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

by Neil Sheehan

  An NVA lieutenant showed up outside the barbed wire around the Khe Sanh airstrip perimeter early on the afternoon of January 20, carrying an AK-47 in one hand and a white flag in the other. He said that he commanded an antiaircraft machine gun company and wanted to defect because he had been passed over for promotion. He was cooperative with the Marine interrogators, describing an elaborate plan for the seizure of the base. It was to commence that night with the capture of two key hill outposts that were to be used as mortar and recoilless cannon positions to support further diversionary attacks on the airfield perimeter. The main assault, by a full regiment of the 304th Division, was to come during Tet, when the U.S. and Saigon side had scheduled a thirty-six-hour cease-fire and the Communists had proclaimed seven days of no shooting for the entire holiday period.

  The events of the night of January 20 and the next day seemed to corroborate the lieutenant’s information. Not long after midnight the better part of an NVA battalion struck one of the hill outposts and was repulsed after penetrating a section of the defenses. No attack materialized against the second hill the lieutenant had named, but the assault force could have been broken up by a preemptive artillery barrage. Then, at 5:30 in the morning, the NVA artillerymen announced their arrival. All manner of artillery pieces, rockets, and mortars opened fire on the airstrip and the principal Marine positions in the valley. Hundreds of 122mm rockets streaked into the air from the slopes of Hill 881 North, the one hill mass bought so dearly in the spring that the Marines had judged too far forward to defend. The biggest ammunition dump at the base was set off by some of the first NVA shells. The repeated explosions shook the Marines’ bunkers with mini-earthquakes, threatening to collapse them, and scattered burning mortar and artillery shells all over the place, many of which in turn blew up on impact and created further havoc. Another NVA shell hit a cache of sensitive material—tear gas. Clouds of the stuff drifted through the airstrip, dosing Marines who had laid aside their gas masks.

  Westmoreland turned loose Niagara. Every three hours around the clock, six B-52S from the Strategic Air Command bases in Guam and Thailand obliterated a “box” with 162 tons of bombs. In between, a fighter-bomber struck on the average of nearly every five minutes. Flights of Marine, Navy, and Air Force jets were stacked up as high as 36,000 feet over Khe Sanh awaiting their turn. Forty-six Marine howitzers in sandbagged revetments around the airstrip and the Army 175mm cannon at Camp Carroll and the Rockpile contributed no small flow to the cascade. The Marine artillery was to fire almost 159,000 rounds. Westmoreland airlifted in more Marine infantry and a battalion of ARVN Rangers to show the flag for the Saigon side until he had 6,680 men in the fortifications at the airstrip and the outposts on the hills. The Marines demonstrated their confidence in their Vietnamese ally by placing the Rangers in front of a line of Marines who would be shooting Rangers and NVA if the Rangers did not hold. And as always, nothing silenced the NVA artillery and rockets and mortars, and nothing stopped NVA machine gunners from shooting up transport planes landing in the valley and helicopters trying to resupply the hill outposts and evacuate wounded Marines. The weather is so bad at Khe Sanh at the height of the rainy season that on a good day one is fortunate to get 500 feet of ceiling for a few hours. Despite the massive intelligence-collection effort, most of the time the planes were bombing grid coordinates where someone merely suspected the enemy to be and the artillery was firing blind in the same way.

  Where the commanding general places his standard, the newsmen focus and the nation follows. The images in the newspaper and magazine photographs and on the television evening news programs were the begrimed and haggard faces of Marines in peril. The staunchness of the Marines in these miserable circumstances (another 205 were to die in this second battle in the far northwest corner of South Vietnam) could not relieve the sadness of Khe Sanh nor dispel the public’s anxiety for an American garrison besieged in such a forlorn place.

  The anxiety was shared by a man who was supposedly better informed than ordinary Americans. Lyndon Johnson had a sand-table model of Khe Sanh built and placed in the Situation Room in the White House basement so that Walt Rostow could describe the course of the battle to him. He made Earle Wheeler give him a memorandum from the Joint Chiefs explaining how Khe Sanh could be defended successfully.

  Fred Weyand and John Vann were too concerned with the threat in III Corps to be preoccupied with Khe Sanh. The closer the calendar got to the Tet holiday at the end of January, the more Weyand got the feeling that “something was coming that was going to be pretty goddam bad and it wasn’t going to be up on the Laotian border somewhere, it was going to be right in our backyard.” The Viet Cong attacked all over the corps in the first three weeks of the month. They overran Bau Trai when the province chief denuded the place of ARVN troops one day during an operation, and on the night of January 19 they raided the Chieu Hoi (Open Arms) Center for defectors in Bien Hoa.

  Vann wrote to York that the Communists seemed to be “making a maximum effort to try and go into the Tet cease-fire with an appearance of military strength.” The guerrillas then contradicted Vann’s theory. Their attacks dwindled. Yet the intelligence picture grew steadily more ominous. The trackers in the sky of Vann’s advisory year at 7th Division—the technicians of the 3rd Radio Research Unit who had eavesdropped on the Viet Cong radio operators from their single-engine Otter aircraft—had become the large and sophisticated communications-intercept establishment the U.S. Army fielded. The radio direction-finding analysis told Weyand and Vann that the three Communist divisions were arraying themselves in an arc to the north and northwest of Saigon and Bien Hoa. Two regiments of the 5th Viet Cong Division were about seven miles away, “pointing in like a dagger,” as Vann put it, toward Bien Hoa. Gleanings from the intercepts of the radio traffic and agent reports indicated a big assault on Bien Hoa Air Base, which was, along with Tan Son Nhut, one of the two major air complexes necessary for the support of both III and IV Corps.

  Attacks on Weyand’s headquarters and on a nearby prisoner-of-war camp to liberate the Communist POWs there were also apparently being planned. Weyand sent for Rome Plows, bulldozers with pointed and sharpened blades that had been brought to Vietnam to employ as forest killers in the guerrilla base zones, and stripped away all of the vegetation around his headquarters. The POW camp was in the middle of a former rubber plantation across the Bien Hoa Highway about half a mile away. He had the plows slice down and remove all of the rubber trees too. To be able to react at night with speed and mass, Weyand put his armored cavalry squadrons on full alert.

  The thirty-six-hour cease-fire declared by the United States and the Saigon side began at 6:00 P.M. on January 29, Tet Eve, except in the two northernmost provinces, where Westmoreland had it canceled out of fear for Khe Sanh. George Jacobson, who continued to serve as mission coordinator, gave a party that evening on the lawn of the house where he was currently living. It was behind the new U.S. Embassy a few blocks down wide Thong Nhat Boulevard from the garish Independence Palace that Diem had begun and in which Thieu now resided. Vann went to the party and took Lee with him. The new seat of American power was a rectangular six-story fortress that had been completed in September. The embassy building was encased on all four sides by a concrete shield against bomb blast and rocket and shell fire and was set well back from the street behind the lower protective wall of a guarded compound. The house to which Jake had managed to get himself assigned was a pre-World War II French one that had been incorporated into the back of the compound.

  Vann was struck by what a bizarre contrast the party was to the atmosphere at Weyand’s headquarters less than twenty miles away. The latest intelligence Weyand had was that the attacks would come on the night of January 30 to 31. The officers in his Tactical Operations Center had formed a betting pool as to precisely when the Viet Cong would strike. The bettor had a choice of fifteen-minute intervals beginning with darkness on the 30th. All of the money was being laid on intervals between midnight and 5:00
A.M.

  Jake had hired a band, and Bunker was among the guests, along with a goodly representation of others who counted in the American and Vietnamese establishment in Saigon. In the midst of the evening a twenty-three-foot string of Chinese firecrackers, hanging from a tree, was lit off to drive away the evil spirits for the New Year. The firecrackers were a present from Nguyen Van Loc, the prime minister of the cabinet Thieu had formed since his election as president in September. Ky, who had been elected vice-president, was a ram waiting to be dehorned. With 492,900 American servicemen in the country, the regime felt secure enough to authorize the traditional firecrackers at Tet, a custom that had been forbidden for a number of years to prevent the Viet Cong from using the firecrackers as a cover for gunfire. Vann talked to the ambassador and discovered that Bunker had not heard about the anticipated assaults at Bien Hoa and Long Binh. Westmoreland’s headquarters, which was kept informed, had apparently not bothered to pass on the information. Nothing that Vann told the ambassador seemed to alarm him. Vann interpreted his serenity as a reflection of Bunker’s assumption that Westmoreland had the war in hand.

  Weyand moved the usual 5:00 P.M. briefing up to 3:00 the next afternoon, January 30, the first day of Tet, in order to clear for action. He was plying his old trade of intelligence officer and said the assaults against Bien Hoa Air Base and his headquarters and the POW compound would probably come at 3:00 A.M. on the 31st. A report from Westmoreland’s headquarters raised the tension. It said that installations in Da Nang, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, Ban Me Thuot, Kontum, and Pleiku had been hit during the predawn and on the morning of the 30th.

  Despite these attacks and all of the intelligence, Vann found it hard to believe that the Viet Cong would engage in major combat during the first couple of days of Tet. Although there had been violations in the past, the cease-fires had always been honored in the main long enough to permit a decent celebration. He let caution guide him just the same. He had David Farnham, the executive secretary of his headquarters, dispatch a teletype message to the CORDS teams in every province capital in the corps warning of the intelligence indicators and ordering “maximum alert posture … especially during hours of darkness, throughout the Tet period.” When Farnham said that encoding the message would delay it several hours, Vann replied: “Send it in the clear.” He was not going to let the tension interfere with his own Tet, and he assumed that the Viet Cong would do nothing until their favorite wee hours. He drove the Ford Mustang into Saigon, picked up Lee and took her to dinner, and then drove back to the house in Bien Hoa. They made love and went to sleep not long after midnight, early for Vann.

  Bunker’s Marine guards woke him shortly after 3:00 A.M. in his bedroom on the second floor of the ambassador’s residence. “Saigon is under attack,” they said. The Viet Cong were assaulting the embassy four blocks away. The residence might be hit at any moment. The Marines had brought an armored personnel carrier to the house. They had orders to drive Bunker in it to the home of the chief of embassy security, where they thought he might be safer. He was not to argue, they said, and there was no time for him to dress. The Marines told him to just put his bathrobe on over his pajamas.

  The ambassador’s study on the ground floor of the villa was filled with smoke from burning secret documents. Bunker had a small safe there in which he kept documents for his night reading. The Marines had opened and emptied the safe and were burning everything in case the guards who were to stay behind were killed and the house was captured. In the confusion they scorched two holes through the leather on the top of Bunker’s Brooks Brothers briefcase. He had left the briefcase on his desk when he went to bed.

  Ellsworth Bunker was not a man who would resist Marines attempting to do their duty. He climbed into the M-113. The armored machine rumbled off into the darkness hauling the ambassador of the United States in bathrobe and pajamas through the streets of the capital of a country where 67 percent of the citizenry were supposed to be living in American-conferred security. Tet firecrackers still being lit by the unwitting were muffling the gunfire. Fifteen Viet Cong battalions, approximately 6,000 Communist troops, had moved into Saigon and its suburbs. Bunker kept the scorched briefcase and carried it around afterward in remembrance of the night.

  Khe Sanh was the biggest lure of the war. The Vietnamese Communists had no intention of attempting to stage a second Dien Bien Phu there. The objective of the siege was William Westmoreland, not the Marine garrison. The siege was a ruse to distract Westmoreland while the real blow was prepared. The men in Hanoi had long ago decided that it was impossible to repeat Dien Bien Phu against the Americans. The French Expeditionary Corps had been a polyglot colonial army of a European nation enfeebled by defeat and occupation during World War II. The Vietnamese could gradually build an army that outweighed its French opponent, as the Viet Minh of 1954 clearly did. Giap had more artillery at Dien Bien Phu than the French. The French also had little in the way of transport planes and fighter-bombers and no heavy bomber aircraft. Gen. Henri Navarre lacked the means to sustain or relieve the garrison he placed in the mountains 185 miles from the nearest French stronghold at Hanoi.

  The United States had too much raw military power for the Vietnamese to hope for a literal repetition of their earlier triumph. A serious attempt to overwhelm 6,000 troops as solid as the Marines in the face of U.S. firepower would have entailed an insane number of casualties, far more than the thousands of Vietnamese who were to die at Khe Sanh to maintain the false appearance of this threat, and the effort would certainly have ended in failure, because the siege could always be broken. Khe Sanh was less than thirty miles from the landing docks on the Viet Estuary (Cua Viet) just in from the coast near Dong Ha, and the road was usable as far as the artillery base at Ca Lu ten miles to the rear. If the Air Cav did not suffice to relieve Khe Sanh, Westmoreland could line up a couple of other divisions and blast his way through. These conditions were not unique to Khe Sanh. The Vietnamese realized that the essentials of this military equation would always prevail in their war with the United States. Yet to turn the war decisively in their favor they had to achieve a masterstroke that would have the will-breaking effect on the Americans that Dien Bien Phu had had on the French. The masterstroke was Tet, 1968.

  For the most desperate battle in the history of their nation they reached back to the bold Nguyen Hue who had caught the Manchus at Dong Da during that Tet 179 years before and conceived a plan that in its breadth and daring was beyond the imagination of foreigners and Vietnamese who served foreigners. In cities and towns all across South Vietnam, tens of thousands of Communist troops were launching what the chief of Westmoreland’s operations center, Brig. Gen. John Chaisson of the Marine Corps, called a “panorama of attacks.” The bulk of an NVA division, guided by local guerrillas, stormed into Hue and occupied nearly the whole city and the imperial citadel. The gold-starred banner of the Viet Cong was raised to the top of the immense flagpole at the Zenith Gate where the like-starred banner of the first Viet Minh had been unfurled during Bao Dai’s abdication in 1945. Military camps and command posts, police stations, administrative headquarters, prisons, and radio stations in more than half of the forty-four province capitals and in all of the autonomous cities in the country were under assault in the predawn hours of January 31, 1968, or were soon to be hit. Scores of district centers and ARVN bases in the countryside were being struck. Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa, and a number of other air bases were under ground attack or shelling to try to prevent air support or helicopter reinforcement for endangered garrisons.

  In Saigon, the Viet Cong were also attempting to seize Independence Palace (Thieu was not inside; he had gone to My Tho to celebrate Tet there with his wife’s family), the Navy headquarters, the Joint General Staff compound, and the radio station. With the exception of the embassy, a target of grandstand propaganda value that could not be ignored, and the air bases that were jointly held, the Communist troops were generally seeking to bypass the Americans and to concentrate on their Saigon
ese allies. The goal was to collapse the Saigon regime with these military blows and with a revolt patterned on the August Revolution of 1945. The revolt was to be fomented by Viet Cong cadres among the population in the urban areas being occupied by the Communist fighters. Ho Chi Minh and his confederates hoped to knock the prop out from under the American war, force the United States to open negotiations under disadvantageous conditions, and begin the process of wedging the Americans out of their country. Khe Sanh was one of the few places in South Vietnam where, except for more miserable shelling, nothing was taking place.

  The ruse of Khe Sanh did not by itself enable the Vietnamese Communists to achieve a surprise on this scale. The American style of war had created a vacuum in South Vietnam in which the Communists could move freely. A massive shift of population had been brought about by Westmoreland’s generating of refugees and by the economic attraction of the base-building and other extravagances of the U.S. military machine to poor and war-impoverished Vietnamese. No one knew how many Vietnamese had become refugees. The staff of Edward Kennedy’s subcommittee put the number at 3 million by the end of 1967. A South Vietnam that had been overwhelmingly rural, with 85 percent of its people in the countryside when Vann arrived in 1962, had become substantially urban. The population of greater metropolitan Saigon had grown from about 1.4 million in 1962 to between 3.5 and 4 million, an extraordinary change given a population of about 17 million for the whole of the South. Samuel Huntington, a professor of government at Harvard and a consultant to AID and the State Department, coined the term “forced-draft urbanization and modernization” for what had been wrought. “In an absentminded way the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to ‘wars of national liberation,’” he said.