A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (18 page)

Ziegler made a partial list in his diary of the techniques used by Thuong and his Rangers, cataloguing a dozen. Ziegler printed the title “Strong Methods” above the list in a translation of a French euphemism for methods of torture:

1. Wrap in barbed wire.
   

2. Strip skin off back.
   

3. Rack by use of vehicle or water buffalo.
   

4. Head in mud—
   1½
   minute.
   

5. Shoot thru ear.
   

6. Hook up to EE8. [EE8 was the designation of the American-supplied battery-powered field telephone. The common method was to tape the ends of two wires from the phone to the genitals of a man or to a woman’s vagina and a breast. Shock was then administered as desired by turning the crank handle on the phone.]
   

7. Sit on entrenching tool. [The entrenching tool was the folding pack shovel the U.S. Army supplied the ARVN for use in digging foxholes. The shovel blade was thrust firmly into the ground. The prisoner was stripped of his pants and made to sit on top of the end of the shovel handle. He was then forced down on the handle.]
   

8. Knife strapped to back. [Thuong would tie the prisoner’s hands behind his back and lash the Bowie knife to the wrists with the blade pointing inward toward the back. He would have the prisoner hauled up against a tree, place his hand on the victim’s chest, and start pressing as he asked questions.]
   

9. Water treatment. [Water was forced into the mouth until the stomach swelled painfully, when it was beaten to induce more pain, or a wet rag was held over the nostrils while water was poured down the throat to create the sensation of suffocating.]
   

10. Calves beaten.
    

11. Knee in back, face down, dislocate shoulders.
    

12. Beat stomach until it collapses and indiv. vomits it out.
    

Ziegler penned an asterisk next to technique 11 and a matching asterisk between two photographs he had taken and Scotch-taped to the facing page of the diary. The photographs showed a Ranger first dislocating a prisoner’s shoulders and then kicking him in the testicles as he lay on the ground. Three more captives, their arms bound, guarded by other Rangers, were standing by for their turn should chance not spare them. It was amazing how the prisoners kept their composure during the agony of their companion. They looked away stoically as if they had expected these soldiers to inflict a death of pain on them and seemed to be trying to summon courage for the ordeal that might begin for them in a few minutes. Whenever Ziegler attempted to stop Thuong and his Rangers, they ignored him. He felt his greatest sense of helplessness and anguish when suspected guerrillas were found in hiding places in their hamlet. The wives and children would cling to the fathers,
pleading with the Rangers not to take the men away, until they were cuffed off by the soldiers. If the torment and murder then began right in front of the families, as it sometimes did, the screams and wails of the women and children unnerved Ziegler and nauseated him even more than the sight of the tortures.

Dick Ziegler had told Vann of these experiences. The Rangers were not an exception. Vann had heard similar accounts from some of his battalion advisors and the captains and lieutenants working with the Civil Guard and the SDC. He had been disturbed that prisoners reported captured had disappeared before they reached Drummond and Binh at division level. Because of his tendency to doubt what he did not witness himself, he had wondered whether these horror stories were the exaggerations of young men who had never seen war before. One night in mid-July he had gone out with Thuong’s company on an ambush in Cai Lay District about seventeen miles west of My Tho. Ziegler had also gone along. There had been a good possibility of action because the region was a guerrilla stronghold where the majority of the peasantry had sympathized with the Communist cause since the French war.

At dawn a group of seven Viet Cong, thinking they were in a safe area, came walking right across the dikes of a rice field in front of the company. They were local guerrillas, young farmers in black shirts and work shorts. Thuong waited until they were less than a hundred yards away before giving the order to fire, pinned them down, and captured them by sending a platoon to circle around behind. Three were slightly wounded.

Thuong lined up the prisoners, unsheathed his Bowie knife, and began playing the game he liked best of all. He walked back and forth in front of his captives, speaking quietly to them, telling them that he wanted the truth and that he would not tolerate anyone lying to him, holding the Bowie knife in his hand, flicking the big blade in the air with a snap of his wrist. All of a sudden his dark arm shot forward. He snatched a young farmer by the hair, jerked the man’s head back, and slashed with the Bowie knife. Then he resumed walking back and forth, talking softly again about telling the truth and not lying while the guerrilla who had lost to Thuong’s whimsy writhed on the ground, clutching at his throat, kicking away the last spasms of his life. The rest of the prisoners began to tremble, which is what Thuong wanted. Vann had assumed that Thuong would not dare to murder prisoners in his presence. He had thought Thuong was just threatening them until Thuong slashed the first throat.

“Hey, tell him to cut that shit out,” Vann yelled, so taken aback that he shouted first at Ziegler instead of at Thuong.

“That’s his way of interrogating,” Ziegler replied, shuddering as Thuong cut another throat.

“Goddam you,” Vann screamed, leaping toward Thuong with menace in his voice this time, “I said to cut that shit out!”

Thuong quickly slit a third throat to show that he was not intimidated by Vann’s screaming and turned, waved his knife at the four surviving guerrillas, and shouted back into Vann’s face: “You want ’em. You take ’em.” He paid no heed as Vann cursed him for a stupid, murdering bastard. He wiped the blood off the knife onto his pants leg, slid the blade back into the scabbard, and walked away.

One of the four surviving guerrillas had been shot in the leg. The pilots of a Marine helicopter that Vann summoned to evacuate the prisoners hovered just above the flooded paddy instead of landing. Because of a problem with spare parts in these early years, the pilots tried to avoid the stress on the engine of pulling the wheels out of the muck. Vann had picked up the guerrilla with the leg wound and was lifting him into the machine when the pilots tipped the aircraft sideways, tossing Vann and the Viet Cong back into the water. The guerrilla jumped up despite his injured leg, grabbed Vann, shoved him into the machine, and climbed in behind him. His three companions and Ziegler followed.

The episode compelled Vann to conclude that the other stories he had been told were not exaggerations and that torture and murder were a common practice. As an American officer he had resisted making a judgment like this about his ally. At the next general meeting of his advisors he lectured them never to discuss this filth with outsiders, but to report to him every instance they witnessed and always to try to stop it.

He confronted Cao with his conclusion and argued that Cao had to confront the problem and take disciplinary measures to demonstrate to his officers and men that he did not condone what they were doing. A soldier had to learn that he existed to uphold law and order, not to undermine it. Torture and wanton killing were not only morally corrupting, they corrupted discipline in a military organization. If a commander allowed his officers and men to fall into these vices, those like Thuong would pursue them for their own sake, for the perverse pleasure they drew from them. Everyone had to be taught the immense stupidity of these perversions. The guerrillas Thuong had killed might have been the ones with the most useful information.

Cao listened to Vann and agreed that he had to do something, but he took no disciplinary measures against Thuong or anyone else and issued no new instructions on the proper treatment of prisoners. The sole result Vann could discern was that Cao let his officers know he did
not wish the Americans to see these regrettable acts. Some of the units took to committing the atrocities when they thought the advisors were not looking. Most, including Thuong and his men, carried on as usual.

Vann had reported this loathsome business to Porter and Harkins in the hope that Harkins would take action against it at the Saigon level. He had planned to keep mention of it to a minimum with Taylor, because to do otherwise could be self-defeating. A visiting general would not welcome tidings of torture and murder. There was an understandable tendency to recoil because of concern about a scandal in the press. Vann had intended to save his words for another horror that troubled him more because it was harming a lot more people. This was the indiscriminate air and artillery bombardment of peasant hamlets. The bombing and shelling were alienating the population by killing and wounding large numbers of noncombatants and destroying farm homes and livestock. Vann also had a particular reason to want to raise this issue with Taylor. He had become convinced that only someone at the top in Washington could put an end to the evil. Harkins and the senior U.S. Air Force officer in South Vietnam were part of the problem.

Porter had alerted Vann to this killing of noncombatants in a conversation shortly after Vann’s arrival in March. Porter was haunted by his own first encounter with these deaths a week after he had landed in Vietnam in January. He had joined a helicopter raid out of Moc Hoa against a cluster of thatched houses on the Plain of Reeds. He had been told the place was a “Viet Cong hamlet.” Shortly before the helicopters set down, the fighter-bombers made a “prestrike” to demoralize the expected guerrilla resistance. The tactic, also known as a “preliminary bombardment,” was a traditional one, reemphasized in the positional fighting of the last phase of the Korean War.

When Porter jumped from the helicopter with the assault troops he did not meet any guerrillas on whom to expend the adrenaline he had built up for the attack. Instead he found the corpses of several older men and women among the houses that the napalm had set ablaze. He then heard a sound he thought he recognized amid the snapping of the burning wood and thatch. He followed it and found a baby lying in the mud, crying hysterically for his mother. Porter was unable to locate her. She was apparently dead or hiding somewhere. He had the baby flown out to an orphanage. No guerrillas were contacted in the vicinity, and there were no foxholes or other evidence that they had been in the hamlet recently. The place probably had been under Viet Cong control, because of its location in a guerrilla-dominated region and the fact that young men were nowhere to be seen. Just as obviously there had been
no Viet Cong in the hamlet when the fighter-bombers had struck, or the guerrillas had been experienced enough to sidestep harm as soon as they spotted the L-19 of the forward air controller overhead. The planes had killed the people whom Porter thought he had come to South Vietnam to protect from the Communists.

Vann shared Porter’s ideal of the soldier as the champion of the weak. A soldier who valued his honor and understood the purpose of his profession did not deliberately kill or wound ordinary people. His trips around the corps region prior to taking charge at the Seminary and his experience with the division taught Vann that Porter had not been exaggerating. On at least fifteen occasions during his first year in Vietnam, Vann was to see old men, women, and children killed by air and artillery bombardments. In each case their deaths were unnecessary.

Captain Binh, Drummond’s counterpart, remembered an incident one day during an operation in Kien Hoa Province south of My Tho. A number of peasants had been killed in an air strike, and an elderly woman had been gravely wounded. Vann radioed for a helicopter to evacuate her to the province hospital. Binh watched him pick her up and carry her to the aircraft, cradling her in his arms and lifting her carefully into the door for the two crewmen to take her from him and lay her on a stretcher. As the pilots opened up the engine’s throttle for takeoff and Vann turned and jogged out from under the rotor blades, Binh noticed that his fatigue shirt and pants were smeared with blood from the woman’s wound. “That American really cares,” Binh said to himself. “No Vietnamese officer would do that.” He walked over to Vann to tell him that he too was sorry, but when he reached Vann they looked at each other and Binh was unable to say anything.

The willy-nilly killing and maiming enraged Vann, not only because it contradicted his ideal of his profession, but also because it struck him as the worst conceivable way to fight this war. A counterguerrilla war surely required the strictest possible controls on air and artillery. He wondered how any American could think that Vietnamese peasants who lost family members and friends and homes would not be as angry as American farmers would have been, and these Vietnamese farmers had an alternative army and government asking for their allegiance and offering them revenge.

Vann had initially found it difficult to believe the utter lack of discrimination and capriciousness with which fighter-bombers and artillery were turned loose. A single shot from a sniper was enough to stop a battalion while the captain in charge called for an air strike or an artillery barrage on the hamlet from which the sniper had fired. Vann would
argue with the captain and later with Cao that it was ridiculous to let one sniper halt a whole battalion and criminal to let the sniper provoke them into smashing a hamlet. Why didn’t they send a squad to maneuver around the sniper and scare him off or kill him while the battalion continued its advance? If they did that they would lose a soldier to a sniper every once in a while, but death was the risk of an infantryman’s trade. People hired an army to protect them, not to blow them up.

The province and district chiefs kept their 105mm artillery pieces and large 4.2-inch mortars, the equivalent of artillery, positioned freely so that they could rotate them 360 degrees and shoot in any direction. During one of his first operations in another division area, Vann had stayed late in the command-post tent to work on some notes of the day’s events and had been alone with the Vietnamese duty officer and a few enlisted men. A voice came up on the radio. The duty officer picked up the microphone and, after a brief exchange with whoever was calling, walked over to the map, checked something on it, and then returned to the radio to give a quick reply.