born in New York City the son of a doctor, but in the Bronx, not in Manhattan where the families of prosperous Jewish doctors lived, and he had grown up in the Bronx, in Yonkers, and in towns in Connecticut where his mother had worked as a schoolteacher to support him and his brother after his father had died prematurely of a heart attack when Halberstam was sixteen. He had an enduring sense of Jewish apartness. He was unable to forget that he was two generations from the ghettos of Poland and Lithuania. His insecurity showed, as Vann’s did, in his compulsion to be recognized and in his need to test himself.

  At twenty-eight, David Halberstam was on his second overseas assignment for the Times. He had volunteered to go to Vietnam in September 1962 after fourteen months in the Belgian Congo. (The Belgian Congo took the name Republic of the Congo after independence and was renamed Zaire in 1971.) That country had fragmented into chaos and civil conflict after Belgium had granted it independence in mid-1960. Halberstam had made an auspicious beginning of a career in the way he handled the dangerous and physically taxing job of making what sense was possible out of the melee. He had won an Overseas Press Club Award, and the Times had nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. (He lost out to the late Walter Lippmann, the doyen of columnists. Lippmann flattered him after his return by inviting him to lunch to question him about Africa.) Halberstam saw in Vietnam an even more significant story with which he could turn this fortunate beginning into a reputation as a leading foreign correspondent.