A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (57 page)

John Vann was not deterred in the least by the narrowness of his escape, and he did not waste the month remaining to him in Vietnam. He maintained his newfound role of principal critic of policy via the news dispatches, continuing to educate us and to shape our reporting, arousing in us ever greater admiration for his moral heroism. To keep him out of trouble for a week, Timmes finally did gingerly follow through on the solution he had originally proposed to Harkins and sent Vann on a tour of the Central Highlands and the coastal provinces on the pretext that Timmes wanted a private assessment. Vann was delighted at the opportunity to see the war in the rest of the country. Timmes then sent him off for a two-day visit to the British Jungle Warfare School in Malaya. Vann came back with a tale of how he had managed to get himself assigned to the Gurkhas on the ambushing side. Perhaps the U.S. Army could use some Gurkha advisors, he said. He made sure he found time for the additional task he had set himself this last month. It was to organize material for a briefing campaign he was planning to conduct at the Pentagon to convince every Army general there who would listen to him that Harkins was deceiving the nation’s leadership and that the radical change in policy Vann wanted had to be adopted to avoid defeat. He was scheduled to begin the full ten-month course at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at Fort McNair in Washington in mid-August 1963. From late May until his classes began he was to be assigned to the Army’s Directorate of Special Warfare at the Pentagon, and it was during this time that he intended to wage his personal crusade.

As a format for these anticipated briefings, he was summarizing his views in a four-and-a-half-page document that was officially his final
report to Harkins as division senior advisor. The report was a precisely worded and often witty assault on official policy and optimism. He calculated the level of effort the Diem regime was putting into the war in comparison to the level it could expend if it prosecuted the war seriously: “The counterinsurgency effort in this tactical zone is approximately 10–20% of what could reasonably be expected in view of the personnel and resources available.” One of the documents appended to the report as supporting evidence was an analysis, replete with more statistics, to show that the distribution of regular and territorial troops among the seven provinces of the northern Delta bore no relationship to population density, economic and geographic importance, and enemy threat. Instead the allocation—”misallocation” might be a more accurate term—was governed entirely by Diem’s obsession with anticoup measures and by his personal regard for the province chief concerned. Vann was also carrying home with him a file of his earlier after-action reports, including the Ap Bac account and Porter’s commentary, and other reports he had submitted or that his advisors had sent up to him. He intended to use all of this material to write a thesis someday for a doctorate in public administration, a project that he would always be too busy to undertake in subsequent years.

On the morning of April i, 1963, his first year in Vietnam at an end, Vann turned over command of the advisory detachment to his successor in the same manner that he had received it—without ceremony—and drove out the Seminary gate to spend a couple of days in Saigon before flying home. He had said his goodbyes and shaken hands with Dam and the 7th Division staff the previous day. In mid-March he had also written a farewell message to the division, had it translated into Vietnamese and mimeographed, and distributed it to the division staff, to each of the regimental and battalion commanders, and to all of the province chiefs. There was no reproach for the angry exchanges of the past. The message, a long one that ran four legal-length pages, was warm and tactful, a bit touching in the way he let through some of the emotional attachment that had built up in him toward the country and its people. He wanted to part from these Vietnamese whom he had come to know in a moment of friendliness and hope. He said that he was “proud to have shared with you, even in a small way, a part of the burden of limiting and driving back the spread of communism.” He spoke of “your wonderful children and young people” and said he was certain that they would achieve “peace, prosperity, and freedom” someday. As always,
there was purpose behind his diplomacy. Most of his message consisted of polite but forceful summaries of each of the lessons he had spent the last ten months seeking without success to impart. A copy of his English original went to all of his advisors as a précis of what they should strive to teach. (A decade later in the mountains of the Central Highlands, an Army lieutenant colonel who had served as a captain in Vietnam during Vann’s first year, and who was back fighting with an ARVN Ranger group, took a frayed copy of the original mimeographed message from his fatigue shirt pocket and showed it to me. He said that a friend had sent it to him in 1963, and he had been so struck by its distilled knowledge that he had preserved it and always carried it with him, reading it over every once in a while to remind himself of what he had to try to attain.)

Bowers, who was also going home, rode up to Saigon with him in the jeep at Vann’s invitation. He knew that Vann was leaving under a career shadow, but it was not etiquette for a sergeant and a lieutenant colonel to discuss the lieutenant colonel’s dispute with the commanding general, and so they reminisced about their ten months together in the Delta. Vann had said to Ziegler, just before Ziegler’s own departure two weeks earlier, that he was going to have to decide whether he had spoiled his prospects in the Army by defying Harkins so boldly.

Early in the afternoon of April 3, 1963, a small crowd gathered in the second-floor restaurant of the passenger terminal at Tan Son Nhut to say goodbye. There were a number of his captains from My Tho, the commanding officers and a few of the pilots from two of the helicopter companies, and Halberstam and I and others from the handful of correspondents who had learned so much from him. We were proud and sad for him, proud for the man and what he had sought to achieve, sad for what we were afraid he was going to have to pay for his patriotism. Halberstam had proposed that we give him a memento to express our gratitude for his lessons and to show our admiration for his moral heroism and professional integrity. Vann did not smoke, but a shop on Tu Do, Saigon’s main street, still called Rue Catinat from its name in French days, sold handsome round cigarette boxes fashioned by Cambodian silversmiths for coffee tables. We all contributed, and Halberstam arranged for the shop to engrave our names on the side of the box under the inscription:

Halberstam presented the box to Vann with some emotional remarks about how much we and the public who read our reports owed to him. The Saigon customs and passport-control officers were casual in those years. Everyone walked downstairs and out onto the field to the plane with Vann when it was time to board. Halberstam said he had one last thing to tell him: every time we had cabled a story we had worried about hurting his career. We hoped that Vann would pull through professionally. Vann looked up at him quickly. Halberstam remembered his small, tight smile. “You never hurt me any more than I wanted to be hurt,” Vann said.

By chance I flew home with Vann, and he was not discouraged about his future in the Army in all of the talking we did during a long flight to San Francisco. I had decided to spend a month’s leave in the United States, because I had not been back to Massachusetts to see my parents in three years. Neither Vann nor I had thought to bring a book, so there was not much to do except talk and sleep. Vann said he would not permit himself the luxury of letting what had happened during his ten months in the Delta get him down. He had done his best and he had learned a lot. He was looking forward to his year at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and then to promotion to full colonel early in his next assignment. (The Industrial College is in the topmost rung of institutional schools that a career officer can attend, the equivalent of the National War College or the Army War College for officers with the logistics speciality that Vann had adopted seven years earlier while a major in Germany to obtain accelerated promotion.) He showed me his farewell message to the division and let me have a copy; I asked for it because I was impressed at what a catechism it was. At the end of the message he conveyed the same intention of persevering in the Army. He invited any of the advisors or Vietnamese officers who wished to do so to write to him at Fort McNair and to visit him and Mary Jane and their family if they happened to pass through Washington. Normally, he said to me, an officer who was marked as a troublemaker never went beyond a full colonel’s eagles. He was game to see if he could become an exception. The Army was his life, he said, and he was not about to let Harkins push him out of it. Time and events, he thought, would vindicate him. In the meantime, he was going to convert every general he could to his point of view in the hope of gaining high-level allies to discredit Harkins.

In mid-May 1963, after six weeks of leave in El Paso to let the children finish the school term, he and Mary Jane sold their house there, packed and shipped their furniture as they had in so many previous Army moves,
and took the family off to Washington. Patricia and John Allen, the eldest, had the treat of flying ahead to Baltimore to meet Mary Jane’s sister and her husband for a week of sightseeing in Virginia at Williamsburg and Jamestown. The three youngest, Jesse, Tommy, and Peter, had to ride all the way from Texas in the family station wagon. Vann initially put the family up in the Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia, with a Methodist minister who had been his boyhood patron in Norfolk. They then crowded into an apartment in Alexandria until he rented a house on the Chesapeake Bay shore about twenty-five miles east of the capital. He had a long commute to the Pentagon, but the rent was low and the area was semirural, with lots of room for the boys to play and to fish and net crabs.

I got back to Vietnam in time to watch the regime provoke rebellion in the cities and towns with the same abuse and arrogance that had maddened the population of the countryside. On May 8, 1963, the Ngo Dinhs set off what was to become known as the Buddhist Crisis. A company of Civil Guards, commanded by a Catholic officer, killed nine persons, some of them children, and injured fourteen others in a crowd in the former imperial capital of Hue. The crowd was protesting a new decree that forbade the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddha’s birthday, his 2,587th. The edict had been issued by Diem at the instigation of his elder brother, Thuc, archbishop of Hue and the South’s leading Catholic prelate in 1963. When Thuc had celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his elevation to bishop a few weeks earlier, the Catholics of Hue had flown Vatican flags all over the home city of the Ngo Dinhs. After the killings, Diem and his family behaved in character. They did not attempt to mollify the chief monks, who were antagonized by nine years of discrimination. Instead, they maneuvered to crush the Buddhist leaders as they had crushed the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects and the Binh Xuyen organized crime society in 1955.

The monks fought back in a Vietnamese way. On the morning of June 11, 1963, a seventy-three-year-old monk named Quang Due sat down in the middle of a Saigon intersection a few blocks from Ambassador Nolting’s residence. He crossed his legs in the lotus position of meditation while another monk poured gasoline from a five-gallon plastic container over his shaven head, soaking his orange robe. The old monk’s hands moved swiftly when he lifted them from his lap to strike the match, lighting his body into a symbol of anger and sacrifice and setting ablaze the tinder of resentment in the urban centers of the South.

The Buddhist movement became a rallying point for all of the discontent that had been accumulating against the ruling family among urban Vietnamese since 1954. While the monks were able to draw on the ill will against Catholics as a foreign-serving minority that was a reflex in Vietnamese society, the Ngo Dinhs had made themselves so repugnant by early 1963 that some Catholics clandestinely aided the Buddhist leaders. A photograph of Quang Due’s suicide taken by Malcolm Browne, the Saigon bureau chief of the Associated Press, astonished the American public and international opinion and embarrassed the Kennedy administration.

The Ngo Dinhs applied tear gas and billy clubs and attempted to seal off the pagodas with barbed wire barricades in the streets. They spurned appeals to compromise from Nolting, who cut short a vacation in Europe to try to persuade Diem to see reason, and from Kennedy himself. “If the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue,” Nhu said at the end of a dinner with Nolting and a number of other senior American officials in July, “I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match.” Madame Nhu said in press interviews that the monks were all Communists and dupes of the Communists, that the demonstrators “should be beaten ten times more” by the police, and that “I shall clap my hands” at another suicide. She preempted Richard Nixon by nearly a decade in the use of a term that he was to make famous. The family was supported by a “silent majority,” she announced. The Ngo Dinhs assumed that the Americans would gradually acquiesce in the crushing of the Buddhist leaders as Washington had welcomed the suppression of the sects and the Binh Xuyen in 1955. The one member of the family who argued for a settlement, Ngo Dinh Can, another younger brother of Diem who lived in Hue and was the overlord of Central Vietnam, was deprived of much of his authority by Diem for his common sense. The police swung the truncheons harder, as Madame Nhu wished, and threw more tear-gas grenades and stretched more barbed wire, but the monks instigated more self-sacrifices by fire, the anger against the family grew fiercer, and the demonstrations spread from the cities to the smaller towns.

John Mecklin, a career foreign correspondent who had taken a leave from
Time
for the experience of a stint in government and who was chief of the USIS in Vietnam in 1963, had a nightmare. In his nightmare he went to a play in which the members of the U.S. Embassy gradually discover that the local government they have been dealing with for years is composed of madmen, whose words are meaningless, and everything the Americans thought had happened in this strange dream country has
actually never occurred. He woke up before he found out how the play ended.