A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (143 page)

Social revolution: Doug Ramsey, Frank Scotton, Ev Bumgardner. Recollections of personal discussions with John Vann in 1965 and 1966.

Ambush of the canary yellow pickup: Diary and an account of the ambush Vann wrote for the senior USOM police advisor in the III Corps region. He also described the ambush to me and showed me photographs of the damaged truck.

John McNaughton’s 70%-20%-1o% memorandum; Westmoreland’s troop requests and his plan to win the war; McNamara’s memorandum to Lyndon Johnson and the president’s decisions; the Pentagon Papers.

“Harnessing the Revolution in South Vietnam”: The drafts of Vann’s strategy proposal were among his papers. Interviews with Bumgardner, Ramsey, Scot-ton, and Gen. William Rosson. General Rosson remembered Westmoreland’s returning to MACV headquarters one day with a copy of Vann’s proposal, apparently one of those distributed by Charles Mann at a meeting of the mission council.

The Marines meet the 1st Viet Cong Regiment: my dispatches to the
New York Times;
personal recollections; the official Marine history for 1965 by Jack Shulimson and Maj. Charles Johnson,
U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Landing and the Buildup
.

Vann’s hopes for Lodge: Vann’s correspondence; Sam Wilson; personal discussions with Vann in 1965 and 1966.

York’s recommendations to Westmoreland: Vann-York correspondence; interview with General York.

Capture of Ramsey: Vann’s investigation of the ambush and the notes and report in his papers; interview with Ramsey; his unfinished manuscript; a copy, which Ramsey provided me, of his official debriefing on his captivity by the State Department after his release on February 11, 1973.

Vann’s attempt to rescue Ramsey: his report to his USOM superior on the rescue endeavor; a copy of the handwritten note from the village chief; the original of the letter of reply from the National Liberation Front, neatly penned in black ink in a tiny Vietnamese hand on both sides of a small piece of graph paper, filed in Vann’s papers along with a translation. Also, interviews with Frank Scotton and Tom Donohue, the CIA officer who saw Vann’s face when he received the news.

Ramsey’s argument with the sixteen-year-old guerrilla and his two older escorts: his unfinished manuscript and my interview with him.

The Battle of the la Drang: my dispatches to the
New York Times
and my memories. Tim Brown told me how he noticed the red star over Chu Prong on the ARVN intelligence officer’s map during a series of interviews I also did with him and Hal Moore and others right after the battle for a proposed article for the
Times’
Sunday magazine. The article was never written because of the pressure of daily news reporting. An account of Moore’s fight at “X-Ray” by Maj. John Cash, published by the U.S. Army’s Office of the Chief of Military History in
Seven Firefights in Vietnam
, was of great assistance. The ambush of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry north of X-Ray was graphically described by one of the survivors, Specialist Four Jack P. Smith, a son of the television commentator Howard K. Smith, in an article in the
Saturday Evening Post
of January 28, 1967.

“Masher”: I am indebted to my colleague R. W. “Johnny” Apple, Jr., for reporting the next ordeal of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry on the Bong Son Plain. He covered that battle for the
Times
. I went to Bong Son afterward to do follow-up stories and have drawn on those dispatches and on my memories. Frank Scotton confirmed my memory of Vinh Loc, the ARVN II Corps commander, and his relative, the new province chief of Binh Dinh, taking advantage of Masher to run copra down to Qui Nhon.

John Vann and Daniel Ellsberg: interview with Daniel Ellsberg; Vann-Ellsberg correspondence; their correspondence with others which casts light on the relationship; sundry notes and memoranda by both men; interviews with a number of acquaintances of both. The skittishness John McNaughton developed about Ellsberg shortly before his departure for Vietnam in 1965 is mentioned in a letter to Vann by a mutual acquaintance who was in the Pentagon at the time.

Vann and “Lee”: interviews with Lee and her sister; letters and photographs Lee gave me.

John Vann and “Annie”: interviews with Annie and her father, mother, sister. Photographs and letters Annie gave me. Vann talked to friends like Ellsberg and George Jacobson about his relationship with both women.

Death of Myrtle and her funeral: interviews with Dorothy Lee Cadorette and Aaron Frank Vann, Jr. Frank Junior remembered his father’s remark on seeing Myrtle at the funeral home. Dorothy Lee took me to her mother’s grave during my research trip to Norfolk in 1981.

Pacification teams dispute: interviews with Tran Ngoc Chau, Tom Donohue, Daniel Ellsberg, Richard Holbrooke, and Frank G. Wisner II. Vann’s running notebook on the dispute and a memorandum dated March 16, 1966, on his initial meeting with Ambassador Porter. Vann-Porter correspondence. Ellsberg’s
memoranda to Lansdale. Early on in the dispute Vann told me and Charlie Mohr of the scandal at the training camp and his confrontation with Jorgenson. We decided he would be fired if we wrote the story then and waited until Mai was finally removed, when Mohr recounted the tale in a dispatch published in the July 18, 1966, edition of the
Times
.

Key aspects of Westmoreland’s war of attrition and the creation of the killing machine:

Civilian casualties: estimates based on a formula worked out by Thomas Thayer, director of the Southeast Asia Office of Systems Analysis at the Pentagon from 1966 to 1972. See Bibliography for his book-length statistical monograph on the war. He graciously gave me a copy. Also taken into account were figures derived through my own reporting and those compiled by the staff of Edward Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees. The attempt by Maj. Gen. James Humphreys to ameliorate the lot of the civilian wounded and the effort to establish three U.S. military hospitals to care for them is also drawn from my own reporting and from testimony before Kennedy’s subcommittee.

Firepower: Bomb tonnage figures are official ones. Lt. Gen. Jonathan Seaman remembered when I interviewed him how he had been forced to restrict the supply of artillery shells to 1st Infantry Division while General DePuy commanded it. DePuy’s call for “more bombs, more shells, more napalm” was quoted in a memorandum from Ellsberg to Ambassador Porter.

Base building and the amenities of American civilization: details primarily from personal observation and from three book-length monographs in a series commissioned by General Westmoreland after he became Chief of Staff and published by the Department of the Army:
Base Development, 1965–1970
, by Lt. Gen. Carroll Dunn;
Logistic Support
, by Lt. Gen. Joseph Heiser, Jr.; and
U.S. Army Engineers, 1965–1970
, by Maj. Gen. Robert Ploger.

Moral and social consequences for the Vietnamese and the unprecedented corruption: wide variety of sources including personal recollection and my reporting (e.g., “Not a Dove, But No Longer a Hawk” in the Sunday, October 9, 1966, edition of
The New York Times Magazine);
my talks with Vann in this period; numerous news clippings in years since; interviews with Ev Bumgardner, Frank Scotton, and others.

Westmoreland’s neglect of the ARVN and RF and PF: Vann’s constant complaints in his correspondence; news clippings including a particularly helpful one on Westmoreland’s public relations approach to the matter by R. W. Apple, Jr., in the
Times
of June 1,1967. Lyndon Johnson’s admonishment of his general is in the Pentagon Papers.

The ordeal of Victor Krulak and the Marines of Vietnam: interviews with General Krulak and with Gen. Wallace Greene, Jr.; papers and correspondence that General Krulak kindly gave me, including his October 7,1966, back-channel message to General Walt; relevant chapters from his book,
First to Fight;
LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, for records of his August 1,1966, meeting with Lyndon Johnson; official Marine histories for 1965, and 1967 by Shulimson et al. Also
personal recollections and reporting as I was in I Corps frequently in 1965–1966, spent several days with a Marine company attempting to pacify a village south of Da Nang, and covered the minor civil war there between the pro-Ky and pro-Buddhist forces. The after-action report of the 3rd Marine Regiment, preserved in the archives of the Marine Corps Historical Center at the Washington Navy Yard, was indispensable to reconstructing the “Hill Fights” at Khe Sanh. General Walt told me after his return to the United States in 1967 of flying to Khe Sanh in alarm at the casualties and ordering heavy bombs with delay fusing. The records of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing confirmed his account.

Where Americans died in South Vietnam: The figures are Tom Thayer’s from his statistical analysis of the war. Thayer also let me interview him for the book.

Robert Komer and CORDS: interview with Ambassador Komer. Holbrooke-Vann correspondence. Also interviews with Holbrooke; Brig. Gen. Robert Montague, Komer’s military assistant; and Lt. Gen. Samuel Wilson.

Fred Weyand and John Vann: interview with General Weyand; news clippings and other biographical material on him. The anecdote about the aide with the flying machine came from Col. Thomas Jones, a friend and senior subordinate of Vann’s in III Corps.

Ramsey in captivity: Ramsey gave me a typed copy of his letter to his parents. Also my interview with him; his unfinished manuscript; and his official debriefing on his captivity by the State Department.

Ellsworth Bunker: interview with the late Ambassador Bunker and news clippings and other biographical data. I also requested, with his consent, the declassification of his Vietnam papers, a request the State Department partially fulfilled. Bunker was proud of his performance in the Dominican Republic. The anecdote of how he pressured Ky and Thieu and the other generals into settling the 1967 election dispute among themselves came from my interview with him.

Annie’s second pregnancy and the ceremony and arrangement with Vann: interview with Annie. The senior AID administrator mentioned here told me how Vann had approached him and why he decided to give Vann a house for Annie and the child to come.

Awakening of Robert McNamara: McNamara’s October 14, 1966, memorandum to the president; Enthoven’s memoranda to McNamara on the absurdity of Westmoreland’s war of attrition and Thayer’s statistics to prove the contention; and the May 19, 1967, memorandum to Johnson from McNamara and John McNaughton are in the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg interview for the memorandum reading on the flight to Saigon. Interview with Jonathan Schell for the episode with McNamara in the Pentagon. (Schell’s
New Yorker
article was republished by Knopf in 1968 as
The Military Half.)
Bunker interview for McNamara’s sending the manuscript to the ambassador and the inquiry he ordered. The report of the investigation was among the Bunker papers the State Department declassified for me. LBJ Library for McNamara’s November 1, 1967, memorandum to Johnson, which the library had declassified in 1985, and the written comments on it Johnson sought from Walt Rostow, Maxwell Taylor,
Justice Abe Fortas, and Clark Clifford. Interview with George Christian, who was close to the president, for Johnson’s personal assessment of the war at this time and his conclusion about the change in McNamara. What Christian had to say was confirmed by others and by the documentary record. Also personal reporting as I did a series of interviews in the fall of 1967 with friends and associates of McNamara’s after the rumors began circulating that he had turned against the war. Robert Kennedy was one of those I interviewed.

Bombing of the North and the Ho Chi Minh Trail: While the analysis of the futility of the air war is my own, Col. Jack Van Loan of the Air Force, who was shot down over North Vietnam and imprisoned there, set me on the way with some observations he made when I interviewed him. Much of the material, such as Admiral Sharp’s “LOC cut program” and the POL raids in the summer of 1966, came from the Pentagon Papers. The map of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that eight years of bombing produced was provided to me by Dennis Berend of the public affairs office of the CIA. The estimate that the planes destroyed only about 20 to 25 percent of the trucks rolling to the South was originally derived from classified official figures I obtained in the fall of 1968 from Walt Rostow and one of his assistants. Rostow was then President Johnson’s special assistant for National Security Affairs. Rostow had had the Air Force and the Navy compile the figures for the president. My research indicated that the estimate held for subsequent years in the bombing of the Laos corridor of the Trail, which never ceased, and in the intermittent and then full-scale resumption of the bombing of the North by President Nixon. I am indebted to William Branigan of the
Washington Post
for a dispatch from Vietnam in the April 23, 1985, edition of the newspaper giving the length of the Trail as estimated by the Vietnamese and a description of the memorial cemetery to those who died for it.

The Wise Men: LBJ Library for the records of the meetings, declassified in 1983 and 1984.

My Lai: See Bibliography for books on the massacres and the court-martial of William Calley by Seymour Hersh and Richard Hammer. Also see the report of the investigating commission headed by Lt. Gen. William Peers.

The eve of Tet: Vann had two extended telephone conversations about the Tet 1968 Offensive and the period preceding it with Dan Ellsberg while on home leave in the United States in July 1968. Ellsberg taped the conversations and had them transcribed at the Rand Corporation. Vann also left behind in his papers pocket notebooks with comments by Weyand as Tet drew near. The transcripts and the notebooks were useful both as a record of what occurred and as a stimulus to the memories of Fred Weyand and others whom I interviewed. Vann described his meeting with Rostow to a number of friends. Rostow did not recall details. A copy of his office record, which he generously let me have, showed the time of the meeting. Westmoreland continued to maintain in his memoirs,
A Soldier Reports
, published in 1976, that the Vietnamese Communists were attempting a second Dien Bien Phu at Khe Sanh. The memoirs
were of great assistance in describing his attitudes and actions here and after the offensive unfolded. Also helpful was another of the book-length Department of the Army monographs he commissioned while Chief of Staff,
The War in the Northern Provinces, 1966–1968
, by Lt. Gen. Willard Pearson. For the siege of Khe Sanh itself I found most useful an early Marine history,
The Battle for Khe Sanh
, by Capt. Moyers Shore II, published by the historical branch of the Marine Corps in 1969.