by Neil Sheehan
Jacobson had first come to Vietnam in 1954 as a lieutenant colonel on Iron Mike O’Daniel’s staff. He returned as a colonel in the 1960s, and by 1962 headed the organization and training division of the MAAG under General Timmes. He had been profoundly admiring of Vann’s performance at 7th Division and had attempted to persuade a friend, Maj. Gen. William Yarborough, then commander of the Army’s Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, to have Vann assigned there on his return to the United States. Jacobson’s initiative might have kept Vann in the Army had it succeeded. In 1965, Jake had decided that he was sufficiently committed to the war himself to go into the pacification business and had arranged a transfer to AID on detail from the Army. He was officially Vann’s immediate superior as a deputy director of field operations and unofficially Vann’s chief protector at AID’s Saigon headquarters.
The relationship was again one of ease, because it was complementary, Vann being Jacobson’s touchstone with reality in the countryside. There was also a personal reason that the two men got along sharing a house. Jacobson was moderate in his womanizing, not compulsive like Vann, but he regarded the pursuit of the opposite sex as the best of hobbies. Ellsberg had no roommate in the house he had been assigned next door. His rank (his Civil Service rating had been converted to the highest rank in the Foreign Service Reserve, FSR-1, when he went to Vietnam) entitled him to a house of his own. He gave Vann a key and free run of the place. Vann found Ellsberg’s house especially useful when he had an assignation at some hour that might inconvenience Jacobson.
Prior to 1965 the presence of American wives and children had enforced convention among middle- and upper-ranking U.S. officials. The benefit of life in a poor Asian country with an uncommon number of attractive women had been reserved for enlisted men and younger officers and civilians. Some men with responsible positions had, of course, still indulged in hanky-panky. To protect their careers they had to be discreet, as Vann had been in 1962 and 1963 by taking his pleasure in Saigon or at the beach resort of Vung Tau (Cap St. Jacques) on the occasional weekend he could fly there. When the families had been evacuated at the beginning of 1965 to “clear the decks,” in Dean Rusk’s phrase, for the bombing of the North, convention departed with them. American men in South Vietnam became sexually privileged males. One well-known civilian kept his mistress at his villa and brought her to official social functions where the diplomatic corps and the wives of high-ranking Vietnamese were present. Disapproval of his conduct was mixed with envy. His Vietnamese paramour was a young woman of remarkable beauty. After his assignment ended and he returned to the United States and his wife, she slept her way higher up the ladder of U.S. authority until she found a lover powerful enough to arrange an escape to Paris when it was time for him to leave as well.
Claiming that a mistress was a housekeeper, however, or bringing a woman to one’s quarters in the evening, or carrying on after hours with the Vietnamese secretaries from the office (the women had no choice but to submit if they wished to retain their jobs), was considered perfectly normal. The custom became acceptable even for men who had their wives and children living in the “safe havens” of Bangkok and the Philippines in order to visit their families monthly. (Vann preferred the excuse the war offered to hold Mary Jane and her brood at the safer distance of Colorado.) Men who worked hard were entitled to relaxation. As Ellsworth Bunker, an upright man who was fond of salacious jokes, put it: “There’s a lot of plain and fancy screwing going on around here, but I suppose it’s all in the interest of the war effort.”
In this atmosphere Vann could indulge his proclivity with an abandon that would have been impossible in the United States or on any normal foreign assignment without destroying himself professionally. Ellsberg was not alone among Vann’s friends in noticing that when Vann was in Saigon he often made love to two or three different young women a day. This repeated sexual jousting that would have exhausted most men seemed to invigorate Vann. After his last assignation in the evening he would settle down to the night’s work of reading reports and writing memos, concentrating well and writing quickly into the early hours of the morning.
In addition to these innumerable casual romps, Vann formed enduring liaisons with two Vietnamese women and managed, with considerable agility, to keep each woman ignorant of the other for most of the years to come. He spotted Lee, the nickname he gave his first mistress, on a Friday afternoon in November 1965 about three weeks after he left Hau Nghia. She was standing on the sidewalk in front of her family’s house on a main thoroughfare in Saigon, waiting to hail a cab for the afternoon and evening teaching sessions of an English-language school she had started. He was on his way to the new 1st Infantry Division command post at Di An just north of the city. He stopped his car about ten yards from where she was standing and got out to scrape a piece of gum off the sole of one of his shoes. (He had just stuck it on, one of his many tricks.) He was then genuinely surprised, after he offered her a ride and she accepted, to discover that she spoke fluent English. He had thought she was a student. She was dressed simply and wore her long black hair down over her shoulders. She was five days short of twenty-one at the time, about two years older than his daughter, Patricia. He was forty-one. During the short drive to her school he asked if she would like to have dinner with him on Sunday night. She saw the wedding ring on his hand. She said yes anyway. They would have to meet in front of the school, she said, because her family would object to her dating an American and the neighbors would talk. They set the time for 7:30. Vann kept his weekend trip to a province with Ellsberg short so as not to be late.
The wedding ring was gone when he met her Sunday evening. He was wearing only the Rutgers class ring that he never took off. She was not to see the wedding ring again. Over dinner and dancing at a fashionable nightclub she asked how many children he had. None, he said, his wife had never been able to have any. He said that he and his wife had separated four years ago and he was looking for someone to fall in love with and marry. She asked his age. He said he was thirty-six. Her twenty-first birthday was that Wednesday, and she intended to take the day off to celebrate. He said he would take the day off. They went to a swimming pool near a billet for American officers in Cholon. She wore a bikini. When he saw her figure he said that until that moment he had not realized how truly lucky he had been to meet her. After dinner that evening they made love in his bedroom in the house he shared with George Jacobson.
Lee’s family was one that had prospered in French Cochinchina. Her grandfather had been a finance minister in the Bao Dai years and again under Diem and had headed the National Bank for a while. Her father had served in the Süreté Genérale before 1954 and had then taken a position at the bank. He and her mother kept their French citizenship and passports. At her father’s suggestion she had studied English as her second language for half a dozen years at the French schools in Saigon where she had been educated. She had also taken the courses USIS offered through the Vietnamese-American Association. (She learned to speak a Frenchified Vietnamese at home and later had to teach herself how to read and write the language of her people.) Her father had wanted her to go to Saigon University or to France to study pharmacy or medicine, but while Lee was intelligent, she was not intellectual, and she was tired of books. She wanted some financial independence and was enterprising. The teaching of English was becoming a major industry. It seemed as if every young man who could avoid conscription into the ARVN and every young woman who could pay the tuition wanted to learn enough English to get a job with the Americans. When Lee met Vann she had about fifty full-time students at her small school and was earning an excellent living.
Although Lee was a pleasant-looking woman, she did not have one of those slim Vietnamese figures that turned American heads. She was buxom for a Vietnamese, with a rounded figure not unlike Mary Jane’s when she and Vann had met at Critic’s ice cream parlor. Vann had an eye for women who were, as Lee said in the American slang she quickly learned, “well padded.” She was also a ph
ysical challenge to him. He told Dan Ellsberg that no matter how many times he made love to her of an evening, she was always prepared for more. Her command of English, her intelligence, and her feisty personality made her a good companion as well.
Their trysts grew into a full-fledged affair after Vann was appointed AID’s manager of the new program to train specialized teams of Vietnamese pacification workers near the end of 1965. The job required Vann to divide his time between Saigon and the training camp for the teams at Vung Tau, and on many days when he was at the camp, he flew back to Saigon in the evening. He would pick Lee up at her school after she had taught her last class. The two would have a late supper at his house (he and Jacobson kept a cook) and then make love before he drove her home and returned to tackle his paperwork. On weekends he would treat her to dinner at a French or Chinese restaurant or to dancing at a nightclub, and on an occasional Sunday they would drive to Vung Tau to sun and swim. Vann had an ARVN engineer captain he became friendly with forge a set of French license plates for his car, and Lee was not alarmed by grenades on the seat. She had been ready for an affair with an exciting American, hoping to maneuver the affair into marriage, because she had made up her mind in her teens that she did not want to marry a Vietnamese. She felt that with too few exceptions, Vietnamese men tended to treat their wives crudely and to victimize them. Her father had confirmed her impression. He had taken a second wife and split his spare time between her mother’s household and a house he maintained for the other woman. Lee did not intend to share her mother’s fate.
She began to suspect after a while that Vann might be cheating on her. On days when he was in Saigon he often picked her up early so that they could make love at the end of the afternoon. He would drive her back to the school afterward for her evening teaching session. He sometimes showered and put on dress slacks and a fresh white shirt and tie before he did. A shirt and tie were acceptable wear for a dinner date at a Saigon restaurant, because even if the restaurant was air-conditioned, a jacket became oppressive as soon as one went outside. About a month after they first made love, he had also put a wrinkle in the initial impression he gave her that he was unencumbered by confessing to the existence of his children. She had been slightly upset as well to discover through her inevitable questions that she was so close in age to Patricia. He then acknowledged being a bit older than he had first told her. He wanted her so much, he said, that he couldn’t stop himself from lying. She forgave him the lie about the children and the trimming of his age. He had assured her again that he and Mary Jane were separated and that he was going to ask for a divorce as soon as he went on his next home leave. Whenever she now showed suspicion that he was putting on a shirt and tie to date someone else, he fobbed her off by telling her that he had an important meeting for which he had to dress up.
Lee’s suspicion was correct. In the spring of 1966 Vann was starting an affair with the young woman who was to become his second Vietnamese mistress and eventually the mother of his child. He brought to his avocation the same resourcefulness he did to his vocation. The Good Samaritan who happened to be driving by on a rainy night and offered a ride, the nonchalant American who stopped on a sunny afternoon to scrape a piece of gum off the sole of his shoe, also scouted places where Vietnamese girls regularly gathered. One such place was the Vietnamese-American Association when English classes were being held. He found “Annie” there right after the evening session on Saturday, April 2, 1966.
She was a romantically inclined seventeen-year-old with a problem that was not unusual for a girl of her age. She was acquainted with a lot of boys in Dalat, where she had just finished her junior year at the Lycée Yersin, but none of them had ever shown any romantic interest in her. She had yet to go out on her first date. She was back home in Saigon for the annual three-month vacation and had decided to take advantage of her spare time to improve her rudimentary English.
Vann had a practiced eye for loneliness. He walked over to her and said that she was pretty and complimented her on her clothes. He said he had come to the VAA to see an Army captain who was a friend and one of the volunteer English instructors. (The captain did teach there, and the pretense of visiting him was another of Vann’s ploys.) Vann said that he wished he had a friend like her to teach him Vietnamese. (Vann was unable to learn foreign languages with any proficiency, because he was tone-deaf. He had dropped out of an AID course in Vietnamese for this reason.) She smiled and said she wished she had an American friend so that she could practice her English. She accepted his offer of a ride home.
In the car she too heard the Vietnam variation of the infallible line that the weeping German girl had recited to Mary Jane in Heidelberg a decade earlier. There was a whit more truth in the separated-from-wife and seeking-new-woman-to-love-and-marry yarn he told Annie than in the one he had given Lee. He no longer felt it necessary to lie about his children. He asked her for a date. She declined, saying that she was too busy at the moment. “Okay, I’ll wait,” he said. After her next class at the VAA, she found him waiting to drive her home. She gave him her phone number. He called several times and cajoled until she accepted his invitation to dinner at a good French restaurant near the Saigon River. She remembered him as “an ideal man, very kind, very tender, very gentle, and always very patient.” After dinner he drove her to his house and asked her to come in and see where he lived. Not this time, she said.
He was surprised when, a number of French and fancy Chinese restaurants later, she did let him take her to bed. He used Ellsberg’s house for the occasion, as Jacobson apparently had visitors that evening. He assumed, because of the ease with which she had let him pick her up on the first night at the VAA, that she had some experience and was being coy. She was a virgin.
She went back to the lycée at Dalat in July, but she couldn’t study. She was too preoccupied with Vann. She wrote him ardent letters, and he responded. To her surprise, he even flew up to Dalat to see her one weekend. Her parents first learned that something was wrong when her grades, which had been fair, fell drastically. She came home in September for the funeral of a grandmother and refused to return to Dalat. She announced that she was going to find a job in Saigon. Her father, a well-educated man, was devastated. She was his first child, and he was ambitious for her. Hers was also a family of means, Chinese on the father’s side, Vietnamese on the mother’s. Vann called her by a diminutive of the French first name she had informally acquired at the lycée, where the teachers made the students choose French names for roll call. Her father had studied business and economics in France and in Britain. He had lived abroad for twelve years, mostly in France, before returning after World War II and serving as an economics advisor in the Bao Dai regime. Later he had gone into the export-import and insurance businesses in a modest way. She had passed the first part of the baccalaureate examination shortly after her junior year in Dalat. Her father had planned to send her to Paris to study medicine or chemistry as soon as she had completed senior year and succeeded at the second part.
Vann encouraged her to quit school and stay in Saigon. Everything he said and did reinforced her conviction that he fully returned her love. She was a contrast to Lee in many ways. Her figure was shapely, but slim. While loving, she was not aggressive. Nor was she the bantering companion that Lee was. She was never to develop Lee’s command of the English language. Annie was a softly restrained young woman, cheerful in a quiet way. Lee appealed to Vann because she was an adventure each time he bedded her and was one of those rare women to whom he could talk. For a man like Vann, however, there would always be an element of threat in a relationship with a woman like Lee. He wanted Annie precisely because of her contrasting qualities.
When the sudden change in Annie alerted her father to what was happening, he had Vann investigated and learned that he was a womanizer with a wife and family. He waited for Vann and Annie to return to her house one evening. As Vann got out of the car, her father walked over and slapped Vann across the face. “What’s wrong
with you?” Annie’s father shouted. “Don’t you have any sense of responsibility? Don’t you know you can be sued for seducing a teenager?” Vann made no attempt to defend himself physically. He said that he wanted to explain. “There’s nothing to explain,” Annie’s father said. “You stay away from my daughter!” He slapped Annie across the face and ordered her into the house.
Vann behaved as he never would have dared in the United States. He kept seeing Annie and making love to her. He avoided getting his face slapped again by dropping her off a block from the house. Whenever he called to set up a rendezvous and Annie’s father happened to pick up the phone, he would curse at Vann—to no avail. Annie’s father was too ashamed to take the only practical recourse open to him of complaining to Lodge. He tried reasoning with his daughter. He explained to Annie that Vann had no intention of marrying her and was too old for her in any case. Vann was just taking advantage of her gullibility. She was destroying her future, depriving herself of both a career and a chance someday to have a decent husband and family.
Reason had no effect. The father turned to physical measures. Their house, like those of other upper-class Saigonese, was surrounded by a wall. Annie’s father locked the gate and took away her key to force her to stay home at night. She climbed over the wall. Vann would be waiting outside to lift her down to the street. The tryst had been arranged earlier by phone or note. In his rage and despair, Annie’s father started to beat her when she came back. As soon as she could arrange another tryst with Vann, she would climb over the wall again and return to take her beating. Her apparent submissiveness masked a headstrong nature, and at this stage of her life she was a spoiled young woman accustomed to having her way. Above all, she was transfixed by her reverie of romance. She saw Vann’s defiance of her father as further evidence of his devotion.
After Vann returned from his mid-1966 home leave, he told Lee that he had tried to persuade Mary Jane to grant him a divorce so that they could marry, but she was unwilling and had set prohibitive conditions. He would have to beggar himself with huge alimony and child-support payments. Lee said she would wait, that Mary Jane might later change her mind. The conversation with Mary Jane had not taken place. Had Vann asked her for a divorce during the first few years after his return to Vietnam, she would have refused, but he had decided not to ask. Maintaining the form of an American marriage and family was as important as ever to Vann’s self-image of respectability, and he thought the appearance enhanced his AID personnel record. Mary Jane had become equally important to him as the perfect excuse. An indissoluble marriage in America facilitated sexual freedom in Vietnam.