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

  He made it a point, over the objection of Cao, who was fearful that he might be killed or captured, to go out with squad-size groups of about a dozen men. Vann knew there was a better chance of laying a successful ambush with a small unit and also less chance of being counterambushed in the dark. To his chagrin he was rarely able to ambush guerrillas. He learned that the reason was not a lack of Viet Cong moving about the countryside at night. He told Porter they had a lot of work ahead of them with this army. These soldiers, the regulars and the territorials, had a sense of inferiority toward the enemy. They were afraid to risk a fight on a man-to-man basis with the guerrillas. He noticed that almost every time he heard the approach of what might be a bunch of Viet Cong walking down the trail and into the snare, one of the Saigon soldiers would give the ambush away by coughing, or snapping the bolt of a weapon, or making some other noise. This occurred too often to be accidental. Porter had suspected an attitude of inferiority. He was glad that for the first time in this war the United States had an infantry officer with experience and perspective who insisted on working at the cutting edge. To solve any of these problems they needed information and understanding. Vann was giving him both, because Vann had rank and credentials. What he reported could not be dismissed by the generals and the headquarters staff colonels as the imaginings of a green captain.

  Vann fulfilled his vow to Ziegler that every unit participating in an operation would have an American advisor attached to it. The advisors serving with the territorials were assigned to various training centers and not to specific units. The division battalions taking part were also usually split into two task forces each, to increase the chances of running into guerrillas. The American captain advising the battalion commander obviously could not be with both. Vann overcame the problem by calling for volunteers before an operation. His purpose went beyond acquiring proxy control. He thought that the Saigon troops might behave more aggressively if the commander always had an American officer or sergeant by his side to encourage and assist him. American élan, he hoped, would prove infectious.

  John Vann’s élan was infectious within the advisory detachment. The atmosphere had been enthusiastic under Clay. He was the sort of brave, considerate, and hardworking officer who is admired and liked in any army. (He had twice won the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest decoration, leading tanks against the Germans in North Africa and Italy.) Under Vann the atmosphere became supercharged. When the advisors returned to the Seminary, exhausted after a couple of days in the sun and the muck of the paddies, the familiar voice would call out in a high-pitched rasp: “Come on, let’s get those volleyball teams out there.” He had rested less than anyone, but in a few minutes he would have them all out in the courtyard in front of the net. If his team began to lose, he would yell and bang his fist against one of the posts holding up the net in frustration and to goad his side to greater effort. He would never give up trying to out jump a six-foot, 185-pound Hawaiian captain named Peter Kama, who was to serve under him ten years later in the Central Highlands.

  The war was still an adventure in 1962—”the greatest continuing war games we’ve ever come up with,” as one officer put it—no matter what problems Vann and his detachment faced in trying to improve the fighting qualities of the Saigon troops. The frequent presence of danger and the occasional shooting created the tension and zest of war without the unpleasantness of dying. The Vietnamese were doing the dying almost exclusively. Fewer than twenty Americans had been killed in Vietnam by late May 1962 when Vann reached My Tho, and no one in the 7th Division Advisory Detachment had been unlucky enough to die. The older men were hoping to retrieve the excitement of wars past. The young men were eager to prove themselves worthy of their first. Maj. Gen. Charles Timmes was chief of the original Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) in South Vietnam, now a subordinate command responsible for training and equipment programs. Timmes had earned his Distinguished Service Cross leaping into Normandy on D-Day at the head of a battalion of paratroops. He summed up the prevailing attitude in a pep talk at the Seminary: “It isn’t much of a war, but it’s the only war we’ve got, so enjoy it.”

  Timmes was also reflecting more than the excitement of an adventure in his remark. These men were the regulars of an Army that had chafed for eight years under President Eisenhower’s strategy of “massive retaliation.” The mission of the Army had seemed reduced to occupying the radioactive rubble of Eastern Europe, Russia, and China after the Air Force and the Navy had won World War III by loosing their planes and missiles in a thermonuclear holocaust. The military budget had been apportioned accordingly. The Army had become a mendicant. Now the Army had a president in John Kennedy who was intent on making “the sword … an effective instrument of foreign policy,” in the words of his military mentor, the distinguished general Maxwell Taylor. Kennedy wanted a military establishment that would enable him to apply whatever level of force was necessary to have his way wherever the United States was challenged. He saw an expanded Army, revitalized with the latest in mobility and weapons, as the principal means of wielding the sword under his strategy of “flexible response.” Taylor had minted the term to contrast the apparent rationality of this approach with the irrationality of Eisenhower’s strategy of massive retaliation. The strategic concept was the logical application of Taylor’s doctrine of “limited war.” He had retired as chief of staff of the Army in 1959 to preach the doctrine in a much-praised book called The Uncertain Trumpet. Kennedy had adopted Taylor’s ideas enthusiastically, exploiting them during his 1960 campaign for the presidency. He had made the doctrine, with Taylor’s catchy name for it, the national strategy after his election. He had also appointed Taylor as his White House military advisor.

  The new American president and the men around him saw the guerrilla insurgency that Vann was determined to crush in the northern Delta as the most insidious form of challenge that the Communists had yet devised. Fidel Castro had come to power in Cuba with a guerrilla revolution, and similar insurrections were expected elsewhere throughout the so-called Third World—the poor countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was for this reason that Kennedy had instructed the Army to use Vietnam as a laboratory to develop techniques of “counterin-surgency.” The Pentagon had composed an acronym for this mission of suppressing revolutions—COIN. The Soviet dictator of the day, Nikita Khrushchev, had announced the guerrilla war strategy to a Moscow conference of Communist parties in January 1961. Khrushchev had said that the Soviet Union would avoid an atomic war with the United States but would support “liberation wars and popular uprisings” in the poor nations of the Third World. The Chinese had vowed what appeared to be like intentions. Kennedy had condemned such revolutions as “wars of subversion, covert aggression.” The war in Vietnam was more than a test of the feasibility of Taylor’s doctrine of limited war, in which the Army had such a stake. Vietnam in 1962 was a test of whether the “Free World” or the “Communist World” would prevail.

  Americans of the early 1960s, paid little attention to the animosity between the Soviet Union and China and to other cracks in the monolith they called “International Communism.” The enmity between Moscow and Peking had been evident and growing for quite a while. In the summer of 1960, Khrushchev had cut off all aid to China and withdrawn thousands of Soviet technicians working on development projects there. The implication of Yugoslavia’s break with Russia in 1948, that a nationalist movement could be led by native Communists, was not a matter to which Americans gave serious thought. Vann and the Americans of his time were mentally habituated to a globe halved between darkness and light. Their thinking was governed by their own ideology, and this vision of the world accommodated and reinforced that ideology. The Army’s security-clearance forms reflected the vision by grouping all Communist countries together in “the Sino-Soviet bloc.”

  While no one in the detachment displayed quite as much self-assurance as Vann did in this adventure that had the moral fervor of a crusade, these men
were a confident crowd. The captains were a cock-of-the-walk bunch. Most displayed both the wings of a parachutist and the gold-lettered tab of a Ranger on their combat fatigue shirts. Ziegler was typical. He had been an instructor at the Ranger School at Fort Benning for two years before being told one morning that the Army personnel branch at the Pentagon had just selected 150 outstanding captains to be field advisors in Vietnam and that he was one of them. The son of a salesman, he had been a star on the high school football team in East Greenville, Pennsylvania. He had gone on to West Point because he had wanted, he recalled, “to be a big fish in a big pond” on the West Point football team and because he had needed a free education. Two famous coaches of the era, Earl “Red” Blaik and Vince Lombardi, had thought enough of his skill at handling his six feet of brawn to make him a varsity middle linebacker and running guard as soon as he had completed his plebe year.

  Having a leader with Vann’s charisma made these men cockier still and gave a special verve to this adventure. Soldiers respect a leader who is competent. They admire a leader who is competent and bold. When he is an accomplished student of war, leads boldly, and also savors gambling his own life, he acquires a mystique. Cautious officers shake their heads at this love of danger and condemn it as daredeviltry, which it often is. They secretly admire it and wish they had as much faith in their luck and the power to lead lesser men that the mystique confers. Vann’s luck was so good it was called “the Vann luck.”

  Vann knew which of the secondary dirt roads the Viet Cong had ditched and which were still usable because he explored them in a jeep on his frequent trips to the district centers and to outposts and hamlets that interested him. The normal American method of surveying roads was from a helicopter or an observation plane. It was safer. The sky was free of mines and ambushes. Vann claimed that surveying by aircraft was not good enough. To find out how much of the countryside the Viet Cong controlled and how much was still accessible it was necessary to go out on the ground and test. “Hell, you can drive these roads with a ninety-five percent chance of survival if you just use your head,” he would say in his penchant for a statistic. He avoided patterns, trying not to return by the same route. He did not linger in one place too long and give the guerrillas in the area time to come after him or to organize an ambush farther down the road. He refused to take along the reinforced platoon of troops considered the minimum escort, because an escort would slow him down. He drove fast, and he always drove himself. He would put the ARVN soldier Cao had assigned to him as a driver in the backseat with a carbine. If there was a scrape and a Vietnamese driver was wounded or lost his nerve, he might stop. Vann wanted to make sure this could not happen, because he was convinced that salvation lay in movement and he was determined never to be taken prisoner.

  Porter did not try to restrain him. Porter knew that if he ordered Vann not to take such risks, Vann would take them without telling him. As with Vann’s night patrols, Porter was getting observations he would otherwise never have received from a man whose experience he could trust. Instead of trying to stop Vann, he would kid him about his dare-deviltry on visits to the detachment when Vann would mention some place he wanted to see and invite Porter to ride with him. “Is this another of your suicide drives, John?” Porter would ask.

  The advisors at the Seminary learned to look forward to a trick Vann played on staff officers who came down from Saigon to “see the war.” These visitors were referred to derisively as “Saigon commandos” or “straphangers,” slang for supernumeraries which derives from stand-up passengers who grip the overhead straps to steady themselves on a subway or bus. The staff officer often came outfitted in a panoply of combat regalia, complete to a wide-brimmed bush hat and a hunting knife strapped to his pants leg. He would announce that he was not going to be content with briefings at the Seminary and was determined to “get out where the action is.” Vann would smile and say that there was some action underway in a nearby province and instruct the visitor to be ready to depart at 4:30 A.M. the next morning for a “little reconnaissance mission” en route to the operation.

  At 4:20 A.M., while the staff officer was still lacing his boots in one of the bedrooms in the senior officers’ suite on the second floor, Vann would have had his coffee and be standing at the bottom of the stairs, shouting up at him to hurry. “All right, we’re ready to go,” he would holler. “Get your butt down here.” As Vann turned on a flashlight and led the straphanger to his jeep in the darkness of the courtyard, he would explain that the two of them were going to “check out the security” on the road to Ben Tre, the next province capital, about ten miles to the south, from which they would then drive “to the action.” Vann would climb in behind the wheel and carefully place a fast-firing new rifle called the Armalite and a couple of grenades beside his seat so that he could easily grab one. All the while he would be instructing the staff officer on how to play dead if they were ambushed and the man was fortunate enough to be wounded rather than killed outright, because the guerrillas executed prisoners too injured to march with a bullet through the back of the head. Then he would rev up the jeep motor, yell at the Vietnamese guard to open the gate, and dash out and down the road toward Ben Tre.

  The staff officer would have assumed that they would have an ARVN squad or a platoon to escort them, or at least another jeep of advisors along for company. Here he was in a lone jeep with the black mass of the foliage rushing by, here and there the light of a candle or a kerosene lamp flickering from a peasant’s house, and this wild man behind the wheel shouting at him above the wind to be prepared to open fire with his own weapon if they hit a Viet Cong roadblock, because he, Vann, was going to smash through; he had no intention of being taken alive to be exhibited in a cage like a monkey. There was a ferry crossing on the way, which stretched the nerves of the visitor a bit further. The crossing was guarded, and the Vietnamese on the boat were just travelers or farmers going to market in Ben Tre. The visitor would not notice the guards, and he had probably never stood in a crowd of Vietnamese country folk before. The whole experience usually sufficed to persuade the staff officer to stay in Ben Tre until he could catch a helicopter back to Saigon. If he turned out to be a kindred sort who laughed at this initiation, he was welcomed on his next visit to the Seminary. Actually, the predawn trip was somewhat dangerous. Vann was shot at a couple of times by a stay-awake sniper. He had deduced, however, that any guerrillas manning a roadblock would probably have gone home to sleep by 4:30 A.M.

  Maj. Herbert Prevost was the one man in the detachment who seemed to love danger as much as Vann did, whose luck appeared just as phenomenal, and who summed up the nostalgia for the excitement of wars past. Prevost, an impish-looking thirty-eight-year-old pilot, was the Air Force liaison officer to the 7th Division. The U.S. Air Force might have decided as an institution that strategic bombing was the proper way to win wars. Herb Prevost was not the sort to go along with the crowd. He had remained a small-plane man who liked to keep his wars personal. During World War II in Europe he had managed to get several P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers shot up under him while blasting Germans who impeded the advance of armored and infantry columns. His Distinguished Service Cross had come the day Prevost and his wingman in another P-47 had taken off loaded with a new incendiary weapon called napalm and had seen a pack of German tanks lying in wait in a woods to surprise an American column advancing up a road. The wingman was shot down and killed by Germans firing machine guns from the tanks. Prevost’s plane was struck so many times that the mechanics decided to junk it after he somehow flew it back to the airfield. The Germans’ surprise had been spoiled and five of the tanks and their crews incinerated.

  In Vietnam it appeared that Prevost had been tamed. The Air Force had assigned him the smallest aircraft in its inventory, a Cessna observation plane called the L-19 (also designated the O-1) Bird Dog. It was a single-engine two-seater, the seat in front for the pilot and the one behind for the observer. The L-19 had no guns. Prevost’s job was to coor
dinate requests for fighter-bomber and transport plane support for the 7th Division and the territorial forces in the five provinces with the 2nd Air Division in Saigon, the Air Force component of General Harkins’s command. He had been given the L-19 to enable him to keep in touch with three Air Force captains who worked for him in the provinces.

  Prevost was an imaginative gladiator of the air. He persuaded Vann to give him a pair of the new lightweight Armalite rifles, officially designated the AR-15 and later to be designated the M-16 when the Armalite was adopted as the standard U.S. infantry rifle. The Army was experimenting with the weapon and had issued Armalites to a company of 7th Division troops to see how the soldiers liked it and how well it worked on guerrillas. (The Armalite had a selector button for full or semiautomatic fire and shot a much smaller bullet at a much higher velocity than the older .30 caliber M-1 rifle. The high velocity caused the small bullet to inflict ugly wounds when it did not kill.) Prevost strapped the pair of Armalites to the support struts under the wings of the L-19 and invented a contrivance of wire that enabled him to pull the triggers from the cockpit to strafe guerrillas he sighted. He bombed the Viet Cong by tossing hand grenades out the windows. Occasionally he dropped twenty-pound antipersonnel bombs, whenever he could talk some out of acquaintances assigned to an air commando squadron operating from the former French air base at Bien Hoa fifteen miles north of the capital.