A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (12 page)

These part-time local guerrillas would “fade back into the woodwork,” Vann reasoned, and become full-time peaceful farmers again. The Saigon authorities, with American assistance, could then start the slow task of identifying and arresting the secret Communist agents who had fomented this insurrection and who directed the clandestine government in its daily activity of marshaling the peasantry to support the guerrilla fighting units. The economic and social aid the United States was providing would further influence the allegiance of the farmers. The gift of drilled wells for clean drinking water and lessons in how to build latrines on solid ground were going to liberate the farmers from the parasites and intestinal diseases that afflicted them. They would be given dispensaries for regular medical care, elementary schools to eliminate illiteracy among their children, fat Yorkshire hogs to replace the lean black native variety, and better rice yields with improved seed and
chemical fertilizer. Vann thought that it would probably require ten years to create a healthy rural society of satisfied peasants and effective local government which would be impervious to Communist attempts to renew the insurgency. It should not take him more than six months to smash the Main Force and Regional guerrillas in the northern Delta and start this cycle of returning peace in the most vital part of the country.

Vann had been as fortunate in the assignment of Jim Drummond to the detachment as its intelligence officer as he had been in finding Ziegler available as an operations planner. He had again demonstrated his talent for leadership by recognizing Drummond’s qualities and giving him rein to exercise them, while at the same time directing Drummond so that his work meshed with that of Ziegler. The two were the team Vann needed to conduct his six-month campaign.

Secrecy shielded the Viet Cong fighting forces in the same way that it protected the activities of the Communist administration. As long as their location and movements were secret, the guerrillas could train and prepare undisturbed and strike with surprise. For the first time in this war they were being deprived of this secrecy. Drummond was taking away their shield with the skills of intelligence gathering that the U.S. Army had accumulated through two world wars and the Korean conflict. In Drummond’s case, the skills were fortified by an unusual affinity for his craft.

Drummond displayed a passion for knowledge of his quarry. Everything about the guerrillas interested him. He collected the homemade shotguns the Viet Cong turned out in their thatched-roof arsenals for the local guerrillas along with the crude but functioning copies of sophisticated small arms like the Thompson submachine gun. He even examined the seams and cut of uniforms to see if they differed in one province or region from another. Vann was struck by this fascination. He saw there would be no need to remind Drummond, as he would have had to remind some intelligence officers, that it was not enough to interrogate prisoners and to read translations of captured documents at headquarters, that one had to venture into the field to gain insights about the enemy and to gather the myriad details that could never be obtained from an office. Drummond, who had twice won the Bronze Star for Valor as an infantryman in Korea, had begun marching on operations as soon as he had arrived in late April, and Vann often ran across him in the field after he reached the Seminary in May.

For all their cleverness, the Viet Cong had a weak point. They had fallen into regular patterns of behavior. They had done so, despite a
doctrine that said they must never lapse into such dangerous predictability, because they were human and human beings are creatures of habit. These guerrillas had been fighting the same war against the same enemy in the same rice paddies too long not to succumb to their humanity. Drummond had spotted the weakness early, and he and Vann had talked about it in one of their first discussions. Vann’s haste in persuading Cao to let his intelligence officer cooperate with Drummond had been motivated as much by eagerness to exploit this weakness as by the need to gain proxy control over the division. Ever since, Drummond had been organizing a system to produce information for Vann’s six-month campaign of destruction.

He and his assistant, an Army sergeant who was an intelligence specialist, showed Cao’s G-2 and his staff how to compose a “profile” for each regular and provincial guerrilla battalion and company. The sergeant, who was a patient man, taught the Vietnamese to sort the captured Viet Cong reports, messages, diaries, letters, maps, and sundry other material by unit and to extract anything potentially useful. All the available data on a unit were then assembled and broken down into categories with file folders and charts and cross-reference cards. The system was designed to permit new material to be added constantly in order to increase knowledge of the unit and ability to predict its behavior. Distinguishing characteristics were carefully noted, because these were like fingerprints that helped Drummond to track a unit with fragmentary reports that would otherwise be worthless.

In this early period, all of the Viet Cong battalions were greatly inferior in firepower to their ARVN opposites, their weaponry an arms bazaar of French and American manufacture captured from the Saigon troops. Some of the battalions had a mortar, while others had none; a couple had two .30 caliber machine guns and the rest were fortunate to have one. The catalogue of weaponry measured the threat the battalion posed and was also a distinguishing characteristic. Drummond and his sergeant started rosters on the personnel strength of each battalion and its components and created biographical files for the officers and noncoms. The Viet Cong cadres used aliases for protection, but because they were local men and not Northern Communists, it was at times possible to learn who they were and to obtain some knowledge of their personalities and attitudes. Their aliases alone were useful as fingerprints of the unit. In some cases Drummond was able to obtain photographs taken from dead guerrillas or seized in raids on camps. The Vietnamese are a sentimental people, and despite the risk of compromise the Viet Cong liked to take souvenir photographs of each other. Whole platoons
would line up to have their picture taken, as if they were a high school class. Another separate file was established to delineate the normal operating area of each battalion and company. Their movements were charted to learn the customary routes the guerrillas took and the hamlets in which they stopped while making their assigned rounds to overrun outposts and stage ambushes. Drummond was just as interested in the escape routes they were likely to follow if attacked in a given vicinity.

Drummond discovered that his counterpart, Capt. Le Nguyen Binh, a Catholic from North Vietnam who had fled south after the French collapse in 1954, was a conscientious officer whose performance had been underestimated by Cao and the Americans. He was friendly and eager to share his information. One reason Binh had been so little heeded in the past was that there had been no professional intelligence officer on the American side to work with him, even if Cao had permitted cooperation. No one whose expertise Cao could recognize had told him of Binh’s worth. The unit profiles that Drummond and his sergeant put together with Binh and his staff were rudimentary and had great gaps. Nonetheless, Drummond was surprised at how much relevant information Binh’s raw files contained. He was also surprised to learn that Binh had a useful network of secret informants. Binh had established the network after being assigned to the division a year earlier and ran it himself out of fear that one of his staff might be a Communist penetration agent. He paid his spies with nonaccountable funds he was given for the purpose in imitation of the
caisse noire
(“black chest”) system of the French colonial army. The most useful informant was a jobber of water buffalo, who had the perfect excuse to travel all over the northern Delta buying and selling these work animals of the Vietnamese peasantry, moving in and out of guerrilla-dominated sections without arousing any suspicion. He could be sent on missions to verify reports from other informants or to obtain a specific piece of information.

Vann cultivated another source of intelligence—the American Protestant missionary who lived in My Tho. Like most American missionaries in Asia, he believed in promoting anti-Communism along with Christianity. Clay had told Vann of his attitude, and Vann took to calling on him regularly. He was happy to pass along what he could gather from the Vietnamese pastors of his congregations in the outlying towns.

In their quest for security, the Viet Cong would give themselves away. When they assembled in a hamlet, or in a cluster of hamlets, to rest, to propagandize the peasantry, or to launch an attack, they usually restricted the movements of the population. If anyone responsible on
the Saigon side was alert, the fall-off in the number of peasants coming to market was a tip of the Viet Cong’s presence.

Like all good military organizations, the guerrillas wanted to operate in an efficient manner. Over the years they had configured the decks of their sampans to utilize the available space to best advantage. Their packs, cook stove, rice, stack of wood or charcoal, and crock of
nuoc mam
were placed in specific spots toward the bow to leave maximum room for sitting and sleeping toward the stern. Once one learned the arrangement, it was not difficult to tell that these sampans did not belong to farmers.

The guerrillas’ permanent training camps and hospitals were well hidden in patches of woods in remote areas of the Plain of Reeds near the Cambodian border on the western side of the division zone or in mangrove swamps and water palm jungles that were difficult to penetrate in the populated provinces to the east. They could also conceal themselves in woods and swamps when they stopped to sleep while on the march, because each regular and provincial guerrilla carried a hammock he could sling between two trees. But sleeping in the open in a malaria-ridden country that has a monsoon climate and numerous other biting insects besides mosquitos is neither healthy nor comfortable. The guerrillas’ doctrine also said that they could not survive if they did not live among the peasants. For these reasons they slept in hamlets whenever they could and built way stations and “safe houses” in populated regions so as not to impose on the peasantry. The ditched roads advertised the strongholds of population under their control and thus the hamlets where they slept and where such way stations and safe houses were most likely to be found. At first glance these structures also seemed to be just more peasant houses. On second look there were no animals around them and no cultivation except perhaps a small garden.

Although the Viet Cong did not know it, they were also sending an invisible tracer of their movements to a tracker in the sky. The Army’s electronic espionage organization, the U.S. Army Security Agency, had begun functioning in earnest in South Vietnam in 1962 under the innocuous-sounding code name of the 3rd Radio Research Unit. By June there were 400 ASA technicians in the country. The majority worked out of the military side of Tan Son Nhut Airport in planes as innocent-appearing as their code name. The aircraft were built by De Havilland of Canada and had originally been designed for bush flying. They were a long and boxy, single-engine propeller type called the Otter, which could carry a communications intercept team and its sophisticated monitoring and direction-finding equipment and loiter for hours high over
suspect areas while the team picked up and tape-recorded Viet Cong radio traffic. The guerrillas had older American radios of the World War II generation which they had captured from the Saigon forces or from the French before them. They used voice radios for short distances and the rudimentary but reliable Morse-code method of sending dots and dashes with a telegraph key (a different combination of dots and dashes for each of the letters in the romanized script of their language) for long-range communications. They transmitted sparingly and encrypted everything, so they thought they were reasonably safe.

They did not realize, until an Otter with an intercept team aboard crashed about a year later, that not only were the Americans breaking their codes, but that the transmissions themselves gave them away. Every Morse operator strikes the key with a different rhythm, called his “fist” in the electronics spy trade. Voices can also be tape-recorded, compared, and identified. The “fist” or the voice became the distinguishing characteristic of the radio. The electronic emissions likewise vary from one radio to another. The highly advanced ASA methods of interception and analysis collected and sorted this “special intelligence,” as it is known. The results came to Drummond in a separate pouch. By putting the findings of this electronic espionage together with what he received from the human network, Drummond was often able to confirm that a particular radio belonged to a specific company or battalion. Because the ASA technicians could also frequently determine the general location from which the radio was transmitting, the unit could be followed and its pattern of movement outlined on the map.

With all of this information coming to him from these varied sources, Drummond started filling out the profiles and providing Vann with fresh tactical intelligence on the location and apparent intentions of a number of the regular and provincial guerrilla units. His limited knowledge often made his information imprecise, but there was enough hard information for Vann to begin systematic attacks in June.

The same American technology that tracked the guerrillas from the sky enabled Vann to launch effective assaults. The Vietnamese Communists no longer had the protection of time and space that the geography of their country had provided them during the war against the French and against Diem’s regime prior to Kennedy’s intervention. In the past the guerrillas had been able to shelter in natural fortresses that were impregnable to surprise attack. The largest and most famous one in Vann’s area was the Plain of Reeds. Its expanse of swamp, fields of waist-high reeds, and clumps of brush and woods covered most of two provinces at the northwestern corner of the Mekong Delta adjacent to
Cambodia. The plain was nearly roadless and thinly populated, because the acid soil of black clay made rice cultivation difficult despite annual flooding by the Mekong. To reach one of the guerrilla havens on the plain required an enervating two- to three-day march. The smaller fortresses the Viet Cong had created in the populated regions had also been immune to surprise. The ditched roads and a warning network of pickets and sympathetic peasants had given days or at least hours of notice that the Saigon troops were coming.