by Neil Sheehan
Lyndon Johnson might have lost his credibility; his general was still believed. The president called Westmoreland home for a major speech and a round of press conferences and television appearances. Acheson and several of the other Wise Men had suggested that he bring Bunker home. In Johnson’s line of work one learned the public relations value of stars and a uniform. Barry Zorthian, a shrewd publicist who headed the USIA operations in South Vietnam and who less shrewdly believed at the moment that Westmoreland was right about the war, had also been pressing for some time for a morale-fortifying expedition by the general on the home front. He had been struck by Westmoreland’s talent for publicity and by his credibility with Congress and the public during the general’s trip to Washington for the troop discussions at the end of April. Johnson had had Westmoreland address a joint session of Congress then. The speech had been a great success, and Westmoreland had provided the perfect finale. He had come to attention, turned around, and saluted the presiding officers, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Speaker of the House John McCormack, and then turned front again and saluted the assembled legislators on both sides of the aisle. They had still been applauding as he left the chamber.
Zorthian was also certain that Westmoreland would welcome a platform in the United States for a reason of his own. He had detected in the general an ambition that the Army was too small to satisfy. Westmoreland was not scheming with any political faction, nor was he doing anything else that was improper. He was simply allowing himself to be put in position so that later, should he choose to do so, he might take advantage of the American tradition that had begun with George Washington and most recently sent Dwight Eisenhower to the White House. Johnson did bring Bunker home in November to appear jointly with Westmoreland on NBC’s Sunday-morning television interview program, Meet the Press. He also summoned Komer back to promote the cause in private background sessions with the Washington press corps and in appearances of his own. The president put Westmoreland at the center of the stage.
“We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view,” the general said in his speech at the National Press Club in Washington on November 21, 1967. The beginning of the end was the start of “Phase III,” his victory phase, which would accelerate to all-out thrust with the onset of 1968. He gave the country a summary of the Saigon briefings, explaining again how he had built his ports and airfields, achieved the crossover point by raising the enemy’s “losses above his input capacity,” and harried the Viet Cong regulars and the NVA to the frontiers of South Vietnam. He did not place a specific time frame on his victory phase as he had in 1965 in telling McNamara and Johnson it would take “a year to a year and a half.” He conveyed that impression by saying that “we have already entered parts of Phase III” and by hastening forward to a new phase that had not existed in his 1965 plan, “Phase IV—the final phase,” the mopping up of the Vietnamese Communists. “That period will see the conclusion of our plan to weaken the enemy and strengthen our friends until we become progressively superfluous.” (In answer to a question afterward that was reported and televised along with the speech, the general said “it is conceivable to me that within two years or less” Phase IV would have advanced sufficiently to begin withdrawing American troops, “at the outset … token, but hopefully progressive, and certainly we are preparing our plans to make it progressive.”) Westmoreland concluded by exhorting his fellow Americans to have faith in him:
We are making progress. We know you want an honorable and early transition to the fourth and last phase.
So do your sons and so do I.
It lies within our grasp—the enemy’s hopes are bankrupt. With your support we will give you a success that will impact not only on South Vietnam, but on every emerging nation in the world.
Vann left Saigon on November 14, 1967, for the longest leave he had ever taken—nearly eight weeks. His discouragement had become so severe that for the first time in Vietnam he had been finding his work a burden. He could distract himself from his frustration during the day by staying out in the field. At night it closed in on him as he confronted the papermill in his office in Bien Hoa. Vann tolerated paperwork well when he thought the effort was furthering his cause. Now the task seemed without purpose, and the burden had increased manyfold with the new CORDS organization and his added responsibilities.
The paperwork had grown to the point where it was interfering with his sex life, which irritated him the more. Lt. Col. David Farnham, a former reservist who had become disenchanted with academic life at Boston University and abandoned his pursuit of a doctorate in philosophy to volunteer for active duty, was the executive secretary of the Bien Hoa headquarters in 1967. He would stack the paperwork on Vann’s desk in three piles of descending priority, Absolutely Critical, Critical, and Necessary (which could be postponed for a few nights and invariably was), and would watch the anger build in Vann as he became more and more intolerant of what duty was requiring him to do. By 10:30 or 11:00 P.M. Vann would look at his watch again and say that he couldn’t bear one more letter, one more memo, one more form. If he didn’t have Lee waiting for him at the Bien Hoa house, he would announce that he was leaving for Saigon or for the house in Gia Dinh where he was keeping Annie. Farnham would remonstrate to no avail that the Viet Cong were going to get curious about who drove a blue Ford Mustang late down the Bien Hoa Highway four to five nights a week or that Vann was going to get himself shot by the nervous and trigger-happy troopers of a U.S. armored cavalry regiment who were forced to patrol the road in the darkness in tanks and M-113s. Annie never knew which night he would arrive. Some weeks he appeared twice, others three times, waking her at midnight or at 1:00 A.M., on occasion at 4:00 A.M.
He flew from Saigon to Europe, ostensibly to brief the embassy staff in Rome and Paris on the war and actually to spend several days on the Riviera and in Paris with Lee, who had preceded him to France for a holiday. Then he flew on to Washington. Komer let him stay there for a couple of days while Komer was in town with Westmoreland and Bunker and could keep Vann under at least a modicum of surveillance. Vann managed just the same to give a few closed briefings at AID and at the Pentagon and the State Department for insiders like Holbrooke, briefings that contradicted what Westmoreland and Bunker and Komer were saying. He went to Littleton for Thanksgiving with Mary Jane and the children and tried to arrange an audience with the president through Palmer Hoyt, the editor and publisher of the Denver Post.
Vann got as far as Walt Rostow’s office in the White House basement. The meeting began at 2:00 P.M. on December 8,1967. Rostow is a warm and enthusiastic man. He welcomed Vann and sat down next to him on the office couch. Ambassador William Leonhart, Rostow’s assistant, and George Christian, the president’s press secretary, were also there. Vann had decided on a dilute-the-vinegar approach. He started out by listing the positive aspects he could think of, like the organizational accomplishments of CORDS. Rostow smiled. He slapped Vann on the knee. “That’s great!” he said. Vann gradually shifted to the unpleasantries. Rostow left the couch, sat down behind his desk, and riffled the papers on the desktop. He interrupted Vann. Didn’t Vann agree, despite these flaws he claimed to see, that the United States would be over the worst of the war in six months?
Restraint deserted Vann. “Oh hell no, Mr. Rostow,” he said. “I’m a born optimist. I think we can hold out longer than that.”
Rostow remarked that a man with Vann’s attitude should not be working for the U.S. government in Vietnam. It was close to 2:30 P.M. Rostow had another appointment.
Vann’s Vietnamese daughter was born the day after Christmas while he was once more in Littleton with Mary Jane and his American family. The baby was not supposed to arrive until shortly after his return to Vietnam in early January, but Annie slipped on the stairs of the Gia Dinh house and the mishap brought on labor. Her maternal grandmother had recently moved into the house to watch over her. They took a taxi to her parents’ home in Saigon, and her parents then drove
her to the Clinique St. Paul, a small lying-in hospital run by an order of French nuns. Her obstetrician, an elderly French doctor, delivered the child at 11:30 on the morning of December 26, 1967. To keep the bargain with Vann, the space for the name of the father was left blank on the child’s birth certificate. Annie alluded to him in the Vietnamese name she decided to give the baby on the certificate, Thuy Van, a name she also chose because it is that of the daughter who leads a happy life in the famous Vietnamese narrative poem The Tale of Kieu. The allusion was more direct in the informal European name she gave the little girl, the name by which his daughter was always to be called. Vann had left Annie an address in Littleton to which she could send letters. He said it was the address of an uncle, that he didn’t live at home during his visits because of the legal separation he claimed to have from Mary Jane. The address was the home of a former secretary at Martin Marietta with whom he remained friendly. Annie’s father cabled the news to him there. Mary Jane was another woman in Vann’s life who was for the moment none the wiser.
He got back to Bien Hoa on January 7, 1968, after a stopover in Santa Monica to see Dan Ellsberg, and found Fred Weyand a worried corps commander. Westmoreland’s 1968 campaign plan was based on the assumption that the Viet Cong and the NVA were no longer capable of sustained attacks within the interior of South Vietnam. The central provinces of III Corps were scheduled to be turned over to the ARVN by July 1. The 1968 campaign was to get under way with a series of assaults, starting with a spectacular parachute drop into the wilds of northeastern Phuoc Long Province in the upper corner of the corps area no miles above Saigon, a region sufficiently remote so that the Viet Cong had been marching Ramsey to it when he had been caught in the horror of the interim camp. If Weyand positioned his troops for this and other planned border operations, he would have most of his forty-three infantry and armor battalions (they included the 4,500-man Australian task force with its small New Zealand contingent and a separate battalion of Thais) in the rain forests out along the Cambodian frontier by the Tet or Lunar New Year holiday at the end of January.
Weyand did not share Westmoreland’s view of the war. His disinclination to join in the contentment of the high command was due in considerable measure to the influence of Vann, which Weyand was the first to acknowledge. Like Vann, Weyand did not see a crippled enemy, nearly half of whose battalions were “not combat-effective.” The 600-to-700-man knockout battalions the Viet Cong had fielded at their zenith in 1965 had been ground down over two years of resisting the Americans and were struggling to maintain a day-to-day strength of 400 to 500 men. Westmoreland’s policy of driving the peasantry into urban slums and refugee camps to “deprive the enemy of the population” had also shrunk the guerrillas’ recruiting base in the South. One of the three Communist divisions in the corps was a regular NVA division, the 7th. The other two divisions, the 5th and the 9th Viet Cong, were about half filled with North Vietnamese replacements. The mix of Northerners and Southerners was working, however; a roll call of 400 to 500 men was respectable for fighting battalions, and what was impressive was that the Communists were able to sustain this strength despite high casualties and the high desertion rate brought on by the danger and hardship of the war against the Americans.
The Communist leadership had also greatly enhanced the firepower of all of the Viet Cong battalions, not just the regulars. One after another during the summer and fall of 1967 the twenty-nine regional or provincial battalions in III Corps, now called “local force” battalions by U.S. intelligence, had marched over to the sanctuaries in Cambodia, where weapons shipped in Chinese freighters through Sihanoukville had been cached. They turned in their semiautomatic M-1 Garands and other captured American arms and were reequipped and trained in the use of fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles, B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launchers (an antitank weapon that served equally as a hand-held cannon with lots of blast and penetration), and the rest of the Soviet-designed infantry arsenal employed by the NVA.
A further complaint of Weyand’s was that Westmoreland’s intelligence officers were not paying enough attention to the threat posed by the genuine local guerrillas in the district companies, village platoons, and hamlet squads. He did a study on his own and discovered when he added up all of those in III Corps that they constituted the equivalent in rifle strength of roughly another forty battalions.
Weyand had been opposed to Westmoreland’s campaign plan since the previous fall. “It’s a great plan but it won’t work,” he told the MACV colonel who came out from Pentagon East to brief him on the latest version around the time Vann was going on leave. His particular worry by Vann’s return, which he described to Vann right away, was that while he was under orders to move out to the Cambodian border, the enemy was apparently moving into the interior of South Vietnam. The intelligence indicated firmly that the three divisions, and the three separate Main Force Viet Cong regiments in III Corps, were shifting out of their bases near or across the frontier and infiltrating down into the populated provinces closer to Saigon. Weyand was fearful that as soon as he stripped the interior provinces of American troops, the Communist regulars would team up with the local force battalions and the true local guerrillas and lay waste the cadre teams working in the hamlets, the newly trained RF and PF units, and the other pacification projects in which he and Vann had invested so much effort.
He was thinking of going to Saigon to see Westmoreland. Vann urged him to do so. Weyand started with Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland’s deputy, as that seemed the most prudent approach. Abrams listened, said that Weyand had a good argument, and took him into Westmoreland’s office. Weyand laid out his intelligence once more for the commanding general and summed up at the map. “I can see these guys moving inward. They’re not staying in their base areas,” he said. His hand was up along the Cambodian border. “We’re going to be in the base areas and they’re going to be down here somewhere.” He pointed to the Saigon-Bien Hoa area. “I don’t know what they’ve got in mind, but there’s an attack coming.” Weyand wanted to postpone the opening of the whole 1968 campaign plan in III Corps.
Westmoreland tended to be ad hoc in the latitude he gave local commanders. Weyand had amassed a lot of evidence, and he was asking Westmoreland to postpone, not to cancel. Westmoreland agreed. He thought he had a bigger worry of his own at the moment. The Vietnamese Communists seemed to be attempting to achieve a second Dien Bien Phu at Khe Sanh.
Hanoi was moving two infantry divisions, each bristling with a regiment of artillery, roughly 20,000 men in all, into the ridges around the airstrip in the Khe Sanh Valley and the hill positions above it that the Marines had clung to after the ghastly struggle for them in April and May of 1967. The 325C Division, two of whose regiments had fought the Marines for the hills, was coming back. The other division, the 304th, an original regular formation of the Viet Minh, had Dien Bien Phu emblazoned on one of its battle streamers. The opinion of the Marine generals as to the wisdom of possessing Khe Sanh had not changed since Lowell English, the assistant commander of the 3rd Marine Division in 1966, had observed: “When you’re at Khe Sanh, you’re not really anywhere.” Robert Cushman, Jr., who had succeeded Walt, and his subordinate commanders had kept their peace and done Westmoreland’s bidding. Krulak, still in Hawaii as Commanding General Fleet Marine Force Pacific, and less able than ever to influence events, was vitriolic, hiding his scorn only from newsmen. (Lyndon Johnson had just denied him the commandancy of the Marine Corps. The rancor he had aroused against himself by his opposition to Westmoreland’s strategy had been one of the contributing factors.) In December, as the scud clouds and fog and crachin rain of the northeast monsoon shrouded Khe Sanh and the enemy activity around it quickened, Cushman had reinforced the caretaker battalion and a regimental headquarters garrisoning the base with a second Marine battalion.
The anticipated confrontation was both nerve-racking and welcome to Westmoreland. It held out promise of fulfillment on a grand scale of the scheme he had presented
to Krulak during their argument at Chu Lai in the fall of 1966 when Westmoreland had first decided to cast Marines as bait at Khe Sanh. He had also never ceased to be convinced, and had said publicly a number of times that at some point in the war Hanoi would try to stage a second Dien Bien Phu. Hanoi’s ambition was Westmoreland’s opportunity; he would achieve a Dien Bien Phu in reverse. He would bury Hanoi’s divisions under a cascade of bombs and shells. Five days before Weyand came to see him in January he issued instructions for the initial phase, the silent phase, of his plan, code-named Niagara after the famous honeymooners’ waterfall on the Canadian-American border where John Vann and Mary Jane had gone on their wedding trip. No intelligence means—ground reconnaissance teams, aerial photography, airborne infrared and side-looking radar, communications and signal intercept, electronic sensors sown from aircraft along likely approach routes—was to be spared to pinpoint the NVA troops and their heavy weapons enveloping Khe Sanh.
Westmoreland did not intend to rely solely on planes and artillery for this climactic battle. As January lengthened and the forays from the base encountered more and more resistance from the NVA closing in and Cushman strengthened the garrison with a third Marine battalion, Westmoreland ordered the entire Air Cav division to shift from the Central Coast to northern I Corps. With the Air Cav he could reinforce rapidly and massively at Khe Sanh should the need arise. He instructed his staff to organize a new higher headquarters for I Corps. It was to be called the MACV Forward Command Post and would outrank Cushman’s III MAF. Creighton Abrams was to be put in charge of it. Westmoreland wanted to tighten his control over the Marines and the additional Army forces, besides the Air Cav, that he planned to send north as soon as he could. He had a further worry. He feared that the Vietnamese Communists would couple an assault on Khe Sanh with a conventional-style invasion across the DMZ to try to seize most of the two northernmost provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien in order to set up an NLF regime in a “liberated zone.” By the end of January he had concentrated in I Corps, if one counted the Marines, 40 percent of all the infantry and armor battalions he had in South Vietnam.