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

by Sheehan, Neil

  McNamara gave the new president a self-serving excuse for the failure to perceive the erosion in the Saigon position and Viet Cong progress before the coup. He flew to South Vietnam again in the latter half of December for a two-day trip. In his report to Johnson on December 21 he blamed the Ngo Dinhs and their servants like Cao. McNamara said it was “my best guess … that the situation has in fact been deteriorating in the countryside since July to a far greater extent than we realized because of our undue dependence on distorted Vietnamese reporting.” His acceptance of July as the start of the decline was an acknowledgment of the analysis the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research had made the previous October to try to warn Kennedy. No effort was made by anyone at the top of the U.S. government to look back further than July and see what sort of reports Vann and Porter and Ladd and other prescient field advisors had been submitting prior to the coup.

  The men at the top could not afford to investigate Harkins, because McNamara and Taylor were nearly as guilty as he was. He was not relieved and sent home in disgrace like the general whom Patton had replaced after the rout at the Kasserine Pass in 1943. He was not officially blamed at all. McNamara and Taylor gradually undercut him in private, they gave him less and less protection from the public ridicule that built up against him, and they finally insulted him professionally by not inviting him to one of the strategy conferences in Honolulu, asking instead his new deputy, William Westmoreland, whom they sent out in January 1964. They did not remove him. They kept him in command in Vietnam for nearly eight months after the coup, until late June 1964. When they did bring him home he was taken to the East Room of the White House, where the president decorated him with the Distinguished Service Medal in order “to say on behalf of a grateful Nation, ‘Well done,’ to a good and faithful servant.”

  The plan for the major campaign of clandestine warfare, code-named Operation Plan 34A, was presented to the president at the beginning of January 1964 in a memorandum from Krulak. He referred to the raids as “destructive undertakings” and said they were designed “to result in substantial destruction, economic loss and harassment.” Their tempo and magnitude were intended to rise in three phases through 1964 to “targets identified with North Vietnam’s economic and industrial well-being.” The raids were to be prepared and controlled by Harkins’s headquarters rather than the Saigon regime. Johnson approved, and the strikes began on February 1, 1964, using Vietnamese, Chinese, and Filipino mercenaries. As the attacks unfolded, fast PT boats bombarded radar sites and other coastal installations, commandos were landed by sea to blow up rail and highway bridges near the coast, and teams of saboteurs were parachuted to try to destroy targets farther inland. Groups of Vietnamese trained in psychological warfare were also dropped into the night to attempt to undermine the confidence of the population in Hanoi’s rule. Northern fishing boats were seized. The civilian fishermen were kidnapped, taken South to be interrogated for intelligence purposes, and then released off the coast of the North again.

  Lodge was in a wider sea than he knew how to navigate after the coup. The situation in the South was probably irretrievable for any government in Saigon by November I, 1963, but “Big Minh” proved more talented at plotting a coup than governing. He was indecisive. Nothing was done to organize a coherent war effort. He and Don and Kim (they brought in General Dinh as the fourth member of their junta and gave him the Ministry of the Interior as they had promised) also suffered from the lack of roots among their people and other flaws common to the Tory mandarin class.

  Henry Cabot Lodge did not think, as Vann did, that the United States should take over the direction of the war. He had grown up with the surrogate system, had seen it succeed elsewhere, and believed that the Saigon government should retain command of its own armed forces and war effort. He stated what he sought in an unintentional description of the surrogate system in a cable prior to the coup. He wanted a regime that was on a par with one of “the very unsatisfactory governments through which we have had to work in our many very successful attempts to make these countries strong enough to stand alone.” He had not gained this minimum standard in Minh’s junta. He permitted Minh and his associates to be overthrown at the end of January 1964 in a second coup by a more ambitious general—Nguyen Khanh, thirty-six, another member of the Franco-Vietnamese elite.

  Khanh made an ostentatious start in his paratrooper’s red beret. (He had graduated from the French Army Airborne School at Pau in the Pyrenees in 1949 and been a company commander in the first battalion of parachutistes formed for Bao Dai’s army.) He soon showed himself as indecisive and incapable of governing as his predecessors. All of his energy went into counterintrigues against the generals and colonels who wanted to replace him as he had replaced Minh’s junta. “Every one of these sons of bitches drives by the palace and thinks about how he’d like to shack up in there with his mistresses,” Conein said in disgust at the plots and counterplots.

  The lack of coherence was just as bad on the American side. Lodge and Harkins hardly communicated, because there was so much rancor between them from the coup and because Harkins sheltered in new fantasies of victory to come as the Viet Cong built on their gains from the November-December offensive and absorbed more and more of the country.

  The Central Highlands went the way of the northern Delta and the rubber-plantation country in the spring of 1964. The CIA’s organizing work among the Montagnards in the Highlands and the efforts of the Special Forces teams operating there had been wasted because Diem had refused to grant the tribes any of the local autonomy that the minority peoples possessed in the North. He had insisted on “assimilating” them, precisely what the Montagnards did not want because it meant permanent victimization in a Vietnamese-dominated society. At the beginning of 1964 the Viet Cong also dispensed with clandestine control and started to assert themselves openly in the coastal rice deltas of Central Vietnam that had been Viet Minh redoubts during the French war. They began there to repeat the pattern of sweeping Saigon’s presence from most of the densely populated countryside as they had in the big Delta to the south. Lodge could hoodwink the commanding general and organize the American elements of a coup by himself. He needed the commanding general to organize the American elements of a war effort. After William Westmoreland arrived to be Harkins’s deputy, Lodge offered him an office in the embassy so that they could work together. A surprised Westmoreland replied that he was an Army officer and his boss was Harkins.

  As the intelligence advisors colored their maps with more red each month of 1964, those Americans most responsible retained their positions of influence within the circle of power or were promoted. Johnson’s confidence in McNamara became greater, perhaps, than Kennedy’s had been. Krulak was given the third star of a lieutenant general in early 1964 and put in charge of all of the Marines in Holland Smith’s ocean as Commanding General Fleet Marine Force Pacific. The Air Force laid bureaucratic claim to his job as watchman of counterguerrilla warfare to ensure that air power would gain a larger share and brought Anthis home from Vietnam to be the new special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities. No one reread Wheeler’s report on his mission of inquiry after Ap Bac. In late June on the advice of McNamara and Taylor, Johnson promoted Wheeler from chief of staff of the Army to chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Taylor gave up the chairmanship to replace Lodge in Saigon. (Lodge came home at the beginning of July ostensibly to try to stop Barry Gold water from gaining the Republican nomination and leading the party to defeat in the fall and actually because he was a tired and frustrated man who had run out of ideas. He recommended bombing North Vietnam.)

  Johnson had no less confidence in Taylor than he did in McNamara. An agreement between the Pentagon and the State Department that had made Harkins the equal of the ambassador was abrogated. Taylor went to Saigon with the full civil and military authority of a proconsul. Westmoreland succeeded Harkins as commanding general, but he was Taylor’s subordinate. Taylor was supposed to use his
unhampered authority to organize an effective prosecution of the war. Only Harkins had to retire, with honor, at the beginning of August.

  Colby was correct in predicting that Krulak’s major campaign of clandestine warfare would be a waste of lives. Operation Plan 34A was as ineffective as Colby’s small program. The raids did not intimidate the leaders in Hanoi, nor did they reduce the level of violence in the South. The officers in the Studies and Observations Group in Saigon (the covert section of Harkins’s and then Westmoreland’s headquarters), who readied the attacks and supervised their execution after Washington had approved each raid in advance, were never able to escalate the program to the destruction of industrial targets as Krulak had envisioned. The task was beyond the capability of their teams of Vietnamese and mercenary Asian saboteurs. Had they succeeded in sabotaging some industries in the North, it would not have made any difference.

  The sole tangible result of Krulak’s scheme was to facilitate the commencement of the larger war in which Krulak was to suffer the rage and despair of Vann. The 34A raids provoked the Tonkin Gulf incident of August 1964, the clashes between torpedo boats of Hanoi’s navy and U.S. Navy destroyers, which Johnson used to trick the Senate into giving him an advance declaration of war for the far higher level of force he had decided by then he was probably going to have to employ to bend Hanoi to his will. McNamara and Dean Rusk helped him by deceiving the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations about the clandestine attacks in secret testimony before the committee. The president thought that his deception was in the best interest of the nation, as did McNamara and Rusk in misleading the senators. Johnson did not want to incur the blame Truman had received for going to war in Korea without a Senate resolution, and at the same time he wished to avoid a public debate that might bring the Vietnam policy into question. He was sufficiently confident of prevailing to think that he could get by with the form of a declaration and that his trickery would not be discovered.

  The statesmen and military leaders of the United States did not understand that their Vietnamese opponents had passed beyond intimidation by 1964 and were willing to risk whatever punishment the greatest power on earth might inflict on them. Walt Rostow, the interventionist intellectual who was then counselor for policy planning at the State Department, assured Rusk in a memorandum in February that the Hanoi leaders were extremely vulnerable to the blackmail of bombing. Ho Chi Minh “has an industrial complex to protect: he is no longer a guerrilla fighter with nothing to lose,” Rostow said. At the urging of Lodge, Rusk arranged for the senior Canadian delegate to the ICSC to call at the prime minister’s office in Hanoi on June 18, 1964. The Canadian diplomat transmitted a secret message designed to reinforce what Washington was trying to communicate through the 34A strikes and preparatory military deployments it was making in Asia at the time and publicizing so that Hanoi would not miss them. He told Pham Van Dong that the patience of the United States was running out and that if the war kept escalating “the greatest devastation would of course result for the DRV itself.” (DRV means Democratic Republic of Vietnam, i.e., North Vietnam.) On August 10, after Johnson had also used the Tonkin Gulf incident as a pretext to conduct a preliminary round of bombing raids on the North and demonstrate his readiness to punish with the awesome force the United States possessed, the Canadian was sent back with a more detailed threat. He received the same response he had on the first occasion. “Pham Van Dong showed himself utterly unintimidated and calmly resolved to pursue the course upon which the DRV was embarked to what he confidently expected would be its successful conclusion,” a Pentagon historian wrote from the report of the Canadian messenger.

  By 1964, Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong and the other Vietnamese revolutionaries in Hanoi were prepared to lose the industries they had constructed with hope and sacrifice. They were prepared to risk having every city and town in the North bombed into rubble and worse. They were willing to risk anything. Ho and his disciples were not engaged in a “limited war,” Maxwell Taylor’s rationalization to find employment for an unemployed U.S. Army. They were committed to a total war. There were no limits for them. They could be physically destroyed and the will of their people broken if the United States turned its air power loose on the North without restraint, targeting the flood-control system of the Red River Delta and the population itself, killing millions as Curtis LeMay, the chief of staff of the Air Force, wanted to do. “Bomb ’em back into the Stone Age,” he said. The men in Hanoi were willing to take that risk too. The one thing that the United States could not do was to deter them.

  The Communist mandarins had strayed from their destiny in the mid-1950s when they had been distracted by the fashioning of their Marxist society in the North and in undoing the damage caused by the disastrous fanaticism of their Land Reform Campaign. The Southern cadres who survived Diem’s terror and disobeyed them in 1957 by rebelling against the Ngo Dinhs and the Americans had recalled them to their destiny. Men like Squad Leader Dung had kept them in the war. By 1964 it was too late to retreat, whatever the Americans threatened, whatever the Americans did. The men in Hanoi knew that if they did order the Viet Cong cadres to halt, they would lose control, because many would defy them and persist in a war that was being won. But they would never issue such an order. To do so would be to deny the central purpose of their lives. “Vietnam is one nation,” their constitution proclaimed.

  Their actions were the proof of their refusal to be deterred. They pressed ahead throughout 1964 with the creation of the second Viet Minh to complete the revolution in the South. The heavy weapons the trawlers had brought in on moonless nights made their first appearance in battle that spring. The 12.7mm Soviet-model antiaircraft machine gun was more accurate against helicopters and fighter-bombers than the Browning .50 caliber, because the gun rested on a tall and hefty mount that steadied the weapon and permitted the gunner to swing it more freely. The Viet Cong commanders staged a regimental-size action in April in the southern half of the Delta, a safe place to perform this first test of simultaneously maneuvering three battalions in combat. The fighting and training and organizing went on all through the summer and fall of 1964, and by the end of the year the Hanoi leaders were close to their goal. On January 2, 1963, the Viet Cong had been a hesitant force of approximately 23,000 regular and Regional guerrillas assembled in twenty-five battalions of varying strengths from 150 to 300 men and sundry provincial companies and district platoons. By December 1964, these 23,000 guerrillas had grown twice over and then some into an army of 56,000 confident and well-trained troops. The twenty-five catch-all battalions and assorted companies and platoons had been transformed into seventy-three uniformly strong battalions, sixty-six infantry units, and an additional seven heavy weapons and antiaircraft machine gun battalions. The infantry battalions were formidable task forces of 600 to 700 men each. (The JGS intelligence information had said in the summer of 1963 that the Viet Cong were moving toward 600-man battalions, but Halberstam, feeling so much pressure, had settled in his August 15 dispatch for a more conservative report that spoke of 400-man formations. They had seemed menacing enough at the time.) Most of the battalions had been organized into regiments complete with communications, engineer, and other combat support units, and the Viet Cong commanders were in the process of forming the regiments into divisions. This army of 56,000 fighters was backed by another 40,000 men in base-echelon training, supply, medical, and related services.

  Nearly six years of pain and dying had been necessary to raise the desperate remnant of 2,000 Viet Minh in the spring of 1957 to the 23,000 uncertain guerrillas of the day of Ap Bac. It had taken less than two years, with the help of Diem and the Americans, to form the sledgehammer battalions of December 1964.

  The hammers began to break the ARVN into pieces that month. On December 9 an unprecedented ambush occurred on a road in the rubber-plantation country forty miles east of Saigon. An entire company of fourteen M-113s was destroyed, all of the armored personnel carriers smashed into hulks by 57mm and 75mm
recoilless cannon. An L-19 and two of the Huey gunships that came to their assistance were shot down. Although no one in Saigon knew it, the ambushers were two battalions from one of the new Viet Cong regiments. At the end of the month the Viet Cong commanders baited the Saigon side into battle in the same area by repeatedly attacking a district center and overrunning the outposts protecting a neighboring hamlet of Northern Catholic refugees called Binh Gia. On December 31,1964, an elite Saigon marine battalion of 326 officers and men was decimated in a giant ambush amid the rubber trees near Binh Gia. Almost two-thirds of the Saigon marines were killed, wounded, or captured. Twenty-nine of the battalion’s thirty-five officers died. Another elite Saigon battalion was operating close by that day, one of the new Ranger battalions Westmoreland had formed to try to strengthen the ARVN. It suffered a worse fate in a second giant ambush and was literally wiped out. Nearly 400 officers and men became casualties. The two guerrilla regiments responsible for the ambushes were part of a still larger unit whose existence was also unknown to Westmoreland and the ARVN generals—the 9th Viet Cong Division, the first division of the second Viet Minh to become operational in the South.

  Only the intervention of the regular armed forces of the United States could now prevent the collapse of the Saigon regime and the unification of Vietnam by the men in Hanoi. The alternative that Vann had been convinced was not an alternative—the big American air and ground war in Vietnam—had become inevitable. Ziegler remembered what Vann would say when the subject came up of bringing the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps out to take over the war. It would be the worst possible move, Vann said. They had to find a way to make the ARVN fight, because waging the war with a Vietnamese army was the only course that made sense. The Viet Cong were so intermingled with the peasantry that the Saigon troops had difficulty distinguishing friend from foe. Think, Vann said, how much more difficult it would be for Americans. The American soldiers would soon start to see the whole rural population as the enemy. The Army and the Marine Corps would create a bloody morass into which they and the Vietnamese peasantry would sink. “We’d end up shooting at everything—men, women, kids, and the buffalos,” Vann said.