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

by Sheehan, Neil

  There was obviously no satisfaction to be drawn from the catastrophe, but Halberstam and I and Vann’s other friends regretted that he was no longer in the Army to obtain at least the professional vindication he deserved now that the truth was so large some of it would have to be conceded sooner or later. The letter we had received from him in July 1963 had said that he was going to retire at the end of the month to accept a job as an executive with the Aerospace Division of Martin-Marietta in Denver. He said that the Army personnel officers refused to give him the troop-command assignment he was entitled to after his classes at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces ended in June 1964, and that he could not face the three to four years of elevated clerkdom they insisted he would then have to accept in a logistics job at the Pentagon. He wrote us a capsule account of his campaign at the Pentagon and the cancellation of his briefing for the Joint Chiefs three hours before he was to give it. He sent a similar letter to the advisory team at My Tho. His emotion showed at the end of the letter to his captains. He signed it, “Your brother officer, John.” We, and Vann’s Army friends, all assumed that he was retiring in disgust after being refused a hearing before the Joint Chiefs so that he could gain the freedom to speak out about the war in public. He confirmed our assumption in press interviews after he left the Army by saying that this had been the real reason for his retirement.

  The failure of his briefing campaign at the Pentagon would not have hurt Vann’s odds at overcoming the clash with Harkins had he subsequently behaved himself by taking up his studies at the Industrial College until ruffled dignity settled and events began to vindicate him. He had gained the disapproval of Wheeler, who was to succeed Taylor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but one of the numerous admirers he had simultaneously gained was Harold Johnson, who was to succeed Wheeler as chief of staff. With the chief of staff as an admirer, one can afford some ill will in other quarters. Vann’s retirement raised still higher our admiration for his moral courage.

  Vann’s moral heroism became the core of his legend. An account of the cancellation of his briefing for the Joint Chiefs first appeared at the end of September 1963, two months after he retired, in a long, frontpage article with a photograph of Vann and Cao in the New York Journal-American. Vann provided the details and the photograph to an editor of the paper who had heard rumors about the incident and telephoned him in Denver.

  Halberstam, whose reporting was vindicated by a Pulitzer Prize after his return to the United States in December 1963, gave the real life to Vann’s legend by putting it into print prominently, first with his profile of Vann in Esquire magazine in November 1964, and then with his book The Making of a Quagmire in 1965. When Halberstam flew out to Denver in the spring of 1964 to interview him for the book, Vann recounted his crusade at the Pentagon and how Krulak and Taylor had aborted the briefing. He said that he could not bear to stay in the Army after that disappointment. The denouement was the perfect high-drama ending to the epic of Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, the officer of surpassing career promise, who had renounced a general’s stars to alert the nation to the truth about the war in Vietnam because he was also a man of surpassing principle. The ending appealed as well to Halberstam’s hero-villain style of journalism. While writing the book, Halberstam thought of Vann’s retirement so much in terms of a resignation of protest that he used “retired” and “resigned” interchangeably:

  So he retired and took a job with an aircraft company in Denver. … He had … done what no other American official had done in that land where there was such a disparity between theory and practice: he had thought that the failures and the mendacity were serious enough to merit a resignation, the traditional American protest.

  Vann emerged as the one authentic hero of this shameful period. The heroism stayed with him, the heroism of the David who had stood up to the Goliath of lies and institutional corruption. It was repeated in subsequent articles written about him. It was cited in 1969 when the secretary of state, then William Rogers, presented him an award from the Association of the Foreign Service for “extraordinary accomplishment involving creativity, intellectual courage and integrity.” If you asked a friend why he had left the Army, he would reply that Vann had resigned in protest.

  The memory of Vann’s moral heroism was the foundation of his reputation in later years in Vietnam for candor and willingness to grasp the brambles of fact however they might hurt. Even though he always drew back from condemning the war itself, this reputation for truth-telling lent credibility to what he had to say about the war to those who might differ with him on the fundamental issue of whether the United States ought to be waging war in Vietnam at all. The memory was in the chapel the day he was buried at Arlington. His old professional enemies and friends like Ellsberg who had since come to oppose his war—all paid homage to a man who had given up what he loved most, the Army, rather than be a party to lies and delusions.

  The story wasn’t true. He had not renounced his career and retired in protest in order to warn the country of impending defeat. He did have moral courage. He had defied Harkins, fought to gain acceptance of the truth at the Pentagon, and had his briefing for the Joint Chiefs canceled by Krulak and Taylor just as he was within reach of the hearing he wanted, but these were not the reasons he left the Army. He lied to Halberstam and manipulated him, doing so naturally with the same talent he sought to work on Cao. He had deceived everyone in Vietnam. We had interpreted his career recklessness as self-sacrifice and had worried about our stories hurting him because we had thought that he was sacrificing a general’s stars. He had wanted us to think this. He had wanted his captains like Ziegler and his enlisted men like Bowers to think this too—otherwise he would not have told Ziegler he was worried that he might have spoiled his prospects in the Army by defying Harkins. All the time he was deceiving us he knew that he had no career to ruin and no stars to throw away. He had known before he went to Vietnam in March 1962 that he would probably retire after he came home. He had meant more than Halberstam could have realized when he said at the airport farewell with his small, tight smile: “You never hurt me any more than I wanted to be hurt.” He also said more about himself than he meant to say when he told the Army historian: “We had also, to all the visitors who came over there, been one of the bright shining lies.”

  He had left the Army because a dark compulsion in his personality had led him to commit an act that he was convinced would bar him forever from promotion to general. There was a duality in the man, a duality of personal compulsions and deceits that would not bear light and a professional honesty that was rigorous and incorruptible. Two years before he had marched through the swinging doors of Dan Porter’s office in the old French cavalry compound in Saigon, he had nearly been court-martialed because of his secret vice. By maneuvering with cunning he had managed to get the charges dismissed. The system through which the Army maintained an officer’s personnel record had permitted him to hide the incident from everyone in Vietnam. There was much else about his life that he always kept hidden or repressed.

  He had known that he could not hide the black spot from a board considering colonels for promotion to general officer. A promotion board would have access to his entire record, including a file with his name on it that was preserved permanently by the criminal investigation division of the Military Police and a copy of the pre-court-martial proceedings that might still exist in the records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General. He had tried and failed before going to Vietnam to steal those records and destroy them in order to remove the stain. He had been convinced that any promotion board that saw that stain would decide the Army could not afford to risk having an officer accused of his crime among its generals. He had sworn to himself when he was a boy that he would go places and be somebody. He could not stand being relegated to Number Two. He had to be in on the scramble to be Number One. Once he had determined that he was barred from the opportunity to climb to the top in the Army, he told himself that he would have to leave when he
was still young enough at thirty-nine to begin another career.

  Yet while he left the Army for his own hidden reasons, he did not want to leave and he regretted leaving as soon as he had done so. He felt rejected in Denver, as if the Army had cast him out. The feeling was one he knew well. He had been born an outcast. His mother had not wanted him, nor had she had a rightful name to give him, nor any love.

  BOOK FIVE

  ANTECEDENTS

  TO

  THE MAN

  HE WAS ILLEGITIMATE. His father’s name was not Vann, it was Spry, Johnny Spry, and he was named John Paul after him. His mother’s name was Myrtle Lee Tripp. She was just short of nineteen years old when she gave birth to him on July 2, 1924, in a run-down brick mansion that had been cut up into apartments in an old section of the port of Norfolk, Virginia. He was the offspring of one of the few genuine attachments his mother was to have in a lifetime of shoddy liaisons until the effects of alcoholism and a beating when she was drunk one night on the Norfolk beachfront carried her off at the age of sixty-one.

  Johnny Spry was in his mid-twenties in 1924 and drove a trolley car. His formal name was John Paul, but everyone who knew him called him Johnny. Even if he had wanted to marry Myrtle Tripp someday, it would have been inconvenient. Johnny Spry already had a wife, a three-year-old son named John Paul, Jr., and another son of nine months when the boy who could not bear his family name was born. This John Paul was a “love child” in the phrase of the South of his birth, a euphemism that was never to help alleviate his shame.

  When her son was four, Myrtle Tripp met Aaron Frank Vann, a city bus driver. He had migrated to Norfolk from a farm in North Carolina just as Myrtle and most of her family had done in her childhood. She decided to marry him after she became pregnant with the daughter who was to be Vann’s half sister, Dorothy Lee. The marriage was to endure in form, if not in fact, for twenty years, and Frank Vann, as he was called, eventually adopted the boy Myrtle brought to him.

  John Paul Vann was an original white Southerner. His lineage reached back centuries to the beginnings of the South, and his birth was in keeping with his ancestry: the majority of his forebears had been social illegitimates.

  The Puritans who settled in New England to escape religious persecution were a community of farmers, craftsmen, and scholar-preachers. The settlements they founded tended to attract others in their image, skilled and literate people who joined in starting the village-to-town-to-city civilization that was to make America an industrial colossus.

  The white settlers of the South were mainly the condemned and the desperate of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Ireland, with a passel of troublesome Scots tossed in for good riddance. Tobacco was the principal reason for their coming. It had been discovered being grown by the native inhabitants of the South, the Indians, who were being exterminated. Britain and the rest of Europe were demanding the new narcotic in such quantities that the slave traders could not bring over those other original settlers of the South, the black men and women of Africa, fast enough to meet the labor needs of the colonial planters along the coasts of what are now Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

  Ireland was a garrisoned colony then, with a truculent peasantry kept in check by the gun and the noose. The countryside of England was a battleground of class warfare. The gentry were expanding their estates by gradually expropriating the common lands, ruining small farmers, evicting tenants, and driving down the survival wages of agricultural laborers. The poor and the victimized fought back by organizing strikes and burning barns and mills and with riots to loot grain storehouses during the recurrent famines. The atmosphere encouraged lawlessness of every kind. In the cities there was the added peril of dying from one of the many diseases bred by the filth. Life was so precarious in eighteenth-century London that deaths outnumbered baptisms by two to one.

  The gentry of Britain took advantage of the planters’ need for labor to rid themselves of their undesirables. Parliament passed statutes authorizing judges to commute death sentences to exile (the euphemism was “transportation”) to the colonies for life. With men and women being hanged for rioting to get something to eat or stealing half a pound of tobacco (approximately 200 offenses were punishable by hanging), there was no dearth of sentences to commute. Transportation was also made a general punishment for noncapital offenses. The minimum sentence was for seven years, the usual number these unfortunates had to labor in the tobacco fields to repay the planter the cost of having a “convict servant” shipped across the Atlantic in chains.

  Except for the chains, the greater part of the other white migrants to the South were hardly distinguishable from the convict men and women. The coast of the colonial South, with its malaria and yellow fever and cholera, was not a place that would attract the settlers who went to New England. The majority of those who came were the orphans, the ruined farmers, the evicted tenants, the destitute rural laborers, and their women and children. After hunger had so bereft them of hope that they were willing to face the terror of the two-to-three-month voyage in the frail sailing ships and the grimness of work in the plantation fields, they sold themselves to a planter to pay for their passage to America. Their bondage was called “indenture.” It was the same as that imposed on the convicts but for a shorter term, normally about four years. They too were chattel property of the planter for the duration of their contract. They could be pursued and returned by force if they ran away, and they could be whipped if they refused to work.

  Half to two-thirds of all the white people who came to the South prior to the Revolution were convicts or indentured laborers. Their good fortune was that they were not brought as the black people were to labor in permanent bondage. A few had sufficient ambition and cunning to complete their terms of servitude and go on to acquire large lands of their own, to buy slaves, and to bring more of their compatriots across the Atlantic to cultivate their tobacco. These planter families prospered sufficiently over the generations to gain learning and manners and to mimic the British gentry who had cast out their ancestors. They became the grandees of the old South and the cavaliers of the Confederacy.

  The crowd of farmers beneath the planter aristocrats remained more representative of those who got off the ships. These original white Southerners were a distinct people among the many peoples who were to make up America. The social conditions in the mother country that influenced who would be forced to emigrate and the harshness of their introduction to the new world gave them certain qualities that set them apart. They tended to be a hardy people. The weaker among them perished on the ships, in the fields from the long days and bad food, or from the epidemics. They also had a kind of wildness. The Victorian era and industrialization tamed the masses of Britain. Nothing ever quite tamed these people whom Britain had discarded. The hellfire-and-brim-stone fulminating of their Methodist and Baptist and Presbyterian preachers could not burn away a strain of hedonism. There was a strain of violence in them as well. It showed in the value they placed on physical prowess, on a man’s ability to ride and shoot and use his fists, and in their impetuous love of a fight. They followed their planter captains eagerly into the Civil War, and amid defeat and occupation by a Northern army they drew solace from how bravely they had fought. To outsiders there seemed to be something about them that harked back to what they must have been like in that turbulent Britain of long ago.

  John Vann’s ancestors did not go far from the coast where they had landed. Little information is available about the Spry side, from which Vann seems to have obtained most of his physical traits and his high nervous energy. (Johnny Spry rarely slept more than four or five hours a night, and he had to keep himself busy all the time he was awake.) Clarence Spry, Vann’s paternal grandfather, followed the familiar job-seeking route from North Carolina to Norfolk. He married a young woman named Olive Savells, whose people had been farmers and fishermen in the tidewater country just below Norfolk.

  His mother’s family, the Tripps and the Sm
iths, seem to have given Vann much of his character, especially his will to dominate. He appears to have taken after his maternal grandmother, Queenie Smith, and his mother’s older sister, Mollie, both independent and venturesome women. From his Aunt Mollie, a handsome woman with long legs, he also got the two physical traits that gave a hint of his character—his narrow, bird-of-prey eyes and the straight mouth with the firm upper lip.

  There have been Tripps and Smiths in the piney lowlands of northeastern North Carolina since the region was first settled during the latter half of the 1600s and the early 1700s. The Tripps and Smiths who were Vann’s immediate forebears had their lands in Pitt County near the modern city of Greenville, where the coastal plain picks up from the swampy tidewater country and stretches out in a level and gently rolling expanse to the foothills of the Appalachians. Their holdings were not large enough to rank them as planters, but they were big farmers, with hundreds of acres and slaves to raise their tobacco and then the cotton that followed as the source of wealth in the South. The sandy loam of the upper coastal plain of North Carolina is one of the finest soils in America. Almost anything will grow well in it, and the Tripps and the Smiths prospered until the Civil War.

  Defeat brought Northern exploitation that ground Southern farmers down into poverty. A worldwide depression in agricultural commodities began in the 1880s and continued through the turn of the century. The price of cotton fell from fourteen cents a pound in 1873 to four and a half cents a pound by 1894. The value of tobacco plummeted too. The North took advantage of the situation to shackle the conquered South into the classic relationship of an agricultural colony to an industrialized power. The Northern-dominated Congress passed prohibitive tariffs to keep competing European manufactures out of the country. Northern industry bought cheap raw materials from the South and then pegged the prices of the manufactured goods it sold there artificially high.