A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (134 page)

His relationship with Dan Ellsberg had become increasingly complicated. He had been enraged at Ellsberg after the publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971, cursing him to mutual acquaintances and shouting that Ellsberg, who was being prosecuted by the Nixon administration for conspiracy, theft, and a violation of the espionage statute, ought to be thrown into jail for treason. Vann was not angry at Ellsberg’s wholesale breach of security regulations. He was incensed at the assault Ellsberg was attempting on his war. Yet he did not want to forsake the friendship. “Can’t say I’m in agreement with your way of making your
point—but you sure as hell created a stir,” he wrote Ellsberg that fall. Six different investigators from four agencies had come to his headquarters in Pleiku to question him, he said, and he had seen to it that none of them “made his trip worthwhile.” He was lying. He apparently cooperated with the investigators. He also passed tips to Kissinger on how the administration ought to proceed against Ellsberg.

On his way home to Littleton for this Christmas of 1971, he landed in Los Angeles so that he could see his brother Gene, who was living in nearby Redlands, California. He called Ellsberg on the phone from Gene’s house, and they had a long talk. Ellsberg described for Vann in confidence the defense strategy his lawyers had developed for Ellsberg’s forthcoming trial in Los Angeles. Later in this holiday leave, when Vann flew from Colorado to Washington for his usual round of calls, he stopped at the Pentagon office of J. Fred Buzhardt, then the general counsel of the Defense Department and subsequently one of Nixon’s lawyers in the Watergate affair. Buzhardt was gathering information for the prosecution of Ellsberg. Vann spent an hour and a half passing along Ellsberg’s defense strategy and suggesting how the administration might defeat it.

Vann did not intend the game to end as the betrayal of a friend. After the message from Weyand and Jacobson came in January and Vann was on his way back to South Vietnam and to battle, he stopped in San Francisco. He and Ellsberg met there for several hours to talk about the war and Ellsberg’s trial. Ellsberg asked Vann to testify for him, because Vann would carry such credibility with a jury. “I’ll say anything you want,” Vann replied. The promise was one he undoubtedly meant to keep, but he would not have known what he was going to say until just before he sat down in the witness chair.

John Vann planned to defeat his enemy as he had seen Walton Walker defeat the North Koreans in the Pusan Perimeter. He would not throw away infantry as Westmoreland had done in sending men against fortified positions in the wilderness. The roles had been reversed. To win the war, the Vietnamese Communists had to come to him, and when they advanced out of the mountains, he would break them on his strong-points. The apparent objective of the NVA offensive in II Corps was Kontum, a garrison and trading center with a population of about 25,000, the capital of the province of the same name and the northernmost town of substance in the Highlands. Kontum was guarded to the north by the regimental base at Tan Canh on a plateau near the district headquarters
of Dak To twenty-five miles up the ascending asphalt ribbon of Route 14. Just below Tan Canh and to the west of it, a series of ridgelines ran in a north-south direction, parallel to Route 14 and back down toward Kontum. These were known collectively as Rocket Ridge because they had been the recipients over the years of so many of the NVA’s 122mm rockets. The U.S. Army had built a string of fortified artillery positions, called fire support bases or fire bases for short, down Rocket Ridge to shield the road and the northwest approaches to Kontum and had bequeathed these to the ARVN. Before the Vietnamese Communists could attack Kontum, they first had to overrun Tan Canh or crack the fire-base line along Rocket Ridge.

Hanoi gathered about 35,000 men for the showdown under one of its best generals, Hoang Minh Thao, a protégé of Giap’s who was destined to become chief of staff of the Vietnamese Army. Thao had commanded the B-3 Front, the NVA corps for the Highlands, since 1966. He was given two regular infantry divisions, one of which had just infiltrated from the North at the turn of the year, and he had the equivalent of a third infantry division in independent regiments. The infantry were assisted by other regiments of sappers and combat engineers and backed by artillery regiments equipped with captured American 105mm guns, Soviet-model 130mm guns, 120mm mortars, the formidable rockets, and an array of antiaircraft weapons.

Thao marshaled his troops in the triborder area beyond Tan Canh and Rocket Ridge where Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam meet. The region was another of those primeval fastnesses of the Annamites that the NVA had transformed into a bastion they called Base Area 609. It was a place of dread for the Saigon soldiers, as it had become for their American predecessors. On Hill 875 and neighboring precipitous ridges in Base Area 609, 287 men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 4th Infantry Division had died and more than 1,000 had been wounded in a gruesome border battle in November 1967 while Westmoreland was proclaiming victory in Washington. The Plei Trap Valley farther south had been the scene of so many ambushes that only an intrepid few from the Special Forces and the long-range patrols of the ARVN Airborne would venture there anymore.

When the offensive did not begin in February, Vann mistakenly thought he might have forestalled it with dozens of B-52 strikes he was laying along the approach routes and by incessant bombardment with tactical jets. The Hanoi leadership wanted to coordinate the attacks in II Corps with the focal points of the offensive in other corps regions, and the preparations for all required time.

The NVA made their preparations boldly on this occasion. Sound travels far in the mountains at night, and light can be seen a long way off. The advisors on the fire bases could hear the bulldozers of the NVA engineers widening the old French tracks and cutting new roads, and they could see the headlights of the trucks hauling food and ammunition and towing artillery into position. The 2nd NVA Division closed on Tan Canh from the northwest while the 320th Division maneuvered from the west against Rocket Ridge, the Communist infantry sheltering as they came in the great massif of Chu Mom Ray (Mom Ray Mountain) that the American soldiers had named, not with affection, Big Mama.

On March 30, 1972, in the general assault the Americans called the Easter 1972 Offensive because Easter Sunday came three days later, NVA troops led by tanks surged out of the Demilitarized Zone against Camp Carroll and the other positions the Marines had won in I Corps and turned over to the ARVN there. By that time several of the fire bases in Vann’s area along Rocket Ridge were under siege. A few days later, there was an assault where no one expected an attack. Vann’s old acquaintances in III Corps, the 5th and 9th VC divisions and the 7th NVA, appeared out of Cambodia, overran the district headquarters of Loc Ninh in the rubber-plantation country at the top of Route 13, one of the main roads to Saigon, and moved down on the province town of An Loc sixty miles from the South Vietnamese capital. They too were led by tanks.

Vann’s plan worked to perfection in the beginning. Hoang Minh Thao tried to unhinge the Rocket Ridge line by knocking out the strongest position near the bottom of it, Fire Base Delta, manned by a battalion of ARVN paratroops from one of two airborne brigades Dzu had obtained from the Joint General Staff as reinforcements. Thao encountered the lieutenant who had kept the riflemen in the fight on the lonely hilltops beyond Masan, Korea, in September 1950. “Rogue’s Gallery” (Vann’s radio call sign in II Corps) happened to arrive over Delta at the break of dawn on April 3, 1972, with a flight of three slick-ship Hueys and two Cobra gunship helicopters. The NVA attackers had just overwhelmed the paratroops in the northern part of the base and were battling their way down trench lines to conquer the rest of it. The Cobra was a slimmed-down advance on the Huey, roughly twice as fast and built to carry firepower. Pods on stubby wings held dozens of rockets, an extremely rapid-fire 7.62mm “Minigun” shot streams of bullets, and an automatic launcher hurled 40mm grenades. Vann had come to rescue the crew of a Chinook that had been shot down while resupplying Delta four days earlier. In an instant he turned rescue of crew into rescue of fire base.

He sent the Cobras slashing into the follow-on groups of Communist infantry who were running through the wire to help their comrades already inside. He took charge of the artillery at the brigade command post back at Vo Dinh on Route 14, of the Stinger and Spectre fixed-wing gunships with the Bofors cannons and Vulcan guns, and of the fighter-bombers arriving from the carriers off the coast and from the Air Force squadrons that had been shifted to fields in Thailand. While the Saigon paratroops counterattacked, Vann destroyed every attempt by the NVA to reinforce the couple of hundred assault troops who had fought their way inside.

Lt. Huynh Van Cai, Vann’s ARVN aide who was flying with him, had seen combat. He had been an infantry platoon leader with the regiment at Tan Canh for eight months. He had never seen a battle from a helicopter before. He was fascinated by the scene below of men rushing forward and being tossed into the air by bombs and shells, and falling as the bullets cut them down.

The NVA inside Delta were wiped out by the afternoon, but the base was still going to have to be abandoned soon for lack of ammunition, water, and medical supplies. Vann announced that he personally would resupply it. The paratroop battalion commander, despite his need, radioed that Vann would be killed. The NVA had sited 12.7mm and electrically rotated 14.5mm antiaircraft machine guns around Delta and had a flak cannon whose shells burst in the air with a black puff. That Vann’s helicopter had not been shot down while dancing high above the base since dawn to direct the artillery and air strikes was already a sufficient miracle for the day. The airborne brigade commander at Vo Dinh and his advisor, Maj. Peter Kama, the tall Hawaiian who had been one of Vann’s captains at My Tho, told him he was being foolhardy. “I’m experienced at this,” Vann said.

The model helicopter Vann now used was the latest Scout type the Bell Aircraft Corporation had produced for the Army, officially designated the OH-58 Kiowa and commonly known as the Ranger from its commercial name, JetRanger. The Ranger was a sleek little craft with a swept-back fuselage and a nose shaped like the snout of a shark, the perfect helicopter for Vann because it combined the speed of a Huey with the agility of a small machine. There were two seats in front for pilot and copilot and a space behind, with separate side doors, for cargo or two passengers. Vann always rode in the copilot’s seat so that he could fly when he wanted or take the controls if the pilot was hit. The pilot flying him that day was a brave Cajun from Louisiana, Chief Warrant Officer Paul Arcement. Vann also had Cai to help with the resupply. Vann had decided when he came to II Corps that an ARVN aide who
spoke English would be more appropriate than a U.S. Army aide and he could then dispense with an interpreter. Dzu had selected Cai, the son of a shopkeeper in Due Hoa in Hau Nghia. The post-Tet mobilization had caught him because he had flunked out of the Saigon College of Pharmacy in grief over the death of his mother and he was too poor to buy false exemption papers. Cai was honest, without fear, and devoted to Vann. Where Vann went, he went too.

Vann supervised the loading of the supplies into the Ranger at the airborne brigade command post at Vo Dinh. He had noted the positions of the NVA machine guns earlier in the day. He showed Arcement a path to take in and out across the treetops that would present the most elusive target. As soon as the Ranger flashed over the barbed wire of the perimeter, Vann and Cai pitched out the cases of M-16 ammunition, grenades, claymore mines, flares, canisters of water, and medical supplies for the scores of wounded paratroopers. Then Arcement tossed the helicopter into a steep climbing turn and twisted away back over the trees to Vo Dinh for another load.

When the duty officers in the II Corps Tactical Operations Center down at Pleiku figured out what was going on, they alerted Dzu and Vann’s staff. The underground bunker next to the headquarters building on the hill above the town filled with officers listening to the voices over the radio as the little Ranger loaded again and again at Vo Dinh and ran the gauntlet of machine guns to the fire base, six times before dark. “No Vietnamese general would do that,” Dzu said. “Not even a U.S. general would do that.” Fire Base Delta had enough sustenance to hold out through the night, and the next day relieving airborne battalions broke the siege.

Vann’s continuing ability to manage Dzu was a major source of his confidence that he would defeat the NVA. He had put Dzu in unique debt to him the previous summer by rescuing Dzu from an accusation of heroin trafficking. The ARVN general whom Dzu had replaced had sought revenge for losing his job by concocting a dossier purporting to prove that Dzu was a narcotics smuggler. He palmed the dossier off on a visiting American congressman, who subsequently announced at a congressional hearing in Washington that Ngo Dzu was one of the heroin lords of South Vietnam. The accusation came at a time when narcotics peddling to American soldiers had burst into a notorious scandal and Thieu was being squeezed by Bunker to take some action. He decided Dzu would make a fine goat to sacrifice to the American public and its politicians and was going to relieve and disgrace him.

John Vann had not been about to part with his investment. Dzu also swore to him that dope was not among his sources of graft. Vann believed
him. As Vann explained to George Jacobson, narcotics was such a jealously guarded racket that the senior generals and their Chinese businessmen partners would never have let anyone as far down the ladder as Dzu chisel in on the profits. Vann saved Dzu by organizing a press campaign for him to refute the charges. He drafted a statement for Dzu to issue and coached him on how to answer questions. He set up a televised press conference, arranged subsequent interviews to keep up the momentum, and made statements on Dzu’s behalf himself. Dzu was astounded at Vann’s ability to assemble reporters and amazed that any American would protect him like this. “He acted as if he was my brother,” Dzu said. His feeling of obligation to Vann tended to reinforce his original belief that he could promote himself through Vann’s talents. Dzu did not always do what Vann wanted, but he did so enough of the time that members of Dzu’s staff who did not like him mocked him as “the slave of John Paul Vann.”