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

by Neil Sheehan

  VANN& CAO

  AUGUST, 1962

  “The best US-Vietnamese team for fighting Communists.”

  Had Vann wanted to throw up his hands over Cao, he could not have done so in any case. By the early fall of 1962 he was snared in his “Cao the Tiger” game because of the sheer number of Viet Cong being killed through the level of planning and intelligence he had attained and with the shock effect on the guerrillas of American technology—the helicopters, the M-113 armored personnel carriers, and the fighter-bombers. Vann was, in effect, trapped by his own outward-seeming success. During the first four months after his arrival, as many Viet Cong were reported killed by ground and air action in the 7th Division zone as in the rest of the country combined—4,056, including village and hamlet guerrillas. (The figures were those of the Saigon officers and encompassed the separate, province-level operations by the Civil Guard and the SDC when Americans were often not on the ground to estimate casualties.) Even when Vann subtracted 50 percent for exaggeration, a factor that he and the senior advisors to the other ARVN divisions believed was common to the reporting of enemy casualties throughout South Vietnam, 2,000 dead in four months was a punitive rate of loss for the Viet Cong in the northern Delta. None of the Main Force or Regional battalions had been destroyed—that is, had had so many men killed that there were not enough survivors to reconstitute the unit with time and replacements. A number had been hit so hard that they were incapable of combat for the moment. Indeed, Vann began to hope that if he could somehow maintain the current pace of operations the cumulative impact could still break the striking arm of the Viet Cong despite Cao’s refusal to pay the price of infantry combat. For six straight operations in August and September the guerrillas suffered 100 or more dead. Another operation on the Plain of Reeds on September 18 against a Main Force battalion, this one the 502nd, was a greater success in fact than the July 20 “greatest victory” had been on paper. One company of the 502nd and about 100 provincial guerrillas with it were literally wiped out by the M-113 armored personnel carriers.

  The Viet Cong regulars tried to organize a defense behind the low dikes of a flooded paddy field, but the squat tracked monsters bounded right over the dikes and charged into them, the bullets of the guerrillas ricocheting off the aluminum-alloy armor. The infantry riding inside the carriers stood up in the open hatches and fired over the sides, shooting guerrillas in the water a few yards away. The machine gunners manning the big .50 calibers mounted in front of the top hatches raked down others who insanely attempted to run through the waist-high water and gray muck underneath that sucked at their feet. The Viet Cong who managed to keep their heads amid this terror sought to escape by hiding under the water of the paddies and nearby reed fields, breathing through hollow reeds or by holding only their nostrils at the top of the water. The carrier drivers defeated this ruse by rocking their ten-ton boxes back and forth to make waves, which exposed the guerrillas. The Saigon infantrymen on the M-113s also threw grenades into the water to blast them to the surface. As soon as a Viet Cong was spotted the driver would turn the carrier toward him and run him down, if he did not die first in a storm of bullets before the vehicle could crush him.

  The guerrillas lost 158 killed and 60 captured that day. Vann sent Mary Jane a clipping of the lead front-page article on the Communist debacle in Saigon’s English-language newspaper, the Times of Vietnam. He wrote across the top of the double-decker headline: “Biggest single kill of whole war in Vietnam!” Diem awarded the 7th Division the ARVN fourragére, a braided, multicolored cord worn around the left shoulder as a citation of an entire unit for gallantry. It was copied from a French decoration of the same type which has also been imitated by the U.S. and other western armies. This was the first time the fourragére had been given to a whole ARVN division. Cao was informed that Diem had in mind promoting him to general and elevating him to command of a corps.

  Vann had also become General Harkins’s favorite advisor. The reason was not that Vann’s after-action reports had become optimistic. They continued to be written with the coarse-grained honesty of his July 20 report. Where the ordinary lieutenant colonel might have shaped events positively in the success-oriented atmosphere of the Army, Vann did not polish the rough edges. The recurrent theme of his reports was that he and his advisors were getting no closer to solving the long-term problem of turning the ARVN into an army capable of fighting and winning the war against its guerrilla opponent. Harkins did not seem to be disturbed by the bad-news side of Vann’s reporting. Instead he seemed to focus on the stacks of bodies that Vann was piling up. The general and his staff had decided that in this war of no fronts the essential measure of progress was the number of Viet Cong killed, the “body count” in the jargon of the bureaucracy. “In a war without battle lines, perhaps the best overall index of progress is that of casualties,” the briefing officer at the Saigon headquarters put it in less macabre fashion in his standard orientation lecture for newcomers and visitors.

  Harkins’s press officers encouraged correspondents to visit Vann’s detachment and to cover 7th Division operations. Touring congressmen and generals and civilian officials from the Pentagon were invariably flown down for a briefing by the Vann-Cao team that was shooting record numbers of guerrillas. As part of his strategy, Vann had coached Cao to the point where he was a model briefer who radiated offensive-mindedness from the podium in the War Room of his villa. Vann also had his staff compose colored charts and graphs and produce slides for Cao that were on a par with anything displayed in the Pentagon. While he always gave Cao center stage in these performances, Vann would take the podium to cap them with a short presentation of his own. He had learned the art of briefing while a young major on the U.S. Army Europe headquarters staff in Heidelberg, rehearsing until he had mastered the weaving together of gesture, statistic, and personal anecdote to convey dramatic effect and conviction to his audience. Long after he had left he was remembered at the Heidelberg headquarters as the best briefer who had served there. He invariably impressed his audience in Vietnam. If there was time, which there often was not, Vann would draw the Pentagon general or civilian official aside or take him over to the sitting room on the second floor of the Seminary for a private and different briefing. Otherwise, he left it to Harkins’s headquarters to pass along what he was reporting confidentially. This occasional privilege of privately imparted perspective from Vann did not apply to congressmen and journalists.

  Cao reveled in the acclaim and the prospect of a general’s stars. “I kill fifty Viet Cong today,” he would announce to reporters coming to the command post. He began to learn the public relations game perhaps too well. Whenever a particularly large body count had been achieved, Harkins’s headquarters or the presidential palace would lay on a special flight to make certain that all of the press, including the French correspondents and the Vietnamese from the Saigon newspapers, advertised this evidence of who was winning the war. Horst Faas, a German-born photographer for the Associated Press who was to win the Pulitzer Prize twice during ten years in Vietnam, arrived earlier than the reporters were expected on one occasion. He found Cao reconstructing the battlefield. ARVN soldiers were dragging the cadavers of guerrillas into fighting positions and placing captured weapons in front of them. Cao was striding about giving directions with his swagger stick.

  Several of Vann’s captains were offended after Cao also took to wearing a bush hat around the headquarters tent as the fancy struck him. They thought the hat was a bit much, even for Cao. He would rub his hands together when the fighter-bombers or the armored personnel carriers were running up an excellent score and talk about how he had the guerrillas in a trap.

  But he would never spring the trap. Each time the moment came, he and Vann would have the same clash they had had at the decisive point in the July 20 operation. The reserve troops would be ready, the helicopters would be fueled and waiting, and Cao would refuse to block the guerrillas’ escape. He stopped giving Vann bizarre explanations of t
he sort he had on July 20 that a regimental commander did not want to share the “victory.” Instead Cao began pulling what Ziegler called his “general’s act.” He would listen to Vann for a while, say something about being prudent, listen to Vann a bit more, and then pout and say that he did not want to discuss the subject any further. If Vann continued to press him, he would draw himself up and announce: “You are an advisor. I am the commander. I make the decision.”

  Vann held his temper, but his staff noticed how difficult it was becoming for him to control himself. His face would flush and the normal harshness of his nasal voice would get harsher with the stress. Back at the Seminary afterward he would scream out his frustration, cursing Cao with a profanity that had the fluent vileness of the poor-white Norfolk neighborhood of his youth.

  During one argument he gestured to Faust and the other advisors to walk away to the far side of the command-post tent. He grasped Cao by the arm and led him to the map. The staff watched him jab again and again at the opening through which the guerrillas were running. They could hear him tell Cao in a low voice that tamped down the fury inside him that Cao had to face up to his moral responsibility as an officer and a soldier. He had to bar the gate and wipe out that Viet Cong battalion so that those guerrillas would not live and learn how to fight better another day and come back and kill his people. Vann’s staff waited for Cao to issue the order to load the reserve into the helicopters. Their chief really had his dander up, and surely he was going to prevail this time. Cao did not pull his “general’s act” on this occasion. He simply walked out of the tent. Faust started to wonder if Cao might secretly be a Communist agent.

  John Vann was in such excellent graces with General Harkins because of the casualty toll he was inflicting on the guerrillas that when Maxwell Taylor returned to South Vietnam in September for a brief survey, Vann was one of the officers invited to have lunch with him at Harkins’s residence in Saigon. It had been nearly a year since Taylor’s mission of inquiry in the fall of 1961 had hastened Kennedy’s decision to commit the arms of the United States to this war. Taylor’s purpose on the current trip was to see whether there had been any progress in the intervening year. Vann was chosen to represent the division-level advisors at the luncheon the day after Taylor’s arrival on September 10, 1962. Three other advisors who were more junior, a major and two captains, were also invited. They were all supposed to give Taylor a frank appraisal of the situation as they saw it in the field where the war was being fought.

  Vann was thrilled with this opportunity to state his worries to a man who had the power to influence high policy and set matters right. Kennedy, who had brought Taylor out of retirement in 1961 to be his military advisor, had in July once more demonstrated his confidence in Taylor by naming him to be the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When his turn came to speak, Vann intended to present Taylor with an appraisal as rudely honest as his confidential reports to Harkins. He was disappointed that his reports had not aroused the sense of urgency in Harkins that he had thought they would. Porter had been upset by them, but Porter had also been unable to stir Harkins. The John Vann who had driven down the road to My Tho in May so confident of how he was going to win the war was by September uncertain that he could accomplish what he was expected to achieve within the limitations imposed on him, and he was apprehensive about the future.

  His seeming success tended to buffer him against his worries, but not to eliminate or even diminish them. While he could and did hope that he would destroy the Viet Cong regular and provincial battalions in spite of Cao, it would have been irresponsible of him to count on doing so. The likelihood was that the guerrillas would sooner or later learn not to panic and to fight more intelligently, and when they did the days of easy killing would end. In the meantime he was not accomplishing the minimum tasks he and Porter had agreed on. After an initial show of enthusiasm, Cao was not cooperating in a matter as elementary as training the division’s battalions in marksmanship and infantry tactics. He never allowed any of the battalions to complete the three-week refresher course that Vann had set up at the SDC training center at Tan Hiep, and none of the battalions did anything fit to be called training at their home bases. The “Monthly Critiques” by the advisors were monotonous in reporting that the battalions spent most of their time “resting.” When a battalion did get to Tan Hiep and had been training for a few days, Cao would pull it out, often to pursue a guerrilla band that had overrun an outpost or staged an ambush. Vann was certain Cao knew as well as he did that it was impossible to catch the Viet Cong after such attacks; they planned their withdrawal in advance. Cao would never acknowledge this. Vann suspected Cao sent the battalions chasing long-gone foxes because he wanted to give the presidential palace the impression he was on the alert. Afterward he would order the battalion back to its base to “rest” instead of returning it to the training center. Training his men for combat was not one of Cao’s priorities. He pretended they were already well trained.

  Cao was also thwarting Vann’s effort to foster night patrols and ambushes that would hinder the growth of the insurgency by denying the Viet Cong the freedom of the night. Cao had only acquiesced in night operations in the first place because of Diem’s instruction to get along with the Americans where it cost nothing and because he had wanted to show generosity to his new advisor. Having demonstrated that he was amiable, Cao had become intent on returning to what he considered sanity. He had just finished breakfast one recent morning when his staff had informed him that Vann had been out all night with less than half a squad this time—a five-man patrol. Cao had sent for Vann in a fury and had shouted that unless Vann stopped this madness he, Cao, was going to request another advisor. Didn’t Vann realize that if an American officer as senior as a lieutenant colonel were captured or killed on an adventure like this, President Diem would hold Cao responsible and never forgive him the embarrassment to the government? Cao’s career would be ruined. Diem might even throw him into jail. Vann had said that he was under orders from Porter to provoke night actions and someone had to push the troops. He had reminded Cao that he was not an amateur and had learned in Korea that one was safer at night with a small group than with a large one. Cao had been so angry and fearful that Vann had decided he would have to compromise in order to retain any ability to employ American officers and sergeants as a possible catalyst for night patrols and ambushes. He had let Cao argue him into an agreement that he and the other field-grade officers in the detachment would not go out at night with less than a company. The junior officers and sergeants could continue to go out with small groups. Once Cao had Vann and the senior Americans reined in, he had begun to squeeze. Vann’s junior officers and sergeants were finding it increasingly difficult to round up men willing to accompany them. Cao had passed the word.

  Vann had much more on his mind than training and night patrols and ambushes. He was troubled by the resilience the Viet Cong were demonstrating against the battering he was giving them. He had heard from Drummond that some of the battalions they had decimated were already receiving replacements to start rebuilding. Drummond had also discovered that despite all of the Viet Cong reported killed in the division zone since the beginning of the year, the total number of Main Force and Regional Viet Cong in the five provinces remained unchanged. Those units Vann had not yet caught up with had increased in size and offset the numerical losses in the ones he had crippled. Worse, Drummond had learned that there were a lot more local—that is, village and hamlet—guerrillas in the region than the 10,000 they had originally estimated. He did not yet know how many more existed, but the difference was substantial. This meant that the Communists had a much wider manpower base in the Guerrilla Popular Army from which to replace their casualties in the Main Force and Regionals than Vann had thought at the beginning.

  During the jeep drive from My Tho to Saigon on the morning of September 11,1962, Vann rehearsed, with the intensity he had rehearsed his first briefings for VIPs at U.S. Army Europe headq
uarters in Heidelberg in 1956, how he was going to grasp Taylor’s attention at the luncheon table and keep the conversation focused while he made his points. He was going to be careful not to sound alarmist to Taylor. One did not influence generals by talking like a Cassandra. They concluded that you were unprofessional. Vann could truthfully say to himself that he did not feel alarmist. He was both encouraged and worried, and he intended to convey this balance of hope and apprehension to Taylor. Once Taylor knew the truth, he would tell Kennedy the truth, and once Kennedy understood what was happening in Vietnam, he would exert the necessary pressure on Diem, and Taylor would simultaneously exert it on Harkins, and Vann’s worries would end.

  When he walked up the front steps of the commanding general’s residence a couple of minutes before 12:30 P.M., he was the same spiffy figure in starched cotton khakis, peaked green cap, and glass-shined shoes who had reported to Porter that first day in March. His invitation was handwritten on a card embossed with a general’s flag of four white stars on a field of red. The residence was a white mansion in the best quarter of Saigon, where the French dignitaries had formerly lived. It had an elegantly kept lawn and a circular drive in front. The butler was an American sergeant. The lesser servants were Vietnamese. The mansion and grounds were encircled by a high wall for privacy and security, but there was company to be had not far away at the pool and tennis courts of the Cercle Sportif, the gathering place of Saigon’s foreign community and the Vietnamese upper class.