A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (80 page)

The exception was the 24th Infantry, a black regiment. (Most of the officers were white.) The 24th might have been Kean’s best regiment but for the racist policies of the still-segregated Army of 1950. The regiment was the only one outside Europe that was up to strength in June 1950, with all three infantry battalions and a third firing battery in its artillery battalion. The Southerners who had dominated the Army officer corps since their return during the Spanish-American War had been denigrating black combat units for half a century. (Black fighting units had first been organized by the Union side during the Civil War and had performed well then and during the Indian Wars and the war with Spain.) Decades of forcing black soldiers into quartermaster and transportation units to fetch and carry for white warriors had exacted its price. Many of the troops of the 24th believed the myth of inferiority and repeatedly ran before the North Koreans. The regiment was finally disbanded in 1951. While numerous black Americans fought gallantly in Korea, black soldiers as a group were to have to wait for the changes brought about by integration and the civil rights movement to prove in Vietnam that courage has no color.

Kean’s two other regiments, the 27th and the 35th, steadied after their initial encounters. Vann’s superior, Lt. Col. Silas Gassett, a brisk, task-oriented artilleryman who was the division G-4, harassed the Eighth Army supply officers for more and better weapons and equipment. In the meantime the officers and noncoms made do with what they had. The companies and platoons without functioning radios fell back on the most ancient form of military communication—a runner with a message.
The regiments were soon strengthened with third battalions stolen from another division in Eighth Army. The 27th Regiment performed so well under the leadership of Lt. Col. John Michaelis that General Walker made it the fire brigade for Eighth Army. He sent Michaelis rushing across the peninsula at the end of July to block a flanking move by the North Koreans that might have captured Pusan, severed the channel of supply and reinforcement, and driven the Americans to evacuate Korea. Marguerite Higgins was to turn “Mike” Michaelis and his 27th Infantry “Wolfhounds” into an Army legend in her dispatches to the
New York Herald Tribune
, and Michaelis was to leave the Army a general.

Walton Walker was as resolute as the bulldog he resembled. He was to redeem himself in Korea and to give a lieutenant an example to carry to Vietnam, an example of how a military leader stands and fights back when the battle runs against him. Mac Arthur’s plan was to have Walker keep a foothold on the peninsula while he got ready to cut off and destroy the North Korean Army with an amphibious landing far in its rear at Inchon, the port for Seoul. He flew to Korea in late July and told Walker there could be no question of an evacuation. Walker had, in fact, already chosen the ground on which he intended to stand. The day before MacArthur’s visit he had warned Kean and his other American division commanders, and the Korean officers leading the units of Rhee’s army that Walker had salvaged, to prepare for withdrawal to it soon. The ground was a rectangle that ran north up the peninsula for about a hundred miles and inland from the east coast for fifty to sixty miles all along its length. It was to become known as the Pusan Perimeter, because the port was its anchor at the bottom. Walker had selected the ground because most of it is bounded by the Naktong River, a natural obstacle behind which he could maneuver his troops to mass and counterattack wherever the North Koreans penetrated in force.

At the end of July, as the time neared to fall back for a last time, Walker appeared at a dusty schoolhouse in a town called Sangju where the 25th Division had temporarily established a headquarters. He spoke alone to Kean first and then had him assemble the whole staff. One of the officers took notes of the general’s speech and wrote a summary afterward for the division’s war diary. Lieutenant Vann stood at the back of the room behind the majors and lieutenant colonels. “We are fighting a battle against time,” General Walker explained, and they had run out of space. “There is no line behind us to which we can retreat.” Nor could they contemplate escape or surrender:

Walker gave the 25th the worst sector of the line to hold. It was the bottom corner of the southwest, where Michaelis had momentarily stopped the North Koreans from thrusting to Pusan. The enemy now began to batter much harder at this door to victory in the fight to the death between the two armies. The terrain on the southwest, a series of hills, was also more favorable to the North Koreans, because the Naktong offered no obstacle there. The river turns from its southerly course and starts to flow east about fifteen miles above the coast. The battle quickly became a slugging match in which the outcome was as dependent on the supply officers on both sides as on the courage and stamina of the infantry. The North Koreans were at the end of a long supply line. They would build up stocks and assault, but then run low on ammunition after a couple of days and lose momentum. In the meantime the Americans would also have run low on ammunition from having thrown everything they had at their opponents to try to contain the attack. Vann and the other supply officers under Gassett would work frantically to replenish fast enough for the troops to counterattack and regain the hill positions just lost or to hold on to those they had retained when the next assault came in a week or so, as it surely would. The American riflemen were able to hold against the greatly superior odds because of the superb artillery and air support they were receiving by August, but the supply situation was so confused that there was constant danger of an interruption in the flow of shells to the artillery. Gassett gave a lieutenant a further lesson, this one in how to short-circuit the bureaucracy when it gets in the way of winning. Instead of simply arguing with the Eighth Army G-4 officers who were responsible for supplying the shells, Gassett wangled out of their headquarters copies of the cargo manifests and sailing dates of freighters coming from the United States. The length of the voyage to Pusan from the various U.S. ports was known; it averaged sixteen days from the West Coast. Gassett would send Vann or another officer with a convoy of trucks to meet the ship as soon as the freighter docked and seize what the 25th Division needed.

It was the boy who had leaped in front of the buses and trucks in his street game in Norfolk who kept many of the riflemen in the fight and
saved scores and possibly hundreds of lives when the climax of the battle came at the beginning of September. By late August, Kim II Sung and his generals were wild to break down Walker’s Pusan Perimeter and grasp the victory that was so close and yet might be so quickly denied them and replaced by the destruction of their army. Although they did not know where Mac Arthur might stage an amphibious landing, and never guessed that it would be at Inchon, they knew that he had a counterstroke like this in mind, because he boasted of it in interviews with correspondents in Tokyo. They did not have the manpower to prepare to defend the numerous places where MacArthur might land and still pursue their main chance against Walker, and so they concentrated on Walker. They sent every bullet and grenade and shell they could down the peninsula by train and truck, in fishing boats along the coast, and then on A-frame packs on the backs of peasant men and women to the fighting units beyond the roads. This time they intended to sustain the attack until Walker’s troops buckled.

The offensive began half an hour before midnight on August 31,1950, with the whistling and crashing of the most intense mortar and artillery bombardment of the war thus far against the positions of the 35th Infantry Regiment northwest of the town of Masan. General Kean had set up his division headquarters in Masan in the classrooms of another schoolhouse. The North Korean infantry assaulted by the thousands behind the barrage. By dawn on September 1 an estimated 3,000 enemy troops had surged past the company strongpoints on the hilltops in the front line of the 35th and penetrated through the rest of the regiment six to seven miles into its rear. The only impediment that kept the North Koreans from reorganizing and resuming their advance on September 1 was the refusal of any element of the 35th to budge. The men of the 35th Infantry were resisting with a gallantry that was matched only by the desperate valor of their North Korean opponents. The cannoneers at the artillery batteries became their own infantry, lowering their pieces and firing point-blank into the North Koreans and radioing other batteries to lay barrages around them. There was hand-to-hand fighting at a number of places with grenades and the bayonet.

Many of the soldiers in the 35th Infantry had initially resented Walker’s order to “stand or die.” They had thought the general was commanding them to “stand
and
die.” They were veterans now, understood the wisdom of the order, and fought in its spirit. They had learned that when the North Koreans enveloped both flanks and the rear in a favorite tactic to make an opponent panic, the worst option was to try to withdraw. Only a few would escape then. If they held until a relief column
could reach them, some would die but some would live and they would avoid having to abandon their wounded comrades to certain death and possibly torture and mutilation beforehand by the enraged North Korean soldiery. The rub was that on this occasion Kean had no way of pushing relief columns through to the surrounded front-line companies of the 35th before some of them would run out of ammunition and perish.

Vann had been pondering the problem from earlier battles and had come up with an idea for resupply in just such an extremity. Vann’s scheme was for him to toss ammunition to the infantrymen from the back of an L-5 observation plane, the World War II predecessor of the L-19 in which he was to win the Distinguished Flying Cross at Bac a dozen years later. The L-5 had a less powerful engine than its successor but was highly maneuverable and had the same tandem seating arrangement of pilot in front and observer behind. Two days before the offensive, Vann had persuaded Gassett to let him test the idea to resupply a company that was under pressure from a preliminary North Korean move, and the technique had worked.

On the morning of the offensive the division aviation section refused to provide the planes. The pilots said that Vann’s scheme was suicidal. The American mortar and artillery crews were dropping shells around the encircled riflemen to help them hold off their attackers while the North Koreans were simultaneously bombarding them to weaken resistance. The pilots would have to fly through the trajectories of all these shells as well as expose their aircraft to small-arms fire from the enemy infantry. Vann said the pilots were being too cautious. Gassett appealed to Kean, arguing that the risk was acceptable, given the stakes. Kean agreed and ordered L-5S put at the disposal of Lieutenant Vann. Because of their protest, the pilots were assigned to one mission each in the sequence in which they would normally have come up for duty on the roster that day. A mission consisted of three ammunition drops. One pilot volunteered for a second flight, six drops in all, and then he quit. The other pilots would fly only a single mission.

Vann flew every mission, and he displayed no nervousness after returning. He was calm as he went about packaging ammunition and loading a plane for the next flight. He selected boxes big enough to hold about 100 pounds in clips of bullets for the M-1 rifles, belts for the machine guns, and hand grenades. After he filled a box he wrapped and tied a blanket around it to prevent it from bursting and spewing out its contents on impact. Although a 100-pound box weighs almost four-fifths of what Vann did at the age of twenty-six, he was strong enough to manhandle one. He wedged two of the boxes into the back of the plane
where he sat and held the third in his lap. The locations of the companies were known. Before they took off, Vann spread out his map and briefed the pilot on where they were going to make the drops and how he wanted the approach flown. Three hundred pounds of ammunition overloaded the plane, but Vann’s lightness compensated somewhat and the dirt airstrip near the Masan schoolhouse was sufficiently long and the engine sufficiently powerful to get the L-5 into the air. Once they were aloft, Vann gave the pilot further directions over the intercom.

A major from the division intelligence section who was flying over the battlefield that morning to assess the situation and to drop propaganda leaflets on the North Koreans urging them to surrender could hardly believe what he was watching. He saw another L-5 suddenly dive to ground level and start flying right over the heads of the North Korean infantrymen straight for one of the hills where an American company was holding out. The enemy soldiers could shoot at the plane from all sides. There were no clumps of woods or rows of trees the pilot could fly alongside to partially obscure the aircraft on the approach to the hill. The terrain was completely open, either barren or grassy. The plane did gain some concealment from the clouds of smoke and dust rising from the mortar and artillery shells crashing into the ground just beneath it, but this could hardly be comforting, the major thought, given the danger of being blown up by one of the shells. Right before the base of the hill the pilot pulled back on the stick, skimmed up the slope, and clipped over the American position at the top. As the plane cleared the hilltop by twenty to thirty feet the major saw a box sail out and land among the foxholes below. He realized then that Vann was in the L-5. He had seen Vann loading the boxes at the airstrip, had asked out of curiosity what was going on, and had been told about the novel resupply method.