A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (93 page)

Vann made friends right away with the teacher at the hamlet two
miles from Bau Trai where the Ranger company had been wiped out. She was a homely middle-aged woman of outgoing temperament. The fact that she was also the Viet Cong medical worker for the hamlet, a place called So Do, did not seem to affect her attitude toward Vann and Ramsey. Vann won her gratitude by repairing her two-room school, which had been damaged in the attack, and also by arranging corrective surgery for several children he noticed there who were afflicted with harelip, a congenital deformity of the upper lip. (The deformity is rarely seen in the United States and other industrialized countries because it is corrected at birth.) These harelip cases Vann encountered at So Do and other hamlets called to mind Gene with his legs bowed by rickets, a senseless curse that modern medicine could banish. Vann started a program to send all such children for treatment to the Filipino and South Korean surgical teams on loan to USOM. Many months later he was to discover that the So Do schoolteacher saved his life and Ramsey’s on three occasions by persuading guerrillas who had planted a mine in the road and were waiting for them not to blow them up as they drove by.

John Vann also made friends with a lot of the children. Their bright and eager faces moved him. Vietnamese peasant children had a winning manner, and none more so than the children of the Delta. The diet, protein-rich from fish and vegetables and fruit, made them vigorous. They laughed easily and played hard. In their bare feet and shorts and loose shirts—tending the family water buffalo or shouting and kicking a can for a soccer ball in the dirt of a farmyard because they did not have a real ball or other toys and had to contrive their own fun—they were the children Vann and his brothers had been in their good moments in Norfolk. He learned quickly that the children could protect him. They wanted the American who handed out the candy and gum to return, and they would sometimes warn him when there were guerrillas in a hamlet or farther down a road.

Doug Ramsey was both the perfect subordinate and partner for Vann at this moment and a major influence on Vann’s thinking at this time. Ramsey was, like Halberstam, another of the messianic innocents of the 1950s generation, as intense as his fence-rail frame was tall. An only child, he had grown up amid the big firs and ponderosa pines on the fringes of the Grand Canyon and in the desert oasis town of Boulder City, Nevada. Ramsey’s father was a minor administrator for the National Park Service, and his mother was chronically ill in a period when the government did not provide virtually limitless medical care to the dependents of civil servants. He had gone through Occidental College
in Los Angeles on scholarships and loans, graduating in 1956 as one of the few students in the history of the college to achieve a perfect record, an A in every course for all four years. The State Department had drawn him away from a scholar’s life after a year of graduate study at Harvard because it seemed to offer adventure and demanding service. Before he could accept his appointment to the Foreign Service he had to give the Air Force two years, most of the time as a communications intelligence officer, to fulfill a college ROTC obligation he had acquired at Occidental. Ramsey had then found himself assigned to the State Department’s Honolulu Reception Center for foreign visitors across from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki.

To rid himself of such comfortable assignments, Ramsey had volunteered for Vietnamese language training and field work in South Vietnam, arriving in May 1963 as the Buddhist crisis was about to begin. He had been given another comfortable assignment, this one as branch public affairs officer for USIS in the mountain resort city of Dalat. Diem and the Nhus had weekend villas at Dalat, and the place was sophisticated and highly politicized. Ramsey’s curiosity and his facility with the language had turned his months there into an education in Saigon society. Connections he formed in USIS had also gradually brought him work more to his liking, such as interview surveys of peasants in hamlets along the Central Coast and in the northern Delta to try to pinpoint specific grievances that motivated the farmers to support the Viet Cong. After nearly two years of patience and more volunteering, the State Department had finally given him a job he really wanted—detail to AID and assignment to Hau Nghia in February 1965 as assistant province representative.

Ramsey had known nothing of his new boss when Vann arrived a month later. Vann had introduced himself by giving Ramsey a copy of Halberstam’s
Esquire
article. Ramsey was an admirer of Halberstam’s reporting on Vietnam in 1962 and 1963. To learn that his new superior had inspired much of that reporting and had been the hero of that miserable tale affected Ramsey deeply. Although it would have been difficult for a young man of Ramsey’s inclinations not to have followed Vann, in all that Ramsey was to see of him Vann was never to fall short of Halberstam’s heroic portrait. The two men were in tune—in tune in their emotional commitment to the war, in tune in their affection for the country they were struggling to retain. Ramsey was to write afterward of how they would sometimes abandon common sense entirely and go for a spin down a back road at the close of day to watch the falling sun turn the rice fields “to burnished copper in the afterglow.”
They would stop for a moment “in some red-tiled or thatched-roof hamlet where the people were settling in for the night as they had for hundreds of years.” They would savor the sights and smells of this land “as if we were small city children on the way to camp for the first time.”

At night, after dinner with Hanh, Vann and Ramsey would stay up late in their office at the province headquarters (they had electricity and the comfort of fans there) discussing the war and mulling over the events of the day. Ramsey pointed out to Vann that the hunger for education Vann was seeing in the peasant children would, under the Saigon system, end in frustration for those with the most intelligence and initiative. Ramsey had learned enough about South Vietnamese society to know that the educational system set up by the French and perpetuated by the Saigon regime effectively reserved secondary and higher education, and therefore the leadership positions in non-Communist society, for the urban middle and upper classes and for the former landed class of the countryside that had fled to the towns and cities. If a peasant child managed to get through the five years of elementary education, he faced a dead end. The nearest secondary schools were in the district centers. The farm families were usually too poor to send the children to them, and the district schools did not go beyond the initial four years of secondary education in any case.

Virtually the sole route to status in life for a peasant child was to turn to the Viet Cong and their National Liberation Front, as the most talented obviously did. Because they had to draw leaders from the peasantry, the Communists had no rigid educational requirements and tried to further the education of promising cadres within their own system. The commander of the Viet Cong battalion that was killing the most Saigon troops in Hau Nghia (elements of his battalion had annihilated the Rangers at So Do) was a forty-five-year-old native of the abandoned Due Hue District on the northeast corner of the Plain of Reeds. He was a highly respected man. At the moment he was equivalent in rank to a major in the ARVN. He would soon be equivalent to a lieutenant colonel, as he was expanding his battalion into a regiment. He had worked his way up from the ranks, which meant that he had probably received no more than a few years of elementary education in the Saigon system he was striving to overthrow.

Vann’s thoughts during this period were also being influenced by two of Ramsey’s friends, who were to become Vann’s friends and comrades in the Vietnam enterprise. One was Ev Bumgardner, the psychological-warfare specialist who had witnessed Diem’s speech at Tuy Hoa ten years earlier and returned to Vietnam to run the field operations of
USIS. The other was Frank Scotton, Bumgardner’s chief operative in the field. Vann had encountered Bumgardner and Scotton during his first year in the country, but had never had an opportunity to become well acquainted. Ramsey introduced him to them. Both were the kind of original men whose spirits attracted Vann.

Frank Scotton was a strapping twenty-seven-year-old in 1965 with a dark complexion and dark brown hair, raised on the lower-middle-class side of a Boston suburb by a conscientious mother after his father, a fireman, enlisted in the Army and was killed during World War II. He was adventurous and friendly and yet a bit rough and wary in manner. His preference in weapons was a 9mm Swedish K submachine gun he had acquired from the Special Forces. His mind was naturally unorthodox, and a fascination with guerrilla warfare and a self-steeping in the writings of Mao Tse-tung and Vo Nguyen Giap had reinforced this trait.

He and Bumgardner were attempting to fight the Vietnamese Communists with their own methods by copying Communist molds and filling them with anti-Communist ideology. A new program to politically indoctrinate and motivate the Saigon militiamen that Vann was enthusiastic about was an outgrowth of an experiment Scotton had conducted the previous year in Quang Ngai Province on the Central Coast. With Bumgardner’s encouragement and the help of an imaginative Army major named Robert Kelly and several CIA agents, Scotton had organized forty-five-man commandos that were an imitation of the Viet Cong’s armed propaganda teams. Scotton’s commandos had not stopped the guerrillas from taking over almost all of Quang Ngai (by May 1965 the regime was considering whether to abandon the province capital itself), but they had performed as no other Saigon units ever had—helping the farmers, propagandizing in guerrilla-dominated sections, laying ambushes that actually did surprise guerrilla bands at night, and sneaking into hamlets to assassinate local Viet Cong leaders.

Bumgardner was at first glance the contrasting mentor that an action-oriented type like Scotton seemed to need, a cerebral and restrained man, diminutive and balding now at forty years. Along with Bumgardner’s even temper and self-effacing manner went a capacity to think and behave with the same unorthodoxy Scotton did. The passion in Bumgardner showed in his dogged pursuit of the war and in a zest, concealed from strangers, to put himself in dangerous places and to hear bullets buzz and snap.

Whenever Vann and Ramsey went into Saigon on business together and stayed overnight, they would get together with Bumgardner and Scotton to talk about the war. While Bumgardner and Scotton reflected
the same inability as the rest of their countrymen to grasp the nationalist basis of Vietnamese Communism, they were knowledgeable about current social and political conditions in South Vietnam. Both men were fluent in Vietnamese, and Bumgardner had married into a Chinese family that had lived in Vietnam for generations. They were convinced, like Ramsey, that the Viet Cong drew their greatest strength from the conditions that nurtured social revolution. They thought that anti-Communist nationalism was still a viable alternative in the South, but only if there was a complete transformation of the Saigon regime. The United States could not simply take over the regime as Vann’s reflex had told him and run the country through Vietnamese front men. The regime had to be somehow changed into an entirely different kind of government that was responsive to the desires of the rural population. Unless a change was made, Bumgardner and Scotton believed, the war could not be won. Even if the U.S. Army were to occupy the whole country and crush the guerrillas, the rebellion would break out again after the American soldiers had gone home.

What Ramsey, Bumgardner, and Scotton said sounded right to Vann because of what he saw in Hau Nghia. By the end of May he had seen and heard enough to express his new and, for Vann, extraordinary appreciation of the war in a letter to General York:

For eleven years, Vann thought, the United States had been wasting Vietnamese and American lives and hundreds of millions of dollars
attempting to preserve the unpreservable old order in South Vietnam. The task before him was so much larger than anything he had envisioned in Denver when he had decided to return to the war. What he had to do was to devise a strategy that was constructive rather than destructive, a strategy that could shape South Vietnam into a nation able to stand with the United States in the global struggle for the underdeveloped lands. After devising that strategy he would have to translate it into a program and then into action by selling the program to those on high. The idealism that Garland Hopkins and Ferrum had instilled in him expressed itself in a desire to Americanize the world. When he looked at these farm youngsters he did not simply see Vietnamese children. He saw potential Vietnamese counterparts of Lansdale’s Filipinos—native leaders so infused with American values and so grateful for American help that they would naturally make the cause of the United States their own. “Had we begun eleven years ago,” he said in a lecture in Denver while on home leave that fall, “we’d now be having the leaders emerging that we want. I think we can still do it through children like this.”