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

by Neil Sheehan

  Richard Nixon’s “de-Americanization … with all deliberate speed” was not proving cheap in American lives. During 1969, 11,527 U.S. servicemen perished in Vietnam. During 1970, another 6,065 were to die. In all, nearly 21,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during Nixon’s presidency and about 53,000 seriously wounded, more than a third of the total U.S. casualties.

  Nixon’s troop withdrawals did have an unanticipated benefit. They prevented the Army in Vietnam from disintegrating. The riflemen who had fought with Hal Moore in the valley of the Drang and at Bong Son would not have recognized the U.S. Army of 1969. It was an Army in which men escaped into marijuana and heroin and other men died because their comrades were “stoned” on these drugs that profited the Chinese traffickers and the Saigon generals. It was an Army whose units in the field were on the edge of mutiny, whose soldiers rebelled against the senselessness of their sacrifice by assassinating officers and noncoms in “accidental” shootings and “fraggings” with grenades. The signs of demoralization were evident by the time of Westmoreland’s departure in mid-1968. They worsened under Creighton Abrams because, while he attempted new tactics, he continued Westmoreland’s attrition strategy and kept pushing American soldiers into the bunker-complex killing grounds the NVA prepared. In a notorious example in May 1969, fifty-five men of the 101st Airborne Division died to seize a fortified ridgeline on the edge of the wild A Shau Valley in the mountains west of Hue. The troops named the ridge “Hamburger Hill.” The sad idiom of the American soldier in Vietnam reflected the futility of his war. A man was not killed there. He was “wasted.” He was “blown away.”

  The ARVN did not get better as Vann had persuaded himself it would. The venerable bungler Phan Trong Chinh had at last been deprived of command of the 25th Division on the eve of Tet, but his removal had not been complicated by any question of competence. It had been one of those periodic shuffles motivated by personal relationships and graft and politics. As if to prove the point, Lam Quang Tho, the province chief at My Tho in 1963, Vann’s “goddam poltroon” who had sabotaged every attempt to unhinge the Viet Cong flank at Ap Bac, rose to general and was given command of a division by Thieu. Westmoreland’s failure to reform the Saigon forces and provide them with sound leadership while there was time meant grisly casualties now that they were being pushed into border battles with the NVA and fights with the remaining Viet Cong regulars. The Saigon troops had suffered nearly 28,000 killed in action during the year of Tet, almost half of all U.S. dead for the war. Their killed declined to about 22,000 in 1969, but the toll was running roughly twice as high as in pre-Tet years. In 1970 they were to lose more than 23,000 men.

  Nor did Vann find himself working with the kind of province and district chiefs he had originally hoped Tet would shock the Saigon regime into appointing. Most were not stolid and well-meaning men like Hanh, or men like Chau in whom ambition was mixed with some idealism. The best-known province chief in the Mekong Delta in 1970 was Lt. Col. Hoang Due Ninh. His first cousin, the president of the Republic, Nguyen Van Thieu, gave him Bac Lieu Province in the lower Delta. Ninh was boundless in his rapacity. He levied tribute on almost every commodity sold in the province from gasoline to cigarettes; he sold government supplies, too, and had his troops steal back some of the government gasoline he sold so that he could sell it a second time; flower and potted-tree soldiers bloomed on his muster rolls; no one retained a safe assignment in Bac Lieu town or in one of the district centers without a fee to Ninh; his artillery batteries kept the countryside awake with harassing and interdiction fire so that he could flog off additional thousands of brass shell casings; he extorted unusually large payments from innocent people he blackmailed under the Phoenix Program and let real Viet Cong out of jail for twice the price. No opportunity to make money escaped his attention. He even broke holes in a coastal dike that had been built with U.S. funds to keep the salt seawater out of farmers’ rice fields and sold fishermen the privilege of erecting nets at the breaks to catch fish when the tide rose. The farmers had to endure the ruin of their paddies. Ninh was as brazen as he was greedy. Warren Parker, a former lieutenant colonel in the Special Forces who joined AID after retirement and was Vann’s province senior advisor in Bac Lieu, tried to restrain Ninh by warning that corruption this extreme might provoke a scandal in the press. “I’m not afraid of American or Vietnamese newspapermen,” Ninh said. Every time Ninh made a speech he boasted of “my cousin, the president.”

  Komer had started a secret program to fight corruption, and Colby carried it forward and regularized it in his methodical way. Bumgardner supervised the program for him. Dossiers were compiled on province and district chiefs and other provincial officials who were more egregiously corrupt than their fellows. Colby would deliver the dossiers to Thieu’s prime minister with a request for removal and punishment. Bunker would follow up by raising the case with Thieu. That the program continued year after year was as much a measure of the capacity of senior American officials for meaningless ritual as it was of the corruption of the Saigonese. Bunker kept count of the occasions on which he saw Thieu on corruption cases. He did it seventy-eight times. (The dossier eventually submitted on Ninh was a tribute to his entrepreneurship at graft. It was about thirty pages long in single-spaced type.) Hardly anyone was punished. Ninh was promoted to full colonel in 1971. Pressure sometimes resulted in the removal of an individual, but Bumgardner discovered this was a trick. The man would be put in a staff job for a while and then given another province or district. Bumgardner named this dodge “the Lazy Susan.” No Saigon official was taken off the wheel of corruption. He revolved on it.

  The John Vann of years past had known that a Saigon government led by moral bankrupts and a Saigon armed forces commanded by thieving incompetents were doomed. He had raged against those who spent Vietnamese and American lives in the false hope of perpetuating them. The John Vann of years past would deceive himself and others without limit to satisfy his cravings. The deceptions had never affected his professional integrity. He had always kept professional truth in a separate compartment of his life, and he had preserved inviolate this central truth about the war. His willingness to hew to this truth had been one of the qualities that had made him stand out morally and intellectually from the other major figures of the war. He had never fooled himself about it nor fooled those he served. His crusades in Hau Nghia against corruption and for a strategy of social revolution and reform might have been quixotic, but they had been sincerely motivated by the knowledge that to wage war for the status quo was wrong and would fail.

  The new John Vann’s proposed solution to the corruption of Ninh was, incredibly, to try to have Ninh made a regimental commander. He went to see a contact he had recently acquired at the presidential palace in Saigon, Hoang Due Nha, Ninh’s younger brother. Nha had spent his lycée years living in Thieu’s household before going to college in the United States. Thieu regarded him as a son. He was ostensibly commissioner general for information; he was actually a confidant whom Thieu relied on for advice on how to deal with the Americans. Vann invited Nha to dinner at La Cave, at this time the favorite French restaurant of the American community. He told Nha that his brother’s military talents were being wasted in a province chiefs job, that Ninh ought to be put at the head of a regiment. Nha was flattered that Vann would think so highly of his brother, as was Ninh when he heard what Vann had said. “He’ll steal less with a regiment,” Vann later explained to Warren Parker. The ploy didn’t work. Ninh was left in Bac Lieu to continue enriching himself. When he was later given a special inter-provincial command, considerably more important than a regiment, his entrepreneurship was to mature accordingly. He was to sell artillery barrages to imperiled garrisons; no bribe, no artillery when the Communists attacked.

  Dan Ellsberg and David Halberstam were not the only old friends to notice that Vann had lost his compass. Col. Sam Wilson was hardly a man to become an antiwar dissenter. He was to complete his career in the 1970s as a lieutenant general
and director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Despite the organizational success of his Long An experiment and its contribution to the founding of CORDS, he had no faith that the United States would win by the time he came home in mid-1967. He kept his peace and kept soldiering, because the Army was his life; he commanded the 6th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg and then the Military Assistance School there. Fort Bragg was one of Vann’s regular lecture stops when he was on home leave. Wilson would watch with fascination as Vann, wearing a neck microphone, paced back and forth across the platform, enthralled himself and seeking to enthrall, melding anecdote and statistic and opinion and emotion into a performance that was more a stream of consciousness than a formal lecture. Many of his listeners were swayed. Wilson was not. Nothing Vann said convinced Wilson that anything essential had changed in South Vietnam. Wilson decided Vann had invested so much of John Vann in the war that he had talked himself into believing he had to be winning. “John, you’re there and I’m not and I’d like to agree with you,” Wilson said after one performance, “but this tells me I can’t.” He tapped at his stomach.

  The John Vann his old friends had known had disappeared into the war. Each year South Vietnam had become a more perfect place for him. The war satisfied him so completely that he could no longer look at it as something separate from himself. He had finally bent the truth about the war as he had bent other and lesser truths in the past.

  Vann got his stars through Fred Weyand and a Saigon general of ordinary venality who thought that he could benefit from Vann’s talents and was willing to be manipulated. Nixon’s decision to send the U.S. Army and the ARVN into Cambodia at the end of April 1970 set Vann on his way.

  The character of Norodom Sihanouk, the hereditary ruler of Cambodia, triggered the destruction of his country. He was a mercurial man, fond of intrigue for its own sake. Although he and his cronies were being well compensated for the use of Sihanoukville as a supply port, and the Vietnamese Communists publicly recognized the French-established frontiers of Cambodia, which the Saigon regime refused to do, and privately assured Sihanouk they would depart as soon as the war was over, his temperament would not permit him to wait. After Nixon began secret B-52 bombing of the Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia in March 1969, Sihanouk tacitly encouraged the raids. He also incited right-wingers in his regime to demand that the Vietnamese evacuate the country. The first and most ironic result was a series of events that provoked Sihanouk’s overthrow by his own prime minister, Gen. Lon Nol. Nixon then moved, hoping that a war in Cambodia would divert Hanoi’s energies from the battle for South Vietnam. He encouraged Lon Nol, who had a poorly led wisp of an army, to go to war against the Vietnamese, a lunatic enterprise where the welfare of the Cambodian people was concerned and one that Lon Nol was witless enough to undertake. At the same moment, Nixon sought to buy additional time for Vietnamization by ordering U.S. and Saigon forces across the Cambodian frontier to tear up the Vietnamese sanctuaries and seize as much as possible of the arms and ammunition stockpiled there.

  Cambodia was to suffer the crudest consequences of the American war in Indochina. Sihanouk shifted to the left, installing himself in Peking and forming a national front with Pol Pot and other leaders of the formerly insignificant Cambodian Communist movement. The Vietnamese had never encouraged the Cambodian Communists, known as the Khmer Rouge, because Cambodian bases were essential to the struggle for the South and they had no wish to disturb their arrangement with Sihanouk, who previously had persecuted his own Communists. Hanoi proceeded to train and equip a Cambodian Communist army to assume the burden of fighting Lon Nol. Sihanouk provided his name to rouse the masses.

  Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died in the subsequent civil war, in which the United States sustained Lon Nol with arms and lavish airpower, particularly B-52S. The Vietnamese soon lost control of the Khmer Rouge army they formed when China became its supplier. The Hanoi leaders discovered they had created a monster that would one day make war on Vietnam. Pol Pot and his adherents turned out to be zealots of an extremist form of Communism. They were to rule Cambodia after their victory in 1975 with a homicidal mysticism akin to that of Hitler. They emptied Phnom Penh and the other cities and towns by driving the inhabitants into the countryside, banned the national religion of Buddhism and murdered the monks, and killed educated persons as a group, including most of the country’s doctors. The surviving urban dwellers and peasants were herded into labor camps to dig irrigation canals and till the rice fields. An estimated 1 to 1.5 million persons out of a population of roughly 7 million perished under Pol Pot from famine, forced labor, disease, and unremitting executions with hoes and axes.

  While these consequences could not be foreseen in 1970, many found the casting of another nation into the furnace morally abhorrent. Laos had already been sacrificed for the sake of the Vietnam venture. The sections where the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran were not the only parts of Laos to feel American bombs. The towns and villages of Communist-held northern Laos were a desolation. The CIA had enticed the Hmong tribal people of the Laotian mountains, also called the Meo, to fight the Vietnamese and the Laotian Communists, the Pathet Lao, and killed off a quarter of the tribe in the process. The United States was sending twelve-year-old boys into battle in Laos. Three members of Kissinger’s staff, William Watts, Roger Morris, and Anthony Lake, who had served in Vietnam as an aide to Lodge and as consul in Hue, resigned to protest the addition of Cambodia. Kissinger probably would have been dismissed had he too been opposed and resisted strongly, but he favored what Nixon was doing. Lake made a last plea on humanitarian grounds. “No one has a monopoly on compassion, Tony,” Kissinger replied.

  John Vann had once disapproved of cross-border marches as a diversion from the real problem. “If we go across the border, there will always be one more sanctuary just beyond the one we clean out,” he told Philip Geyelin, the editorial-page editor of the Washington Post, in December 1967. With his new perspective he enthusiastically approved of Nixon’s thrust into Cambodia, because he now also viewed it as a worthy purchase of time for the war in Vietnam.

  Had Vann known the effect of the cross-border venture on Ramsey, his reaction would have been more complicated. He suspected that Ramsey was dead from disease or a bombing raid. He had been unable to obtain any firm information on Ramsey since the smuggled letter in February 1967 and a fragmentary report shortly afterward. He was careful not to convey his suspicion in the letters he sent once or twice a year to Ramsey’s parents to encourage them.

  Ramsey was in Cambodia, chained to a tree in a patch of jungle where he and seven other prisoners in his group had been marched by their captors to evade the American troops crossing the frontier. He was so weak from a two-thirds reduction in rations, from diarrhea, and from a renewed onslaught of beriberi that he could hardly raise his arms above his head to adjust the plastic sheeting that was his only shelter. He had survived “the Hell Hole,” as he had named the bivouac camp in northern Binh Duong, he had beaten the worst of the beriberi and trekked to new camps astride the Cambodian border in the mountains of the lower Central Highlands, and he had escaped B-52S in the fall of 1969 that had driven the guards to yet another camp a few miles inside Cambodia—three consecutive days and nights of Arc Light strikes on the ridges and in the valleys all around him, fifteen raids in one night of trembling earth and thunder and huge fireballs, again three weeks later with no warning in darkness and rain, the bombs marching right up to the edge of a low ridge behind the prison compound, the concussion deafening, the shattered tree limbs and debris whirling through the camp—only to come to this hiding place with his captors to avoid the advancing American soldiers, having to dodge infantry firelights and artillery barrages and helicopter gunships on strafing and rocket runs as they fled. He was kept chained to the tree in the patch of jungle for five weeks, unshackled just to relieve himself and for a rare washing, before the guards felt secure enough to return to the camp.

  By that time, Ramsey no
longer had access to the chloroquinine tablets he had been taking to control the recurring malaria, and he had a fever. He was dizzy too, because the starvation diet had affected the balance mechanism in his inner ears, and he had night blindness. The moon did not look its normal color to him. It shone a bloody red. The march back to camp took fifteen hours. The guards had to lead him after darkness came. He fell six times in the last quarter of a mile.

  Ngo Dzu, the ARVN general who was to help Vann gain his stars, had never expected to become a corps commander himself. A pleasant, round-faced man with a bit of a puckish manner, he had standard credentials for an ARVN officer. He was a Catholic born in Qui Nhon, the son of a province finance official in the colonial administration, and had been educated by French priests at a boys’ school in Hue. Dzu was intelligent and enjoyed hard work, despite a mild heart condition. He was not a courageous man, and he was not particularly greedy or adept at scheming. He had not gained a reputation as one of the rare fighting generals in the ARVN, like Du Quoc Dong, a Southerner from Kien Hoa who led the paratroop division, or Ngo Quang Truong, Dong’s former deputy, who was currently 1st Division commander at Hue. Nor had he cultivated sufficient ties of political cronyism and corruption to place himself on the common road to senior command. During the latter years of Dzu’s career he had served in a series of staff jobs at JGS, rising by his industriousness to the most important, deputy chief of staff for operations. As such, he had supervised ARVN planning for the push into Cambodia. When Brig. Gen. Nguyen Viet Thanh, the IV Corps commander, an unusual man whom Vann liked because he was relatively free of corruption, was killed in a midair helicopter collision two days after the operation began, Creighton Abrams put pressure on Thieu to replace him with the general most familiar with the plan. Ngo Dzu went to IV Corps as acting commanding general.