A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (13 page)

The helicopter leaped the barrier of terrain and shrank time and effort from enervating days to exhilarating minutes. Almost all of the guerrillas’ havens were within twenty miles in point-to-point distance from a province capital or a district center held by the Saigon government. The helicopter the Army had sent to Vietnam, the H-21 Shawnee, was an ungainly-looking machine of Korean War vintage, shaped like a fat bent pipe with large rotors fore and aft and appropriately named the Flying Banana by its crews. Nevertheless, it was a helicopter. A Flying Banana could pick up a squad of a dozen soldiers and move them, at eighty miles an hour, twenty miles in any direction in fifteen minutes. The newer H-34 Choctaw of the Marines, also called the HUS-1 Sea Horse, somewhat resembled a tadpole turned sideways. It could carry the same squad twenty miles in thirteen minutes at slightly over ninety miles an hour. A mere fourteen helicopters sufficed to carry the standard assault task force of half an ARVN battalion, about 165 men, with all of their weapons, ammunition, and food for a couple of days. Half an hour later the machines could return with a second task force and drop it along a route that the fleeing guerrillas had hoped to use for an orderly escape. There would be no warning beyond a minute or two if the pilots flew “contour”—that is, at treetop level—for the last few miles, which they did whenever they could. The whirling rotor blades drove the sound of the engines into the earth.

U.S. industry furnished Vann another machine that terrified the guerrillas every time they encountered it. The thing was a movable box of aluminum-alloy armor, rectangular, with sundry hatches and doors. A powerful engine mounted within turned caterpillar tracks on both sides. It was properly known as an armored personnel carrier, officially designated the M-113, and called an APC, a “track,” or a “carrier” in the slang of armor officers. A company of twelve of these machines joined the division in June. Each had a .50 caliber heavy machine gun mounted in front of the command hatch on top. A reinforced company of 140 infantrymen also rode inside the protection of the boxes. The behemoth weighed ten tons and was amphibious. When the monster struck flooded
rice paddies it churned across them at ten to twenty miles an hour, crashing into the small dikes of the fields with its tracks and bouncing over them. The armor was impervious to the bullets of the guerrillas’ rifles and machine guns, and the Viet Cong had no antitank weapons worth mentioning. The company of infantrymen were trained to dismount through the rear hatches on signal and to attack under the formidable firepower of the dozen .50 caliber machine guns.

As guerrillas were killed and weapons were captured with regularity, Colonel Cao became still more pleased and cooperative. Vann was sure he would be able to set in place the last element of his plan to run the 7th Infantry “just like an American division” and launch it on a ruthlessly executed campaign to destroy the Main Force and Regional Viet Cong battalions in the northern Delta. This final element was the transformation of Cao into an aggressive leader in Vann’s U.S. Army image. To attain the degree of proxy control necessary for a campaign of this magnitude, Vann needed to turn Cao, as Vann put it, into “the Tiger of South Vietnam.”

The difficulty was that Cao did not have a tigerish personality. What resemblance he bore to a cat was a certain plump sleekness of body and craftiness of character. He lacked claws. Vann thought he saw a way around that deficiency. He would emulate his hero, Lansdale.

The Ugly American
, the novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that had embellished Lansdale’s legend and made good sense to Vann when he had read it, was a political tract, “written as fiction … based on fact,” to warn Americans that the United States was losing to Communism an ideological battle for the minds of Asians. The book was a primer on how Americans could win this battle if they would learn how to get Asians to do what was good for America and Asia.
The Ugly American
was not only a best-seller and the basis of a movie after its publication in 1958, it was accepted well into the 1960s as an example of serious political thought. In the novel, Col. Edwin B. Hillandale is sent from the Philippines, where he has recently outwitted the Communist Hukbalahap guerrillas and helped his friend Ramón Magsaysay win the presidential election by a landslide vote, to the kingdom of Sarkhan, “a small country out toward Burma and Thailand,” where the United States is engaged in a contest with the Russians and the Chinese Communists for the friendship of the Sarkhanese leaders and people. One of Hillandale’s hobbies is reading palms and casting horoscopes. He has a diploma from the “Chungking School of Occult Science.” He observes during a walk through the capital city, Haidho, that palm readers and astrologers are accorded the same respect in Sarkhan as
“fashionable physicians in America” and that no one of importance makes any decision of importance without a palm reading and a horoscope. After a bit of spying and dossier reading to familiarize himself with the personalities and backgrounds of the Sarkhanese leaders and the latest intrigues, Colonel Hillandale is soon manipulating political events in the country by convincing the prime minister that he is the world’s greatest palm reader and astrologer. “Every person and every nation has a key which will open their hearts,” Hillandale tells the American ambassador to Sarkhan. “If you use the right key, you can maneuver any person or any nation any way you want.” As Hillandale had employed palm reading and horoscopes in Sarkhan, so Vann was going to use ego appeal to metamorphose Cao into a tiger and have the Vietnamese Communists suffer the consequences.

Huynh Van Cao was thirty-four years old in the summer of 1962 and had been promoted to command of a division when he was twenty-nine, an extraordinarily rapid rise in any army. Once asked by an American correspondent to explain his rocket ascent, Cao had pointed his swagger stick at himself and said: “Leadership!” He had designed the briefing office on the second floor of his house, his “War Room,” to be an exact replica of the map room of Napoleon. He had to settle for a partial replica when it turned out that imitating Napoleon to perfection would entail having the door open through the middle of the most important province on Cao’s enlarged map of the division zone. He had written a transparently disguised autobiography in the form of a novel entitled
He Grows Under Fire
. The book held up his career as a model for aspiring military leaders. He had a tendency to strut and he was never without his swagger stick, a gnarled and highly polished piece of exotic dark wood.

The title of Cao’s autobiographical novel was somewhat misleading. He had not seen a great deal of combat and should not have chosen the profession of soldiering because he had no vocation for making war. He lacked the nerves of a soldier. During one operation when nervous strain undid him he ran out of the command tent, vomited, and ordered the artillery to stop firing a barrage in support of an infantry unit engaged with the guerrillas. The noise upset him too much, he said. He did possess a semblance of military competence, as distinguished from combatíveness, as a result of superficial schooling by the French and U.S. armies. With his intelligence and glibness, he was able to make this semblance pass for actual competence with visiting American generals because they never saw him under stress.

Competence had, in any case, little to do with his double-time promotions
and the fact that he held command of the 7th Division astride the main road thirty-five miles below the capital. He had been appointed division commander because he was a Central Vietnamese and a Roman Catholic who had been born and educated in the former imperial capital of Hue, Diem’s home city, where his family had been known to the Ngo Dinhs, the president’s family. Like many sons of Vietnamese mandarin families who had taken the side of the French during the first war, he had gone into the military because it had offered status in an employment-starved society, not because he had wanted to fight.

He had begun in 1946 when it was still respectable in the milieu in which Cao grew up for a young Vietnamese of decent family to serve as a noncom. He had joined the French-sponsored regional militia for Central Vietnam, a post-World War II equivalent of the Civil Guard, as a staff sergeant. The French secondary education that had qualified him for a job in the operations section of a headquarters (the church had put him through its Lycée Pellerin in Hue) had also kept him out of harm’s way most of the time. He had thus been around two years later to obtain a place in the first class of a cadet school the French had opened in Hue to train officers for the new Vietnamese National Army they were raising for Bao Dai. In 1949, at the end of the six-month course, Cao had been commissioned a second lieutenant. He had then shuttled upward over the succeeding years of the early 1950s from platoon leader to company commander to staff officer of a battalion. The positions were more pro forma than real in terms of leadership and combat experience, because the French, under pressure from the United States to organize a native army, did not season and test these young men.

Cao had come to Diem’s notice in 1954 when he was on the staff of a battalion that had taken Diem’s side while Lansdale was guiding Diem to victory in the power struggle with his non-Communist rivals. Diem had brought Cao to the palace to work on his personal military staff for two years, making him its chief within a few months. To Diem’s way of thinking, two years of service at the palace and Cao’s family background were the best preparation for the responsibility of a division. He had given Cao one of the lesser divisions in 1957 and then, after Cao had completed a series of three-month courses in the United States at the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and other schools, had put him in charge of the 7th.

His first duty was to be prepared at all times to rush his troops to Saigon to save the president and his family should dissident elements of the armed forces launch another coup d’état like the one that a group
of paratroop officers had attempted unsuccessfully in November 1960. Diem had a special radiotelephone network that reached directly from the palace to Cao and the other division commanders and to most of the province chiefs. The fact that Cao kept his family in the security of Saigon was not the primary reason he had turned his house into a second headquarters, with another set of communications like the radios at the division headquarters in the old French caserne. The headquarters at the house was meant to serve as an alternate command post should disloyal subordinates seize the main one.

Cao theoretically took his orders from the brigadier general who was Porter’s counterpart at the corps headquarters in Saigon. In practice, Cao reported directly to Diem and ignored or appealed to the president any orders that did not suit him. “He is my king,” Cao would say when he spoke of his devotion to Diem. Cao’s king was a wily man who had rigged numerous fail-safe devices. While Cao was a trusted officer, unlike the brigadier general, who had no direct control over the troops in the three divisions that composed his corps, Cao too was not beyond question from another officer of nominally lower rank. The major who was the province chief in My Tho simultaneously commanded the armored regiment attached to the division. Diem had made the appointment just in case Cao might acquire strange ideas or fail Diem and his family for some other reason. Tanks could be president keepers or president killers. The major was from one of the landowning families of the Mekong Delta who had allied themselves with the Ngo Dinhs. He was a distant cousin but close associate of another division commander who had come to Diem’s rescue with troops in 1960 and had displayed his own loyalty by joining his relative in the crisis. Like the rest of the province chiefs, the major in My Tho also reported directly to the president, supposedly in his capacity as civil governor of the province.

In the summer of 1962, Vann felt confident that the flaws in Cao, to the extent he could then perceive them, and related problems like this deliberate muddling of authority, would not prevent him from turning Cao into an aggressive military leader. He believed that if he made Cao appear to be a tiger often enough Cao’s vanity would force him to play the part, even if he was a pussy cat.

Through June and into July, whenever the division killed a score or two of guerrillas in an operation, Vann would flatter Cao by telling him what a fine commander he was. He would praise Cao in the same way to me and the other reporters who came down to cover these engagements while Cao stood by listening and smiling. (I had arrived in South Vietnam as a freshman foreign correspondent in April 1962, about a
month after Vann, to serve as Saigon bureau chief for the UPI. The Kennedy administration had lifted its prohibition against newsmen riding along on helicopter assaults and accompanying the advisors on operations in late May, just as Vann reached My Tho.) Nothing Vann said in public ever betrayed his game. Instead, after dinner in the Seminary mess hall the night before an operation he would give the assembled correspondents a pep talk on “emphasizing the positive” in our stories in order to encourage our ally. “Sandy” Faust, the outgoing major who was Vann’s chief of staff, and Ziegler and the other officers at the command post were amused when they watched Vann work on Cao during an operation. To try to get Cao to direct the action the way he wanted, Vann would resort to little devices such as: “I know what you’re going to do next because you’re that kind of a commander.” Before Cao had a chance to ask what Vann meant, Vann would pretend that he had heard Cao ask and describe the move. Often Cao would smile and say, yes, that was exactly what he had in mind, and issue the order. If Cao did not like the proposal, he would smile just as cheerfully and tell Vann that he had a better idea. Vann did not approve of all of Cao’s ideas, but he took care never to contradict Cao in front of the American or Vietnamese staffs. Later in private he would explain his objections.

Cao’s attitude gave every evidence that Vann’s puppeteering was having the desired effect. He strutted a bit more and his manner became more pompous, but he also clearly saw advancement of his career in the hero image that Vann was projecting of him and in the fact that his division was killing Viet Cong on a scale that none of the other divisions was attaining. Vann told Ziegler he was sure that his handling of Cao would pay off soon in the first “big kill” of the series of hammer blows with which he intended to smash the guerrillas. At the rate they were harrying the Viet Cong, the guerrillas were going to make a truly serious mistake one of these days while attempting to escape a helicopter assault. When that moment came he was going to kill or capture an entire battalion of Viet Cong or its equivalent in separate companies that had banded together to train or fight.