A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (126 page)

Vann was struck by what a bizarre contrast the party was to the atmosphere at Weyand’s headquarters less than twenty miles away. The latest intelligence Weyand had was that the attacks would come on the night of January 30 to 31. The officers in his Tactical Operations Center had formed a betting pool as to precisely when the Viet Cong would strike. The bettor had a choice of fifteen-minute intervals beginning with darkness on the 30th. All of the money was being laid on intervals between midnight and 5:00
A.M
.

Jake had hired a band, and Bunker was among the guests, along with a goodly representation of others who counted in the American and Vietnamese establishment in Saigon. In the midst of the evening a twenty-three-foot string of Chinese firecrackers, hanging from a tree, was lit off to drive away the evil spirits for the New Year. The firecrackers were a present from Nguyen Van Loc, the prime minister of the cabinet Thieu had formed since his election as president in September. Ky, who had been elected vice-president, was a ram waiting to be dehorned. With 492,900 American servicemen in the country, the regime felt secure enough to authorize the traditional firecrackers at Tet, a custom that had been forbidden for a number of years to prevent the Viet Cong from using the firecrackers as a cover for gunfire. Vann talked to the ambassador and discovered that Bunker had not heard about the anticipated assaults at Bien Hoa and Long Binh. Westmoreland’s headquarters,
which was kept informed, had apparently not bothered to pass on the information. Nothing that Vann told the ambassador seemed to alarm him. Vann interpreted his serenity as a reflection of Bunker’s assumption that Westmoreland had the war in hand.

Weyand moved the usual 5:00
P.M.
briefing up to 3:00 the next afternoon, January 30, the first day of Tet, in order to clear for action. He was plying his old trade of intelligence officer and said the assaults against Bien Hoa Air Base and his headquarters and the POW compound would probably come at 3:00
A.M.
on the 31st. A report from Westmoreland’s headquarters raised the tension. It said that installations in Da Nang, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, Ban Me Thuot, Kontum, and Pleiku had been hit during the predawn and on the morning of the 30th.

Despite these attacks and all of the intelligence, Vann found it hard to believe that the Viet Cong would engage in major combat during the first couple of days of Tet. Although there had been violations in the past, the cease-fires had always been honored in the main long enough to permit a decent celebration. He let caution guide him just the same. He had David Farnham, the executive secretary of his headquarters, dispatch a teletype message to the CORDS teams in every province capital in the corps warning of the intelligence indicators and ordering “maximum alert posture … especially during hours of darkness, throughout the Tet period.” When Farnham said that encoding the message would delay it several hours, Vann replied: “Send it in the clear.” He was not going to let the tension interfere with his own Tet, and he assumed that the Viet Cong would do nothing until their favorite wee hours. He drove the Ford Mustang into Saigon, picked up Lee and took her to dinner, and then drove back to the house in Bien Hoa. They made love and went to sleep not long after midnight, early for Vann.

Bunker’s Marine guards woke him shortly after 3:00
A.M.
in his bedroom on the second floor of the ambassador’s residence. “Saigon is under attack,” they said. The Viet Cong were assaulting the embassy four blocks away. The residence might be hit at any moment. The Marines had brought an armored personnel carrier to the house. They had orders to drive Bunker in it to the home of the chief of embassy security, where they thought he might be safer. He was not to argue, they said, and there was no time for him to dress. The Marines told him to just put his bathrobe on over his pajamas.

The ambassador’s study on the ground floor of the villa was filled with smoke from burning secret documents. Bunker had a small safe there
in which he kept documents for his night reading. The Marines had opened and emptied the safe and were burning everything in case the guards who were to stay behind were killed and the house was captured. In the confusion they scorched two holes through the leather on the top of Bunker’s Brooks Brothers briefcase. He had left the briefcase on his desk when he went to bed.

Ellsworth Bunker was not a man who would resist Marines attempting to do their duty. He climbed into the M-113. The armored machine rumbled off into the darkness hauling the ambassador of the United States in bathrobe and pajamas through the streets of the capital of a country where 67 percent of the citizenry were supposed to be living in American-conferred security. Tet firecrackers still being lit by the unwitting were muffling the gunfire. Fifteen Viet Cong battalions, approximately 6,000 Communist troops, had moved into Saigon and its suburbs. Bunker kept the scorched briefcase and carried it around afterward in remembrance of the night.

Khe Sanh was the biggest lure of the war. The Vietnamese Communists had no intention of attempting to stage a second Dien Bien Phu there. The objective of the siege was William Westmoreland, not the Marine garrison. The siege was a ruse to distract Westmoreland while the real blow was prepared. The men in Hanoi had long ago decided that it was impossible to repeat Dien Bien Phu against the Americans. The French Expeditionary Corps had been a polyglot colonial army of a European nation enfeebled by defeat and occupation during World War II. The Vietnamese could gradually build an army that outweighed its French opponent, as the Viet Minh of 1954 clearly did. Giap had more artillery at Dien Bien Phu than the French. The French also had little in the way of transport planes and fighter-bombers and no heavy bomber aircraft. Gen. Henri Navarre lacked the means to sustain or relieve the garrison he placed in the mountains 185 miles from the nearest French stronghold at Hanoi.

The United States had too much raw military power for the Vietnamese to hope for a literal repetition of their earlier triumph. A serious attempt to overwhelm 6,000 troops as solid as the Marines in the face of U.S. firepower would have entailed an insane number of casualties, far more than the thousands of Vietnamese who were to die at Khe Sanh to maintain the false appearance of this threat, and the effort would certainly have ended in failure, because the siege could always be broken. Khe Sanh was less than thirty miles from the landing docks on the Viet Estuary (Cua Viet) just in from the coast near Dong Ha, and the road was usable as far as the artillery base at Ca Lu ten miles to
the rear. If the Air Cav did not suffice to relieve Khe Sanh, Westmoreland could line up a couple of other divisions and blast his way through. These conditions were not unique to Khe Sanh. The Vietnamese realized that the essentials of this military equation would always prevail in their war with the United States. Yet to turn the war decisively in their favor they had to achieve a masterstroke that would have the will-breaking effect on the Americans that Dien Bien Phu had had on the French. The masterstroke was Tet, 1968.

For the most desperate battle in the history of their nation they reached back to the bold Nguyen Hue who had caught the Manchus at Dong Da during that Tet 179 years before and conceived a plan that in its breadth and daring was beyond the imagination of foreigners and Vietnamese who served foreigners. In cities and towns all across South Vietnam, tens of thousands of Communist troops were launching what the chief of Westmoreland’s operations center, Brig. Gen. John Chaisson of the Marine Corps, called a “panorama of attacks.” The bulk of an NVA division, guided by local guerrillas, stormed into Hue and occupied nearly the whole city and the imperial citadel. The gold-starred banner of the Viet Cong was raised to the top of the immense flagpole at the Zenith Gate where the like-starred banner of the first Viet Minh had been unfurled during Bao Dai’s abdication in 1945. Military camps and command posts, police stations, administrative headquarters, prisons, and radio stations in more than half of the forty-four province capitals and in all of the autonomous cities in the country were under assault in the predawn hours of January 31, 1968, or were soon to be hit. Scores of district centers and ARVN bases in the countryside were being struck. Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa, and a number of other air bases were under ground attack or shelling to try to prevent air support or helicopter reinforcement for endangered garrisons.

In Saigon, the Viet Cong were also attempting to seize Independence Palace (Thieu was not inside; he had gone to My Tho to celebrate Tet there with his wife’s family), the Navy headquarters, the Joint General Staff compound, and the radio station. With the exception of the embassy, a target of grandstand propaganda value that could not be ignored, and the air bases that were jointly held, the Communist troops were generally seeking to bypass the Americans and to concentrate on their Saigonese allies. The goal was to collapse the Saigon regime with these military blows and with a revolt patterned on the August Revolution of 1945. The revolt was to be fomented by Viet Cong cadres among the population in the urban areas being occupied by the Communist fighters. Ho Chi Minh and his confederates hoped to knock the
prop out from under the American war, force the United States to open negotiations under disadvantageous conditions, and begin the process of wedging the Americans out of their country. Khe Sanh was one of the few places in South Vietnam where, except for more miserable shelling, nothing was taking place.

The ruse of Khe Sanh did not by itself enable the Vietnamese Communists to achieve a surprise on this scale. The American style of war had created a vacuum in South Vietnam in which the Communists could move freely. A massive shift of population had been brought about by Westmoreland’s generating of refugees and by the economic attraction of the base-building and other extravagances of the U.S. military machine to poor and war-impoverished Vietnamese. No one knew how many Vietnamese had become refugees. The staff of Edward Kennedy’s subcommittee put the number at 3 million by the end of 1967. A South Vietnam that had been overwhelmingly rural, with 85 percent of its people in the countryside when Vann arrived in 1962, had become substantially urban. The population of greater metropolitan Saigon had grown from about 1.4 million in 1962 to between 3.5 and 4 million, an extraordinary change given a population of about 17 million for the whole of the South. Samuel Huntington, a professor of government at Harvard and a consultant to AID and the State Department, coined the term “forced-draft urbanization and modernization” for what had been wrought. “In an absentminded way the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to ‘wars of national liberation,’” he said.

The crowding of so many people in and around the cities and towns was deceptive. It gave an appearance of increased Saigon government control while, in reality, there was less control than ever because of the social and economic chaos and the unprecedented corruption. The police had no desire to venture into the new slums that had risen in response to American needs. They feared the gangs of hoodlums and ARVN deserters in these warrens. With everyone so busy at the feast of loot there was scant security in many better sections. The official ARVN history of the Tet Offensive, by and large an intellectually honest account, was to acknowledge that assassinations and other acts of terrorism had been common in the northern Saigon suburb of Go Vap during 1967 and that the guerrillas had frequently established roadblocks on outlying streets in Cholon and attacked police posts there and in adjacent Phu Lam. “Enemy soldiers had reached the doors of the city,” the history said.

Annie and her grandmother became friendly with several of the neighbors
around the house AID had rented for Vann in the other Saigon suburb of Gia Dinh. The neighbors pointed to the homes of a number of families who were known to be guerrilla sympathizers or who had family members or close relatives in the Viet Cong. Vann’s new daughter was five weeks old by the end of January. When Annie woke early on the morning of the 31st to feed the baby she heard shouts of “Let’s get out of here!” from the street. She and her grandmother ran outside and saw people hurrying from their houses with as many of their belongings as they could carry to flee the shooting that was about to begin. A group of Viet Cong had taken up positions in a Buddhist pagoda a few hundred yards away. Weeks before with the collusion of the monks the guerrillas had dug a bunker under the pagoda and stashed weapons and ammunition there.

The majority of the Viet Cong battalions that penetrated the western side of Saigon to attack Tan Son Nhut and other targets came through Tan Binh District. Vann had learned the previous summer that the district chief of Tan Binh was collecting pay for 582 RF and PF troops when he actually had 150. One of the RF battalions presumed to be defending the west side of Saigon was called “the Chinese Battalion.” The names on its roll were mostly shopkeepers and other Chinese who never left their businesses in Cholon. William Westmoreland thought that he possessed South Vietnam. What he owned was a lot of American islands where his soldiers stood.

Vann woke at the first thunderclaps of the 122mm rockets and 82mm mortars slamming into Bien Hoa Air Base almost exactly at 3:00
A.M.
He dressed in a frenzy, telling Lee that he had to go to the CORDS compound and she could not come with him. The house was the safest place for her, he said. She should stay in the bedroom and hide in the wardrobe if any Viet Cong broke inside. He ran out the door to his car with Wilbur Wilson, his deputy, who had also awaked and dressed in an instant.

The concussion from an ammunition dump at Long Binh detonated by sappers who sneaked into the base blew the fluorescent light bulbs out of their fixtures and tossed furniture around the Quonset hut where Fred Weyand had his Tactical Operations Center. Weyand wasn’t hurt. He put on his helmet and flak jacket as the duty officers and enlisted staff recovered from the shock and lit emergency gasoline lanterns. Weyand hadn’t been able to sleep and had gotten out of bed and gone to the TOC an hour earlier to wait. The helicopter gunships he had
placed on strip alert were taking off, some to search for the rocket and mortar positions, others to wait for the Communist infantry. The night was confusion, flash, and din. More 122mm rockets and mortars crashed around Weyand’s headquarters as the Viet Cong sought to knock out his command post with a bombardment rather than a ground assault. The generators kept feeding power to the radios and teletypes and the phones kept working fine, and Weyand was amazed at the reports coming in from Saigon and the ring of installations around the capital.