A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (21 page)

The fighter-bombers struck with bombs, napalm, and rockets. The guerrillas did not panic on this day. They stayed in the shelter of the foxholes until they could withdraw in good order. They used other tree lines for concealment along their route of retreat. They carried their dead and wounded with them and picked up the expended cartridges around the foxholes so that they could reload the brass cases with fresh powder and bullets.

Their performance seemed ominous to Vann. Some of the Viet Cong leaders were teaching their troops not to let fear overcome judgment, to maneuver, and to take advantage of the terrain. The time of easy killing was coming to an end. The 7th Division would have to begin to fight an infantry war. David Halberstam, who had just arrived in Vietnam as the correspondent for the
New York Times
, had been with a division battalion close enough to hear the shooting and to see the planes dive-bombing. Back at the Seminary that night Vann explained to him that the engagement showed how the guerrillas were learning to reduce the advantage American technology gave to the Saigon side. The most recent deserters from the Viet Cong had said the officers were stressing that if every man took the helicopters under fire, they could knock them down. The officers had made their point. The rank-and-file guerrillas
would start to look at the helicopters with less awe in the future, Vann said. The incident would also raise the prestige of the Viet Cong with the peasants in the area of the battle. The peasantry called the helicopters “the great iron birds.”

In all about twenty men from the division were killed in the fight and another forty wounded. The casualties were light by the measure of subsequent years of the conflict and were not grave by the standards of infantry combat in any war. They were serious in comparison to the negligible casualties the division had taken on previous operations when the guerrillas had conveniently run to the slaughterhouse.

Cao reacted better than Vann anticipated he would. He assured Vann he would not permit the incident to interrupt the pace of offensive operations. They would simply have to be “more prudent” in the future. Vann agreed on the need for caution where tree lines were concerned. From now on, every unit would have to keep skirmishers out in front to probe them. Vann told himself that Cao would learn from the incident and be less nervous the next time they got into a rough fight. He would remember that his career had survived this one. It would also be a while before the rest of the Viet Cong battalions learned to fight as well as the 514th clearly could. The massacre by the M-113s on September 18, only two and a half weeks before this ambush, would retard the learning process because it was bound to have worsened the general morale problem the guerrillas had been having.

Three days after the ambush of the Rangers a Civil Guard company in another province ran into a company of guerrillas from a Main Force battalion and suffered eighteen killed. The Civil Guards gave as good as they took and counted the bodies of eighteen Viet Cong afterward. Cao was not upset. The action had not occurred during a division operation and thus he was not responsible.

Then the calamity came. Cao suddenly called Vann to his house the next day. He was frightened. He said that he had been summoned by Diem to appear at the palace in the morning and explain the losses in both engagements. Vann had him briefed that night by Torrence and the advisor to the Civil Guards. They prepared explanations that Cao rehearsed before he flew up to Saigon at daybreak. Vann assumed that Cao would be able to defend himself adequately. The ambush had been the sort of lesson that soldiers have to learn the hard way in war. Cao had done nothing for which Diem could reproach him in the case of the Civil Guards.

Cao told Vann afterward that he never had an opportunity to explain. He arrived in the anteroom outside the president’s office before Diem’s
first appointment. An aide told him to wait. He sat. Others came to see the president and departed. Cao was left to sit. He sat all day. No one offered him lunch. Late in the afternoon the aide beckoned him into the presence of the man Cao called “my king.”

Diem was capable of a discussion when he thought one was to his advantage. He was famous for his monologues. He used the technique on subordinates who caused him problems and on American officials who might ask him unwelcome questions. He talked for hours, ignoring any attempt by his captive to interrupt. All the while he chain-smoked a local imitation of Gauloises Bleues, a pungent French cigarette. In this way he could not be contradicted. The experience was so painful that the victims were eager to describe it to others, which was how he had acquired a reputation for these performances. Cao got the monologue treatment. He was told that he was listening to his American advisors too much and was taking too many risks on offensive operations. These were resulting in too many casualties. If he wanted to be promoted to general and to be given command of a corps, as he had been informed might happen, he would have to show more caution. He was dismissed with no supper.

Cao put an end to Vann’s elaborately contrived system of joint planning after he returned to My Tho. He no longer had any interest in Ziegler’s talents or the folderol of the command briefings he had enjoyed so much. He resumed the planning of all operations himself, down to the minor details. Vann did not see the plans until they had been completed. Cao planned so prudently that during the next fourteen operations from mid-October through most of December only three of his soldiers were killed and the reports indicated that these three died accidentally from “friendly fire.” He put intelligence to a purpose that Vann and Drummond had not foreseen when they had taken such pains to develop a professional system for him. He used the information to go where there were no guerrillas. As further insurance, he planned an easily perceived opening in his scheme of maneuver through which the guerrillas could escape in case any should unexpectedly happen to be in the area. Sandy Faust dubbed it “the gap.” There was the potential problem of enemy casualties. Cao solved that by inventing even larger kills from air strikes than he had in the past.

At last Vann understood why Cao had always refused to commit the reserve to trap and annihilate a whole battalion of guerrillas. Cao knew that once the guerrillas were trapped, they might well attack straight into the reserve or turn and try to burst through whichever side of the box was nearest to them in their desperation to escape. There would
be fighting at close quarters. A battalion of the best troops the Communists had would die or be captured, because if the reserve buckled under the assault, Cao and Vann could always reinforce with more troops, which the Communists could not do. Cao would also take casualties. If he took casualties he would get into trouble with Diem. He would not be promoted and he might be dismissed. Once the helicopters and the armored personnel carriers had terrified the Viet Cong and the fighter-bombers had stacked up a few cords of bodies for him, he was no longer interested in taking risks. He had a fine score, and that was all he needed to look good and get promoted. The order telling the reserve not to advance on July 20 had come from Cao, not the regimental commander. He had instructed the regimental commander to issue it in order to hide its origin from Vann. There had been an explanation for his baffling attitude, as there was for so many things the Vietnamese did that the Americans thought were the offspring of stupidity, ignorance, or that inscrutable something called the “Oriental mind.”

Vann probed further and discovered that Diem had long ago secretly issued a verbal order to Cao and his other commanders not to conduct offensive operations that resulted in serious casualties, particularly to the regular army, as had occurred on October 5 with the Rangers. Vann did not yet know enough about the history of the regime to discern the specific reasons for the order. The explanation, it would turn out, was again not an especially complicated one.

Diem and his family believed that casualties suffered on offensive operations against the Viet Cong had been a major cause of the abortive coup d’état in November 1960. The Ngo Dinhs were convinced that the ARVN paratroop officers who had led the attempt had plotted with oppositionist politicians because they had been disgruntled over these losses. Actually, the paratroop officers had concluded, as had the politicians, that the Ngo Dinhs were creating the conditions that caused the Communists to thrive. They had also been disgusted at seeing the lives of their fellow officers and troops wasted by men like Cao whom the president and his family had promoted to senior command positions. The Ngo Dinhs had never investigated sufficiently to learn the real reasons for the 1960 coup, and they could not have accepted the reasons had anyone dared to confront them with the facts. South Vietnam’s ruling family combined in their outlook the mentality of the Bourbons of postrevolutionary France and George III, who managed to drive thirteen colonies in America out of the British Empire. They never learned anything, they never forgot anything, and they fervently believed that whatever they desired was innately correct and virtuous.
They did not want another attempt at a coup, and therefore they did not want the army to suffer casualties on offensive operations.

The president and his family were also unwilling to commit the ARVN to a war because the army was the mainstay of their rule. The Americans saw the ARVN as an army with which to defend South Vietnam. The Ngo Dinhs, on the other hand, saw the ARVN primarily as a force-in-being to safeguard their regime. The first priority of the Ngo Dinhs was the survival of their rule. To hazard the ARVN in a war was to hazard their regime, and that was unthinkable. Control of the army had enabled them to crush their non-Communist opponents in the young years of the regime in the mid-1950s. They thought that even if most of the South was ultimately lost to the Communists, an intact ARVN would enable them to hold on to Saigon and the other major population centers long enough for Washington to send the U.S. Army and the Marines to rescue them. They assumed that the United States, as the preeminent power in the world, could not afford to let their anti-Communist government fall to Hanoi’s guerrillas. John Stirling, the Saigon correspondent of
The Times
of London in 1962, who was, like some Englishmen, more sophisticated about these matters than the Americans, had correctly discerned the attitude of Diem and his family. “The principal export of this country,” he was fond of saying, “is anti-Communism.” That their attitude could prove expensive in the blood of Vietnamese was another of those thoughts that did not occur to the Ngo Dinhs. They were willing to accept casualties in defensive actions because they saw these as unavoidable to maintain the outpost system that was the substance of their rule in the countryside. Most casualties in defensive actions were also inflicted on the SDC militiamen who manned the posts. The Ngo Dinhs were not troubled by the deaths of these peasants. The stability of the regime was not affected, and the lives of the militiamen were cheap. They could be replaced by other peasant hirelings at the equivalent of $10 a month in Saigon piasters. Diem thought so little of them that he did not allow wounded militiamen to be treated in military hospitals. They had to go to the provincial hospitals, charnel houses where surgery for nonpaying cases like militiamen was crude and medicines scarce, because so much was stolen and sold by the Vietnamese doctors and staff. Infection was common from the vermin and open sewers. An intact regular army, however, was insurance for the president and his family that they would endure come what may.

Vann argued to Cao that Diem’s prohibition against casualties was militarily absurd, that the Communists would win the war if the ARVN did not fight, and that it was Cao’s duty to tell his president this. Vann
had still not fully reckoned with Cao’s capacity to rationalize whatever benefited Cao, and Vann was hoisted by his ego-building scheme. Cao transmogrified his refusal to fight into the stuff of military genius. He issued a message to his officers and men on October 31,1962, the seventh anniversary of the organization of the division, comparing his leadership in the northern Delta to that of Vo Nguyen Giap at Dien Bien Phu. Giap suffered by the comparison. “In the Dien Bien Phu battle of 1954, the tactics employed by Vo Nguyen Giap were so poor and so badly conceived that thousands of troops and people were killed needlessly in obtaining the victory,” Cao proclaimed.

When Vann told Porter and Harkins of Diem’s secret order, and Harkins went to Diem to ask if he had issued it, Diem was prepared for him. He had heard arguments from the Americans before about aggressiveness. It was the American philosophy. Diem had convinced himself it was a poor approach. He refused to accept the proposition that he had a choice of risking his army or seeing the Communists win the war. He considered airplanes and artillery more effective instruments against guerrillas than infantry. The fact that none of his officers ever repeated the American argument to him strengthened his conviction. (Those who privately agreed with the advisors did not, of course, dare to say so.) He was also convinced that he had already started to win the war with a wise strategy that was in accord with the ideas he and his family had on how to rule the peasantry. He was gaining control over the peasants by herding them into “strategic hamlets.” Thousands of these fortified places, surrounded by barbed-wire fences, were being built in the countryside. The Americans were financing this national pacification program and supplying the barbed wire and other materials. Diem thought that he was separating the peasants from the Communists, drying up the sea in which the guerrilla fish of Mao Tse-tung’s metaphor swam. With the Strategic Hamlet Program well launched, there was no need to seek out infantry battles.

Their relationship with the Americans was the one area in which Diem and his family had learned new lessons in craftiness. They did not hesitate to disagree with the Americans if they saw that confrontation was to their advantage. They had discovered that the Americans were susceptible to verbal bullying and blackmail. They had also found that frequently the best way to handle the American ambassadors and generals and senior CIA agents was to agree with them, to tell them what they wanted to hear, even if it was a lie. The Ngo Dinhs had learned that these important Americans would more often than not go away content, report what they had been told to Washington, and not inquire to see if it was the truth.