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

by Sheehan, Neil

  The Rangers were evacuated from Kangwha when the Eighth Army retreated again after Walker’s death, but were sent on new behind-the-lines operations to obtain intelligence for the first counteroffensive launched by General Ridgway in late January. Vann had to avoid anything more serious than a skirmish during these missions. An encounter with a large Chinese force would have doomed his men to no purpose. He thought he might have an opportunity to show his mettle on February 10, 1951, when the Rangers teamed up with the tanks of the 25th Division’s mechanized reconnaissance company to help recapture Inchon. There were only stragglers to fight. The Chinese abandoned the city.

  Vann did not steal the tale of Puckett’s valor right away. On the contrary, he behaved with the loyalty he always showed toward a brave fellow officer. He was responsible for Puckett’s receiving the Distinguished Service Cross. He interviewed survivors of the night on Hill 205, collected affidavits of Puckett’s courageous leadership, and submitted a recommendation for the award along with a proposed citation to accompany the medal. He also obtained decorations for the enlisted men who rescued Puckett. When he and Puckett met later at Fort Benning, Vann asked to see the citation and said how pleased he was that it had been approved exactly as he had written it.

  The theft of Puckett’s story was to come a dozen years later in Vietnam. Vann appropriated it for a number of reasons. The John Vann of Vietnam could not have been the John Vann he wanted to be and not have led his Ranger company through a night of heroic resistance when the Chinese attacked in Korea. He knew he would have behaved just as courageously as Puckett had, and so he wove the story into his legend. He recalled the details fairly well from having written the citation, and he added a few others to give the episode broader meaning—for example, the “over 500 dead Chinese soldiers” he had seen by the dawn’s light “going down the way the Chinese had come up.” (Puckett didn’t know how many Chinese they had killed. There had been no way to count.)

  The picture of hundreds and hundreds of bodies and Vann’s description of the Chinese “human-wave tactics” were useful for his argument in Vietnam that Americans could never win a war of attrition on the Asian mainland. There would always be more of them than of us no matter how much firepower we had, he would say, and then cite what had happened to him and his Ranger company. The way he modified the details in his mind—”when the sixth human-wave attack ran through us”—also reflected the image of China he was to bring to Vietnam. To Vann, China’s millions were not a transitory military asset and a permanent impediment to achieving true power through modernization. Rather, they were an ever-expanding menace to be contained. The image was shared by most Americans of this time. Korea made the image vivid and tangible to Vann.

  Like many Army officers of his generation, Vann had a tendency as well to rationalize what happened in North Korea. The Army was too close to its World War II victory to admit that its leaders had been outgeneraled and that, with some exceptions like Puckett’s Rangers and the Marines, the American soldier had been outfought by his Chinese opponents because he was so unprepared and misinformed. Vann told Mary Jane afterward that MacArthur had made a terrible mistake in doing battle with the Chinese, but he was inclined to excuse the defeat by attributing it to numbers. MacArthur’s accomplishments were too large, he had wrapped himself too artfully in the flag and in the pride of the nation, and his excuses were too eloquent for Americans like Vann to see his flaws of character and his loss of touch with his profession. It was to take Truman four and a half months to fire him, and the president dismissed Mac Arthur then only because the general, in his craving to vindicate his military reputation, insisted on publicly lobbying for all-out war with China. When he came home MacArthur received a hysterical welcome from a country that still loved him.

  Ironically, Vann was never to receive the decoration he deserved for saving the rifle companies in the Pusan Perimeter. The major from the intelligence section who witnessed the fights from another spotter plane was preoccupied with his own work and did not mention what he saw to Gassett. Vann’s calm demeanor while loading the ammunition and the luck that none of the planes was seriously damaged gave Gassett the misimpression that the pilots really were exaggerating the risk. Vann was not shy about letting Gassett know that he shuttled trains and truck convoys and moved men and supplies faster than any other division transportation officer in the Eighth Army. (He received a second Bronze Star for his skill at this work during the pursuit of the routed North Koreans up the peninsula after Inchon.) He boasted of these accomplishments to Gassett in the same way he had boasted to Crutchfield about the athletic awards he won at the junior high school in Norfolk. He measured his worth by his achievements. He never gave Gassett any indication of how dangerous the ammunition drops to the surrounded companies had been. His silence did not come from lack of desire for a medal. He told Mary Jane afterward how much he had wanted to win an impressive decoration in Korea. He knew that he would appear to be asking for a medal if he described the flights to Gassett. A medal for bravery was one of the few things he valued so highly that he would not ask or scheme for it. If it did not come his way by itself, he did not want it. He said nothing, and Gassett, a conservative man who believed that an officer took the risks necessary to do his job, only recommended that Vann be given an Air Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, the equivalent of receiving the medal twice. An Air Medal is a mundane award for a specific number of flights in a combat area, without regard to the degree of hazard involved. The recommendation was lost by the clerks somewhere along the chain of command.

  (Eight years later in Heidelberg, Germany, the intelligence officer met Gassett again and told him the extraordinary daring he had witnessed. The two men wrote a description of Vann’s exploit, the intelligence officer attached an affidavit of what he had seen, and Gassett recommended that Vann be decorated with the Silver Star for Gallantry. Vann was denied the medal on one of those Catch-22 technicalities that military bureaucrats seem to have a gift for inventing. The law would have permitted him to receive the award by raising Gassett’s original recommendation for an Air Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster to a recommendation for the Silver Star. The law even provided for the consideration of lost recommendations if evidence could be found that they had once been submitted. The evidence in Vann’s case was a carbon of the original recommendation in his personnel file and Gassett’s word that he had submitted it. The Office of The Adjutant General ruled that this evidence was insufficient and that separate evidence had to be found in its records to prove that the recommendation had been “placed in military channels” prior to being lost. Separate evidence could not be found, because the recommendation had been lost. Vann would have to wait for Ap Bac to receive his first medal for valor in the Distinguished Flying Cross.)

  Vann might still have won the high decoration he wanted in Korea if he had been able to lead his Ranger company long enough to run into a hard fight with the Chinese and distinguish himself. He kept the company only two and a half months. Jesse, who was to object so much to his second war, ended his first one prematurely.

  John Vann had never seen his second son. Jesse had been born on August 5, 1950, while his father and the 25th Division were in desperate battle to hold the southwest corner of the Pusan Perimeter. The Army hospital at Osaka was in such turmoil that the nurse was unable to find clean sheets for the bed when Mary Jane went there with labor pains. The obstetrician was in surgery helping with the latest group of wounded to arrive on the planes from Korea and rushed over to the delivery room just before Mary Jane started to give birth.

  Jesse was a pretty baby, with light blond hair and large blue eyes, but sickly, without much appetite. Mary Jane blamed his weakness on her foolishness in listening to another obstetrician at the prenatal clinic who had instructed her to diet during her pregnancy. Instead of eating for two, according to her Grandmother Allen’s old saying, as she had done with Patricia and John Allen, she had often eaten little but celery and carrots. In early February 19
51, when Jesse was six months old, his breathing became shallow and his eyes began to protrude. He kept moving to the foot of the crib, another old-wives’-tale symptom of illness in a child. Mary Jane couldn’t understand what might be wrong with him, because he was not running a temperature. The pediatrician who examined him at the hospital happened to have worked with meningitis prior to being sent to Japan. He did a spinal tap. The analysis of the fluid showed that Jesse had a form of meningitis, attacking the layer of tissue covering the brain. The pediatrician told Mary Jane that he might be able to save the baby with a recently developed treatment, but that Jesse’s chances were not good. As she walked down a corridor in shock, Mary Jane met a friend, another officer’s wife who was working at the hospital as a Red Cross volunteer. Mary Jane broke down and told her friend the news. The friend sent an urgent message to Korea through Red Cross channels. Vann found himself on a plane with emergency-leave papers in his pocket.

  He surprised her by arriving unexpectedly at the house. The friend had called to say that he was on his way, but he had to change planes in Tokyo and Mary Jane had not known when he would reach Osaka. She was overcome at the joy of having him home again and having him embrace her, despite the reason for his return. He was dressed in clean fatigues he had been given at the delousing station at the Tokyo airfield. He took off his cap to show her how his head had also been shaved to deprive the lice of their best hiding place. He was amused at his bald pate. “Don’t worry about catching any from me,” he said, explaining how thoroughly he had been fumigated.

  They drove to the hospital immediately. In the couple of days it had taken for the message to reach the division headquarters and for Vann to return to Osaka, Jesse had started to hold his own against the disease. The doctor was encouraged. Vann comforted Mary Jane. They had been lucky with Patricia and John Allen, he said, and Jesse would recover and someday be as healthy as they were.

  When the child survived the crisis and the doctor wanted Vann sent home because Jesse had a long period of recuperation ahead and could get better treatment in the United States, Vann resisted going. The division headquarters was informed of the doctor’s wish and sent Vann a message at the end of February, as his two-week leave was almost over, telling him that he was being given a compassionate transfer. He telephoned Korea and said there was no need for him to go home, that Mary Jane could take Jesse and the two older children to her parents in Rochester by herself. He said he wanted to return to his company. The headquarters assumed he was trying to behave like a good soldier and refused to listen. He was told that as a captain he would be coming up for rotation during the summer in any case to attend the next Advanced Course at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. In the meantime an officer with his experience was needed at the new Ranger Training Command there. His reassignment orders were being cut. He had no choice.

  Mary Jane sensed how much he resented giving up the war and his Ranger company. His attitude hurt her badly. She had looked forward eagerly to having him return and to sharing things with him again. Physically nothing was different between them. The physical attraction had always been strong and they renewed the relationship undiminished, but John did not reminisce when they were together and reveal his thoughts as he had before. She tried to talk to him about the life that she and the children had led while he had been away. He did not respond. She could tell that his mind was still in Korea with his company. She may also have sensed a change in him because they had reacted so differently to the war. For him the war had been the most fulfilling experience of his life. No time had hung on his hands. Nothing had been trivial or dull. Every day had been meaningful, every act important and urgent. He had been fascinated to learn how he excelled at war’s demands, how far he could rise above other men in its test. Intellectually she had accepted the justification of the war at face value, as she did everything else she was told. Emotionally she had rejected it, because the war had taken John away and what she saw of it frightened her.

  General Kean had asked all of the officers’ wives to work either as nurse’s aides and Red Cross volunteers at the hospital or in helping sort the wounded at the airfield when they were flown in from Korea. Mary Jane had chosen to work at the airfield, because she lived closer to it. The walking wounded were escorted into a hangar and sat on benches while a doctor and several medical corpsmen assigned them to buses that took them to different sections of the hospital, depending on their wounds. The serious cases with shattered limbs and grave intestinal, chest, or head injuries were carried directly from the planes to ambulances. Before they served coffee and cocoa to the walking wounded and assisted them onto the buses, Mary Jane and the other wives would go into the ambulances and try to comfort the badly wounded men. The sight of this human wreckage coming off the planes stunned her. She had never imagined such brutality. For the rest of her life she was to recall the faces of these young men and the way their bodies were broken. After she overcame her initial reaction, the dread that one of the figures on a stretcher might be John, she could not help seeing the wounded as boys. At twenty-three she was not much older than most of these soldiers of eighteen and nineteen and twenty, but she was a mother with two sons of her own. It seemed so wrong to her that this should be happening to these boys. They should be in college, or working at their first jobs, or out on a date, not getting mangled. She wondered if someday one of her sons would be taken and torn apart like this in some other war. She was struck at how naive she had been to think that the Army was like Coca-Cola or some other big corporation that periodically sent husbands and families to pleasant overseas stations. Now she realized that the business of the Army was making war.

  John’s resentment at being forced to leave the war would pass, Mary Jane felt, but there was something else between them that time did not seem to change, despite their physical attachment. It was John’s sexual compulsion. She had learned of it before he left for Korea. It was another of the unsettling discoveries she had made in the house on the hill. He was making love to the two Japanese housemaids. At first she was outraged that he would betray her and magnify the indignity by doing so in her home. Then she became fearful because she thought that if she confronted him openly, it might destroy their marriage, and every action she took to show her disapproval silently only brought firmer resistance from him. The maids, who were sixteen to eighteen years old, could hardly refuse him, with jobs and food so scarce for Japanese in 1949–50 She nevertheless decided to fire the maid he seemed most actively involved with and hoped that he would get the message. He ignored it and took up with the new maid she hired. When Mary Jane fired her and did not replace her, he hired another second maid himself without informing her. She could tell that he had selected this latest girl and brought her into the house in order to make love to her. When Mary Jane fired this girl too, he got still another. His activity with the maids did not seem to affect his ability or desire to make love to her. It seemed that John had plenty of sexual energy to spare. Mary Jane had remained silent, but for the first time in the marriage there had been tension between them. He made clear that he was going to have his harem and that he expected her to accept his behavior. He showed no sign of guilt.

  At Fort Benning, which the Vanns reached in early May 1951 after the voyage home and a long visit with the Aliens in Rochester, John substituted American women for the Japanese maids. The family lived in one of the new garden-apartment complexes the Army had constructed on the post with funds flowing from the Korean War. John often went out in the evening after dinner, saying that he had a basketball game or had to study at the post library. Mary Jane continued to say nothing. Instead she retaliated by becoming bitchy with him when she could not contain her anger, but she usually controlled herself and endured his infidelities. The parachute jumping and other rigorous exercise at the Ranger Training Command and then the eight months of studying his profession in the Advanced Course at the Infantry School kept him in good humor. He was attentive to her need for diversion from the
children and took her to parties and bridge games with fellow officers and their wives. They frequently got together with Ralph Puckett and his fiancée to charcoal-broil steaks while the men talked about the war. (Puckett’s shoulder and feet were being rebuilt by the surgeons at the Fort Benning Hospital.)

  On many evenings when John was off pursuing women, Mary Jane was also preoccupied with nursing Jesse through bouts of pneumonia, which kept recurring during his first three years. To relieve the congestion in Jesse’s lungs the doctors had her improvise a steam tent by draping a sheet over his crib and putting a vaporizer underneath. Afraid to leave him, she would sit for hours by the crib. His head was too big for his little body. His eyes still bulged from the pressure on the brain, and the doctors had to tap the skull cavity once to remove fluid. The meningitis also caused lesions on the brain. They gradually scarred over, but the constant illness delayed Jesse’s mental and physical development. He walked late and did not speak his first word until he was two.

  When Vann finished his course at the Infantry School in the spring of 1952 and was assigned to Rutgers University as an ROTC instructor, a crueler time began for Mary Jane. He requested the assignment so that he could take his bachelor’s degree in business administration through spare-time and night classes. He needed at least a bachelor’s degree for career purposes, and given his talent at mathematics and statistics and his earlier year at Rutgers in economics, business administration was a logical subject. He drove to New Jersey ahead of time and rented a house for the family in Parlin, a small town east of New Brunswick where the university is situated. The location made sense to him, because the rent for a house large enough for a wife and three children was cheaper in Parlin than in other communities nearer the campus and yet he was still within commuting distance.