A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (130 page)

Yorty forwarded the letter to the president-elect, but Vann received no inquiries about joining the Nixon administration as a high-level advisor. Exuberance and his search for his star occasionally led him to flights of fancy about his eligibility for exalted Washington office. He dreamed of one day being rewarded for his Vietnam service with the post of secretary of the Army so that he could settle scores with the institution he felt had rejected him. Vann nevertheless did contribute to the formulation of the Nixon strategy through the letter, the Arnett article, and the fact that Henry Kissinger, who was chosen that November to be Nixon’s special assistant for national security affairs, was familiar with his ideas. Vann managed to convey them to Kissinger during an earlier attempt in 1968 to further himself and his war. He had offered to join Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign as its Vietnam expert. His overture became moot with Rockefeller’s defeat by Nixon at the Republican National Convention, but in the meantime Kissinger had received copies of Vann’s letters to Edward Kennedy and others.

The Nixon strategy was soon to emerge under a catchier term than the de-Americanization one Nixon had used in the letter to Yorty. It was to be called Vietnamization. Kissinger was to pay Vann an exaggerated compliment on the extent of his contribution. “It’s your policy,” he was to say. Despite the lack of an invitation to come to Washington, John Vann was content for the moment. He believed he had at last found a way to win the war that put him at one with the men of power who made victory and advancement possible.

He became a touchstone of optimism and progress for his fellow seekers of this other way. Komer passed Vann to his successor, William Colby, when Komer decided to accept Johnson’s farewell gift of the ambassadorship to Turkey and left Vietnam in November 1968. Colby had returned to Saigon from CIA headquarters shortly after Tet at Komer’s behest to serve as his deputy. By the time Komer left, Colby held Vann in the same regard. CORDS did seem to be pacifying the South Vietnamese countryside. Under pressure from Johnson, the Saigon regime widened the military manpower pool in 1968 by lowering the draft age with a new General Mobilization Law. The law was to
bring an additional 200,000 Vietnamese into uniform by the end of 1969 and to permit a major expansion of the ARVN and, more important for pacification, of the RF and PF.

Komer and Colby, with Vann encouraging them, also persuaded Thieu to put his authority behind a special program to capture or kill the cadres of the clandestine Viet Cong government, the so-called VCI, for Viet Cong Infrastructure. The program was given the English name Phoenix, a compromise translation for the Vietnamese name Phung Hoang, a mythical bird that could fly anywhere. The rival intelligence and police agencies on the Saigon side were forced to pool their information so that dossiers and blacklists could be drawn up and cadres targeted. The CIA’s assassination squads, the former Counter Terror Teams that were now known as Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), constituted the action arm, with the RF and PF employed too when convenient. Technically, no cadres were marked for assassination, only for arrest, because a prisoner led to others when he or she talked. In practice, the PRUs anticipated resistance in disputed areas and shot first. People taken prisoner were usually men and women denounced and arrested in Saigon-held zones, picked up at checkpoints, or captured in combat and later identified as VCI. Cadres who did not wish to risk the PRUs or jail had the choice any guerrilla had of defecting. Komer set a quota for all of South Vietnam. He wanted 3,000 VCI “neutralized” every month. He launched the first Accelerated Pacification Campaign just before he departed.

Tet had drained the Viet Cong of the armed strength the guerrillas needed to shield their cadres and to contest the Saigon side for physical control of the hamlets. Vann confirmed this supposition during the final months of 1968 in III Corps and after he was transferred to Can Tho in February 1969 to be chief of pacification for the Mekong Delta (IV Corps). Komer had wanted to shift him there during the summer of 1968, because he felt Vann had set standards and built a CORDS team in III Corps that could be passed on to someone else and because the Viet Cong had traditionally drawn so much of their manpower, tax revenues, and other resources from the Delta. Vann had resisted surrendering the III Corps position and all that it meant to him, sending Wilbur Wilson to Can Tho in his place. He had eventually given in to pressure from Colby.

He discovered that many of the 2,100 hamlets the HES listed as under Viet Cong ownership in IV Corps in February 1969 (another 2,000 hamlets were listed in varying degrees of Saigon control) were actually held by half a dozen guerrillas. The district companies and regional
battalions that had once been on the qui vive to back up the locals and punish intrusions by the Saigon side had more dead heroes than keen-for-battle fighters on their rolls. Moreover, those on the Saigon side sensed the change. The atmosphere was the reverse of the days of panic and intimidation in Hau Nghia in 1965 when Viet Cong commandos could barge into Cu Chi town and chase recalcitrant members of the district intelligence squad down dirt lanes and across rooftops for hours undisturbed. The province and district chiefs were willing to tackle their enemy when prodded to do so by Americans like Vann. His methodical recruiting of more RF and PF to form garrisons and his establishment of hamlet and village administrations through the RD Cadre teams enabled him to quickly penetrate reaches of the Delta that had known no Saigon presence since Diem.

Saigon officialdom saw the glitter of extortionist gold in the Phoenix Program, blackmailing innocents and taking bribes not to arrest those they should have arrested. In the rush to fill quotas they posthumously elevated lowly guerrillas killed in skirmishes to the status of VC hamlet and village chiefs. The Phoenix bird was a predator nonetheless. After all of these years, the identity of many hamlet, village, and district cadres was common knowledge in their neighborhoods. Thousands died or vanished into Saigon’s prisons. Colby was to state in 1971 that 28,000 VCI had been captured in the whole of South Vietnam under the program, 20,000 had been killed, and another 17,000 had defected.

The Viet Cong did not disappear, of course, nor did the fighting cease, but the guerrillas were forced into a period of relative quiesence. They managed to retain strongholds south of the Bassac in the U Minh Forest of Ca Mau, in Kien Giang and Chuong Thien provinces, and in Chau Doc along the Cambodian border, and they clung to smaller bases in the northern Delta. To accomplish this, Hanoi had to infiltrate four NVA regiments into IV Corps. A lot of the cadres who survived had to hide in the swamps and jungles or pose as Saigon officials. Large sections of the Delta acquired a tranquillity that was spoiled only once in a while by shooting. Bridges were repaired and long-closed roads and canals reopened. The farmers who had stayed on the land or who returned to it thrived. Television was one of the gifts of a technological civilization that the U.S. military had brought in its baggage train, to broadcast tapes of American programs for the troops and to create a Saigon network that could propagandize for the regime. From his helicopter Vann noticed television antennas appearing on the roofs of the bigger farmhouses.

He acquired friends he would not have made before. “You and I
… such unlikely companions,” Joseph Alsop, the Establishment newspaper columnist who was one of them, remarked in a letter to Vann in the fall of 1969. Alsop and Vann had met once before, in the fall of 1967, at Alsop’s request and under duress from Komer. Vann had at first refused to see Alsop, because he looked on him then with the scorn of Halberstam and Vann’s other reporter friends. Komer had said that one could not refuse to talk to Joe Alsop, that Komer would order Vann to do so if Vann persisted. Vann had relented, and Alsop had satisfied his curiosity. “I am not at all sure that we see the Vietnamese situation from the same angle of vision,” Alsop had said afterward in a rare instance of understatement in his note thanking Vann for the meeting. Vann got no mention in Alsop’s column. Two years later, Alsop’s hope in Westmoreland was a memory, but he was as much in search as ever of proof that the United States could achieve victory in Vietnam. With Vann’s new angle of vision, he was the touchstone Alsop needed.

That fall of 1969, Alsop spent the better part of a week touring the Delta and wrote several columns celebrating the experience of being in “John Vann’s country.” If Vann, “in the long past… Vietnam’s super-pessimist,” said the United States and the Saigon side were currently winning, then it had to be true. “‘Not too far down the road,’ John Vann told me, ‘I’m confident that 90 percent of the Delta population will be under solid government control.’” John Vann was “an infinitely patriotic, intelligent, and courageous and magnificent leader.” The sincerity in the friendship that developed came from Alsop, a man who, when he gave his affection, gave it generously. Vann outwardly returned the friendship, accepted the advertising and the increased respectability Alsop provided him, and explained that he was nice to Joe because Joe was “the president’s journalist.”

Respectability opened the door of the Oval Office. Colby received a cable from Washington during the second week of December 1969. The president wished to see Vann on December 22 at 11:00
A.M.
Vann was due to be in the United States then for Christmas leave and had hoped to meet Kissinger. He had written for an appointment. Another of his newly acquired friends, Sir Robert Thompson, transformed a prospective meeting with the president’s special assistant into the ultimate compliment. He suggested to Kissinger that the president talk to Vann.

Sir Robert’s opinion of whether the United States would prevail in Vietnam had fluctuated over the years, depending on whose ideas were being pursued. He was perceptive in analyzing Westmoreland’s. As with so many men of affairs, his critical faculties were daunted by his own. Richard Nixon was a student of Thompson’s writings and had invited
him to the White House that October. Thompson had told the president that the Vietnamization strategy could put the essentials of victory in place within two years. (He was more cautious in a book he published in 1969, giving a three-to-five-year estimate.) Nixon then hired Thompson as a consultant and sent him to South Vietnam to validate his judgment. Thompson, another man in need of a touchstone, chose Vann as his validator.

Vann escorted him around the Delta for three days at the beginning of November. They were together to hear Nixon’s watershed speech on Vietnam on November 3, 1969, listening to it over the radio in a district headquarters in Ba Xuyen Province, a former guerrilla bastion below the Bassac. Nixon had already ordered the withdrawal of 60,000 American troops to appease public opinion, and there was general expectation that he would use the occasion to announce a program for quick withdrawal of most of the rest and perhaps a cease-fire too. He instead appealed to “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” for their patience and support while he prosecuted the war until he could obtain “peace with honor.” The withdrawals would continue, but at a measured pace to permit the strengthening of the Saigon forces. Vann was elated by the speech, because it meant, he wrote a friend, that Nixon had decided “to tell the demonstrators to go to hell.” Fortified by his days with Vann, Thompson reported back to Nixon that the Saigon side held a “winning position.”

The president was standing beside his desk, looking out the French door toward the Rose Garden, when Vann entered his office. The hour of the appointment had been changed. The time was five minutes past noon. Nixon turned and stepped forward in greeting. Kissinger introduced Vann with unstinting praise. The president had cleared his desk to listen, his habitual courtesy to visitors, but he seemed genuinely to want to listen to what Vann had come to tell him. “I will not be the first president of the United States to lose a war,” Nixon said to the Republican congressional leaders that fall. He talked with Vann for nearly an hour. After Vann briefed him on pacification in the Delta, Nixon questioned Vann on how he had seen the war change over the years, seeking to learn why Vann had arrived at his current opinions. “He appeared to accept with some confidence the judgments I gave him as to the now favorable situation,” Vann said in his memorandum of the conversation. Vann assured the president that with the advantage of heavy weapons and U.S. airpower the ARVN would be able to handle the NVA when they someday faced off. The worst that could occur, he said, was that the Saigon regime “would have to give up some territory
and some population if an all-out conventional invasion took place,” but the “invasion would be contained as the enemy extended his supply lines and became vulnerable to bombardment by air and artillery.” The president thanked Vann for his service and instructed him to return to Vietnam and keep up the good work. He gave Vann a fountain pen and an autographed golf ball as souvenirs of their meeting.

Success did not tame John Vann easily. He almost got himself fired again for attempting to save his best Vietnamese friend, Tran Ngoc Chau, from jail. After the dispute with the CIA over the pacification teams, and simultaneous trouble he had had with Ky’s minister for pacification, Chau decided he had spoiled his chance for further promotion in the ARVN. He took a leave of absence from the army and transferred his ambition to politics, winning the seat from Kien Hoa in the lower house of the National Assembly during the October 1967 elections. He did well in the Assembly, managing to get himself elected secretary-general of the Lower House. The Tet Offensive then propelled him into a high-stakes maneuver. He sought to make himself the go-between in the peace talks, utilizing one of his brothers who had stayed loyal to Ho Chi Minh as a secret channel to the other side. This brother, Tran Ngoc Hien, was a senior agent in Hanoi’s intelligence service and had been back in the South since 1965, posing as a traveling salesman of pharmaceuticals. To further his plan, Chau had turned on an old ARVN friend and a former political ally, Nguyen Van Thieu, and attacked him by denouncing his bag man in the Assembly, a wealthy pharmacist named Nguyen Cao Thang whose task was to bribe delegates to vote as Thieu desired. Chau was not motivated entirely by ambition. Tet had convinced him that it was wrong to inflict on the Vietnamese people a war “without any end in sight,” and he thought that the Saigon side had a chance of surviving if it negotiated a peace in time.