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

  No one could remember how Mary Allen produced the stockings, whether she stopped at a store or they drove back home for another pair. In any case, Myrtle did a quick change before entering the church.

  It was John who held up the ceremony for half an hour. He and Joe Raby got lost driving Mollie’s car to the chapel of the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. The neo-Gothic chapel was a romantic setting, and like many Rochester brides, Mary Jane had chosen to be married there rather than at her own church. The bridal consultant whom the Aliens had hired to oversee the flower arrangements and to tend to Mary Jane’s gown and other fine points of the wedding became convinced she had a jilted bride on her hands and almost lost her self-control. Mary Jane’s pastor from Westminster Presbyterian, who was to perform the ceremony, kept the guests calmer than he was by announcing that they would have to wait a bit because the groom had been delayed. Mary Jane recalled that she seemed to be the only one who was not worried. She was certain that she and John were meant for each other and that he would come to marry her. The chapel was a difficult place for a stranger to find, and Vann’s knowledge of Rochester was limited to the downtown area. The rehearsal the day before had been held at Westminster Presbyterian. He and Joe finally managed to hail a motorcycle policeman. The arrival of the groom was announced by a siren.

  Despite the rush their son-in-law-to-be imposed on them with his sudden-turn ways, the Aliens gave their daughter a wedding that was decidedly not an Atlantic City, Norfolk, affair. The altar was lit by candelabra and flanked on both sides by large baskets of pink and white gladiola set against a background of palms. Mary Jane wore the long-sleeved gown of white satin she had liked best at Sibley’s Bridal Shop. It had a heart-shaped neckline traced by rows of seed pearls. Her necklace was a string of pearls. The skirt of her gown swept behind her in a long train; her full-length veil fell back from a tiara of orange blossoms. Doris was the maid of honor in rose taffeta. Three of Mary Jane’s girlfriends were bridesmaids, and the bride and her attendants carried bouquets of pink pompons, roses, daisies, and snapdragons. Jess, in a formal double-breasted suit with a striped silver morning tie and a carnation in his lapel, gave the bride away.

  The groom and the other servicemen among the guests in the chapel lent the wedding its World War II aura, for the war was still in the air even though Japan had surrendered. John was elegant in the semidress uniform of an Army officer of the period. It was called “pinks and greens” and consisted of a long belted jacket of dark green and contrasting trousers of tan cavalry twill with a pinkish hue. Mary Jane noticed that John was nervous during the ceremony and the reception that followed when they cut a four-tiered wedding cake. His nervousness shows in the pictures taken by the photographer the Aliens hired to record the wedding. Perhaps he was a bit intimidated by all of this middle-class pomp and satin and worried whether Mollie would succeed in keeping his mother in line. The photographs also show that he was a happy young man, pleased with the prize he had gained in this young woman. Mary Jane looked a prize worth winning that day. She was a pretty bride. The dark red lipstick women wore in the 1940s emphasized the symmetry of her mouth and her fine, even teeth. The fullness of her brunette hair, set in graceful waves, called attention to her hazel eyes and matched, in its sheen, the satin of her gown.

  John Vann had learned a lot in two and a half years in the Army. The most important thing he had learned was that he was a different person in this uniform. When he had this uniform on he wasn’t little Johnny Vann or LeGay or what’s-his-name, the bastard kid of that good-timer Myrtle down at the end of the bar. He was Lieutenant John Paul Vann of the U.S. Army Air Corps. The Army and the war had freed him in a way that Ferrum could not do from that trash-filled house in Norfolk, and he wasn’t ever going back into it again. No matter what he did in Norfolk, if he became richer than the millionaire oyster dealer who had bought him his first good clothes, he still couldn’t achieve the respectability he felt as a second lieutenant in the Army. In Norfolk, somebody would always remember and point. In this uniform, no one could tell. He was indistinguishable from decent folk as long as he kept it on.

  The proof was this woman he had gained for a wife. Her parents had accepted him because he was an Army officer. They would never have let him have her if they had been able to see through that uniform and recognize who he was and where he had come from. (Mary Allen did learn a few years later that John’s family were not her kind of people, but Jess shielded her from the details. One day when the Aliens were passing through Norfolk on a trip, Jess stopped by the police headquarters and, using his credentials, got the police to tell him what they knew. He was so upset by what he found out that he refused to let Mary know what it was. The police apparently gave him an earful about Myrtle. Jess and Mary did not hold John’s beginnings against their son-in-law. Rather, they decided they had to admire him for going so far.)

  He intended to go much further, and the Army seemed to him the place in which to do it. He had also discovered during these two and a half years that he was smarter than most of his contemporaries, and tougher too, and that he could work twice as hard as they could, three times as hard if necessary. He could become one of those awesome colonels with eagles on their shoulders and the power of command over lines of men and machines. He might someday wear the stars of a general. It seemed hardly possible that anything so grand could happen to him, but he could hope.

  Spry sensed what the Army meant to him. After John bought Mary Jane her engagement ring in April 1945, he went down to Norfolk for a triumphal visit. He appeared at Spry’s house in his pinks and greens to better display his new lieutenant’s bars and navigator’s wings. Spry had been in the Coast Guard during World War I but had not risen beyond ordinary seaman. Spry mentioned the visit to another son who was also in the service and who intended to return to Norfolk after the war. “We won’t be seeing much of Johnny around here anymore,” Spry said.

  He and Mary Jane had been married only a few months when he was transferred from Kansas to Guam to recover B-29s from Saipan and other Pacific island bases and fly them to storage parks in Hawaii and the United States. She went back to Rochester to stay with her parents until his return. He wrote her from Guam in the spring of 1946 to say that he had decided to give the military a trial as a career and was taking an examination for a permanent, or Regular Army, commission. His original commission was in the Army Reserve, and under it he could be demobilized at any time. He said that he could finish his college education free at government expense and could always resign his commission later.

  Mary Jane was pregnant at the time with their first child, Patricia. He had not consulted her before making his decision. She wondered about it at first. Most people she knew would not have considered Army service a fit way to earn a living and raise a family, but she felt that the choice of career had to be his and she wanted him to do something he enjoyed. She did not see why a military career for him should deny her the family life she envisioned the marriage as bringing. She could adjust to the periodic separations as she was adjusting to this one. Vann received his Regular Army commission in July 1946. It was his first victory on the road he had set himself. Ten reserve officers had applied for every Regular Army commission available.

  Educational credentials are important for an officer who wants to move ahead. Vann got himself sent to Rutgers University in New Jersey in the fall of 1946 on a program available to new Regular Army officers for a two-year course in economics to complete requirements for his bachelor’s degree. Mary Jane made what home she could for the two of them and little Patricia in one of the tiny trailers the university provided for married students. Then in May 1947 he suddenly announced that he was suspending his studies and transferring to the infantry. The Air Corps was in the course of breaking away from the Army to form an independent Air Force under the National Security Act of 1947. Vann was one of the relatively few Air Corps officers who elected to stav with the Army. He guessed accurately that pilots, not navigators,
were going to dominate an independent Air Force and that he would have a better chance of advancement in the infantry. It had room for maneuver, and the opportunity to command men would give him a challenge on the ground that would be greater than that of piloting a plane in the air. If and when another war came the infantry would also mean maximum risk and maximum possibility of distinction in combat and promotion.

  That June he sold their first car, a worn Chevy coupe he had bought for $200, because its radiator boiled over constantly and he did not think it would carry them far on the journey they had to make. He invested in a Ford of more recent vintage. Mary Jane laid eight-month-old Patricia in a traveling crib on the backseat and they set out for Georgia and the Infantry School at Fort Benning, where John was to take the three-month course every infantry lieutenant receives in the fundamentals of leading a platoon and a company in battle. He had also decided to take parachute and glider training so that he could command airborne troops. Again he had not consulted her, and again she had not objected. She had not expected life with him to be normal. She had expected it to be an adventure, and so far the adventure had been a good one.

  The odor of drying fish startled her. There were thousands drying on open-air racks along the docks. She had never smelled anything so strange and pungent before, nor had she ever seen oranges and reds as rich as those in the sunset across the harbor as the ship maneuvered up to the dock in Yokohama in April 1949. John was waiting at the end of the gangplank to take charge of her life again, to kiss and hug her and lift the children in his arms. He had asked her if she would join him in Japan when he had been sent there after nine months with the American occupation forces in Korea. (With some exceptions, military families were not permitted in Korea, even though no one of importance anticipated a war there.)

  Vann’s career as an officer of infantry had not begun auspiciously. While his instructors at the airborne training center at Fort Benning had been so impressed with him they had urged assigning him to a regular paratroop unit as a platoon leader, the personnel officers at the Pentagon had ruled otherwise. They had shipped him to Korea to be a special services officer—the man in charge of service clubs and entertainment for the troops. His job in Japan was also hardly one that an ambitious infantry officer would choose, although his duty station was certainly pleasant. He was the purchasing and contracting officer at the headquarters of the 25th Infantry Division in Osaka, another port city on the main Japanese island of Honshu, 240 miles southwest of Tokyo. His task was to procure supplies through the Japanese administration that served the occupation forces and to manage seized buildings and other real estate the division was using.

  She was glad she had not known how harrowing the journey to Japan would be or she might not have had the courage to say yes. The Army of the late 1940s regarded travel in comfort as an officer’s right and travel by his family as an unnecessary nuisance. When John had sailed the Pacific to Korea he had shared a ship’s cabin with another officer. They had played bridge and read to pass the time. After her train trip across the country with Patricia, who was now two and a half, and John Allen, their first son, born on Christmas morning of 1947 in the garrison hospital at Fort Benning, she had waited three weeks in Seattle to board a troop ship, the USS Darby. She was the only officer’s wife to sail on this trip, but the distinction entailed no privilege. She spent the three weeks in Seattle living dormitory-fashion in a barracks with the wives and children of enlisted men. A measles epidemic broke out. Neither Patricia nor John Allen caught measles, but John Allen came down with an ear infection and tonsillitis. There was more dormitory living on the Darby in a compartment with several enlisted families. The door to the communal toilet was of heavy steel and slammed shut whenever the ship rolled in the trough of the waves. One child lost a finger to it. The banging of the door kept Mary Jane in fear that one of her children was going to be similarly maimed. She held on to fourteen-month-old John Allen with one hand while restraining Patricia in a harness and leash with the other. The boy continued to run a high fever and to suffer from diarrhea aboard ship. Most daylight hours during the two-week voyage she seemed to be either in the ship’s dispensary with him or waiting with him on line to get into the dispensary.

  Mary Jane’s anger over the hardships disappeared in her surprise at the sights and smells of this country and at the Japanese themselves. She had expected to find wicked little monsters who were surly under American rule. She saw cheerful and industrious people, the porters at the Yokohama docks smiling at the children as they hustled the luggage into a taxi John hired to drive them to the railway station for the train to Osaka and their new home.

  He took her to a paradise on a hill in a suburb south of Osaka. She could not believe at first that she was to be the mistress of such a house, she who had trimmed her dreams to a trailer and then to a cottage outside Fort Benning that had formerly been a tenant farmer’s shack. She did not yet understand that to be an American in Japan in these years of the occupation was to be a demigod. A mere first lieutenant was entitled to a mansion, and it was acquired simply by evicting the Japanese owners. This mansion had, in fact, previously been given to a warrant officer without children. He and his wife had found it too big and so they had passed it to John in order to move to a smaller place.

  The house was white. It was built near the base of the hill at a level spot where the slope evened out briefly. A high stone wall at the front and sides gave privacy, reserving the perfection of the azalea bushes and ornamental trees that landscaped the grounds for the eyes of those who dwelt within. The gate opened to a path of flat stones in irregular shapes fitted together to form a walk that curved to the house entrance. The gardener had placed a sentinel beside the three steps leading up to the front door of dark wood. The sentinel was a cultured Japanese pine tree called a mugo, this one tall, with a gently crooked trunk and boughs that reached out in sculptured spreads of gray-green needles. When John opened the door, Mary Jane was stopped again by more of the beauty these Japanese created with such sureness. The servants—another privilege for a conqueror’s wife—had filled a vase with azalea blossoms and placed it on a stand at the far end of the entrance alcove to welcome their new mistress. On the wall behind the vase a scroll of calligraphy was hung. The red of the azalea blossoms seemed to illuminate the Chinese characters sketched on the scroll in jet-black ink and made them stand out more sharply on the yellowed parchment.

  The interior of the house was U-shaped. The right wing was Westernized, with a carpeted dining room, a living room, and bedrooms on the second floor equipped with European-type plumbing. The left wing, where the kitchen was located, was traditional Japanese, the floors covered with straw tatami mats. The open space between the two wings had once been an interior garden. The warrant officer and his wife had converted it into a patio and hung floodlights for entertaining at night. Mary Jane was glad to have it, because for the first time in their marriage, she needed a home in which she could entertain. At Fort Benning their social life had been limited because John had been a transient as a student. Now, with John an officer on the 25th Division staff, she had added responsibilities.

  Japan was Mary Jane’s initiation into Army garrison life and into a group the Army quaintly referred to as the “distaff side”—the corps of officers’ wives. She discovered that she liked this life and membership in this special circle for the same reasons that she had enjoyed growing up in the middle-class world of Rochester. The hierarchy and the structured, busy, group-oriented atmosphere appealed to her and gave her a feeling of security and place. The officers’ wives had a sense of belonging to a service of their own, because responsibility for most of the social activities of the garrison and its community and welfare work fell to them by tradition. The women liked the arrangement because it gave them authority and something to do. The Army liked it because the government got their talents and labor free. The belief that a wife’s attitude and behavior reflected on her husband and either helped or hindered h
is career also contributed to this sense of membership in an inner group. The rank structure within the coips of wives paralleled the official one. The commanding general’s wife headed it. The wives of the more senior officers acted like den mothers toward the younger women, coaching them in the same way that older officers were supposed to counsel their juniors. Mary Jane found the wives of the major and the lieutenant colonel who were John’s superiors to be warm and caring women, and she responded in kind. She was ambitious for John and wanted to help him advance. She tried to be just as “ready, willing, and able” to entertain with cocktail parties and dinners in their paradise on the hill and to participate in arranging the dances and bridge parties and in the fund-raising and volunteer work for organizations like the Red Cross as John was at his duties for the division. She had bought a book at Fort Benning entitled The Army Wife, and she studied it to be certain that she behaved properly.

  She decided her initial suspicion that the Army was an unfit place in which to raise a family had been unwarranted. The twin demands of family and garrison activities kept her days and nights filled, and the opportunity to observe this remarkable country and people in the most privileged of circumstances gave life a distinction it could never have had at home. The Army appeared to her like an international bank or some other large firm with overseas branches. Her husband was required to work abroad periodically, and in return he and his family were rewarded with adventure and this gracious existence. One of the American women with whom she made friends in Japan was the wife of the Coca-Cola representative. He was about John’s age, and he and his wife lived as comfortably as the Vanns did. John was adapting to occupation duty by learning golf. By Christmas 1949, Mary Jane was pregnant with their third child, Jesse.

  Paradises, it seemed, were nevertheless mixed as well as difficult to reach. Her house on the hill was infested with cockroaches, centipedes, and rats. The Army exterminators fumigated the insects, and Mary Jane learned to live with those that persisted. She found the rats much harder to tolerate. She was not aware of them at first because they lived inside the walls and normally waited until the house was still at night to come out and forage. She learned of them when she got up at dawn one morning to get John some breakfast before he left for an unusually early appointment. A big gray rat was crouched under the kitchen table. It looked at her and did not run. She screamed for John. He came bounding downstairs in his shorts and bare feet, and the rat took off toward the den. Most men would have been content to run the rat out of the kitchen and let it go back to its nest, because rats get viciously aggressive when cornered. Not Vann. He grabbed a small steel kitchen stool and a cane and, while Mary Jane watched, aghast, chased the rat and drove it into a corner of the den. When the terrified rat leaped at him with its teeth chattering, he knocked it down with the stool and slashed at it with the cane to force it back into the corner, thrusting and slashing, as the rat kept leaping at him, until he finally had it pinned to the wall with the stool. Then he beat the rat to death with the cane. Mary Jane was trembling afterward. Vann was out of breath, but not frightened. He seemed satisfied.