Read A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam Online
Authors: Neil Sheehan
Tags: #General, #Vietnam War; 1961-1975, #History, #United States, #Vietnam War, #Military, #Biography & Autobiography, #Southeast Asia, #Asia, #United States - Officers, #Vietnam War; 1961-1975 - United States, #Vann; John Paul, #Biography, #Soldiers, #Soldiers - United States
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (141 page)
DOCUMENTSJohn Vann’s papers were the primary source of written material for this book. His family turned all of them over to me when they were shipped home from Vietnam after his death. The classified documents and letters among them were culled by a military historian in Saigon and sent separately to the U.S. Army Military History Institute at the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. These were, except for a small number of documents lost by the State Department, declassified by the relevant agencies under a Freedom of Information Act request I submitted and copies were made for me by the institute. Because permission was granted by his family, the Office of The Adjutant General also arranged for the retrieval and release to me of Vann’s entire Army record, including that of his enlisted service in World War II. Friends of Vann, such as Prof. Vincent Davis, director of the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky, added material they held. Davis, for example, had safeguarded all of his correspondence with Vann and had tape recorded the not-for-attribution lectures Vann gave for him each year while on home leave. I had the lectures transcribed. I further supplemented Vann’s papers with much that I had gathered in the course of newspapering and with other correspondence and documents given to me by people I interviewed for the book. The result filled the better part of five file cabinets.
The Pentagon Papers were the second major source of documentation for the book. Despite the years that have passed since they were first published in condensed form by the
New York Times
in 1971, they remain the most complete and informative official archive on the Vietnam War. Regrettably, no full edition of the papers has ever been published. The
Times
series was first printed in book form in paperback by Bantam as
The Pentagon Papers
, followed soon afterward in 1971 by a hardcover version by Quadrangle Books. Beacon Press of Boston also published a four-volume edition with a fifth index volume,
The Pentagon Papers: History of United States Decision Making on Vietnam
, Senator Gravel edition, in 1971 and 1972. The most extensive but unfortunately censored version is the one declassified by the Department of Defense and published in a twelve-book set in 1971 by the U.S. Government Printing Office as
United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967
. I relied on the copy of the original, approximately three thousand pages of narrative history and more than four thousand
pages of appended documents, that I first obtained for the
Times
. It was reasonably complete except for four sections on the secret negotiations with Hanoi. I later acquired these after they were obtained and made public by Jack Anderson.The Source Notes for “The Funeral” and Books I-VII that now follow are by no means an exhaustive listing. They are simply an attempt to indicate the principal interviews, correspondence and documents, and published works consulted for the sections cited.
SOURCE NOTES
The experience of going to John Vann’s funeral led me to write this book. I drew for this section on my interviews with the members of the Vann family and with the principal public figures who attended the funeral. Col. Samuel Loboda, the commander of the U.S. Army Band in 1972, was extremely helpful in explaining details of the ceremony. Mark Murray, the Department of the Army civilian official in charge of Vann’s funeral as operations officer for ceremonies for the Military District of Washington, was equally helpful in this regard. Maj. Charles Ingram, ceremonial officer on the Military District of Washington staff at the time, was of further assistance. Mr. Murray also provided details on the confrontation in the Roosevelt Room at the White House and Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft was kind enough to let me interview him on Jesse Vann’s attempt to give Richard Nixon half of his draft card.
In this section and elsewhere in the book, conversations are rendered in quotation marks where there is a written record or the memory of the person or persons interviewed seemed precise enough to justify placing the words in quotes.
The most significant interviews for Book I were those with Lt. Col. Le Nguyen Binh, Maj. Gen. Frank Clay, Col. James Drummond, Col. Elmer Faust, Col. Jonathan F. Ladd, Col. Daniel Porter, Jr., Col. Herbert Prevost, and Lt. Col. Richard Ziegler. I am especially grateful to Colonels Drummond, Porter, and Ziegler for the breadth of information they provided and I thank Colonel Porter for speaking with such candor on subjects that were painful to him.
John Vann’s papers were the most important source of written material. It was possible to reconstruct much of this period from the reports he wrote while at 7th Division, notes, letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, and an occasional item of surpassing value like the invitation to the September 11, 1962,
lunch for Maxwell Taylor and the results of the lunch Vann penned on the back. The transcript of Vann’s tape-recorded top-secret interview with an Army historian, Charles von Luttichau, on July 22, 1963, after his return to the United States was also helpful.
Colonel Ziegler provided me with an additional source of written material that supplemented Vann’s papers. He had kept copies, complete with map overlays, of a number of the after-action reports, including the report on the July 20, 1962, action on the Plain of Reeds. These reports were missing from Vann’s papers and the copies in the official Army records had also been lost. Furthermore, Colonel Ziegler turned his operations journal, one of those old-fashioned cloth-bound eight-by-fourteen-inch ledgers the Army used to issue for record keeping, into a diary of his year at 7th Division, Scotch taping photographs of people and events onto the pages. The diary, and related documents he preserved, was a mine of information on this period with many insights into Vann’s thinking.
The carbons of my UPI dispatches proved another valuable archive. David Halberstam’s
The Making of a Quagmire
was a useful published source. Here, as elsewhere in the book, I also drew on my memory and my talks with John Vann.
While the behavior of Generals Harkins and Anthis speaks for them on the bombing and shelling of peasant hamlets, the generals did admit in secret that they were aware of what they were doing. The admission came after W. Averell Harriman, then assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs, attacked the bombing policy in a position paper in March 1963. Ambassador Frederick Nolting replied at the end of April 1963 with a lengthy letter, classified Top Secret, attaching to it a still lengthier top-secret memorandum from Harkins and Anthis. Both had been drafted by Anthis’s 2nd Air Division staff. The central argument of the letter and the memorandum was a World War II-derived rationale that any peasant hamlet was fair game if it was in an area believed to be dominated by the Viet Cong. The ambassador said in the letter that the peasants were more likely to blame the Viet Cong for occurrence of the air strikes than the Saigon regime and the Americans for making them. The generals also argued that the strikes would help win the war by putting fear into the peasants. “The common man in the Orient has an inordinate respect for power,” they said.
Everet Bumgardner, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, and Col. Alfred Kitts provided the key interviews for Book II.
Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale’s secret history of his mission to Vietnam, which came to me through the Pentagon Papers, was the basic documentary source
on his role. Lansdale’s book,
In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to
Southeast Asia
, was also helpful, as were my talks with him over the years.
The Pentagon Papers repeatedly proved to be a valuable archive: on the return of the French in 1945, on Ho Chi Minh’s vain appeals for American help, on the so-called Bao Dai solution, and on the origins of the second Indochina war in the birth of the Viet Cong.
I am grateful to Prof. Walter LaFeber for clarifying, in an important monograph, the role of Franklin Roosevelt in the Indochina tragedy. See “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina: 1942–45,”
American Historical Review
, December 1975.
Vietnam: The Origins of Revolution
, by John McAlister, Jr., is a fine published source on the genesis of the Viet Minh and France’s return in 1945. The official history of the U.S. Navy in Vietnam in these early years,
The United States
Navy and the Vietnam Conflict
, Volume I:
The Setting of the Stage to 1959
, by Dean Allard and Edwin Hooper, is another source on the circumstances of the French return.
Lucien Bodard, in his
The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam
, is eloquent on the French debacle along Route Coloniale 4 in October 1950, and Bernard Fall provides details in his
The Two Viet-Nams
.
Denis Warner’s
The Last Confucian
and Robert Shaplen’s writings on Ngo Dinh Diem and his family were a supplement to my own research and my personal experience.
My greatest debt is to Alexander Woodside for discerning the nature of the Vietnamese Communist leadership and much more in his pathfinding book on Vietnamese history and culture:
Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam
. Professor Woodside placed me further in his debt by reading Book II in manuscript and suggesting a number of changes.
The source for Diem’s desecration of the Viet Minh cemeteries and war memorials in the South is Bernard Fall’s account of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu,
Hell in a Very Small Place
.
Figures on the growth of the Viet Cong from the start of the insurrection in 1957 until John Kennedy’s decision to intervene in November 1961 are taken from U.S. military intelligence reports.
To write this account of the Battle of Ap Bac, I compared John Vann’s exhaustive after-action report with the equally thorough Viet Cong report that was later captured. I expanded on the information in both documents with interviews and with my own observations of the battlefield at the time. My UPI dispatches on Ap Bac stimulated memory as well as adding more material.
Vann’s report and the Viet Cong document tended to corroborate each other, a fact of which Vann was proud.
Some nitty-gritty, such as Vann’s radio call sign, “Topper Six,” and that of the advisors to the M-113 company, “Walrus,” again came from the marvelous record keeping of Colonel Ziegler. He saved his pocket notebooks with the jottings he had made during Ap Bac and other actions.
Information on the home areas of the men of the 1st Company of the 261st Main Force Viet Cong Battalion comes from a personnel roster of the unit that was also captured after the battle. Unfortunately, the original copy of the roster, with the names of the ordinary guerrillas and the aliases of the ranking cadres, has been lost and all that remains is an American analysis of it which mentions the places of origin.
The principal interviews for Book HI were those with Candidate Gen. Ly Tong Ba, Sgt. Major Arnold Bowers, Lt. Col. Robert Mays, Colonel Porter, Colonel Prevost, Lt. Col. James Scanlon, and Colonel Ziegler.
“Friendly” shelling at Bac and background on General York: personal recollections, carbons of my UPI dispatches, Vann’s after-action report on Ap Bac, and interview with Lt. Gen. Robert York.
Harkins wanting to fire Vann right after Ap Bac and subsequently relenting: interview with Maj. Gen. Charles Timmes. The clipping of the Bill Mauldin cartoon with the note by Harkins was in Vann’s papers.
Porter’s memorandum to Harkins on Ap Bac: Vann preserved a copy of Porter’s indorsement on his Ap Bac after-action report by attaching it to the copy of the report in his papers.
July 23, 1962, Honolulu Conference: Where the official documents, such as the record of the conference, are mentioned in the text, I will not cite them again here.
Joint Chiefs’ mission to South Vietnam provoked by Ap Bac: The Joint Chiefs’ instructions to the team were repeated in the team’s subsequent report. The remark by the head of the team summing up its mission—to answer the question “Are we winning or are we losing?”—was made during the “debrief” at the Hawaii headquarters of Commander in Chief Pacific when the team was on its way back to Washington.
“Brute” Krulak’s pre-Vietnam career: interview with Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak; sundry Marine Corps sources, including the official history of Marine helicopter development, which recounts Krulak’s contribution; and the general’s 1984 book on the history of the Corps and his career:
First to Fight
.
Conduct of the JCS investigating team in South Vietnam and the writing of
its report: interviews with Colonels Porter and Ladd, General York, General Krulak, and Lt. Gen. George Forsythe, then a colonel and the senior aide to the four-star Army general who led the team. In addition, I questioned Lt. Gen. Theodore Parker, on the team as the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, and Vice Adm. Andrew Jackson, the senior Navy representative.
Premier Pham Van Dong’s skepticism: Ambassador Maneli told me of his exchange with the Hanoi prime minister when I first met Maneli in Saigon in 1963.
The U.S. arms the Viet Cong: The figures on American weapons supplied to the Saigon side, and thus available for capture by the guerrillas, are taken from the records of the Honolulu strategy conferences and other official U.S. documents of the period.
Viet Cong recruiting after Ap Bac: The discovery that the guerrillas recruited 2,500 young farmers in Kien Hoa in the spring of 1963, most right out of the strategic hamlets, was made by Lt. Col. J. Lapsley Smith, then a captain and intelligence advisor for the province.