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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Life in Germany was much happier than she could have anticipated after her ordeal in New Jersey. John’s good mood at being in an overseas unit tended to make him give her a semblance of the marriage she wanted. He showed an interest in the children and on Sundays frequently took the family on bicycle trips along the dirt roads through the evergreen forests. Mary Jane would put the newest baby, Peter, who was born at Heidelberg in November 1955, in the basket of her bicycle. John carried little Tommy in the basket of his bicycle, and five-year-old Jesse rode in a seat on the back. Patricia, who became nine in the fall of 1955, and John Allen, who became eight that Christmas, followed on their small bikes. Mary Jane packed a lunch, and she and John strapped badminton rackets and poles and a net to their bicycles to set up a game at a picnic clearing. Every six months or so John went on leave and loaded the family into the car for a vacation. They drove to the Bavarian Alps on one occasion, toured Holland on another, and visited West Berlin, which bustled with a freedom that defied the Soviets, who kept it isolated.

  Patricia remembered that Christmas was always the best time of the year, because her father made such a fuss about it. One year he even painted a panorama of Santa Claus and his reindeer across the picture window in the living room of their apartment in Patrick Henry Village, the Army housing complex at Heidelberg. He insisted that they have a big tree and helped decorate it lavishly. A couple of days before Christmas he bought everyone lots of presents at the PX. Mary Jane later told Patricia that he would not let her go along, that he wanted to do all of the Christmas shopping by himself. John and Mary Jane would wrap the presents after the children had gone to sleep on Christmas Eve. They would then rouse Patricia and her brothers at 4:00 A.M. or SO and watch the children rush to the tree and whoop as they tore open their gifts.

  One afternoon in Heidelberg when Mary Jane was home and Peter and Tommy were having their naps, the door buzzer sounded. She opened the door to a German girl who spoke English. The girl said that she wanted to speak to Mary Jane about a private matter. Mary Jane took her into the living room and offered her a cup of coffee. The girl’s hand shook. She spilled some of the coffee on her dress as she tried to sip it. She started to sob and told Mary Jane a long tale of how John had seduced her by saying that he loved her and was going to divorce his wife and marry her. After a few weeks he suddenly dropped her; he was having his secretary at the office tell her that he was out whenever she telephoned, and he would not answer her letters pleading to see him. At first she had not wanted to confront Mary Jane, the girl said, but then she had decided it was the only way to learn the truth. She was so much in love with John that she had to know. He had seemed so sincere, and that was why she had gone to bed with him. Was it true that he and Mary Jane no longer loved each other and were going to be divorced?

  Mary Jane felt pity for the girl. John had probably used this same technique on dozens of girls, she thought; for all she knew, perhaps hundreds, at the rate he went through women. She told the girl that she believed John still loved her in his own way and there had been no discussion of divorce. If there was, she would fight a divorce, she said. She advised the girl to be more careful with men in the future. Mary Jane gave her a handkerchief to blow her nose and wipe her eyes and said that she would have to leave now because the older children were about to return from school. The girl did not mention her age, but was clearly still in her late teens.

  John did not deny sleeping with her. He did deny that he had said he loved her and had promised to marry her. He had better learn to control himself, Mary Jane said, before he made some young woman pregnant or ran across one who raised a stink when he dropped her and he hurt his career and his family. He told Mary Jane to leave him alone, that he knew how to handle himself.

  His success in the G-4 Division at the Heidelberg headquarters was even grander than the acclaim he had won at the 16th Infantry. If Vann’s degree of energy and verve is rare in the world of the fighting soldier, it is that much rarer in the world of the quartermaster. “Major Vann is a virtual dynamo in getting work done,” one of his superiors remarked on an efficiency report. “It would take the production of three or four average officers to equal his daily work production anywhere—in an office, on a staff study, or in the field.”

  Vann’s job in the Logistical Management Section was to analyze the Army supply system in Europe and recommend improvements. He approached it, as he did all professional tasks, by seeking the basics. He got authorization to travel. He went to the depots and found out what they had in stock and how they were issuing their supplies. He went to the combat units and found out what they needed and whether they were receiving it. Major Vann soon knew more than anyone else in the G-4 Division of U.S. Army Europe about how the supply system was actually functioning. He wrote up his findings in reports that were simple and incisive in their reasoning, full of facts that were surprising because no one else had thought to look for them, and illustrated with statistical tables that complemented his logic instead of cluttering it.

  He presented a plan to reorganize the entire system and eliminate many of the bottlenecks and other shortcomings. His plan was accepted by the two-star general in charge of the G-4 Division and by the four-star commander of U.S. Army Europe. Vann was appointed the action officer to implement his plan. The reorganization uncovered further problems. Vann again won acceptance of his views on how to solve them and was once more put in charge of carrying out the solution. He was promoted to chief of the Logistical Management Section and made the briefing officer for the G-4 Division. Whenever a civilian VIP or a touring general or admiral appeared in Heidelberg, Major Vann got out on the high wire in the briefing room to dazzle the eminent visitor with what a remarkable job the G-4 Division of U.S. Army Europe was doing. Wilbur Brucker, President Eisenhower’s secretary of the Army, came to the headquarters in July 1956 on an inspection trip. Major Vann briefed him on supply operations in Europe. The G-4 Division did work hard in those years of tension, and Vann was, in any case, convinced its performance was exemplary because his own was so good. Brucker and the other visitors wrote letters of appreciation afterward that went into Vann’s file, and his grateful superiors saw to it that his other accomplishments were also recorded for future promotion boards. He was twice sent as a special escort officer with newly arrived generals on orientation tours of the units the generals were to command. The trips were a compliment to a young major. He advised the generals on what questions to ask and also on the usefulness of the answers.

  “Vann is an … officer with a bright future ahead of him,” Bruce Palmer had predicted. Major Vann’s future was bright indeed. He and Mary Jane and the children sailed home from Germany in the summer of 1957 for a long leave before he started classes in the fall at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. He had been selected to attend it that spring as he was nearing completion of his two years at Heidelberg. His superiors at Heidelberg gave him the highest possible efficiency rating: “an outstanding officer of rare value to the service,” equally adept at staff or command. “He represents a great potential to the Army as a future leader of the Army.”

  John Vann fulfilled their expectations at Fort Leavenworth. His standing in the class there reflected the extent to which he had grown in his profession by diligence down through the years. He had graduated from the Basic Course at the Infantry School in 1947 in the bottom half of his class. He had completed the Advanced Course there in 1952 in the upper 20 percent. He graduated from the nine-month course at the Command and General Staff College in June 1958 in the top 2 percent, eleventh out of 532 officers in his class.

  The college had to mail him his diploma. He and the family left a week before the graduation ceremony in a Volkswagen bus he had bought in Germany and drove east to Syracuse, New York, so that he could start the summer session at the university there. While at Heidelberg he had agreed to a career specialty in logistics, because specialization was the most certain route to early promotion for an offic
er who was not a West Pointer. The Army had in turn approved his request for civilian postgraduate study at Syracuse University to obtain his master’s degree in business administration. By early May 1959, he was within three months of his MBA. He had also crammed in enough additional courses in public administration so that he would leave Syracuse with two courses and a thesis left to do for a doctorate in that field. He planned to take the two courses and write the thesis in Washington during a three- to four-year logistics staff assignment he was scheduled to begin at the Pentagon in the summer of 1959. He wanted the civilian degrees for their own sake, but also because they would help him win accelerated promotion to lieutenant colonel and beyond. He did not intend to stay in logistics. It bored him on a steady basis. He intended to work his way to command of an infantry battalion as quickly as possible after he became a lieutenant colonel, turn in another of his spectacular performances, and by then be far enough ahead of his contemporaries to win further accelerated promotions within the infantry itself. His future was assured. He could see his stars. Then his other life caught up with him.

  An agent from the criminal investigation division of the Military Police appeared in Syracuse on the morning of May 7, 1959, and called Vann out of class. The agent informed him of his Constitutional right not to incriminate himself, because he was going to be questioned about an accusation that could become a formal charge of statutory rape. He had been accused by another officer of having an affair with a fifteen-year-old girl while a student at Fort Leavenworth. Statutory rape is a felony under military law. If convicted, Vann could be sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Because of his record, a court-martial would most likely show mercy and dismiss him from the Army. Dismissal for an officer is the equivalent of dishonorable discharge for an enlisted man. He would be ruined in civilian life as well if that happened. Former soldiers with dishonorable discharges had a hard time finding decent low-level jobs in the pre-Vietnam atmosphere of the 1950s and early ’60s. What business firm would hire a dishonored officer as an executive?

  Vann was cagey. He said the agent’s questions did not surprise him. The girl had told a chaplain at Fort Leavenworth that he had had an affair with her, he said. He had received a letter from the chaplain about it shortly after reaching Syracuse and had written back to say that it wasn’t true. It was all a fantasy, he said. The girl was emotionally disturbed. At the agent’s request he signed and swore to a statement saying that he had not slept with her.

  Mary Jane was sewing when he came home in the afternoon. He told her the truth. When he told her who the girl was she screamed and threw a box of buttons at him. The girl had done some baby-sitting for Mary Jane. She had been an overweight fifteen-year-old, not pretty, and emotionally withdrawn and unhappy with her family life. Men as sexually insecure as Vann are sometimes drawn to girls like this. Mary Jane was already full of worry and didn’t know how she was going to stand any more. Peter had been in the hospital at Rome Air Force Base, thirty-five miles from Syracuse, for the last four months. Vann had driven him there at Mary Jane’s request for an examination in early January, about a month and a half after Peter’s third birthday, because his skin had started to turn yellow. The doctors said he had hepatitis. He got worse in the hospital. He lost weight, and the skin all over his body became deeply jaundiced. The doctors didn’t seem to know how to make him well. She and Vann had been having terrible arguments over the boy’s illness. He accused her of bringing on the hepatitis by neglecting Peter. She had become suspicious of the Air Force doctors and wanted to transfer Peter to a civilian hospital. The Rome unit was the only military hospital in the area. Government regulations required officers and enlisted men to pay for civilian medical treatment for themselves and their families if they chose it when military facilities were available. Vann was unwilling to pay the possibly large sums involved. He said that the civilian doctors would not be any better.

  Three days after the appearance of the CID agent, the Air Force doctors decided to release Peter from the hospital. They claimed that his condition had stabilized. The weight loss had recently stopped and the jaundice had diminished. Peter didn’t look that much better to Mary Jane, but she was glad to get him away from the Air Force doctors. He wasn’t home long before the jaundice returned in all of its gruesome hue and his stomach swelled up. Now Vann also became alarmed for Peter and did not object when Mary Jane said she was taking the boy to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, where she had been treated as a child. The doctors at Rochester confirmed the hepatitis diagnosis of the Air Force physicians and put Peter on the same cortisone medication, with the same lack of success.

  By mid-June, Mary Jane was convinced that she was going to lose her son. With his swollen stomach and his spindly arms and legs sticking out from his body, Peter reminded her of child victims she had seen in photographs of Nazi concentration camps. Someone on the hospital staff at Rochester was also apparently convinced that Peter was going to die soon and tipped off an enterprising representative of a funeral home. He approached Vann and Mary Jane while they were visiting one evening and asked if he could ease their burden. She went berserk and raved at the man. As angry as he was himself, Vann had to restrain her. They drove Peter to the hospital at Syracuse University Medical School. The doctors there said that Peter might have a blood disorder, but they really didn’t know what was wrong. Their advice was to take him to the Children’s Hospital in Boston, the best pediatric medical center in the world. Vann carried Peter out of the hospital wrapped in a blanket and laid him on the backseat of the car. He dropped Mary Jane off at the house to stay with the other children and drove straight through the night to Boston.

  He returned to Syracuse a day later and told her he had had a horrible experience getting Peter admitted to the Children’s Hospital. When Vann had walked in carrying Peter early in the morning the clerk at the admissions desk had said the hospital’s services were in such demand that it could not take patients right off the street. Vann needed an appointment to have one of the staff doctors examine his son. There were no beds available at the moment. The best the clerk could do was to put Peter on a waiting list. Vann said he barged past the admissions desk and roamed the corridors with Peter in his arms until he found a doctor whom he talked into examining the boy. He told the doctor that he didn’t care about the fees, that he would pay whatever the hospital wanted—just please save his son. The doctor said that Peter’s chances did not appear good, but that he would do his best, and he arranged Peter’s admission to the hospital. A bed opened up because another child who had been one of the doctor’s patients had just died. Peter might need surgery to try to find out what was wrong with him, Vann said. Mary Jane immediately closed down the house they were renting in Syracuse—sending the other children to her mother in Rochester and putting her furniture in storage—and moved into a rooming house in Boston to be with Peter. Vann stayed in Syracuse to finish his courses.

  After a week of tests, the doctors at the Children’s Hospital decided that exploratory surgery was necessary. Peter didn’t have hepatitis. The cortisone the Air Force doctors and the civilian physicians at Strong Memorial had been giving him for this presumed liver infection had been aggravating the problem he did have. He also was not as close to death as he looked, but the condition from which he was suffering and continued mistreatment of it would eventually have killed him. The exploratory surgery revealed that a temporary disorder of the pancreas gland had caused an obstruction in the duct leading from the pancreas to the small intestine. (The pancreas secretes an alkaline solution that is required for the digestive process.) The disordered pancreas and the obstructed duct had in turn caused all sorts of other abnormalities, including a malfunctioning liver. Peter’s body was in such disarray that he had the highest cholesterol count in the history of the Children’s Hospital. The surgeon who did the exploratory work and diagnosed the problem also removed the obstruction in the same operation and sent Peter back to his bed, a child ready to mend. The hospi
tal released him in the first part of July, two weeks after the surgery, although Peter was to be many months recovering fully. Vann came down and picked up Mary Jane and his son and drove them to her parents.

  The story of how Vann saved Peter’s life by begging a doctor at the Children’s Hospital to accept him became part of the family lore. Peter thought of it as he stood beside the grave at Arlington and the chaplain handed him the folded flag from the coffin. Vann did save his son’s life by acting immediately on the advice of the Syracuse University doctors. Mary Jane had also saved the boy by goading Vann into letting her take Peter to civilian hospitals. The truth was that Vann hadn’t had any difficulty getting Peter admitted in Boston. The Children’s Hospital never turns away a child in need of care. The pediatrician on duty in the hospital’s emergency room when Vann arrived had examined Peter and ordered him admitted, and a staff pediatrician and a surgeon had been assigned to his case. Vann had invented the drama because he wanted Mary Jane to think well of him at a time when she had reason to think otherwise.