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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Secretary McNamara, who personified the hubris of the senior civilian leadership with his cocksureness and naive acceptance of his generals at face value, had put the self-fulfilling success machine in motion when the American war effort was only five months old. At the end of his first visit to Vietnam in May 1962, he gave a press conference in the living room of Nolting’s Saigon residence. He had been in the country just two days, and he was in a hurry to board his four-engine jet and fly back to Washington to report to President Kennedy. Running the world was a big job, and high American officials of McNamara’s generation were always in a hurry, hurrying to make decisions so that they could hurry on to more decisions. McNamara was admired for his capacity for decision-making at a trot. His staff once calculated that he made 629 major decisions in a single month. The fact that he never seemed to worry about the possibility of a mistake and never looked back afterward was also regarded as a virtue.

  He was unshaven at the press conference, because he had not wanted to waste time using a razor that morning. His khaki shirt and trousers were rumpled and his hiking boots dusty from touring the countryside. His notebooks were filled with figures he had gathered by incessantly questioning every American and Vietnamese officer or official he met at each stop. The reporters asked him what impression he was carrying back to the president. “I’ve seen nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future,” he said. The reporters pressed him. Surely he could not be this optimistic this soon? He would not yield under the questioning. He was a Gibraltar of optimism. I assumed that he had gained an unfortunate notion of what constituted good advertising in his years at the Ford Motor Company. I caught him outside as he was getting into his car. I said that I was not quoting him, that the question was off the record because I wanted to know the truth. How could a man of his caliber be this sanguine about a war we had barely begun to fight? He gave me the McNamara look, eyes focusing boldly through rimless glasses. “Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning this war,” he said. He sat down on the backseat of the sedan. A Marine guard slammed the door shut and the driver sped off to the airport.

  At a strategy conference in Honolulu on July 23, 1962, three days after the fiasco on the Plain of Reeds when Cao dismayed Vann by letting 300 guerrillas escape into Cambodia—including the company of training cadres, who would return to germinate more Viet Cong—McNamara asked Harkins how long it would take “before the VC could be eliminated as a disturbing force.” The question followed a briefing by Harkins on the current state of the war. Prior to leaving Saigon for Honolulu, Harkins had requested and received from Vann a special after-action report on the July 20 engagement. The top-secret record of the conference shows that he did not permit anything Vann told him to interfere with what he wished to tell the assemblage of dignitaries. He gave them an extremely optimistic estimate of the situation characterized by his favorite briefing fare:

  Contact is being made with the VC every day. During April 434 ground operations were mounted. This was increased to 441 in May. Over 1,000 air sorties were flown in June. The GVN still needs to work on their organization but progress is being made. PRES DIEM has indicated that he plans that his troops will get out into the field more often and stay out longer.

  The general ended his briefing with a pronouncement that would have astounded Vann: “There is no doubt that we are on the winning side.”

  McNamara was understandably pleased. “Six months ago we had practically nothing and we have made tremendous progress to date,” he remarked to the gathering. Harkins then replied to McNamara’s question as to how long it would take to defeat the Viet Cong: “One year from the time that we are able to get [the Saigon forces] fully operational and really pressing the VC in all areas.” He indicated that the start of this one-year period would be early 1963 when his Operation Explosion was scheduled to go off.

  The secretary of defense thought it unwise to be so optimistic. “We must take a conservative view and assume it will take three years instead of one year,” McNamara said. “We must assume the worst and make our plans accordingly.” He was worried that American public opinion and Congress might force the administration to withdraw from Vietnam after Americans began to die there. “We must line up our long-range programs as it may become difficult to retain public support for our operations in Vietnam,” he explained. “The political pressure will build up as U.S. losses continue to occur.”

  With this worst-case scenario of three years to victory settled, McNamara instructed Harkins to draw up a plan to phase out the U.S. expeditionary corps and hand over what was left of the mopping up to the Saigon forces by the end of 1965. In the meantime, Harkins was to train enough Vietnamese to man the fighter-bombers, helicopters, and other gear that would be left behind. Harkins’s staff obligingly formulated a withdrawal plan, entitled “Comprehensive Three-Year Plan for South Vietnam.” It called for reducing the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam to 1,600 by December 1965. This would not meet the 685-man limit allowed by the Geneva Agreements of 1954, but the level would be low enough for the American public to lose interest and would be insignificant by comparison with South Korea, where 40,000 American troops remained nine years after the conclusion of that war.

  Harkins may have consciously deceived McNamara and Taylor and others above him. He may have thought that since he was going to win anyway, what was the harm in fudging the score a bit to keep his superiors happy? If so, he gave no indication of this to anyone around him, including men he trusted like Charlie Timmes. The more likely explanation seems to be that Harkins was not lying, that he willed himself to believe what he wished to believe and to reject what he wished to reject.

  The after-action report on Ap Bac that Vann compiled with such passion and concern and the judgment that Porter rendered with the logic and insight of an old infantry officer merely angered the commanding general. Harkins placed Porter and Vann in a category that was above, but not far above, the reporters who exasperated him for the same reason. They were all denying the truth of the approaching victory that he could so plainly see. York warned Porter that Harkins was so incensed that Porter should not be surprised if he found himself being fired along with Vann. Porter and York had become friends while serving together in the 1950s at Fort Benning. Another brigadier general who was also a friend of Porter’s from Benning years separately passed him the same warning. The fear of a scandal that had prevented Harkins from dismissing Vann and the imminence of Porter’s departure provided Porter with equivalent protection, although Porter was not aware of this protection at the time. He quickly noticed the commanding general’s displeasure. Harkins came to the Delta on another flying tour and did not invite Porter to ride along in the twin-engine Beechcraft. While Harkins continued otherwise to be polite to his face, Porter sensed the irritation beneath.

  Harkins saw no reason to postpone the start of his Operation Explosion. On the contrary, he wanted to move up its scheduled detonation from mid-February to the end of January. On January 19, 1963, three days after Porter had forwarded Vann’s report and his own warning of disaster to Saigon, Harkins also sent to Adm. Harry Felt, Commander in Chief Pacific, in Honolulu, the final draft of the program for victory by the end of 1965—the Comprehensive Three-Year Plan for South Vietnam that McNamara had requested. Harkins continued to believe that he would not require three years.

  Paul Harkins need not have had the last word at this moment when the war was at the meeting of two trails. The Joint Chiefs voted to dispatch an investigating team of six generals and an admiral, assisted by sundry colonels and lieutenant colonels, from the three major services and the Marine Corps. They were to spend as much time as necessary in South Vietnam, and they had the broadest possible mandate. The team was instructed “to form a military judgment as to the prospects for a successful conclusion of the conflict in a reasonable period of time” and to recommend in its report any “modifications to our program which appear
ed to be desirable.” The head of the team, an Army general, stated simply the question the mission was to answer: “Are we winning or are we losing?”

  The Joint Chiefs’ team was a distinguished group that was presumably capable of rising to its task. The team chief was one of the Army’s most prominent generals. The other members were drawn from among the ranking officers in the Pentagon or were designated heirs to leadership. The delegations from the three major services were each headed by the deputy for operations who also acts as a proxy for his service head within the organization of the Joint Chiefs. The deputies meet as regularly as the chiefs do to dispose of ordinary business and to fight the exploratory skirmishes on issues that are scheduled to come before the service heads themselves. The Marines, as the ostensibly junior service, settled for a brigadier general who was a well-regarded aviator. In fact, the Corps was more than amply represented in an unofficial capacity by the team member with the greatest potential for influencing the mission’s report. Maj. Gen. Victor Krulak was a fifty-year-old bantam Marine who had won the Navy Cross, an award that ranks just below the Congressional Medal of Honor, for heroism against the Japanese in the Pacific. Krulak was the only general on the team who had been to Vietnam before. He had accompanied McNamara there on the secretary of defense’s first visit in May 1962, and he had been back again in the late summer of 1962 when Vann was still inflicting fearsome casualties on the Viet Cong in the northern Delta. The war in Vietnam was Krulak’s business. He was its inspector-general in Pentagon heraldry, overseeing the conflict from Washington on a day-to-day basis for the Joint Chiefs and McNamara as their special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities (SACSA). He was going this time as the delegate from the Joint Staff that served the Joint Chiefs.

  If one were to select any man in the hierarchy of the U.S. armed forces in 1963 with the imagination to grasp the importance of this moment and not let it escape him, Victor Krulak would probably have been that man. During his twenty-eight and a half years of service he had displayed a capacity for innovative military thinking that could be described without exaggeration as genius. The war with Spain and the turn-of-the-century drive for empire had transformed the Marines from shipboard soldiers into an amphibious assault force that prided itself on anticipating the needs of the next war to fulfill a mission of expanding American power through the Caribbean and Central America and across the Pacific into Asia. Krulak’s career reflected this spirit of the Corps. The son of a Denver gold-mine manager who mined enough to retire and let his son grow up in the tranquillity of San Diego, Krulak gained admission to the Naval Academy in 1930 at the age of sixteen—the year after his father lost his fortune in the crash of the stock market and returned to Denver and mining—by passing the entrance examination with just a ninth-grade education. His fellow midshipmen at Annapolis nicknamed him “Brute” to poke fun at his undernourished appearance. He was slighter than Vann. He stood five feet pve inches and weighed 138 pounds; he needed an exemption from the regulations to obtain his commission in the Marines.

  As a fresh-caught first lieutenant in the intelligence section of the 4thMarine Regiment at Shanghai in 1937, Brute Krulak made a contribution to the winning of World War II that reserved him a place of note in the history of the Corps. The Marines lacked an essential tool for the war they were anticipating with imperial Japan: landing craft capable of rapidly unloading infantry, vehicles, and heavy weapons like artillery and tanks onto a beach. The Japanese militarists set out to conquer all of China in 1937. By the fall of that year they reached Shanghai, China’s main seaport, and were about to seize the city (except for the International Settlement, a privileged commercial enclave the Marines were guarding) with an assault landing. Krulak knew from intelligence reports that the Japanese were also experimenting with amphibious operations. He decided that they might reveal something valuable and that he would watch. He persuaded a fleet intelligence officer to lend him a Navy tugboat and a Navy photographer equipped with a telephoto lens. The captains of the Japanese destroyers rendered the courtesy of the sea to the little tug carrying this Marine spy bent on their future destruction. As the boat drew abreast of one of the destroyers bombarding the shore, the guns would go silent, the Japanese destroyer crew would give the traditional salute from one navy to another—the American tug crew returning it—and the destroyer would then resume firing when the tug passed.

  Not long after the landing commenced, Krulak spotted the answer to the Corps’ quest. One type of Japanese landing craft had a square bow that was also a retractable ramp. When the craft reached shore, the crew would drop the bow. The infantrymen inside would charge right out or the vehicles in the boat would drive across the ramp and onto the beach. The boat crew would then raise the ramp and return to a transport ship for more troops or vehicles. Nothing had to be laboriously hoisted over the sides as with the landing craft the Marines were then using. Krulak told the photographer to concentrate on the ramp-bow craft and made it the principal subject of his report. He selected photographs that best illustrated it and supplemented the photographs with sketches that further explained how well this simple design solved the problem of rapid unloading. The report was relayed up through channels to Washington with praise from his superiors.

  Lieutenant Krulak did not let the matter rest on applause. Reassigned to the Washington area nearly two years later, he learned that Marine Corps Headquarters had referred his report to the Navy’s Bureau of Ships. The two civil servants in a broom-closet office that was the small-craft section of “Buships” had decided that Krulak was such a green lieutenant he did not know a bow from a stern. (The stern of the Japanese landing craft was somewhat pointed, as a bow normally is.) They had tucked his discovery away in a filing cabinet as a curiosity. “Some nut out in China,” a marginal comment read.

  Krulak retrieved his report and took it and a balsa-wood model he made of the Japanese craft to one of the most farsighted officers ever to command Marines, then Brig. Gen. Holland M. “Howling Mad” Smith, the father of modern amphibious warfare, who was to lead the way across the Pacific and watch the men of the Corps raise the Stars and Stripes over Mount Suribachi on I wo Jima. The Marines had found the hull design they needed in a craft originally created for rum-running during Prohibition by a New Orleans boat builder named Andrew Jackson Higgins. The retractable ramp-bow turned Higgins’s boat into an assault vehicle.

  The result was the LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel), the standard landing craft of World War II. A larger version to bring a thirty-ton Sherman tank ashore became the LCM (Landing Craft, Mechanized). Krulak’s inspiration carried American and Allied troops and the tanks and trucks and artillery and ammunition and other supplies and equipment they needed to prevail onto every beachhead from Saipan to Normandy. The 1937 report from the lieutenant in Shanghai and his sketches and the photographs of the Japanese landing craft were one day to be displayed in a glass case at the Marine Corps Museum in the Washington Navy Yard.

  World War II did not diminish Krulak’s imagination. In 1948, when the helicopter was regarded as a toy, he foresaw the rapidity with which its technology would mature into large and powerful machines. He prompted the Corps into staging the first helicopter assault maneuver in history on May 23, 1948, with first-generation Sikorskys, each capable of carrying only three Marines, from an aircraft carrier anchored off Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The helicopter tactics that were considered so new in 1963 had been sketched out fifteen years earlier by Krulak when he was a lieutenant colonel on the staff of the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, near Washington. All the basic elements of the Army’s current helicopter operations manual were copied from a Marine manual he shaped then.

  The originality of Krulak’s mind was not the sole reason for his potential to influence the mission of inquiry the Joint Chiefs were sending to Vietnam. He had also formed an enviable relationship that gave anything Brute Krulak said unusual credibility with the president of the United States a
nd others at the top. He had chanced upon the opportunity to form it while demonstrating during World War II that he could fight as well as he could think. Holland Smith had appointed Krulak his aide, and when Pearl Harbor occurred he was a captain on Smith’s staff in San Diego. He decided that the quickest way to get out of staff work and into the shooting was to volunteer for the first dangerous and unorthodox assignment he heard about. This turned out to be parachute training. By the fall of 1943, Captain Krulak was a lieutenant colonel leading the 2nd Marine Parachute Battalion in the South Pacific. Krulak’s “ParaMarines” never had an opportunity to jump into battle. Instead they fought as an independent amphibious assault unit for Adm. William “Bull” Halsey.

  In late October 1943, Krulak was ordered to conduct a series of night amphibious raids on the island of Choiseul in the Solomons to trick the Japanese into thinking that Halsey was trying to capture the place and divert Japanese reinforcements from the garrison at Bougainville, the largest island in the chain, where a landing by 14,000 Marines was to take place on November 1, 1943. During a fighting withdrawal after one of the raids, a landing craft carrying about thirty of Krulak’s men, a number of them wounded, struck a coral reef and began to sink. A torpedo boat from a Navy squadron assigned to support the landings dashed in and took many of the Marines aboard, including three severely wounded. The rescue was a courageous act. The reef was close to the beach, and the Japanese were shooting at the torpedo boat while its captain and crew held it alongside the landing craft to take off the Marines. Had they not been picked up, some of the Marines would have been killed by the Japanese and the wounded would certainly have drowned. As it was, one of the gravely wounded men died shortly afterward in the bunk of the torpedo boat’s skipper, a twenty-six-year-old Navy lieutenant. When the torpedo boat pulled up to Krulak’s headquarters ship to transfer the rescued Marines, Krulak wanted to express his gratitude. Privileges were rare in the Solomons in 1943. Whiskey was especially hard to come by. Krulak had a fifth of the popular brand Three Feathers stored in his duffel on Vella Lavella, another island his battalion had captured earlier. “If we ever get back to Vella Lavella alive, that bottle of Three Feathers is yours,” he told the lieutenant.