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

by Sheehan, Neil

  The Spectre had in the meantime been trying to do the job for the ARVN. Ingenious Air Force technicians had mounted a 105mm howitzer in the C-130. The cannon shot pinpoint, because it was hooked up to a digital fire-control computer that was fed data by the sensors. Six times the pilot radioed Kaplan that he had “hit” a tank. The difficulty was that, not having been forewarned, the Spectre had no antitank ammunition aboard, only high explosive. The T-54 is a sturdy tank. The three-man crews were undoubtedly being given something worse than headaches, but only one crew abandoned its tank near a hamlet just below Dak To District center. The PF there captured the driver, an eighteen-year-old North Vietnamese, and brought him to the district headquarters. A small group of NVA then came down the road, chased away the PF around the tank, and drove it off to join the others still moving toward Dat’s command post.

  Kaplan resorted to the artillery batteries at Tan Canh, with the Spectre acting as his spotter. The tanks scattered at the first salvos. The NVA observers around the compound, who had registered their artillery during the day, then called for counterbattery, and the ARVN gunners ran back to their bunkers at the incoming shells.

  “Colonel, the artillery must fire!” Terry McClain, Kaplan’s deputy, shouted at Dat.

  “The artillery is firing, Colonel,” Dat replied.

  ***

  John Vann wrote his will in the helicopter speeding toward Tan Canh early on the morning of April 24, 1972. The last time he had visited Norfolk, his oldest brother, Frank Junior, had asked him if he wasn’t afraid of dying in Vietnam. “Hell, no,” he said. He had survived so many scrapes that he was sure the war would never claim him. The odds did not apply to him, he said. After the offensive intensified, he had started to wonder. The antiaircraft fire was getting so bad, he wrote Dan Ellsberg, that he might not come through this fight.

  On several occasions he had told Annie that he had made a provision for the support of his child in the event something happened to him. In fact, he had made no provision for his Vietnamese daughter. His estate was small. The dual expense of his women and the family in Littleton kept him from saving anything substantial. He had some life insurance policies worth about $85,000, and if he left a widow she would receive his combined military and AID pension. The way his affairs stood, Annie could not claim the pension and she and the child would have a tenuous claim at best to any of the insurance benefits. With the offensive on his mind, Vann had not even taken the preliminary step, during one of his trips to Saigon, of filling out a declaration to marry Annie at the consular section of the embassy. She and his daughter were currently living in a house in Nhatrang on the coast. Vann had decided to leave the CORDS component of II Corps in the former Field Force headquarters in Nhatrang, and the house there was his official residence. His most recent will, drawn up at the time of his abdominal surgery in mid-1968 when the child was about six months old, left everything to Mary Jane and his American children. It had been duly registered in Colorado and remained in effect.

  When he went to bed in his room at Pleiku around 2:00 A.M. that morning, it was clear there was nothing he could do to stop the tanks and that he would need some sleep for the day to come. The Tactical Operations Center woke him a little before 6:30 and said that Kaplan wanted him at Tan Canh right away. He had his pilot roused while he pulled on his clothes, and they ran to the helicopter pad and took off for Tan Canh in the little Bell Ranger. He might succeed in snatching a bunch of advisors from a compound with tanks bursting into the place. He might not.

  Vann carried a three-by-five-inch spiral note pad in his shirt pocket to jot down whatever he wanted to remember of a day. He took it out as he flew toward Tan Canh, marked the time, 0700, and the date at the top right corner of the lined page, printed “LAST WILL & TESTAMENT,” and wrote underneath: “My wife, …, and my daughter, …, are to share equally in my estate. All my possessions in SVN are to be sold and the proceeds also given to my wife, . …” He signed, “John P. Vann,” and put the note pad back in his pocket. He apparently thought that if it was found on his body, he would have provided for Annie and his Vietnamese daughter.

  He didn’t tell the pilot beside him, Chief Warrant Officer Robert Richards, what he had written. Richards was a skinny, friendly redneck from South Georgia, a former NCO who had become an officer and a gentleman because of the Army’s sudden need for helicopter pilots in 1966. He had learned harum-scarum flying during his first tour in Vietnam as a scout pilot for the 1st Infantry Division and had become Vann’s regular pilot in the Delta in 1970 because he was deft with a helicopter in dangerous spots and would take risks Vann’s previous pilots had refused. Ordinary men have to draw on their fortitude for brave deeds. Since the beginning of the offensive, Vann had been draining the courage out of Richards faster than Richards could replace it. Richards had once liked to drink at night for fun. Now he was looking for valor in whiskey. Vann knew how tattered Richards’s nerves were. “We’ll make it, Bob,” he said. “We always make it.”

  The scud clouds of the oncoming monsoon, morning haze, and smoke from fires lit by the NVA bombardment obscured Tan Canh. Richards saw there were enough holes in the clouds so that he would be able to get underneath them. Another Ranger piloted by Capt. Dolph Todd of Tacoma, Washington, was right behind Vann and Richards’s aircraft. Todd had volunteered the day before to be Vann’s backup pilot on the 24th. He liked hazardous flying but had not known then what he would face.

  Vann began talking on the radio to Kaplan, McClain, and seven other Americans from the division advisory team. Kaplan had despaired of stimulating any resistance and ordered his team to abandon the substitute command bunker shortly after dawn. He made sure when they left it that two of his advisors were carrying portable radios so that they would be able to communicate with helicopters. Dat and his staff had followed the Americans out of the bunker and then, in a few minutes, returned to its seeming safety. To keep their opponents intimidated while the tanks drew near, the NVA had quickened the bombardment to three to four rounds of mortar, artillery, and rockets every minute. Vann, and Richards and Todd, who were monitoring the radio conversation, learned they were going to face the additional risk of detonating mines when the helicopters landed. The advisors said they were in the middle of the minefield where it curved around the west side of the Tan Canh compound.

  Kaplan’s original escape plan had proved impractical. By the time he led his advisors to the Cobra parking place next to the minefield where he had told Vann to pick them up, two tanks had rolled in through the front of the compound, the NVA infantry were starting to follow, and a third tank had pulled up beneath a tall concrete water tower not far away at the west front corner, threatening their position. Capt. Kenneth Yonan, a twenty-three-year-old West Pointer who was a deputy regimental advisor, had climbed to the top of the water tower with his ARVN counterpart to call in jets on the tanks. He hadn’t been able to do so because of the clouds and haze, and the tanks had then trapped him and the ARVN officer on the water tower. Yonan was never seen again.

  Staff Sgt. Walter Ward, the team’s administrative NCO, spotted a way to get through the minefield and gain some distance from the tank under the water tower. About 900 of the nearly 1,200 ARVN officers and men stationed at the Tan Canh headquarters were signal, engineer, and other service personnel. When the tanks came in through the front of the compound, these service troops panicked and burst out through the barbed wire and the minefield that encircled the rest of Tan Canh, many blowing themselves up on their own mines as they ran. Ward suggested that the team follow, walking in the footsteps of those ARVN soldiers who had escaped unhurt so as not to step on a mine. The advisors stopped at an old road that ran through a slight dip about midpoint in the minefield. Kaplan thought the fold in the ground there would partially shield a helicopter from the tank when it landed. The Americans lay down to hide while they waited. Lying around them were terrified ARVN soldiers also hoping for life.

  Bob Richards didn’t see any sheltering
fold in the ground. All he saw was the 100mm gun in the turret of the T-54 under the water tower pointed right at the spot where the advisors were lying and where he was about to put his helicopter. “I’m coming in to land and I’m looking at that big son of a bitch and I’m thinking, T ain’t going to make it, this is the end of me,’” Richards said. ‘That barrel looked to me like I could have flown the helicopter down it.”

  Mines or no mines, Richards came in “hot,” the skids striking hard, the rotor guard at the end of the tail boom bouncing against the ground. Todd darted in after him. Kaplan sent three of the advisors scrambling into each machine. He did not want to risk a crash by overloading the Rangers; neither did Vann. Kaplan and McClain, as the senior officers, would wait for the next pickup, along with Capt. David Stewart, the division signal advisor, who had one of the portable radios. Richards stared at the big gun again when he lifted away. To his surprise it did not explode, and no one else seemed to be shooting at them with anything of smaller bore.

  Two of the ARVN in the minefield grabbed hold of the radio antennas on the sides of Vann and Richards’s helicopter when they took off with the advisors in the back, and a couple of other Saigon soldiers clung to the skids. Vann could also see several ARVN dangling from the outside of Todd’s aircraft. He had originally intended to ferry the advisors to the former Special Forces camp at Ben Het a dozen miles to the west, one of the few islands still held by the Saigon side along the Laotian border and relatively safe because it was not under threat of imminent assault. The Rangers could bear the weight of the ARVN clinging to them once they were aloft, but Vann was afraid the Saigon soldiers would lose their grip during the longer flight to Ben Het and fall to their deaths. He decided to take the advisors instead to the main Dak To airfield, Dak To II, because it was just a couple of miles away. He knew the NVA would soon overrun the airfield too, but he had a Huey on the way that could reach Dak To II before the NVA did. Vann and Richards and Todd dropped the six advisors off at the airfield. He radioed the Huey pilot and ordered him to land there and fly the advisors to Pleiku.

  Richards and Vann started back for Kaplan and the two others. They ran out of luck. They were flying contour, because that seemed safest and because of the low clouds. An NVA soldier who knew how to shoot saw them coming. He popped up from behind a bush and raised his AK-47 to rake the front of the cockpit with a burst. Richards “honked” back on the controls, powering the helicopter up into an arc, hoping to escape into one of the scud clouds. The stream of bullets thudded into the Ranger, riddling the FM radio in the console between Richards and Vann and smacking the floor under Vann. He would have been wounded or worse but for Richards’s acrobatic maneuver and the fact that the AK-47 fires a bullet that is relatively light and of modest velocity. The rounds that struck under Vann came through the honeycombed aluminum decking of the floor at an angle, tumbled, and lost their force.

  Vann raised Todd on an alternate radio and had him go for Kaplan, McClain, and Stewart. Todd picked them up without incident. Vann instructed him to bring them to Pleiku behind him and Richards. The damage to the radio made it imperative for them to return there. The fuel gauge fell with unusual rapidity during the flight. When they landed at the pad beside II Corps Headquarters, Richards climbed out and looked at the fuel cells. The NVA soldier had punched holes in them too. The fuel was running down the fuselage. Richards shook his head. One tracer bullet would have turned the Ranger into an orange ball.

  John Vann paid no attention. He leaped into Todd’s machine as soon as Kaplan and the two other advisors got out and headed back to Tan Canh. His ARVN aide, Cai, who had been waiting for him at the headquarters pad, jumped into the rear seat to go with him. Vann had Todd land near Dak To II to rescue an American major, the advisor to an ARVN airborne battalion Dat had been lent a week before in an attempt to stiffen his defenses. The airfield had been overrun by now, and some of the paratroops were in a panic. Vann beat off those who grabbed the skid on his side of the Ranger with his rifle butt as Todd was lifting away with the major and the major’s wounded interpreter aboard, but so many clung to Todd’s side that the helicopter tipped until a main rotor blade struck the ground and the machine crashed, flipping over twice. Cai was pinned underneath. Vann pulled him free, snatched a portable radio from the wreckage, guided Cobra gunships in strafing runs against the NVA soldiers who immediately started to close, and hammered at them with his M-16. A Huey pilot managed to maneuver down and pluck Vann, Cai, Todd, and the two others from the Communist infantry, his aircraft taking repeated hits as he did so.

  Vann left Cai at the Kontum dispensary for treatment of an injured shoulder, got another helicopter, and flew once more toward Tan Canh. The close call reminded him of his will. He stopped at the airborne brigade command post at Vo Dinh, where his former captain at My Tho, Peter Kama, was the brigade advisor. He tore the page out of the note pad, had Kama sign it as a witness, and left the will with him for safekeeping.

  John Vann could not sit in the Tactical Operations Center in the bunker at Pleiku and moan with Dzu. He guided jets in strikes against the tanks, he ordered the bombing of the ammunition dumps around Tan Canh to deny the munitions to his enemy, he evacuated other advisors from neighboring fire bases, he picked up Captain Cassidy and the major who was the district senior advisor at Dak To. He had to act, no matter to what avail, amid this calamity he had done so much to bring about.

  Those thousands of ARVN soldiers who could get away ran so fast down the road toward Kontum that the Montagnard tribesmen nicknamed them “the rabbit soldiers.” Dat perished. He finally did leave the bunker, after vainly radioing Dzu to send a helicopter to rescue him at the bunker door, and reached Dak To II airfield, where he was wounded and may have shot himself with his service pistol. Kaplan and McClain were fortunate that rank required them to wait in the minefield, as was Stewart to wait with them. Three of the six advisors Richards and Todd shuttled to Dak To II were killed when the Huey Vann sent to fetch them was shot down while taking off. Sergeant Ward, who had led the way into the minefield, was among the survivors.

  Had the NVA possessed a tradition of pursuit, the course of the war would have been different. The collapse at Tan Canh created the classic moment for pursuit, the moment when one’s enemy is so demoralized he will keep running from anything, and while the might-have-been’s of war can never be more than speculation, the special circumstances of Vietnam posed a unique opportunity. If the NVA commanders had refueled their tanks that night of April 24, 1972, loaded a couple of battalions of infantry into captured jeeps and trucks and armored personnel carriers (they had plenty from which to choose; the ARVN abandoned everything in the Tan Canh area, including more than 200 vehicles), and shot their way down the twenty-five miles of Route 14 to Kontum, the town would have been theirs by morning. If they had not wished to risk a dash, they could have pursued at leisure, pushing down from Tan Canh and Rocket Ridge in a few days, or in a week, or even in ten days, and Kontum “would have fallen apart,” Vann acknowledged later.

  If Kontum had fallen in 1972, the panic that was always just waiting beneath the surface on the Saigon side would have burst forth in an uncontrollable contagion in II Corps. The Highlands would have been lost, and much of the Central Coast would have become untenable. The panic would have spread there. Binh Dinh was already teetering, because of the collapse of the northern districts. The Communists could have captured the port of Qui Nhon and started to threaten the other major coastal towns after the B-3 Front divisions from the Highlands had linked up with the Yellow Star Division in Binh Dinh. Lack of supplies need not have halted the Communist units. Their opponents would have abandoned enough to sustain them.

  The Nixon administration thought it had hired Hessians to guard the coast. At the cost of additional hundreds of millions of dollars in military and economic aid to South Korea, the administration had persuaded the government in Seoul to leave two ROK divisions in place from Nhatrang up through Qui Nhon. The Koreans would
not have held on their own with the Saigon side collapsing around them. They would have demanded evacuation. They were already reneging on their Hessian role because of secret instructions from Seoul to avoid casualties. They would not even keep open the road that was II Corps’ main supply route from the docks at Qui Nhon to the depots at Pleiku. Two battalions from a regiment of the Yellow Star Division had blocked Route 19 at the An Khe Pass in Binh Dinh in mid-April. Vann had to curse at the Korean generals for two weeks to get them to reopen the road. In the meantime he was dependent on aerial resupply and on a longer overland route from Nhatrang that might also be cut at any moment.

  The negotiations in Paris were in the balance too. Nixon had made Kissinger’s secret talks there with Le Due Tho public in January in an attempt to portray the Vietnamese Communists as obstinate. The Vietnamese were obstinate. They had fruitfully waited out Nixon’s withdrawal gamble and now, with the battlefield going their way, were more unyielding than ever in their demand that the United States pull out all of its forces unilaterally and dismantle the Thieu regime as well in exchange for a peace agreement. Nixon had resumed regular air raids on the North in response to the offensive, after years of bombing intermittently to try to intimidate the Vietnamese, and was about to mine Haiphong and the other ports. The outcome in the South was what would matter. Kissinger was attempting to bargain a compromise. If the divisions of the NVA were linked from the mountains to the sea and South Vietnam was split in two there would not be a great deal to bargain about.