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

by Neil Sheehan

  Anderson started to draw fire as soon as he began his descent; he was fifty to seventy-five feet above the rice fields before he spotted the little band, despite a smoke grenade one of the advisors set off to guide him. The helicopter vibrated from the thumping recoil of the .50 caliber machine guns Anderson had installed for his door gunners to replace the 7.62mm guns a Huey normally carried. He was glad he had decided to mount the great machine guns. His gunners knew how to handle them. If they got in and out on this trip, Anderson thought, it would be because the .50s spoke with such authority. He hovered on a dike while Eisenhower helped Schorr aboard and Hacker and the two Kit Carson Scouts then vaulted inside. A couple of mud-covered ARVN in their skivvies appeared out of the paddy and scrambled aboard too. The door gunners were killing NVA soldiers twenty-five yards away.

  When they reached the airstrip at Landing Zone English near Bong Son town, they counted the bullet holes in the aircraft. There were only nine. The crew chief, who served as one of the gunners, had several pieces of shrapnel in his leg from a round that had struck an ammunition box and exploded a .50 caliber shell.

  Over the next twelve days the two larger districts of Bong Son and Tarn Quan went in the same wretched way Hoai An had. The whole of northern Binh Dinh, where 200,000 people lived, fell to the Communists. Vann took time he could not spare from the battle for the Highlands to fly down to the coast and exhort: another Canute vainly commanding the waves to stand still. Thousands of RF and PF deserted. The two remaining battalions of the 40th Regiment would not even defend their home base at LZ English. The ARVN military police forced the wounded to die on the airstrip at English while they sold seats on the VNAF medical evacuation helicopters to deserters. They split the proceeds with the VNAF pilots before the helicopters took off.

  ***

  All the while, a bigger crash was in the making in the Highlands. Dzu had, with Vann’s encouragement, invested the equivalent of an ARVN division, roughly 10,000 men, in the defense of Tan Canh. He and Vann had placed the headquarters of the 22nd Division with two of its infantry regiments there and reinforced them with separate infantry battalions, the 22nd’s own armored cavalry regiment, and most of a second independent regiment of armor. Because Tan Canh was the most forward position, the alignment was a gamble of the highest order. If the Rocket Ridge line broke and Route 14 running south from Tan Canh to Kontum was cut, these forces around Tan Canh with their accompanying artillery, tanks, APCs, trucks, and other fighting gear would be enveloped and isolated. If the Tan Canh defenses themselves cracked, it would be impossible with troops as unsteady as the ARVN to conduct an orderly retreat down a single mountain road. The division would disintegrate. More was at risk than an ARVN division. If either eventuality occurred, the forces needed to hold Kontum would be lost.

  Vann’s military deputy, Brig. Gen. George Wear, told him he was courting a catastrophe. His chief of staff, Col. Joseph Pizzi, a shrewd soldier who had tried to warn of the Chinese peril in North Korea in 1950 while serving as the estimating officer in Eighth Army intelligence, said the same thing. The prudent course would have been to organize a battlefield in depth and seek to exhaust the offensive by withdrawing to successive lines of defense, punishing the NVA for each one. This would have meant giving up Tan Canh and nearby Dak To District headquarters at some point with the hope of later regaining them. Vann was not in a mood to listen. “The sons of bitches will have to fight or die,” he said of the ARVN. Wear and Pizzi persisted. Vann said he would raise their fear at his next Saigon strategy meeting with Abrams.

  On his return, he said the answer was no, that Tan Canh and Dak To had to be held for political reasons. The evidence is that he deceived Wear and Pizzi and never did state their case with conviction because he had already committed himself privately to retaining Tan Canh and Dak To and was about to commit himself publicly in his April 12 memorandum. When Abrams came to Pleiku on a rare visit, Wear argued emotionally in a meeting with Vann and Dzu and the commanding general. He told Abrams the Tan Canh position was “a pending disaster.” Vann, who was fond of Wear and was attempting to get him his second star, suggested with irritation that they discuss the matter in private afterward. Abrams was also displeased. He seemed to regard such fears as defeatist.

  The gamble at Tan Canh was rendered yet more uncomfortable by the division commander there, Col. Le Due Dat, whom Vann had helped to get fired for excessive graft when he had been a province chief in III Corps in 1967. Dat had been vulnerable at the time, because although he had a high corruption connection, Ky’s power was waning and Thieu’s waxing and Dat had not kept his political alliances adjusted to changing times. He had subsequently recouped and in 1970 had been appointed deputy commander of the 22nd Division. Vann had just managed to rid himself of the previous 22nd Division commander, a lazy man, in February 1972. He had sought then to block Dat’s elevation to full command and to substitute a candidate of his own, but Dzu had been unable to object to Dat, whose corruption connection was too high for Dzu to risk offense. Dat, a slim, intense, excitable man, was a heavy smoker of a brand of English cigarettes called Craven “A.” They came in little red packages of ten. He did not carry the cigarettes himself. When he wanted one he flicked his hand and an aide put a cigarette in his fingers and gave him a light.

  On April 20, the Joint General Staff notified Dzu that they were depriving him of the second airborne brigade and the field headquarters of the Airborne Division that had been guiding the two brigades in the fight for Rocket Ridge. Dzu and Vann would have to hold the line, weakened in the middle by the loss of Fire Base Charlie on the 14th, with the remaining paratroop brigade and a depleted Ranger group Dzu was to be given. The brigade being withdrawn and the Airborne Division headquarters were to be flown to I Corps to defend Hue. Despite Vann’s prediction of disaster for the Vietnamese Communists on all fronts in his April 12 memorandum, the NVA in I Corps were in the process of conquering the whole of Quang Tri Province below the DMZ and were also threatening Hue from the A Shau Valley to the west.

  If the former imperial capital fell, Thieu would fall with it, and so difficult choices had to be made. The frayed Ranger group Dzu was being sent were the only troops that could be spared. The other major element of Saigon’s general reserve, the marine division, was already fully engaged in I Corps. The last of the reserve, the third brigade of the airborne, was caught in battle too on the Cambodian front of the offensive at the province capital of An Loc sixty miles northwest of Saigon. An Loc was under full-scale assault and might well succumb. The 21st ARVN Division had been brought up from the Delta to try to prevent the Communists from advancing down Route 13 any closer to Saigon if An Loc did go under.

  On April 21, while Vann was in Saigon for another strategy conference with Abrams, Fire Base Delta, the bottom hinge point of Rocket Ridge, was overrun. The NVA pressure was proving to be more than the airborne could handle. The situation was becoming as grim at Tan Canh as it was on Rocket Ridge. Vann’s plan to break the NVA on his strongpoints had not envisioned the ARVN simply sitting and waiting in foxholes and bunkers. He had wanted them to sortie out and make contact in order to bring artillery and air to bear as the NVA moved forward, to establish themselves on key ridges, and to counterattack and retake high ground when it was lost. Instead, Dat occupied some of the high ground around Tan Canh and sat. He would not maneuver, nor would he marshal reinforcements and relieve one of his battalions when it was attacked. The infantry of the 2nd NVA Division were steadily fragmenting his defenses by working their way in between the ARVN positions, each time closer to the former regimental compound where Dat’s command bunker was located.

  When Dat’s advisor, Col. Phillip Kaplan, would tell him that he had to maneuver and fight, Dat would explain that North Vietnamese soldiers were superior to South Vietnamese soldiers and you could not maneuver against the NVA. If you tried, they would surround and destroy you. Kaplan, a keen and robust airborne officer who had served under Bob York in the Dominican Repu
blic, held his temper with Dat as best he could and kept coaching in the positive way of the American military man. He did not realize that the attitude expressed by Dat, a Northerner himself (he was from a Tonkinese family of substance and had taken his baccalaureate at the Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi), had nothing to do with the fact that Dat’s opponents were North Vietnamese, but was rather the ingrained inferiority complex toward the Viet Minh of a Vietnamese who had fought with the French. Dat was behaving as most ARVN commanders would have in the circumstances. He was sheltering in his bunker and assuming his troops would hang on until U.S. air power persuaded his enemy to go away.

  A successful defense of Tan Canh entailed a slugging match of blow and counterblow in difficult terrain, a battle the ARVN was incapable of fighting. Vann had placed this army he was trying to use for his ends in a contest beyond its strength. He sought to goad Dat into becoming the leader he wanted him to be. They were standing in the briefing room of the bunker late one afternoon in front of the situation map with its ominous indications. Vann jabbed at the map, curtly describing in his harsh, nasal twang the actions Dat had to take to survive. “Colonel Dat, you are going to be the first division commander in the ARVN to lose your division, because you are going to be overrun and destroyed if you do not …”

  “Oh, that won’t happen,” Dat replied.

  ***

  It started to happen on the morning of Sunday, April 23, 1972. An ARVN infantry battalion was engaged with the NVA not far from the Tan Canh compound. The shelling, which had been building gradually since Friday, had increased to about a round a minute of mortar, artillery, and 122mm rockets. The bombardment was sufficiently accurate to indicate that smaller groups of NVA had infiltrated to within hundreds of yards and had the compound under good observation. Phil Kaplan, the division senior advisor, received a report that a tank had been knocked out at the main gate. He and his deputy, Lt. Col. Terrence McClain, left the command bunker to investigate, making their way to the gate along a ditch to avoid the bombardment. An ARVN soldier who spoke English told Kaplan he had seen a missile fly through the air and hit the tank. The wire-guided antitank missile, a unique weapon because it can be sent to its target with precision from a considerable distance, had been invented in the 1950s by a French air force officer. The Soviets had developed a powerful version during the 1960s called the Sagger. None had ever appeared in Vietnam. As Kaplan was continuing to question the soldier, a Sagger sailed overhead with a high-pitched warbling noise and in a flash and roar knocked out another tank inside the compound about sixty to seventy yards away.

  The command bunker was next, a bit later in the morning. Something that could be shot in a straight line, probably another Sagger, penetrated the sandbag wall at a weak point near a fresh-air vent and exploded in the radio room, setting the supporting timbers of the bunker on fire. The timbers had been treated with creosote or a similar wood preservative. Smoke billowed from them. No one had thought to stock fire extinguishers, and there was no water line to the bunker. Kaplan was about to toss a plastic container of water the advisors kept for making coffee at the blaze when he realized he was being foolish. In moments men would be suffocating and trampling each other in a stampede for the exits. “Get everybody out of here!” he ordered.

  The 22nd Division headquarters soon became a pile of smoldering sandbags, the timbers of the bunker collapsing as they were consumed by the flames. An alternative command post was set up in a much smaller bunker the advisors had beside their living quarters, and the wounded were evacuated by helicopter in the afternoon. Kaplan had only a superficial scalp wound from the explosion and Colonel Dat had not been hurt, but the operations advisor, Maj. Jon Wise, had been more seriously injured in the head and arm. Eight to ten members of Dat’s staff had also been hurt, and there were forty or so ARVN from elsewhere in the compound who had been wounded by the bombardment. Vann flew up from Pleiku and supervised the evacuation, a nerve-racking business for the helicopter crews and the wounded because of the incoming shells. Vann would not duck from them himself. Kaplan told him, before he returned to Pleiku, that if the worst came the advisors would assemble for a pickup at an alternative helicopter pad next to the minefield on the west side of the compound. The Cobra gunships had used it as a parking spot in quieter times.

  The NVA kept shooting the Saggers at the ARVN tanks around the Tan Canh compound throughout Sunday. There were eight operational in the morning. By Sunday afternoon there was only one left. Dat took to sitting in a chair and staring. As the night approached he looked at Kaplan and said: “We will be overrun tomorrow.”

  Around 10:00 P.M. they received a report from Dak To District that the PF at a Montagnard hamlet near Route 14 northwest of the district center could hear tanks. Route 14 ran north past Tan Canh, continued up past the district headquarters, and turned west into country that was now, except for PF platoons at the Montagnard hamlets, controlled by the NVA. A battalion positioned on a ridge high enough to overlook the road radioed next that they could hear tanks and then that they could see the lights of a tank column. Kaplan asked the air operations center at Pleiku for a C-130 Spectre gunship. The Spectres had night-vision devices and infrared sensors. “There are eleven tanks down there,” the Spectre pilot told Kaplan. The tanks were driving east along the road toward the turn down for Dak To District. Capt. Richard Cassidy, the assistant district advisor, ran to the front gate of the district compound. He saw the hooded blackout headlights military vehicles are equipped with about half a mile away. The Spectre dropped a flare, and Cassidy saw the tanks coming toward him in a staggered column. “They’re shooting at us,” he yelled in panic before he caught himself. The tanks were not shooting. Cassidy had no immediate cause for fear. The tankers had orders to disregard the district headquarters. They drove past the compound without firing a shot.

  The NVA were engaged in a maneuver the Vietnamese call “striking the head of the snake.” The idea is one of those oft-used schemes of war that are forever new when executed with surprise. The Vietnamese were ignoring Fire Bases Five and Six near Tan Canh and all of the battalion positions around it and going straight for Dat’s headquarters. There were actually fifteen tanks coming down the road. They were Soviet-built T-54S, medium tanks of late-1950s vintage that were attached to the 2nd NVA Division. The North Vietnamese tankers had driven their T-54S down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in February, towing additional ammunition and diesel fuel behind them in trailers. They had waited in Laos for a month and crossed into South Vietnam about two weeks earlier. For the past few days they had been hiding their tanks above Tan Canh, apparently in some gullies off a dirt track that connected with Route 14.

  An irrational skepticism Vann had been displaying over the presence of NVA tanks in II Corps contributed to this surprise. It was logical that if the NVA were employing tanks in I Corps and had managed to drive them down to III Corps, they would use them in II Corps as well. There had also been plenty of evidence of tanks before the opening of the offensive and during the prior weeks of fighting in the Highlands. Prisoners and defectors had spoken of tanks. The Special Forces and the long-range patrols from the ARVN Airborne had found tank tracks in Laos and in the Plei Trap Valley west of Rocket Ridge. Another battalion of T-54S was attached to the 320th NVA Division, and they seem to have entered South Vietnam earlier.

  The habit of personally verifying reports had become a form of arrogance in Vann, to the point where he tended to disregard what he could not confirm. Every time he received a report of tanks he had flown out to look for them and had found none. He had decided the reports were the exaggerations of spooked men or sightings of PT-76S, light amphibious tanks the NVA occasionally brought into play which were not a major threat because of their thin armor. Just two days before, the 320th had used three of its T-54S in the final assault on Fire Base Delta, but Vann had been at the Saigon strategy conference then and had not paid attention to the report on return. When Kaplan now called him on the radiophone to say that the
Spectre confirmed the vehicles were tanks, he got the customary gallows humor mixed with self-defensiveness: “Well, if they are, congratulations,” Vann said, “because these are the first positive tanks that anybody has found in II Corps.”

  A surprise gained is not a battle won. There was a lot of time in which to stop the tanks and a lot of weaponry with which to destroy them. The T-54S were not accompanied by NVA infantry, and tanks alone are vulnerable to opposing infantry with antitank weapons, particularly at night when the infantry can more easily wait in ambush or approach unseen. Despite his skepticism, Vann had made certain that the 22nd Division troops and the Dak To District forces were equipped with hundreds of M-72 LAWs (light antitank weapons), the Vietnam-era successor to the bazooka, just in case. The troops had been instructed in how to fire the LAW, and tank-killer teams had been formed in the companies. One of the division’s 106mm recoilless cannons, lethal against tanks, happened to be sited along the road, and the crew had been issued antitank rounds. There was also the regular division artillery, and Dat still had tanks to counter the NVA’s. While the North Vietnamese with the Saggers had eliminated the ARVN tanks around the Tan Canh compound to facilitate the arrival of their own, more tanks were stationed at the main Dak To airfield a couple of miles away, called Dak To II to distinguish it from an older and shorter airstrip next to the compound.

  The PF militia at the first bridge the tanks had to cross had LAWs. They were ordered to ambush the T-54S. They ran away. “Yes, we’ll do it,” Dat said when Kaplan told him to dispatch ARVN tank-killer teams. The teams didn’t leave their foxholes. “We’ve already given those orders,” Dat replied when Kaplan told him to summon the tanks from Dak To II. They didn’t come. The crew of the 106mm recoilless cannon sited along the road does not seem to have fired a round.