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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Vann would have been more disconsolate still had he known that by the time his rescue effort had seriously begun, Ramsey was already far beyond his reach at the edge of the Annamite rain forest that was to be Ramsey’s purgatory for the next seven years. The day after his capture, Ramsey had been turned over to a three-man liaison team. That evening they had started marching him toward the camp for important prisoners at the region headquarters in War Zone C in northern Tay Ninh Province, the Duong Minh Chau redoubt of the French war that Bumgardner had explored in his jeep when it had been deserted in the interlude of 1955. Except for rest stops, they marched all night. Ramsey slept the next day fettered in leg irons in a bomb shelter under a guerrilla communications hut until they could resume the march in the evening. At midnight he saw fireworks in the distance and thought he might be witnessing the opening of the Tet festivities at Trang Bang in Hau Nghia. The round mass of Nui Ba Den, the Black Virgin Mountain, rising out of the Tay Ninh plain at dawn told him they had been moving northwest at a much faster pace than he had thought. The fireworks he had seen had probably been at Tay Ninh City. They kept marching that morning, the twentieth, because it was the first day of the cease-fire and the guerrillas felt safe from air attack. By noon Ramsey was walking toward the great wall of trees that marks the end of the cultivated lowlands and the beginning of the rain forest and the foothills of the Annamite chain.

  Ahead of Ramsey lay the torment of the rain-forest prison camps—the chills and fevers of the two varieties of ordinary malaria and the convulsions and coma of the killer type that attacks the brain, the painful muscle cramps and swelling of the limbs brought on by beriberi, the dysentery, the leeches, the cobras that were to curl for the night under the bunk of his cage, the forced marches whenever the exigencies of the conflict required a shifting of the camp, the terror of the B-52 strikes by his own Air Force, the guards who stole food the prisoners needed to survive because they were hungry themselves, the hideously cruel interrogators who were embittered toward all white men by too many years of war and fugitive jungle existence. Ramsey had no premonition of any of this when the group halted at a creek not far inside the forest to have a swim and eat a midday meal. The guerrillas untied Ramsey to let him swim with them. An attempt at escape did not seem practical, so he relaxed and enjoyed the coolness of the water after the long march. The three members of the liaison team had treated him with humanity, even kindness, given the fact that he was a prisoner of war. The cadre in charge, an older and experienced man, had bought him some sweetened rice cakes, a Tet treat, the previous evening, and early that morning they had stopped at an isolated farmhouse so that Ramsey could rest and share in the Tet feasting that had begun there.

  Ramsey had been most impressed by the junior member of the team, a sixteen-year-old farm boy. The youth was tall for a Vietnamese, high-spirited, and clearly enjoying the life of a guerrilla soldier. Shortly after they entered the trees he spotted a hawk perched on a branch and shot it for their dinner that evening. His pride in his prowess as a hunter amused Ramsey. The boy appeared to have little in the way of formal education, but he was bright, and the clearly extensive political indoctrination he had received had not repressed a nature that was curious and friendly. He had become so talkative with Ramsey at one point on the march that the cadre had reprimanded him for crossing the line and being too familiar with a prisoner. Ramsey had remarked to himself as the youth was temporarily silenced that the cadre did not realize what an advertisement the boy was to an American who had encountered too many elitist Saigon University students, teenage street hooligans, and drunken young ARVN irresponsibles.

  When they were all resting on the creek bank after the swim, the young man asked Ramsey why the Americans were making war in Vietnam. Ramsey gave the most common reason—the containment of an expansionist China—because he assumed it was the one a sixteen-year-old Vietnamese peasant could most easily understand. He explained that while the war was against the immediate best interests of the Vietnamese people, the United States was benefiting the Vietnamese in the long run by preventing China from taking over all of their country and the other nations of Southeast Asia.

  Doug Ramsey’s explanation seemed to irritate and arouse the boy. He said that it didn’t make sense to him. If the Americans hated or feared the Chinese so much, why didn’t they go to China and make war? There were no Chinese soldiers in Vietnam. The only foreign soldiers in Vietnam were Americans and foreign allies of the Americans like the South Koreans, he said. (The first of the South Korean divisions to fight in Vietnam under an arrangement between Seoul and Washington arrived in late 1965.) In fact, the last people to bring Chinese troops into Vietnam had been the Americans. They had let the Chinese Nationalists occupy the North after World War II. Now the Americans were talking again about possibly bringing Chiang Kai-shek’s troops from Taiwan to fight for them in the South. The Vietnamese would never permit foreign troops to occupy their soil. “We have no fear that the present Chinese regime will attack us or attempt to take us over,” the youth said, “but if things changed in the future and a new government ever dared to try …”He began to describe how the Vietnamese had smashed invading armies from China in centuries past.

  Ramsey started to explain further why Americans saw the Vietnamese Communists as pawns of the Chinese. The cadre and the other guerrilla broke in. Ramsey was wrong, they said. Just because China had become a socialist country did not mean that it could dominate Vietnam. The Vietnamese would not tolerate any foreign domination, regardless of the ideology of the foreigner. Least of all, they said, would they tolerate Chinese domination. The two older men and the youth brought Ramsey into the historical world of the Vietnamese Communists. He was fascinated that these products of a Communist movement, which denounced modern vestiges of “feudalism,” could identify so passionately with the figures of their feudal past. Their nationalism was fervid, quite different from the attitude he had become accustomed to on the Saigon side.

  They were glad in a way that the task of defeating the United States had fallen to Vietnamese of their time, the guerrillas said. After the Americans had despaired and gone home, potential menaces closer at hand—they implied they had China uppermost in mind—would not dare to attempt what the most powerful capitalist nation in history had failed to achieve. They were confident they would be able to emulate their ancestors in their war against the United States.

  That afternoon they resumed the march deeper into the Duong Minh Chau forest toward the prison camp. The geopolitical rationale that the United States was containing China by frustrating her Vietnamese pawn had been “reduced to ashes” for Ramsey. It occurred to him that Americans need look no further than this Vietnamese Communist enemy for the best possible native barrier against Chinese expansion into Southeast Asia.

  Westmoreland’s plan to destroy the Vietnamese Communists was essentially a replica of Harkins’s war-of-attrition strategy, with American soldiers and the lethal technology that came with them substituted for the ARVN. The similarities extended to details. Both plans had preparatory Phases I and II during which a killing machine was to be put together and the early battles fought, followed by a victorious Phase III when the machine would shift into its highest gear and mince the Vietnamese enemy. The reflex adoption of a war-of-attrition approach demonstrated once more how rotelike the American military mind of the 1960s had become. William DePuy, Westmoreland’s chief of operations, who had drawn up this plan that Westmoreland then made his own, was a distinguished infantryman and a highly intelligent officer who was regarded as one of the best thinkers in the U.S. Army. Yet he held the same skewed perspective on World War II that Harkins had—the belief that all a general need do to win was to build a killing machine and turn it loose on his opponent. He gave his “We are going to stomp them to death” prediction in a conversation with Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News as the buildup was getting underway in 1965. He added, Beech thought in a kind of confession, “I don’t know any other way
.”

  Harkins had predicted victory in a year and a half and been instructed by a McNamara who was attempting to be conservative to extend his vision. Westmoreland was more cautious in his scheduling. He allowed three to three and a half years. The time period seems to have been chosen because it would bring clearcut or sufficiently obvious success by the November 1968 presidential election and because, in the atmosphere of Westmoreland’s Saigon headquarters in the summer of 1965, it appeared a reasonable length for an American war. The defeat of Nazi Germany had taken slightly less than three and a half years, the destruction of Japan not much more. The stalemated Korean conflict had lasted three years and a month.

  Westmoreland said that he would “halt the losing trend by the end of 1965” through defensive measures and limited offensive thrusts called “spoiling attacks” to disrupt the enemy’s campaign. He would start his Phase II, his preparing-to-win phase, in the first half of 1966 by going over to the offensive “in high priority areas” with “search and destroy operations” against Main Force Viet Cong units and the North Vietnamese Army regulars who were joining them. During this phase he would bring into the South the rest of the 300,000 Americans he had requested thus far and whatever additional reinforcements he might need. He would also construct the ports, jet-capable airfields, supply and repair depots, base camps, hospitals, communications systems, and other elements of the elaborate support structure the machine required.

  He was vague about the amount of time he would need for Phase II, giving himself some margin for the unexpected here. He implied that he could finish it by the end of 1966 or in the first half of 1967. If the Viet Cong and Hanoi had not acquired wisdom and given up the struggle by then, he said, he would launch his Phase III. It would be a full-scale, nationwide offensive to complete “the defeat and destruction of the remaining enemy forces and base areas.” This victory phase would take “a year to a year and a half,” i.e., until mid-1968 or the end of the year. With this three-to-three-and-a-half-year timetable, McNamara the statistician had thus been projecting a price for South Vietnam of possibly 18,000 American dead when he had told the president in his July memorandum that U.S. killed in action might reach 500 a month by the end of 1965. McNamara could still recommend approval of Westmoreland’s plan. The schedule enabled him to assure Lyndon Johnson that the course they were following stood “a good chance of achieving an acceptable outcome within a reasonable time.”

  The three guerrillas had told Ramsey that they and their comrades would fight harder and die more willingly than the American soldiers because they were defending their homeland. They were wrong about the U.S. Army of 1965 that Westmoreland was given. Its senior leadership might be wanting, but the officers at brigade and battalion and company level and the soldiers who followed them into harm’s way were the finest army the United States had ever fielded straight from the training camps of America to a foreign battleground. Colonel and rifleman shared a faith. The president said that if the Communists were not stopped in Vietnam, they would have to be stopped in Honolulu or on the beaches of California. Colonel and rifleman believed him. This was an army that shared a confidence too in its weapons and in its combat skills. The world was a tactical map to these men. They were prepared to fight any enemy at any grid coordinate.

  This U.S. Army of 1965 was the fruit of Maxwell Taylor’s admonition that the neglected Army of the Eisenhower era had to be reforged into an effective instrument for the “brushfire wars” that were inherent in American foreign policy. McNamara and his secretary of the Army and subsequent deputy, Cyrus Vance, had been at the task for the past four years. They had spared neither care nor expense. The crown of their accomplishment was the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)—the first military organization in history to take full advantage of the helicopter as a vehicle to maneuver troops and bring firepower to bear. The Air Cav, as the officers and men unofficially renamed their division, was to the jeep-and-truck-borne divisions of World War II and Korea what those mechanized formations had been to their predecessors dependent on horses and mules and foot power. The troops of the Air Cav flew to the assault point in agile transport versions of the Huey gunships that had sought to protect the cumbersome old H-21 Flying Bananas of Vann’s initial year in Vietnam. There were “escort gunships” to shepherd these “slick ships” carrying the assault force and other “aerial rocket” Hueys with dozens of rockets in side-mounted pods to back up the riflemen once they were on the ground. Each battalion had an Air Force lieutenant attached as a forward air controller to put the heavier ordnance of the fighter-bombers where it would count. A large new cargo helicopter, the CH-47 Chinook, lifted the artillery to wherever the guns were needed. The Chinooks could move an entire battery of six 105mm howitzers twenty miles over roadless country and have the battery firing again within an hour after the first gun had been picked up. Advanced navigational systems enabled the Chinooks to keep the artillery and the troops supplied with almost unlimited quantities of ammunition and other sustenance of war at night or in bad weather.

  Intangible things had also been invested in the creation of the Air Cav. The troops and their sergeants and officers knew and trusted one another. Most had organized and trained together for more than a year at Fort Benning as the experimental nth Air Assault Division. The pilots of the different helicopter formations had learned to play their individual roles and to synchronize their movements in a complicated ballet. When Johnson had said yes to Westmoreland in July 1965, the experimental division had been given the colors of the regular 1st Cavalry Division and additional battalions to bring it up to strength and sent to Vietnam in September, establishing an immense base camp for its three brigades and 435 helicopters in the An Khe Valley on the eastern side of the mountains not far from the Central Vietnamese port of Qui Nhon.

  I heard about the first big battle between the Air Cav and Hanoi’s regulars of the NVA in mid-November 1965 while I was in Central Vietnam to research a story on refugees. I had found five hamlets behind a stretch of beach in Quang Ngai Province that had comprised a prosperous fishing village of about 15,000 people until the previous summer. The houses had not been the common thatch and wattle. They had been homes of thick-walled brick, the achievement of generations of saving from the labor of the sea. All had been reduced to rubble or grotesque skeletons by two months of bombardment from aircraft and point-blank shelling by the 5-inch guns of Seventh Fleet destroyers. The village had been declared a Viet Cong base and razed simply because it had been in a guerrilla-controlled area. Officials from the district center said their inquiries showed that more than 180 civilians had been killed before most of the inhabitants had fled. Other estimates that seemed reasonable ran to 600. The young officers at the province military advisory detachment said they knew of at least ten more hamlets that had been leveled just as thoroughly on the same vague reasoning and twenty-five others that had been severely damaged. The pattern of destruction was widening, they said.

  That evening I called the Times office in Saigon to describe the story I would be writing. Charlie Mohr, the bureau chief, told me that it would have to wait. A major fight had just started with the NVA near Pleiku, the principal town in the center of the Highlands, and I had better get there as fast as I could.

  An obliging captain drove me out to the province airstrip, and late into the night I hitchhiked rides on planes down the coast to Qui Nhon and then over the mountains to Pleiku. I was accustomed to the desultory quality of an ARVN command post after sunset. At Pleiku the night was alive and roaring. The radios were raucous with requests and orders and reports. The big, boxy Chinooks clattered down, loaded up with artillery shells, and lifted away again to feed the howitzers that reverberated through the flare-broken darkness off to the southwest where the battle was taking place.

  Two weeks before Thanksgiving, Col. Thomas “Tim” Brown, a scion of a military family (his brother, George, an Air Force general, became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the mid-1970s), was at ARVN II Cor
ps headquarters on a hill beside Pleiku being briefed by the corps intelligence officer. Brown commanded the 3rd Brigade of the Air Cav. His executive officer was Lt. Col. Edward “Shy” Meyer, the first of the Vietnam generation of officers to become chief of staff of the Army at the end of the 1970s. The 3rd Brigade had been dispatched to the Highlands earlier in November to find two NVA regiments that had attempted to seize a Special Forces camp at the Montagnard village of Plei Me about twenty-five miles south of the town. Brown’s three battalions had searched south and southeast of the camp itself for several days without success, and he had exhausted his intelligence. Westmoreland had sent word through Maj. Gen. Harry Kinnard, the division commander, that he wanted Brown to search west toward the Cambodian border, but Brown didn’t know where in the west to begin. He had come to II Corps headquarters hoping for a lead.

  Brown was thinking that the ARVN intelligence officer had little to offer when he noticed a red star drawn on the briefing map near the Cambodian border southwest of Pleiku. The star called attention to a massif, a cluster of peaks and ridges covered with double-canopy rain forest, that rose suddenly out of the Drang River Valley west of the Plei Me camp and extended back over the border six to seven miles farther to the west. Brown had seen the massif from the air. It looked forbidding. It was called the Chu Prong (Prong Mountain), after the highest peak within it.

  “What does that red star signify?” Brown asked.

  ‘That’s a VC secret base, sir,” the intelligence officer answered.

  “What’s in there?” Brown asked.

  “We don’t know, sir, we’ve never been in there,” the intelligence officer replied.