A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (4 page)

The Vietnamese Communists had spoiled Komer’s career in government with their Tet 1968 Offensive. Prior to the offensive he had mistakenly believed that the United States was winning the war, had told the president so, and had publicly predicted that victory was assured and imminent. After Tet he had been something of an embarrassment to the Johnson administration, and he had left Saigon toward the end of 1968. He had continued to coach from Washington, however, making occasional trips to Vietnam and writing upbeat reports which said that Vann and his comrades in the hard core still committed there might just be able to pull it off, might just succeed in keeping South Vietnam going long enough to exhaust the Communists and persuade them to give up.
This morning the 300 persons assembled at the funeral heard the reedy, tough-guy voice of the old Komer carry through the chapel as he stood over the coffin and praised Vann.

He spoke of “the courage, the spirit, the exuberant energy, the earthy vitality, the sheer gutsiness of the John Vann we knew.” He praised Vann in the same unstinting fashion in which the old Komer had given himself to the war.

“To us who worked with him, learned from him, and were inspired by him, he was that scrawny, cocky little red-necked guy with a rural Virginia twang—always on the run like a human dynamo, sleeping only four hours a night, almost blowing a fuse at least twice a day, knowing more than any of us about what was really going on, and always telling us so. And any of us with his head screwed on right invariably listened.

“That’s the John Vann we remember. He was proud to be a controversial character, a role he played to the hilt.

“I’ve never known a more unsparingly critical and uncompromisingly honest man. He called them as he saw them—in defeat as well as victory. For this, and for his long experience, he was more respected by the press than any other official. And he told it straight to everyone—not just to them [the press] or his own people, but to presidents, cabinet officers, ambassadors and generals—letting the chips fall where they may. After one such episode I was told, and not in jest, to fire John Vann. I replied that I wouldn’t, and couldn’t; that in fact, if I could only find three more John Vanns we could shorten the war by half.”

Mary Jane, who had not heard anything the chaplain had said, found herself listening to Komer. His voice and words restored her composure. The meaning of what he said was less important to her than the pleasure of hearing John praised by a man who spoke in the same bold way he had.

“If John had few illusions,” Komer said, “he also had no torturing doubts about why he was in Vietnam—to help defend the right of the South Vietnamese people, whom he loved, to live in freedom. He probably knew more Vietnamese and worked more closely with them, sharing their trials as well as their joys, than any other American. He was more at home in the hamlets, where he so often spent the night, than in the offices of Saigon.

“In uniform or out, he was a born leader of men. Personally fearless, he never asked anyone to do what he wouldn’t do himself. To him the role of a leader was to lead, regardless of the risk. He was the epitome of the ‘can do’ guy. And I’ve never met one among the thousands of men who served with or under John who didn’t admire him. He educated
and inspired a whole wartime generation of Vietnamese and Americans—as our teacher, our colleague, our institutional memory, our hair-shirt, and our friend.”

Komer was swept up by the occasion and by what he was saying. His voice rose into a high pitch it acquired whenever he felt great emotion. He spoke his words sharply and distinctly. He said it was fitting that Vann should be buried in Arlington.

“For he was the highest type of professional soldier, whose last tour fulfilled his secret longing to be back in command of American troops. But John was more than a professional soldier. He understood well that firepower alone was not the answer to Vietnam’s travail.

“Let us hope,” Komer said, trying to be positive even on this day, “that his real monument will be the free and peaceful South Vietnam for which he fought so well.

“Yet whether or not this tragic conflict ends with that aim fulfilled, all of us who served with Vann will long remember him. He is not a man who will be easily forgotten. So we salute one of the authentic heroes of a grim and unpopular war, who gave all of himself to the cause he served, finally even his life. No, we shan’t forget you, John. You were the best we had to give.”

Ellsberg, who had worked with Komer and had once been friendly with him, did not feel any friendship toward him today, even at Komer’s praise of the friend they had shared. He felt alienated from Komer and others in the chapel who still supported the war. “Yes,” he said to himself in an angry play on Komer’s last words, “he was the best we had to give away.”

The chaplain said the concluding prayers and a benediction, and then the head usher announced: “Everyone please rise.” The assembly stood up. The organist began to play a hymn. The coffin was wheeled back down the aisle, this time preceded by the official pallbearers. They formed two lines of honor, one along each side of the green canvas archway leading out from the center door of the portico, for the coffin to pass through as it followed them from the chapel. The generals and the South Vietnamese Army colonel saluted and the civilians placed their right hands over their hearts when the coffin was lifted off the wheeled frame and placed on the caisson trimmed in black bunting and hitched to the six gray horses that had been waiting in the sun. The drum major raised his silver mace high into the air and brought it down sharply. The band struck up a march for the procession to the grave three-fifths of a mile away through the gate and down the cemetery road.

The band led the way, playing the march that Mary Jane had requested for Vann because it had been his favorite. It was a tune of unbroken will, “The Colonel Bogie March” from the film
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. He had bought a record of the march after he had seen the movie and had never seemed to tire of listening to it. The honor guard, the color bearers, the pallbearers in two files, and the chaplain marched in sequence behind the band. Next came the horses drawing the caisson, followed by the family in black Cadillac limousines lent by an armaments and aerospace firm for which Vann had briefly worked as an executive in between his retirement from the Army and his return to Vietnam. Despite the heat and the distance, many in the assembly chose to walk behind the limousines out of respect for Vann rather than to ride in their own cars.

They passed, most without noticing them, the monuments to the “splendid little war” with Spain in 1898 which had thrust the western frontier of the United States across the Pacific from San Francisco to Manila and inaugurated the American imperial age whose confident enthusiasm this gathering was symbolically laying to rest today. The first monument was the memorial to the 385 men killed in action in the whole of that war, less than a week’s battle deaths at the height of the war in Vietnam. It was a tall memorial, a round column of buff marble topped by a globe, and it conveyed the ambition of that beginning. A bronze band of stars from “Old Glory” ringed this globe of 1898. An eagle sat astride it and surveyed the earth, holding the arrows of war in its talons, ready to loose them at a challenge. As the procession moved along, a second monument rose in the near distance off to the left. It was the mast of the USS
Maine
, salvaged from the hulk of the battleship that had mysteriously blown up and sunk in Havana harbor, killing 266 of her officers and crew and giving an eager America the opportunity to seize what an old and corrupt Spain was no longer able to defend. A bit farther down the cemetery road the procession passed another monument, this one low and spike-shaped and hewn with deliberate roughness out of gray stone. It was the memorial to the dead of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, the “Rough Riders” Alsop’s granduncle had recruited and helped lead to glory in that all too easy commencement.

There was no fresh earth at Vann’s grave to remind one of the battlefields in Vietnam. The grave had been dug in a grove of maples on a rise that looked down toward the white marble of the Memorial Amphitheater and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier where the Unknowns of World War I and World War II and the Korean War lay. The succession
of wars had made the American military practiced at rites for the living and the dead. When ceremonies were held on the front lawn of the Pentagon in winter, the frost-browned grass was dyed green. The authorities had taken care to make certain that everything here at Arlington was also presentable. The gravediggers had covered the dirt with carpets of what is called cemetery grass, an ersatz grass like the Astroturf that is used for artificial playing fields. Two rows of folding steel chairs with green slipcovers had been set up off to the right side of the grave for the family and close relatives.

Mary Jane was sitting next to a door in the backseat of the first limousine in the procession. When Edward Kennedy had walked over to the air-conditioned Cadillac in front of the chapel to give her his sympathy, she had opened the door window to let him speak to her. She had forgotten to close the window, and so she heard another tune as soon as the band started to play it after the horses pulling the caisson hailed before the grave. She had not expected to hear this song. During the flight from Denver to Washington two days earlier she had asked the Army liaison officer to have the band play it beside the grave. She had repeated the request several times since, most recently this morning on the way to Arlington. She had thought that the authorities would consider the song inappropriate for the state funeral of a hero of the war and would forbid it. But the drum major set the band to playing the song at the moment when eight sergeants in dress blues, four on each side, grasped the handle railings of the coffin and lifted it off the caisson. Mary Jane was moved when she heard it. She wondered if the drum major and the men in the band shared her feelings about the war and what the war had done and if this was why they were fulfilling her wish. She thought that anyone else at the funeral who heard the song and knew it would understand much of the message she was trying to convey.

The song was called “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” It had originated in the antiwar movement. Then it had caught on among the American soldiers in Vietnam and had eventually become a popular song of the era, perhaps the best-known song of Vietnam, a song that made one think of the war whenever it was played. The verses and refrain were simple and cumulative, and the band played through them while the sergeants carried the coffin to the grave.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time ago.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Gone to young girls every one.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

 

This was Mary Jane’s song, as “The Colonel Bogie March” had been John’s. It was a song of the sadness she felt as a mother for all of the young men who had died in the war; it was a song of the ravaging of her son Jesse by the structure of authority that had made the war, because he had opposed that authority and the war; it was a song of the ruined hopes of the marriage she had dreamed of in her youth; it was a song of the death of a man she had not wanted to die, because she had loved him despite all that had happened between them.

Where have all the young girls gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the young girls gone?

Long time ago.

Where have all the young girls gone?

Gone to young men every one.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young men gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the young men gone?

Long time ago.

Where have all the young men gone?

Gone to soldiers every one.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

 

The chaplain led the way to the grave now, walking before the eight sergeants carrying the coffin. The sergeants turned in step after they had lifted the coffin from the caisson, the steel plates on the toes and heels of their pristine black imitation-leather shoes clicking on the pavement until they reached the grass. The lieutenant in command of the honor guard stood at attention with his saber unsheathed, the blade held out at an angle from his side, the tip pointing toward the ground. The troops behind him held their rifles high and straight before their faces at present arms. A color bearer dipped the Army flag and the battle streamers in salute to the coffin as the band played.

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Long time ago.

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Gone to graveyards every one.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

 

Peter Vann received the flag from the coffin. The sergeants folded it into a triangle with the stars showing. Peter had asked his mother if he could be the one to accept it, and she had consented, because, at sixteen years, he was the youngest child. He stood up to receive it. The chaplain handed it to him at the end of the graveside service, after the firing party had fired three volleys, the bolts of the rifles working harshly, metal on metal, in the stillness between each volley; after the bugler had sounded the taps; after the chaplain had said the last prayer and a final benediction.

Peter had been six years old when his father had first gone to Vietnam. He had not felt any genuine grief until the moment he accepted the flag, because he had hardly known his father and knew even less about what his father had done. Peter was not an intellectual. His interest was tinkering with cars. The war had been going on so long that he had forgotten which side was the enemy. When the family had been driven to the South Vietnamese Embassy the previous day to receive the posthumous award to his father of the Saigon government’s highest honor, Peter had wondered whether it was the South Vietnamese or the North Vietnamese Embassy. He hoped, as he took the flag and started to cry, that his father had not died hating him for all of the arguments they had had when Vann was home. He also hoped that his father would not be ashamed of him for crying. His father had always ridiculed his sons when they had wept, telling them it was a sign of weakness.