A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (3 page)

Ellsberg was sitting with the family because Mary Jane, Vann’s wife of twenty-six years until their divorce eight months earlier, had asked him to do so. She needed the strength of his friendship at this time and she valued the calming influence he had on Jesse, her twenty-one-year-old son, who was sitting next to Ellsberg in the second pew. She had also asked Ellsberg to sit with the family as an act of defiance. She intended to have her gesture say to those in the chapel who resented Ellsberg’s presence that she admired his actions against the war and shared his views. The previous year she had said as much to two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who had come to the family home in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, to question her about Ellsberg’s relationship with Vann.

Mary Jane considered herself John Vann’s widow despite the divorce. The divorce had been a gesture of frustration, a self-defeating attempt to strike back at him for a marriage that had become one of form rather than substance after Vann had gone back to Vietnam in 1965, this time to stay. He had been the love of her youth, her first man, the father of her five children—four sons who were with her in the chapel and a married daughter who could not come to Washington because she had just given birth to Vann’s first granddaughter. Mary Jane had clung to the marriage as long as she could. She could not imagine loving any other man the way she had loved him. The raising of their children and the keeping together of a marriage had been a calling as central to her background and character as this war had been to his.

Her father had been a proper family man, the chief court reporter in Rochester, New York. Her mother had possessed a sense of respectability that had approached a passion. When Mary Jane had married John at the age of eighteen, the year after her graduation from high school, she had been slightly plump, yet quite attractive. Her brunette hair had been lovely in the wavy set of the day, her hazel eyes pleasing, her mouth nicely formed. Her values had been those of family, church, and country, as defined for her by her parents and the other figures of authority in her middle-class world. A calm marriage and a warm family life had been the dream of her maiden years. Because she had known
nothing but security in her childhood, she had expected to find it as well in marriage and motherhood. She had not found security in marriage, however hard she had sought it. The war and the want of a father who was there when needed had also profoundly disturbed Mary Jane’s second son, Jesse. The conventions of patriotism and the socially approved behavior that she had thought beyond question had threatened Jesse and clashed with her vocation of motherhood.

At forty-four, Mary Jane Vann was still a pleasant woman to look at when she took the trouble to dress nicely and to make up her face and set her hair, as she had done on this funeral morning. It was ironic, she thought, that Christmas was the last time John had come home. Christmas was always when she most wanted him to be at home, because they had met at Christmas and their first son, John Allen, had been born on a Christmas morning. She remembered all the Christmas days when he had not been there and she had needed him. The day she learned of the crash she had looked through the house for his dress uniform, that dark blue uniform with the gold trim that the soldiers of the honor guard were wearing today. He had once told her to dress his body in it if he was killed. She had not been able to find it. Perhaps he had taken it to Vietnam. When she got to Washington they had told her that the casket was sealed and that she would not have been able to bury him in his dress blues anyway. She remembered that he had kissed her on the cheek that last Christmas, even though they were divorced, instead of shaking hands when he said goodbye as he had been doing for a number of years before.

There was silence in the chapel now. The organist had stopped playing. It was time for the service to begin. From outside, Mary Jane heard the shouts of commands and the sounds of rifles being slapped by white-gloved hands as the honor guard came to present arms. This was her first military funeral, but she had been an Army wife. She knew what those shouts and those sounds meant. They were bringing John into the chapel in his coffin. He really is dead, she thought. She began to sob quietly.

The coffin, shrouded in a flag and resting waist-high on a wheeled frame, was rolled down the center aisle by two soldiers from the honor-guard regiment who were acting as ushers. Eight official pallbearers followed it in two columns of four. Ellsberg looked at them. Three he did not know. Two of these were civilian officials from AID, and the third was a South Vietnamese army colonel who was the military attache at the embassy and was representing his government. Ellsberg recognized the other five prominent men. In his grief and bitterness he remarked
to himself that they were appropriate pallbearers for Vietnam.

Three of them were generals in white summer dress uniforms. The first was Westmoreland, now chief of staff of the Army, a position to which President Johnson had elevated him in 1968 after relieving him of the Vietnam command. He walked at the front of the right file, the place of highest rank, as protocol required. When the United States Army had gone to war in Vietnam in full array in 1965, Westmoreland had seemed, in his handsomeness and proud demeanor, to represent the Army’s pride and accomplishment. Today, seven years later, still outwardly the model of a general at fifty-eight, he represented as chief of staff the institution of the Army, which was claiming Vann in death as one of its own. It was an Army that sensed its defeat in Vietnam, although it did not understand the reasons for its defeat. Westmoreland would never understand. The Army had spent so much of its pride in Vietnam that it could not help but hope for the ultimate vindication of its aims there. Vann had implicitly been seeking to vindicate those aims. In his last battle in the mountains of the Central Highlands he had been trying to accomplish with the South Vietnamese Army, the protégé of the U.S. Army, what the Army had been unable to accomplish by itself. The Army also knew that Vann had never left it in spirit. He had finally become the fighting general he had always wanted to be, despite his nominal civilian status, and in his refusal to accept defeat he had embodied the Army’s ideal of leadership.

Gen. Bruce Palmer, Jr., the vice chief of staff, a contemporary of Westmoreland—a fellow member of the West Point class of 1936—walked at the head of the left file of pallbearers. He had served in Vietnam as one of Westmoreland’s deputies, after having commanded the expeditionary force that President Johnson had dispatched to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent that small Caribbean country from going the way of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The paratroopers and Marines under Palmer’s command had made it possible for Ellsworth Bunker, currently the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, to reimpose on the Dominican Republic a government that would function as a surrogate for American interests. Palmer had been one of Vann’s Army patrons since the mid-1950s, when Palmer had been a colonel commanding the 16th Infantry Regiment in Germany and Vann had been a captain in charge of his heavy mortar company. Vann had been the best of his company commanders, if the most difficult to handle, Palmer remembered. Four days prior to Vann’s death, Palmer sent him a note praising his leadership at Kontum. Vann received and read the note just before he died.

The third general in dress whites was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for military operations, fifty-five-year-old Lt. Gen. Richard Stilwell. Dick Stilwell had been one of those who had not been sorry to see Vann leave the Army in 1963. He had arrived in Saigon in April of that year just as Vann was departing for Washington and his unsuccessful campaign at the Pentagon to try to persuade the ranking military leadership that the United States was failing in Vietnam and had to change its strategy. In 1963, Stilwell had been a brigadier general and chief of operations for Gen. Paul Harkins, Westmoreland’s predecessor in the Saigon command. Stilwell had applied his high intelligence to rebutting the arguments of Vann and those other field advisors who had also believed that the war was being lost. Stilwell’s behavior in 1963 had been predictable to those who knew him. He had an unwavering trust in authority that led him to place loyalty to superiors above other concerns. He aspired to gain the pinnacle of chief of staff, an aspiration he was to be denied. He had graduated near the top of his class at West Point, two years after Westmoreland and Palmer, and had chosen the traditional route for a graduate of academic stature, a commission in the Corps of Engineers. His ambition and his talent as a staff officer had led him to switch to the infantry during World War II, when he and DePuy, who was sitting in the chapel next to Alsop, had served together in the same infantry division in Europe. Two wars later, in mid-1964, Stilwell had moved up in Saigon and become chief of staff to Westmoreland, the new commanding general. DePuy had arrived to assume Stilwell’s former duties as chief of operations, and Stilwell had then overseen DePuy’s work in planning the war-of-attrition strategy that was to have brought victory. Stilwell had gradually realized that he had been wrong about Vann and had come to admire him. As Stilwell was also a man of sentiment, he had asked to be a pallbearer at Vann’s funeral.

The pallbearer who walked behind Westmoreland was a civilian, a slim and erect man in a navy-blue suit. He wore glasses with clear plastic frames that added a further touch of plainness to his pinched and undistinguished features. One had to notice the unusual steadiness of the myopic pale blue eyes behind the glasses to sense the sternness in this man’s character. The civilian was William Colby of the CIA, covert warrior, soon to be named the Agency’s deputy director for plans, the euphemism for clandestine operations, and then spy master-in-chief as the director of central intelligence.

Had William Colby been born in the sixteenth century, his character and mindset might have led him into the Society of Jesus and a life as
a Jesuit soldier of the Counter-Reformation. Having been born in the twentieth, he had joined the CIA and become a soldier of the Cold War. A need to serve and a desire to serve in secret were dominant traits in his personality. He had parachuted into German-occupied France in August 1944 as a twenty-four-year-old major in the OSS, schooled in the arts of sabotage and terrorism at an English country estate (Lucien Conein had been one of his classmates there), to lead a French Resistance group against the Nazis. The war had not ended for him with the surrender of Germany nine months later. Godless Communism, a term that meant just what it said to Colby, had replaced Fascism as the menace to humankind. The Roman Catholicism he had inherited from his father, an Army colonel who had been a convert, and from his Irish mother had made him from his student days at Princeton as fervently anti-Communist as he had been anti-Fascist. The question had simply been which menace to fight first.

In contrast to Lansdale, Bill Colby had been an unsung member of the clandestine service. His way had been quiet and sustained. He had carried out the desires of the U.S. government in Vietnam over much of the previous twelve years, beginning in early 1959 as deputy and subsequently chief of the CIA station in Saigon and then in the same promotion pattern as deputy and chief of the Far East Division of clandestine operations. He had supervised the Agency’s first counterguerrilla programs in the South. On President Kennedy’s order, he had resumed the covert warfare against the Communist North that had been allowed to lapse after Lansdale’s years. He had infiltrated by parachute and boat teams of Vietnamese terrorists and saboteurs trained by the CIA to try to start a guerrilla war against the Hanoi authorities like the one the Viet Cong were waging in South Vietnam. In 1967 he had helped Robert Komer, a former CIA officer and the fifth pallbearer Ellsberg recognized, to set up the Phoenix Program to kill, jail, or intimidate into surrender the members of the secret Communist-led government the guerrillas had established in the rural areas of the South. The program had resulted in the death or imprisonment of tens of thousands of Vietnamese. The antiwar movement had condemned Colby as an assassin and war criminal. “Wanted for Murder” posters with his picture on them had been plastered on the buildings of college campuses in Washington. None of the accusations had unsettled Colby’s faith in his cause and his conviction that the work he was doing was necessary and good. His manner had remained as gentle and as friendly and—not without some calculation—as disarming as it had always been. In 1968, Komer had departed and Colby had taken over the entire pacification program
and become Vann’s superior. He had appreciated Vann’s talents. Vann, who sought klieg lights and center stage, and Colby, who preferred to perform in the shadows, had come to respect each other.

The two soldiers positioned the flag-draped coffin at the end of the center aisle before the altar. The official pallbearers took their places in the pews at the left front of the chapel where William Rogers, the secretary of state, and Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense, were already seated. After the Army chaplain had read from the scripture and given his sermon, Robert Komer rose from the first pew and walked up onto the altar to deliver the eulogy.

Komer had been the general of the pacification campaign, what the newspapers had called “the other war in Vietnam.” A man of medium height and build, balding in middle age, he had been noticeable among the pallbearers. Unlike the other civilians in suits of dark colors, he was dressed in light gray. His suit had been made for him by a proper London tailor during his CIA years back in the 1950s. He had worn it today because Komer felt that the etiquette of a eulogy demanded a vest and it was the only summer suit he owned that had one.

President Johnson had once regarded Komer as an extraordinary problem solver. The president had sent him to Vietnam in May 1967 to pull together into a single, cohesive organization the fragmented pacification programs of the military and the various civilian agencies. Komer had created the organization and had done his best to pacify Vietnam. He had a terrierlike personality. He had dashed into the task with spirited confidence and abrasive vigor. He had taken joy in violating bureaucratic decorum and had been pleased with the nickname that friends and enemies alike had applied to him—”the Blowtorch.” Vann had given Komer his most valuable advice on how to build the organization and had been his most accomplished subordinate at translating plans into action.