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

by Sheehan, Neil

  The generals and the Madame Generals, their friends the Mrs. Colonels, the Chinese middlemen in Cholon, and all the lesser crooks in the Saigon regime had laid before them an unprecedented feast of corruption, gargantuan in scale. Thieu and his wife made so many millions that eventually they acquired control of a bank of their own to funnel their graft. Saigonese happenstance explained why so many of the buildings the Americans decided to rent as living quarters, offices, and supplementary warehousing turned out to belong to the families of people in the regime or people connected to it. With the U.S. Army paying more than $24 million in leases in 1966, the by-chance owners had good luck indeed. The Chinese and rich Vietnamese clamored with bribes for permits to put up more apartments and hotels to rent to the Americans. All new construction required permits, because cement, steel reinforcing bars, and other building materials were supposedly being rationed for the war effort and critical social needs like refugee housing. The hundreds of millions of dollars of increased AID-financed commodities coming into the country to try to hold down inflation meant a lot more graft from the sale of import licenses.

  Given the thirst of the American soldier, franchises to distribute Filipino and Japanese beer were also particularly lucrative. In addition to the forty ice cream plants, the U.S. Army shipped forty ice-making plants to South Vietnam, mainly to keep the mess halls and clubs in ice cubes. It seemed, however, that the Americans could never get enough ice and bought all they could locally. Brig. Gen. Pham Quoc Thuan, the commander of the 5th ARVN Division at Ben Cat in the rubber-plantation country, responded to the need of his allies. He had his division engineers construct an ice plant, went into the ice-peddling business, and was henceforth known as the Icehouse General.

  Bao Dai and his Binh Xuyen friend Bay Vien and their cronies had considered themselves fortunate to enjoy the time-honored rake-off from prostitution and associated entertainment. The rake-off of their successors was magnified by these galaxies of prostitutes attracted by the armed forces of the most powerful nation on earth, whose soldiers were wealthy men compared to the French troops and the Foreign Legionnaires and North African mercenaries of the Expeditionary Corps. An entrepreneurial spirit also need not be confined to such traditional rackets as prostitution rake-off, because new rackets kept appearing that were peculiar to the American style of war. The brass business was an example. The historic expenditure of ammunition caused a worldwide shortage of brass. The empty brass shell casings were collected and shipped out of the country to scrap-metal dealers at premium prices.

  One of the new sources of wealth that appeared with the Americans was sinister—narcotics. Opium addiction was not uncommon in Southeast Asia, and, as Vann had discovered, the ARVN soldiers had turned to marijuana and alcohol as means of escape from their hopelessness in 1965. Heroin users were rare among the native peoples. The Americans were different. Many of them brought to South Vietnam the craving for marijuana and heroin that had been increasing gradually in the United States since the latter half of the 1950s.

  The Corsican gangsters who had traditionally run opium out of Indochina, refining it into heroin in Marseilles and then selling the heroin in Europe and the United States, couldn’t take advantage of the sudden appearance of a major American market right in South Vietnam. There were too few of them; they lacked networks with sufficient span. The big-time Chinese racketeers in Cholon could handle the business. They had plenty of capital, networks of brothers and cousins and in-laws all over Southeast Asia, and lots of lesser Chinese at their beckoning to run the distribution system in the South. The Corsicans continued to buy what opium they could in Laos and send it to Marseilles, but most of the Southeast Asian opium was now bought by other hands and refined into heroin in secret laboratories in Burma and Thailand. Marijuana, previously grown on a small scale as a cash crop by the farmers of the region, was also planted much more widely and began to come into South Vietnam by the ton. The soldiers of the Air Cav learned that in the shanty town outside their base camp at An Khe in the middle of nowhere they could buy all of the “grass” they could smoke as well as cheap heroin that gave them a fast high because it was not diluted like the dope being sold for far more money on the streets back home. Huge payoffs were necessary to protect a business as profitable and sensitive as this one. The Chinese traffickers did not have to pay every Saigon general, only those powerful enough to assure protection in return for the money.

  With the exception of the airborne battalions and the Saigon marines whom Westmoreland employed on his search-and-destroy operations, the regular ARVN avoided combat assiduously after 1965. “I consider the performance of the ARVN to be more disgraceful than ever,” Vann wrote in the December 23, 1966, letter to York in which he said that while delighted with his new job as director of OCO for III Corps, he could not see any significant progress in the war. He laid out the statistics on small-unit operations reported by the three ARVN divisions in III Corps for the previous five days. The 25th Division under Vann’s acquaintance in Hau Nghia, Phan Trong Chinh, who had struck up an alliance with Ky and got himself promoted to brigadier general; the 5th Division under “Icehouse” Thuan; and the 18th ARVN Division at Xuan Loc claimed to have conducted 5,237 patrols and other small-unit operations over the five-day period. They reported making contact with the enemy thirteen times. “I can easily establish more enemy contacts on a daily basis myself,” Vann wrote.

  As Westmoreland kept raising his demands for more American troops to fight his war of attrition, he came under increasing pressure to end the nonperformance of the ARVN. By early 1967 Lyndon Johnson had agreed to give him 470,000 Americans. In March the general then informed Washington that he had to have another 80,576 for a “Minimum Essential Force” of about 550,500 men “as soon as possible but not later than 1 July 1968.” He said he would prefer to have an additional 207,838 Americans for an “Optimum Force” of about 678,000 men. The president admonished him to “make certain we are getting value received from the South Vietnamese troops” and to try experiments to save U.S. manpower like the KATUSAs in Korea.

  The general responded by pressing his latest request for more Americans while taking steps to protect himself against the accusation that he might be neglecting Vietnamese soldiers. Westmoreland had his staff draw up a program and reproduce it in a thick booklet marked “Secret.” The booklet described forty-four subprograms for more equipment, better training, and more advisors for the Saigon forces. Westmoreland gave the Saigon forces 3,000 more advisors. He also issued instructions that senior advisors were to accentuate, whenever possible, “the positive combat accomplishments of the South Vietnamese Army,” and to play down the failings of the Saigon troops. He made speeches praising them. His chief public affairs officer said that the general wanted to “improve the image” of the ARVN. Westmoreland also began several experiments in the use of Vietnamese soldiers. The most serious, the mating of an ARVN Ranger group with the U.S. 199th Light Infantry Brigade, was to be terminated before the end of the year.

  Most of the soldiers in the regular ARVN divisions might be able to escape for the moment; the men in the Regional Forces and the PF could not, because they continued to be frittered away in the outposts and in ambushes. On the Saigon side, 11,953 men perished in 1966, approximately 2 for each of the 6,053 Americans who died in Vietnam that year; 12,716 Vietnamese soldiers were to be killed on the Saigon side in 1967, the year the Americans almost caught up to them in dying.

  With his penchant for gallows humor, Vann would have appreciated the irony had he known that at this moment at the end of 1966 when he was writing York that nothing had changed on the Saigon side, his nemesis of three and a half years earlier, Victor Krulak of the Marine Corps, was as frustrated and as angry as Vann had ever been. The singular quality of Brute Krulak’s intellect and his gift for his craft had finally brought him abreast of the war. He had acquired the distinction of becoming an American military leader who understood the minds of the men in Hanoi.

  A
s a good lawyer is impelled to approach each case as unique, the beginning of the American war in 1965 had inspired Krulak to look at the war in Vietnam anew. The attrition strategy of Westmoreland and DePuy that he had accepted so unquestioningly in Harkins’s time no longer made sense to him, particularly in view of the terrain and population features of the five northernmost provinces on the Central Coast (I Corps) where the Marines were being deployed. Krulak also happened to be in Vietnam on another of his frequent trips there as Commanding General Fleet Marine Force Pacific, when the first hard fight occurred in August 1965. Watching the battle with the 1st Viet Cong Regiment in which fifty-one of his Marines died amid the hedgerows and bamboo thickets near the airfield that bore the Chinese phonetics of his name and then studying the reports of Moore’s fight and the destruction of the other Air Cav battalion in the valley of the Drang in November made him reflect more carefully still. By December 1965 his mind was made up. He had been expounding ideas as they occurred to him since the previous spring in memoranda and letters to McNamara and others and had not been obtaining the response he wanted. He decided to bring all of his thoughts together into one paper that would arouse the attention he needed. It was plain that Hanoi was not going to buckle under the gradually escalating air raids against the North and that the ground conflict in the South was passing the point of no return. Krulak wanted to get the war under control and on a winning course while there was still time.

  He wrote his paper in his office on the mountain overlooking Pearl Harbor where he now held the place of Holland Smith. He took a week to write it, drafting the sentences in pencil on a large pad of lined paper as he did all of his important letters and memoranda. The finished product ran to seventeen typed pages; Krulak went into each of his arguments in detail, even drawing diagrams to illustrate his main points. The paper was full of the standard American misconceptions about the Vietnamese and ignorance of their history. That Krulak could find his way to the dynamics of the war despite this mental bric-a-brac was another demonstration of the originality of his mind.

  Attrition would fail, Krulak wrote, because attrition was the enemy’s game. In a reference to the fighting in the valley of the Drang that had taken 233 American lives in four days, he warned that the Vietnamese Communists were “seeking to attrit U.S. forces through the process of violent, close-quarters combat which tends to diminish the effectiveness of our supporting arms,” i.e., artillery and air power. The Hanoi leaders believed that if they killed and wounded enough American soldiers over a period of time they would “erode our national will and cause us to cease our support of the GVN.” Vo Nguyen Giap “was sure that if the cost in casualties and francs was high enough, the French would defeat themselves in Paris. He was right. It is likely that he feels the same about the U.S.A.”

  Krulak did the arithmetic of attrition to prove that Hanoi had far more people to spend at this macabre game than the United States did. The Vietnamese Communists had at their disposal in the North and through the Viet Cong in the South a probable military manpower pool of about 2.5 million men. If one accepted the current official “kill ratio” of one American or Saigon soldier for 2.6 Viet Cong or North Vietnamese—an exchange of corpses that Krulak thought might be “optimistic”—and the proportional share of dying in 1965 between the American and the Saigon troops, 10,000 Americans and 165,000 Saigon soldiers would have to die in order “to reduce the enemy [manpower] pool by only a modest 20 percent.”

  Brute Krulak laid out his plan to win. In a further irony Vann would have appreciated, Krulak’s plan was similar to his. Krulak also wanted to adopt a strategy of pacification that would seek the support of the Vietnamese peasantry through a generous program of land reform and other social and economic benefits and change. To accomplish it he too advocated a level of U.S. influence that would amount to a takeover of the Saigon regime. He explained that a strategy of pacification and social and economic reform was the only way to succeed. Attrition was “peripheral” to the real struggle. The big-unit fighting with the Main Force Viet Cong and the NVA “could move to another planet today, and we would still not have won the war” because “the Vietnamese people are the prize.” Without the sustenance they provided through the local guerrillas and the clandestine Viet Cong government, the Communist regulars could not exist. The United States therefore had to employ its troops to shield the populated areas while it pacified by earning “the trust and loyalty of the people.”

  The Main Force Viet Cong and the NVA were not to be left entirely at peace in their rain-forest and mountain fastnesses. Krulak wanted to track them by every possible means of intelligence and to “attack them continuously by air.” He was willing to join battle in these sparsely inhabited regions when the intelligence promised “benefits … overwhelmingly in our favor, and when to do so will not consume forces needed for protection of cleared areas.” But the United States must not march to the enemy’s plan by reacting to Communist “initiatives or seek them out just to do battle.” The choice of strategies was a choice of outcomes. Pacification and social and economic reform were “a design for victory.” Attrition was “the route to defeat.”

  This was no renegade lieutenant colonel buttonholing generals in the Pentagon, no USOM province representative peddling a brainstorm. This was the third-ranking general in the Marine Corps and a man whose influence had, in any case, always outreached his rank. Furthermore, Krulak had two senior allies in the military hierarchy. The first was his superior in Hawaii, Adm. Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, who had been a destroyer commander during World War II and had replaced Harry Felt as Commander-in-Chief Pacific in 1964. “Oley” Sharp had decided many months before, when Krulak had begun developing his ideas, that his was the logical way to proceed in Vietnam. Krulak’s second ally was his like-preaching bishop, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Wallace Greene, Jr., another slightly built man, with a gravelly voice and a deliberate way of speaking. Krulak sent Greene a copy of his memorandum as soon as he passed one to Sharp. “Wally” Greene and Brute Krulak had been professional acquaintances since Krulak’s days as a lieutenant with the 4th Marine Regiment in Shanghai, where Greene had been a captain and company commander. Greene was no more hesitant than any other American military leader of the 1960s to go to war in Vietnam. He wanted to mobilize the reserves and put 500,000 men in South Vietnam as fast as possible, but he did not want to see American soldiers and Marines used as Westmoreland intended. There was a school of pacification strategists within the upper ranks of the Marine Corps because of its institutional history. The decades of pre-World War II pacifying in Central America and the Caribbean, codified in the Corps’ Small Wars Manual, were a strategic precedent which ruled that wars like Vietnam were wars of pacification. The Marines had adopted an approach that emphasized pacification over big-unit battles almost from the outset of their buildup in I Corps. While Krulak had been the guiding intellect, taking account of the special conditions of the Vietnamese war and grafting social and economic reform onto the strategy the Marines had followed in those earlier decades of pacifying, Greene and other senior Marine officers believed just as firmly in the concept.

  Westmoreland was the obstacle. Greene had vainly attempted to talk him into a simpler version of the pacification approach during a visit to South Vietnam on the eve of the buildup in April 1965. Sharp had sought to persuade him, and Krulak had argued with him repeatedly. Krulak’s scheme was to go over Westmoreland’s head, exploit the relationship he had formed with McNamara during the Kennedy years, and use his paper to convert the secretary to the strategy. Sharp and Greene approved. Krulak flew to Washington and saw McNamara in mid-January 1966. The secretary was struck by Krulak’s mathematics of futility—175,000 lives for 20 percent of Hanoi’s manpower reserves. “I think you ought to talk to the president about this,” he said. In the meantime he suggested that Krulak see Averell Harriman to discuss thoughts Krulak had also expressed in his memorandum about the air war against the North, thoughts McNamara did n
ot like. Krulak warned that it was foolish to try to interdict Soviet and Chinese war matériel once the weapons and supplies were flowing to the South down the roads and rail lines of the North. To be effective, he said, the air campaign had to stop the matériel from entering the North by bombing and mining Haiphong and the other ports and attacking the North Vietnamese railroads from China.

  “Do you want war with the Soviet Union or the Chinese?” Harriman lectured during the soup course at lunch at his Georgetown home. He waved a heavy sterling-silver spoon in Krulak’s face as he spoke. Krulak has a prominent nose and felt uncomfortable having a big spoon waved at it. McNamara did not follow up his implied promise to arrange a meeting with the president. Krulak did not realize at the time that although he could catch McNamara’s attention momentarily, he could not hold it. Despite the fright McNamara had received from the fighting in the valley of the Drang, he was still too captivated by Westmoreland and the other Army generals to heed logic and simple arithmetic.

  Wally Greene tried to bring his fellow members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff around to the Marine point of view in hope of persuading them to order Westmoreland to adopt the strategy. He had a separate study done by his staff at Marine Corps headquarters. It confirmed Krulak’s estimate of the manpower available to the Vietnamese Communists. Greene briefed his colleagues on its findings and argued for the Marine approach to the war. None of his peers were won over. No one disputed the manpower estimate and the calculations that followed. “You couldn’t challenge the figures,” Greene was to recall from retirement. Greene’s peers reacted as Westmoreland did. They avoided coming to grips with the numbers and the logical implication the numbers had for strategy. The Army generals, Earle Wheeler, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Harold Johnson, the chief of staff, rallied to their Army commander in the field. Gen. John McConnell, who had taken Curtis LeMay’s place as chief of staff of the Air Force, and Adm. David McDonald, the current chief of naval operations, saw no reason to side with Greene against their Army colleagues. The Air Force and the Navy were obtaining their share of the action in Indochina through the air war.