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

by Sheehan, Neil

  At night, after dinner with Hanh, Vann and Ramsey would stay up late in their office at the province headquarters (they had electricity and the comfort of fans there) discussing the war and mulling over the events of the day. Ramsey pointed out to Vann that the hunger for education Vann was seeing in the peasant children would, under the Saigon system, end in frustration for those with the most intelligence and initiative. Ramsey had learned enough about South Vietnamese society to know that the educational system set up by the French and perpetuated by the Saigon regime effectively reserved secondary and higher education, and therefore the leadership positions in non-Communist society, for the urban middle and upper classes and for the former landed class of the countryside that had fled to the towns and cities. If a peasant child managed to get through the five years of elementary education, he faced a dead end. The nearest secondary schools were in the district centers. The farm families were usually too poor to send the children to them, and the district schools did not go beyond the initial four years of secondary education in any case.

  Virtually the sole route to status in life for a peasant child was to turn to the Viet Cong and their National Liberation Front, as the most talented obviously did. Because they had to draw leaders from the peasantry, the Communists had no rigid educational requirements and tried to further the education of promising cadres within their own system. The commander of the Viet Cong battalion that was killing the most Saigon troops in Hau Nghia (elements of his battalion had annihilated the Rangers at So Do) was a forty-five-year-old native of the abandoned Due Hue District on the northeast corner of the Plain of Reeds. He was a highly respected man. At the moment he was equivalent in rank to a major in the ARVN. He would soon be equivalent to a lieutenant colonel, as he was expanding his battalion into a regiment. He had worked his way up from the ranks, which meant that he had probably received no more than a few years of elementary education in the Saigon system he was striving to overthrow.

  Vann’s thoughts during this period were also being influenced by two of Ramsey’s friends, who were to become Vann’s friends and comrades in the Vietnam enterprise. One was Ev Bumgardner, the psychological-warfare specialist who had witnessed Diem’s speech at Tuy Hoa ten years earlier and returned to Vietnam to run the field operations of USIS. The other was Frank Scotton, Bumgardner’s chief operative in the field. Vann had encountered Bumgardner and Scotton during his first year in the country, but had never had an opportunity to become well acquainted. Ramsey introduced him to them. Both were the kind of original men whose spirits attracted Vann.

  Frank Scotton was a strapping twenty-seven-year-old in 1965 with a dark complexion and dark brown hair, raised on the lower-middle-class side of a Boston suburb by a conscientious mother after his father, a fireman, enlisted in the Army and was killed during World War II. He was adventurous and friendly and yet a bit rough and wary in manner. His preference in weapons was a 9mm Swedish K submachine gun he had acquired from the Special Forces. His mind was naturally unorthodox, and a fascination with guerrilla warfare and a self-steeping in the writings of Mao Tse-tung and Vo Nguyen Giap had reinforced this trait.

  He and Bumgardner were attempting to fight the Vietnamese Communists with their own methods by copying Communist molds and filling them with anti-Communist ideology. A new program to politically indoctrinate and motivate the Saigon militiamen that Vann was enthusiastic about was an outgrowth of an experiment Scotton had conducted the previous year in Quang Ngai Province on the Central Coast. With Bumgardner’s encouragement and the help of an imaginative Army major named Robert Kelly and several CIA agents, Scotton had organized forty-five-man commandos that were an imitation of the Viet Cong’s armed propaganda teams. Scotton’s commandos had not stopped the guerrillas from taking over almost all of Quang Ngai (by May 1965 the regime was considering whether to abandon the province capital itself), but they had performed as no other Saigon units ever had—helping the farmers, propagandizing in guerrilla-dominated sections, laying ambushes that actually did surprise guerrilla bands at night, and sneaking into hamlets to assassinate local Viet Cong leaders.

  Bumgardner was at first glance the contrasting mentor that an action-oriented type like Scotton seemed to need, a cerebral and restrained man, diminutive and balding now at forty years. Along with Bumgardner’s even temper and self-effacing manner went a capacity to think and behave with the same unorthodoxy Scotton did. The passion in Bumgardner showed in his dogged pursuit of the war and in a zest, concealed from strangers, to put himself in dangerous places and to hear bullets buzz and snap.

  Whenever Vann and Ramsey went into Saigon on business together and stayed overnight, they would get together with Bumgardner and Scotton to talk about the war. While Bumgardner and Scotton reflected the same inability as the rest of their countrymen to grasp the nationalist basis of Vietnamese Communism, they were knowledgeable about current social and political conditions in South Vietnam. Both men were fluent in Vietnamese, and Bumgardner had married into a Chinese family that had lived in Vietnam for generations. They were convinced, like Ramsey, that the Viet Cong drew their greatest strength from the conditions that nurtured social revolution. They thought that anti-Communist nationalism was still a viable alternative in the South, but only if there was a complete transformation of the Saigon regime. The United States could not simply take over the regime as Vann’s reflex had told him and run the country through Vietnamese front men. The regime had to be somehow changed into an entirely different kind of government that was responsive to the desires of the rural population. Unless a change was made, Bumgardner and Scotton believed, the war could not be won. Even if the U.S. Army were to occupy the whole country and crush the guerrillas, the rebellion would break out again after the American soldiers had gone home.

  What Ramsey, Bumgardner, and Scotton said sounded right to Vann because of what he saw in Hau Nghia. By the end of May he had seen and heard enough to express his new and, for Vann, extraordinary appreciation of the war in a letter to General York:

  If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger East-West confrontation, and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government. There is a revolution going on in this country—and the principles, goals, and desires of the other side are much closer to what Americans believe in than those of GVN [the Saigon Government]. I realize that ultimately, when the Chinese brand of Communism takes over, that these “revolutionaries” are going to be sadly disappointed—but then it will be too late—for them; and too late for us to win them. I am convinced that, even though the National Liberation Front is Communist-dominated, that the great majority of the people supporting it are doing so because it is their only hope to change and improve their living conditions and opportunities. If I were a lad of eighteen faced with the same choice—whether to support the GVN or the NLF—and a member of a rural community, I would surely choose the NLF.

  For eleven years, Vann thought, the United States had been wasting Vietnamese and American lives and hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to preserve the unpreservable old order in South Vietnam. The task before him was so much larger than anything he had envisioned in Denver when he had decided to return to the war. What he had to do was to devise a strategy that was constructive rather than destructive, a strategy that could shape South Vietnam into a nation able to stand with the United States in the global struggle for the underdeveloped lands. After devising that strategy he would have to translate it into a program and then into action by selling the program to those on high. The idealism that Garland Hopkins and Ferrum had instilled in him expressed itself in a desire to Americanize the world. When he looked at these farm youngsters he did not simply see Vietnamese children. He saw potential Vietnamese counterparts of Lansdale’s Filipinos—native leaders so infused with American values and so grateful for American help that they would naturally make the cause of
the United States their own. “Had we begun eleven years ago,” he said in a lecture in Denver while on home leave that fall, “we’d now be having the leaders emerging that we want. I think we can still do it through children like this.”

  The war was also reaching a juncture that Vann saw as an opportunity to implement a new strategy. By early June 1965, Westmoreland had more than 50,000 American military men in South Vietnam, including nine battalions of Marines and Army paratroops. Although the Johnson administration was being vague in public about the decisions it was reaching, more U.S. battalions were clearly on the way. They were arriving just in time. The Saigon government had been preparing to evacuate all five northern provinces along the Central Coast—the whole of the I Corps zone where the Marines now held the airfield at Phu Bai near the former imperial capital of Hue as well as the port and air base at Da Nang below it. The Saigon generals had even developed a secret plan to move JGS headquarters from the handsome compound de Lattre de Tassigny had built next to Tan Son Nhut to the old French Army school for military orphans on the Vung Tau peninsula (Cap St. Jacques) forty miles southeast of the city. The peninsula was easy to defend, and the generals would be a few minutes from ships and the open sea there. They were uncertain whether they would be able to defend the remnants of the Central Highlands they still held long enough to shift the burden to the Americans. The principal mountain towns of Kontum, Pleiku, and Banmethuot had become fragile islands accessible only by air.

  In Hau Nghia there were signs everywhere that the regime would not see 1966 without an American rescue. Minings and ambushes had become so frequent along the main road to Saigon, Route 1, that Vann and Ramsey would pass smashed jeeps and trucks from which no one had yet bothered to remove the bodies. Worse, they occasionally spotted part of a body beside a wreck. On some mornings the guerrillas blew up military vehicles within 200 yards of the police checkpoints at each end of Bau Trai. The policemen stationed in the sentry boxes the night before had probably heard the guerrillas digging the mines into the road or had watched in the moonlight as the Viet Cong had strung the wires to the detonators in the brush nearby, yet they had said nothing. Desertions were also becoming more significant. The chiefs of two hamlets right next to Bau Trai, two of the six supposedly “pacified” hamlets in the province, were no longer willing to depend on the insurance they purchased by assisting the Viet Cong covertly. They deserted openly to the guerrillas. One took his deputy and almost all of the militia platoon in the hamlet with him. Vann and Ramsey had been fond of this PF platoon. Most of its members were local teenagers who would cheer whenever the Americans brought them bulgur wheat or cooking oil to supplement their ridiculous salaries. The happy-go-lucky teenagers shocked their American friends by wiping out part of a pacification team stationed in the neighborhood before deserting.

  The nerves of those on the Saigon side who did not desert were so frayed that panic was a flash away. The village center of Due Lap along the road two miles north of Bau Trai had been attacked several times in recent months. One morning the place was swept by a rumor that a squad of guerrillas—a single squad—was about to arrive. First the regular police, then the heavily armed Combat Police, then a Ranger battalion headquarters and one of its companies fled in terror. They all straggled back after the rumor proved false. Vann and Ramsey would have taken less notice if the panic had occurred at 2:00 A.M. in the predawn darkness when some sort of attack might have been developing. The time had been 10:00 A.M.

  Vann had never changed the views he had expressed to Ziegler back in 1962 on the folly of trying to fight the war with American troops. “If the war is to be won,” he had written Lodge’s assistant from Denver in the spring of 1964, “then it must be done by the Vietnamese—nothing would be more foolhardy than the employment of U.S. (or any other foreign) troops in quantity. We could pour our entire Army into Vietnam—and accomplish nothing worthwhile.” He felt the same way roughly a year later as the Marines and Army infantrymen started to arrive.

  Not that he was unhappy to see them come. Without them South Vietnam would, he remarked, have “gone down the drain.” Their arrival meant an end to the much-feared danger that, as the regime neared collapse, some group of neutralist or pro-Communist politicians would form a government in Saigon and demand that the United States withdraw. Ky and his fellow generals could hold on as long as they had American guns to protect them. The Vietnamese Communists obviously lacked the capacity to eject a large U.S. force that could be supported by sea and air. What troubled Vann was that these American soldiers would now be sent out to fight the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regulars of Hanoi’s Vietnam People’s Army (called the NVA, for North Vietnamese Army, by the U.S. military), who had started to march down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to reinforce the guerrillas. Given the inability of American troops to distinguish friend from foe, the potential for mindless carnage was enormous.

  The sensible course, Vann believed, would be to use the American troops to secure Saigon and the ports and airfields and those inland cities and towns that could not, as a matter of prestige, be lost to the Communists. The U.S. soldiers would serve as a garrison and an emergency reserve. They could be employed offensively in those rare instances when a large Viet Cong or NVA unit had been well located, the circumstances favored the Americans, and there was little danger of civilian casualties. The primary if unspoken mission of the American troops would be political. They would provide the muscle to stop the bacchanal of coups and recoups and bring the Saigon generals to heel. Behind the shield of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, the United States would take over the regime and gradually turn it into a government whose leaders were not fundamentally corrupt men. The Vietnamese soldiers of the ARVN and the Regional and Popular Forces would do most of the fighting in the countryside, not the American troops. The Saigon forces would have to be reorganized and reformed as they carried the burden of defeating the Viet Cong and beginning the pacification of the hamlets. This goal could be accomplished, Vann felt, by creating a “joint command” in which Americans would issue the orders. He recognized by now that the rank and file of the Saigon forces were as disgusted with their leadership as he was. He was convinced that they would respond to competence and discipline and the success these would bring. Vann began to focus his late-night talks with Ramsey and their discussions in Saigon with Bumgardner and Scotton on the core of a new strategy—the details of a program to attract the peasantry and change the nature of Saigon society.

  In the meantime, Vann decided, the place to start changing things was Hau Nghia, and he would begin with an example of corruption he could do something about—the thieving contractor. Vann had been fighting a private guerrilla war with the contractor since his discovery that the man had corrupted another AID official with women. He had a weapon he could use against the crooked builder. USOM regulations required Vann to sign a release before the contractor could be paid for a completed project. Vann made a point of catching the contractor in the theft of aluminum roofing sheets. He drove to a recently finished maternity clinic and to a school, climbed up and counted the number of sheets in the roofs, and checked the records to see how many sheets had been issued to the contractor for the buildings. Vann then refused to sign payment releases until the contractor agreed to reimburse the U.S. government for the missing sheets.

  The conflict escalated in the latter part of May when the contractor visited Hanh to offer him the same 10 percent kickback arrangement on contracts that the builder had had with the last province chief. He advised Hanh not to take Vann seriously. The AID official corrupted by the contractor now occupied a staff position at USOM headquarters in Saigon. The contractor said his American friend had informed him that Vann was considered a troublemaker and would be replaced soon. Hanh did not react. That evening he tipped Vann off to what the contractor had told him. Vann asked Hanh to cancel every contract the crooked builder had in the province. Hanh would not commit himself to such drastic action, but he did not seem unwilling
if Vann could sufficiently discredit the builder.

  A week later the contractor was back to see Hanh. He enlarged his proposition to make it more attractive. The Resources and Population Control program that was supposed to deny the Viet Cong useful commodities required export-import certificates for goods and raw materials, such as sugar, entering or leaving the province. The certificates were commonly sold for graft. The builder had handled the sales for the last province chief. He offered to perform the same service for Hanh, for a percentage, of course. Hanh explicitly declined the offer this time and again repeated the conversation to Vann.

  By this point the contractor had learned that Vann was attempting to expel him from Hau Nghia, and he correctly assumed that the new province chief would not be acting so strangely were it not for Vann’s encouragement. The Saigonese had become practiced over the years at striking a pose of innocence and injured national pride whenever a genuine interest like corruption was threatened by Americans. The contractor, a member of a prominent Southern Catholic family, was adept at the game. He wrote Vann a letter upbraiding him for behaving like “the French colonial bosses when they dominated our country.”