A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (47 page)

York was able to follow Vann’s arguments because a special experience in his career set him apart from his peers. The only American general to fly to Bac was also the only American general in Vietnam with any firsthand knowledge of a Communist-led guerrilla insurgency in Asia. In 1952, York had by chance been assigned for three and a half years as the U.S. Army observer of the British campaign to suppress the guerrilla revolt by the Chinese minority in Malaya. The lessons he had learned there led him to suspect prior to coming to Vietnam that the task of defeating the Viet Cong was going to be a lot more difficult than his fellow generals thought. The British had held a twenty-to-one advantage in police and troops against a guerrilla force that never numbered more than 10,000, including its civilian support apparatus, a fraction of the Viet Cong armed strength and civilian adherents, and they had had the racial antagonism of the Malay majority toward the Chinese in their favor as well. The war had still lasted twelve years.

There was also a personal reason to bring General York to Bac. He and his relatives had been one of the first American families to be hurt by the war in Vietnam. In July 1962, three months after his arrival, a nephew he regarded with pride and affection, Capt. Donald York, one of Ziegler’s classmates at West Point, who had volunteered to advise a paratroop battalion, had been killed in an ambush on Route 13 where the road ran through an old Viet Minh redoubt in the rubber-plantation country just north of Saigon. When York heard the news of Ap Bac late the previous day, he had made up his mind to fly to the scene at the first opportunity in the morning.

York and Turner and I, and York’s aide, Lt. Willard Golding, found only three bodies while walking down the foxhole line and then through the hamlet. In the irrigation ditch behind the main dike, half sunken from a rocket hit, was one of the hollowed-log sampans the guerrillas had used to evacuate the wounded and to replenish their ammunition. Standing among the foxholes on top of the dike, we could appreciate for the first time the football-field view the Viet Cong had held of the
rice fields to the front where the helicopters had landed. The whole position had been so perfectly chosen and prepared that Scanlon was later to remark that it was the Fort Benning “school solution” of how an outnumbered infantry unit ought to organize a defense. We noticed that despite the stress of retreating under air and artillery bombardment, the Viet Cong had practiced their usual frugality by collecting most of the brass shell cases to reload with new powder and bullets in the base camps.

I had acquired enough experience by this time to know what the evidence meant, but a reporter is supposed to have an authority draw judgments for him. York was a handy authority, and so I asked him how he thought the guerrillas had fared. “What the hell’s it look like?” he said, a bit exasperated by the silliness of the question. “They got away—that’s what happened.”

Turner, York, Lieutenant Golding, and I thought for a while that we were not going to be as lucky as the guerrillas. Cao, who claimed to have killed the same Viet Cong general several times over, always forgetting that he had made the boast before, almost bagged a genuine American general, his aide, and two reporters. The four of us were standing on a paddy dike near the downed helicopters watching a fresh battalion of 7th Division infantry who had arrived that morning march into the hamlet. Turner and I had been at Bac for over four hours. We knew that this was the biggest story we had ever encountered in Vietnam. We were eager to get a fuller explanation of the battle from Vann and his staff at Tan Hiep and then drive back to Saigon to file another dispatch and tell the world what we had learned. York had consented to give us a ride to the airstrip in his helicopter, which was scheduled to return soon. A howitzer sounded from the south, and a smoke shell threw up a shower of mud on our side of Bac a short distance inside the tree line, where a column of infantry from the new battalion had just disappeared into the foliage.

“Hey, that’s pretty damned close,” Golding shouted. As he shouted, two howitzers boomed. The high-explosive shells rushed through the air toward us with that unnerving, fast-train-in-the-night hustle; they crashed beside another column of infantry walking toward the hamlet on a dike about seventy-five yards away. The concussion and flying shrapnel knocked several soldiers off the dike, and the rest tumbled into the paddy yelling with fear.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” York shouted while more shells exploded in the paddy about thirty yards from us. With York in the lead, we ran away from the hamlet down the narrow, sun-baked top of
the dike, trying to escape from the impact area. The shells followed us. We had sprinted only a short distance when one exploded close by and the blast almost knocked us off our feet. “Get down!” York yelled. We threw ourselves into the slime and huddled up against the dike with the shells crashing all around us.

Cao had decided to fake an attack on Bac now that the Viet Cong were gone. He wanted the palace to think that he was doing something to recoup. For this reason he had ordered the additional infantry battalion to Bac to make the attack along with some of Ba’s troops. He had then taken a helicopter over to Tho’s field command post on the main Delta road to the south and instructed Tho to fire a barrage to soften up the enemy for “the assault.” Cao had not flown over Bac to see whether any of his men were inside the hamlet. Tho in turn had simply told his deputy to order the batteries to open fire. Cao and Tho might have been stopped had the ARVN second lieutenant who was the artillery forward observer with the new division battalion been more proficient at reading a map. The artillery officer had been worried and had radioed the lieutenant to check on the position of the battalion. The lieutenant had replied with map coordinates that had put the battalion about three-quarters of a mile southwest of Bac.

Unlike Cao and Tho, the second lieutenant paid for his error. Enraged at the shells killing and wounding his men, the battalion commander pulled his service pistol and shot the lieutenant in the head as soon as the barrage began. Before the lieutenant’s radio operator could again make contact with the artillery officer to halt the bombardment, four soldiers had been killed and twelve wounded by the nearly fifty shells fired. There would have been more casualties had the mud and water not limited the bursting range of the shrapnel. Some or all of us four would also have been killed or wounded had York not shouted at us to jump up and run farther down the dike during a lull of about thirty seconds at one point. The next two shells exploded right where we had been lying. As it was, a shard of shrapnel as big as a fist sliced into the dike ten feet in front of Turner.

I located one of Ba’s sergeants who spoke French from his days in the colonial forces and translated York’s instructions to radio the airstrip for helicopters to evacuate the wounded. Ba and the advisors and Herb Prevost, who had also flown in for a look, were off in the hamlet with the infantry. York supervised the loading of all of the wounded and dead the troops could gather.

At the airstrip we found General Harkins. He had flown down from Saigon for a briefing by Vann. I had seen him and spoken to him many
times previously and nothing about his appearance was unfamiliar, but the sight of him suddenly took me aback on that day after Ap Bac, perhaps the more so because I, like Turner and Golding, was covered with filth. I was twenty-six years old, and Turner and Golding were also in their twenties. The bombardment was our first experience at the wrong end of artillery, and we had burrowed into the ooze in terror to try to hide from the shells. York was the only one who was still presentable. In a feat of self-control, he had propped himself up on his elbows and kept the front of his fatigue shirt clean. “I didn’t want to get my cigarettes wet, son,” he said when I noticed his unsoiled shirt right after the shelling and asked him how he had managed it.

Harkins was a world apart from the four of us. He was dressed in his office uniform, a short-sleeved shirt and trousers of tan tropical worsted, an outfit called “suntans.” The tabs of his shirt collar were held in place by matching bands of four silver stars. The brim of his parade-ground cap was covered with gold braid. He was wearing street shoes, carrying a swagger stick, and using the long white cigarette holder he favored. He questioned York about the shelling incident before boarding his twin-engine Beechcraft to fly back to Saigon. David Halberstam of the
New York Times
and Peter Arnett of the AP told me that they had approached Harkins a little earlier and asked him what he thought of the battle. “We’ve got them in a trap and we’re going to spring it in half an hour,” he said. Halberstam and Arnett had looked at Harkins in amazement. They had just come back from circling over Bac and Tan Thoi in a helicopter. They could see that the hamlets were quiet. They had also learned from reports the pilots were receiving over the radio and from Vann and the advisors at the airstrip that the Viet Cong were long gone.

There was something obscene about all of this to me and the other reporters. Amid this maiming and dying, a Vietnamese general who should have been serving in an opera company rather than an army was heaping macabre farce upon macabre farce while an honor guard waited upon him. An American general with a swagger stick and a cigarette holder, whose four stars on his collar tabs said that he commanded the fighter-bombers and helicopters and the flow of arms and ammunition that made this battle and this war possible, but who would not deign to soil his suntans and street shoes in a rice paddy to find out what was going on, was prattling about having trapped the Viet Cong.

As soon as Harkins had left, Vann came over to say that he was sorry about the shelling. “Jesus Christ, John,” I asked, “what in the hell happened?”

Vann had not yet learned that Cao was principally to blame for the bombardment. “It was that goddam poltroon Tho,” he said. This last idiocy seemed to break the restraint he had always imposed on himself with reporters. He went into a tirade at the stupidities and acts of cowardice of the last two days.

“It was a miserable damn performance,” he said. ‘These people won’t listen. They make the same goddam mistakes over and over again in the same way.” He railed on about the escape that Cao had arranged for the Viet Cong. “We begged and pleaded and prayed for the paratroops to come in on the east, but when they finally came in they were deliberately put on the western side.”

What Vann did not say, his subordinates said for him. The level of indiscretion was commensurate with the level of disgust. The helicopter pilots also talked freely. They were equally incensed because the lives of their people had been thrown away and their aircraft squandered.

Like the other reporters, I tried to shield Vann and his advisors and the pilots by quoting them anonymously. I attributed Vann’s remarks to “one American officer.” A headline writer for the
Rochester Democrat & Chronicle
, the hometown newspaper of Vann’s wife, Mary Jane, picked up his forthright description of how the Saigon forces had disgraced themselves. The newspaper ran my dispatch across the top of its front page under the headline “A Miserable Damn Performance.” Mary Jane’s mother, Mary Allen, who still lived in Rochester, recognized her son-in-law’s flair for the candid phrase. Vann had been stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, adjacent to El Paso, prior to volunteering for Vietnam. Mary Jane was living there with the children. Her mother mailed her a clipping of the article with a notation over the headline: “This sounds like a remark John would make.”

Harkins almost cut short Vann’s ambitious endeavor to change policy on the war. When the general returned to Tan Hiep the next morning, January 4, for another briefing, he wanted to fire Vann. The “playbacks” of our dispatches as they had been printed and broadcast in the United States had come in over the teletype. Prior to Ap Bac, the Kennedy administration had succeeded in preventing the American public from being more than vaguely conscious that the country was involved in a war in a place called Vietnam. The public had been focused on places like Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and the Congo as the scenes of the nation’s foreign policy crises. Ap Bac was putting Vietnam on the front pages and on the television evening news shows with a drama that no other
event had yet achieved. Harkins was embarrassed and enraged by the stories. The dispatches, replete with details of cowardice and bungling and salty quotations like Vann’s “miserable damn performance” remark, were describing the battle as the worst and most humiliating defeat ever inflicted on the Saigon side and as a dramatic illumination of all of the flaws in Diem’s armed forces. President Kennedy and Secretary McNamara wanted an explanation. Harkins was also under pressure from the regime to make Vann a scapegoat. Diem and his family and their trusted adherents were in a fury over the loss of face. Cao’s excuse to the reporters when he finally talked to us on January 3 was that Vann and Dam had drawn up a faulty plan and failed to show it to him beforehand so that he could correct it. In his excuse to the palace he blamed the whole debacle on Vann. Madame Nhu said that everything would have gone splendidly had it not been for an American colonel who had flown around the battlefield all day in a little plane, countermanding the orders of her brother-in-law’s senior officers.

“We’ve got to get rid of him,” Harkins said to Maj. Gen. Charles Timmes, his principal Army subordinate as chief of the Military Assistance and Advisory Group. Timmes had been on a tour of the northern part of the country on the day of the battle, and the morning of the fourth was his first opportunity to fly to Tan Hiep. He had arrived shortly after the commanding general. Harkins took him aside right away and ordered him to replace Vann immediately as senior advisor to the 7th Division. Vann technically worked for Timmes. The field advisors were still being assigned to the MAAG in these early years, even though they took their operating instructions from Harkins’s headquarters. Timmes had served Harkins loyally and earned his confidence. Harkins therefore did not feel a necessity to maintain the bland and courteous exterior he normally preserved in personal dealings. He let Timmes see how angry he was.