John Paul Vann: American Hero
John Paul Vann: American Hero
A lot of people wail that the age of heroes is long gone....
ONE SUCH MAN WAS JOHN PAUL VANN.
"The Age of heroes is not past....
so long as there remains ONE MAN
who contributes to sustain the weak,
mold the characters of the young
and bring hope to the lives of the needy."
I strongly encourage you to read the best book yet written on the Vietnam war, A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan and learn about this great human being.
John Paul Vann was a "mini-model" of America in her two Asian wars, travel with him as a young U.S. Army officer he leads by example and personally drops ammunition from a L-19 "Bird Dog" small plane to troops surrounded by the enemy in the Korean War.
Follow him later as a LTC, he advises the South Vietnamese Army at the 1963 epic battle of Ap Bac, (scroll down after going to the link) where a technical level of war pair of errors gives the VC their first victory against the U.S. war machines: the VC are operating a radio which a small plane direction finds and locates; rather than run or disperse, the VC decide to stand and fight.
The U.S. pilots flying the H-21 "Flying Banana" helicopters carrying the ARVN troops land within effective small-arms range of the dug-in VC despite Vann's instructions not to, and the M113s tracked Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFVs) do not have gun shields to protect their track commanders manning their .50 caliber Heavy Machine Guns.
MAP OF THE BATTLE OF AP BAC drawn by U.S. advisor
The helos get shot to pieces upon landing, and when LTC Vann again gets in a small plane(Like Rommel and Patton, he knew how to fly) to spur the reluctant ARVN M113 commander to save the day and seize victory from the "jaws" of defeat, the force takes too long to get there by not having fascines to cross rice paddy dikes. When the M113s arrive, the VC concentrate fire on the exposed TCs and they are turned back.
Vann gets the South Vietnamese Paratroopers to drop but their non-motivated ARVN officers refuse to launch a timely parachute assault to the VC's rear to trap them from escaping.
The loss at Ap Bac in 1963, emboldens the VC and the ARVN are routed continually thereafter, LTC Vann's Army career is destroyed. The situation deteriorates and this leads to the full-scale U.S. troop landings to fight off the VC from over-throwing the South, particularly the deployment of better Air Assault-trained U.S. Army 1st Air Cavalry Division troopers to prevent the nation being cut into two in the central highlands.
Mel Gibson as Freedom fighter, William Wallace in the film, Braveheart
What is so AWESOME about LTC Vann, is he doesn't give up! He makes countless briefings to those in power at the Pentagon to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people, reform the South Vietnamese Army/government and not over-rely on refighting WWII in the rice paddies. The recent film adaptation of Sheehan's book, "A Bright Shining Lie" starring Bill Paxton does a wonderful job of showing this. He becomes a civilian aid worker and he then goes about taking apart the VC infrastructure in the villages by Civic Action and fighting corruption. Vann networks---finds allies and leading by example makes it happen. After the Tet offensive gamble decimates the VC to nothing, the provinces are secure, though back home in America public support for the war has collapsed. Now for the Communists to win, THE North Vietnames Army (NVA) will have to invade. Which is what they do in 1972.
There, in his finest hour, Vann gets in a helicopter and single-handedly directs air strikes and U.S. military/ARVN forces to repel the NVA invasion. One man can and did make a differance! NVA General Ngo Giap, victor at Dien Bien Phu gets fired for this failure!
Sadly, Vann dies in a helicopter crash. The state funeral he has opens Neil Shehann's AWESOME book which Oliver Stone should make into a movie. My conjecture is that had Vann lived, the South would not have been lost to the communists in 1975. He would have seen to it that people in Washington D.C. and the Pentagon would have not thrown away our hard-won victories in Vietnam. His loss was the turning point in the Vietnam War.
JOHN PAUL VANN AS A METAPHOR FOR U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM?
Neil Sheehan in an extensive interview describing how he wrote his book said:
After all of this experience, both there and here, you chose this Colonel to focus on as a metaphor for American involvement. Why that choice?
"It was an accident to begin with. John Vann was my friend, I had known him in those three years I'd been in Vietnam and I'd see him periodically afterwards. When he was killed, I went to his funeral at Arlington in 1972, and it was like an extraordinary class reunion. Here were all the figures of Vietnam in this chapel. This man had left the army as a renegade lieutenant colonel, had gone back to Vietnam as a civilian, and ended the war holding a General's position even though he was a civilian. General Westmoreland was his chief pallbearer, and a few minutes before the ceremony started, Edward Kennedy, the last of the Kennedy brothers, came in. And I thought of the older brother who sent the country to fight this war in Vietnam in '62 when I first went there, already buried in this cemetery, and here was the youngest brother coming ... he was a friend of Vann's. Sitting with the family was Daniel Ellsberg, who was about to go on trial for copying the Pentagon Papers. He and Vann had remained best friends, despite going in totally opposite directions on the war. It was very moving. I realized that we were burying more than John Vann. We were burying the whole era of the war. We were burying the era of boundless self-confidence that led us to Vietnam. By that time, John had come to personify the war. He'd spent the better part of ten years there. Everyone else would go for a year or two, three at the most, and he'd spent the better part of ten. And I realized that if I wrote a book about him, I could write a history of the war. I could put the two together, and people might be able to understand the war because they would be reading about it in human terms, though the story of a man whose life turned out to be like a novel.There was a moral outrage in what he was telling you about the war that you wound up conveying to the audience back home in the United States.He had influenced that band of war correspondents who first clued America in to what was going on in Vietnam during the last period of the Kennedy administration.
Oh yes, he'd influenced us enormously because his first year in Vietnam was during my first assignment as a reporter and David Halberstam's first American war assignment. Vann had an extraordinary mind. He had an incredible capacity to relate to human beings. He was a wonderful actor. He could manipulate people. He could sense human issues. At the same time, he had a capacity to deal with hard facts, like statistics. He was a statistician. Usually those qualities seem to cancel each other out, but they didn't in him. So in that first year, we were faced with the problem of covering a war where the advisors in the field were telling us we were losing the war. We could see that as well when we went out on operations, which was pretty frequent. The General in Saigon, a man named Paul Harkins, always saw the world through rose-colored glasses and kept seeing it through them. He would maintain we were winning the war. You were caught between the two. It was an adversarial relationship. And Vann helped us to understand the war in a way that other advisors couldn't, because he was fearless. He would work down on a tactical level, and he could apply what he saw down there at the strategic level. He gave us perspectives and information that we didn't get from other advisors. He shaped our reporting because we were trying to come to grips with this ourselves, and this man helped us come to grips with it in a way we wouldn't have been able to without him."
"Yes, there was a moral outrage on several levels. First of all, you've got to remember in that period of time, this country was at the high noon of its power. We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans. And Vann embodied that, and so did the reporters. We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this General and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see. I discovered later on that they believed these delusions. We thought they were lying to us; I discovered later on they believed what they were saying. They were really deluded men. And then there was the moral outrage over the way the war was being conducted. Vann had the keen sense of honor as a Soldier and he was enraged at the bombing and shelling of peasant hamlets, which was routinely done by the Vietnamese and American Generals. He thought, first of all, this was terrible. When I say keen sense of honor as a Soldier, he was in Vietnam to fight other men, not to kill somebody's mother or sister or kid. And he felt that, first of all, this was wrong, and secondly, it was stupid, because it was going to turn the population against us, and of course he was quite right. So a sense of moral outrage was conveyed on several levels, yes."
You quote him at one time as saying, "This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing. The best weapon in killing is a knife." You emphasize his criticism of the indiscriminate bombing, which was really the way that we chose to pursue the war. The Generals were fighting another war, they were still fighting World War II, and it made no sense in the Vietnam context.
"When I got at the records, I realized that they also understood what they were doing. I mean, they thought that they could -- you know, Mao Zedong described guerrillas as fish swimming in the sea; well, they were going to empty the sea. And the Vietnamese Generals on the Saigon side thought that they could terrify their peasantry into ceasing to support the guerrillas. I think the American Generals, as it turned out later on, deliberately wanted to empty these areas of population".
JOHN PAUL VANN AS THE MODEL FOR TODAY'S U.S. ARMY LEADER
I know one bitter Vietnam vet criticized the book, A Bright Shining Lie, but needs to rethink his position: Vann is the model of the leader we need today who can network and orchestrate a victory.
To this may be added a further set of observations drawn from current events. Most adversaries that the United States and its allies face in the realm of low-intensity conflict, such as international terrorists, guerrilla insurgents, drug smuggling cartels, ethnic factions, as well as racial and tribal gangs, are all organized like networks (although their leadership may be quite hierarchical). Perhaps a reason that military (and police) institutions have difficulty engaging in low-intensity conflicts is because they are not meant to be fought by institutions. The lesson: Institutions can be defeated by networks, and it may take networks to counter networks. The future may belong to whoever masters the network form."
"The Mongols, a classic example of an ancient force that fought according to cyberwar principles, were organized more like a network than a hierarchy. More recently, a relatively minor military power that defeated a great modern power--the combined forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong--operated in many respects more like a network than an institution; it even extended political- support networks abroad. In both cases, the Mongols and the Vietnamese, their defeated opponents were large institutions whose forces were designed to fight set-piece attritional battles.
"Cyberwar is coming" by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, International Policy Department RAND
These guys are right on target at the source of our temporary loss in Vietnam 1975-1991?. However, war is not just a lethal sporting contest among combatants, its about whose IDEAS will dominate, in the case of FREEDOM, in the end the truth has won out over communism.
In fact, Sheehan returns years later to Vietnam in the book, After the War is over, Hanoi and Saigon a review states:
"Sheehan sees a Vietnam suffering not from the American war but from a prolonging of the agony by the rigid regime of Le Duan, with its prosecution of new wars and its Stalinist economics. In 1986, as General Giap relates in a longish and candid interview, came doi moi, or ``the new way.'' Out went the collective farms and heavy industrial projects; in came a free market. Within a year, Vietnam was exporting rice, and the currency had stabilized. Still, it's a desperately poor country, the North in particular, as Sheehan's tour of hospitals demonstrates: They are underequipped and cannot afford to stock antibiotics or basic vaccines. In Saigon, Sheehan is overcome with memories and seeks out his and Susan's old haunts, as well as those of John Vann, subject of much of A Bright Shining Lie. Like the North, the South is a society run by party faithful--and the privileges of rank have hearkened to them, leaving out a great many of the ``mutilated.'' Even so, the armies of homeless have been eliminated, and no one is starving. In Saigon, Western influence is strongest, ready for the moment when the American embargo drops and Vietnam becomes the economic powerhouse everyone is anticipating. Already the BMWs proliferate."
However, if the forces of freedom were more open-minded and networked like the Vann did while he was alive and the enemy did, we could have won the struggle sooner on the battlefield and not just wait for cultural changes to do it for us. The men who fought in Vietnam need to know that their sacrifices did count-just ask the people of Thailand. But if we are to learn from our war there, we must not make excuses that the politicians "did this or that" when there is plenty to do at our own level within the military to network and "out guerrilla the guerilla", which is what Vann did.
John Paul Vann is one of the greatest American heroes to ever live, this book is a classic, the only fault I have is the "lie" ending in the title, probably a sop to get anti-war types to read it! I would change the word to "Hope" that was lost that we need to rekindle by reading this fine book.
UPDATE 2004: JOHN PAUL VANN COIN FOR TODAY?
COUNTERINSURGENCY: The John Paul Vann Model
By Rich Webster
In November of 1968 I can remember the legendary John Paul Vann speaking to our graduation class of newly trained advisors at Di An, South Vietnam. You cant win a guerrilla war by dropping bombs from the air, he said. You may kill some of the enemy, but you will alienate the people you are there trying to help, and they will turn against you.
John Paul Vann was our Lawrence of Arabia in Vietnam. He spent 10 years there, first as an American infantry officer, then later as the main architect of the Vietnamization/Pacification program.
Other words of his I remember were, You need to go after the guerrilla with a rifle at the village level and kill them face to face. And to do that effectively, you need local Soldiers from the area to assist you. If the locals are properly led and equipped, they will do the job.
What Vann was saying seems to me to be applicable to Iraq today. You need the support of the local population and indigenous troops to combat the guerrillas/terrorists/thugs on their own turf. Large conventional American military infantry units arent necessarily best suited for this task.
Most think that it was just the Special Forces who were conducting counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. Very few have heard about the Co Van Mis (Vietnamese for American Advisors) and the mobile advisory teams (MATs). After 1968, fewer than 5000 assisted, advised, and to use a recently coined term, were embedded with a 500,000 Regional Force/Popular Force Army that took the war to the enemy at the local level for a period of over five years.
There were 354 mobile advisory teams made up of five U.S. Army personnel (two officers and three NCOs). The MATs were really a scaled-down Special Forces team with one of the NCOs being a medic and there was a Vietnamese interpreter for communication purposes. As a young lieutenant, I served with a number of Popular Force platoons and Regional Force companies while a member of Advisor Terms 49 and 86.
Very little has been written about this little known aspect of the Vietnam War. In the book about John Paul Vann and the advisory effort, A Bright and Shining Lie, the big lie is what the author, Neil Sheehan, leaves out of the book. Most of the book deals with the South Vietnamese Army and the advisory effort up to the Tet Offensive in 1968, and very little if any detail or mention is given to the many years afterward where the Regional Forces and Popular Forces gave quite a good accounting of themselves against the enemy.
Sheehan spends the first 700 pages of his book detailing how bad the South Vietnamese Army was up to the end of 1967 (parts of which are true), then spends several pages on the Tet Offensive in early 1968, in which he fails to emphasize that the main fighting units of the Viet Cong army including their commanders and NCOs were eliminated, never again to become a viable fighting force. Some interpret this sound defeat of the Viet Cong as a deliberate attempt by the Hanoi Leaders to eliminate their comrades in the south.
Sheehan then skips five years of the war effort where the Regional Forces/Popular Forces held their own against the NVA/VC and defeated them in most of the smaller unnamed battles of the war at the village level. Then he picks up again with the 1972 Easter Offensive where Vann was killed, not by enemy contact, but by a helicopter crash during the monsoon rains. Barely 30 pages of Sheehans book are devoted to Vanns success with Vietnamization. There was hardly mention of the Regional Forces/Popular Forces [RF/PF] the home militias, the little guys in tennis shoes, who inflicted over one-third of the casualties against the enemy.
I spent almost nine months with these little guys as a lieutenant taking the fight to the VC at the hamlet and village level. Not all the RF/PFs were great soldiers, but many of them were if properly led, just as Vann had told us at the advisor school.
Nicknamed the Ruff-Puffs, they were not configured to stand up against a large force of NVA regulars, but they could provide security for the locals in a hamlet or village. The Soldiers either had their families living with them, or in the nearby village. Who better to know when the enemy was coming into a village than those who lived there?
There were many times when I knew when the Vietcong were coming into the village at night to recruit or create havoc. And then instead of being ambushed, I and my little band of Popular Force Soldiers became the ambusher. We beat the guerrillas at their own game. We took the night away from them. We no longer patrolled endlessly and aimlessly looking for a needle in a haystack, waiting for the enemy to initiate contact.
We waited for them in the darkness of the night, and kicked hell out of them. In today's military vernacular, we preempted them. Thats how you fight the guerrilla and the terrorist and beat him at his own game.
I cringe now watching news clips on TV as young American Soldiers in Iraq are ambushed by snipers and blown up with the new version of the command controlled booby trap, the IED (improvised explosive device). But how would the young American Soldiers be able to distinguish the al-Qaida terrorist from a local Iraqi civilization? The simple answer is, they cant.
And how do they find the IED? The answer is they cant unless an informer warns beforehand as to the location.
I believe the answer to this problem is found in the type of force that Vann created in Vietnam, coordinated by CORDS (Civil Operations for Revolutionary Development Support). So different was this approach to conventional warfare tactics that Vann insisted it be operated under civilian control on equal footing with the military hierarchy. Vann really wanted the U.S. military advisors to be in command of the Ruff-Puffs instead of being advisors, but Robert Komer, the first director of CORDS, resisted this idea.
Vanns approach to counterinsurgency was the blending of all civilian agencies in Vietnam under CORDS with a loan of 1800 U.S. military personnel to serve as advisors to local Soldiers to provide security for all aspects of the U.S. effort in Vietnam. These were the front line guys who made up the mobile advisory teams, who moved from one RF/PF unit to another accompanying them on day and night time operations.
It seems to me we are always waiting for the enemy to ambush us in Iraq. The first strike is always thrown by the terrorist, and then we react by sometimes killing Iraqi civilians as the sniper fades away into the crowd. This unfortunate response is, in itself, a tactic of the terrorist/insurgent/enemy combatant.
Dont we need to pre-empt the terrorist as he is preparing the IED to blow up an unsuspecting U.S. Soldier and dont we need to know that a terrorist cell from outside Iraq has begun operating in a neighborhood? To do so, we need intelligence from the local civilians and Soldiers from the area who understand the language, customs, and dynamics of the local situation, who can easily point out strangers in the area even though they speak the same language, but look different.
The best of the MAT teams helped perform all of the above missions because they lived with their Vietnamese counterparts 24 hours a day, ate their food, got to know their families and developed friendships that last even today, 28 years after the war. The Co Vans did not retreat back to a secure base camp far removed from the people they were trying to help and defend.
So where do we get the local Soldiers in Iraq to perform this mission? As a former Co Van, I sat in astonishment when I saw the 500,000 man Iraqi Army being disbanded and sent home immediately after Saddams main army collapsed. For the most part, they surrendered without firing a shot. Why send home a trained army, although obviously not well trained according to Western standards, but surely part of them could have been used along the guidelines of the MAT team concept in Vietnam?
I realize that all of Saddams army could not have been used like we used the RF/PF in Vietnam, but surely some of them could. It was obvious that a large number of Saddams conscripted forces were not loyal to him.
We could have had local Iraqi soldiers patrolling under the command of small military advisor teams to help flush out enemy combatants and newly arrived in-country al-Qaida terrorists. The advisor teams would provide the coordination and communication with the larger American units in the area. This would enhance security for the civilian efforts and NGOs in Iraq. The Iraqi civilians must feel safe and secure before a new form of government can develop without the imprint of a terrorist stamp.
I believe that what Vann said in the 1960s in Vietnam is relevant today in Iraq as it relates to counterinsurgency. All the high tech gadgetry and firepower that our military has today, leaves us relatively helpless when it comes to fighting the insurgent who blends in with the civilian population. An innocent civilian killed translates into a win for the terrorist. To avoid this, it takes the Soldier on the ground with a rifle taking the fight to the terrorist, in an area that he previously thought was a safe sanctuary. And to do that, you need local Soldiers familiar with the terrain, the language and the customs of the area. John Paul Vann understood that.
The Vietnam Was has been misremembered, misunderstood, and misreported in regard to John Paul Vanns effort with Vietnamization and the fighting ability of the South Vietnamese Soldier. Sheehan has done them a great disservice in hi book, A Bright And Shining Lie, from which a movie of like title was made.
Few know that the Viet Cong lost the war, and that they were no longer a viable force after 1968. The Viet Cong could not have won the war and bested the South Vietnamese Army in battle. The advisory effort in Vietnam wasnt perfect, but the South Vietnamese forces held their own in the 1972 Easter Offensive by the North.
The South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) was finally defeated in 1975 when they were invaded by the fifth largest army in the world. They were invaded by 17 divisions of the North Vietnamese Army to include over 700 tanks that steamrolled everyone in front of them. The North Vietnamese were still being supplied with war materiel by their allies, the Soviets and Chinese, while the allies of the South Vietnamese, the United States, abandoned them in their hour of need.
The ARVN were also disadvantaged and vulnerable because they had to defend everywhere, and the NVA could concentrate superior forces at weak points in the South.
The myth perpetuated by the anti-war media was that the South Vietnamese military was no good. I returned to the province capital of Xuan Loc, Vietnam, in 2002 and visited the large communist cemetery there filled with 5000 graves. This is where the last battle of the Vietnam War was fought, where the 18th ARVN Division defeated three NVA divisions before finally being overrun by 40,000 of the enemy.
Would Vanns model of counterinsurgency work in Iraq today? Thats a good question, but what is the alternative? Our Soldiers now are getting tired, and our forces are being stretched too thin to continue the mission indefinitely.
The architect of the 1975 invasion of South Vietnam, North Vietnamese Tein Van Dung, in an indirect manner, gave Vann a complement for his conduct of the pacification program. In his book, Great Spring Victory, he never once mentions revolutionary warfare or the guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong as aiding him in his final assault on the South. Thats because Vann's program of Vietnamization had basically wrested control of the south from the guerrillas who we no longer a viable fighting force.
Thats rather ironic, isnt it? The myth exists today that peasants wearing rubber tire sandals employing guerrilla tactics won the war in Vietnam.
Our officials in Iraq are saying it will take three to five years to build an Iraqi Army. With Vanns model, we could have taken the best of the 500,000 former Iraqi military, and put them under the control of U.S. military advisors. Instead of having young American soldiers patrolling the streets of Baghdad and the smaller cities around the country, surely we could have used Iraqi soldiers advised by several thousand American military personnel. Instead, we sent them home to do what?
Unlike Vietnam, there is no outside Army that is going to invade Iraq in division-size strength and overwhelm our military units there. Our powerful and well-trained military units, with the aid of the British, have already won the big battles of the war. Now we need small units of local Soldiers taking the war to the enemy at the village level. I see no other way to preempt the terrorist before he has the time to act.
The small suitcase bomb, the suicide bomber, chemical and germ warfare, and the IED, all weapons used by the terrorists in the 21st century, make it necessary to defend everywhere. The terrorist will always go for the target of opportunity, searching for the most vulnerable target.
And this appears to be the difficulty of the are of the future the preempting of the terrorist before he can strike. Or, even before that, having the will and knowledge of how to preempt the terrorist.
Note: The above article appeared in Counterparts quarterly journal Sitrep in the Winter/Spring 2004 issue. Counterpart is an association of US-Vietnamese advisors and their Vietnamese counterparts.
For more information on the author, the association and its periodical, contact:
Ken Jacobsen
kjacobsen@knology.net
Airborne!
FEEDBACK!
"Dear Mr. Sparks,
I read what you said on amazon about A Bright Shining Lie. I agree with what you said about LTC John Paul Vann and how he was a hero. I think he was one of the guys who really cared about the war and cared about the people in Vietnam. By reading your column about A Bright Shining Lie, you have convinced me to buy this book and of course, read it. It was a great shame that LTC John Vann died. I think it was a tragic loss to the military and the people of Vietnam and the United States. I hope you have HBO, because HBO did a movie on A Bright Shining Lie. It stared Bill Paxton as LTC John Paul Vann. I think
Bill Paxton played the role great. It was a great movie and you have to see it".
XX XXXXX
XXXXX@XXXX.com
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