A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan

  ALSO BY NEIL SHEEHAN

  A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

  After the War Was Over

  The Arnheiter Affair

  Once Again and Always for Susan

  A First Time for Maria and Catherine

  And for my Mother and Kitty

  We had also, to all the visitors who came over there,

  been one of the bright shining lies.

  —John Paul Vann

  to a U.S. Army historian,

  July 1963

  CONTENTS

  The Funeral

  BOOK I Going to War

  BOOK II Antecedents to a Confrontation

  BOOK III The Battle of Ap Bac

  BOOK IV Taking On the System

  BOOK V Antecedents to the Man

  BOOK VI A Second Time Around

  BOOK VII John Vann Stays

  Acknowledgments

  Interviews

  Documents

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  THE FUNERAL

  IT WAS a funeral to which they all came. They gathered in the red brick chapel beside the cemetery gate. Six gray horses were hitched to a caisson that would carry the coffin to the grave. A marching band was ready. An honor guard from the Army’s oldest regiment, the regiment whose rolls reached back to the Revolution, was also formed in ranks before the white Georgian portico of the chapel. The soldiers were in full dress, dark blue trimmed with gold, the colors of the Union Army, which had safeguarded the integrity of the nation. The uniform was unsuited to the warmth and humidity of this Friday morning in the early summer of Washington, but this state funeral was worthy of the discomfort. John Paul Vann, the soldier of the war in Vietnam, was being buried at Arlington on June 16, 1972.

  The war had already lasted longer than any other in the nation’s history and had divided America more than any conflict since the Civil War. In this war without heroes, this man had been the one compelling figure. The intensity and distinctiveness of his character and the courage and drama of his life had seemed to sum up so many of the qualities Americans admired in themselves as a people. By an obsession, by an unyielding dedication to the war, he had come to personify the American endeavor in Vietnam. He had exemplified it in his illusions, in his good intentions gone awry, in his pride, in his will to win. Where others had been defeated or discouraged over the years, or had become disenchanted and had turned against the war, he had been undeterred in his crusade to find a way to redeem the unredeemable, to lay hold of victory in this doomed enterprise. At the end of a decade of struggle to prevail, he had been killed one night a week earlier when his helicopter had crashed and burned in rain and fog in the mountains of South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. He had just beaten back, in a battle at a town called Kontum, an offensive by the North Vietnamese Army which had threatened to bring the Vietnam venture down in defeat.

  Those who had assembled to see John Vann to his grave reflected the divisions and the wounds that the war had inflicted on American society. At the same time they had, almost every one, been touched by this man. Some had come because they had admired him and shared his cause even now; some because they had parted with him along the way, but still thought of him as a friend; some because they had been harmed by him, but cherished him for what he might have been. Although the war was to continue for nearly another three years with no dearth of dying in Vietnam, many at Arlington on that June morning in 1972 sensed that they were burying with John Vann the war and the decade of Vietnam. With Vann dead, the rest could be no more than a postscript.

  He had gone to Vietnam at the beginning of the decade, in March 1962, at the age of thirty-seven, as an Army lieutenant colonel, volunteering to serve as senior advisor to a South Vietnamese infantry division in the Mekong Delta south of Saigon. The war was still an adventure then. The previous December, President John F. Kennedy had committed the arms of the United States to the task of suppressing a Communist-led rebellion and preserving South Vietnam as a separate state governed by an American-sponsored regime in Saigon.

  Vann was a natural leader of men in war. He was a child of the American South in the Great Depression, a redneck born and raised in a poor white working-class district of Norfolk, Virginia. He never tanned, his friends and subordinates joked during that first assignment in Vietnam. Whenever he exposed himself to the sun by marching with the South Vietnamese infantrymen on operations, which he did constantly, his ruddy neck and arms simply got redder.

  At first glance he appeared a runty man. He stood five feet eight inches and weighed 150 pounds. An unusual physical stamina and an equally unusual assertiveness more than compensated for this shortness of stature. His constitution was extraordinary. It permitted him to turn each day into two days for an ordinary man. He required only four hours of sleep in normal times and could function effectively with two hours of sleep for extended periods. He could, and routinely did, put in two eight-hour working days in every twenty-four and still had half a working day in which to relax and amuse himself.

  The assertiveness showed in the harsh, nasal tone of his voice and in the brisk, clipped way he had of enunciating his words. He always knew what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. He had a genius for solving the day-to-day problems that arise in the course of moving forward a complicated enterprise, particularly one as complicated as the art of making war. The genius lay in his pragmatic cast of mind and in his instinct for assessing the peculiar talents and motivations of other men and then turning those talents and motivations to his advantage. Detail fascinated him. He prized facts. He absorbed great quantities of them with ease and was always searching out more, confident that once he had discovered the facts of a problem, he could correctly analyze it and then apply the proper solution. His character and the education the Army had given him at service schools and civilian universities had combined to produce a mind that could be totally possessed by the immediate task and at the same time sufficiently detached to discern the root elements of the problem. He manifested the faith and the optimism of post-World War II America that any challenge could be overcome by will and by the disciplined application of intellect, technology, money, and, when necessary, armed force.

  Vann had no physical fear. He made a habit of frequently spending the night at South Vietnamese militia outposts and survived a number of assaults against these little isolated forts of brick and sandbag blockhouses and mud walls, taking up a rifle to help the militiamen repel the attack. He drove roads that no one else would drive, to prove they could be driven, and in the process drove with slight injury through several ambushes. He landed his helicopter at district capitals and fortified camps in the midst of assaults to assist the defenders, ignoring the shelling and the antiaircraft machine guns, defying the enemy gunners to kill him. In the course of the decade he acquired a reputation for invulnerability. Time and again he took risks that killed other men and always survived. The odds, he said, did not apply to him.

  A willingness to take risks in his professional life was another quality he had in great measure. He displayed it during his first year in Vietnam, from March 1962 to April 1963, and showed it often in later years. While serving as senior advisor to a South Vietnamese infantry division in the Mekong Delta that first year, Vann saw that the war was being lost. The ambassador and the commanding general in South Vietnam were telling the Kennedy administration that everything was going well and that the war was being won. Vann believed then and never ceased to believe that the war could be won if it was fought with sound tactics and strategy. When the general and his staff in Saigon did not listen to him, and his r
eports aroused their displeasure, he leaked his meticulously documented assessments to the American correspondents in the country. He was reassigned to the Pentagon at the end of his tour, and he conducted a campaign there to try to convince the nation’s military leadership that corrective action had to be taken if the United States was not to be defeated in Vietnam. He was rebuffed. Having completed twenty years of active duty, he chose to retire from the Army on July 31, 1963. His retirement was interpreted by most of his friends and associates as an act of protest so that he could speak out publicly on the war. Vann proceeded to do precisely that in newspaper, magazine, and television interviews and in speeches to whatever groups would listen to him.

  He went back to Vietnam in March 1965 as a provincial pacification representative for the Agency for International Development (AID). He was never to return to the United States, except for occasional home leaves, until his death. He distinguished himself as pacification representative in one of the most dangerous provinces in the country just west of Saigon and by the end of 1966 was made chief of the civilian pacification program for the eleven provinces in the corps region surrounding the capital. In his reports to his superiors during those years, Vann denounced as cruel and self-defeating the indiscriminate bombing and shelling of the countryside which the U.S. high command was conducting to try to deprive the Vietnamese Communists of their population base. Large sections of the peasantry were driven into slums in the cities and into refugee camps near the district capitals and larger towns. Vann never hesitated to use whatever level of force he felt was required to further his cause, but he considered it morally wrong and stupid to wreak unnecessary violence on the innocent.

  In 1967 his professional boldness again put him in disfavor with those in authority. He warned that the strategy of attrition being pursued by Gen. William Westmoreland with a 475,000-man American army was not succeeding, that security in the countryside was worsening, that the Vietnamese Communists were as strong as ever. Vann was vindicated when, on January 31, 1968, the Communists took advantage of Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year holiday, to launch a surprise offensive against installations in cities and towns throughout the country, penetrating even the U.S. Embassy compound in the middle of Saigon. The war-of-attrition strategy was discredited. Westmoreland was relieved as commanding general in Vietnam.

  Although Vann hurt his family and others close to him in his personal life, his loyalty to friends, associates, and subordinates seemed limitless over the years. After the Tet Offensive his best Vietnamese friend, a former lieutenant colonel and province chief who had left the South Vietnamese Army to go into politics, launched a complicated scheme to negotiate a settlement to the war and started to denounce the Saigon regime. Several senior U.S. officials suspected Vann’s friend of seeking to form a coalition government with the Communists in the hope of securing a prominent place for himself. Vann disapproved of his friend’s negotiating scheme, but he risked his career again in a vain attempt to save his friend from jail. He was nearly dismissed and sent home. Vann also parted over the war with his best American friend, Daniel Ellsberg, who had earlier been a comrade in the struggle to make the Vietnam endeavor succeed. Ellsberg began an antiwar crusade in the United States while Vann continued his crusade to win the war in Vietnam. Their friendship remained intact. When Vann was killed, Ellsberg was preparing to go on trial in the Federal District Court in Los Angeles for copying the Pentagon Papers. Vann had told Ellsberg that he would testify in his behalf. Ellsberg wept at the loss of the man to whom he had been closest in life.

  Despite his maverick behavior, Vann had gradually risen in the system. His leadership qualities and his dedication to the war had assisted his promotion, as had a realization by those in power in Saigon and Washington that his dissent over tactics or strategy was always meant to further the war effort, not to hinder it. In May 1971 he was made senior advisor for the corps region comprising the Central Highlands and the adjacent provinces on the Central Coast. He was given authority over all U.S. military forces in the area, along with control of those civilians and military officers assigned to the pacification program. The position made him, in effect, a major general in the U.S. Army. The appointment was unprecedented in the history of American wars, as Vann was technically a civilian employed by AID. In addition, he covertly shared command of the 158,000 South Vietnamese troops in the corps because of a special relationship he had developed with the South Vietnamese general who was his counterpart. The influence he wielded within the U.S. civil-military bureaucracy and the Saigon government structure made him the most important American in the country after the ambassador and the commanding general in Saigon. His accumulated expertise and aptitude for this war made him the one irreplaceable American in Vietnam.

  Vann’s political credo was the set of beliefs characteristic of the United States that had emerged from World War II as the greatest power on earth, the view of self and the world that had carried America to war in Vietnam in the fullness of this power. To Vann, other peoples were lesser peoples: it was the natural order of things that they accept American leadership. He was convinced that having gained the preeminence it had been destined to achieve, the United States would never relinquish the position. He did not see America as using its power for self-satisfaction. He saw the United States as a stern yet benevolent authority that enforced peace and brought prosperity to the peoples of the non-Communist nations, sharing the bounty of its enterprise and technology with those who had been denied a fruitful life by poverty and social injustice and bad government. He assumed that America’s cause was always just, that while the United States might err, its intentions were always good. He was simplistic in his anti-Communism, because to him all Communists were enemies of America and thus enemies of order and progress.

  He saw much that was wrong about the war in Vietnam, but he could never bring himself to conclude that the war itself was wrong and unwinnable. To admit this would have been to admit the inevitability of defeat, and at a certain point in him intellect stopped and instinct took over. He could not abide defeat, defeat for himself or for his vision of America. He believed that America had staked that vision in Vietnam and he knew that he had made his stake there. That spring, when many around him had despaired at the height of the North Vietnamese Army offensive, he had said no, they would not retreat, they would stand and fight. He had fought and won the battle and then he had died. This was why some of those who had assembled at Arlington on June 16, 1972, wondered if they were burying with him more than the war and the decade of Vietnam. They wondered if they were also burying with him this vision and this faith in an ever-innocent America.

  The man who had been the attending physician at the birth of South Vietnam, Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale, was standing on the steps beneath the portico, saying hello to friends and acquaintances as they passed him on their way into the chapel. He had retired from government service four years earlier. He was a widower and alone because of the death of his wife that spring. “I’m sorry about your wife, Ed,” one man said, shaking his hand. “Thanks,” Lansdale replied with his habitual smile and a throaty voice that was now tired and old.

  It was difficult to imagine that this ordinary-looking man of sixty-four had been the legendary clandestine operative of the Central Intelligence Agency, the man who had guided Ramón Magsaysay, the pro-American Filipino leader, through the campaign that had crushed the Communist Hukbalahap rebels in the Philippines in the early 1950s; that this unstylish man in a light brown business suit had been the famed missionary of American democracy in the Cold War era, the “Colonel Hillandale” of a best-selling novel of the period, The Ugly American. In an ironic play on its title, the novel told how imaginative Americans filled with the ideals of their own Revolution could get Asians to defeat the dark ideology of Communism in the Orient.

  Lansdale had arrived in Saigon eight years before Vann. He had gone there in 1954 after his triumph in the Philippines, when the United States was tentatively but
openly extending its power into Vietnam to replace the French, whose will had been broken by their defeat at Dien Bien Phu. America’s new hope in Saigon, a Catholic mandarin named Ngo Dinh Diem, had faced more enemies than it seemed possible to vanquish. Arrayed against him were rival politicians, pro-French dissidents in the South Vietnamese Army, and two religious sects and a brotherhood of organized criminals. The religious sects and the organized-crime society also had their own private armies. Lansdale had arranged the defeat of them all. He had denied the Vietnamese Communists the chaos that would have permitted them to take over Vietnam south of the 17th Parallel without another war. He had convinced the Eisenhower administration that Diem could govern and that South Vietnam could be built into a nation that would stand with America.

  Waiting just behind Lansdale, a step above him, was Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, the best-known member of the team Lansdale had employed to help him preside over the creation of South Vietnam. Conein was a rough and sentimental man, an adventurer born in Paris and raised in Kansas. He had enlisted in the French Army at the beginning of World War II. After the fall of France and the entry of the United States into the war, he had joined the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner of the CIA. He had first landed in Indochina by parachute in 1945, under the pseudonym Lieutenant Laurent, to conduct raids against the Japanese Imperial Army. He had been of considerable assistance to Lansdale ten years later because of his felicity for what the intelligence trade calls “dirty tricks.” When Lansdale had returned to the United States in 1956, Conein had stayed on in South Vietnam, and in 1963 he had accomplished the act that is one of the highest professional aspirations for a man of Conein’s calling—setting up a successful coup d’état. He had been the liaison agent to the South Vietnamese generals who had been encouraged to overthrow the man whose position Lansdale had taken such pains to consolidate. Ngo Dinh Diem had outlasted his usefulness to the United States in the intervening years. He and his family had been getting in the way of the Kennedy administration’s campaign to suppress the Communist-led rebellion. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had been assassinated in the coup.