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

by Neil Sheehan

  Toward the end of 1942, halfway through his second year of junior college at Ferrum, Vann decided that he could wait no longer. Some of his classmates had already quit and gone to fight. They felt that the country was in danger and they could not delay. Most young men who had turned the draft age of eighteen, as he had in July 1942, and were not in uniform began to feel ashamed. He had delayed because he wanted to be a fighter pilot, and Hopkins had apparently convinced him that he had a better chance of being selected for flight school if he completed junior college before enlisting.

  To become a paladin of the air was a dream Vann shared with many of his generation. The fabled men of the last war in Europe had been the aviators, and they were the romantic figures of this war too. Vann saw them in the newsreels at the movies: the immortals of the Royal Air Force in their white scarves and sheepskin jackets climbing into their Spitfires to humble the arrogant Luftwaffe. To fly was to fight among the elite. Vann’s fascination with flying also went beyond the reflection of a popular fantasy. Mollie thought it was the same urge that led him to seek the freedom he felt when his body was hurtling through the air in a backflip off a porch roof. When he had earned a dime as a boy he had often chosen not to spend it on food; instead he had bought a model airplane kit of balsa wood. He would carve out the parts and glue them together and carefully follow the directions on how to paint the replica with the original colors and insignia of one of the primitive aircraft in which the pilot heroes of World War I had dueled. His model airplanes had been the sole possession he would not share with Frank Junior and Gene.

  His dream was to become one of those smiling, thumbs-up pilots he also saw in the newsreels revving their engines on the decks of the aircraft carriers to lift into the wind and face the Zeros over the Pacific. When he came home on Christmas vacation in 1942 he was carrying a letter from the president of Ferrum recommending him for the Naval Air Service. He seems to have been disappointed by the response he received at the recruiting office in Norfolk. He returned to Ferrum to finish enough of his course work so that the junior college would make the common exception of the wartime emergency and credit him for the full two years even if he left early to put on a uniform. In March, with his eligibility fortified, he took a train to Richmond and tried the Army Air Corps recruiter there. This time the response was not discouraging. There were too many would-be heros of the air for the Army to make promises, but he was an excellent candidate for flight school if he enlisted. Perhaps to have an excuse for Myrtle, who was afraid he would be killed and was urging him to find a civilian job that would entitle him to a deferment, he allowed himself to be drafted with the proviso that he was entering for the Air Corps.

  Early on the morning of March 10, 1943, he took the train to Richmond again for his physical examination at the induction center there. He was eighteen years and eight months old. The Army record of his physical shows that he stood five feet six and a half inches and weighed 125 pounds. An examining physician recorded his complexion as “ruddy.” He spent several hours in a line with other youths who had likewise stripped to their shorts to be questioned about their childhood ailments and drinking habits; made to read an eye chart; ordered to bend over and poked embarrassingly by a finger in a rubber glove; stuck with a needle for a blood test and type determination (his was A); and given a chest X-ray to see if they had tuberculosis (his test was negative). Then he was allowed to dress again and was led into a large room with the other recruits to take the oath to obey all lawful orders from his superiors. He was given a train ticket back home to Norfolk and mimeographed orders instructing him to report to Camp Lee, Virginia, a week later. The induction station also thoughtfully provided him with a voucher for the train ticket from Norfolk to Camp Lee. He spent his last week of civilian life passing out more sandwiches and cold drinks at Mollie’s canteen and sticking the wet bills under her cigar box. He would need the money he earned. The pay of an Army private in 1943 was fifty dollars a month.

  On arrival at Camp Lee he signed “Johnny Vann” to a statement saying that he was in the same physical condition as when he had enlisted the week before. His youth seems to have ended with his initiation into the way of a soldier. Henceforth he was to sign all statements with a formal “John P. Vann.”

  During his first day at Camp Lee and for four days afterward the Army hit him with the psychological shock of disorientation and beginning anew that facilitates the transformation of boys into fighting men. He was made to shed his civilian clothing, including his underwear, and handed Army khaki and olive green; his head was shaved; he was given another medical examination to verify that he had been telling the truth when he had signed the arrival statement; and he was revaccinated for smallpox and vaccinated for typhoid and tetanus. A sergeant shouted him and his fellow recruits out of the barracks and into formation for frequent roll calls and, with more shouts and curses, marched them in a column to and from meals and wherever else they went. The Army also examined everyone’s mind. He and his comrades took a series of aptitude tests that would supposedly determine how the Army could best utilize their skills. Vann scored 97 on the aptitude test for flight training. A notation was put on his record that he was “Qualified for Aviation Cadet Appointment.” The clerk also noted that he had received the Army’s “Sex Morality Lecture” on the day after his arrival.

  Despite his score on the aptitude test and the original notation the Norfolk induction center had made on his record that he was entering the service for the Air Corps, Vann was a long way from a plane, and he learned what could be in store for him if his wish to fly was not granted. Camp Lee (subsequently Fort Lee) was the chief quartermaster training center for World War II. The assignment section there put him in the Army Service Forces and designated him to spend the war repairing jeeps and trucks. On March 22, 1943, he was shipped by train to the Atlanta Ordnance Depot for basic infantry training and then rudimentary instruction in automotive mechanics.

  He wrote to Ferrum for additional letters of recommendation and submitted a request for flight school. The application and the letters got him a hearing before the officers of the Aviation Cadet Examining Board in Atlanta. The guidance counselor at Ferrum who had made him a teacher’s assistant in the country grade school because she noticed that he liked to lead and teach told the board that she looked forward to “outstanding accomplishments” from Vann. “I expect him to go beyond the ordinary call of duty,” she wrote.

  On June 19, 1943, nearly three months after he arrived in Atlanta, Pvt. John P. Vann of the 3037th Auto. Maint. Co., 139th Auto. Maint. Bn., received a letter from the second lieutenant who was the secretary of the board. “We are pleased to inform you that you have been fully qualified for Air Crew training in the Army Air Corps,” the letter said. It told Vann he would soon be transferred. (The Air Corps was officially renamed the Army Air Forces in 1942 but continued to be referred to popularly and in official correspondence as the Air Corps.)

  “Soon” in the Army meant another month in Atlanta and then two months at an Air Corps processing center in Miami Beach before he obtained what he wanted: orders directing him to the 51st College Training Detachment (Air Crew) at Rochester, New York. The Air Corps had taken over part of the Rochester Business Institute and was using it as a preflight center to instruct cadets in elementary knowledge of aviation prior to more detailed schooling and actual air crew training for those who passed this preliminary course.

  Vann arrived in Rochester on September 18, 1943, and thrived at his course work. His instructors also quickly recognized his leadership ability and appointed him one of the cadet officers in the detachment. That June the administrator at Ferrum had mailed him his junior college diploma and his copy of the yearbook of the Class of 1943, The Beacon. Quotations were printed beside the photographs of each member of the class. The quotation beside the photograph of the smiling boy who had been Johnny Vann at Ferrum read:

  Intelligent, clear-eyed—of such as he,

  Shall Freedom’s yo
ung apostles be.

  They met in Critic’s ice cream parlor on the Sunday before Christmas, 1943. It was around 3:00 in the afternoon. Mary Jane and her girlfriend, Nancy, always went there for a sundae after the matinee at the movies. Being well-bred young women, they sat in a booth for two. He was sitting in the booth opposite with five other Air Corps cadets. She overheard him ask the waitress for apple pie, which Critic’s did not serve but which her mother made well, before he turned and started a conversation with her. He said he had noticed her standing on the sidewalk during a Saturday-afternoon parade the previous weekend when he had been marching at the head of his group of cadets.

  Although she remembered him right away, because she had noticed him too, she didn’t answer at first. She had never replied to a sally from a strange young man before. She was sixteen years old and in the middle of her senior year at West High School. His Virginia twang, which had strength to it and was not unpleasant to her ear, was not the only thing that made him different from any of the boys she had dated at school. His hair, still blondish then, was combed up high on his forehead in a wave that was the fashion of the day. His dark green cadet uniform was attractive with its small silver wings at the jacket lapels and the round wing-and-propeller badge of an aspiring aviator sewn on the lower left sleeve. He smiled and leaned forward as he spoke. She got a feeling that he knew a lot more about women than she did about men. He was what she and her girlfriends would call a “wolf.” Everything she had been told to beware of in a young man, she liked about him. So she broke the rule her mother had sworn her to and answered him by acknowledging that she had been standing on the sidewalk and that she did recognize him now. The rest of the conversation passed from memory over the years, except that he ended it by asking her for a date. She refused. Her mother, she told him, did not permit her to go out with strangers.

  The next afternoon he appeared in the picture-frame section of Sibley’s department store at the corner of Main Street and Clinton, where she was working part time as a sales clerk after school. He used the purchase of a frame for a photograph as a pretext to ask her again for a date. She couldn’t accept, she said, but her mother might let her date him if he came to her house and met her parents. Why didn’t he come for Christmas Eve dinner and bring another cadet for her girlfriend? She saw that smile she liked so much. Where did she live and what time should he come?

  He arrived promptly with a friend and impressed her parents with his politeness and the fact that he answered their questions about his cadet training directly and knowledgeably, not like some nineteen-year-olds they knew. Her mother served him apple pie for dessert. Mary Jane had asked her mother to bake it. After dinner the grown-ups left the two couples to trim the tree, and he flirted with her while they talked and laughed. When it was time for him and his friend to leave he told her mother that it was the best Christmas Eve he had ever had. Her older sister, Doris, offered to drive the two cadets back to the hotel where they were being billeted. He flirted with Mary Jane some more in the car on the way.

  They did not see each other again for well over a year. His preflight course at Rochester had ended, and he had to spend Christmas Day on a train to an Air Corps classification center at Nashville, Tennessee. He telephoned to say goodbye on Christmas morning. He called her “honey” on the phone and said a number of other endearing things. At Nashville he was given a ride in a Piper Cub liaison plane, his first opportunity to fly. He sent her a love letter enclosing a snapshot of himself as the storied figure he hoped to become. He was standing beside the little plane in a sheepskin flight jacket with a parachute strapped on behind, his gloved right hand resting on a wing strut. His cap was cocked to the side of his head and his hair rippled over his forehead. He signed the snapshot as he had the letter: “Love, Johnny.”

  She replied encouragingly, and the romance thrived as the letters and photographs went back and forth in the months that followed. To her he was the impulsive vitality, the excitement, the adventure she had never known in her stable life. To him she was not only physically attractive, she was the world of middle-class respectability and family love and absence of shame that he had dreamed about when he had walked through the prosperous sections of Norfolk on his way to junior high school and looked at the well-groomed houses and thought that life must indeed be wondrous within them.

  Her name was Mary Jane Allen. She had known everything that he had been denied. She had been one of those little girls whom Norman Rockwell idealized in his covers for the Saturday Evening Post. Her father, Justus Smith Allen, was a man of modest but worthy position in Rochester. He was the senior court reporter for the city and corresponding secretary of the Justices and Magistrates Association of Monroe County, New York. His branch of the Allen family were originally Mainers. They claimed ancestry to Ethan Allen of Vermont, who had liberated Fort Ticonderoga during the American Revolution in the name of “the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” Justus Allen (he was called “Jess” by his wife and friends) was a pleasant-looking, even-tempered man, short, slightly stocky, and of firm jaw. He wore a vest with his suits and rimless glasses, parted his hair down the middle, and came home every afternoon at 5:30 to read his newspaper before dinner.

  Mary Jane’s mother was Mary Andrews, the daughter of Solomon and Catherine Eleck, Rumanian immigrants who had assimilated quickly into American life by changing the family name and converting to Pres-byterianism in Gary, West Virginia, a coal town in the southeastern part of the state, where Solomon found work in the mines. He had shifted the family to Detroit when Mary was eleven to take a job on the assembly line at the Ford plant. She had met Jess on a June afternoon at an amusement park on the outskirts of Detroit. She had also been just sixteen when she met her man. Jess had been twenty-seven and a stenographer at General Motors then. They courted a year and married the following June. Perhaps in part because of her immigrant background, Mary Andrews had a passion for upright Protestant ways and the sanctity of marriage and family. She and Jess moved to Rochester the fall after they were married when an opening occurred for a court reporter. Jess had spent much of his youth in the upstate New York city and had a brother living there. He had found a better stenographic position at Ford since meeting Mary, but he disliked punching a time clock in Detroit. He felt that court reporting would be more interesting and secure.

  He was correct on both counts. The human folly of crime and lawsuits is secure from economic collapse, and Jess’s occupation shielded the Allen household from the misery that pained millions of other families across the land after 1929. While Mary Jane was in grammar school and the Depression was at its worst, the family moved upward from a plain house in a suburb of Rochester to a spacious home within the city. The city government was conscientious about repairing the sidewalks and tending the big shade trees that lined Elmdorf Avenue and its neighboring streets. The Aliens’ home, like the others on the avenue, sat back behind a box hedge and a deep lawn. It was a two-story house with white siding on the ground level—the boards precisely joined and neatly painted, none of the slipshod clapboarding of the South—and green shingles on the second story. The front porch was a pleasure to sit on of a day or an evening. Mary Allen had awnings made to shelter it from sun and rain and furnished it with rockers and swings. Jess kept the lawns thriving and planted shrubbery alongside the two-car garage at the back where he parked his Chrysler and stored his gardening tools. There were four bedrooms on the second floor and an enclosed sleeping porch for summer nights. The dining room on the ground floor had bay windows, exposed oak beams, and a chandelier. Jess had the basement converted into a recreation room with a hand-crank victrola and a Ping-Pong table. Although Rochester summers are not particularly hot, the Aliens rented a cottage every July and August on one of the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, Lake Conesus, about an hour’s drive from the city. Mary Allen would go there at the end of June with the children. Jess would drive out for the weekend after Friday’s court session and then spend his summer
vacation at the lake.

  The Aliens were able to give each child a separate bedroom in the house on Elmdorf Avenue and still have a guest room to spare, because they had only two children. Mary Jane, the second daughter, was born on August 11, 1927. She was bright but lacked the intellectual curiosity to be an outstanding student. Her interests were in domestic and traditionally feminine pursuits—dolls and doll houses, sewing, and playing at keeping house.

  As a little girl she was a sugar-and-spice of smiles and curls and bows and fashion-plate dresses. Shirley Temple was the child movie star of the day, and the age was one in which the public admired and imitated movie stars somewhat more naively than it would later. Every little girl wanted to look like Shirley Temple. Those with mothers who had the patience to do the curling wore their hair coiled in the style that Shirley Temple made popular. Not many little girls also had enough of the Shirley Temple charm to go with the curls and be chosen by the Rochester department stores to model Shirley Temple clothes. Mary Jane Allen did. On April 23, 1934, Shirley Temple’s sixth birthday, Mary Jane and eight other mini-models displayed “exact copies of dresses that were made for Shirley herself” at McCurdy’s department store. “The juvenile fashion revue was attended by nearly 500 interested mothers and excited little boys and girls,” the Rochester Times-Union reported. Mary Jane had an appropriately wide-eyed look in the photograph above the story. By Shirley Temple’s seventh birthday, Mary Jane was modeling at B. Forman Company and appeared in the Rochester Journal-American smiling and crinkling up her nose in a way she often did if something amused her. This time she also had an oversized bow pinned into her brunette hair. And when the Westminster Presbyterian Church, where her family attended 11:00 A.M. services and she went to Sunday school, staged a Christmas pageant, it seemed natural to choose Mary Jane Allen to play the part of Mary.