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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Cao told Vann afterward that he never had an opportunity to explain. He arrived in the anteroom outside the president’s office before Diem’s first appointment. An aide told him to wait. He sat. Others came to see the president and departed. Cao was left to sit. He sat all day. No one offered him lunch. Late in the afternoon the aide beckoned him into the presence of the man Cao called “my king.”

  Diem was capable of a discussion when he thought one was to his advantage. He was famous for his monologues. He used the technique on subordinates who caused him problems and on American officials who might ask him unwelcome questions. He talked for hours, ignoring any attempt by his captive to interrupt. All the while he chain-smoked a local imitation of Gauloises Bleues, a pungent French cigarette. In this way he could not be contradicted. The experience was so painful that the victims were eager to describe it to others, which was how he had acquired a reputation for these performances. Cao got the monologue treatment. He was told that he was listening to his American advisors too much and was taking too many risks on offensive operations. These were resulting in too many casualties. If he wanted to be promoted to general and to be given command of a corps, as he had been informed might happen, he would have to show more caution. He was dismissed with no supper.

  Cao put an end to Vann’s elaborately contrived system of joint planning after he returned to My Tho. He no longer had any interest in Ziegler’s talents or the folderol of the command briefings he had enjoyed so much. He resumed the planning of all operations himself, down to the minor details. Vann did not see the plans until they had been completed. Cao planned so prudently that during the next fourteen operations from mid-October through most of December only three of his soldiers were killed and the reports indicated that these three died accidentally from “friendly fire.” He put intelligence to a purpose that Vann and Drummond had not foreseen when they had taken such pains to develop a professional system for him. He used the information to go where there were no guerrillas. As further insurance, he planned an easily perceived opening in his scheme of maneuver through which the guerrillas could escape in case any should unexpectedly happen to be in the area. Sandy Faust dubbed it “the gap.” There was the potential problem of enemy casualties. Cao solved that by inventing even larger kills from air strikes than he had in the past.

  At last Vann understood why Cao had always refused to commit the reserve to trap and annihilate a whole battalion of guerrillas. Cao knew that once the guerrillas were trapped, they might well attack straight into the reserve or turn and try to burst through whichever side of the box was nearest to them in their desperation to escape. There would be fighting at close quarters. A battalion of the best troops the Communists had would die or be captured, because if the reserve buckled under the assault, Cao and Vann could always reinforce with more troops, which the Communists could not do. Cao would also take casualties. If he took casualties he would get into trouble with Diem. He would not be promoted and he might be dismissed. Once the helicopters and the armored personnel carriers had terrified the Viet Cong and the fighter-bombers had stacked up a few cords of bodies for him, he was no longer interested in taking risks. He had a fine score, and that was all he needed to look good and get promoted. The order telling the reserve not to advance on July 20 had come from Cao, not the regimental commander. He had instructed the regimental commander to issue it in order to hide its origin from Vann. There had been an explanation for his baffling attitude, as there was for so many things the Vietnamese did that the Americans thought were the offspring of stupidity, ignorance, or that inscrutable something called the “Oriental mind.”

  Vann probed further and discovered that Diem had long ago secretly issued a verbal order to Cao and his other commanders not to conduct offensive operations that resulted in serious casualties, particularly to the regular army, as had occurred on October 5 with the Rangers. Vann did not yet know enough about the history of the regime to discern the specific reasons for the order. The explanation, it would turn out, was again not an especially complicated one.

  Diem and his family believed that casualties suffered on offensive operations against the Viet Cong had been a major cause of the abortive coup d’état in November 1960. The Ngo Dinhs were convinced that the ARVN paratroop officers who had led the attempt had plotted with oppositionist politicians because they had been disgruntled over these losses. Actually, the paratroop officers had concluded, as had the politicians, that the Ngo Dinhs were creating the conditions that caused the Communists to thrive. They had also been disgusted at seeing the lives of their fellow officers and troops wasted by men like Cao whom the president and his family had promoted to senior command positions. The Ngo Dinhs had never investigated sufficiently to learn the real reasons for the 1960 coup, and they could not have accepted the reasons had anyone dared to confront them with the facts. South Vietnam’s ruling family combined in their outlook the mentality of the Bourbons of postrevolutionary France and George III, who managed to drive thirteen colonies in America out of the British Empire. They never learned anything, they never forgot anything, and they fervently believed that whatever they desired was innately correct and virtuous. They did not want another attempt at a coup, and therefore they did not want the army to suffer casualties on offensive operations.

  The president and his family were also unwilling to commit the ARVN to a war because the army was the mainstay of their rule. The Americans saw the ARVN as an army with which to defend South Vietnam. The Ngo Dinhs, on the other hand, saw the ARVN primarily as a force-in-being to safeguard their regime. The first priority of the Ngo Dinhs was the survival of their rule. To hazard the ARVN in a war was to hazard their regime, and that was unthinkable. Control of the army had enabled them to crush their non-Communist opponents in the young years of the regime in the mid-1950s. They thought that even if most of the South was ultimately lost to the Communists, an intact ARVN would enable them to hold on to Saigon and the other major population centers long enough for Washington to send the U.S. Army and the Marines to rescue them. They assumed that the United States, as the preeminent power in the world, could not afford to let their anti-Communist government fall to Hanoi’s guerrillas. John Stirling, the Saigon correspondent of The Times of London in 1962, who was, like some Englishmen, more sophisticated about these matters than the Americans, had correctly discerned the attitude of Diem and his family. “The principal export of this country,” he was fond of saying, “is anti-Communism.” That their attitude could prove expensive in the blood of Vietnamese was another of those thoughts that did not occur to the Ngo Dinhs. They were willing to accept casualties in defensive actions because they saw these as unavoidable to maintain the outpost system that was the substance of their rule in the countryside. Most casualties in defensive actions were also inflicted on the SDC militiamen who manned the posts. The Ngo Dinhs were not troubled by the deaths of these peasants. The stability of the regime was not affected, and the lives of the militiamen were cheap. They could be replaced by other peasant hirelings at the equivalent of $10 a month in Saigon piasters. Diem thought so little of them that he did not allow wounded militiamen to be treated in military hospitals. They had to go to the provincial hospitals, charnel houses where surgery for nonpaying cases like militiamen was crude and medicines scarce, because so much was stolen and sold by the Vietnamese doctors and staff. Infection was common from the vermin and open sewers. An intact regular army, however, was insurance for the president and his family that they would endure come what may.

  Vann argued to Cao that Diem’s prohibition against casualties was militarily absurd, that the Communists would win the war if the ARVN did not fight, and that it was Cao’s duty to tell his president this. Vann had still not fully reckoned with Cao’s capacity to rationalize whatever benefited Cao, and Vann was hoisted by his ego-building scheme. Cao transmogrified his refusal to fight into the stuff of military genius. He issued a message to his officers and men on October 31,1962, the seventh anniver
sary of the organization of the division, comparing his leadership in the northern Delta to that of Vo Nguyen Giap at Dien Bien Phu. Giap suffered by the comparison. “In the Dien Bien Phu battle of 1954, the tactics employed by Vo Nguyen Giap were so poor and so badly conceived that thousands of troops and people were killed needlessly in obtaining the victory,” Cao proclaimed.

  When Vann told Porter and Harkins of Diem’s secret order, and Harkins went to Diem to ask if he had issued it, Diem was prepared for him. He had heard arguments from the Americans before about aggressiveness. It was the American philosophy. Diem had convinced himself it was a poor approach. He refused to accept the proposition that he had a choice of risking his army or seeing the Communists win the war. He considered airplanes and artillery more effective instruments against guerrillas than infantry. The fact that none of his officers ever repeated the American argument to him strengthened his conviction. (Those who privately agreed with the advisors did not, of course, dare to say so.) He was also convinced that he had already started to win the war with a wise strategy that was in accord with the ideas he and his family had on how to rule the peasantry. He was gaining control over the peasants by herding them into “strategic hamlets.” Thousands of these fortified places, surrounded by barbed-wire fences, were being built in the countryside. The Americans were financing this national pacification program and supplying the barbed wire and other materials. Diem thought that he was separating the peasants from the Communists, drying up the sea in which the guerrilla fish of Mao Tse-tung’s metaphor swam. With the Strategic Hamlet Program well launched, there was no need to seek out infantry battles.

  Their relationship with the Americans was the one area in which Diem and his family had learned new lessons in craftiness. They did not hesitate to disagree with the Americans if they saw that confrontation was to their advantage. They had discovered that the Americans were susceptible to verbal bullying and blackmail. They had also found that frequently the best way to handle the American ambassadors and generals and senior CIA agents was to agree with them, to tell them what they wanted to hear, even if it was a lie. The Ngo Dinhs had learned that these important Americans would more often than not go away content, report what they had been told to Washington, and not inquire to see if it was the truth.

  When Harkins asked Diem if it was true that he had ordered his officers not to take casualties, Diem lied. It certainly was not true, Diem said. On the contrary, he had lectured the ARVN commanders and his province chiefs to be aggressive. He had ordered them to attack the Viet Cong without hesitation wherever they could be found. Harkins did not question Diem further. He began to accept Cao’s faked body counts and to pass these reports of Communist losses on to Washington with no warnings attached. Vann asked Porter for permission to deny Cao the use of American helicopters to try to put a halt to these farcical operations. Porter told him that Harkins forbade it.

  The relationship between the manipulated and the manipulator is a two-way exchange. Vann had thought that he was manipulating Cao, but Cao had gotten his way. Two American presidents, Eisenhower and Kennedy, had sent men of high reputation to Saigon to manipulate the Ngo Dinhs in the interest of the United States and the Ngo Dinhs had gotten their way.

  Through November and December, Vann watched the Communist-led guerrillas overrun more outposts, seize more modern American weapons, and build their battalions in the northern Mekong Delta. He got nowhere with Cao or Harkins. Vann became a frustrated and angry man. He had made the same mistake with Cao that his hero, Lansdale, had made with Diem at the commencement of this venture that had brought Vann to South Vietnam.

  BOOK TWO

  ANTECEDENTS

  TO A

  CONFRONTATION

  LOOK, THEY STEPPED all over my shoes,” Diem said with wonder on the return plane ride to Saigon, staring down at his scuffed and dusty shoes, which had been a lustrous black at the outset of the day. He had been reluctant to go, content to govern from his office in the palace. Now he was glad that he had listened to Lansdale and the Americans around Lansdale. Everet Bumgardner, a Virginian like Vann from the small town of Woodstock on the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley, began working his trade of propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam in the mid-1950s as a photo journalist for the U.S. Information Service. He remembered how enthusiastic he and the other Americans on the plane had been after this trip, one of the first visits by Diem in 1955 to what had been a Communist-controlled area, a “liberated zone” in the language of the guerrillas. They had flown up to the small port of Tuy Hoa on the Central Coast that morning. The French had always been unwilling to spare the manpower necessary to permanently occupy Tuy Hoa and the rice-farming hamlets in the valley leading into the mountains behind it. Ho Chi Minn’s Viet Minh guerrillas had held the region undisturbed, except for occasional French forays, during the nine years of the first war. The guerrillas had only recently withdrawn, marching up the coast to the larger port of Qui Nhon, where they had boarded Polish and Russian ships to redeploy north of the 17th Parallel as agreed to at Geneva.

  The CIA pilots had to put the old twin-engine C-46 down in an open field. The Viet Minh had destroyed the local airstrip. As soon as the plane stopped, a mass of peasants rushed to it, jostling around it so wildly that Bumgardner was afraid some of them might be killed by the propellers before the pilots could shut off the engines. When Diem emerged, the peasants overwhelmed his guards and almost trampled this short, plump figure dressed in the correct attire for senior officials—a white linen suit and a black tie. In their eagerness to see him and to touch his hand, some of the peasants accidentally stepped on his shod feet with their bare ones, imprinting the evidence of this frenzied welcome which he was now regarding in happy amazement.

  Although Diem’s brother and chief political advisor, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had sent organizers to Tuy Hoa several days earlier to arrange a reception, no one in Saigon had expected anything like this. The drive into town was an unfolding cheer of more peasants and townsfolk. The children and the young people waved miniature paper replicas of the flag of Diem’s Saigon government—a yellow banner with three horizontal red stripes across the center. Bumgardner was unable to make an accurate estimate of the crowd at the town soccer field where Diem spoke because the people were jammed into a mass that extended back from the small speaker’s stand set up for Diem at one end. There were at least 50,000 and possibly 100,000 persons. The size of the crowd astonished Bumgardner. Diem gave a speech on the evils of Communism and attacked Ho and the Viet Minh as puppets of the Russians and the Chinese. He accused Ho of seeking to destroy Vietnamese traditions and to impose an atheistic tyranny on the country. The stilted tones of his Hue accent did not seem to hinder his ability to communicate. The crowd shouted its approval and applauded each time he paused after making a point. Bumgardner photographed the enthusiastic faces and took notes for a story to accompany the pictures in Free World, a magazine published and distributed free by USIS in special editions in Vietnamese and the languages of the other non-Communist countries of Asia. USIS also made his photographs and stories available to friendly newspaper editors in Vietnam and elsewhere round the world.

  Listening to Diem marvel at his reception while riding back on the plane, Bumgardner decided that the peasants and townspeople were overjoyed to be freed from the oppression of Communism and welcomed this man as their liberator. He was convinced that he and other Americans in Vietnam would be able to promote Diem into a national hero to compete with the leader of the other side. Lansdale intended to turn Diem into another Ramón Magsaysay, the Filipino paragon of an anti-Communist and progressive Asian leader, and to transform South Vietnam into another Philippines of the mid-1950s, the model of the kind of working democracy the American empire preferred to foster in Asia.

  The men who ran the American imperial system—men like Dean Acheson, who had been Truman’s principal secretary of state, and the Dulles brothers in the Eisenhower administration, John Foster at the State Depar
tment and Allen at the CIA—were not naive enough to think they could export democracy to every nation on earth. The United States had established democratic governments in occupied West Germany and Japan and in its former colony of the Philippines. If American statesmen saw a choice and high strategy did not rule otherwise, they favored a democratic state or a reformist-minded dictatorship. Their high strategy was to organize the entire non-Communist world into a network of countries allied with or dependent on the United States. They wanted a tranquil array of nations protected by American military power, recognizing American leadership in international affairs, and integrated into an economic order where the dollar was the main currency of exchange and American business was preeminent.

  The United States did not seek colonies as such. Having overt colonies was not acceptable to the American political conscience. Americans were convinced that their imperial system did not victimize foreign peoples. “Enlightened self-interest” was the sole national egotism to which Americans would admit. The fashionable political commentators of the day intended more than a mere harkening back to the imperial grandeur of Britain and Rome when they minted the term “Pax Americana.” Americans perceived their order as a new and benevolent form of international guidance. It was thought to be neither exploitative, like the nineteenth-century-style colonialism of the European empires, nor destructive of personal freedom and other worthy human values, like the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and China and their Communist allies. Instead of formal colonies, the United States sought local governments amenable to American wishes and, where possible, subject to indirect control from behind the scenes. Washington wanted native regimes that would act as surrogates for American power. The goal was to achieve the sway over allies and dependencies which every imperial nation needs to work its will in world affairs without the structure of old-fashioned colonialism.