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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Lew Walt cared about the lives of his Marines. He flew to Khe Sanh the moment he received a report of the bloodletting on the hill, took a squad of riflemen, and crawled forward to find out for himself what was happening. Peleliu in the fall of 1944 had been the first of the Pacific islands where the Japanese had avoided foolish banzai charges and holed up in caves and pillboxes of steel-reinforced concrete and coral. Walt had been sent back to the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, after that battle and put in charge of the attack section, which developed a special course on how to overcome a fortified position. He therefore understood the limits of conventional bombardment against bunkers like the ones he now saw on Hill 881 South and the rashness of sending infantry to seize them. He ordered all of the Marines withdrawn from the hill and instructed the air wing to switch to 750-, 1,000-, and 2,000-pound bombs with delay fuses. The delay fusing meant that the bomb penetrated the earth before exploding. A miss was still effective, because the subterranean shock waves tended to collapse the bunkers from beneath. The concussion from the big bombs was disabling in itself (lethal when the hit was close enough), and the delay also gave the pilot time to fly clear.

  Walt intervened too late. The death toll in the Hill Fights was already ninety-nine. Close to half of the men had just been killed in this impetuous attack on 881 South, and this time the Marines were forced to abandon their dead in order to extricate the living. When they returned two days later to recover the bodies of their comrades and occupy the wasteland of cratered ridges littered with splintered trees, fifty of the bunkers were still intact and the Vietnamese were gone again. The survivors of the 18th NVA Regiment that had borne the battle until this point had retreated to Hill 881 North, where, unbeknownst to the Americans, they had been relieved by fresh troops of the 95th Regiment, which the NVA division commander had been holding in reserve.

  Lew Walt had also put his 1st Marine Aircraft Wing to work on Hill 881 North with heavy bombs, but 2,000-pounders could not blow away the perverse weather of this land. As the lead Marine company neared the top of that hill late on the same afternoon that 881 South was occupied, the men encountered brisk sniper fire. The Marines thought they could handle the snipers. They could not handle the tropical storm that enveloped them with forty-mile-per-hour winds and blinding rain. The battalion commander had to order a retreat. It was too dangerous to allow his Marines to plunge ahead into who knew what.

  The Vietnamese took advantage of the hiatus to launch a counterattack that night by two reinforced companies. The NVA troops broke through the perimeter of one Marine company and seized some previously unoccupied bunkers in a tree line. There, with automatic weapons and grenades, they traded their lives through most of the next day in a fight to the death bunker by bunker. More dying followed on subsequent days. By the time the two and a half weeks of fighting for the hills had ended, the bodies of 155 Marines had been carried to the graves registration point at Khe Sanh airstrip and 425 had been wounded, the worst Marine losses for any single battle of the war thus far.

  As quickly as they let it ebb in the west, the Vietnamese shifted the fighting to the eastern side of the DMZ, striking the Marine base at Con Thien with two battalions in early May. The shelling became the worst curse of this DMZ war, worse than the infantry assaults, worse than the ambushes of the supply convoys, worse than the raids by the sappers (a term Americans applied to NVA and Viet Cong commando-type troops) who stripped to their undershorts and crawled through the barbed wire to toss satchel charges into bunkers and artillery revetments. The shelling was worse because it was equally lethal but harder on the nerves. It too began to get serious in May when nearly 4,200 rounds fell on the Marine positions. The Vietnamese brought to bear all manner of artillery in the Soviet-designed arsenal—85mm, 100mm, 122mm, and 130mm guns; 120mm mortars that burst in an extremely large fragmentation pattern; and 122mm Katyusha rockets nine feet long. By July they were shooting 152mm guns at the Marines. The duds from these penetrated four feet into the earth.

  The Marines tried all manner of counterbattery measures to silence their opponents. Their batteries, Westmoreland’s Long Toms, and the guns of the Seventh Fleet cruisers and destroyers fired hundreds of thousands of shells. The A-4 Skyhawks and F-8 Crusaders precision-dive-bombed, and the B-52S and the Marine and Navy A-6 Intruder bombers, which lofted a respectable seven tons each, laid carpets in the tens of thousands of tons. Nothing gave more than a respite from these Asian artillerymen who counted in their intellectual heritage the seventeenth-century French genius of artillery and siegecraft Sebastien de Vauban, and who had had so much practice at digging and disguising against his direct military heirs who had forgotten his teachings.

  The Vietnamese built phony gun positions for the interpreters of the aerial photographs to find. They set off harmless explosive charges to simulate muzzle flashes for the Marine observers. They hid the real guns and mortars and rocket launchers in deep pits and in tunnels, fired the weapons at irregular intervals, and pulled the camouflage back over the weapon and its emplacement after each shot. A favorite time to shoot was in the late afternoon when the muzzle flashes were hardest to spot. A technique for the heavy mortars was to burrow a narrow shaft far down into the slope of a hill or ridge that looked toward a Marine position. Chambers were hollowed out at the bottom of the shaft for the mortar and its crew so that weapon and men would have the whole of the earth above as protection. The fired mortar round flew up and out the camouflaged opening of the shaft. A variation of the technique was often used for the howitzers. Gun and mortar and rocket-launching sites were found, of course, and the weapons and the crews smothered in bombs and shells. The arsenals of the Soviet Union, China, and the Eastern European countries produced a plentitude of artillery to resup-ply the Vietnamese, and Hanoi did not stint at replacing the crews. Soon, if one counted in the smaller 82mm mortars, half of the Marine casualties were resulting from shellfire and rockets.

  When Lew Walt went home in June 1967, at the end of two years, he took with him the lesson in how to deal with the bunker complexes. The lesson had to be relearned on almost every occasion by trial and error in American lives. The American military system of the 1960s provided for the unlearning rather than the learning of lessons. The one-year tour that Westmoreland had decided to carry over from the advisory era because he thought it would help morale meant that all ranks from colonel to private first class left the country by the time they were beginning to acquire some experience and perspective. The turnover was twice as fast, every six months, at the operating levels of battalion and brigade (regiment was the equivalent of brigade in the Marine Corps), where experienced leadership was needed most. The officer spent the other six months of his tour in a staff job or as an executive officer at a higher level. There were few exceptions, and only rarely could a man hold a command longer than six months by volunteering to extend his tour. (Often the turnover was faster than six months because the officer became a casualty or got sick.)

  The Army personnel bureaucracy tended to view Vietnam as an educational exercise and rationalized the six-month rule as a way of seasoning more officers for the “big war” yet to come with the Soviets in Europe and for more of these “brushfire wars.” The real reason, which held true for the Marine Corps too and which explained why the practice was derisively called “ticket-punching,” was a mechanistic promotion process and the bureaucratic impetus this created. To win eagles a lieutenant colonel had to punch a battalion command on his record. To gain a star a colonel had to punch on command of a brigade or a regiment. To keep an officer in a battalion or brigade or regimental command longer than six months was regarded as unfair to his contemporaries. Much the same system of ticket-punching held true for the general officers, although they were on eighteen-month tours. A general was seldom permitted to hold a division or corps command for more than a year, because so many other generals were waiting in line to qualify for another star. Walt had been an exception, because he was the senior Marine. Th
e Vietnamese could thus count on their American opponents to behave according to pattern.

  More than half of all American servicemen who died in combat in Vietnam from 1967 onward, 52 percent, were to die in I Corps. Of this 52 percent, 25 percent were to perish along or close to the DMZ itself in the two northernmost I Corps provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien. The remaining 27 percent were to die in the three lower provinces of I Corps, because these quickly reverted to big-unit warfare after Westmoreland forced Walt and Krulak to abandon their pacification strategy. Westmoreland’s success had the effect of uncovering the Marines’ rear and permitting the Viet Cong regulars and the NVA to operate freely once more in the populated rice deltas close to the coast.

  The same summer of 1966 that they lured Westmoreland to the DMZ, the Vietnamese moved the focus of their second border front in the Central Highlands where Moore had fought his battle. They drew the Americans farther north to the remote mountains of upper Kontum Province, right next to the terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply line and another region where the Annamites are at their most rugged. In 1967 the Hanoi leaders were able to open a third border front in III Corps along the Cambodian frontier. The Chinese made an arrangement with Sihanouk to ship the Vietnamese thousands of tons of arms, ammunition, medicine, and other supplies (more than 26,600 metric tons by the end of 1969) through the port of Sihanoukville. The Cambodian army received a small share of the weaponry, and Sihanouk and his generals were bribed. One of Sihanouk’s wives owned the trucking company that was paid to haul the weapons from the port to the Vietnamese depots.

  The statistics on where Americans died invariably demonstrated the extent to which Westmoreland convenienced his enemy. Nearly four-fifths of all Americans killed in action in Vietnam from 1967 onward, 77 percent, died in just ten of the country’s forty-four provinces. Five of the provinces were those constituting I Corps. Three others were the border provinces of Kontum, Tay Ninh, and Hau Nghia of Vann’s memory. The ninth province was Binh Duong, in between Tay Ninh and Hau Nghia and thus part of the Cambodian border front. The sole exception to the border pattern was the tenth province, Binh Dinh on the Central Coast, and Binh Dinh has its own mountainous interior that reaches back into the Highlands.

  Krulak found it hard to look at the casualty lists a secretary laid on his desk each morning in his office on the mountain overlooking Pearl Harbor. He had a memory for names and faces and was familiar with many of the company commanders and platoon leaders and with the noncoms and the “grunts” from his visits to the units. His three sons had followed him into the Corps. His oldest, an Episcopal clergyman, had chosen a military ministry as a chaplain; his two younger sons were regular Marine officers, company commanders. Their choice of a vocation gave a grim edge to his ordeal. At one point all three of his sons were in Vietnam together. His youngest, Charles Krulak, served two tours in I Corps as a company commander and won a Silver Star for Gallantry and three Bronze Stars for Valor. He was wounded twice, the second time on the same ridge where Capt. James Carroll, after whom Camp Carroll was named, died three years earlier.

  Had John Kennedy lived, Krulak thought, the war might have gone differently. Kennedy’s fascination with counterinsurgency and the lessons he would have learned by 1965 would have enabled him to grasp the importance of what Krulak was saying when Krulak had gone to the Oval Office with his strategy paper in hand. The president would have forced the Army generals to fight the war intelligently.

  If Krulak was right about Kennedy, if there was any substance to his musing, it was another of the many might-have-beens of Vietnam. In this war, 14,691 Marines were to die, three times as many as had died in Korea, a weighty loss in lives, a loss that weighed more heavily than the 24,511 Marines who had been lost during World War II. For Brute Krulak was to know, before most of these Marines of Vietnam had died, that all of them were to die in vain.

  As the Vietnamese Communists were shifting the focus of combat to the eastern side of the DMZ in May 1967, John Vann was engaged in a bureaucratic battle to help Robert Komer create the pacification organization that was to be known by the acronym CORDS, for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. The battle was one of the few bureaucratic contests of Vann’s career that turned into a relatively easy victory, because Westmoreland saw that it was not in his interest to resist and overruled his own staff. Komer’s bravado broke any further resistance.

  The U.S. Army MPs who protected Westmoreland’s headquarters didn’t believe in the beginning that this slightly balding man of forty-five in a bow tie and a three-button suit was the first civilian general. Komer convinced them, as he was to convince others, in Komer fashion. When Komer arrived at the MACV gate for the first time in the status symbol Westmoreland had provided him, one of three black Chrysler Imperials in Saigon (Westmoreland and his new military deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams, rode around in the other two), the MP on duty threw up the back of his hand in a halt signal. Komer was sitting in the backseat behind his Vietnamese civilian police driver and a Vietnamese police bodyguard. The MP walked over to the rear door of the Chrysler. Komer rolled down the window.

  “Sir, who are you?” the MP asked.

  “I’m the high panjandrum of pacification,” Komer said, and then identified himself.

  “Yes sir, I’ll look you up,” the MP said. He walked back to the guard post and read down his list of VIPs. He picked up the phone and called inside.

  The Vietnamese driver and bodyguard started to talk. Komer could tell that they were discussing the delay and that he was losing face. There were more important people in Saigon with whom Robert Komer was determined not to lose face. Komer spoke loudly whether his ever-present pipe was in or out of his mouth. He had laughed with satisfaction when he learned in 1966 while quarterbacking pacification from the White House that Lodge had nicknamed him “the Blowtorch” because of the heat he generated for progress. This morning, as the military policeman was embarrassing him, Komer had on his mind an article that Ward Just, the correspondent for the Washington Post, had written a few days earlier. Just had said that Komer might think he was tough in Washington, but he would discover things were different in the military aviary of Saigon. Komer was now a pullet among chicken hawks, Just implied, and the generals and colonels on Westmoreland’s staff were going to have him for lunch.

  Komer decided he was going to make Just a false prophet. He had noticed that the MP who stopped him had given an instant wave-through and a snap to attention and salute to a plain olive-green sedan that was ahead of his Imperial. The sedan displayed red plates with the two white stars of a major general.

  “That’s it, that does it,” Komer shouted to his assistant, Col. Robert Montague, as soon as he entered his office in the headquarters. “I want four stars put on my car. Westy has four stars. Abe”—the nickname of Creighton Abrams—”has four stars. I want four stars. Tell the chief of staff to put four-star plates on my car.” Montague picked up the phone and relayed Komer’s instructions.

  William Rosson was no longer the chief of staff at MACV. He had gone to Quang Ngai to command the provisional division Westmoreland had formed there. Maj. Gen. Walter Kerwin, Jr., an energetic artilleryman with a sense of the orthodox akin to a regimental striped tie, had taken Rosson’s place. “Dutch” Kerwin spared himself the humiliation of dealing with Komer on this occasion and sent a deputy, an Air Force general.

  “Sir, we’ve got a problem, we can’t put four-star plates on your car,” the Air Force general said.

  “Why not?” Komer boomed.

  The general explained that according to the regulations only a military man of four-star rank was entitled to a four-star plate.

  “Those regulations were written before anyone ever thought we’d be fighting a war like this. Put four stars on my car,” Komer said.

  The Air Force general had the temerity to suggest that the regulations ought to be taken seriously. He got a further browbeating from Komer. The exchange ended with the general
backing out the door saying, “Yes, sir.”

  He returned in an hour. “Sir, I think we’ve got a solution to the problem,” he said.

  “What is it?” Komer demanded.

  “We’re going to design a special plate for you. It has an eagle in the middle and four stars on it, one in each corner. It’s just like the plate the secretary of the Army has.” He looked at Komer and smiled tentatively.

  “Fine, put it on,” Komer said.

  “Yes, sir,” the Air Force general said with a less tentative smile.

  If the MPs at the MACV gate still had to puzzle at the oddball plate, they were awfully quick to give the wave-through and the snap to attention and salute, and in a short time they didn’t need to see an eagle and stars. They knew that the man in the back in the bow tie was Komer.

  When Lyndon Johnson had initially appointed him the White House watchman of the “other war” in Vietnam in the spring of 1966, Robert Komer knew virtually nothing about East Asia. It was the one part of the world he had never studied and where he had never traveled during a twenty-two-year career in government, begun in Italy during World War II as a corporal in Army intelligence. Komer, the son of a prosperous Midwestern family, had graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1942, returned right after the war to take an M.B.A. at Harvard Business School, and then decided that intelligence, not business, was his calling. As a senior analyst in the Office of National Estimates at the CIA, he had headed staffs on Western Europe, on the Middle East, and on the Soviet Union. After John Kennedy’s election and the offer of a job on the National Security Council staff from McGeorge Bundy, he had served as the White House man for the Middle East. Africa had later been added to his responsibilities, and he had risen to become Bundy’s deputy.