A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (58 page)

Vann had his campaign at the Pentagon going within a few days of reporting for duty to the Directorate of Special Warfare on the morning of May 24, 1963. He looked up the “debriefing officer” responsible for interviewing returned advisors for the “Lessons Learned” program on Vietnam. Vann said that he wanted to be debriefed. The officer replied that at “Saigon’s wish” he was not going to be interviewed. Vann had been expecting that response. (Kelleher, his one senior convert on Harkins’s staff, had returned in April to retire, and he, like Porter, had also not been debriefed at “Saigon’s wish.”) Vann began to brief on his own. He started out by just talking to fellow officers in the directorate and showing them copies of his final report, his February 8 message, the Ap Bac account, and like documentation to substantiate his arguments. His official job at the directorate was to devise new procedures to handle financing and procurement for the worldwide counterinsurgency mission of the Special Forces, a small chore for a man with Vann’s training in fiscal management. He therefore had lots of time for his serious task. Over the next month he gradually worked his way up through the Army hierarchy; his conversations formalized into briefings for senior officers and their staffs, complete with statistical charts and maps he would cast on a screen with a slide projector, and anecdotes of his experiences in Vietnam for authenticity and a human touch. Vann’s dramatic briefing techniques helped him put his arguments across, but they did not gain him his listeners. What attracted Vann’s audience was that he had so much of substance to say and that he was saying it in 1963. A U.S. Army officer in Washington then could still regard the war as a foreign affair and look upon the performance of the Saigon forces with a certain amount of objectivity generated by distance and his feeling that they were not his own army.

By late June, Vann had briefed several hundred officers in the Pentagon, almost all Army men, including half a dozen generals in staff positions. One of the few officers he briefed from another service was an Air Force major general named Lansdale. It was the first meeting between Vann and his hero. Lansdale listened and did not react, because there was nothing he could do. He was in disfavor with the circle of power. After his enemies in the bureaucracy had sabotaged a proposal to name him ambassador to South Vietnam in late 1961—Diem had requested his return and Kennedy had told him he would be going—
the president had put him in charge of an ultrasecret project that was of intense emotional concern to John Kennedy because of his humiliation at the Bay of Pigs. The project was called Operation Mongoose. The task was to get rid of Fidel Castro, coiled in defiance and threatening to breed other Communist reptiles in the Caribbean and Latin America, by fomenting a revolution against him or by some other, more direct means. The president and Robert Kennedy were not particular about propriety. They wanted results. The pressure had risen after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Lansdale had failed to fulfill his reputation as a magician of clandestine operations and conjure up a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi to dispose of the cobra in Havana. He was about to be driven into retirement. His Filipino friend Ramon Magsaysay had died prematurely in a plane crash in 1957, without instituting the social and economic reforms that might have brought a lasting peace to the Philippines.

Toward the end of June, Vann finally reached an officer who did have influence, Maj. Gen. Harold Johnson, the Army’s assistant deputy chief of staff for operations. (Johnson was to be made chief of operations and then to be promoted to full general and appointed chief of staff within a little over a year.) He listened to Vann and sent him to Gen. Barksdale Hamlett, the vice chief of staff. Hamlett found Vann’s presentation sufficiently upsetting to arrange for him to brief the assembled Joint Chiefs of Staff on July 8, 1963.

Vann was thrilled and awed that he was at last coming within touch of victory in his battle to get the truth about the war to those with the power to make use of it. Hamlett’s response reaffirmed a conviction that Vann had held to in Vietnam despite all of his frustrations with Harkins—the conviction that Harkins was an aberration, that bad strategies came from ignorance and misguided intentions, that in the final analysis his system was founded on reason.

When Vann briefed the Joint Chiefs on July 8 he was going to cross paths again with Victor Krulak, who returned at the beginning of July from another inspection trip to South Vietnam. Krulak briefed McNamara and Taylor and the other members of the Joint Chiefs on his week-long visit. The distribution list for copies of his 129-page report has been lost, but documents such as this were widely distributed at the top in Washington. In all likelihood Krulak’s report went up to his admirer at the White House through McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s special assistant for national security affairs, and to his other admirer in the attorney general’s office.

“The shooting part of the war is moving to a climax,” Brute Krulak announced. The boys would be coming home on McNamara’s three-year
schedule with another war behind them. “General Harkins considers that a reduction of 1,000 men could be accomplished now, without affecting adversely the conduct of the war.” Had the report not been classified Secret because of its intelligence data and discussion of Hanoi’s use of Cambodia and U.S.-Saigon forays into Laos, it would have qualified as an immediate press release. Krulak had personally written only the fifteen-page introduction. The remainder consisted of questions submitted by Krulak and answers prepared under the guidance of then Brig. Gen. Richard Stilwell, who had arrived in Saigon in April to replace Kelleher as chief of operations. His habitual confidence in authority had immediately led him to start promoting the views of the commanding general and suppressing dissent within Harkins’s staff and anywhere else in the command he could find it. Krulak made Stilwell’s answers his own by ornamenting them with the enthusiasm of his introduction.

The Viet Cong were not proliferating and growing into a more formidable foe, as Vann said. On the contrary, Harkins’s attrition strategy was turning them into an endangered species of Vietnamese. “Captured documents have revealed that many Viet Cong are already on short rations and are in dire need of drugs. … Prisoners of war have also stated that Viet Cong morale is deteriorating due to lack of logistics and popular support,” one of Stilwell’s answers read. The latest intelligence data showed that the total number of Communist-led insurgents in the country had declined from a peak of 124,000 guerrillas of all types in January 1963 to a “reasonably reliable” estimate of 102,000 to 107,000 Viet Cong by June.

What made the Communist-led guerrillas so vulnerable to this attrition process? It was the Strategic Hamlet Program, “the heart of the counterinsurgency strategy,” Krulak said. By mid-June 1963, 67 percent of the rural population of the South was living in the 6,800 strategic hamlets built since the first had been erected in Operation Sunrise in April 1962. Most of the peasantry “appears favorably disposed” to the program. By the end of 1963, when the United States and the Diem regime had constructed all 11,246 strategic hamlets planned for the South, the Viet Cong would be complete outsiders. Although the United States had persuaded Diem to permit an amnesty program for the guerrillas, the number of defectors was going to fall off dramatically because “there will actually not be a very great number of people available for the amnesty program to attract,” Krulak wrote.

(The intelligence section of Krulak’s report did contain some significant information. The Viet Cong were creating regiments in skeletal form in the rain-forest war zones north of Saigon. The numerical designation
the guerrillas had given one regiment was mentioned. “Artillery specialists” were also being grouped into “heavy weapons battalions.” Other and unconfirmed information said that the Viet Cong had received 75mm recoilless cannon and 12.7mm antiaircraft machine guns which “allegedly are to be kept ‘secret’ until the proper time arrives for their employment.” Neither Krulak nor Stilwell understood the importance of these details, apparently assuming, as Harkins did, that guerrillas in regiments would be bigger and easier targets.)

Several days before July 8, Krulak’s staff began calling the Army’s Directorate of Special Warfare for a copy of Vann’s briefing. The Pentagon grapevine had apparently alerted Krulak to Vann’s campaign to discredit Harkins’s version of the war. As Vann was now to brief the Joint Chiefs, the normal course was being followed of leaving nothing to chance. Vann was preparing a text of what he would say, along with slides of the statistical charts and maps he was going to display on the screen in the “Tank,” the irreverent nickname for the conference room of the. Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon. He rehearsed the briefing before his colleagues in the directorate, editing his text at their suggestion so that it wo:ild startle his august audience into attention and yet not put them off by sounding too radical or seeming to attack Harkins personally. Vann’s immediate superior, Lt. Col. Francis Kelly, a onetime New York policeman who was later to command the Special Forces in Vietnam, and others advised him to stall Krulak as long as possible.

Vann’s briefing would strike anyone who was enthralled by Harkins’s illusion as outrageous. His twelve-page narrative and his accompanying charts and maps might well impress someone whose mind was not made up as a deftly crafted presentation of the war by a man who had spent most of a year at its center in the struggle for the northern Delta. Vann was confining the briefing to his experience and specific area of responsibility so that his personal knowledge could not be challenged.

The Joint Chiefs would first see a map of South Vietnam cast on their screen with the northern Delta colored to stand out in relation to the rest of the country. Vann would explain to them what was at stake in the people, the geography, and the economic resources of the half of the South’s rice bowl that touched Saigon itself. Then he would display some statistical charts while he sought to dispel myths and attempted an education in “the fundamentals of guerrilla warfare” as John Vann had learned them and passed them on to the newsmen. For example, he would display a chart showing a total of 9,700 Viet Cong “reported killed” in the 7th Division zone during the ten months that he had been senior advisor. (He would not mention the body-count figures in Harkins’s
“Headway” reports. The Joint Chiefs were familiar with these.) “I use the term ‘reported killed,’” he would say. “Actually the number [9,700] is highly misleading. With over 200 advisors in the field, we estimate, and I stress this can only be an estimate, that the total number of people killed was less than two-thirds of those claimed. Additionally, we estimate that from 30 to 40 percent of the personnel killed were merely bystanders who were unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of a combat action.” The Joint Chiefs would be told that “we never had intelligence that was good enough to justify prestrikes by air, artillery, or mortars” but that as weapons went “a rifle … is the last one that was preferred for use.” They would tour the outposts in the 7th Division zone where the garrisons were “shot in their beds,” follow Cao’s campaign of the fall of 1962—”plans so prudently made that we had only three friendly troops killed”—and see the tree lines of Bac and Tan Thoi as Vann cast a colored sketch on the screen and gave a brief account of the disastrous consequences to which make-believe leads in war.

John Vann was not going to conclude his briefing for the Joint Chiefs with a dirge. He knew this would not help him with these generals, and he did not feel that way in any case. There was still time to win if corrective action was taken. If policy was changed and the Saigon side was forced to accept American advice it would be possible to “break the back of the Viet Cong military forces [in the northern Delta] within six months.” The complete pacification of the region would take years, but a war effort that exploited the full potential of the Saigon side and a hard-fought six-month campaign could reduce “the military capability of the Viet Cong … from battalion-size operations of regular forces to platoon-size harassments by local guerrillas.”

He had Mary Jane send a uniform to the cleaners especially for the Monday of the briefing. “There wasn’t a wrinkle near him,” she remembered later, as he left for the Pentagon in the morning. He was scheduled to address the Joint Chiefs at 2:00
P.M.
He stalled as long as he dared on letting Krulak have a copy of his text, until four hours before the briefing, and then sent one over and walked to the outer office of Gen. Earle Wheeler, the current chief of staff of the Army, to wait there just in case there were any last-minute questions from Wheeler’s aides. They had already been given a copy.

At about 11:00
A.M.
, an hour after he had sent the text to Krulak’s office, the phone rang on the desk of one of Wheeler’s aides. Vann heard the aide ask the officer at the other end of the line: “Who wants the item removed from the agenda?” The answer was apparently confusing.

“Is it the secretary of defense or the chairman’s office?” the aide continued. He seemed to get some clarification. “Is that an order or a request?” he asked. There was further explanation from the other end of the line. “Let me get this right,” the aide said, summing up the conversation to be certain he had it correctly. “The chairman requests that the item be removed.” The aide answered that he would convey Taylor’s request to the chief of staff and call back. He hung up.

“Looks like you don’t brief today, buddy,” he said to Vann. He walked into the inner office where Wheeler worked, came back in a short time, and telephoned the caller at Taylor’s office. “The chief agrees to remove the item from the agenda,” he said.

Krulak had clearly alerted Taylor to this incredible briefing as soon as he read Vann’s text, and Taylor acted. Taylor did not bear professional contradiction lightly. He was quick to show irritation when he encountered opposition on military matters. Neither Krulak nor Taylor believed it was possible that Vann could be correct. He was obviously a disgruntled upstart of a lieutenant colonel. They had other reasons to stop him. They did not want to expose all of the Joint Chiefs to dissent of this magnitude and have it go on the record. To attack Harkins was first of all to attack Krulak. He was by this time identified in the eyes of the Washington establishment with Harkins’s position. It was also to attack Taylor. He too had been consistently sanguine in his reports to McNamara and the president. In addition, Taylor was responsible by proxy for the performance of his protégé in Saigon. When the question had come up in December 1961 of a general for the new command in Vietnam, Kennedy had not wanted to entrust the war to Harkins. He had considered Harkins too regular. He had wanted to reach down for a younger man with an unorthodox background in the hope of imaginative performance. Taylor had persuaded the president to accept Harkins, assuring him that Harkins had exactly the talents they needed.