A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (8 page)

There was no guerrilla with a mine on the way to My Tho on May 21, 1962. Vann reached the new quarters of the 7th Division Advisory Detachment on the main road half a mile north of the town without incident. The Saigon soldier guarding the iron grillwork gate swung it open and let his jeep into the courtyard. The place had been a school for aspiring men of God and then briefly an orphanage before its recent conversion to the profane work of war. The advisors called their quarters the Seminary because of its original purpose, and two white masonry crosses atop the former chapel at the far end of the courtyard still proclaimed this holy intent to passersby. The American military authorities, who had become the major renter and bankroller of construction in the country, had leased the building from a Roman Catholic diocese in exile from North Vietnam and in need of funds. When Frank Clay, whom Vann was to succeed, had arrived in My Tho the year before, the detachment had consisted of only seven officers and a sergeant, with three of the officers living with the division’s component regiments in other provincial towns. A large house in My Tho had been more than sufficient. After Clay had learned that the detachment was to multiply twentyfold in the spring of 1962 and to keep growing (it would slightly exceed 200 officers and men by the end of 1962), he had arranged for the leasing and renovation of the Seminary as the best available building in the area.

The main two-story structure was pleasant if undistinguished French colonial architecture of brick sheathed in white stucco and roofed with red tile. It was roughly L-shaped, with the long back of the L running down beside a narrow river. The first floor at the base of the L had been remodeled into an office section. The rest of the ground floor had then been renovated into sleeping rooms for the officers, a mess hall, showers and toilets, and a bar and service club. The mess hall doubled as a theater for the movies every second night that, with charcoal-broiled steaks on Sunday and bargain-priced liquor every evening, were among the privileges of American military life overseas. Vann and a few of the
senior officers rated small bedrooms on the second floor above the office section. The remainder of the second floor was divided into dormitory bays for the enlisted men. The advisors used the courtyard as a parking lot for their jeeps and three-quarter-ton trucks. The courtyard was also the scene of the volleyball contests that Vann started right after his arrival. He had a net erected over a basketball court the seminarians had laid out there.

The Viet Cong had come a few nights after the advisors had first moved into the Seminary in early May to tell the Americans they were not beyond the guerrillas’ reach. A group had sneaked through the banana groves across the road and started shooting at the mess hall in the middle of a movie. The sergeants, some of whom were old enough to have been through World War II or Korea, had been amused at the sight of captains who had never before been under fire running around in undershorts, T-shirts, and steel helmets, waving .45 caliber service pistols, with which it is difficult to hit a man in the daytime. Periodically the guerrillas would repeat the exercise, usually from the concealment of a stand of water palm on the opposite bank of the river behind the building. Several guerrillas would fire a string of shots at the generator or water-purification equipment and withdraw into the night. No damage was ever done beyond some pockmarks on the stucco. The next morning the advisors would see a Viet Cong flag, a gold star on a horizontally split field of red over blue, flying from a tree.

A determined guerrilla company could probably have overrun the Seminary in a few minutes. The two dozen territorial troops from the province, called Civil Guards, who were responsible for defending the compound were friendly but seemed to take a casual attitude toward safeguarding the foreign advisors. The Americans could not protect themselves, because there were not enough men to do the job of advising the 7th Division during the day and also mount a guard each night sufficiently strong to hold off the attackers while the rest snatched up their weapons and ran to their stations. Nearly half of the officers and men did not live full-time at the Seminary. They were instead dispersed throughout the division zone with the battalions and regiments, stayed in the province capitals advising the province chiefs and their staffs, or worked at the training centers for the territorial forces. Vann chose to take what precautions he could without interfering with advisory duties and to accept the risk of an attack in order to fulfill the detachment’s mission. The behavior of the guerrillas indicated to him that they did not actually intend to shoot the advisors in their beds. He guessed correctly. The Americans were privileged people in South Vietnam in
the early 1960s. The Vietnamese Communists limited terrorist attacks against Americans in these first years because they did not wish to provoke greater intervention. They were hoping that forbearance would elicit sympathy for their cause from the American public.

The 7th Division headquarters was in the former French Army caserne in the safety of My Tho. The place was a community of about 40,000 people in 1962, the major population center for the northern Delta, a provincial city by Vietnamese standards, a large town by American ones. Like most of the important Delta towns it was located beside a big canal or river for easy access by sampan or barge. This one was a spur off the upper branch of the Mekong as it flowed to the sea, appropriately called Tien Giang for Upper River. My Tho had been founded in the latter half of the seventeenth century by Chinese refugees fleeing the collapse of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu conquest of their homeland. The Vietnamese, who were completing their centuries-long migration by conquest down the Indochinese Peninsula by seizing the Delta from the original Cambodian inhabitants, had welcomed these immigrant allies. The French had enlarged My Tho after they had in turn conquered the Delta in the 1860s. The town had become a garrison and administrative center and a place of commerce to process rice for the export trade to China and other rice-deficit countries of East Asia, and to Europe and Latin America. The plantations of thousands and tens of thousands of acres organized out of the fertile soil and landless peasantry of the Delta, first with the encouragement of the Vietnamese emperors and then on a grand scale by the French and upper-class Vietnamese who had benefited from colonial rule, had been broken up during the first war and its aftermath. My Tho had otherwise changed little physically from the French era by the time Vann arrived. The town was still a busy community that battened off the labor of the peasantry in the surrounding region. Most of the rice produced in the Delta was now consumed within South Vietnam. The warehouses and mills kept occupied storing and processing it for shipment to Saigon and the provinces to the north.

For the Americans the town could be a diversion on an evening or a Sunday afternoon. Groups of advisors occasionally came to the Chinese restaurant beside the river for a meal, or sat and drank at the open-air tables set up around kiosks that sold beer and soft drinks, enjoying the breeze that cooled the Delta landscape at dusk, comparing the merits of the girls on the street, and watching the boats haul produce to the riverfront dock. The enterprising Chinese still ran the small shops that offered everything from bolts of cheap cotton cloth, out of which the peasants sewed the pajamalike blouses and pants called
ao babas
, to
aphrodisiacs. There was a central market with all of the pungent smells of this land. Among the stalls of the fish and fruit sellers were those of the acupuncture artists, whose needles promised an end to pain, and the sorcerers, who peddled ancient herbal medicines and the ancient and modern hokum of magic cures. The Vietnamese and Chinese merchants and landowners lived in solid masonry houuss. The poor made do with wooden shacks. One of the more impressive houses in the town was the villa that the French had built for their provincial governor. It was on the main avenue, with handsome if somewhat neglected gardens around it and a tennis court that the American officers were permitted to use. The villa was occupied by an ARVN major who had been appointed province chief by President Diem. Vann’s counterpart, Col. Huynh Van Cao, the commander of the 7th Division, was forced for want of an established prerogative of office to occupy a more modest whitewashed house, carefully guarded, in a small compound behind a row of flame trees on a side street a few blocks away. He lived there alone and kept his wife and seven children in Saigon.

Vann felt it urgent to reverse the trend of the war in the northern Delta. As matters stood in May 1962, the Viet Cong had the strategic and tactical initiative. It was the Communists who were determining the course of the war by deciding when and where and on what terms to fight. The Saigon side was on the defensive, reacting to guerrilla moves rather than carrying the war to the enemy. Only the main road that went south from Saigon to My Tho and then split into two roads that ran west and south into the lower Delta could be traveled in the daytime in a single jeep and at night by a pair. In large areas of the five provinces the guerrillas had rendered the secondary roads impassable to vehicles by organizing the peasants to dig ditches across them and to dismantle the bridges. They had not yet gotten around to removing the roads entirely by having the peasants dig up the beds bit by bit and scatter the dirt across the rice paddies, as they had in much of the lower Delta. They would get around to it if they were not stopped in time. On those secondary roads that were usable, an escort of at least a reinforced platoon was considered a necessity by the Saigon officers, and then there was no guarantee that the vehicles would not be ambushed. While all of the peasantry in the northern Delta did not sympathize with the guerrillas, the majority either favored the Viet Cong cause or tacitly aided the Communists through the silence of a neutrality that worked against the Saigon government. Whether the neutrality was created by
fear of guerrilla terrorism or by sympathy made no practical difference: the Saigon government lacked the cooperation of the peasantry, and cooperation was necessary to suppress the Communist-led insurrection. South Vietnam in 1962 was an overwhelmingly rural society; 85 percent of the population dwelt in the countryside. With his training in statistics, Vann was struck by the potential for the growth of the Communist guerrilla power in a society with this sort of profile. All of the 2 million people in the division zone, except for the 15 percent who lived in My Tho and the other towns, were currently or potentially within the reach of the Viet Cong. There was no question of who still had the raw military power. Vann estimated that two companies of ARVN regulars, about 180 men, with their American infantry weapons and artillery and fighter-bombers at their call, could go anywhere in the five provinces. In a metaphor he drew for one of his staff officers that summer, however, he observed that the passage of Saigon’s troops through the countryside was like the movement of a ship through the sea. While the ARVN troops were in a given area, their presence pushed the guerrillas into hiding or flight, in the way a ship displaced water. The moment they departed, the guerrillas flowed back.

Prior to leaving Saigon, he and Porter had agreed on a number of goals they saw as the foundation blocks for a strategy to reverse this losing course and win the war. As soldiers, their first priority was to develop offensive operations that would corner and destroy the main striking forces of the guerrillas. The current ARVN operation was appropriately known as “the sweep.” It consisted of marching several battalions across the countryside in dispersed columns. Porter had noted that the scheme of maneuver might be adequate for moving an armored division across North Germany, but it was hardly effective against guerrillas in rice-delta country. He wanted Vann to take advantage of the dexterity that the helicopter offered for landing and shifting assault troops and devise tactics that would stampede the best Viet Cong units into engagements in which they could be annihilated. To initiate these unconventional operations Vann was in turn to persuade Colonel Cao to accept a face-saving ploy that would give the Americans proxy control over the division. The euphemism for the ploy was “joint planning.” Under “joint planning,” Vann and Cao and their staffs would ostensibly plan operations together. In fact, the intent was to persuade Cao to carry out operations that Vann and his staff conceived.

Vann was supposed to work as Clay’s deputy for a month so that he could fully orient himself to the job prior to Clay’s return home near the end of June. He did not have to wait that long. During an operation
on the Plain of Reeds west of My Tho on May 23, 1962, two days after Vann’s arrival, Clay attempted to drive a platoon of about twenty fleeing guerrillas back toward the Saigon troops by strafing them from a pair of helicopters. The Viet Cong paused long enough to shoot up the lead helicopter in which Clay was riding with another lieutenant colonel from Porter’s advisory staff. The pilot received a bullet in the foot; Clay, the other lieutenant colonel, and the copilot were all superficially wounded by fragments of Plexiglás and aluminum sent flying by the bullets that smashed through the cockpit canopy and the control panel. Vann took charge while Clay was flown up to Saigon for treatment and then left for a delayed eight-day rest leave in Hong Kong. Vann was again in acting command through much of June. Clay was off on a tour of the Central Highlands and the central coastal provinces north of Saigon. He had been selected to be the guerrilla warfare specialist on the faculty of the National War College in Washington and wanted to acquaint himself with the differing conditions of the war in these areas.

When Vann formally took charge toward the end of the month, there was no change-of-command ceremony and trooping of the colors in the courtyard of the Seminary as is the custom at the passing of the baton in the U.S. Army. Clay would have forbidden a ceremony, because he was an emotional man and knew that he embarrassed himself on such occasions by turning misty-eyed. In this case he would not have had a choice. The advisors were forbidden to fly the Stars and Stripes over their compounds in 1962. They were also not authorized any combat decorations. Clay and the others wounded on the helicopter were not even entitled to a Purple Heart, and had they been killed their families would not have been given one. (The medal is routinely awarded for wounds and posthumously for death.) President Kennedy hoped that by keeping the horizon of the American presence in South Vietnam as low as possible he could avoid the political consequences of having the public at home understand that the United States was at war there.