A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (34 page)

Their experience with the Viet Minh League had taught the Vietnamese Communists the value of a national front organization, and the NLF fulfilled several needs of this second war. It made joining the rebellion easier for non-Communists in the South. They did not have to join the Communist Party itself. As an institution, the NLF was also the mechanism for waging guerrilla warfare and simultaneously conducting social revolution that the Viet Minh had been. At the same time, it was a sham organization behind which the leaders in Hanoi could shelter while directing the conflict below the 17th Parallel. The United States had rhetorically converted the Provisional Military Demarcation Line of the Geneva Agreements into a national boundary, and the voice of the greatest power on earth had weight. A number of non-Communist countries that subsequently recognized the NLF as the official representative of the Southern guerrillas would have found this difficult to do had the front been run openly by Hanoi. Many of the American intellectuals who were to participate in the peace movement during this second war, and Europeans who were also to agitate against
U.S. intervention, would have had problems of conscience supporting a rebellion in South Vietnam publicly controlled by the Vietnamese Communist Party. Clandestine control permitted anyone to believe what he or she wished to believe.

With the passage of years and the repetition of the denials, the NLF was to acquire a credibility of its own. American and European authors were to devote books to it. The U.S. government was finally to recognize its “independent” existence by granting its delegation, headed by Mrs. Nguyen Thi Binh, a secret Party member whose mandarin grandfather had fought the French in the early twentieth century, a seat at the peace table in Paris on an equal basis with Washington’s Saigon surrogate. When pretense was no longer necessary, Huynh Tan Phat, the secretary-general of the NLF, a Saigon architect who became a secret Party member after joining the Viet Minh during World War II, was to settle the argument with an example of the candor that Vietnamese revolutionaries could display in equal measure with duplicity: “Officially, we were separate [Hanoi and the NLF], but in fact we were the same thing all the time; there was a single party; a single government; a single capital; a single country.”

The Vietnamese on both sides of the war in the South were not fooled by this stage managing. They knew that the Viet Minh had returned and that they were participating in a historic replay. The guerrillas called themselves by the original name the Viet Minh had used—Giai Phong Quan (Liberation Army). The flag of this new national front was a slightly altered copy of the Viet Minh flag. In the middle of its split field of red and blue was the five-pointed gold star of the Vietnamese Revolution. The fear the U.S. intelligence officers had expressed back in the mid-1950s had come true, but as another of those prophecies about Vietnam that Americans made self-fulfilling. The United States had sought to destroy the old Viet Minh and had renamed it the Viet Cong. In the process the United States had created a new Viet Minh, far more formidable than the old Viet Minh the French had faced in the South.

On my first helicopter assault operation in the early summer of 1962 with a battalion from Vann’s 7th Division, I hoped, as young reporters will, for action to write about, hoped that I would witness a fight that day between the ARVN and the Viet Cong. In my mind, as in the minds of other Americans recently come to Vietnam like Vann, the Viet Minh were a distinctly different generation of guerrillas from the Viet Cong. The Viet Minh of my thoughts had been patriots, by and large nationalist
revolutionaries who happened to have been led by Ho and his lieutenants because the Communists had “captured” the independence movement during the war against France. That war had ended and the French had gone. The United States had then intervened in South Vietnam to promote nationalism. The Viet Cong guerrillas were misguided peasants who had been gulled into following the wrong side by Communists who were the enemies of good men everywhere.

A Marine helicopter I was riding in was the fourth or fifth in the flight. Our objective was a Viet Cong base area on the Plain of Reeds. I heard bursts of automatic-weapons fire from the door gunners on the aircraft ahead as mine was settling into a field of waist-high reeds. Looking out the open door over the gunner’s shoulder, I saw half a dozen figures bounding away through the reeds less than a hundred yards beyond. They had weapons in their hands and small packs on their backs, and were wearing some sort of green uniform and dark sun helmets with a turtle-shell shape, like those I had seen Viet Minh guerrillas wearing in photographs of the French war. These were Viet Cong regulars from one of the Main Force battalions. The aim of the Marine gunners was poor. All of the guerrillas managed to escape toward a woods along a canal about half a mile away.

The ARVN captain commanding the battalion dallied for at least fifteen minutes, studying his map and talking over the radio to higher headquarters, before he ordered the troops to move out from the landing zone. He was an older officer. He spoke French and carried a cane, an affectation of French field commanders. The battalion stopped at a cluster of peasant huts a few hundred yards from the woods. An old man and some children were the only people present. The parents of the children were apparently hiding. The ARVN captain started questioning the old man, obviously about the guerrillas. He kept using the term “Viet Minh,” over and over again. The old peasant replied with the same term. “Why is he calling the guerrillas the Viet Minh?” I asked a Vietnamese reporter for one of the foreign news agencies who was with me. “I thought we were after the Viet Cong.”

“The Americans and the government people in Saigon call them the Viet Cong,” he said, “but out here everyone still calls them the Viet Minh.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because they look like the Viet Minh, they act like the Viet Minh, and that’s what these people have always called them,” he said.

The ARVN captain knew that the Viet Minh were back; that was why he had been so cautious. Cao knew that the Viet Minh were back;
that was why he was more afraid than he would normally have been. Diem knew that the Viet Minh were back; that was another reason why he wanted to keep his army intact. Only the Americans knew neither the Vietnamese they were depending on to work their will, nor the Vietnamese enemy they faced.

In his innocence of the antecedents of this war he had been sent to Vietnam to win, Vann still thought at the end of 1962 that the solution was a military one—forcing the ARVN to attack and break up the battalions of guerrilla regulars like those I had seen on the Plain of Reeds. He also could not yet bring himself to abandon his scheme to manipulate Cao into a fighting general who would serve this task.

On December 22, 1962, Diem announced a restructuring of the ARVN command system. The country had previously been divided into three army corps regions. Diem split the third corps region into two sections. He left Saigon and the belt of provinces that ringed the capital from the west to the north and east under the original III Corps headquarters. He established a new IV Corps to cover the Mekong Delta itself, with a headquarters at Can Tho in the center of the Delta. He gave Cao the twin stars of a brigadier general for his prudence in holding down casualties (the ARVN followed the French system in which general-officer ranks begin with two stars) and put him in charge of the new IV Corps. The change also raised the stakes for Vann. Diem enlarged the 7th Division’s zone by adding two provinces to the five the division already had. The effect was to make the division responsible for the entire northern half of the Delta, where an estimated 3.2 million people lived.

Vann heard what was coming and drove up to Saigon a few days before Diem’s announcement with a memorandum for General Harkins. He asked for an appointment and personally delivered his message, explaining that he had written it for the commanding general’s eyes alone. The memorandum was phrased in the diplomatic language that Vann could use well when diplomacy suited him. He reminded the general of the gambit that he had, with Harkins’s approval, employed on Cao—building “a ‘military leader image’ in the eyes of news reporters, subordinate commanders, and visiting U.S. VIPS.” Unfortunately, Vann continued, “General Cao has not yet developed a real aggressive attitude on his own. He needs a strong advisor to stimulate him.” Vann came to his point. Dan Porter, the wise and persistent Texan, was moving to Can Tho to become Cao’s new advisor there but was scheduled to end his tour and go home in February. Harkins had
designated Col. John Powers Connor, who was shortly due from the United States, to replace Porter. Colonel Connor was a gracefully built and pleasantly conventional man. His Army nickname was “Poopy.” Vann did not think that he would “stimulate” Cao. He also observed that Connor’s lack of experience in Vietnam would put him at a disadvantage. Vann proposed another advisor for Cao, an officer he had served under as an instructor at the Ranger Command at Fort Benning in 1951 after leading his Ranger company in Korea. “At the risk of seeming impertinent, I suggest that your efforts this spring will be materially improved if Colonel Wilbur Wilson becomes the Senior Advisor to General Cao,” Vann wrote. “Colonel Wilson’s experience and personality are tailored to bring out the best in General Cao, and the Delta area offers the best opportunity to break the back of the Viet Cong.”

The thought of subjecting Cao to the stimulation of Wilbur Wilson must have amused Vann, as serious as he was in his suggestion. He admired Wilson, as he did Porter, but for different qualities. Wilbur Wilson was a legend in the U.S. Army of his time. He was a strapping, lantern-jawed paratroop officer, fifty-three years of age in 1962, known as “Coal Bin Willie,” a nickname he had gained from one of his eccentricities of discipline. When inspecting barracks he insisted that the coal stacked in the bins at the back slope down at a perfect angle. He would not tolerate a single piece out of line. This was one of several tricks he had put together over the years to train and discipline troops to perfection. He was not a martinet, despite his eccentricities. He had the good commander’s knack for instilling pride in his troops, and he showed them kindness and consideration. His rough side, a frankness to the point of brutality, was reserved for his equals and his superiors. He had spent the past year as senior advisor in the corps region that encompassed the mountains of the Central Highlands and several coastal provinces of Central Vietnam. There had been comparatively little fighting there in 1962 and no opportunity for Wilson to apply his full talents. Oddly enough, his ARVN counterpart in that corps region, a whiskey-drinking ex-paratrooper in the colonial forces, had grown tired of American officers being hypocritically nice to him and appreciated Wilson’s directness.

Harkins thanked Vann for his memorandum and ignored it. The mild-mannered Colonel Connor was assigned to be Cao’s advisor. During his first nine months, Vann had met and been frustrated by the Vietnamese he thought he was supposed to help. In two and a half weeks, at a hamlet called Bac, in the first great battle of the American war in Vietnam, he was to learn the mettle of the Vietnamese he had been sent to defeat.

  
T
HREE DAYS
after Christmas 1962, the 7th Infantry Division received an order from the ARVN Joint General Staff to seize a Viet Cong radio transmitter that was operating from the hamlet of Tan Thoi fourteen miles northwest of My Tho. The order originated with General Harkins’s headquarters. The United States had brought the unobtrusive side of its technology to bear on the revolt in the South again. An Army Security Agency team from the 3rd Radio Research Unit at Tan Son Nhut, eavesdropping from on high in one of those boxy Otters built for Canadian bush flying, had intercepted and pinpointed the guerrilla radio with its monitoring and direction-finding equipment.

Vann and his staff were enthusiastic about the attack. The operation was the first of the new year, the first under a new division commander, and, most important of all, an opportunity to make a new beginning. Cao’s chief of staff, Lt. Col. Bui Dinh Dam, had succeeded him after Cao’s elevation to general and move to Can Tho to head the just-established IV Corps. Dam was an unwilling successor. A diminutive and mild-mannered individual, Dam considered himself a competent administrator but doubted his ability to cope with the emotional burden of command. Cao persuaded him to take the job because Cao did not want to create an opening for a potential rival and knew that he could control Dam. Bui Dinh Dam was a North Vietnamese Catholic and politically reliable, so Diem acceded to Caos wish. He promoted Dam to full colonel and gave him the 7th to lead.