A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (107 page)

Lee’s suspicion was correct. In the spring of 1966 Vann was starting an affair with the young woman who was to become his second Vietnamese mistress and eventually the mother of his child. He brought to
his avocation the same resourcefulness he did to his vocation. The Good Samaritan who happened to be driving by on a rainy night and offered a ride, the nonchalant American who stopped on a sunny afternoon to scrape a piece of gum off the sole of his shoe, also scouted places where Vietnamese girls regularly gathered. One such place was the Vietnamese-American Association when English classes were being held. He found “Annie” there right after the evening session on Saturday, April 2, 1966.

She was a romantically inclined seventeen-year-old with a problem that was not unusual for a girl of her age. She was acquainted with a lot of boys in Dalat, where she had just finished her junior year at the Lycée Yersin, but none of them had ever shown any romantic interest in her. She had yet to go out on her first date. She was back home in Saigon for the annual three-month vacation and had decided to take advantage of her spare time to improve her rudimentary English.

Vann had a practiced eye for loneliness. He walked over to her and said that she was pretty and complimented her on her clothes. He said he had come to the VAA to see an Army captain who was a friend and one of the volunteer English instructors. (The captain did teach there, and the pretense of visiting him was another of Vann’s ploys.) Vann said that he wished he had a friend like her to teach him Vietnamese. (Vann was unable to learn foreign languages with any proficiency, because he was tone-deaf. He had dropped out of an AID course in Vietnamese for this reason.) She smiled and said she wished she had an American friend so that she could practice her English. She accepted his offer of a ride home.

In the car she too heard the Vietnam variation of the infallible line that the weeping German girl had recited to Mary Jane in Heidelberg a decade earlier. There was a whit more truth in the separated-from-wife and seeking-new-woman-to-love-and-marry yarn he told Annie than in the one he had given Lee. He no longer felt it necessary to lie about his children. He asked her for a date. She declined, saying that she was too busy at the moment. “Okay, I’ll wait,” he said. After her next class at the VAA, she found him waiting to drive her home. She gave him her phone number. He called several times and cajoled until she accepted his invitation to dinner at a good French restaurant near the Saigon River. She remembered him as “an ideal man, very kind, very tender, very gentle, and always very patient.” After dinner he drove her to his house and asked her to come in and see where he lived. Not this time, she said.

He was surprised when, a number of French and fancy Chinese restaurants
later, she did let him take her to bed. He used Ellsberg’s house for the occasion, as Jacobson apparently had visitors that evening. He assumed, because of the ease with which she had let him pick her up on the first night at the VAA, that she had some experience and was being coy. She was a virgin.

She went back to the lycée at Dalat in July, but she couldn’t study. She was too preoccupied with Vann. She wrote him ardent letters, and he responded. To her surprise, he even flew up to Dalat to see her one weekend. Her parents first learned that something was wrong when her grades, which had been fair, fell drastically. She came home in September for the funeral of a grandmother and refused to return to Dalat. She announced that she was going to find a job in Saigon. Her father, a well-educated man, was devastated. She was his first child, and he was ambitious for her. Hers was also a family of means, Chinese on the father’s side, Vietnamese on the mother’s. Vann called her by a diminutive of the French first name she had informally acquired at the lycée, where the teachers made the students choose French names for roll call. Her father had studied business and economics in France and in Britain. He had lived abroad for twelve years, mostly in France, before returning after World War II and serving as an economics advisor in the Bao Dai regime. Later he had gone into the export-import and insurance businesses in a modest way. She had passed the first part of the baccalaureate examination shortly after her junior year in Dalat. Her father had planned to send her to Paris to study medicine or chemistry as soon as she had completed senior year and succeeded at the second part.

Vann encouraged her to quit school and stay in Saigon. Everything he said and did reinforced her conviction that he fully returned her love. She was a contrast to Lee in many ways. Her figure was shapely, but slim. While loving, she was not aggressive. Nor was she the bantering companion that Lee was. She was never to develop Lee’s command of the English language. Annie was a softly restrained young woman, cheerful in a quiet way. Lee appealed to Vann because she was an adventure each time he bedded her and was one of those rare women to whom he could talk. For a man like Vann, however, there would always be an element of threat in a relationship with a woman like Lee. He wanted Annie precisely because of her contrasting qualities.

When the sudden change in Annie alerted her father to what was happening, he had Vann investigated and learned that he was a womanizer with a wife and family. He waited for Vann and Annie to return to her house one evening. As Vann got out of the car, her father walked over and slapped Vann across the face. “What’s wrong with you?” Annie’s
father shouted. “Don’t you have any sense of responsibility? Don’t you know you can be sued for seducing a teenager?” Vann made no attempt to defend himself physically. He said that he wanted to explain. “There’s nothing to explain,” Annie’s father said. “You stay away from my daughter!” He slapped Annie across the face and ordered her into the house.

Vann behaved as he never would have dared in the United States. He kept seeing Annie and making love to her. He avoided getting his face slapped again by dropping her off a block from the house. Whenever he called to set up a rendezvous and Annie’s father happened to pick up the phone, he would curse at Vann—to no avail. Annie’s father was too ashamed to take the only practical recourse open to him of complaining to Lodge. He tried reasoning with his daughter. He explained to Annie that Vann had no intention of marrying her and was too old for her in any case. Vann was just taking advantage of her gullibility. She was destroying her future, depriving herself of both a career and a chance someday to have a decent husband and family.

Reason had no effect. The father turned to physical measures. Their house, like those of other upper-class Saigonese, was surrounded by a wall. Annie’s father locked the gate and took away her key to force her to stay home at night. She climbed over the wall. Vann would be waiting outside to lift her down to the street. The tryst had been arranged earlier by phone or note. In his rage and despair, Annie’s father started to beat her when she came back. As soon as she could arrange another tryst with Vann, she would climb over the wall again and return to take her beating. Her apparent submissiveness masked a headstrong nature, and at this stage of her life she was a spoiled young woman accustomed to having her way. Above all, she was transfixed by her reverie of romance. She saw Vann’s defiance of her father as further evidence of his devotion.

After Vann returned from his mid-1966 home leave, he told Lee that he had tried to persuade Mary Jane to grant him a divorce so that they could marry, but she was unwilling and had set prohibitive conditions. He would have to beggar himself with huge alimony and child-support payments. Lee said she would wait, that Mary Jane might later change her mind. The conversation with Mary Jane had not taken place. Had Vann asked her for a divorce during the first few years after his return to Vietnam, she would have refused, but he had decided not to ask. Maintaining the form of an American marriage and family was as important as ever to Vann’s self-image of respectability, and he thought the appearance enhanced his AID personnel record. Mary Jane had become equally important to him as the perfect excuse. An indissoluble marriage in America facilitated sexual freedom in Vietnam.

Annie got pregnant in late 1966 and wanted to have the baby. Vann said his career would be hurt if it was known that he had fathered an illegitimate child and talked her into an abortion. She reluctantly agreed. The abortion was physically and emotionally painful for her. She told Vann she did not want to go through another one. He did not encourage her to adopt contraceptive measures. Lee had two abortions as a result of their affair before she began to practice contraception on her own initiative. Vann appears to have assumed that he would persuade Annie to have another abortion should she get pregnant again. Pregnancy was the woman’s problem as far as he was concerned. His attitude seems to have been another manifestation of the urge to use and abuse all women that Myrtle had implanted in him.

Myrtle’s son fashioned a victory of sorts over his mother in the fall of 1966. Late one September afternoon the Norfolk police found Myrtle lying in a semicoherent state down by the beachfront. She was living alone there in a furnished room. She stank of alcohol and was clutching an unopened bottle of wine she had presumably bought earlier in the day. The police assumed she was just drunk again and locked her in the tank, a communal cell for alcoholics. It was 4:00
A.M.
the next morning before anyone noticed that she had sunk into a coma and might be suffering from something besides wine. She died in the hospital that evening. A sadist had apparently beaten her while she was drunk, fracturing her skull, breaking her ankle, and inflicting numerous minor injuries. Her alcoholism had worsened as she had grown older, with more frequent and prolonged bouts of drinking. The disease had sufficiently weakened her body at sixty-one years so that the doctors could not save her.

By the end, except for what she could beg or chisel, the son to whom she had been crudest was Myrtle’s sole means of financial support. Vann had been sending his mother a check every month for years, much to the resentment of Mary Jane, whom he never ceased holding to the tightest of budgets. He raised the payments in the early 1960s when Myrtle divorced the Navy chief petty officer for whom she left Frank Vann. The petty officer was a rough man. He knocked out Myrtle’s left eye by throwing a beer can at her during a fight. She wore a glass eye in its place. Myrtle called her sailor husband Arkie because he was from Gravelly, Arkansas. They went there to live when he retired from the Navy. Arkie was then arrested in his home state for bootlegging and grand larceny. Myrtle took that opportunity to leave him and move back
to Norfolk, quickly drinking up the modest property settlement she received in the divorce. By the time she died Vann was sending her a couple of hundred dollars a month.

He also paid for her funeral. He didn’t want his mother going to her grave in one of those pine boxes they had used to bury their dead back on the farm in North Carolina. When his first brother, Frank Junior, put through an emergency call to tell Vann of Myrtle’s death, he said he was flying home right away and to arrange a respectable funeral and make sure that she had a nice coffin. He would pay for everything.

The funeral was something of a family reunion. Frank Junior had taken up his father’s trade of carpentry in Norfolk after a stint in the Army as a paratrooper and two combat jumps during the Korean War. Dorothy Lee had also settled there. She lived in the never-ending desperation of trying to be a good mother to five children with a husband, also a petty officer, who was a drinker and a gambler. She had married him when Myrtle and Frank Vann were breaking up. She had wanted a home of her own and had not discerned her sailor’s habits until after they were married. Frank Vann was staying with her. He had retired from his carpenter’s job at the Norfolk naval base at the end of 1963 because of high blood pressure. He had not remarried, and he had not lost his attachment to Myrtle. She would often come to him for money to pay her rent or to buy more liquor when she ran through the check John sent. Frank Vann would give her the money. He also nursed her back to a semblance of health after several bad drunks. Gene had successfully escaped into the military, like the older brother he idolized. He had also made a solid marriage. He was far advanced in his career as a super mechanic in the Air Force, soon to be promoted to senior master sergeant. He was able to fly home from the air base in California where he was currently stationed in time to help Frank Junior and Dorothy Lee with the funeral arrangements.

They laid Myrtle out in a fine gray metal casket at the Holloman-Brown Funeral Home and scheduled visiting hours in the evening. Dorothy Lee’s two closest friends knew that she could not afford to buy her mother a burial dress, so they pooled their own money and bought Myrtle a lovely blue linen outfit trimmed with lace. The morticians tinted her hair in the color of her prime, a reddish brown, and set it gracefully. When Frank Vann came to see her he said she looked “as pretty as the day I met her.” Mollie came from Long Island. Her younger son, Melvin, who had gone with Vann to the recruiting station at Richmond in 1943 to join the Air Corps and had ended up spending World War II in the Marines, drove her down. At Vann’s request, Mollie, who was now a
widow, had tried to give Myrtle a home, but she had been forced to put Myrtle on a bus back to Norfolk. Myrtle had gotten drunk and vomited on the wall-to-wall carpets in Mollie’s large and immaculate house. Dorothy Lee had next tried to keep her mother at her home, with a similar result. Myrtle had then gone alone to the furnished room. Lillian and Roxie, Myrtle’s two other sisters, also came to the funeral. Although not alcoholics like Myrtle, they had both become heavy drinkers. They got tipsy during one evening’s visiting hours, obtained a white-covered Bible from the funeral home, and placed it in Myrtle’s right hand. Frank Junior thought that was going too far. He removed the Bible and put back the lace handkerchief the morticians had originally set in his mother’s hand. The Holloman-Brown firm had broken with tradition and no longer used black hearses. Myrtle was driven to her grave on the afternoon of the burial in a hearse painted baby blue.