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

by Neil Sheehan

  At 10:00 P.M. the two companies set off in a column for the base camps on the Plain of Reeds. The village and hamlet guerrillas and the peasants from Bac and Tan Thoi who had stayed to help during the fight left by a different route for their separate hideouts in the water palm jungles in the vicinity. The regulars of the 261st Main Force who had held Bac led the way. The men of the weapons platoon marched in the middle of the column, carrying the wounded and the bodies of other dead who had been retrieved for burial. The province guerrillas of the 514th Regionals followed, with one of their platoons forming a rear guard. These men were in friendly country, and they were accustomed to marching at night. The sampans were waiting at the canal by the time the column reached it. The wounded were transferred to the boats. The column continued down the canal to a fording place, waded across, and kept marching until well after daybreak without being detected, reaching the camps safely at 7:00 A.M. They had done more than win a battle. They had achieved a Vietnamese victory in the way of their ancestors. They had overcome the odds.

  Vann paid them a tribute at about the time they were beginning their march to safety from the peasant Muoi’s house. It was fitting that the tribute should come from him. He had been the vehicle of destiny in this battle. Without him, Ba might have delayed long enough to have reached the hamlet after it was too late to fight. In his determination to destroy these men, Vann had goaded the armored personnel carriers to Bac. He had forced the battle to its climactic humiliation of the Saigon side and had consummated the triumph of the Viet Cong.

  With Nicholas Turner, a New Zealander who was the Reuters correspondent in South Vietnam, and Nguyen Ngoc Rao, the Vietnamese reporter for the UPI, I had driven down to Tan Hiep that night to find out what was happening. The news we had received in Saigon of five helicopters lost and an airborne battalion dropped in the midst of a battle, all so extraordinary, had made us decide that we had to get to Tan Hiep despite our fear of being stopped and taken prisoner or killed at one of the roadblocks the guerrillas sometimes set up along the route at night. We had probably taken a greater risk in racing Turner’s little Triumph sedan along the two-lane tarmac at seventy miles an hour.

  Cao was incapable of talking to us. I found him pacing to and fro in front of the command-post tent, running both of his hands back over his hair again and again in a kind of nervous crisis. When I walked up to him and asked a question, he stared at me for a moment and then said something incoherent and turned away.

  One of Vann’s captains located him for us. Vann drew us off into the darkness at the edge of the airstrip, away from the dim light cast out of the headquarters tent by the naked bulbs that hung inside on wires from the generator. He did not want Cao and Dam and the other ARVN officers to see him talking to us. He was frank, but he was still struggling that night to conceal the full measure of his anger from us because of the consequences if we published the worst details of this debacle. He spoke of how the guerrillas had stood and held despite the assault of the armored tracks and all of the pounding and burning from the air and the artillery. He looked out across the darkness toward Bac, as the token artillery fire sounded in the muffled way that artillery always seems to sound on battlefields at night and an occasional star shell from the batteries illuminated the sky despite Cao’s ban on flares.

  “They were brave men,” he said. “They gave a good account of themselves today.”

  BOOK FOUR

  TAKING

  ON THE

  SYSTEM

  HE WAS NOT SUPPOSED to accept defeat. He was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. He might be just an advisor with no authority to command, but this war had become his war emotionally, and emotionally he could not understand why he was being forced to lose it. His pride in himself and his institution and in the majesty of his nation and its preeminence in the world was being trod on more than he could endure. Ap Bac was a decisive battle both for the Vietnamese Revolution in the South and for John Vann. It propelled him down a course toward which he had gradually been moving. He set out to convince Harkins in Saigon, and if Harkins would not listen then to reach over his head and to convince the military and political leadership in Washington, that the only way the United States could avoid being beaten in Vietnam was to drastically change strategy and coerce the Saigon side into accepting direction from him and the other American officers in the field. Harkins was unwittingly preparing a catastrophe for the American enterprise in South Vietnam and for those Vietnamese who had thrown in their lot with the United States. Vann saw the elements of that catastrophe with more clarity than anyone else in Vietnam at the time, and he was determined to do everything he could to prevent it. His undertaking was an ambitious one for a lieutenant colonel. He did not realize how ambitious it was when he began it because he took each step as events confronted him. He was prepared to break the rules the Army had conditioned him to obey in order to change policy and to win his war. The first indication that he was ready to kick over the traces was his abandonment the morning after the battle of any attempt to conceal his anger and the extent of the debacle from reporters he knew.

  Just as the U.S. military presence had not yet escalated by January 1963 to the hundreds of thousands of troops it was to reach after 1965, so the foreign press corps had not yet burgeoned to the hundreds of both sexes and all nationalities—newspaper, television, and radio correspondents, still photographers, television cameramen, sound technicians, and sundry war groupies posing as free lances—who were to descend on Vietnam to cover “the big war.” When the Battle of Ap Bac occurred there were about a dozen resident correspondents in Vietnam, including the French journalists, who were relatively inactive because it was no longer their war. The U.S. expeditionary force had grown to 11,300 by then, but the field advisors numbered only about a quarter of the total, approximately 3,000 officers and men. The dimensions of the war were still such that the reporters and the most important advisors and many of their subordinates could get to know each other.

  The reporters had not needed encouragement from Harkins’s senior public affairs officer, as impressed as his chief was by Vann’s high “body counts,” to cover the 7th Division and its advisory detachment. Reporters follow a story: the story in 1962 and 1963 was the pivotal fighting for the northern half of the Delta. Vann had reinforced a natural relationship. He had welcomed reporters to the Seminary. He liked publicity; it flattered him. At the beginning he also saw publicity as useful in his campaign to turn Cao into the “Tiger of South Vietnam,” always brandishing the clipping of the story to Cao whenever he conned a reporter into writing that Cao was aggressive. The forthright side of his personality, on the other hand, permitted us journalists to see and hear much that did not further this chicanery. He made certain that his staff officers gave us what briefings we wanted and that we got out on operations with his captains and lieutenants. Vann’s subordinates took their cue from him; the junior officers advising the combat units were candid about the flaws in the Saigon forces.

  Once a reporter had demonstrated that he would endure discomfort and expose himself to danger by marching through the paddies and spending nights in the field—that he would take this soldier’s baptism—he was accepted by these amiable and sincere men, and frank discussion followed. On his next trip the exchange was freer. The advisors also noticed, from wire service dispatches printed in Pacific Stars & Stripes, the armed forces newspaper in the Far East, and from clippings mailed by their wives and families, that the reporters protected them by quoting anonymously or otherwise disguising the source when the remark or information was derogatory. By the time of Ap Bac, I and the half dozen other American correspondents had been out on numerous operations with the 7th Division and were friendly with Vann and his men. (Nick Turner of Reuters, and Peter Arnett, a New Zealander who worked for the Associated Press, counted as Americans because they held essentially the same attitude as their American colleagues.) The American reporters shared the advisors’ sense of commitment to this war
. Our ideological prism and cultural biases were in no way different. We regarded the conflict as our war too. We believed in what our government said it was trying to accomplish in Vietnam, and we wanted our country to win this war just as passionately as Vann and his captains did.

  Turner and Rao and I drove back to Saigon after talking to Vann on the night of the battle, cabled our dispatches, and then showered and ate and returned to Tan Hiep in the darkness in order to fly to Bac as soon as the helicopters resumed operations at dawn. Merton Perry, then with Time magazine, a rotund man of 220 pounds whose cheerfulness and energy were as great as his girth, came with us. We arrived shortly after sunrise, in time to watch Cao drive up in a jeep, its olive-green paint waxed to a sheen, from My Tho, where he had spent the night. He had regained some of his composure and was dressed in freshly starched fatigues with the twin stars of his new rank attached in French Army style to the front of his shirt. Dam had called out the division honor guard for the corps commander. The soldiers were drawn up in a line in front of the headquarters tent—white helmets, white web belts, shined brass buckles, and white laces in their black boots. The honor guard came to attention and presented arms as Cao alighted from the jeep. He acknowledged their salute with a wrist snap of his swagger stick and strode into the tent, smiling nervously at us in greeting, clearly still not wanting to talk. Vann pointed out two H-21s that were about to fly to Bac to pick up the dead. Turner and I climbed aboard one while Mert Perry stayed behind to talk to Vann and Rao remained at Tan Hiep to learn what he could from the Vietnamese junior officers.

  The rubble of the houses was still smoking, and the H-21 pilots circled cautiously to the west of the hamlet. They stayed well away from the tree line, landing in a paddy not far from the last canal that Ba’s company had been so slow to cross the day before. Turner and I could see Ba’s M-113s parked over by the tree line. There was no shooting, and we walked along a paddy dike toward the downed helicopters. I counted about twenty dead in the largest group of corpses stacked on top of other dikes. These Vietnamese soldiers lay on their backs, their fatigues bloodied, the toes of their small boots pointing up into the air.

  Scanlon approached with two M-113s to load the bodies and carry them to the helicopters. He said that the guerrillas had withdrawn from the tree line the previous afternoon, but despite the absence of the Viet Cong, the pilots had orders not to land any closer. The infantrymen on Ba’s two carriers were so demoralized they did not want to touch the corpses of their comrades. Scanlon shouted at them and pulled several off the machines to force them to load the bodies. Turner and I helped pick up the dead, including Braman and Deal. At the helicopters Scanlon had the same trouble making the living show their fellow soldiers the decency of returning the bodies to the families for burial. He again had to shout and manhandle Ba’s troops to force them to lift the corpses into the aircraft. By now Turner and I were also angry at their behavior, and we started yelling at them too. We had never seen an American advisor and ARVN soldiers behave like this. We wondered at the dimensions of the debacle that had occurred here.

  Brig. Gen. Robert York, forty-nine years old, from the red-dirt town of Hartselle in the hill country of northern Alabama, who commanded a special detachment the Pentagon had established in Vietnam to experiment with weapons and tactics, landed at Bac in a third helicopter soon after we had finished loading the bodies. York was another member of that Depression generation of Southerners who had initially been attracted to the military academies by the opportunity for a free education and had then discovered that soldiering was a profession that suited them. He had been a boxer at West Point and carried his alert, muscular figure into midlife. York was envied by his contemporaries for one of the finest infantry combat leadership records in the Army. He had led a battalion, originally in the renowned 1st Infantry Division, “the Big Red One,” and then a regiment flawlessly for more than two years from the first testing battles against the Germans in Tunisia through Sicily, Italy, and D-Day in Normandy to the mopping up in the rubble of the Third Reich.

  Of the twelve American generals in Vietnam in January 1963—a third more general officers than the entire Saigon forces had on active service—only York felt an obligation to fly to Bac and personally find out what had happened there. His desire to learn the truth was unusual, and Vann was one of the reasons for it. Since his arrival in Saigon the previous October, York had been using the freedom of his position (Harkins’s headquarters exercised only nominal control over York and his detachment) to roam about the countryside so that he could form his own estimate of how the war was going. Vann had understood the seriousness of York’s purpose and had tried to give him a feeling for the people and the terrain and the particular problems of this conflict, like the outpost system Vann was making no progress in dismantling, by boldly taking York on jeep tours through areas that York had sensed were dangerous. As they talked, York had been struck by Vann’s capacity to become emotionally involved and yet to stand back, to see the Vietnamese on his side objectively and to acknowledge their faults. Vann had not been tempted into the error some advisors had committed of conjuring up success for their Vietnamese because progress by their counterparts would help to advance their own careers. One was fortunate to find a young lieutenant colonel who thought creatively at his own echelon. Vann could think creatively at Harkins’s level.

  York was able to follow Vann’s arguments because a special experience in his career set him apart from his peers. The only American general to fly to Bac was also the only American general in Vietnam with any firsthand knowledge of a Communist-led guerrilla insurgency in Asia. In 1952, York had by chance been assigned for three and a half years as the U.S. Army observer of the British campaign to suppress the guerrilla revolt by the Chinese minority in Malaya. The lessons he had learned there led him to suspect prior to coming to Vietnam that the task of defeating the Viet Cong was going to be a lot more difficult than his fellow generals thought. The British had held a twenty-to-one advantage in police and troops against a guerrilla force that never numbered more than 10,000, including its civilian support apparatus, a fraction of the Viet Cong armed strength and civilian adherents, and they had had the racial antagonism of the Malay majority toward the Chinese in their favor as well. The war had still lasted twelve years.

  There was also a personal reason to bring General York to Bac. He and his relatives had been one of the first American families to be hurt by the war in Vietnam. In July 1962, three months after his arrival, a nephew he regarded with pride and affection, Capt. Donald York, one of Ziegler’s classmates at West Point, who had volunteered to advise a paratroop battalion, had been killed in an ambush on Route 13 where the road ran through an old Viet Minh redoubt in the rubber-plantation country just north of Saigon. When York heard the news of Ap Bac late the previous day, he had made up his mind to fly to the scene at the first opportunity in the morning.

  York and Turner and I, and York’s aide, Lt. Willard Golding, found only three bodies while walking down the foxhole line and then through the hamlet. In the irrigation ditch behind the main dike, half sunken from a rocket hit, was one of the hollowed-log sampans the guerrillas had used to evacuate the wounded and to replenish their ammunition. Standing among the foxholes on top of the dike, we could appreciate for the first time the football-field view the Viet Cong had held of the rice fields to the front where the helicopters had landed. The whole position had been so perfectly chosen and prepared that Scanlon was later to remark that it was the Fort Benning “school solution” of how an outnumbered infantry unit ought to organize a defense. We noticed that despite the stress of retreating under air and artillery bombardment, the Viet Cong had practiced their usual frugality by collecting most of the brass shell cases to reload with new powder and bullets in the base camps.

  I had acquired enough experience by this time to know what the evidence meant, but a reporter is supposed to have an authority draw judgments for him. York was a handy authority, and so I asked
him how he thought the guerrillas had fared. “What the hell’s it look like?” he said, a bit exasperated by the silliness of the question. “They got away—that’s what happened.”

  Turner, York, Lieutenant Golding, and I thought for a while that we were not going to be as lucky as the guerrillas. Cao, who claimed to have killed the same Viet Cong general several times over, always forgetting that he had made the boast before, almost bagged a genuine American general, his aide, and two reporters. The four of us were standing on a paddy dike near the downed helicopters watching a fresh battalion of 7th Division infantry who had arrived that morning march into the hamlet. Turner and I had been at Bac for over four hours. We knew that this was the biggest story we had ever encountered in Vietnam. We were eager to get a fuller explanation of the battle from Vann and his staff at Tan Hiep and then drive back to Saigon to file another dispatch and tell the world what we had learned. York had consented to give us a ride to the airstrip in his helicopter, which was scheduled to return soon. A howitzer sounded from the south, and a smoke shell threw up a shower of mud on our side of Bac a short distance inside the tree line, where a column of infantry from the new battalion had just disappeared into the foliage.

  “Hey, that’s pretty damned close,” Golding shouted. As he shouted, two howitzers boomed. The high-explosive shells rushed through the air toward us with that unnerving, fast-train-in-the-night hustle; they crashed beside another column of infantry walking toward the hamlet on a dike about seventy-five yards away. The concussion and flying shrapnel knocked several soldiers off the dike, and the rest tumbled into the paddy yelling with fear.