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

by Neil Sheehan

  Within a week and a half, Vann no longer had to do battle with the flies in Bau Trai’s restaurant. He and Ramsey were invited by the province officials and military officers to join the communal Vietnamese mess. (The officials and officers had organized a mess because the lack of decent housing and the insecurity kept them from bringing their families to Bau Trai.) The inclusion of the Americans meant that the Vietnamese would eat better; Vann and Ramsey could purchase food from the commissary in Saigon. The invitation would not have been extended, however, had the Vietnamese decided they did not like Vann. He was delighted, because mealtimes were an opportunity to settle problems and talk up new programs. Vann also did not anticipate any conflict with the senior American military advisor in the province, a young lieutenant colonel named Lloyd Webb, who knew Vann by reputation and respected his experience.

  Near the end of April, a new province chief arrived—Maj. Nguyen Tri Hanh, a Southern Catholic who had previously been a deputy province chief in the rubber-plantation country. He had been promised a quick promotion to lieutenant colonel to induce him to accept Hau Nghia. He was a husky man of forty-five years with a stolid temperament, and he was a surprise. Hanh was straightforward in manner, appeared honest, and seemed sincerely committed to governing the province well. “I’ll have him in the palm of my hand in thirty days,” Vann predicted to Ramsey.

  Two nights later the Viet Cong reminded Vann that goodwill and hard work would not by themselves suffice to rescue Hau Nghia or to win the war in the rest of South Vietnam. He had understood this, but in the strongly positive mood in which he approached any new task he had not faced up to the implications of what he had been seeing around him. At 2:30 A.M. on April 28, 1965, the guerrillas brought him to fuller awareness. They started firing 81 mm mortar shells into Bau Trai to discourage the artillerymen there from supporting an ARVN Ranger company the Viet Cong were assaulting at that same moment at a hamlet two miles away. Radio contact with the company was lost immediately.

  When Vann drove to the hamlet early in the morning he found the company annihilated—thirty-five Rangers dead, sixteen missing and captured, and eleven wounded survivors left behind by the attackers. The assault force was one of those armed-by-Harkins nightmares Vann had had at 7th Division, elements of a regional guerrilla battalion rich in American machine guns and other automatic and semiautomatic weapons, its heavier recoilless cannons and mortars smuggled in by sea from the North. (The Viet Cong, who had been fortunate to possess a couple of machine guns for a battalion in 1962, now had three in each platoon, the same as in the U.S. Army.)

  The guerrillas had hardly needed to employ their heavy armament. Despite the fact that another Ranger company had been lost at the same hamlet the previous October, the officers and noncoms of this company had not taken the most elementary precautions. No outer listening posts had been organized or trip flares set up, and no foxholes had been dug for a perimeter defense. The company had simply bedded down for the night around a house near the elementary school at one end of the hamlet. The peasants said that the Rangers had been asleep. Vann had already surmised this, because most of the dead wore only undershorts and he counted eleven men who had been shot in the face while they were apparently still lying unawares. Women and children from the hamlet had come with torches as soon as the attack was over, Vann learned, and picked up the weapons of the Rangers for the guerrillas. The women and children had also helped to carry off several wounded guerrillas and two Viet Cong who had been killed by the few Rangers who woke up in time to fight. The Rangers were detested by the population in the vicinity for their abuse. Vann noticed that the guerrillas were careful not to harm any of the other houses in the hamlet with their fire. Only the one house near the school and the school itself were damaged.

  The deterioration on the Saigon side was far beyond anything Vann could have imagined in Denver. Bau Trai was not a dangerous place to live simply because the Viet Cong menaced it. The demoralized Saigon soldiery were a closer peril. Four soldiers from the 25th Division’s M-113 company got drunk and started a rumpus at the town’s restaurant. At midnight the police attempted to quiet them down. The soldiers scattered the cops with a fusillade from Thompson submachine guns and several other weapons they had with them. They then decided it was fun to frighten policemen and higher figures of would-be authority too. For the next three and a half hours, until they got bored and went to sleep, the four soldiers staggered around Bau Trai firing in every direction. They yelled challenges to Hanh, the new province chief; to the major who was his military deputy; and to every other officer in town to come out and try to stop them.

  The USOM bungalow was a mere thirty yards from the restaurant. Ramsey was in Saigon for the evening, but the area police advisor was spending the night with Vann. They lacked the authority to halt the rampage and could only take shelter on the floor and curse whenever a soldier swung a weapon their way. The next morning Vann counted the pockmarks of about twenty bullets on the stucco of the outside walls of the bungalow. He was incredulous that no Saigon officer had taken action to stop four drunks from shooting up a town. At breakfast he did not hide his contempt from Hanh. To Vann’s further amazement, Hanh and his military deputy pretended that nothing had happened. Vann would soon learn that Hanh and his deputy believed there was nothing they could do. The soldiers were in a state of despair. They had lost respect for their officers and would mutiny if anyone tried to discipline them.

  Sandy Faust had wondered at 7th Division if Cao was a Viet Cong agent. The intelligence advisor on the province military advisory staff was absolutely convinced that the commander of the 25th Division in Hau Nghia, Col. Phan Trong Chinh, was a Communist agent. The previous intelligence advisor had reached the same conclusion. It did not seem possible to behave so consistently for the benefit of the enemy out of mere incompetence or cowardice, and Chinh appeared to be a smart man. He had a reputation as an amateur poet. Chinh forbade ambushes at night and in the day too except in “friendly” territory. He not only did everything he could to avoid attacking the guerrillas himself, he went to pains to keep anyone else from doing so. He interfered so frequently with province operations, altering the plans and forcing Hanh to send the troops where there was no enemy, that Hanh too began to suspect that Chinh was working for the other side. When Chinh ordered airburst artillery fire, even the time fuses on the shells would be set to go off high above the ground and vitiate the effect of the shrapnel.

  Chinh, of course, was not a Communist agent, no more than Cao had been, and looking back a decade later, Ramsey decided that Chinh was probably just terrified of the Viet Cong and thought that his troops would be torn apart if they seriously engaged the enemy. Chinh was too cruel to the peasantry, targeting hamlets for air strikes and shelling them with point-detonating ammunition that did blow up houses and blast away people, to have been a genuine Communist sympathizer. In Hau Nghia in 1965, Vann and Ramsey, while not as convinced as the intelligence advisor, also suspected Chinh’s motives. They had a standing joke between them that he must report nightly to Hanoi.

  If Chinh’s purpose was to save the lives of his men, he kept it well hidden. He and his regimental commanders were forever marching columns up and down roads with no troops out on the point and the flanks for security. The result was a monotonous series of slaughters. Between these ambushes and the guerrillas’ night attacks, Chinh was losing an average of a company a month. The Viet Cong had no need to tear his division apart. He was bleeding it to death for them.

  The question of where incompetence and stupidity ended and treachery and sabotage began was a real one. Viet Cong penetration of the Saigon side had always been a major problem, and it became an ever graver one as the fortunes of the regime declined and men and women turned their coats to hedge against the future. The suspicion the subversion bred was even more corrosive. No one trusted anyone. In the village headquarters of Trung Lap north of Bau Trai, where a Ranger training center was located, the village chief, the local milit
ia commander, and the head of the training center all accused each other of being Viet Cong agents. The village chief moved elsewhere in fear for his life after a guerrilla commando squad walked into the place one day disguised in Ranger uniforms and shot seven genuine Rangers.

  It was hardly surprising that the soldiers would despair in this atmosphere. During Vann’s first year in Vietnam, Saigon soldiers had used alcohol sparingly while outside of town and in potential danger. Many now drank heavily at night on bivouac in the countryside. They had also taken to smoking marijuana, another reason they may have continued to sleep soundly after the Viet Cong arrived. Their desperation seemed to aggravate the vicious cycle in which they were caught. It magnified their sense of alienation from their own people. Their predatory habits worsened and they provoked more of the peasantry into conniving with the Viet Cong to kill them, as had happened to the Ranger company. In their hopelessness the soldiers seemed almost to offer themselves up to death to end the suspense. Less than two weeks after the Ranger company died while sleeping at the hamlet two miles from Bau Trai, another company perished in identical fashion while camped at a hamlet four miles south of the town. The habit of falling asleep without security precautions had formerly been confined to militiamen in outposts. It had now become common to almost all of the Saigon forces.

  In these circumstances, the Viet Cong could behave with near impunity. One night a twenty-man commando invaded Cu Chi district town to kidnap or assassinate two members of the district intelligence squad who had been sufficiently conscientious to irritate the guerrillas in the area. The two intelligence men had the unusual good luck to flee their houses as the guerrillas were breaking inside. The annoyed Viet Cong chased their quarry through the town, across rooftops, and down dirt lanes with shouts and shots. The intelligence men eluded them, but the guerrillas did not feel any need to leave. They searched the town for two hours in a vain attempt to find their intended victims. None of the Civil Guards, now called the Regional Forces or RF and referred to derisively by the advisors as “Ruff Puffs,” who were supposed to be protecting Cu Chi, stirred. The district chief was not disturbed by the guerrillas, and he returned the courtesy by doing nothing to help his intelligence men. Nor did any officer appear with a rescue force from the headquarters of a regiment of Chinh’s division less than half a mile away in a rubber plantation on the edge of Cu Chi. Vann and Ramsey later determined that the regimental headquarters had become fully aware of what was occurring.

  On another evening a Viet Cong propaganda troupe decided to entertain the population of a large village center just off the main road to Saigon a few miles west of Cu Chi. The troupe set up its show in the village movie theater right across the street from a school where an ARVN company was bivouacked. The propaganda troupe was armed and had a small escort. The lieutenant in charge of the company ordered his men to attack the guerrillas. They refused. He got in his jeep and drove to Cu Chi to ask the district chief what to do. They discussed the problem for a while and then both of them went out and got drunk.

  After the death of the first Ranger company at the hamlet two miles from Bau Trai, Vann wrote a friend in Denver not to hold out any hope that the bombing of the North would alter events in the South because “regrettably, we are going to lose this war.”

  We’re going to lose because of the moral degeneration in South Vietnam coupled with the excellent discipline of the VC. This country [South Vietnam] has pissed away its opportunities so long it is now force of habit—and apparently nothing is going to change them.

  I’m bitter … not at these ridiculous little Oriental play soldiers—but at our goddam military geniuses and politicians for refusing to admit and act on the obvious—to take over the command of this operation lock, stock, and barrel—but maintaining Vietnamese front men. It is such a hopeless situation that nothing else will work. The little bastard, General Ky, made a speech today demanding that we invade the North and liberate North Vietnam—the goddamn little fool can’t even drive a mile outside of Saigon without an armed convoy and he wants to liberate the North! How damned ridiculous can you get?

  During his first year in Vietnam, Vann had seen the solution to the war primarily in military terms—the destruction of the regular Viet Cong battalions in order to create enough security to gradually pacify the countryside. The means of destruction was an ARVN that would fight. The way to attain such an ARVN was through a junta in Saigon or a strongman who would willingly take American advice or who could be dragooned into accepting American direction by the threat of withholding the military and economic aid that kept South Vietnam alive. In Hau Nghia, Vann was learning that the task facing the United States was a much more complicated and intractable one. He was finding out how parasitic and moribund the Saigon side was, some of the reasons for its condition, and how profoundly Saigon society would have to be changed if it was ever to survive against its Communist opponent.

  The worst of the ills he was encountering, the one from which these other ills of demoralization and indiscipline seemed to rise, was corruption. He had not known before exactly how pervasive it was. He was discovering in Hau Nghia that corruption infected the whole of Saigon society, from Ky and almost all of the other Young Turk generals consolidating their power at the center, to the corps and division commanders, through the province and district chiefs and their administrations, to the village policeman blackmailing a farmer into paying him a bribe not to report the farmer as a Viet Cong suspect.

  The Saigonese form of corruption differed completely in magnitude and nature from the corruption most commonly found in state and local government in the United States. The American variety, while destructive when it grew out of hand, could be a malodorous lubricant for the political machines that got shopping centers and highways and public housing built. Saigonese corruption was incapacitating, a malignancy that poisoned the entire system of government. Graft was the main preoccupation of those on the Saigon side, Vann learned, absorbing more time and thought than any other concern and summoning considerable ingenuity from people who were incompetent at the task they were supposed to perform. At the very time when the Vietnamese on the Saigon side should have been joining together in self-sacrifice and unity to prevent their world from being destroyed, they were hastening its destruction. The greater the peril to their society became, the more viciously they preyed on one another. They seemed to loot with the assumption that they and their families would somehow escape the common disaster at the last moment, or that the Americans would step in and save them. Mostly, Vann observed, their greed was too rapacious to permit any thought of its ultimate consequence.

  Hanh gave Vann some of his first lessons on the subject. As province chief, Hanh was entitled to take his meals in his own quarters. Vann and Ramsey began eating with him, rather than with the other province officials, after his arrival near the end of April. Often Hanh invited one or two of his subordinates to join them. Just as frequently there were only the three of them. Eating at the province chiefs table was a natural thing for the civilian American advisors in a province to do, and it also fit in with Vann’s hope to organize a concerted effort against the Viet Cong in Hau Nghia by managing Hanh. In these early years most American advisors, civilian or military, learned relatively little about the intricacies of corruption in South Vietnam, because they avoided the subject. They knew that corruption was officially regarded as an embarrassment and that reports about it were not welcome at the embassy or at Westmoreland’s headquarters. Their Saigonese counterparts also knew this, and while they gossiped about corruption, they did not press confidences on the Americans. Hanh, an exception within his own system, recognized Vann as an American exception. Vann also presented himself as an American with connections in high places who might be able to change things.

  One of the initial lessons Hanh taught Vann was that losses and desertions and the difficulty of recruitment did not by themselves explain why Saigon’s fighting units were chronically short of men. At Vann�
�s suggestion, Hanh agreed to rotate his Regional Forces troops through a refresher training course. To try to encourage buttressing of the combat units, the Americans had prevailed on the Ministry of Defense to require that a unit meet a minimum strength figure before it could be admitted to a training center. Hanh thought he would have no problem with the first unit he selected because its roster showed approximately 140 men and the training center minimum in this case was about 100. When he mustered the unit he found fifty men. The other ninety names on the roster represented what the Vietnamese called “ghost soldiers” and “potted-tree soldiers.” The “ghosts” were men who had been killed or who had deserted. The “potted trees” were men who paid bribes for false discharge or leave papers so that they could return to their families or civilian jobs, hence the allusion to an ornamental tree safely ensconced in a pot. The unit commanders pocketed the monthly pay and allowances for these phantoms and domesticated greenery, dividing the profit with more senior officers who protected them. Instead of looking for incentives to recruit soldiers, the Saigon officer corps had created a disincentive to keeping its units strong enough to fight.

  Hanh was aware of the practice, of course, but he had expected to net 100 troops out of a roster that listed 140. He had the ARVN major who was his deputy for military affairs investigate to determine how much the other RF units were understrength. The major came back with an unsettling report. It seemed that the RF commander for Hau Nghia “ate too much,” a phrase for a man who was considered greedy even by Saigon standards, and encouraged his subordinates to pad the rolls excessively. Hanh’s deputy then made a suggestion. He proposed that he and Hanh cut themselves in on the rakeoff. Hanh decided he had no one on his staff he could trust. He told Vann and Ramsey the story and asked them to start taking pictures of RF and Popular Forces units they encountered on their travels in the province. (The SDC militia had also been renamed and was now called the Popular Forces or PF.) He intended to compare the photographs with the unit rosters to try to find out how many troops he really did have.