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

by Sheehan, Neil

  While the pilots made run after run and the helicopters were refueled, Vann got Cao organized to reap the full harvest of this opportunity toward which so much preparation had gone. He created two more reserve task forces to supplement the one they already had. With three reserves they could cut off the escape of these guerrillas and any others who might be flushed no matter which way they turned. The airmen had forty-five minutes of exuberant shooting before the helicopter refueling was completed and the first reserve of two companies lifted off from Moc Hoa airstrip to be dropped farther north between the Viet Cong and the border. The assault troops who had landed at 9:50 A.M. were ordered to stop and hold in a “blocking position.” The two-company reserve task force was to drive south in the classic “hammer and anvil” tactic. Those guerrillas who had managed to escape the planes by hiding in the reeds were to be killed or captured by the descending “hammer” of the reserve or caught on the “anvil” of the troops in the block if they fled back south. Vann took off in a separate helicopter to encourage the Saigon commanders and to see for himself what was happening so that he could guide Cao accurately now that the action had reached the critical stage.

  As the helicopters descended with this first reserve, the pilots saw more guerrillas heading toward the border farther away to the west. Vann wasn’t worried about how to deal with them. He and Cao had discussed what to do before he had left the airstrip. Just to make sure, he radioed Faust, who was in charge of the advisory side of the command post in his absence, and told him to recommend that Cao commit the second reserve northwest of these guerrillas with similar instructions to drive down onto the “anvil.” Faust said he already had made the recommendation and that Cao had agreed.

  The turning of Vann’s anticipated triumph into an unanticipated nightmare began in a puzzling way. He flew over the scene of the air strikes and verified the evidence of the planes’ success floating among the reeds. He then stopped to see the battalion commander in charge of the assault troops who were holding in place as the “anvil.” Everyone was jubilant. They had found an 81mm mortar to add to the numerous small arms abandoned by the terrified guerrillas. He congratulated them and took off again to check on the progress south of the first reserve task force. He was surprised to see as soon as the helicopter gained altitude that they had not moved from the spot where they had jumped out of the helicopters. He landed to find out why and was told by the ARVN captain that he had been ordered by the regimental commander to “maintain a blocking position.” That didn’t make sense, Vann said. The assault troops were already blocking and Colonel Cao had ordered the captain to push south as fast as he could before the reserve had left Moc Hoa. The regimental commander had just instructed him over the radio to block and not advance, the captain replied. Where in hell did the major running the regiment get the authority to overrule Colonel Cao? Vann demanded. The captain looked at him blankly and said nothing. Didn’t he realize that the Viet Cong he was supposed to be killing and capturing were escaping while he dawdled? Vann yelled. The captain shrugged. Vann asked him to call the regimental headquarters, explain the situation, and ask permission to move. Vann flew back to the assault troops to see if the regimental commander had instructed them to attack north instead. No, they were supposed to hold in place. He returned to the reserve. The captain said he had contacted regiment as Vann had asked and had again been ordered to stay put. Vann radioed his advisor at the regimental headquarters set up in a village center south of the operation and also called Faust to have Cao dispel this confusion right away. He got no results. He tried to argue the reserve captain into advancing on his, Vann’s, responsibility. The captain refused. Vann flew back to the assault troops again and attempted to persuade the captain there to advance, also to no avail. Forty minutes of this maddening routine went by, and every few minutes the Viet Cong got that much closer to the border. In the meantime the helicopters did not return to drop the second reserve to the northwest. When Vann radioed Faust for an explanation, Faust said that Cao seemed to be reneging on his earlier agreement. Cao would not issue the order. Vann flew back to Moc Hoa to set matters right himself.

  He jumped from the helicopter, ran into the headquarters in the hangar, and told Cao that he had to get the first reserve in motion and load the second into the waiting helicopters right away or the Viet Cong were going to escape. Cao said he couldn’t do that.

  “Why not?” Vann asked.

  “Because the commander of the Tenth Regiment does not wish to share his big victory with another regiment,” Cao said. The 10th Regiment commander was the major who had ordered the reserve not to move. One of his battalions, split into two task forces, had made the original landing. The reserves were from other regiments.

  Vann was so astonished he was at a rare loss for words. “What?” he said, staring into Cao’s face.

  Cao repeated what he had said with a calm expression. He smiled.

  Vann had to strain hard to control himself. He drew Cao off to one side to avoid openly embarrassing him in front of their subordinates. Cao could not let the vanity of some major stop them from winning the war, he said. Cao was the division commander. He could simply override his subordinate by issuing an order. There were no risks. They far outnumbered the Viet Cong. Cao had lost a mere two men killed and a dozen wounded. Vann estimated that there were probably 200 guerrillas still alive and heading for Cambodia. Cao could not allow the Communists to escape like this to fight another day. He had a reputation to uphold as an aggressive commander. Today was his opportunity to accomplish an unprecedented feat. He could bag a whole battalion. If he didn’t act, he would look like a coward.

  Cao was unmoved. He said he was not going to upset his regimental commander.

  Vann eventually argued Cao into marching the first reserve south, but they did not start until 2:00 P.M., almost three hours after they had landed. As a result of Vann’s persistence, Cao obtained a rare prize. The reserve troops found a heavy .50 caliber machine gun abandoned by the Viet Cong. Seven guerrillas hiding under the water and breathing through hollow reeds were also discovered and shot as they vainly tried to run, and more small arms were captured. Cao was not at all hesitant about gathering up the weapons. He had already sent helicopters out to bring in the 81 mm mortar and small arms seized in the original assault by the time Vann returned and had called the Joint General Staff in Saigon to boast of his treasure. Vann nearly regretted gaining Cao the .50 caliber when the ARVN general who was chief of staff of the JGS and a colonel flew out to ooh and ah over the mortar and machine gun and the twenty-seven small arms captured, most of them French bolt-action rifles. Cao had soldiers stack the weapons in front of the hangar on tables covered with white sheets like trophies at a banquet.

  The headquarters ceased to function as Cao in his ecstasy abandoned further direction of the operation and most of his staff did the same. “It was only with the greatest of difficulty that the interest of the division commander and his staff could be refocused on continuing,” Vann said later in the temperate language of his official report. He was flabbergasted that the Saigon general saw nothing wrong with the way Cao behaved and acted no better himself. Cao had also let another 80 to 100 guerrillas escape on the eastern end of the operation while Vann was out flogging himself into useless frustration trying to get the reserve to advance. These Viet Cong were probably the company of the 504th Battalion that Vann had just missed catching by one day at the river junction. Neither of the two Saigon battalions that flushed the guerrillas would pursue them, despite the pleas of their advisors. Cao also would not respond when Vann called for pursuit after his return. An A-26 Invader from the air commando squadron had been on station overhead, and Cao had loosed an air strike with his customary alacrity the moment the guerrillas had been sighted. The pilots claimed to have killed twenty-five. Vann carefully inspected the scene from a helicopter. This time the airmen had blasted reeds and bushes. There were no bodies.

  Vann received worse news the next day. Cao h
ad forfeited an opportunity to destroy a resource more valuable to the Vietnamese Communist cause than a battalion of guerrilla regulars. The clumps of woods above the hamlet had hidden the most important Viet Cong training camp in the northern Delta. Interrogation of the eleven prisoners captured disclosed that one of the units hit was a specialized company of instructors. Drummond had not known of its existence before. The second unit was another company of the 504th Battalion assigned to protect these training cadres. The rest of the Viet Cong were youths from provincial units all over the region who had been selected for assignment to the Main Force battalions. They had been in the camp for four months receiving advanced instruction in weapons, tactics, and camouflage and other techniques of guerrilla warfare. Drummond found four thatched-hut classrooms furnished with blackboards under the trees, as well as two other groups of huts used for medical training.

  The pilots shuddered at the sight of the American-manufactured .50 caliber, because the big machine gun can be a lethal antiaircraft weapon in skilled hands, and its appearance was evidence that the guerrillas were beginning an intelligent program to counter the helicopters. This first impression was confirmed. In his eagerness for more captured arms to display, Cao brought out two teams with mine detectors the next day. They discovered the tripod mount for another .50 caliber underwater. The barrel and action could not be found. The prisoners said the training company had three .50 calibers and had been teaching a select group of the recruits how to shoot them against aircraft. Drummond and Binh found instruction booklets in the camp describing how the gunner should fire ahead of the fighter-bomber or helicopter in order to compensate for its speed. One captured document listed the serial numbers of the three machine guns, which had probably either been lost by the French or captured from an ARVN unit in some other region, as Binh knew of none taken in the 7th Division zone. The prisoners said that some of the braver guerrillas had tried to shoot down the fighter-bombers with the .50 calibers before they were killed or fled.

  The fiasco was the more painful for Vann because it was so unexpected. It had been inconceivable to him twenty-four hours earlier that after he had prepared so meticulously by orchestrating the talents of Ziegler and Drummond and every other means at his disposal, Cao would nullify all. It had been just as inconceivable to him that Cao would confound his theory of human nature by sidestepping the burden of the role Vann had assigned to him. In Vann’s code of an officer it was unthinkable to throw away the lives of one’s soldiers by permitting an enemy to escape as Cao had done. The Viet Cong had been badly hurt, but since approximately 300 of them had gotten away, there were plenty of survivors to reconstitute the units. The training cadres would be back to breed more guerrillas, and the 504th Main Force Battalion would return to overrun more outposts and lay more ambushes.

  Raising a public fuss would have ended Vann’s game with Cao, which he was determined to pursue despite this defeat, and would have led to his dismissal by General Harkins, because policy was to display a front of cordiality between the advisors and their counterparts. When Malcolm Browne, then with the Associated Press, hitched a ride out to Moc Hoa on a helicopter from Saigon, Vann gave him the impression that all had gone precisely according to plan right from the start. The predawn landings by the Marines had been “a beautiful job,” he said. “They landed exactly on schedule, and for a change, it looks as if we caught the Viet Cong completely off guard.” After Cao announced that his troops and the planes had killed a record 131 Viet Cong in the biggest success of the war and that one of the eleven prisoners was the Party representative for a district, Vann did not quietly enlighten the correspondents. (He estimated in his confidential report to Porter and Harkins that the number of guerrillas slain “did not exceed 90.”) He had to watch, seething, while Cao received a hero’s laurels, unable to let truth tarnish his creation.

  Diem was so pleased that he gave Cao the most elaborate victory parade in Saigon since 1955, the year the ARVN paratroopers delivered the coup de grace to the private army of the organized crime society, the Binh Xuyen, which had been one of Diem’s rivals. Radio Saigon and the controlled newspapers of the capital exulted in “the greatest victory of the war.” The parade was held on a Saturday so that as many civil servants and their families as possible could be recruited to fill the crowds. Pretty girls in the traditional Vietnamese woman’s dress, the ao dai, a tight-fitting tunic that becomes a split skirt at the waist and unfurls over pantaloons, met Cao and his officers at the outskirts and bedecked them with garlands of orchids and other flowers. He rode into the city to the parade marshaling point standing up in a jeep, waving and saluting right and left, and then marched at the head of his officers and men down one of the main avenues to the former French opera house where Diem’s National Assembly met. Everyone had on combat fatigues, boots, and steel helmet, except Cao, who took a general’s prerogative of calling attention to himself by wearing the baseball-type field cap coming into fashion in the U.S. Army. He carried his fancy swagger stick and had a Colt .45 on his hip in a leather holster. All of the captured weapons were displayed for the public to see on a stage erected in the square in front of the opera house. Scores of medals were awarded to officers and soldiers, and the acting minister of national defense pinned a medal for heroism to the 7th Division flag. In the climax to the day, Cao was driven to the palace and decorated by Diem for gallantry.

  The contrast between this public chicanery and the honesty of Vann’s confidential after-action report to Porter and Harkins made the alarm Vann sounded in secret for his leaders all the more resonant. By this time he had seen enough of the flaws in the leadership of the Saigon forces, noting them individually in previous after-action reports, to begin to understand the dimensions of the problem that confronted the whole advisory mission. He and his colleagues were charged with waging a war of infantry combat against a guerrilla enemy with an army that suffered from an institutionalized unwillingness to fight. Vann owed his premature assumption of command at the Seminary to this unwillingness. Clay’s helicopter had been shot up and he had been wounded on May 23 because the ARVN lieutenant leading the company he was with had refused to pursue or even fire at a platoon of guerrillas running across the dikes of a rice paddy in plain sight, and so Clay had chased after them with a pair of helicopters. Now the division commander was letting fifteen times as many guerrillas run free. The timidity amounted to a phobia against risks and casualties. “A deplorable condition … exists,” Vann wrote, “because commanders at all levels who do nothing can still retain their command, and even advance, while those who are aggressive may be relieved if they suffer a setback or sustain heavy losses.” The ARVN officers also did not understand the purpose of their existence. “Petty jealousies among battalion and regimental commanders take precedence over, and detract from, the primary mission of closing with and destroying the enemy. Regimental and battalion commanders obey orders that suit them, ignore or change those that do not.” If the advisors were to fulfill their mission of winning the war with the ARVN, the magnitude of these failings had to be recognized and adequate measures taken to overcome them. “Unless the entire ARVN can be retrained to function on a chain of command, orders will be obeyed basis, then an acceptable degree of combat effectiveness will not be achieved,” he warned Porter and Harkins.

  A U.S. Army officer is taught to do the best he can with what he is given. To recognize the possibility of failure is never to concede it but rather to persevere all the harder on the assumption that if one does persevere with imagination, failure will not occur. This attitude was more pronounced in Vann than in most officers because he prided himself on never permitting a challenge to defeat him. He also partially believed Cao’s excuse that the 10th Regiment commander had prevented Cao from trapping the Viet Cong. He did not absolve Cao of responsibility, but he knew that Cao had his problems with the province chiefs and Vann thought that the major in charge of the regiment might be some other favorite of Diem’s.

  In additio
n, Cao talked a good war. He spoke of his desire to prevent the Communists from imposing a dour tyranny on the South. They would repudiate their promises of land and other benefits to the peasants once they had seized control, he said. They would massacre all genuine and potential opponents in a bloodbath, collectivize the land, suppress religion, destroy Vietnamese traditions, and ban those personal freedoms that Vietnamese in the South did have under Diem in order to regiment the society with their Marxist totalitarianism.

  Vann believed that the Communists would commit all of these crimes if they won the war. He concluded that Cao, whatever his faults, was a Vietnamese patriot, a sincere nationalist who wanted to give his country the decent alternative of an anti-Communist government in Saigon and gradual modernization under American guidance. He assumed that Cao cared as much about a country called South Vietnam as Vann did about the United States and that with time he could still flatter and coax and shame Cao into acting like the kind of military leader South Vietnam needed to protect it.

  The fiasco of July 20 thus became for Vann a setback but not the failure of his plan. In August he sent Mary Jane a snapshot of himself and Cao standing side by side in front of the headquarters tent during an operation. He had the photo shop in My Tho tint the black-and-white photograph with life tones to turn it into a color shot. In the photo, Vann was looking at the camera and Cao was looking at Vann. On the back Vann wrote in ball-point for Mary Jane: