A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (98 page)

Vann had been alerted to expect an invitation to join the Lansdale team. Lansdale did not extend the offer that day, and in any case Vann thought he would decline the invitation when it was extended. His aspirations had outgrown Lansdale, and he was uncertain how much influence Lansdale was going to have in this South Vietnam of September 1965. For all his crusading and egocentricity, Vann had a keen sense of the realities of government. Lansdale would have no agency under his control with money and manpower to lend him weight in a world where bureaucracies and the men who ran them were going to compete and clash. Lodge had real power, with which Vann could accomplish something if he could gain a role in wielding it. “I’ll have to know one helluva lot more about what Lansdale’s plans are before I tie in with him,” he wrote a friend in Denver on the night of Lansdale’s visit. “I am still waiting for a call from Lodge, and I’m not about to jump until I find out what his ideas may be.”

The call came in a few days. Vann put on a suit and tie for the occasion, quite a contrast to the blue jeans and short-sleeved sports shirt that had become his working garb. He also had a freshly typed copy of the final draft of “Harnessing the Revolution” in his hand when he took the elevator up to Lodge’s office on the sixth floor of the embassy. The building had been refurbished and fitted with shatterproof windows since the huge car bomb Vann had missed by ten minutes on his last visit five and a half months and a lot of learning ago. The blast had also shattered
the official unwillingness to show fear and given the embassy more resemblance to one of the regime’s ministries. The traffic on the busy Saigon riverfront streets was now kept a block away in all directions by barricades of barbed wire stretched across welded iron frames.

Lodge was friendly and seemed pleased to see Vann, but apologized that they would have to keep the visit short because his schedule was still so crowded with the business of his return. After the pleasantries Vann had time only to hand Lodge the proposal and explain that he and his friends had devised this strategy to win the war from their collective experience in the field and that he hoped Lodge would find what he had written persuasive. Lodge said that he was glad to have the paper and would read it. Vann mentioned his Field Liaison Office idea. Lodge was again noncommittal. He promised Vann a “lengthy chat” soon and said that in the meantime Vann should hold down the risks he was taking in Hau Nghia, that he was too valuable a man to lose.

Later that week Vann ran into two political officers from the embassy. Lodge had sent the paper to the political section for comment. The two political officers told Vann that he was “out of line” as a USOM province representative to be handing papers on grand strategy to the ambassador. What did they think of the ideas in the proposal? Vann asked. They refused to say.

Vann was not upset. Theirs was the attitude he expected from bureaucrats. “I make nearly all the professional staff people in there [Saigon] damned uneasy,” he said in another of his letters to a friend at home. He would wait for his serious talk with Lodge. “Someone must be a catalyst if our policies are to be even remotely dynamic,” he wrote to an acquaintance at the Pentagon.

General Rosson kept his promise to break away for a couple of hours from his duties as Westmoreland’s chief of staff and flew out to Bau Trai for a briefing by Vann. He restated his approval of the ideas in Vann’s proposal. James Killen was being replaced as head of USOM in Vietnam by Charles Mann, who had been running AID operations in Laos. Mann was due in Bau Trai for a visit the third weekend of September. Vann hoped to make a convert of him.

He also won what he called “a small but significant victory” in the first half of September. He got unobserved artillery and mortar fire banned in Hau Nghia. Unless the shells were being directed onto a specific target by a ground or air spotter or an outpost or unit was under attack and calling for protective fire, the guns could not shoot. As random firing accounted for most of the firing, there was a sudden and
unusual quiet much of the time in Bau Trai and the district centers. Vann had apparently complained about the shelling when he briefed Westmoreland in July, pointing out that it violated a directive forbidding unobserved fire in the provinces around Saigon that Westmoreland had designated for priority pacification. Westmoreland seems to have responded to Vann’s complaint by having JGS issue an order forbidding unobserved shelling in Hau Nghia. Colonel Chinh was in a rage over it. He somehow got the idea that Hanh was the instigator and was angrier at him than he was at Vann. The order did not apply to sections that had been declared free-bombing or free-fire zones, and the preplanned air strikes were continuing. John Vann the pragmatist saw half an evil eliminated.

Vann was in trouble in his war on corruption in the province, but he was fighting gamely. Over dinner with Hanh one Sunday evening toward the end of July, about a week after Lyndon Johnson decided to give Westmoreland 200,000 American soldiers to save South Vietnam, he learned that he had a new problem bigger than the crooked contractor. Hanh said he had just been put on notice that he was going to have to start conforming to the generate-the-graft pattern or lose his province-chief job.

The military government presided over by Air Marshal Ky was consolidating its position and turning on the pressure. Hanh’s patron in the regime was understandably a fellow Catholic, Nguyen Van Thieu, who had become the chief of state. (Ky held the executive power as prime minister.) Hanh had been told that to remain province chief of Hau Nghia he would have to contribute 250,000 piasters to the “High Command.” Hanh told Vann he did not know what was happening in the coastal provinces of Central Vietnam and in the Highlands, but that the squeeze for more graft was occurring all over the IV Corps zone that encompassed the Delta and in III Corps, which included Hau Nghia and the other provinces around the capital. The district chiefs were being dunned for amounts ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 piasters, depending on the wealth of the district.

As usual, the generals’ wives were overseeing the transactions. The wife of the IV Corps commander, a rotund brigadier general named Dang Van Quang who was a close ally of Thieu’s, had flown up from Can Tho the past week and laid down payment conditions to district chiefs’ wives who were living in Saigon. Hanh had been advised that he could embezzle up to 750,000 piasters on this occasion. He was to share the additional 500,000 piasters with the Hau Nghia district chiefs to help them meet their obligations. It was suggested that he submit phony bills
for materials provided free by the Americans or hand in budget requests for nonexistent projects.

Hanh wanted Vann to get the demand stopped, naturally without letting on that Hanh was the informant. The next day, Vann had typed up a memorandum listing the main points of the conversation. He had stated that Hanh was the source of the information, to lend the memorandum credibility, but had marked it “Personal and Confidentiar and handed it to Wilson after giving him an account of the dinner. He had asked Wilson to pass the memorandum to Killen and to Taylor, still the ambassador at the time, so that the Saigon generals could be told the United States government knew about their games and would no longer tolerate this filth. Wilson was concerned about corruption too. He had said he would pass the memorandum along. Vann had not heard of any action by the time of his brief call on Lodge in early September. He was determined to bring the matter to Lodge’s attention himself if he did not hear soon. In the meantime he was encouraging Hanh to stall on embezzling the money.

In late September he flew home to Littleton for a two-week leave. Mary Jane and the children did not see much of him, because he found it difficult to resist invitations to speak about the war. When he wasn’t lecturing on the war he tended to be on the phone about it to someone in Washington or to one of his newspaper contacts.

As soon as he returned to Vietnam in October, Charles Mann, the new USOM director, told him that he would be leaving Hau Nghia at the end of the month. He had not, during Mann’s weekend visit, converted Mann to his main thesis, but Mann was a practical-minded individual who liked a number of the ideas in Vann’s paper. He also liked Vann’s dynamism and knowledge and ability to work with the Vietnamese. He was promoting Vann to a more important field position as USOM representative and advisor on civilian affairs to Maj. Gen. (soon to be Lt. Gen.) Jonathan Seaman, the commander of all U.S. forces in the III Corps area. Seaman was in the process of bringing the 1st Infantry Division into South Vietnam. He was going to put “the Big Red One” together with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which had already arrived, to start forming a U.S. Army corps to subdue the Viet Cong in the eleven-province region. Vann’s job would be to advise Seaman on anything affecting the population and to act as a liaison officer in dealing with the province governments and the USOM advisors in each province.

While the promotion was flattering, Vann was sad to leave Hau Nghia. The struggle for the province and its people had become an unfulfilled commitment. He found himself hoping that he could someday return
and finish what he had started during the seven months since he had arrived. He had also formed ties of affection. Ramsey was no longer an assistant and interpreter with impressive educational credentials. He was a fondly regarded companion and protégé. Vann’s friendship with Hanh had grown into a friendship with Hanh’s family too. Whenever he was driving back from Saigon, Vann would offer Mrs. Hanh a ride to Bau Trai so that she could visit her husband. The Hanhs had invited him to meals at their home in the city. He brought candy and trinkets from the PX to the Hanh children so often that they called him Uncle John. The homely schoolteacher at So Do was another of the figures attaching him to Hau Nghia. The school building, the stopping of the unobserved shellfire, the progress so far in his war on corruption had all given him a sense that his perseverance was beginning to result in tangible gain.

Ramsey remembered Vann’s last day as province representative. It was November 1, 1965, the anniversary of the overthrow of Diem, which the succeeding Saigon governments had adopted as the country’s National Day. Vann had been in Saigon for meetings to prepare for his new job. He drove to Bau Trai for the National Day ceremonies. Ramsey was surprised to see him appear in the white summer dress uniform of a lieutenant colonel. Because the day was a special one, Vann said, he had obtained permission to take the uniform out of his old Army foot-locker that he used as a storage trunk. He had his medals pinned on too. Ramsey recalled a few evenings at the office when they had not been lost in a discussion of the war. Vann would find a tape he had of Douglas MacArthur’s farewell address to the corps of cadets at West Point and play it on a portable recorder. He would sit and listen reverently as MacArthur spoke of “faint bugles” and “far drums,” of “the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield,” of “Duty, Honor, Country.” MacArthur’s rhetoric and the dress whites said to Ramsey that John Vann would never leave the U.S. Army. Vann had arranged for Ramsey to be designated acting province representative rather than fully succeeding to his job just in case he might be able to return in a few months. That afternoon he packed his belongings, exchanged the white dress uniform for jeans and a sport shirt again, and set off for the 1st Infantry Division’s temporary encampment in a city of tents beside the highway near Bien Hoa.

His gains of seven months started to fade within weeks of his departure. The first to go was Hanh’s self-respect. When no action had occurred
to block the graft demands by the generals, Vann had sent a copy of his memorandum directly to Lodge. But Lodge, apparently after raising the matter with Ky and getting no response, had taken the attitude that this sort of venality was to be expected in South Vietnam and was not worth a ruckus with a government that continued to be fragile. Ramsey and Vann had agreed that if Vann was unable to get the demand stopped, they would have to let Hanh embezzle the money. Ramsey was accordingly on the lookout for a suspicious appropriation. Not long after Vann left the province, a supplemental request for 750,000 piasters for the education program, an amount that matched the graft scheme, came across Ramsey’s desk from Hanh’s office. The program for the current fiscal year was already fully funded, because of the special effort they had been putting into it. Hanh had also not mentioned to Ramsey that he would be submitting a supplemental. Ramsey picked up the request and walked over to ask Hanh about it. He encountered the province chief on the way. He waved the paper suspiciously and moved it across Hanh’s line of vision slowly so that the province chief could read it. Hanh lowered his eyes. Neither man said a word. Ramsey allowed the supplemental to go through without objection. He felt that he and Vann and the U.S. government had let Hanh down and there was nothing else to be done. “We failed him,” Ramsey said.

Chinh then succeeded in getting the ban on unobserved shellfire in Hau Nghia lifted. Vann tried to use his connections to have it reimposed and failed. The U.S. commanders wanted to shoot unobserved artillery in Hau Nghia, so-called harassing and interdiction fire, and the privilege could therefore not be denied to the ARVN. The sole permanent result of the ban was to weaken Hanh’s position by giving Chinh another grudge to hold against him. Chinh also continued to be irritated with Hanh’s performance on kickbacks. Despite having embezzled the 750,000 piasters, Hanh was still refusing to steal enough to satisfy the 25th Division commander.

Worst of all, Vann did not get the promised “lengthy chat” with Lodge, nor could he interest anyone else in high authority in his strategy. “Harnessing the Revolution in South Vietnam” was to become an important document in the history of the war. Many of the individual ideas it contained, such as drawing all the advisors in a province, whether civilian or military, into a single province team under one senior advisor, were to be slowly accepted and incorporated into the pacification effort over subsequent years. The men with the power to set policy showed no interest in Vann’s central concept—to behave like a benevolent colonial power and win the war by winning the Vietnamese peasantry through an American-sponsored social revolution.