A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (7 page)

Toward the end of the afternoon Vann returned to Porter’s office with a memorandum several pages long, which he had typed. It translated the computerese into layman’s language, described the concept of the system simply, and laid out a practical method through which the Vietnamese G-4 officers and their American advisors who were not computer specialists could use the system to order the spare parts and other materiel required. Porter was taken aback. He had no more than a passing knowledge of computerized systems, but he was certain that he had given Vann enough work to keep an ordinary officer with an expertise in logistics occupied for two days. This man was back in half a day with a far better solution than he had expected. What was the next odd job that Porter wanted him to do? Although Porter did not tell Vann then, he decided that afternoon that the rooster was going to the 7th Division.

For the next two months, Porter took advantage of Vann’s diverse talents and prepared him for his task. Of the three ARVN corps regions, that of Porter’s III Corps (the ARVN used the U.S. Army system of designating a corps by Roman numerals) was the largest in the country, and most of the fighting was taking place within it. The III Corps zone extended from the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula at the bottom of the Mekong Delta up through a belt of provinces that ringed Saigon on the north. To acquaint Vann with as much of this war as he could, Porter sent him on helicopter assault missions with the division stationed in the rubber-plantation country north of the capital, where the teak and mahogany rain forests edged down from the foothills of the Central Highlands. He let Vann range south through the expanse of rice lands nourished by the Mekong, the great river of Indochina. Vann marched on operations with the two divisions there and visited the main province
towns and the rural district centers where the district chiefs lived with their families and had their offices in little compounds fortified with bunkers and barbed wire. To familiarize Vann with the weaknesses of the ARVN staff system, Porter also put him to work in the corps G-3 (operations) and G-2 (intelligence) sections.

On the morning of May 21, 1962, Vann shook hands with Porter and climbed into a jeep. He drove out of the old French cavalry camp and then maneuvered in his impatient way through Saigon’s vehicular extravaganza of trucks and gaudily painted buses coming and going from the countryside, Vespa scooters and Lambretta motorbikes, cyclos (a bicycle version of the rickshaw), motorcyclos (a wildly dangerous motorcycle version of the rickshaw), modest French and British sedans, an occasional and immodest swan-fendered Mercury or Chevrolet from the 1950s; and everywhere tiny yellow-and-blue Renault taxis of a vintage no one could remember, driven with an abandon equal to their durability. At last, at a place called Phu Lam, he cleared the southwestern edge of the city. A construction crew was at work there starting to raise giant antennas over land that had been rice paddies until American bulldozers had recently drained and filled them. A high-frequency radio station at Phu Lam already tied General Harkins’s Saigon headquarters into the communications network that reached out over the globe from the telephones and teletypes of the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon. The antennas, the latest in communications technology, bounced electronic signals off the troposphere through a technique called Troposcatter. They would extend the span of General Harkins’s command into the Southeast Asian mainland—north along the peaks and plateaus of the Annamite chain of the Highlands and up the narrow rice basins of the Central Coast to the other principal ports and airfields of South Vietnam, and then over the mountains to the military air base at Ubon in Thailand, a second ally that America had given its word to protect in this part of the world.

Vann turned the jeep’s engine loose and sped south down the two-lane tarmac road that was the main route into the Mekong Delta, the wind against his face in the open vehicle an added pleasure. He was on his way to the 7th Infantry Division headquarters at My Tho thirty-five miles away. Porter had given him the best assignment in the country. He was putting Vann in command of the American effort in the cockpit of the war.

The 7th Division’s zone of responsibility covered most of the northern half of the Delta, where the course of the war was going to be decided. The 6,000 square miles and five provinces swung across South Vietnam
from the swamps of the Plain of Reeds on the Cambodian border on the west to the South China Sea on the east. The division zone held more than 2 million people, a seventh of South Vietnam’s population of 14 million in 1962, who grew more than a seventh of the country’s food. The Saigon government had already forfeited most of the southern half of the Delta to the guerrillas. The northern half was still being contested. Approximately 38,000 of Saigon’s troops faced an estimated 15,000 guerrillas there. The government that the United States was depending on to hold South Vietnam could hardly survive if it lost a region so rich in manpower and resources on the edge of its capital.

The challenge and the responsibility did not intimidate Vann. Rather, he welcomed them with an exhilaration that held no little arrogance. In his American mental universe of 1962 there were no unknowables and no unattainables. What he did not know, he could discover. He had no experience with guerrilla warfare beyond the unconventional operations with his Ranger company in Korea, but he had spent the past nineteen of his thirty-seven years learning how to make war. A counterguerrilla war was simply another form of warfare, and he would learn how to wage it successfully. The previous year, on instructions from President Kennedy, the Army had begun to publish doctrine for its officers on how to suppress guerrillas. Porter had developed some specific ideas on ways to apply these vague concepts to the context of the war in Vietnam as a result of his observations in the field. Porter’s ideas made sense to Vann on the basis of what he had been able to see over the previous two months.

Vann also knew nothing of the Vietnamese and their culture and history. He did not consider this ignorance any more of an impediment to effective action than his lack of knowledge of counterguerrilla warfare. He was convinced from his experiences as a junior officer in Korea and Japan that Asians were
not
inscrutable orientals. Lansdale was one of his heroes for this reason. He had read
The Ugly American
and liked it. Lansdale knew how to operate in Asia. Lansdale understood that Asians were people, that you could discern their desires and play upon those desires to your advantage. Vann was sure that he would be able to see what motivated the Vietnamese officers with whom he would be working and persuade them to do what was in their best interest and in the interest of the United States. The fact that the French had been defeated in Indochina was irrelevant to him. Americans were not colonialists as the French had been, and the French were, in any case, a decadent people whose time had passed. Their army had never recovered from the humiliation of being beaten by the Germans
in World War II. Vann had seen the U.S. Army lose battles in Korea but never a war. History had not shown Americans to be fallible as other peoples were. Americans were different. History did not apply to them.

Vann had no moral qualms about killing Vietnamese Communists and those who fought for them, nor was he troubled by the fact that he would be getting Vietnamese who sided with the United States killed to achieve American aims in Vietnam. He had been trained to kill Germans and Japanese in World War II, although the war had ended before he could. During the Korean War he had killed Koreans on the Communist side and, with a clear conscience, had helped send Koreans who were fighting with him to their deaths in his cause. He assumed that he and his fellow Americans had a right to take life and to spend it, as long as they did so with discretion, whenever killing and dying were necessary in their struggle. His assumptions were buttressed by his pride in being one of the best officers in the U.S. Army, the finest army that had ever existed, but he was also conscious that he and the Army represented a greater entity still, an entity in which he took even more pride. He was a guardian of the American empire.

America had built the largest empire in history by the time John Vann reached Vietnam in 1962. The United States had 850,000 military men and civilian officials serving overseas in 106 countries. From the combined-services headquarters of the Commander in Chief Pacific on the mountain above Pearl Harbor, to the naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, to the shellproof bunkers along the truce line in Korea, there were 410,000 men arrayed in the armies, the fleets, and the air forces of the Pacific. In Europe and the Middle East, from the nuclear bomber bases in the quiet of the English countryside, to the tank maneuver grounds at Grafenwóhr on the invasion route from Czechoslovakia, to the attack aircraft carriers of the Sixth Fleet waiting in the Mediterranean, to the electronic listening posts along the Soviet frontier in Turkey and Iran, there were another 410,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen deployed. When the diplomats from the State Department, the agents from the CIA, and the officials of the sundry other civilian agencies were counted, together with all of their wives and children, the United States had approximately 1.4 million of its servants and their families representing it abroad in 1962. John Vann saw himself as one of the leaders of the expeditionary corps of infantry advisors, helicopter crews, fighter-bomber pilots, and Special Forces teams whom President Kennedy had decided in November 1961 to dispatch to South Vietnam, the threatened Southeast Asian outpost of this empire. With the wind
in his face on the road to My Tho, he did not intend to let the Communist-led guerrillas win the battle for the northern half of the Mekong Delta.

The Mekong Delta was a deceptive place in late May 1962. It had the appearance of a land of milk and honey. The onset of the monsoon early in the month had quickened the rice seeds into shoots that were pushing green from the seedbeds and would soon be ready for the second event in a Vietnamese peasant’s year—the transplanting of the seedlings into the earth waiting beneath the gray water of the paddy fields that stretched out in an expanse from both sides of the road. The landscape looked flat, but it kept the eye busy. Narrow dikes to trap the water for the rice plants checkered the paddy fields. The checkerboard of the paddy fields and the dikes was in turn crisscrossed by the straight lines and sharp angles of canals for irrigation and transport. The lines and angles of the canals were occasionally interrupted by the wide bend of one of the rivers that fed them. Stands of bamboo and a species of water palm whose fronds stood twenty feet high edged the canals and rivers. Taller coconut palms also grew in profusion, singly and in clusters, along the banks. There were large groves of the most common Vietnamese fruit trees—bananas and papayas. There were smaller groves and separate trees of mangos, grapefruits, limes, tangerines, oranges, peaches, and jackfruit. The list of others was so various that a horticulturist would have puzzled at trying to identify all of the local subspecies. Peasant boys wearing conical straw hats to ward off the sun rode the backs of the buffalos that pulled the plows and harrows to prepare the paddy fields for the rice. Rangy black hogs rooted among the thatched houses in the hamlets. Although the houses seemed insubstantial, they were adequate for this climate. They were made by erecting a frame of logs and bamboo poles over a pounded earth floor. Dried and split fronds of the water palm were then used to thatch the fairly steep ridge roof and the sides and to partition the interior into rooms. The roof overhung the sides so that its thatch carried off the monsoon torrents and also shaded the house against the sun. Chickens shared the yards with the hogs. The ducks were usually kept in flocks, with their wings clipped so that they could not fly. They were herded by children or by landless agricultural laborers to keep them out of the paddy fields and vegetable gardens of neighbors. The canals and the rivers knew no limit of fish, shrimp, crabs, and eels. When the monsoon reached its height in July and August, and the fish could swim into the paddy fields, these too became fish ponds.

Every once in a while a soldier stopped Vann’s jeep at a bridge to let a line of traffic from the opposite direction cross over. The bridges were one-lane structures erected by the French out of Eiffel steel beams that arched overhead. Peasant children posted at these checkpoints would come up to hawk, for the equivalent of a few pennies in Saigon government piasters, chunks of coconut meat and sugar cane, and slices of fresh pineapple sprinkled with large grains of salt to contrast with the sweetness. Material want seemed to be the least of concerns in this land.

The concrete blockhouses at the bridges were the warning that this was not a land of contentment. While he bought a piece of pineapple from one of the insistent children, Vann had time to study the blockhouses, encircled with rusting barbed wire, and to observe the soldiers walking guard along the sides of the bridges. He had time to think that the green line of water palm fronds along a canal bank he had passed five minutes earlier might suddenly have quickened with the muzzle flashes of an automatic weapon reaching at the jeep. He could see that the rains would make the fields of sprouting sugar cane high and dense enough in a few months to conceal a battalion. He had time to wonder if a guerrilla might be waiting, across the river and farther down the road, for a jeep such as his. Jeeps were the most satisfying targets, because they usually carried officers. If a guerrilla was waiting he would probably be squatting behind a tombstone in one of the small peasant graveyards set on mounds among the paddy fields. He would be a patient man, not one to waste an opportunity if he could avoid doing so. He would be keeping himself alert, his hands over the detonator connected by wires to a mine dug into the road the night before—the cut tarmac set carefully back into place to conceal the explosive—ready to send the jeep and its occupants twisting into the air.

This land had known war for most of the seventeen years prior to Vann’s arrival. The older children among the groups selling coconut and pineapple at the checkpoints could remember the final years of the first war. It had begun in 1945 when the French had attempted to reimpose their colonial rule on Vietnam and the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos. There had been only three years of intermittent peace after the first war had ended with the humiliation of the French and their Vietnamese troops in the mountain valley of Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam in 1954. Then war had resumed in 1957 between the guerrillas and the Saigon regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the mandarin whom Lansdale had secured in power. By 1961 the guerrillas had become so strong that President Kennedy had had to commit the arms of the United
States to prevent Diem’s government from being overthrown. The Americans and the Saigon government called the guerrillas the Viet Cong, an abbreviation of the words for Vietnamese Communists. (The advisors had shortened the term to VC for everyday usage, except in the lingo of field radio traffic, in which the VC became Victor Charlies.) The guerrillas referred to themselves as the Liberation Army and called this second war the Liberation War. They said that both wars were part of the Vietnamese Revolution—this second war a renewal of the struggle to achieve the original goals of the war against the French.