A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (111 page)

The theory may have had some validity. Inflation was held to between 50 and 60 percent a year, mainly by more than doubling the commodity imports AID financed for the South Vietnamese economy ($650 million in 1966) and by shipping millions of tons of American rice to a country that had been able to export rice as recently as 1964. Given the magnitude of the social and moral catastrophe, what points the theory gained against the inflation index could not have made much difference. The Vietnamese of the South found themselves in a world turned upside down. Hundreds of thousands started to earn their livelihood by serving the profligate foreigners. When one counted the families of these Vietnamese, other hundreds of thousands began to live off the Americans by proxy. The sanitation services collapsed in Saigon, because the workers quit en masse and rushed away to labor at the base construction sites for much higher salaries than the municipality could pay.

Prior to 1965, two prominent American construction firms, Raymond International and Morrison-Knudsen, had formed a partnership to build bases in South Vietnam under the military assistance program. To take advantage of the cost-plus-a-fixed-fee windfall, they subsequently pooled resources with two other big firms in the industry, Brown & Root and J. A. Jones, and created a consortium known as RMK-BRJ. In mid-1966, during the most labor-intensive phase of the base-construction program, RMK-BRJ had about 50,000 Vietnamese on its payroll. The Army engineers, the Navy Seabees and Marine engineer battalions, and the Air Force developed their own Vietnamese labor forces. The Army Engineer Command, for example, had 8,500 Vietnamese workers in 1967. Pacific Architects and Engineers (PA&E), another big company that the Army paid on a cost-plus-a-fixed-fee basis to maintain facilities once they were completed, employed many thousands more. The U.S. military also required domestic help. There were Vietnamese “housemaids” and “houseboys” to do laundry, shine boots, and clean the barracks, waitresses for the clubs and mess halls, and scullery workers to perform the menial chores in the kitchens. (Enlisted men were freed of KP duty at most base camps.) Counting the PA&E staff, more than 20,000 Vietnamese were to work at Long Binh alone.

Other Vietnamese among these hundreds of thousands were employed in the business of amusing the foreigners. The Saigon newspapers published cartoons of a new social hierarchy ranked by its importance to the Americans. The prostitutes stood at the top, followed by their
pimps, and then by the taxi drivers who carried the Americans to and from their pleasures. (The drivers no longer wanted Vietnamese passengers, because they could not overcharge them.) GI culture in bars with names like A-Go-Go and Chicago and The Bunny (after Hugh Hefner’s creation), cheap tailor shops, and “Turkish Bath” and “Massage Parlor” bordellos proliferated in Saigon, Qui Nhon, Da Nang, and the other cities and in the shanty towns thrown up overnight outside bases in the once sparsely populated regions like Cam Ranh Bay. Saigon itself was to acquire 56,000
registered
prostitutes; this figure did not, of course, include the amateurs. The bar girls were the elite among the prostitutes. They received a percentage from the drinks of colored water, called “Saigon tea,” that the soldiers had to buy them to enjoy their company and dance to the rock ‘n’ roll music that blared from the bars. After-hours sex cost extra. The bar girls and their less fortunate sisters who worked the brothels and the streets were pathetic creatures. They flaunted themselves in makeup and clothes they did not know how to wear and swelled their Vietnamese breasts with injections of silicone to attract the bosom-conscious Americans. Some had their eyelids Westernized by cosmetic surgery, an operation that was also becoming popular among young upper-class Saigonese women.

Many of the prostitutes were farm girls, for another collateral effect of the physical destruction in the countryside was to help fulfill American needs for labor and entertainment. Refugees crowded into the already crowded warrens of shacks that were the working-class quarters of Saigon and the other cities and raised new slums around towns and urban centers everywhere. One noticed the new slums quickly, because some of the shacks had a novel construction that reflected the Vietnamese talent for coping. The refugees scavenged empty beer and soda cans discarded at the American dumps, cut the cans open, pounded them flat, and nailed them to strips of scrap wood to make metal sheets for walls.

Not everyone could find a job serving the Americans, or live off someone who did; not everyone had a daughter old enough to sell herself. South Vietnam had always had some beggars. On Saigon’s Rue Catinat a small number of regulars, most of them crippled unfortunates, had occupied the same sidewalk spots day after day, nodding a greeting to regular passersby and seeming to subsist on many tiny handouts. Widows, orphans, and amputees begging from Americans now became a ubiquitous element of urban life. The children, filthy in a nation where the poor traditionally valued personal cleanliness, their legs covered with sores, would call “Hey, you!” or “Hey, GI!” and shout obscenities
if they were not given money. They formed gangs to pick pockets and steal.

The garbage, rarely collected because the municipal workers had deserted to the higher salaries at the base sites and the regime did not care enough to recruit replacements from among the refugees, piled up in Saigon until the stacks were half a block long. Late at night after curfew when the streets were still, the tops of the stacks would move as one walked by. The feeding rats would be disturbed by the sound of approaching footsteps and scurry about. One day I saw words in Vietnamese chalked in large letters on the pavement in front of a pile of garbage. I asked a Vietnamese reporter who was with me to translate them. The words said: ‘This is the fruit of American aid.”

The generals and the Madame Generals, their friends the Mrs. Colonels, the Chinese middlemen in Cholon, and all the lesser crooks in the Saigon regime had laid before them an unprecedented feast of corruption, gargantuan in scale. Thieu and his wife made so many millions that eventually they acquired control of a bank of their own to funnel their graft. Saigonese happenstance explained why so many of the buildings the Americans decided to rent as living quarters, offices, and supplementary warehousing turned out to belong to the families of people in the regime or people connected to it. With the U.S. Army paying more than $24 million in leases in 1966, the by-chance owners had good luck indeed. The Chinese and rich Vietnamese clamored with bribes for permits to put up more apartments and hotels to rent to the Americans. All new construction required permits, because cement, steel reinforcing bars, and other building materials were supposedly being rationed for the war effort and critical social needs like refugee housing. The hundreds of millions of dollars of increased AID-financed commodities coming into the country to try to hold down inflation meant a lot more graft from the sale of import licenses.

Given the thirst of the American soldier, franchises to distribute Filipino and Japanese beer were also particularly lucrative. In addition to the forty ice cream plants, the U.S. Army shipped forty ice-making plants to South Vietnam, mainly to keep the mess halls and clubs in ice cubes. It seemed, however, that the Americans could never get enough ice and bought all they could locally. Brig. Gen. Pham Quoc Thuan, the commander of the 5th ARVN Division at Ben Cat in the rubber-plantation country, responded to the need of his allies. He had his division engineers construct an ice plant, went into the ice-peddling business, and was henceforth known as the Icehouse General.

Bao Dai and his Binh Xuyen friend Bay Vien and their cronies had considered themselves fortunate to enjoy the time-honored rake-off from prostitution and associated entertainment. The rake-off of their successors was magnified by these galaxies of prostitutes attracted by the armed forces of the most powerful nation on earth, whose soldiers were wealthy men compared to the French troops and the Foreign Legionnaires and North African mercenaries of the Expeditionary Corps. An entrepreneurial spirit also need not be confined to such traditional rackets as prostitution rake-off, because new rackets kept appearing that were peculiar to the American style of war. The brass business was an example. The historic expenditure of ammunition caused a worldwide shortage of brass. The empty brass shell casings were collected and shipped out of the country to scrap-metal dealers at premium prices.

One of the new sources of wealth that appeared with the Americans was sinister—narcotics. Opium addiction was not uncommon in Southeast Asia, and, as Vann had discovered, the ARVN soldiers had turned to marijuana and alcohol as means of escape from their hopelessness in 1965. Heroin users were rare among the native peoples. The Americans were different. Many of them brought to South Vietnam the craving for marijuana and heroin that had been increasing gradually in the United States since the latter half of the 1950s.

The Corsican gangsters who had traditionally run opium out of Indochina, refining it into heroin in Marseilles and then selling the heroin in Europe and the United States, couldn’t take advantage of the sudden appearance of a major American market right in South Vietnam. There were too few of them; they lacked networks with sufficient span. The big-time Chinese racketeers in Cholon could handle the business. They had plenty of capital, networks of brothers and cousins and in-laws all over Southeast Asia, and lots of lesser Chinese at their beckoning to run the distribution system in the South. The Corsicans continued to buy what opium they could in Laos and send it to Marseilles, but most of the Southeast Asian opium was now bought by other hands and refined into heroin in secret laboratories in Burma and Thailand. Marijuana, previously grown on a small scale as a cash crop by the farmers of the region, was also planted much more widely and began to come into South Vietnam by the ton. The soldiers of the Air Cav learned that in the shanty town outside their base camp at An Khe in the middle of nowhere they could buy all of the “grass” they could smoke as well as cheap heroin that gave them a fast high because it was not diluted like the dope being sold for far more money on the streets back home. Huge payoffs were necessary to protect a business as profitable and sensitive
as this one. The Chinese traffickers did not have to pay every Saigon general, only those powerful enough to assure protection in return for the money.

With the exception of the airborne battalions and the Saigon marines whom Westmoreland employed on his search-and-destroy operations, the regular ARVN avoided combat assiduously after 1965. “I consider the performance of the ARVN to be more disgraceful than ever,” Vann wrote in the December 23, 1966, letter to York in which he said that while delighted with his new job as director of OCO for III Corps, he could not see any significant progress in the war. He laid out the statistics on small-unit operations reported by the three ARVN divisions in III Corps for the previous five days. The 25th Division under Vann’s acquaintance in Hau Nghia, Phan Trong Chinh, who had struck up an alliance with Ky and got himself promoted to brigadier general; the 5th Division under “Icehouse” Thuan; and the 18th ARVN Division at Xuan Loc claimed to have conducted 5,237 patrols and other small-unit operations over the five-day period. They reported making contact with the enemy thirteen times. “I can easily establish more enemy contacts on a daily basis myself,” Vann wrote.

As Westmoreland kept raising his demands for more American troops to fight his war of attrition, he came under increasing pressure to end the nonperformance of the ARVN. By early 1967 Lyndon Johnson had agreed to give him 470,000 Americans. In March the general then informed Washington that he had to have another 80,576 for a “Minimum Essential Force” of about 550,500 men “as soon as possible but not later than 1 July 1968.” He said he would prefer to have an additional 207,838 Americans for an “Optimum Force” of about 678,000 men. The president admonished him to “make certain we are getting value received from the South Vietnamese troops” and to try experiments to save U.S. manpower like the KATUSAs in Korea.

The general responded by pressing his latest request for more Americans while taking steps to protect himself against the accusation that he might be neglecting Vietnamese soldiers. Westmoreland had his staff draw up a program and reproduce it in a thick booklet marked “Secret.” The booklet described forty-four subprograms for more equipment, better training, and more advisors for the Saigon forces. Westmoreland gave the Saigon forces 3,000 more advisors. He also issued instructions that senior advisors were to accentuate, whenever possible, “the positive combat accomplishments of the South Vietnamese Army,” and to play
down the failings of the Saigon troops. He made speeches praising them. His chief public affairs officer said that the general wanted to “improve the image” of the ARVN. Westmoreland also began several experiments in the use of Vietnamese soldiers. The most serious, the mating of an ARVN Ranger group with the U.S. 199th Light Infantry Brigade, was to be terminated before the end of the year.

Most of the soldiers in the regular ARVN divisions might be able to escape for the moment; the men in the Regional Forces and the PF could not, because they continued to be frittered away in the outposts and in ambushes. On the Saigon side, 11,953 men perished in 1966, approximately 2 for each of the 6,053 Americans who died in Vietnam that year; 12,716 Vietnamese soldiers were to be killed on the Saigon side in 1967, the year the Americans almost caught up to them in dying.

With his penchant for gallows humor, Vann would have appreciated the irony had he known that at this moment at the end of 1966 when he was writing York that nothing had changed on the Saigon side, his nemesis of three and a half years earlier, Victor Krulak of the Marine Corps, was as frustrated and as angry as Vann had ever been. The singular quality of Brute Krulak’s intellect and his gift for his craft had finally brought him abreast of the war. He had acquired the distinction of becoming an American military leader who understood the minds of the men in Hanoi.