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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Drummond discovered that his counterpart, Capt. Le Nguyen Binh, a Catholic from North Vietnam who had fled south after the French collapse in 1954, was a conscientious officer whose performance had been underestimated by Cao and the Americans. He was friendly and eager to share his information. One reason Binh had been so little heeded in the past was that there had been no professional intelligence officer on the American side to work with him, even if Cao had permitted cooperation. No one whose expertise Cao could recognize had told him of Binh’s worth. The unit profiles that Drummond and his sergeant put together with Binh and his staff were rudimentary and had great gaps. Nonetheless, Drummond was surprised at how much relevant information Binh’s raw files contained. He was also surprised to learn that Binh had a useful network of secret informants. Binh had established the network after being assigned to the division a year earlier and ran it himself out of fear that one of his staff might be a Communist penetration agent. He paid his spies with nonaccountable funds he was given for the purpose in imitation of the caisse noire (“black chest”) system of the French colonial army. The most useful informant was a jobber of water buffalo, who had the perfect excuse to travel all over the northern Delta buying and selling these work animals of the Vietnamese peasantry, moving in and out of guerrilla-dominated sections without arousing any suspicion. He could be sent on missions to verify reports from other informants or to obtain a specific piece of information.

  Vann cultivated another source of intelligence—the American Protestant missionary who lived in My Tho. Like most American missionaries in Asia, he believed in promoting anti-Communism along with Christianity. Clay had told Vann of his attitude, and Vann took to calling on him regularly. He was happy to pass along what he could gather from the Vietnamese pastors of his congregations in the outlying towns.

  In their quest for security, the Viet Cong would give themselves away. When they assembled in a hamlet, or in a cluster of hamlets, to rest, to propagandize the peasantry, or to launch an attack, they usually restricted the movements of the population. If anyone responsible on the Saigon side was alert, the fall-off in the number of peasants coming to market was a tip of the Viet Cong’s presence.

  Like all good military organizations, the guerrillas wanted to operate in an efficient manner. Over the years they had configured the decks of their sampans to utilize the available space to best advantage. Their packs, cook stove, rice, stack of wood or charcoal, and crock of nuoc mam were placed in specific spots toward the bow to leave maximum room for sitting and sleeping toward the stern. Once one learned the arrangement, it was not difficult to tell that these sampans did not belong to farmers.

  The guerrillas’ permanent training camps and hospitals were well hidden in patches of woods in remote areas of the Plain of Reeds near the Cambodian border on the western side of the division zone or in mangrove swamps and water palm jungles that were difficult to penetrate in the populated provinces to the east. They could also conceal themselves in woods and swamps when they stopped to sleep while on the march, because each regular and provincial guerrilla carried a hammock he could sling between two trees. But sleeping in the open in a malaria-ridden country that has a monsoon climate and numerous other biting insects besides mosquitos is neither healthy nor comfortable. The guerrillas’ doctrine also said that they could not survive if they did not live among the peasants. For these reasons they slept in hamlets whenever they could and built way stations and “safe houses” in populated regions so as not to impose on the peasantry. The ditched roads advertised the strongholds of population under their control and thus the hamlets where they slept and where such way stations and safe houses were most likely to be found. At first glance these structures also seemed to be just more peasant houses. On second look there were no animals around them and no cultivation except perhaps a small garden.

  Although the Viet Cong did not know it, they were also sending an invisible tracer of their movements to a tracker in the sky. The Army’s electronic espionage organization, the U.S. Army Security Agency, had begun functioning in earnest in South Vietnam in 1962 under the innocuous-sounding code name of the 3rd Radio Research Unit. By June there were 400 ASA technicians in the country. The majority worked out of the military side of Tan Son Nhut Airport in planes as innocent-appearing as their code name. The aircraft were built by De Havilland of Canada and had originally been designed for bush flying. They were a long and boxy, single-engine propeller type called the Otter, which could carry a communications intercept team and its sophisticated monitoring and direction-finding equipment and loiter for hours high over suspect areas while the team picked up and tape-recorded Viet Cong radio traffic. The guerrillas had older American radios of the World War II generation which they had captured from the Saigon forces or from the French before them. They used voice radios for short distances and the rudimentary but reliable Morse-code method of sending dots and dashes with a telegraph key (a different combination of dots and dashes for each of the letters in the romanized script of their language) for long-range communications. They transmitted sparingly and encrypted everything, so they thought they were reasonably safe.

  They did not realize, until an Otter with an intercept team aboard crashed about a year later, that not only were the Americans breaking their codes, but that the transmissions themselves gave them away. Every Morse operator strikes the key with a different rhythm, called his “fist” in the electronics spy trade. Voices can also be tape-recorded, compared, and identified. The “fist” or the voice became the distinguishing characteristic of the radio. The electronic emissions likewise vary from one radio to another. The highly advanced ASA methods of interception and analysis collected and sorted this “special intelligence,” as it is known. The results came to Drummond in a separate pouch. By putting the findings of this electronic espionage together with what he received from the human network, Drummond was often able to confirm that a particular radio belonged to a specific company or battalion. Because the ASA technicians could also frequently determine the general location from which the radio was transmitting, the unit could be followed and its pattern of movement outlined on the map.

  With all of this information coming to him from these varied sources, Drummond started filling out the profiles and providing Vann with fresh tactical intelligence on the location and apparent intentions of a number of the regular and provincial guerrilla units. His limited knowledge often made his information imprecise, but there was enough hard information for Vann to begin systematic attacks in June.

  The same American technology that tracked the guerrillas from the sky enabled Vann to launch effective assaults. The Vietnamese Communists no longer had the protection of time and space that the geography of their country had provided them during the war against the French and against Diem’s regime prior to Kennedy’s intervention. In the past the guerrillas had been able to shelter in natural fortresses that were impregnable to surprise attack. The largest and most famous one in Vann’s area was the Plain of Reeds. Its expanse of swamp, fields of waist-high reeds, and clumps of brush and woods covered most of two provinces at the northwestern corner of the Mekong Delta adjacent to Cambodia. The plain was nearly roadless and thinly populated, because the acid soil of black clay made rice cultivation difficult despite annual flooding by the Mekong. To reach one of the guerrilla havens on the plain required an enervating two- to three-day march. The smaller fortresses the Viet Cong had created in the populated regions had also been immune to surprise. The ditched roads and a warning network of pickets and sympathetic peasants had given days or at least hours of notice that the Saigon troops were coming.

  The helicopter leaped the barrier of terrain and shrank time and effort from enervating days to exhilarating minutes. Almost all of the guerrillas’ havens were within twenty miles in point-to-point distance from a province capital or a district center held by the Saigon government. The helicopter the Army had sent to Vietnam, the H-21 Shawnee, was an ungainly-looking machine o
f Korean War vintage, shaped like a fat bent pipe with large rotors fore and aft and appropriately named the Flying Banana by its crews. Nevertheless, it was a helicopter. A Flying Banana could pick up a squad of a dozen soldiers and move them, at eighty miles an hour, twenty miles in any direction in fifteen minutes. The newer H-34 Choctaw of the Marines, also called the HUS-1 Sea Horse, somewhat resembled a tadpole turned sideways. It could carry the same squad twenty miles in thirteen minutes at slightly over ninety miles an hour. A mere fourteen helicopters sufficed to carry the standard assault task force of half an ARVN battalion, about 165 men, with all of their weapons, ammunition, and food for a couple of days. Half an hour later the machines could return with a second task force and drop it along a route that the fleeing guerrillas had hoped to use for an orderly escape. There would be no warning beyond a minute or two if the pilots flew “contour”—that is, at treetop level—for the last few miles, which they did whenever they could. The whirling rotor blades drove the sound of the engines into the earth.

  U.S. industry furnished Vann another machine that terrified the guerrillas every time they encountered it. The thing was a movable box of aluminum-alloy armor, rectangular, with sundry hatches and doors. A powerful engine mounted within turned caterpillar tracks on both sides. It was properly known as an armored personnel carrier, officially designated the M-113, and called an APC, a “track,” or a “carrier” in the slang of armor officers. A company of twelve of these machines joined the division in June. Each had a .50 caliber heavy machine gun mounted in front of the command hatch on top. A reinforced company of 140 infantrymen also rode inside the protection of the boxes. The behemoth weighed ten tons and was amphibious. When the monster struck flooded rice paddies it churned across them at ten to twenty miles an hour, crashing into the small dikes of the fields with its tracks and bouncing over them. The armor was impervious to the bullets of the guerrillas’ rifles and machine guns, and the Viet Cong had no antitank weapons worth mentioning. The company of infantrymen were trained to dismount through the rear hatches on signal and to attack under the formidable firepower of the dozen .50 caliber machine guns.

  As guerrillas were killed and weapons were captured with regularity, Colonel Cao became still more pleased and cooperative. Vann was sure he would be able to set in place the last element of his plan to run the 7th Infantry “just like an American division” and launch it on a ruthlessly executed campaign to destroy the Main Force and Regional Viet Cong battalions in the northern Delta. This final element was the transformation of Cao into an aggressive leader in Vann’s U.S. Army image. To attain the degree of proxy control necessary for a campaign of this magnitude, Vann needed to turn Cao, as Vann put it, into “the Tiger of South Vietnam.”

  The difficulty was that Cao did not have a tigerish personality. What resemblance he bore to a cat was a certain plump sleekness of body and craftiness of character. He lacked claws. Vann thought he saw a way around that deficiency. He would emulate his hero, Lansdale.

  The Ugly American, the novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that had embellished Lansdale’s legend and made good sense to Vann when he had read it, was a political tract, “written as fiction … based on fact,” to warn Americans that the United States was losing to Communism an ideological battle for the minds of Asians. The book was a primer on how Americans could win this battle if they would learn how to get Asians to do what was good for America and Asia. The Ugly American was not only a best-seller and the basis of a movie after its publication in 1958, it was accepted well into the 1960s as an example of serious political thought. In the novel, Col. Edwin B. Hillandale is sent from the Philippines, where he has recently outwitted the Communist Hukbalahap guerrillas and helped his friend Ramón Magsaysay win the presidential election by a landslide vote, to the kingdom of Sarkhan, “a small country out toward Burma and Thailand,” where the United States is engaged in a contest with the Russians and the Chinese Communists for the friendship of the Sarkhanese leaders and people. One of Hillandale’s hobbies is reading palms and casting horoscopes. He has a diploma from the “Chungking School of Occult Science.” He observes during a walk through the capital city, Haidho, that palm readers and astrologers are accorded the same respect in Sarkhan as “fashionable physicians in America” and that no one of importance makes any decision of importance without a palm reading and a horoscope. After a bit of spying and dossier reading to familiarize himself with the personalities and backgrounds of the Sarkhanese leaders and the latest intrigues, Colonel Hillandale is soon manipulating political events in the country by convincing the prime minister that he is the world’s greatest palm reader and astrologer. “Every person and every nation has a key which will open their hearts,” Hillandale tells the American ambassador to Sarkhan. “If you use the right key, you can maneuver any person or any nation any way you want.” As Hillandale had employed palm reading and horoscopes in Sarkhan, so Vann was going to use ego appeal to metamorphose Cao into a tiger and have the Vietnamese Communists suffer the consequences.

  Huynh Van Cao was thirty-four years old in the summer of 1962 and had been promoted to command of a division when he was twenty-nine, an extraordinarily rapid rise in any army. Once asked by an American correspondent to explain his rocket ascent, Cao had pointed his swagger stick at himself and said: “Leadership!” He had designed the briefing office on the second floor of his house, his “War Room,” to be an exact replica of the map room of Napoleon. He had to settle for a partial replica when it turned out that imitating Napoleon to perfection would entail having the door open through the middle of the most important province on Cao’s enlarged map of the division zone. He had written a transparently disguised autobiography in the form of a novel entitled He Grows Under Fire. The book held up his career as a model for aspiring military leaders. He had a tendency to strut and he was never without his swagger stick, a gnarled and highly polished piece of exotic dark wood.

  The title of Cao’s autobiographical novel was somewhat misleading. He had not seen a great deal of combat and should not have chosen the profession of soldiering because he had no vocation for making war. He lacked the nerves of a soldier. During one operation when nervous strain undid him he ran out of the command tent, vomited, and ordered the artillery to stop firing a barrage in support of an infantry unit engaged with the guerrillas. The noise upset him too much, he said. He did possess a semblance of military competence, as distinguished from combatíveness, as a result of superficial schooling by the French and U.S. armies. With his intelligence and glibness, he was able to make this semblance pass for actual competence with visiting American generals because they never saw him under stress.

  Competence had, in any case, little to do with his double-time promotions and the fact that he held command of the 7th Division astride the main road thirty-five miles below the capital. He had been appointed division commander because he was a Central Vietnamese and a Roman Catholic who had been born and educated in the former imperial capital of Hue, Diem’s home city, where his family had been known to the Ngo Dinhs, the president’s family. Like many sons of Vietnamese mandarin families who had taken the side of the French during the first war, he had gone into the military because it had offered status in an employment-starved society, not because he had wanted to fight.

  He had begun in 1946 when it was still respectable in the milieu in which Cao grew up for a young Vietnamese of decent family to serve as a noncom. He had joined the French-sponsored regional militia for Central Vietnam, a post-World War II equivalent of the Civil Guard, as a staff sergeant. The French secondary education that had qualified him for a job in the operations section of a headquarters (the church had put him through its Lycée Pellerin in Hue) had also kept him out of harm’s way most of the time. He had thus been around two years later to obtain a place in the first class of a cadet school the French had opened in Hue to train officers for the new Vietnamese National Army they were raising for Bao Dai. In 1949, at the end of the six-month course,
Cao had been commissioned a second lieutenant. He had then shuttled upward over the succeeding years of the early 1950s from platoon leader to company commander to staff officer of a battalion. The positions were more pro forma than real in terms of leadership and combat experience, because the French, under pressure from the United States to organize a native army, did not season and test these young men.

  Cao had come to Diem’s notice in 1954 when he was on the staff of a battalion that had taken Diem’s side while Lansdale was guiding Diem to victory in the power struggle with his non-Communist rivals. Diem had brought Cao to the palace to work on his personal military staff for two years, making him its chief within a few months. To Diem’s way of thinking, two years of service at the palace and Cao’s family background were the best preparation for the responsibility of a division. He had given Cao one of the lesser divisions in 1957 and then, after Cao had completed a series of three-month courses in the United States at the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and other schools, had put him in charge of the 7th.

  His first duty was to be prepared at all times to rush his troops to Saigon to save the president and his family should dissident elements of the armed forces launch another coup d’état like the one that a group of paratroop officers had attempted unsuccessfully in November 1960. Diem had a special radiotelephone network that reached directly from the palace to Cao and the other division commanders and to most of the province chiefs. The fact that Cao kept his family in the security of Saigon was not the primary reason he had turned his house into a second headquarters, with another set of communications like the radios at the division headquarters in the old French caserne. The headquarters at the house was meant to serve as an alternate command post should disloyal subordinates seize the main one.