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

by Sheehan, Neil

  Porter came back to the embassy the next morning amused and amazed. He said that Vann had gone down in the elevator with him and out the street entrance to the limousine, still talking. Vann had asked Porter if he could ride along to tell him some more, and when Porter said yes, Vann had climbed into the backseat beside him and kept talking. Vann hadn’t stop talking until they had gotten stuck in one of Saigon’s ever more tangled traffic jams. He had then abruptly said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Ambassador,” and disappeared out the limousine door into the exhaust and bumper-to-bumper vehicles. Porter began to perceive the man and his worth beyond the eccentricities.

  Dan Ellsberg’s friendship and admiration counted for Vann in this touch-and-go time. Lansdale left Ellsberg relatively free to decide how to use his time and energy, because Lansdale’s second mission to Vietnam was already a manifest failure by early 1966. The principal if unannounced purpose for which Lansdale had returned—to reform the Saigon regime from the top through persuasion and the magnetic ideals of the American Revolution—had been silly. Westmoreland could get the ear of Ky and Thieu and the other Saigon leaders, because he had resources they could funnel into graft. Lodge could get their attention, because he had power they could manipulate to further their personal political ambitions. Lansdale commanded neither trading commodity on this second visitation, and so the Saigonese gave the back of the hand to him and his sermons. The announced mission of Lansdale and his team—to act as liaison between the embassy and the regime’s Rural Construction Council, now upgraded to a Ministry of Rural Construction with general responsibility for pacification on the Saigon side—had been superseded by the decision of the February Honolulu conference to have Porter oversee civilian pacification programs. Lansdale was in the ill-defined and therefore bureaucratically doomed position of being an advisor on pacification and related matters to Lodge and Porter. The most constructive thing he could do in the circumstances was to use what influence he retained in the U.S. mission to sway opinion on specific issues. The team’s charter permitted Ellsberg to poke into the pacification-team dispute and the running of the Vung Tau camp, and poke he did. His reports to Lansdale were colorful and articulate briefs for Vann. Lansdale was persuaded and took Vann’s side. Porter also saw the reports and was impressed.

  Despite the ludicrousness of the situation, it took months—until June 1966—to get rid of Mai, the sect leader at the camp. Jorgenson simply refused to accept the loss of face involved in admitting that he and the intelligence service he represented had been hoodwinked by such a trusted employee, and he had enough independence as chief of the Saigon CIA station to get his way.

  Vann was afraid he had become a marked man. He had been promoted to chief of plans and projects for field operations in April, with supervisory authority over all other counterinsurgency programs in addition to AID’s role in the pacification-team training. Nevertheless, he feared that Jorgenson’s friends in the Agency would complain loudly enough about him to AID headquarters in Washington to spoil his hope of continued advancement. When he learned through the grapevine that this was indeed occurring, he made up his mind to seek some alternative other than a dreaded return to Martin Marietta in Colorado.

  As part of his effort to gain control over the armed services, McNamara had created a small civilian brain trust in the Pentagon to provide him with independent analyses of weapons programs and strategy. It was called the Office of Systems Analysis and was staffed by “whiz kid” government intellectuals like Ellsberg. Its chief in 1966, Alain Enthoven, and his deputy, Fred Hoffman, were both friends of Ells-berg’s. Enthoven and Ellsberg had been contemporaries at the Rand Corporation. Prior to 1966, Systems Analysis had avoided Vietnam, concentrating instead on nuclear strategy and the NATO alliance in Europe. McNamara wanted his brain trust to begin evaluating the conduct of the war, and Enthoven and Hoffman were eager to make a contribution. They were looking for a man with an unorthodox mind, field experience in Vietnam, and the intellectual training to do quantitative analysis. (The analytical methods used by Systems Analysis relied heavily on statistics.) Another friend of theirs who had met Vann in Saigon that spring thought he might be the perfect candidate.

  In May, Hoffman wrote Vann suggesting that he come to the Pentagon during his next home leave in June to talk over the possibility of heading the Asian Division that Systems Analysis was forming. Vann replied positively and had Ellsberg write Hoffman a letter of recommendation, which Ellsberg did in three single-spaced pages of extraordinary and convincing praise. The job would give Vann a channel to McNamara and allow him to continue to devote himself to the subject that meant most to him, and as a member of the elite who served the power managers in Washington, he might be able to work his way back to Vietnam someday in an important capacity. With Mary Jane and the children settled in Colorado, he might also be able to avoid bringing them to Washington.

  He was interviewed by both Hoffman and Enthoven in June and did his best to communicate the impression he thought they were seeking. Enthoven emphasized that the free rein McNamara allowed Systems Analysis obligated those who joined it to respect the secretary’s confidence should they ever leave out of disagreement with policy. Vann promised discretion and silence. He regarded the Systems Analysis post even more as his best alternative after he had returned to Vietnam and an acquaintance wrote from Washington in July that Rutherford Poats, AID’s chief for the Far East, had become dubious about him because of CIA complaints and was thinking of ordering him sidetracked to a staff position where he would have no executive authority.

  It was a tribute to how far Vann’s reputation for truth telling, moral courage, and willingness to serve had gone within the system that Enthoven, with the approval of McNamara, did offer him the job. By the time Enthoven made up his mind and wrote Vann with a firm offer at the end of September, however, Vann’s primary interest in the Systems Analysis post had shifted. A little perspective and some embarrassing publicity (which Vann helped to promote with leaks) had vindicated him and made Jorgenson and the CIA look foolish. Jorgenson had in the meantime finished his tour and departed. While some ill will lingered, the pacification-team dispute was history to the new CIA station chief. Vann’s position in Vietnam had thus become steadily stronger, strong enough that he now thought he could weather the complaints to Poats and others in Washington. At the beginning of October, right after his return from Myrtle’s funeral, his Foreign Service Reserve rank was raised a grade to FSR-2 and he was promoted to deputy director of AID operations for III Corps.

  Vann knew that a major reorganization of the pacification effort was under consideration in Washington; the president and McNamara were dissatisfied with the rate of progress. One proposal was to give Westmoreland complete responsibility for pacification. Another was to keep civilian and military activities separate, but to unify the civilian agencies by merging all AID, CIA, and USIS programs into a single umbrella organization headed by Porter. A corps directorship in this umbrella organization would clearly amount to a much bigger job than being a regional director for AID alone. Vann had his eye on the job. He had a particularly well-placed advocate now in Ellsberg. Lansdale’s team was starting to break up. Ellsberg had gone to work for Porter and was soon to be appointed his special assistant. The quality of his running reports to Lansdale had gained Ellsberg the position with Porter. What he wrote was full of the grist of the war. Having been taught by Vann that physical risk brought a unique reward in information along with emotional fulfillment, Ellsberg kept venturing into the countryside on his own or with Scotton or Bumgardner when Vann was not available. They accepted him as they had accepted Vann, as another in the small band of Americans who cared and dared.

  John Vann also knew that the course of least bureaucratic resistance in such reorganizations was to give the senior jobs to noncontroversial men. To fortify his chances he turned the Systems Analysis offer into a look-who-wants-me ploy. He wrote back to Enthoven that he certainly would enjoy leading Enthoven’s
new Asian Division. Enthoven started the formal appointment process. Vann then made sure that everyone who mattered in Saigon learned of his attractive alternative and also wrote about it to AID headquarters in Washington to try to have his employment converted from temporary to permanent career status. As he said in a letter to a friend in Denver, “I am using the appointment offer to do a little blackmail with US AID.”

  Porter probably liked Vann well enough to have taken the courageous course anyway. Washington decided on the second alternative—keeping military and civilians separate, but unifying the civilians in an umbrella organization. When the creation of the Office of Civil Operations (OCO) was announced at the end of November 1966, Porter, with Lodge’s consent, gave Vann a choice of III or IV Corps. The Mekong Delta had become a backwater of the war. Vann chose III Corps, because it suited him perfectly for professional and personal reasons. His office in Bien Hoa would be only half an hour’s drive from downtown Saigon. He would thus be staying at center stage with access to the courts of power in the embassy and Westmoreland’s headquarters, to the visiting politicians and other important tourists coming out to see the war, and to his connections in the press.

  His appointment got considerable notice. Ward Just of the Washington Post wrote in a front-page story that Porter had selected “one of the legendary Americans in Vietnam.” He would suffer no inconvenience in his captain’s paradise affair with Annie and Lee, nor would he be deprived of the unparalleled variety of one-night stands that Saigon offered. Yet he would also have an arena of action in the eleven provinces around the capital. He would be establishing his headquarters in a modest office compound that AID had just constructed near Bien Hoa Air Base and the ARVN III Corps headquarters, which had been moved out of Saigon in the coup-rocking year of 1964. Jonathan Seaman’s nascent U.S. Army corps of Vann’s Hau Nghia days had grown to the equivalent of four American divisions and a 4,500-man Australian Army task force with a small New Zealand contingent. It was called II Field Force and had its headquarters in a huge new base being built at a place called Long Binh right down the road.

  The III Corps directorship of OCO was Vann’s first grasp of substantial authority in Vietnam since 7th Division, and he was thrilled with it. His official letter of appointment from Porter said that he was “the senior U.S. civilian in his region” and as such “will direct, supervise and coordinate all U.S. regional civil activities.” The formal appointment to the Systems Analysis job occurred simultaneously with Porter’s decision. Vann wrote his regrets to Enthoven, saying that Porter’s selection of him had come as a surprise. He purchased some insurance for the future by adding that the experience in III Corps would better prepare him for a Pentagon position later on. Because of Westmoreland’s lack of interest in pacification but waiting game to obtain control of it, OCO was merely the civilian half of what Vann had advocated in “Harnessing the Revolution,” and a half solely in organizational terms, devoid of the essentials of an American takeover and social reform. The civilian advisors in a province would at last begin working together in a team under a province senior advisor (he could be from any of the agencies) who would represent all of them in dealings with the Saigon province chief. Keeping the province military advisors in a separate chain of command, however, meant that the security elements indispensable to pacification—the Regional Forces and the militia, or PF—would continue to be advised by Americans from a different team.

  The shortcomings of OCO and his consciousness of its flaws did not lessen Vann’s joy at having the closest equivalent to a field command he could get on the civilian side. When he counted the members of his headquarters and the province advisors and their staffs, he had 330 Americans, nearly 100 Filipinos and South Korean staffers (the so-called third country nationals), and more than 550 Vietnamese employees under him. General Seaman, who was fond of him, welcomed him to the commanding general’s mess at II Field Force, gave him the run of the headquarters, and extended him the perquisite of an important man—use whenever he wished of one of the H-23 Raven helicopters the Army kept for observation and liaison flying. The little helicopter (there was room in the Plexiglás bubble cockpit for just the pilot and one passenger alongside) enabled Vann to cover the eleven provinces in the corps in a week in December. He met for half a day with the civilian advisors in each, briefing them on his plans, taking questions and questioning them, and picking out the men who would be his province senior advisors. The following week he gave Seaman and the II Field Force staff a formal briefing on the new civilian pacification organization and what he wanted to accomplish. Then he briefed Seaman’s division commanders and their staffs. It was exhilarating to be addressing men with stars on their shoulders again. “Needless to state, I am absolutely delighted with my new job,” he wrote to Bob York.

  Vann did not lose his perspective. “Regrettably, I cannot report to you any significant progress since our discussion last spring,” he said in the same December 23, 1966, letter to York. “I am still optimistic about what can be done in Vietnam, but I continue to be distressed at how little is actually being done.” Momentous events were occurring as Vann wrote. General Westmoreland had 385,000 U.S. troops in the South and was far advanced into Phase II, the preparing-to-win phase, of his war of attrition. Vann did not see how any of the violence was contributing to the establishment of a Saigon government and society that could endure. “I am very much afraid that we will never find out if we could have been successful in South Vietnam,” he said in another letter home. “It appears relatively certain to me that this [war] will be escalated to a point where we will force North Vietnam to negotiate and then, at the negotiating table, we will throw away all that has been purchased at the cost of U.S. and Vietnamese lives, not to mention the many billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayers’ money.” He was an angry John Vann whenever I saw him that year, angry at the unnecessary pain being inflicted on the Vietnamese peasantry, angry at the American-fostered corruption, angry at the neglect of the ARVN, angry at the ugly transformation of this country in which he had invested so much emotion.

  The river of the uprooted had swelled to more than 2 million refugees from the many brooks of homeless like the one I had seen flowing from the Bong Son Plain. The civilian casualties, the majority from “friendly action,” amounted by conservative estimate to about 25,000 dead a year, an average of sixty-eight men, women, and children every day. Approximately 50,000 noncombatants a year were being seriously wounded. Abandoned hamlets and barren rice fields were becoming a common sight in the countryside. As much as a third of the riceland had been forsaken in several provinces along the Central Coast. Free-fire zones proliferated so rapidly with new red lines on maps for laying waste that it was no longer possible to keep track of their number and the total area they encompassed. (They had been given the official euphemism of Specified Strike Zones, but everyone still called them free-fire or free-strike or free-bombing zones except in formal reports.) The B-52S of the Strategic Air Command, which struck under the code name Arc Light, were restricted to bombing suspected Communist bases in relatively uninhabited sections, because their potency approached that of a tactical nuclear weapon. The eight-engine jets had been converted into monster flying bomb platforms, each capable of lofting in excess of twenty tons. A formation of six B-52S, dropping their bombs from 30,000 feet, could “take out,” in the language of the airmen, almost everything within a “box” approximately five-eighths of a mile wide by about two miles long. For example, the length of a box would encompass the national monuments of the United States from the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was to be dedicated in 1982, to the Washington Monument, to the Smithsonian Institution complex with its Air and Space Museum and other museums and galleries, to the National Gallery of Art, and on to the smaller Reflecting Pool just below the Capitol. The width of a target box would extend the destruction up through the State Department, Interior, Commerce, Internal Revenue, Justice, the National Archives, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, and a number of other important institutions to the back lawn of the White House. Whenever Arc Light struck in the predawn anywhere in the vicinity of Saigon, the city woke from the tremor.

  The B-52S delivered only a third of the bomb tonnage. Two-thirds was delivered by the fighter-bombers, and they were under no such restriction. By the end of 1966, fighter-bomber sorties were up to 400 a day. Each day, if one included the B-52S, about 825 tons of bombs and other air munitions were let loose on a country the size of the state of Washington. From the window of an airplane or the open door of a helicopter the big brown blotches of the bomb craters disfigured the beauty of the Vietnamese landscape in every direction.

  The planes dropped more than bombs. In 1966 specially equipped C-123 transports of Operation Ranch Hand destroyed nearly 850,000 acres of forest and crops by spraying them with chemical herbicides, also called defoliants. The spraying had begun in the early 1960s as another of John Kennedy’s mistakes, urged on him by Diem in his cruelty and by McNamara in his search for technological solutions. With the arrival of the U.S. armed forces in 1965 the defoliation had, like everything else, expanded geometrically. By 1967, 1.5 million acres a year of forest and crops were being destroyed in an effort to deny the Communist soldiers food and places to hide. Leaky spray nozzles on the C-123S, wind drift, and vaporization of the herbicides from the high temperatures also wilted fruit trees and killed large sections of crops that were not officially targeted. Eighteen million gallons of the herbicides were to be sprayed over 20 percent of the forest land of the South. The most commonly used defoliant, Agent Orange, contained minute amounts of dioxin, a highly poisonous substance. The dioxin accumulated from the repeated spraying, lingering in the silt of the streambeds and entering the ecosystem of South Vietnam. After the war scientific tests indicated that the Vietnamese of the South had levels of dioxin in their bodies three times higher than inhabitants of the United States.