A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (139 page)

The circumstances rendered the NVA vulnerable to the B-52S at a moment in the war when experience and technology had perfected the employment of the bombers. The Strategic Air Command had learned during the siege of Khe Sanh that three B-52S provided enough destructive effect to satisfy most ground commanders. SAC now launched the planes in flights of three rather than the original six in order to double the number of Arc Lights. A new radar system named Combat Skyspot made it possible to place the strikes within five-eighths of a mile of friendly positions. (Rhotenberry and Ba did not hesitate to call a strike
within 700 yards.) The location of the “box,” the target zone that was five-eighths of a mile wide by approximately two miles long, could be changed up to three hours before the bombs were scheduled to fall. Rhotenberry kept a list of every B-52 strike allotted to the battle with the drop time and change time marked in order to switch the box to a new location and catch the NVA in it when an assault was imminent or underway against a sector of the perimeter.

The virtually three-week delay also cost the NVA the advantage of their T-54 tanks. Ba was able to give the tank-killer teams he formed some psychological preparation by having them practice firing the M-72 LAW at junked ARVN tank hulls. The Pentagon had time to respond to an appeal from Abrams and rush out an experimental helicopter-mounted system for the American wire-guided antitank missile, called the TOW for tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided. Two Hueys in which the system had been installed were loaded into C-141 jet transports at the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona and flown directly to Pleiku. Jeep-mounted versions of the TOW also arrived, but they were not to prove useful. The NVA commanders could use their tanks to lead an assault that began at night. The dimensions of the battle forced them to continue the assault into the day with the tanks maintaining a spearpoint role. Hill would have the Hueys with the TOWs over Kontum at first light, and any T-54 in sight was doomed. One tank crew backed its behemoth into a house to try to hide. The TOW team got the tank by shooting a missile through a window.

Vann made the bombers his personal weapon. He could have left the B-52 targeting to Hill and Rhotenberry and the efficient officers in his G-3, air operations section, but he wanted to do it himself. Brig. Gen. Nguyen Van Toan, whom Cao Van Vien finally recruited to replace Dzu, and the Vietnamese staff at the Pleiku headquarters nicknamed Vann “Mr. B-52.” (Toan had been sidelined for excessive graft and a scandal over a girl. Vien had proposed to him that he redeem his career and gain another star by volunteering to take II Corps, and, being a personally courageous man, Toan had accepted. Vien admonished him to listen to Vann.)

The Strategic Air Command was sending Creighton Abrams three-plane flights of B-52S at roughly hourly intervals around the clock from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and the B-52 base at Sattahip in southern Thailand. By mid-May, when the struggle for Kontum began, the siege of An Loc on the Cambodian front had crested, and it was apparent that the ARVN garrison there would survive. In I Corps, after overrunning all of Quang Tri Province and pressing toward Hue from
the west too, the NVA thrusts had also started to falter under the weight of U.S. air power. Hue looked like it was going to stand. Kontum was the last opportunity the Vietnamese Communists had to transform an offensive with important but limited objectives into a spectacular achievement, and it was Abrams’s last big worry. He could let Vann have the bombers. Capt. Christopher Scudder, the B-52 control officer on Vann’s staff, recalled that on some days at the height of the battle Vann lobbied hard enough to obtain twenty-one of the twenty-five B-52 flights coming into the country every day.

Between May 14 and the end of the first week of June, John Vann laid the best part of 300 B-52 strikes in the environs of Kontum. To increase the safety margin in strikes close to friendly positions, SAC had instructed the bombers to fly one behind the other down the center of the box. This formation didn’t give sufficient bomb coverage to satisfy Vann. He persuaded SAC to place the three B-52S in echelon. The first bomber flew right along the safety line to get as close as possible to the ARVN positions and plaster the inner third of the box, the second B-52 flew just behind and beyond it to devastate the middle, and the third came right behind and beyond it to obliterate anything left in the target zone. Vann would circle in his Ranger off a scheduled strike a few minutes before the B-52S arrived and then low-level around the box as soon as the smoke and dust had cleared enough for him to see how many NVA he had killed. He would fire bursts from his M-16 into the bomb craters. There was no danger, he explained to two reporters riding with him one day. Anyone “still living in there is in such a state of shock that he couldn’t pull a trigger for thirty minutes.” On another day he found forty to fifty NVA who had survived staggering around among the craters. He radioed for Cobra gunships to finish them off.

Larry Stern of the
Washington Post
had met Vann in the mid-1960s through Frank Scotton. He came to Pleiku to interview him and was astonished by the man he found. He had never seen a person so suffused with rage and exaltation. Stern remembered the way Vann’s eyes “burned” as he described how he was wielding the bombers. “Anytime the wind is blowing from the north where the B-52 strikes are turning the terrain into a moonscape, you can tell from the battlefield stench that the strikes are effective,” Vann said. “Outside Kontum, wherever you dropped bombs, you scattered bodies.”

The NVA endured the B-52S. Four regiments of infantry, reinforced with sappers, antiaircraft machine gunners, and the ten or so T-54S that remained of the forty that had come from the North, broke into the east side of Kontum from the north and south ends of the town on the
25th, 26th, and 27th of May. Their goal was to link up, turn west, and crush Ba’s reserve and overrun his command post. They almost won. At the height of the battle all that prevented them from linking was two lines of bunkers, one on the upper and the other on the lower edge of the airfield inside the town. The men in the bunkers were Vietnamese too, and on this occasion they upheld the tradition of their people. Ba and Rhotenberry were able to regroup and counterattack, and slowly, despairingly, the Communist soldiers had to give way and withdraw, leaving thousands of their comrades on the battlefield in and around Kontum.

Thieu came on a morale-raising visit on May 30, even though serious shooting was still going on in parts of the town and there was sporadic shelling. Vann carried the president of the Saigon Republic to Ba’s command post in his Ranger and flew Thieu back to Pleiku afterward. Ba briefed his president, and Thieu then pinned single stars on the collar tabs of his fatigues. The ARVN had devised a one-star rank to imitate the American insignia for brigadier. The Vietnamese title was “candidate general,” but being a general under any title is satisfying. Vann had been told that Ba was to be rewarded and had a pair of stars in his pocket in case Thieu forgot to bring them.

Vann did not see the fallacy in his victory. He did not see that in having to assume total control at the moment of crisis, he had proved the Saigon regime had no will of its own to survive. Nor did it occur to him that he might be playing the role he and Fred Weyand had played at Tet—postponing the end. He had once again been the indispensable man. John Hill had been struck by how necessary Vann was to the victory. Any competent American general could have done what he himself accomplished, Hill said, unfairly denigrating his contribution, but without Vann there would have been no battle at Kontum, because Ba and the other Vietnamese on the Saigon side would not have stayed to fight. The man who had become so skilled at manipulating Vietnamese for the U.S. government would not have approved the use to which the men he served would put his triumph. Nixon was to take advantage of the respite bought by the victory at Kontum to have Kissinger negotiate a settlement that would doom the Saigon regime when the next crisis occurred. The Paris Agreement of January 1973 removed the advisors and the residual U.S. military forces propping up the Saigon side, while leaving the NVA in the South to finish its task. The exigencies of American domestic politics demanded the settlement. The president was facing
reelection, and he had exhausted his capacity to manipulate public opinion on the war. The Vietnamese Communists would not give him a settlement until he agreed to withdraw the last of his forces and leave theirs in place. The farce of mutual withdrawal was at an end. Nixon and Kissinger convinced themselves they were not condemning their Saigon surrogate. They reasoned that they could hold Hanoi at bay with the threat of American air power.

On the morning of June 7, 1972, two days after the last NVA soldier was killed inside Kontum, John Vann spoke to a group of recently arrived advisors assembled at his rear headquarters in Nhatrang. His talk was a periodic event called the Newcomers’ Briefing. He said he was “often struck by the widespread belief that South Vietnam had “suffered immeasurably” from an American war. “In point of fact … while South Vietnam is not worth what it has cost the United States in terms of U.S. values, in terms of South Vietnamese values these people are much further ahead today than they would have been either with peace and a non-Communist government or with peace and a Communist government… In 1962 the literacy rate was 15 percent. Today it’s over 80 percent.” The social revolution he had wanted to capture from the Communists in 1965 “has been achieved,” Vann said, “partly by design, but mostly by the accident of the war.” He spoke of miracle rice and irrigation equipment, of television sets and Honda motorcycles. Forced urbanization had helped bring the social revolution to pass, he said, by creating a class of “consumers” for the farmers. In the year in which Vann spoke, 39,000 Saigon soldiers died.

On June 9, 1972, Vann flew to Saigon with John Hill for a morning ceremony at which Abrams awarded Hill a Legion of Merit for his contribution to the victory. Vann stayed there for an afternoon strategy conference with Abrams and Weyand and the U.S. Army generals advising the three other ARVN corps commanders. He and Hill returned to Pleiku late in the day with Vann’s new deputy, Col. Robert Kingston, who was on the promotion list for brigadier. Hill was going home. He had already postponed his scheduled departure for several weeks to see Vann through the battle. Vann tarried at the Pleiku mess for the farewell dinner for Hill. Wine was served, and there were short speeches. Vann told Pizzi and Hill and others at the head table that he was leaving for Kontum immediately afterward to spend the night with Rhotenberry and Ba. He didn’t want to break his record. “I’ve been in Kontum everyday since this thing started.” he said. He had the mess stewards wrap
some fruit and leftover fresh rolls and took an unopened bottle of wine to bring to Rhotenberry and Ba.

He was in a jubilant mood when his helicopter took off shortly after 9:00
P.M.
He had celebrated between the morning ceremony and the afternoon strategy conference by making love to Lee and then to two other Vietnamese women. He had started the official proceedings to marry Annie during an earlier trip to Saigon in May and had just sent her a note with Thomas Barnes, his Dep/CORDS for II Corps, who was flying to Nhatrang that night. He had forgotten all about the will he wrote on the day that Tan Canh fell. Peter Kama had gone off to Hue, where the airborne brigade had been transferred, with the slip of notepaper in his wallet. Vann radioed Rhotenberry and asked for a report on the weather in Kontum. The sky over the town was fairly clear on the night of June 9, but it had been so miserable with rain and fog on recent nights that Rhotenberry could not resist a quip after answering that the weather was fine. “You won’t have to reach down with your foot to find the LZ,” he said. “Roger that!” Vann replied. “I am fifteen minutes from your location.”

Two creeks, one named the Khol and the other the Drou, cross Route 14 about three miles south of the Chu Pao (Pao Mountain) Pass below Kontum near the Montagnard hamlet of Ro Uay. The ARVN soldiers manning a sandbag blockhouse at the bridge there heard a helicopter approaching through the dark sky and then saw the fireball and heard the explosion of a crash. The Army aviators found him. A Cobra pilot spotted the last flames of the wreckage under a grove of tall trees the helicopter had struck. A special Huey gunship called the Night Hawk shone down the beam of its searchlight and located a place where Lt. Col. Jack Anderson, the aviator who had rescued the advisors at Hoai An, could land his Huey. He and a senior aircraft mechanic who had volunteered to go with him, Master Sgt. John Johnson, came upon Vann lying facedown in the grove. He had died instantly from the shock of the crash and his body was broken in many places, but he was not bloodied and the flames had not touched him. His Wellington boots were still on his feet. A patrol of ARVN Rangers who had arrived a few minutes earlier from a nearby fire base exacted payment for the danger of being sent to fetch him at night in an area where they had been fighting with the NVA. They stripped him of his wristwatch and wallet and his Rutgers class of 1954 ring before they carried his body to Anderson’s helicopter. “I hate to be the guy to give John Vann his last ride,” Anderson said to the copilot who had volunteered to fly with him, Capt. Bernard Ferguson, as they lifted off for the hospital at Pleiku.

Doug Ramsey learned of Vann’s death in his seventh and last prison camp, this one near Kratie in Cambodia, where he had been moved in April. He and the other POWs were permitted to listen to Radio Hanoi and to Liberation Radio, the purported voice of the Viet Cong. The Vietnamese Communists paid Vann a reverse tribute by exulting in his end. They gave far more attention to his death than they had to the occasional deaths earlier in the war of ordinary American generals. “Vann committed towering crimes,” Liberation Radio said, and his removal “constitutes a stunning blow” for the U.S. and the Saigon side. The NVA newspaper,
Military People’s Daily
, published a special commentary, which Radio Hanoi broadcast, on the demise of “this outstanding chief advisor.” The Communists claimed to have brought down Vann’s helicopter. Radio Hanoi said a message had been sent to the antiaircraft unit responsible congratulating the gunners “for good shooting.”