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

by Neil Sheehan

  Cao theoretically took his orders from the brigadier general who was Porter’s counterpart at the corps headquarters in Saigon. In practice, Cao reported directly to Diem and ignored or appealed to the president any orders that did not suit him. “He is my king,” Cao would say when he spoke of his devotion to Diem. Cao’s king was a wily man who had rigged numerous fail-safe devices. While Cao was a trusted officer, unlike the brigadier general, who had no direct control over the troops in the three divisions that composed his corps, Cao too was not beyond question from another officer of nominally lower rank. The major who was the province chief in My Tho simultaneously commanded the armored regiment attached to the division. Diem had made the appointment just in case Cao might acquire strange ideas or fail Diem and his family for some other reason. Tanks could be president keepers or president killers. The major was from one of the landowning families of the Mekong Delta who had allied themselves with the Ngo Dinhs. He was a distant cousin but close associate of another division commander who had come to Diem’s rescue with troops in 1960 and had displayed his own loyalty by joining his relative in the crisis. Like the rest of the province chiefs, the major in My Tho also reported directly to the president, supposedly in his capacity as civil governor of the province.

  In the summer of 1962, Vann felt confident that the flaws in Cao, to the extent he could then perceive them, and related problems like this deliberate muddling of authority, would not prevent him from turning Cao into an aggressive military leader. He believed that if he made Cao appear to be a tiger often enough Cao’s vanity would force him to play the part, even if he was a pussy cat.

  Through June and into July, whenever the division killed a score or two of guerrillas in an operation, Vann would flatter Cao by telling him what a fine commander he was. He would praise Cao in the same way to me and the other reporters who came down to cover these engagements while Cao stood by listening and smiling. (I had arrived in South Vietnam as a freshman foreign correspondent in April 1962, about a month after Vann, to serve as Saigon bureau chief for the UPI. The Kennedy administration had lifted its prohibition against newsmen riding along on helicopter assaults and accompanying the advisors on operations in late May, just as Vann reached My Tho.) Nothing Vann said in public ever betrayed his game. Instead, after dinner in the Seminary mess hall the night before an operation he would give the assembled correspondents a pep talk on “emphasizing the positive” in our stories in order to encourage our ally. “Sandy” Faust, the outgoing major who was Vann’s chief of staff, and Ziegler and the other officers at the command post were amused when they watched Vann work on Cao during an operation. To try to get Cao to direct the action the way he wanted, Vann would resort to little devices such as: “I know what you’re going to do next because you’re that kind of a commander.” Before Cao had a chance to ask what Vann meant, Vann would pretend that he had heard Cao ask and describe the move. Often Cao would smile and say, yes, that was exactly what he had in mind, and issue the order. If Cao did not like the proposal, he would smile just as cheerfully and tell Vann that he had a better idea. Vann did not approve of all of Cao’s ideas, but he took care never to contradict Cao in front of the American or Vietnamese staffs. Later in private he would explain his objections.

  Cao’s attitude gave every evidence that Vann’s puppeteering was having the desired effect. He strutted a bit more and his manner became more pompous, but he also clearly saw advancement of his career in the hero image that Vann was projecting of him and in the fact that his division was killing Viet Cong on a scale that none of the other divisions was attaining. Vann told Ziegler he was sure that his handling of Cao would pay off soon in the first “big kill” of the series of hammer blows with which he intended to smash the guerrillas. At the rate they were harrying the Viet Cong, the guerrillas were going to make a truly serious mistake one of these days while attempting to escape a helicopter assault. When that moment came he was going to kill or capture an entire battalion of Viet Cong or its equivalent in separate companies that had banded together to train or fight.

  He saw the possibility of such a victory in an unorthodox attack that his innovative mind had conceived in June and that he gradually stiffened Cao’s nerve to launch in the latter half of July. He intended to show the guerrillas that the darkness did not belong entirely to them. He would stage the first night helicopter assault of the war to rouse the Viet Cong from their sleep in the twilight just before dawn.

  Vann was doubly encouraged about this operation because Cao had become sufficiently confident of his advice to take risks that Cao would ordinarily not have accepted. When Vann had initially proposed the idea at the beginning of July, Cao, whose favorite admonition was “We must be prudent,” had gone along with the concept but had insisted on an alternative to the target Vann wanted. Prevost had flown Vann out to inspect Cao’s alternative. It turned out to be a couple of thatched huts where a squad of local guerrillas might assemble on occasion. Vann had to look at several other bunches of huts, or rice paddies next to large outposts, before he had cajoled and challenged enough in private to batten down Cao’s fear that the landing force would suffer serious casualties. Cao’s timidity was greater than usual because the sites Vann had selected for the predawn landing and a sequence of daylight landings to follow were all beyond the range of artillery. The troops would be dependent on fighter-bombers for support. Vann’s expectations went up several more degrees after he finally pushed Cao to this unprecedented level of risk-taking.

  He was hoping to catch and this time annihilate the 504th Main Force Battalion, one of the two regular units that had been hurt in the first operation that Ziegler had planned on May 23. A group of guerrillas from the 504th who had survived the terror of that day had offered at the end of May to surrender in return for amnesty. Diem did not grant amnesty to Communists and their followers, and their offer had not been answered. Drummond had tracked the battalion to a far section of the Plain of Reeds. There were indications that elements of the second regular battalion that had been cut up on May 23 might be with the 504th. The troops of the 504th and this second battalion were mainly engaged in refitting and training, according to Drummond’s information, but one company from the 504th was reported to be harboring with the sympathetic inhabitants of several hamlets at the confluence of two small rivers about nine miles from the Cambodian border. They were preparing to stage out of these hamlets some night soon and attack an outpost that protected a large agricultural settlement of Catholic refugees from North Vietnam. Drummond thought it likely that a second company of regulars or provincial guerrillas was in the vicinity of these hamlets to reinforce the first for the planned attack and that there was a good chance of discovering other units from either battalion during the follow-up landings in daytime.

  Vann selected the river junction for the predawn landing because the report of the company there was the freshest and most detailed intelligence Drummond had and because the Y where the two streams joined should be easy for the pilots to distinguish from the air in the dim light. To verify his judgment, Vann did the final reconnaissance in a helicopter with Drummond, instructing the pilots to make two passes at 1,500 feet and to fly off and circle for ten minutes in between so that the guerrillas would think the aircraft was on some routine mission and not realize they were under surveillance. Drummond crouched in the open door and held his Leica camera steady against the wind to get sharp pictures of the target while Vann questioned the pilots as to whether the river junction would stand out enough for an aviator in predawn conditions. They thought it would.

  Binh was friendly with the owner of a photography shop in My Tho. He arranged for Drummond’s film to be developed and printed in eight-by-ten-inch photographs. These were distributed to the pilots and to the leader of the landing task force and his company commanders to help them recognize their objective. A sequence of five other landings was planned after this first predawn one. The subsequent landings would initially try to snare any guerri
llas who fled north up the larger stream that the two smaller ones formed and then probe at suspect spots along a canal that ran west from the river junction to Cambodia. Cao would have his command post in a hangar beside the dirt airstrip at Moc Hoa, a huddle of shoddy wooden and thatched houses around a church, a pagoda, and a province chiefs house about forty miles northwest of My Tho. Vann would hold three more companies in reserve there.

  He and Cao agreed that as soon as they flushed guerrillas they would drop the reserves in front of the Viet Cong and wipe them out. They would have nearly thirty helicopters to give them ideal flexibility with all of the troops at their disposal in the open terrain of reed fields and swamps. Some of the landings were certain to prove fruitless. These task forces could then be converted into more reserves for the helicopters to pick up and shift to wherever they were needed to trap fleeing guerrillas. They would use the newer Marine H-34 Choctaws for the first landing, because the H-34S had instruments for night flying.

  At 5:00 A.M. on the morning of July 20, 1962, sixteen Marine helicopters circled in the darkness and descended one behind the other toward an airfield outlined by dots of flame below. Vann’s advisors had placed pails of sand soaked with oil around the edges of the field and set them afire. The airfield was southeast of the target on a direct flight line from the World War II Japanese fighter airstrip at Soc Trang in the lower Delta where the Marine squadron was based. Two companies of troops, one the experimental company armed with the fast-firing Armalites, had been assembled there a day and a half before. The soldiers were ready. The advisors had reorganized them into three assault groups and lined them up at intervals down the runway in squads of a dozen men for each helicopter. As soon as the pilots leading the three flight groups had conferred with the advisors, the engines cranked again and the gold-and-blue flames of the exhaust speckled the darkness once more.

  Curling up their arms to shield their faces from the dirt and pebbles whirled into the air by the blast from the rotor blades, the diminutive Vietnamese infantrymen climbed into the big machines. The interiors were faintly lit by the instrument panels and the amber of the cabin lights. The soldiers sat on the floors and reached out with one hand to grab hold of each other or of the nylon webbing attached to the cabin walls. With the other hand they tried to keep their rifles from falling back and bashing them in the face as the pilots turned the engines up to full power. The cabins reverberated with a noise that made the teeth vibrate in the jaw. The helicopters shook and swayed, and then tilted forward and lifted off one by one in a string formation, the outside navigation lights blinking through the night.

  The Vietnamese soldiers were afraid. One could see the fear on their faces. Vann’s captains were excited by the anticipation of action. Their thoughts were those of Vann and the other Americans in Vietnam in that first year: they were fighting now and someday they would triumph and make this a better country.

  Forty-five minutes later the flight leaders spotted the Y-shaped sheen of water that cut through the deeper blackness of the trees around the houses along the banks. The aircraft plummeted toward the three designated sites at the river junction, the pilots shutting off the outside navigation lights in order not to help any Viet Cong gunners who might be awake. The Saigon officers and the American captains shouted above the racket of the engine, and the troops pulled themselves to their feet and faced the open door. The wheels of the helicopters splashed into the flooded rice paddies just beyond the trees at 6:03 A.M., fifteen minutes before dawn, and nearly 200 men leaped out into the knee-high water and muck and began sloshing toward the houses. As the Marine aviators lifted off and turned back east toward the field at Moc Hoa fifteen miles away to refuel and join thirteen Army H-21 Flying Bananas from Tan Son Nhut for the subsequent landings, a twin-engine C-47 transport that Prevost had arranged for arrived overhead and the crew chief tossed out a parachute flare that consumed what was left of the darkness in the glare of an artificial sun.

  Vann seemed out of luck. The hamlets contained only women, children, and old men. In the backseat of an Army L-19, where he spent the early part of the morning searching for guerrillas and talking to his advisors over the radio, Vann cursed that the first night helicopter assault of the war, executed with such finesse by the Marines, should come to naught. The company of the 504th Main Force Battalion that Drummond had thought was at the river junction had pulled out the day before. A separate platoon of provincial guerrillas who were in one of the hamlets managed to get away to the north up the larger river into which the two smaller streams flowed because the Army helicopters were half an hour late coming from Saigon and so threw off schedule the landing of the Ranger company that was supposed to sever this escape route. Vann then flew back to Moc Hoa to try to resolve an unforeseen problem in refueling the aircraft. He was unable to do anything, and the next assault was delayed by nearly two and a half hours. It too proved to be an empty target. Vann began to wince at the embarrassment of turning up a large zero.

  The fourth landing was designed to search the vicinity of two hamlets seven and a half miles farther up the canal that ran west from the river junction to Cambodia. Vann had selected these two hamlets on the assumption that the Viet Cong might have established base camps near them because of the convenience of the canal for transport. Employing all twenty-nine helicopters, he simultaneously dropped two task forces north of the hamlets at 9:50 A.M. The troops ran right into an estimated 150 guerrillas. Vann had remained at the command post for this lift. The radio reports that some of the Viet Cong were firing automatic weapons and that many were dressed in khaki uniforms indicated that they were almost certainly regulars. Drummond’s information had been essentially correct after all. Vann had made up for its lack of precision by letting terrain suggest to him where guerrillas might be located and by using Ziegler’s probe technique to test his hunch.

  The Viet Cong had seen the illuminating flares during the predawn assault and had watched the helicopters make the subsequent daylight landings. They had assumed that the net would not spread far enough to touch them and that they were safe staying where they were instead of breaking down into small groups and disappearing across the border into Cambodia, only four and a half miles away in a northerly direction and just a couple of miles farther west along the canal. They compounded this first mistake with one of war’s unforgiving errors. They ran to the killing ground that their enemy had prepared for them.

  In attacking this close to the border, Vann knew that he would be tempting any guerrillas who might be in or near the hamlets to run for Cambodia. The Viet Cong had dug foxholes, and expertly camouflaged them, in the higher ground of trails that cut through clumps of woods and brush where the troops had landed just above the hamlets. Instead of taking advantage of these fortifications to try to defend themselves until night gave them an opportunity to escape, they panicked after a few moments of shooting, as Vann had thought they would, abandoned the cover of brush and trees, and fled in disorder toward the hope of sanctuary.

  Five minutes after this fourth landing, a VNAF observer pilot in an L-19 spotted a mob of about 100 Viet Cong start the rush across the open fields of reeds, flooded at midpoint in the monsoon season. The reeds were two to six feet tall. The soft ground underneath was covered with one to three feet of water. Some of the guerrillas were foolishly attempting to wade through the reeds, while others were poling small sampans that held half a dozen men. The observer asked permission to call in the fighter-bombers. It was the moment for which Vann had been waiting since May. He advised Cao to let the planes go to work until they could refuel the helicopters again and drop the first reserve task force ahead of the guerrillas to start the process of encircling and annihilating them. Cao was never averse to an air strike. He issued the order.

  The observer, known as a FAC after the acronym for forward air controller, radioed the planes on station overhead and then banked his wisp of an aircraft to sweep over the guerrillas and mark them by tossing down a white smoke grenade. I
t was hardly necessary. The pilots, Vietnamese trained in France or the United States and “Farm Gate” Americans from the air commando squadron at Bien Hoa, could easily see the sampans and the bunches of tiny figures pushing in a frenzy through the reeds. The sun was high in the sky now and had burned away the ground fog that might earlier have given some concealment to the movements of these fear-crazed men. The sun’s rays glinted off the silver fuselages when the pilots dove.

  The bullets from the .50 caliber machine guns and 20mm cannons churned the water in the strafing runs. The rockets exploded on the sampans, breaking them apart. The shiny aluminum canisters of napalm tumbled end over end and burst on the reed fields, engulfing a group of guerrillas in a great orange flower. From the air the scene had beauty to it. In the cool clarity of the midmorning sky there was no consciousness of the sweat and terror in the heat below. Instead there was the sensation of grace as the planes responded to the controls and the intoxication of omnipotence in the power of these weapons. The pilots had rarely had such good shooting. The radio frequencies of this hybrid air force were alight with a mixture of Vietnamese, French, and English as they talked excitedly with each other and the observer directing their runs. Their propeller-driven AD-6 Skyraiders and converted T-28 Trojan trainers were better than jets for this work, because the pilots could dive more slowly and see better to strafe and rocket. With the wind rushing past the cockpit canopy in the descent, the fuselage shuddering from the recoil of the guns, and the whoosh of the rockets darting out from under the wings, the drama was like one of those World War II movies when the Army Air Corps gave the Germans and the Japs what they deserved. The little figures jumped out of the sampans as the bullets raced up the water toward them, wild to get away. Out in the open like this, escape was pure chance, a chance that was often missed. Soon moving figures lay still and bodies floated among the reeds. Vann’s advisors later counted more than forty dead here. The Saigon troops also blasted away at the panicked guerrillas with their rifles and automatic weapons, cutting down some, but the advisors afterward concluded that the planes had done the biggest portion of the killing.