A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (56 page)

After the call from the major, Drummond contacted the captains serving as intelligence advisors in the province capitals throughout the division zone and asked if they or their counterparts wished to retreat from anything they had told him. No one wanted to soften anything, and some felt they had understated the increase in guerrilla control. With Vann’s permission, Drummond had all of the province intelligence
advisors and their counterparts meet with him and Binh at My Tho. The new map overlay for Harkins’s headquarters that emerged from the meeting had more red on it than the original one, and the written section of the report was grimmer.

Vann decided to time its arrival with a disconcerting message of his own. On February 8, 1963, he sent a secret three-page memorandum to Porter in Can Tho, as the chain of command required, but dispatched an “information copy” directly to Saigon so that Harkins would receive the memorandum immediately. Vann was hoping that his memorandum and the additional red on Drummond’s overlay might at last embarrass Harkins into accepting facts. He told Harkins that Drummond and Binh had reliable information locating Viet Cong regular or Regional companies at ten different sites and just as sound information on thirty-five locations where guerrillas were operating at platoon strength. He had tried to persuade Dam to attack them, but Dam, apparently on orders from Cao, refused to go near any of these forty-five Viet Cong units. Dam was instead imitating Cao’s farces of the previous fall and was staging one large operation after another of 1,000 to 3,000 troops in areas where the intelligence showed there were no Viet Cong or at most a smattering of local guerrillas. Vann proposed that Drummond draw up a list of priority targets in consultation with Porter’s intelligence officer and that Harkins then present the list to the Joint General Staff with a demand that JGS order Dam to attack these guerrillas.

The memorandum sent Harkins into a renewed state of high dudgeon. He ordered his intelligence chief, Col. James Winterbottom of the Air Force, to go down to My Tho with a team of his subordinates. They were to interrogate Vann and Drummond, compare the intelligence files at the Seminary and the 7th Division headquarters with the February 8 memorandum and Drummond’s control report, and search carefully for discrepancies. If anything had been exaggerated, Harkins was going to fire Vann.

Harkins had an Air Force officer as his intelligence chief because the bureaucratization of the American military hierarchy had led to a treaty arrangement decreeing that every service had to have a share of the action. Winterbottom’s specialty had been photo interpretation for the Strategic Air Command, odd credentials for counterguerrilla war. Nevertheless, Drummond had discovered in prior dealings that the worst impediment to Winterbottom’s performance was not his pre-Vietnam experience but the fact that he worked directly for Harkins. Winter-bottom had turned out to be a decent man who would often listen. He and his team spent eight hours in My Tho being briefed by Drummond,
questioning him and Vann, and examining the files. (One of the staff officers let slip to Drummond how provoked the commanding general was by the red on his overlays.) When Winterbottom and his team returned to Saigon, Vann and Drummond had reason to hope that they might at last have forced some truth into the system. “There is no question in my mind,” Winterbottom assured Drummond, “that you have the necessary data to back up your report.” He told Vann that he thought the February 8 memorandum had also been accurate and fair.

Vann was hoping too that Porter would arouse something beyond anger with his final report as corps senior advisor, which Porter was going to submit to Harkins shortly before his departure on February 17 to take up a staff post at Fort Hood, Texas. Vann knew the essentials of what Porter would say, because Porter had discussed them with him and Fred Ladd when he had called them to Can Tho to write a preliminary draft for a section on the views of the division senior advisors. The subsequent drafts and the shaping of the report as a whole were entirely Porter’s work. He wanted to make this record so that he could leave Vietnam and the Army with a clear conscience. He had requested Fort Hood because his hometown of Belton was nearby. He had an elderly mother to take care of there, and he expected the assignment at Hood to be his last before he retired to the place where he had been born.

Porter designed his last report to be more alarming than his commentary on Vann’s chronicle of Ap Bac. He delineated the major fallacies in the entire U.S.-Saigon war effort in the Delta and the provinces of the rubber-plantation country north of the capital. (He had a right to speak of this region too because it had been part of his responsibility under the old III Corps boundaries.) He omitted nothing, including the illusion that the Strategic Hamlet Program was isolating the population from the guerrillas. He took additional care to ensure that the report could not be dismissed as the personal opinion of Dan Porter. Vann and Ladd were not the only advisors he consulted. He also tested his conclusions with the senior members of his staff, the senior advisor to the 5th Division north of Saigon, and with all of the regimental advisors. He said this in the report, stating that the conclusions therefore represented the consensus of the advisors. To translate Porter’s message into Harkins’s World War II terms, the majority of Harkins’s commanders at the most critical sector of the front were warning him that his estimate of the situation was a pipe dream.

Because they were old friends and he knew how General York felt, Porter showed him a nearly final draft. Was he being too blunt? Porter
asked. Bob York said that he had encountered a concrete wall in his continued attempts to influence Harkins, but Porter was speaking with the authority of a year in the country and the report was a consensus. No, Porter was not being too blunt, York said. He urged Porter to hurry the report to Harkins.

Harkins was outwardly cordial when Porter stopped by for a short farewell chat. A recommendation to award Porter the Legion of Merit for a year of distinguished service was going forward, the general said. He did not mention Porter’s final report. Several members of Harkins’s staff had not been so evasive before Porter went in to see the general. They told Porter that Harkins was disgusted with him and considered him a disloyal member of the team. Porter could sense the anger beneath Harkins’s politeness. He knew what Harkins was thinking: “Who in the hell does this country bumpkin of a Reserve colonel think he is, telling me how to fight a war?” Being in the presence of a four-star general usually made Porter slightly nervous, even when the general was as friendly as Harkins had been to him in easier days. On this occasion Porter was calm. For the first time in the nearly thirty-one years since he had earned his second lieutenant’s bars in the Texas National Guard, Dan Porter was not worried about the approval of a general. If he had to make Harkins mad to force him to see the truth, then that was the way it had to be. He had done his job and he was going home.

Scrupulous nicety of behavior can be counterproductive in large bureaucracies governed by manipulative individuals. Porter’s honesty cost him the record he wished to leave. He was so afraid that someone might leak a copy of his final report to the press because of the growing resentment among the field advisors over Harkins’s attitude that he typed the last draft himself, destroyed his earlier drafts, had Winter-bottom classify the report Top Secret, and personally delivered it in a sealed envelope to Harkins’s chief of staff. Porter’s scruples also forbade him to retain a copy for himself, as officers of his rank frequently do when they write a report of this moment. As soon as Porter left the country, Harkins checked to see whether he had every copy. He satisfied himself that he did and announced to his staff that if Porter’s final report ever went to Washington, it would go in properly sanitized form. The final report vanished. Porter was also not called to the Pentagon on his way to Fort Hood for a debriefing on his experience as was supposed to be done with senior advisors. Harkins arranged that too.

Winterbottom reported honestly on Vann’s February 8 memorandum. “The only thing wrong with what he wrote,” Winterbottom told the commanding general at a staff conference, “is that all of it is true.” He
said he had also seen ample evidence to justify Drummond’s overlay revealing the deterioration in the northern Delta. The information did not change Harkins’s mind, and he still wanted to fire Vann. His relationship with Dam had to be unsatisfactory if he was having so much trouble, Harkins said. This time Brig. Gen. Gerald Kelleher, Harkins’s chief of operations, came to Vann’s defense. Kelleher was a rough-hewn infantryman who had won his single star through bravery and battlefield leadership. (He had twice been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, in World War II and in Korea leading a regiment.) Kelleher was cantankerous and narrow-minded on most subjects, but Vann had recently begun to convert him to Vann’s view of the war. Kelleher was the only senior member of Harkins’s staff ever to adopt it actively. York also defended Vann, and Timmes, who kept lengthening the decent interval he had told Harkins he needed to relieve Vann, again urged forebearance to avoid an outcry. Harkins relented.

By now there was considerable dissent within the middle level of the staffs at Harkins’s headquarters and at Timmes’s MAAG. Vann soon learned the fate of Porter’s report and the outcome of Winterbottom’s trip to My Tho. One of Drummond’s sources also informed him that while Winterbottom might have agreed in My Tho that Saigon’s control was deteriorating in the countryside, “that isn’t what went back to Washington.” Harkins had Winterbottom discard Drummond’s overlay and compose another showing far less red and more blue for a gain in the area Saigon held. A report altered like this was not called a false report in the parlance of the American military of the 1960s. It was called a “directed” report. The commander accepted responsibility, and the subordinate concerned supposedly had the moral burden lifted from him.

Unlike Porter, Vann had a way of rationalizing his actions to fit the exigencies of a fight. He was not going to permit Harkins to stop him from sounding the alarm by manipulating the rules. He made up his mind to violate the rules wholesale, and he made Halberstam his instrument. On Halberstam’s next visit to the Seminary in late February, Vann took him into the operations room, closed the door, and sat him down in front of the map of the division zone that covered most of one wall. “Halberstam,” he announced, “I may be a commissioned officer in the United States Army who’s sworn to safeguard classified information, but I’m also an American citizen with a duty to my country. Now listen carefully.” He briefed Halberstam on his February 8 memorandum to Harkins, using the map to point out the locations of the
Viet Cong units and to demonstrate how Cao and Dam exploited the improved intelligence Drummond provided them to go where there were no guerrillas. Vann said his ability to do anything about the problem was exhausted. He told Halberstam of Harkins’s refusal to confront Diem and force Diem to reverse his self-defeating policy and how Harkins got mad himself when anyone attempted to confront him with the facts and provoke him into action. Vann laid out the whole tale of Winterbottom’s trip to My Tho and the reception the truth had received after Winterbottom had brought it back to Saigon. The situation must not be allowed to drift, Vann said. The Viet Cong were becoming more formidable every day. If nothing was done the United States and the Vietnamese on the U.S. side were going to pay dearly for this moral cowardice.

“Jesus Christ, have I got a hell of a story,” Halberstam shouted that afternoon as he burst though the door of the makeshift office we shared in the front room of my apartment on a side street in Saigon. (Halberstam and I had formed a working partnership. A reporter for a wire service, as I was then for the UPI, and a correspondent for a newspaper did not compete with each other because of their differing outlets.) The dispatch he cabled on February 28 began by telling readers of the March 1, 1963, edition of the
Times
that senior ARVN commanders were using intelligence to fake operations and avoid the guerrillas in the entire stretch of country from the 5th Division zone north of the capital down through the whole of the Mekong Delta. (Vann said the fakery was general, and Halberstam and I were able to confirm this by questioning Ladd and his team and sources in the 5th Division advisory detachment.) As the story went on, it narrowed to specific details that made the source of this unusual dispatch obvious to anyone familiar with the message traffic out of the Seminary. Halberstam gave the precise numbers of the Viet Cong company- and platoon-size units that Vann had stated in his secret memorandum. He wrote that the Americans were unable to get Diem’s army to attack any of these units “even with a 7 to 1 advantage, or greater,” and described the most recent phony assault in Vann’s area: “In one of these operations last week, 2,000 troops were used. One guerrilla was killed; one woman and one child were killed in air strikes, and another woman and child seriously wounded by aircraft fire.

“One American advisor,” Halberstam continued, had become so upset over these murderous farces and the consequences for the future of refusing to fight the guerrillas that he had sent “a sharply critical report” to Saigon. The report had been “so controversial” that an investigation had been ordered. Halberstam then quoted verbatim Winterbottom’s
response to Harkins: “The only thing wrong with what he wrote is that all of it is true.” He concluded his story by repeating Vann’s accusation that Harkins was, in effect, more interested in staying on friendly terms with Diem and his family than in winning the war.

Vann would have been fired for this outrage had an instance of the “Vann luck” not occurred. Porter’s recommendation to award Vann the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroism in the spotter plane at Bac had by chance been approved in Washington in late February. Two days before Halberstam cabled his dispatch, Timmes pinned the medal on Vann’s starched khaki shirt in a ceremony at the MAAG headquarters. Firing Vann right after decorating him was awkward and would certainly make the scandal in the press that much worse. With Timmes continuing to counsel restraint, Harkins made the mistake of temporizing once more.