Nguyen Tri Hanh was not an exception merely out of personal desire. He had not bought his province chiefs job and so did not have to generate graft to pay for the position. Most province and district chiefs in South Vietnam did buy their jobs. Hanh’s predecessor, who had been arrested for involvement in the abortive coup in February, was out of jail by late spring but still in trouble for another reason. He had bought the post in 1964 when Hau Nghia had been a somewhat safer place. At the time of his arrest he had not finished paying off his debt to the corps commander who had sold him the province, and the general was pressing him for the money. Hanh had not been asked to pay for the job because so few men had been willing to take Hau Nghia in the spring of 1965 and he had been appointed by a comparatively honest civilian prime minister, who was soon to be forced out by the generals.
Corruption guaranteed incompetence in office, high or low. Professional performance had no bearing on whether men like Chinh held division commands. They kept their positions by their facility at forming corruption alliances with those above them and at creating other corruption alliances with those below in order to channel money upward. (The same pattern of officials generating graft for themselves and higher-ups had prevailed under Diem, with the distinction that the men originally acquired their positions for their loyalty to the Ngo Dinh family.) Lines of authority that needed to function if the country was to be governed rationally and that were already weakened by the influence of family ties and religious and factional connections were undermined entirely by those networks within networks of graft. Hanh had virtually no control, for example, over three of the district chiefs in his province, because they were corruption partners of Chinh and the division commander protected them. Chinh was trying to coerce Hanh into firing the fourth district chief, because the man was independent and competent but would not cooperate sufficiently in graft to please Chinh.
The Saigon regime had, in fact, evolved a system in which no one was permitted to keep his hands clean. For all to be safe, all had to be implicated. As Ramsey was to remark, “The system was designed to ensure that no pot was in a position to call another kettle black.” Inflation had undermined salaries during the Diem years, and corruption had negated any incentive to increase them to realistic levels. Salaries were so ludicrously low (Hanh’s monthly salary was less than two hundred dollars at the official rate of exchange) that a man had to steal something to support his family and maintain his status. The only way an American could distinguish between honest and dishonest officials was to draw a line between those who embezzled what they needed to live and those who enriched themselves. Hanh was honest by this criterion, as Vann had noticed Cao to be at 7th Division. It was easier for an American to discern this line than it was for a Vietnamese who had begun stealing to hold to it. Corruption fed on itself. Few men who had bought a job were willing to forgo a profit on their investment and a bonus in the bargain for the physical risks involved. There was also the temptation to build a constituency within the system. The province and district chiefs most popular with their staffs usually were those who spread the graft around so that everyone got a share.
The system had given rise to a multitude of other distortions that encouraged corruption. One was the role played by the wives. Madame General X or Mrs. Colonel Y often acted as agents for their husbands, frequently dealing with other Madame Generals or Mrs. Colonels. The women liked the role, because it gave them power. A woman who was using the shield of her husband’s authority to run a graft network acquired a share of that authority in the process. Many of the men also favored the arrangement, because it freed them from the tedium of financial details and allowed them to pretend that their wives were just businesswomen and that they were not crooks. There simply was no way for a man to remain truly honest and hold a position at a responsible level. Even if he took only what he needed and kept his wife under control, he still had to permit corruption to go on around him, and he often had to embezzle money for payoff demands by his superiors. If he insisted on honesty to the point of refusing others access to corruption, he became an outsider and was pushed from office. Hanh had so far been able to escape with moderate payments to Chinh. It was uncertain how long he could continue to get off so lightly.
Vann had already found out prior to Hanh’s arrival that corruption undermined his USOM pacification programs and that Americans were not beyond its temptation. He discovered that another AID official (not William Pye, his immediate predecessor) had been allowing the Vietnamese contractor in the province to steal USOM cement and other building materials in exchange for women. Construction materials were bringing spectacular prices on the black market in Saigon, because of the rush of Vietnamese and Chinese speculators to build housing to rent to the thousands of Americans coming into the country. Cement was especially golden. The contractor had included his wife among the women he had provided the AID official. While it might seem difficult to imagine circumstances in which John Vann would refuse free sex, sex as bribery was one of them. (Vann did not, of course, renounce sex because of his assignment to Hau Nghia. He behaved as he had at 7thDivision. He confined his sexual adventures to his trips to Saigon and presented himself as a model of probity while in the province.) The idea that any American would allow himself to be bribed into winking at the theft of government supplies in wartime was also loathsome to Vann. He was outraged at the man and outraged at the contractor for taking advantage of the man’s weakness.
The eagerness for graft was sabotaging USOM programs in more subtle ways than outright theft. The hamlet elementary schools USOM financed had an appeal for the peasants, because the farmers wanted their children to be educated. When the Hau Nghia contractor built a school, he put it up as shoddily as possible, and the benches and desks he provided were so poorly fabricated they did not last a year. The AID official had also been induced to look the other way on matters like this, and the province and district officials always ignored the cheating because the contractor was naturally bribing them too. Similarly, USOM funds marked for “Self-Help” projects to stimulate participation by the peasantry ended up going into hamlet and village offices that were subsequently abandoned or wrecked by the Viet Cong. Province officials kept proposing the construction of such buildings because they got a rakeoff on each one. Vann wanted to carry out the original purpose of the program and let the peasants choose what they wanted, probably another school or a clinic, and then give them the cement and roofing and other materials to build it themselves, so that they would take care of it and discourage the guerrillas from harming it. The province officials opposed the idea, because they would be deprived of their graft.
Corruption’s biggest customer was the Viet Cong. Corruption gave the guerrillas all sorts of advantages. A “Resources and Population Control” program instigated by the Americans was supposed to restrict the movement of guerrilla sympathizers and to deny the Viet Cong medicines and other useful commodities. Americans new to South Vietnam attributed the persistence of the Saigon regime’s complicated edicts and regulations to the influence of French colonialism. They did not understand that each requirement and prohibition served as a pretext for graft. The regulations issued under the control program were an excuse to ask higher prices for contraband goods. The guerrillas did not limit their purchases to such forbidden items as antibiotics and surgical instruments and dry-cell batteries for hand detonators to set off mines. They bought items the Americans had not thought to put on the contraband list, like false identification cards, security clearances for spies seeking jobs with U.S. agencies—almost anything they wanted, simply by paying the requisite prices and bribes.
Corruption in turn raised money to help the Viet Cong finance these purchases and bribes. There was, for example, a large sugar mill in Hau Nghia at Hiep Hoa, northwest of Bau Trai, that processed cane grown by the farmers. The mill was jointly owned by French interests and the Saigon government. The regime’s share was leased to Chinese businessmen in Cholon, who split the pro
fits with whoever was in power. The mill was located in the midst of a guerrilla-dominated area, and yet it was never bothered. Vann noticed that the manager and other supervisors felt sufficiently remote from the danger of bullets and explosions to have plate-glass windows in their houses. The mill’s trucks were never stopped while hauling processed sugar into Saigon. The Viet Cong obtained annual taxes from the mill of 1.7 million piasters, Vann was told. The Hiep Hoa sugar mill was not unique. Commercial enterprises from which Saigon officials gained profits and the Viet Cong derived taxes existed all over South Vietnam. The guerrilla tax collectors provided signed receipts for the payments stamped with the seal of the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong’s clandestine government.
Trafficking with the guerrillas had a special way of feeding on itself, because it was, at least officially, a crime punishable by death. Once someone on the Saigon side had started down the road, the Communists could enlarge future requests under the threat of blackmail. American intelligence officers sometimes wondered why more guerrilla operatives from district and province committee levels were not captured, accidentally if for no other reason. They were caught on occasion and then frequently bought out of their cells before the Americans could discover that a valuable catch had been made.
The Communists had some problems with corruption in the regime in the North, but the circumstances of the struggle in the South militated against corruption in their organization there. The path to a responsible position in the Viet Cong and then to Party membership was too arduous and dangerous to attract men who were motivated by money. The Communist leaders also took measures to prevent corruption from infecting the guerrilla ranks. They held up the example of its evil on the Saigon side and punished venality whenever they discovered it with a trial and a lengthy term of “reeducation” in a rain-forest labor camp or a bullet in the back of the head.
The Viet Cong were winning the war for a larger reason than this ruinous corruption and these other maladies of the Saigon regime, Vann began to realize. They were leading a social revolution in the South Vietnamese countryside and were harnessing its energy to their cause. Vann could understand this social revolution, because his childhood and youth enabled him to identify with the anger and aspirations of poor Vietnamese. His refusal to abandon the roads gave him an opportunity to see the revolution occurring. Most days he and Ramsey were out among the peasantry—escorting their cargo trucks carrying free American bulgur wheat (the Vietnamese found it inedible and sold it for hog feed and used the money to buy rice), cooking oil, powdered milk, and other supplies to groups of refugees, or trying to move forward one of their programs designed to win the sympathy of the population. When they drove together they went in the canary-yellow International pickup; if they split up they would take turns in their second small vehicle, the slower armored Scout, and Vann would go with an interpreter.
The popularity of the USOM program to build hamlet elementary schools first alerted Vann to the social revolution the Viet Cong were leading. With only six Saigon-controlled hamlets in Hau Nghia, Vann and Ramsey had to build schools in hamlets dominated by the guerrillas if they were to build any at all. The task of building them gave Vann a tangible sense of why the Viet Cong won the Vietnamese peasantry to their side. It took him into that halfway world where the guerrillas were exerting dominance and the majority of the population sympathized with them, but where the Viet Cong’s clandestine government had not yet had time to fully organize the community and eradicate every vestige of the Saigon regime and the United States. In areas where they had solidified control, the Viet Cong established their own school system. They tolerated the American school-building program elsewhere, because the farmers were so anxious to have their children educated and many of the peasants also wanted to learn how to read and write and do basic arithmetic in evening classes. The local guerrillas and their children and relatives all benefited. While the teachers were Saigon government employees, the majority were being left undisturbed for the moment as long as they taught from a neutral point of view.
These hamlet elementary schools reminded Vann of the country schools of the Blue Ridge foothills in which he had worked as a teacher’s aide while at Ferrum. A single teacher taught all five grades. He was amazed to find 300 children enrolled in one school. The overcrowding in this case was not as much of a problem as it might have been, because this school had no walls. It consisted of a roof of USOM-supplied aluminum sheets spread over support beams. The roof had several holes in it from shrapnel. The teacher taught in three shifts.
Vann made friends right away with the teacher at the hamlet two miles from Bau Trai where the Ranger company had been wiped out. She was a homely middle-aged woman of outgoing temperament. The fact that she was also the Viet Cong medical worker for the hamlet, a place called So Do, did not seem to affect her attitude toward Vann and Ramsey. Vann won her gratitude by repairing her two-room school, which had been damaged in the attack, and also by arranging corrective surgery for several children he noticed there who were afflicted with harelip, a congenital deformity of the upper lip. (The deformity is rarely seen in the United States and other industrialized countries because it is corrected at birth.) These harelip cases Vann encountered at So Do and other hamlets called to mind Gene with his legs bowed by rickets, a senseless curse that modern medicine could banish. Vann started a program to send all such children for treatment to the Filipino and South Korean surgical teams on loan to USOM. Many months later he was to discover that the So Do schoolteacher saved his life and Ramsey’s on three occasions by persuading guerrillas who had planted a mine in the road and were waiting for them not to blow them up as they drove by.
John Vann also made friends with a lot of the children. Their bright and eager faces moved him. Vietnamese peasant children had a winning manner, and none more so than the children of the Delta. The diet, protein-rich from fish and vegetables and fruit, made them vigorous. They laughed easily and played hard. In their bare feet and shorts and loose shirts—tending the family water buffalo or shouting and kicking a can for a soccer ball in the dirt of a farmyard because they did not have a real ball or other toys and had to contrive their own fun—they were the children Vann and his brothers had been in their good moments in Norfolk. He learned quickly that the children could protect him. They wanted the American who handed out the candy and gum to return, and they would sometimes warn him when there were guerrillas in a hamlet or farther down a road.
Doug Ramsey was both the perfect subordinate and partner for Vann at this moment and a major influence on Vann’s thinking at this time. Ramsey was, like Halberstam, another of the messianic innocents of the 1950s generation, as intense as his fence-rail frame was tall. An only child, he had grown up amid the big firs and ponderosa pines on the fringes of the Grand Canyon and in the desert oasis town of Boulder City, Nevada. Ramsey’s father was a minor administrator for the National Park Service, and his mother was chronically ill in a period when the government did not provide virtually limitless medical care to the dependents of civil servants. He had gone through Occidental College in Los Angeles on scholarships and loans, graduating in 1956 as one of the few students in the history of the college to achieve a perfect record, an A in every course for all four years. The State Department had drawn him away from a scholar’s life after a year of graduate study at Harvard because it seemed to offer adventure and demanding service. Before he could accept his appointment to the Foreign Service he had to give the Air Force two years, most of the time as a communications intelligence officer, to fulfill a college ROTC obligation he had acquired at Occidental. Ramsey had then found himself assigned to the State Department’s Honolulu Reception Center for foreign visitors across from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki.
To rid himself of such comfortable assignments, Ramsey had volunteered for Vietnamese language training and field work in South Vietnam, arriving in May 1963 as the Buddhist crisis was about to begin. He had been given another comfortable assignm
ent, this one as branch public affairs officer for USIS in the mountain resort city of Dalat. Diem and the Nhus had weekend villas at Dalat, and the place was sophisticated and highly politicized. Ramsey’s curiosity and his facility with the language had turned his months there into an education in Saigon society. Connections he formed in USIS had also gradually brought him work more to his liking, such as interview surveys of peasants in hamlets along the Central Coast and in the northern Delta to try to pinpoint specific grievances that motivated the farmers to support the Viet Cong. After nearly two years of patience and more volunteering, the State Department had finally given him a job he really wanted—detail to AID and assignment to Hau Nghia in February 1965 as assistant province representative.
Ramsey had known nothing of his new boss when Vann arrived a month later. Vann had introduced himself by giving Ramsey a copy of Halberstam’s Esquire article. Ramsey was an admirer of Halberstam’s reporting on Vietnam in 1962 and 1963. To learn that his new superior had inspired much of that reporting and had been the hero of that miserable tale affected Ramsey deeply. Although it would have been difficult for a young man of Ramsey’s inclinations not to have followed Vann, in all that Ramsey was to see of him Vann was never to fall short of Halberstam’s heroic portrait. The two men were in tune—in tune in their emotional commitment to the war, in tune in their affection for the country they were struggling to retain. Ramsey was to write afterward of how they would sometimes abandon common sense entirely and go for a spin down a back road at the close of day to watch the falling sun turn the rice fields “to burnished copper in the afterglow.” They would stop for a moment “in some red-tiled or thatched-roof hamlet where the people were settling in for the night as they had for hundreds of years.” They would savor the sights and smells of this land “as if we were small city children on the way to camp for the first time.”