A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (106 page)

At Ham Tan there was a final moment to savor. They pulled up in front of the building where the province military advisors lived and went in and introduced themselves. One of the young officers noticed the Scout parked outside. He did a double take. He looked at Vann and Ellsberg, at the vehicle, and then back at Vann and Ellsberg again.

“Did you people drive here?” he asked. They said yes as casually as they could.

“Is that road open?” another advisor asked, astounded.

“Well, it is now,” Vann said.

They were the first Americans to drive to Ham Tan in nearly a year.

Sex, like danger, was another shared interest that helped make the friendship between Vann and Ellsberg intimate. Ramsey had never displayed much interest in this subject that was of such immense concern to Vann, so Vann had pretended, as he did with men like Ramsey, that his girl hunting in Saigon was just the temporary larking of an overseas bachelor and that he was a serious family man who cared for Mary Jane and was concerned about the upbringing of their children. Ellsberg lacked Vann’s insatiable need for women, but his sexual life mattered to him and he was relatively open about it. When Vann found a friend who regarded sex with some of the importance he did, he interpreted the attitude as an invitation to confide the details of his exploits, which he liked to do. He was also inclined to be more candid about other personal relationships and about his past. “I’m only married in name,”
he explained to Ellsberg. He said that while he respected Mary Jane, he had no special feeling for her, that they had nothing in common anymore. He also told Ellsberg about the statutory-rape episode and how, despite his victory over the lie detector, the accusation would have barred him forever from promotion to general.

The coincidence of having houses in Saigon next door to each other further reinforced the friendship. Although Vann slept most nights during the fall of 1965 in a tent at General Seaman’s headquarters or at some other spot in the countryside, he was entitled to quarters in Saigon under his AID contract. He had begun sharing a house on Tran Quy Cap Street not far from Westmoreland’s villa with another close friend acquired through the war, Col. George Jacobson. Jake, as he was known to his friends, was once called “the consummate staff officer” by Vann. No derision was intended, as Jacobson had seen a lot of action in an armored cavalry reconnaissance unit in France and Germany. He was a tall and well-proportioned man of innate dignity, fifty years old in 1965, with a mustache, a baritone voice, and a warm and genuinely considerate manner. He had earned his living as a professional magician and master of ceremonies prior to volunteering for the Army early in World War II. George Jacobson had disciplined himself during his twenty-four years in the Army to study the character and mindset of a superior in order to avoid futile clashes with idiosyncrasies and preconceptions. Troubles that the boss should not be bothered with, or would not listen to, Jake settled himself or deflected as temporarily insoluble. He then used the credit built up by his tactful efficiency to try to get the boss to confront other important problems he might be capable of resolving.

Jacobson had first come to Vietnam in 1954 as a lieutenant colonel on Iron Mike O’Daniel’s staff. He returned as a colonel in the 1960s, and by 1962 headed the organization and training division of the MAAG under General Timmes. He had been profoundly admiring of Vann’s performance at 7th Division and had attempted to persuade a friend, Maj. Gen. William Yarborough, then commander of the Army’s Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, to have Vann assigned there on his return to the United States. Jacobson’s initiative might have kept Vann in the Army had it succeeded. In 1965, Jake had decided that he was sufficiently committed to the war himself to go into the pacification business and had arranged a transfer to AID on detail from the Army. He was officially Vann’s immediate superior as a deputy director of field operations and unofficially Vann’s chief protector at AID’s Saigon headquarters.

The relationship was again one of ease, because it was complementary,
Vann being Jacobson’s touchstone with reality in the countryside. There was also a personal reason that the two men got along sharing a house. Jacobson was moderate in his womanizing, not compulsive like Vann, but he regarded the pursuit of the opposite sex as the best of hobbies. Ellsberg had no roommate in the house he had been assigned next door. His rank (his Civil Service rating had been converted to the highest rank in the Foreign Service Reserve, FSR-1, when he went to Vietnam) entitled him to a house of his own. He gave Vann a key and free run of the place. Vann found Ellsberg’s house especially useful when he had an assignation at some hour that might inconvenience Jacobson.

Prior to 1965 the presence of American wives and children had enforced convention among middle- and upper-ranking U.S. officials. The benefit of life in a poor Asian country with an uncommon number of attractive women had been reserved for enlisted men and younger officers and civilians. Some men with responsible positions had, of course, still indulged in hanky-panky. To protect their careers they had to be discreet, as Vann had been in 1962 and 1963 by taking his pleasure in Saigon or at the beach resort of Vung Tau (Cap St. Jacques) on the occasional weekend he could fly there. When the families had been evacuated at the beginning of 1965 to “clear the decks,” in Dean Rusk’s phrase, for the bombing of the North, convention departed with them. American men in South Vietnam became sexually privileged males. One well-known civilian kept his mistress at his villa and brought her to official social functions where the diplomatic corps and the wives of high-ranking Vietnamese were present. Disapproval of his conduct was mixed with envy. His Vietnamese paramour was a young woman of remarkable beauty. After his assignment ended and he returned to the United States and his wife, she slept her way higher up the ladder of U.S. authority until she found a lover powerful enough to arrange an escape to Paris when it was time for him to leave as well.

Claiming that a mistress was a housekeeper, however, or bringing a woman to one’s quarters in the evening, or carrying on after hours with the Vietnamese secretaries from the office (the women had no choice but to submit if they wished to retain their jobs), was considered perfectly normal. The custom became acceptable even for men who had their wives and children living in the “safe havens” of Bangkok and the Philippines in order to visit their families monthly. (Vann preferred the excuse the war offered to hold Mary Jane and her brood at the safer distance of Colorado.) Men who worked hard were entitled to relaxation. As Ellsworth Bunker, an upright man who was fond of salacious jokes, put it: “There’s a lot of plain and fancy screwing going on around here, but I suppose it’s all in the interest of the war effort.”

In this atmosphere Vann could indulge his proclivity with an abandon that would have been impossible in the United States or on any normal foreign assignment without destroying himself professionally. Ellsberg was not alone among Vann’s friends in noticing that when Vann was in Saigon he often made love to two or three different young women a day. This repeated sexual jousting that would have exhausted most men seemed to invigorate Vann. After his last assignation in the evening he would settle down to the night’s work of reading reports and writing memos, concentrating well and writing quickly into the early hours of the morning.

In addition to these innumerable casual romps, Vann formed enduring liaisons with two Vietnamese women and managed, with considerable agility, to keep each woman ignorant of the other for most of the years to come. He spotted Lee, the nickname he gave his first mistress, on a Friday afternoon in November 1965 about three weeks after he left Hau Nghia. She was standing on the sidewalk in front of her family’s house on a main thoroughfare in Saigon, waiting to hail a cab for the afternoon and evening teaching sessions of an English-language school she had started. He was on his way to the new 1st Infantry Division command post at Di An just north of the city. He stopped his car about ten yards from where she was standing and got out to scrape a piece of gum off the sole of one of his shoes. (He had just stuck it on, one of his many tricks.) He was then genuinely surprised, after he offered her a ride and she accepted, to discover that she spoke fluent English. He had thought she was a student. She was dressed simply and wore her long black hair down over her shoulders. She was five days short of twenty-one at the time, about two years older than his daughter, Patricia. He was forty-one. During the short drive to her school he asked if she would like to have dinner with him on Sunday night. She saw the wedding ring on his hand. She said yes anyway. They would have to meet in front of the school, she said, because her family would object to her dating an American and the neighbors would talk. They set the time for 7:30. Vann kept his weekend trip to a province with Ellsberg short so as not to be late.

The wedding ring was gone when he met her Sunday evening. He was wearing only the Rutgers class ring that he never took off. She was not to see the wedding ring again. Over dinner and dancing at a fashionable nightclub she asked how many children he had. None, he said, his wife had never been able to have any. He said that he and his wife had separated four years ago and he was looking for someone to fall in love with and marry. She asked his age. He said he was thirty-six. Her twenty-first birthday was that Wednesday, and she intended to take the
day off to celebrate. He said he would take the day off. They went to a swimming pool near a billet for American officers in Cholon. She wore a bikini. When he saw her figure he said that until that moment he had not realized how truly lucky he had been to meet her. After dinner that evening they made love in his bedroom in the house he shared with George Jacobson.

Lee’s family was one that had prospered in French Cochinchina. Her grandfather had been a finance minister in the Bao Dai years and again under Diem and had headed the National Bank for a while. Her father had served in the Süreté Genérale before 1954 and had then taken a position at the bank. He and her mother kept their French citizenship and passports. At her father’s suggestion she had studied English as her second language for half a dozen years at the French schools in Saigon where she had been educated. She had also taken the courses USIS offered through the Vietnamese-American Association. (She learned to speak a Frenchified Vietnamese at home and later had to teach herself how to read and write the language of her people.) Her father had wanted her to go to Saigon University or to France to study pharmacy or medicine, but while Lee was intelligent, she was not intellectual, and she was tired of books. She wanted some financial independence and was enterprising. The teaching of English was becoming a major industry. It seemed as if every young man who could avoid conscription into the ARVN and every young woman who could pay the tuition wanted to learn enough English to get a job with the Americans. When Lee met Vann she had about fifty full-time students at her small school and was earning an excellent living.

Although Lee was a pleasant-looking woman, she did not have one of those slim Vietnamese figures that turned American heads. She was buxom for a Vietnamese, with a rounded figure not unlike Mary Jane’s when she and Vann had met at Critic’s ice cream parlor. Vann had an eye for women who were, as Lee said in the American slang she quickly learned, “well padded.” She was also a physical challenge to him. He told Dan Ellsberg that no matter how many times he made love to her of an evening, she was always prepared for more. Her command of English, her intelligence, and her feisty personality made her a good companion as well.

Their trysts grew into a full-fledged affair after Vann was appointed AID’s manager of the new program to train specialized teams of Vietnamese pacification workers near the end of 1965. The job required Vann to divide his time between Saigon and the training camp for the teams at Vung Tau, and on many days when he was at the camp, he
flew back to Saigon in the evening. He would pick Lee up at her school after she had taught her last class. The two would have a late supper at his house (he and Jacobson kept a cook) and then make love before he drove her home and returned to tackle his paperwork. On weekends he would treat her to dinner at a French or Chinese restaurant or to dancing at a nightclub, and on an occasional Sunday they would drive to Vung Tau to sun and swim. Vann had an ARVN engineer captain he became friendly with forge a set of French license plates for his car, and Lee was not alarmed by grenades on the seat. She had been ready for an affair with an exciting American, hoping to maneuver the affair into marriage, because she had made up her mind in her teens that she did not want to marry a Vietnamese. She felt that with too few exceptions, Vietnamese men tended to treat their wives crudely and to victimize them. Her father had confirmed her impression. He had taken a second wife and split his spare time between her mother’s household and a house he maintained for the other woman. Lee did not intend to share her mother’s fate.

She began to suspect after a while that Vann might be cheating on her. On days when he was in Saigon he often picked her up early so that they could make love at the end of the afternoon. He would drive her back to the school afterward for her evening teaching session. He sometimes showered and put on dress slacks and a fresh white shirt and tie before he did. A shirt and tie were acceptable wear for a dinner date at a Saigon restaurant, because even if the restaurant was air-conditioned, a jacket became oppressive as soon as one went outside. About a month after they first made love, he had also put a wrinkle in the initial impression he gave her that he was unencumbered by confessing to the existence of his children. She had been slightly upset as well to discover through her inevitable questions that she was so close in age to Patricia. He then acknowledged being a bit older than he had first told her. He wanted her so much, he said, that he couldn’t stop himself from lying. She forgave him the lie about the children and the trimming of his age. He had assured her again that he and Mary Jane were separated and that he was going to ask for a divorce as soon as he went on his next home leave. Whenever she now showed suspicion that he was putting on a shirt and tie to date someone else, he fobbed her off by telling her that he had an important meeting for which he had to dress up.