A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (11 page)

Maj. Herbert Prevost was the one man in the detachment who seemed to love danger as much as Vann did, whose luck appeared just as phenomenal,
and who summed up the nostalgia for the excitement of wars past. Prevost, an impish-looking thirty-eight-year-old pilot, was the Air Force liaison officer to the 7th Division. The U.S. Air Force might have decided as an institution that strategic bombing was the proper way to win wars. Herb Prevost was not the sort to go along with the crowd. He had remained a small-plane man who liked to keep his wars personal. During World War II in Europe he had managed to get several P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers shot up under him while blasting Germans who impeded the advance of armored and infantry columns. His Distinguished Service Cross had come the day Prevost and his wingman in another P-47 had taken off loaded with a new incendiary weapon called napalm and had seen a pack of German tanks lying in wait in a woods to surprise an American column advancing up a road. The wingman was shot down and killed by Germans firing machine guns from the tanks. Prevost’s plane was struck so many times that the mechanics decided to junk it after he somehow flew it back to the airfield. The Germans’ surprise had been spoiled and five of the tanks and their crews incinerated.

In Vietnam it appeared that Prevost had been tamed. The Air Force had assigned him the smallest aircraft in its inventory, a Cessna observation plane called the L-19 (also designated the O-1) Bird Dog. It was a single-engine two-seater, the seat in front for the pilot and the one behind for the observer. The L-19 had no guns. Prevost’s job was to coordinate requests for fighter-bomber and transport plane support for the 7th Division and the territorial forces in the five provinces with the 2nd Air Division in Saigon, the Air Force component of General Harkins’s command. He had been given the L-19 to enable him to keep in touch with three Air Force captains who worked for him in the provinces.

Prevost was an imaginative gladiator of the air. He persuaded Vann to give him a pair of the new lightweight Armalite rifles, officially designated the AR-15 and later to be designated the M-16 when the Armalite was adopted as the standard U.S. infantry rifle. The Army was experimenting with the weapon and had issued Armalites to a company of 7th Division troops to see how the soldiers liked it and how well it worked on guerrillas. (The Armalite had a selector button for full or semiautomatic fire and shot a much smaller bullet at a much higher velocity than the older .30 caliber M-1 rifle. The high velocity caused the small bullet to inflict ugly wounds when it did not kill.) Prevost strapped the pair of Armalites to the support struts under the wings of the L-19 and invented a contrivance of wire that enabled him to pull the triggers from the cockpit to strafe guerrillas he sighted. He bombed
the Viet Cong by tossing hand grenades out the windows. Occasionally he dropped twenty-pound antipersonnel bombs, whenever he could talk some out of acquaintances assigned to an air commando squadron operating from the former French air base at Bien Hoa fifteen miles north of the capital.

Herb Prevost’s acquaintances referred to their squadron by its unofficial code name, Jungle Jim. (The official code name was Farm Gate, a play of gallows humor on the World War II expression for the passage into eternity: “He bought the farm.”) The squadron was equipped with propeller-driven planes of World War II and the Korean War—twin-engine A-26 Invaders designed for low-level bombing and strafing with six to ten .50 caliber machine guns in the nose, and T-28 Trojan trainers converted into fighter-bombers by fitting .50 caliber machine guns and racks for bombs, rockets, and napalm canisters into the wings. Although the planes belonged to the U.S. Air Force, they had been repainted with the markings of the Vietnamese Air Force, called the Veenaf, from the abbreviation VNAF, by the Americans. The repainting was not difficult, because the VNAF had, in deference to its more recently acquired patron, done away with its original French-inspired system of marking military aircraft with roundels in the national colors on the sides of the fuselage. The Saigon aviators had adopted the U.S. insignia of a white star in a blue circle, and where American military aircraft had bars in red, white, and blue going off to each side of the circle, the VNAF had bars in red and yellow, the colors of the Saigon government. With a bit of red and yellow paint, the planes of the air commando squadron became Vietnamese. The pilots also never flew without a junior officer or noncom from the VNAF in the backseat. If one of these planes with VNAF markings and a Vietnamese in the backseat was shot down or crashed, the Kennedy administration could claim, as it did on occasion, that the American pilots were merely “conducting training in a combat environment.” Other American aviators were assigned directly to the VNAF with the mission of training and advising the Saigon airmen in the employment of their fighter-bombers—T-28S and AD-6 (also designated A-1) Skyraiders, a Navy plane of the Korean era. These American trainers functioned as extra pilots for air strikes against the guerrillas, again with a Vietnamese in the backseat. The small foreign press corps in Saigon was not permitted into the Bien Hoa base to describe at first hand how the system worked.

Except at critical times during operations when he was tied to the command post summoning air support for the division, Prevost was eager to take Vann, or Ziegler, or Jim Drummond, the intelligence advisor,
out on reconnaissance missions in his miniature fighter-bomber. Army observation pilots who flew ordinary, unarmed L-19S out of Tan Son Nhut were on call to the detachment for reconnaissance work, but Prevost was the ready alternate and, if available, the preferred choice. Vann liked to fly low to study the countryside as much as possible. Prevost preferred to stay lower still, practically shearing the tops off the rice stalks until he had to hop over a tree line. The Air Force liaison officer who replaced him when Prevost was reassigned many months later was new to the country. He asked Vann if Major Prevost normally flew at 1,500 feet, considered a height of acceptable risk from small-arms fire. “Major Prevost didn’t accumulate fifteen hundred feet of altitude in his entire time with this detachment,” Vann replied.

This mood of the war as an adventure was reinforced by the sentimental attachment many of the advisors developed for the Vietnamese for whose benefit, along with that of their own country, they believed they had come to fight. The captains advising the battalion commanders stayed with their battalions whether in base camps or on the march, eating Vietnamese food and accepting the other conditions of life of the ARVN captains they had been sent to help. So did the sergeants teaching weaponry to the soldiers. The advisors to the Civil Guards and the SDC militia lived near the training centers and accompanied their territorial troops on local day-to-day actions against the guerrillas. These shared circumstances evoked a natural affection from the Americans.

The Vietnamese soldiers would pull at the hair on the forearms of the Americans out of curiosity, because their bodies were smooth. They would cadge cigarettes; giggle when an American recoiled at the strong-smelling fish-oil sauce, called
nuoc mam
, which the Vietnamese used as seasoning (it added concentrated protein to their diet in the process); and laugh when one of the big foreigners teetered and toppled off one of the palm logs the peasants laid across the canals for bridges.

Vann took a particular liking to the common soldiers, who were peasants like their guerrilla opponents, whether ARVN regulars or territorials. Perhaps the fact that he was also slightly built and did not tower above their average height of about five feet two inches also made them appeal to him. Their American equipment was invariably too big and too heavy. The helmets swamped their heads; the U.S. Army’s semiautomatic M-1 rifle was too heavy for them at nine and a half pounds and its stock was too long for their arms; and the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) the light machine gunners carried was much too hefty at sixteen pounds for men who averaged 105 pounds in weight to tote through a day. What Vann admired most about them was their cheerfulness
and their endurance. They were as deceptive in appearance as their country. Their bodies were strong despite their slightness, because their diet was good by Asian standards. One could not see their strength because the American-style fatigues hid their wiry build. Their peasant upbringing had also hardened them psychologically to physical labor, so they did not complain on marches in the heat. They smiled often and joked among themselves, and they did not scream or lose control when wounded. The stoic bearing of pain seemed to be part of their culture. They would lie still and moan or clench their teeth against the hurt. They were potentially good soldiers, Vann concluded, who deserved to win their war and not have their lives wasted.

Because he saw the solution to the conflict primarily in military terms during his first year in Vietnam, Vann focused on the initial priority that he and Porter had agreed upon—the destruction of the main striking forces of the Viet Cong through surprise helicopter assaults. These troops were the Communist equivalent of the ARVN and the Civil Guard. They consisted of the elite guerrilla battalions, called the Main Force by the Communists and the “regulars” or the “hardcore” by the Americans, and the provincial battalions and companies known as the Regionals. The Main Force battalions each ran about 250 to 300 men strong in late May 1962. They ranged over a territory of two to three provinces. The Regionals usually kept to their home province. The advisors tended to group both together, calling them “hard hats” because they wore turtle-shaped sun helmets, an imitation of the colonial sun helmet that one saw in Kiplingesque movies of British India on late-night television, and that the French had worn in Indochina. The Viet Cong made their sun helmets by stretching green canvas or plastic over a frame of bamboo. Both the Main Force and the Regionals were full-time soldiers. Their uniforms, homemade by their families or the women of sympathetic peasant hamlets from cloth that was available in nearby markets, varied in these early years. They usually fought in the black
ao baba
of the peasants or in a khaki shirt and trousers, but the regulars also sometimes wore a green battle outfit. The Viet Cong dress uniform, which the guerrillas carried in their knapsacks for ceremonial occasions, was fairly standardized—a shirt and trousers of a deep blue cloth that was commonly sold in country towns. The Main Force had the highest level of combat proficiency and political motivation and the best of the captured weapons. All of the officers and most of the noncoms were Party members. They were called “cadres.” (The Vietnamese Communists
used the term “cadre” for anyone in a leadership position, whether officer, noncom, or administrative official, and for specialists such as medical personnel.) Several of the provincial battalions approached those of the Main Force in fighting quality.

There were about 2,000 Viet Cong regulars operating within the five provinces of the division zone, as well as Jim Drummond could estimate with the information available to him by the end of May, and about 3,000 Regional guerrillas. The way matters stood, the Communist strategy was succeeding. The guerrillas were capturing more and more weapons, which enabled them to launch more and bigger attacks. The Saigon government’s Civil Guard and SDC militia were in turn becoming more intimidated and keeping closer to their outposts and the district centers, ceding more and more of the peasantry to the guerrillas. The quickest way to halt the momentum of this revolution, Vann believed, was to break the point of the spear. If the regular and provincial guerrillas were killed off or scattered, the Communists would no longer be able to mass a force for big ambushes of road convoys and of Saigon’s territorial troops as they marched through the countryside during the day trying to assert the regime’s authority. The Viet Cong would not be able to overrun outposts at night with quite their current ease. Security would start to return and progress toward an enduring pacification could begin. “Security may be ten percent of the problem, or it may be ninety percent, but whichever it is, it’s the first ten percent or the first ninety percent,” Vann would say. “Without security, nothing else we do will last.”

Once the process of decimating the Main Force and Regional guerrillas was well underway, the cycle of the war would turn against the Viet Cong, Vann thought. This conclusion was based on a conviction he shared with virtually all Americans in Vietnam in this early period—a conviction that the Vietnamese peasants were essentially apolitical. The fact that the majority of the peasants in the division zone appeared to be either sympathetic to the Viet Cong or neutral did not mean they were expressing a political value judgment, according to American thinking: the peasantry lacked the political sophistication to make such a judgment. Except for a minority who had specific grievances against local officials of the regime, the peasants were simply responding to whichever side was stronger where they lived. Vann held this conviction with more than ordinary firmness because he had observed on intelligence-gathering missions with his Ranger company in Korea that the Korean peasants he questioned seemed to have no political values. They had appeared just to respond to the side that was dominant at the moment. What all Asian peasants wanted most, he was certain, was
peace and security in which to till their land. They did not care whether those who established the law and order were Communists or capitalists.

When the farmers saw the regular and provincial guerrilla battalions and companies being destroyed one after another, they would realize that the Communists were not going to win. Provided the Saigon side also stopped abusing them, the peasants would begin to lean toward the regime. Intelligence would improve because more and more peasants would be willing to talk. It would become easier to target and decimate the rest of the Viet Cong’s main striking forces. The Communists would also lose the broad base of their armed strength—the local guerrillas on the hamlet and village levels. (The Vietnamese village is not a single population center but rather a cluster of hamlets. The village government has its offices in one of the hamlets. The hamlet chiefs and their assistants are executors who carry out the decisions of the village government.) These local guerrillas were called the Guerrilla Popular Army by the Viet Cong. They were part-time soldiers, farmers during the day, fighters at night, on orders from above or when the spirit moved them. Drummond estimated that there were about 10,000 local guerrillas throughout the division zone. They were of immense value to the Main Force and Regional guerrillas and to the clandestine government of the Viet Cong. The local guerrillas were a pool of manpower in training for the higher forces, an omnipresent intelligence network, a source of scouts and guides who knew the terrain and the attitudes of their neighbors and the militia in the nearest Saigon outpost, a waiting assembly of porters to haul ammunition and to carry away the wounded and the dead during battle, and an ever-present arm to enforce the desires of the hidden Communist administration.