Shadow Warrior (44 page)

John Paul Vann was a professional soldier who had distinguished himself during the Korean War, leading his ranger unit on reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines. Following the requisite stint at the US Army Command and General Staff College, Vann was promoted to lieutenant colonel and then, in 1961, earned a master's degree in business administration from Syracuse University. In 1962, Vann arrived in Vietnam and was assigned as military adviser to the ARVN Seventh Division in IV Corps. At the disastrous battle of Ap Bac, he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery in directing the South Vietnamese effort from a bullet-riddled spotter plane. By that point, he had made the acquaintance of
New York Times
reporter David Halberstam and UPI's Neil Sheehan. He was their chief source as they produced article after article indicting both the inept and cowardly ARVN commander at Ap Bac and the ever-optimistic MACV chief General Paul Harkins. Not surprisingly, Vann was forced out of his adviser position, and he resigned from the army a few months later. Tiring of civilian life, he returned to Vietnam as an employee of USAID and subsequently became the chief US pacification officer in Hau Nghia.
¹³

A short, muscular, athletic man, Vann was brilliant, if a bit undereducated. He was also ambitious, hyperactive, and egotistical. Like Frank Scotton, Vann was determined to live and work with the Vietnamese, whom he was supposed to help toward political and economic self-sufficiency, rather than hailing them from the nearest safe enclave. He deliberately drove around one of the most insecure provinces in Vietnam—night and day—in his International Harvester truck, armed with a carbine and a .45. His duty, as he saw it, was not to kill the Viet Cong, although he reacted with a vengeance when attacked, but to compete with them. If he and his comrades could build more schools, irrigate more crops, and cure more diseases
while containing ARVN and South Vietnamese government corruption, then the struggle for the countryside just might be won.

Vann spoke only a few words of Vietnamese, but that did not keep him from attempting to have sex with every Vietnamese girl he encountered. Indeed, rumor had it that he was drummed out of the military as much for seducing a fifteen-year-old as for criticizing his superiors. Vann would show up at district and village outposts at any and all hours demanding an accounting from his American and Vietnamese staff. The recalcitrant were often invited to take a nighttime ride through the district of Cu Chi, which was laced with Viet Cong tunnels. Vann would come to know anyone who was anyone in Vietnam, but he became particularly close to Tran Ngoc Chau.

Following his return to Vietnam as an USAID employee, Vann would drive into Saigon from the provinces on almost a weekly basis for drinks, dinner, and long conversations with Frank Scotton, Ev Bumgardner, and, after his arrival in August 1965 as part of the Lansdale team, Daniel Ellsberg. When they were in-country, David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan joined the group. For these men, able as they were to move about the country at will interacting with whomever they pleased, Vietnam would be the greatest adventure of their lives. “While Vietnam was a tragedy for many,” Scotton later recalled, “I would not trade all of the wealth in the world for the experiences I had there.” After dinner with the group at a restaurant in Cholon, Patricia Marx, who would later marry Ellsberg, described its members as “desperate men” in the sense that they were detached from family; most of them were single or divorced and were willing to die for what interested them, she observed. There was nothing to keep Vann and his cronies from living a foreign, colonial-type existence in Vietnam, and they loved it. Indeed, Halberstam wanted Sheehan to entitle the book he was planning on Vietnam
The Last Frontier
. It was “the last place to have fun, to fool around with somebody else's country,” Halberstam told his friend.
¹⁴

Like Colby, the group understood that American troops were needed to prevent the collapse of South Vietnam, but they were deeply frustrated with General Westmoreland's war of attrition. It was a rigid, unwieldy strategy that did not permit adaptation to varying local conditions, ignored the Maoist roots of the Viet Cong's tactics, led to a great deal of collateral damage, and failed to take into account the complex political and cultural divisions in Vietnam. According to the Vann group's math, the North Vietnamese could reproduce and conscript soldiers at a faster rate than the
Americans and their ARVN allies could kill them. Moreover, the enemy had captured the flag. “They are imbued with an almost sacred sense of mission,” Scotton observed. “This is the generation [in its own view] that is going to unify the country and expel the foreign presence.”
¹⁵

Indeed, the ongoing refusal of the US Mission to acknowledge that a communist could be an authentic nationalist was as great a problem as Westmoreland's obsession with conventional warfare. Typical was a MACV report asserting that “VC reservoir of strength can be found in intimidated farmers and villagers; anti-government dissidents; isolationists; kidnapped persons who have been brainwashed; various sorts of malcontents throughout the country; and those who believe that the VC will prevail.” On the document, Vann scribbled, “The one kind of person no American can imagine joining the VC is a patriotic Vietnamese who wants to kick the foreigners and those who serve them out of his country.” Something had to be done.
¹⁶

During the summer of 1965, Vann, Scotton, Bumgardner, and Ellsberg put together their position paper, “Harnessing the Revolution.” The National Liberation Front and the Viet Cong were winning the war because their program promised a better life for the average Vietnamese, they wrote. Until and unless Washington and Saigon seized control of the revolution and used it for their own purposes, there could be no progress. The paper called for a different kind of government in South Vietnam, “a national government . . . responsive to the dynamics of the social revolution,” a regime that the masses would fight and die for and that would survive the inevitable American withdrawal.
¹⁷
The ongoing fears of some Americans that their country was slipping into imperialism was nonsense; the United States did not want to convert Vietnam into a colony, but it was going to have to interfere in the political and military life of the country to the extent necessary to end corruption and warlordism and establish a responsive, if not democratic, government. Vann and his colleagues called for placing all military and civilian authority in the hands of carefully selected province chiefs. Combat had to take a backseat to conversion. MACV and the ARVN must be utilized as a tool to facilitate counterinsurgency and pacification.

In Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge read “Harnessing the Revolution” and endorsed it. That Westmoreland had reservations only solidified the ambassador's support. Indeed, the relationship between MACV and the embassy
under Lodge was almost as bad as that between MACV and the CIA. Shortly after Westmoreland had arrived in Saigon in 1964, he attended a dinner Lodge was hosting. When the general began to sing “I Want to Be an Airborne Ranger,” Lodge turned to Mike Dunn, his military aide, and said, none too quietly, “Oh dear. First they send us Paul Harkins, and now they send us this fellow, Westmoreland. You know Mike, we just might not make it this time.”
¹⁸
The ambassador's relationship with Vann was the antithesis of that with Westmoreland—cordial and trusting. It did not hurt that during his time in the States, Vann had actively and conspicuously campaigned for Lodge when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination.

Colby also read “Harnessing the Revolution” eagerly—he had been apprised of the paper's existence while it was in gestation—and enthusiastically recommended it to Richard Helms. But powerful forces from expected quarters arrayed against it. Some in the military failed or refused to grasp its significance. “Pacification . . . depends upon the degree of security in the countryside,” Maxwell Taylor—at the time supposedly the military's foremost intellectual—observed. “We found that in our frontier days we couldn't plant the corn outside the stockade if the Indians were still around. Well, that's what we've been trying to do in Viet Nam. We planted a lot of corn with the Indians still around. . . . As security becomes greater . . . pacification will move along much better.”
¹⁹

Westmoreland expressed a similar if somewhat more sophisticated view. “Pacification could not be the objective—eliminate the enemy and all the rest falls into place,” he declared in a postwar interview. He acknowledged the contributions made by the Rural Development Cadre, the Popular Forces, and the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, but he saw them as merely auxiliary forces, not the building blocks of a new nation. Hawks in the diplomatic establishment were equally dismissive of the notion that mobilizing the countryside was the key to victory. “I don't think this war is going to end by pacification of most of the country,” Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy's successor as national security adviser, wrote to the president in a memo. In his opinion, attrition of the enemy's forces in the south, bombing the north, interdicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and establishing a stable regime in Saigon were the keys.
²⁰

Nevertheless, the Vann group had its supporters—not only Colby, Lodge, and Lansdale, but also Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson and
Westmoreland's deputy, General Creighton Abrams. Just as important were Halberstam, Sheehan, and the
New York Times
. After Vann had been forced out of the military in 1963, it was Halberstam who had rescued him from oblivion, praising him extensively in a long profile in
Esquire
magazine and in his 1964 book,
The Making of a Quagmire
. At lunch at the Harvard Club in late 1964, Halberstam briefed Dan Ellsberg on the war and on John Paul Vann. Thus, when Ellsberg came to Saigon in August 1965 as part of the Lansdale team, he was already a Vann fan and acted as a link between his boss and the proconsul of Hau Nghia Province.
²¹

In February 1966, President Johnson called an impromptu summit meeting in Honolulu. Following the formal opening session, LBJ retired to the King Kalakuau Suite in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for private talks with Prime Minister Ky and President Thieu. He pointed out that 85 percent of the South Vietnamese were peasants who had suffered terribly from the ravages of war during the previous ten years. That must stop, and the regime must earn the support of the people. At the conference's close, the two sides issued the Declaration of Honolulu, in which the United States and South Vietnam pledged to keep fighting until an honorable peace could be negotiated and to launch immediately an accelerated program of social, economic, and political reform. Before they departed Honolulu, LBJ informed Ky that there would be another meeting somewhere in the Pacific in three to six months “to evaluate the progress toward social justice and democracy that had been made in South Vietnam.” Johnson was realistic. “He [Ky] certainly knows how to talk,” LBJ subsequently observed. “Whether he knows how to do as well as he knows how to talk is different.”
²²

In 1966, as it would throughout the remainder of the Second Indochinese War, the United States faced a choice—whether to fight a war of search and destroy or of counterinsurgency and pacification. Was physical security paramount, or should building a society based on social and economic justice take priority? There was no question that the generals in control of the South Vietnamese government favored the first option in both cases. In the eyes of the regime in Saigon, the Vann group was profoundly subversive. Its members were seen as revolutionaries no less dangerous than those of the National Liberation Front and the Viet Cong. The Americans threatened the existing order—a kind of militarized Confucianism in which the Military Revolutionary Council and its extended families controlled
the guns and money in South Vietnam. The Ky-Thieu regime tolerated counterintelligence and pacification only as means to defeat the Viet Cong and to “pacify”—in the infantile sense—the rural population. As the Saigon generals had proven in their attitude toward the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups program, and would demonstrate again in their attitude toward the Rural Development initiative at Vung Tau, they did not view local self-defense and community development as sources of popular empowerment, the building blocks of a vital and independent nation. Reconstruction, not revolution, was their watchword. Vann, Scotton, and company wanted to harness the revolution, but the regime in Saigon was profoundly counterrevolutionary.

Colby understood this and attempted to confront the dilemma. “If . . . the American position supports the reactionary trends which a new sense of nationalism is attempting to shake off,” he wrote to Michael Forrestal, Rusk's special assistant for Vietnam, “can we hope to maintain a position in these new emerging nations[?] Even with the use of considerable force as in Vietnam, can we hope to have other than a discouraging stalemate with an aggressive communist movement which aligns itself with the aspirations of the young and arising leadership and repudiates us along with the old and colonialist leadership?”
²³
Citing Ed Lansdale's 1964 article in
Foreign Affairs
entitled “Do We Understand Revolution?” Colby in his memo pointed to the overwhelming irony of the American position in Vietnam. The United States was the product of the most successful revolution in history—success defined as participation of the electorate, the guarantee of personal freedoms, the rule of law, and the steady (if uneven) economic betterment of the populace. Why was it that the United States was losing out to the National Liberation Front and the Viet Cong in the struggle for hearts and minds?