A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (116 page)

Krulak found it hard to look at the casualty lists a secretary laid on his desk each morning in his office on the mountain overlooking Pearl Harbor. He had a memory for names and faces and was familiar with many of the company commanders and platoon leaders and with the noncoms and the “grunts” from his visits to the units. His three sons had followed him into the Corps. His oldest, an Episcopal clergyman, had chosen a military ministry as a chaplain; his two younger sons were regular Marine officers, company commanders. Their choice of a vocation gave a grim edge to his ordeal. At one point all three of his sons were in Vietnam together. His youngest, Charles Krulak, served two tours in I Corps as a company commander and won a Silver Star for Gallantry and three Bronze Stars for Valor. He was wounded twice, the second time on the same ridge where Capt. James Carroll, after whom Camp Carroll was named, died three years earlier.

Had John Kennedy lived, Krulak thought, the war might have gone differently. Kennedy’s fascination with counterinsurgency and the lessons he would have learned by 1965 would have enabled him to grasp the importance of what Krulak was saying when Krulak had gone to the Oval Office with his strategy paper in hand. The president would have forced the Army generals to fight the war intelligently.

If Krulak was right about Kennedy, if there was any substance to his musing, it was another of the many might-have-beens of Vietnam. In this war, 14,691 Marines were to die, three times as many as had died in Korea, a weighty loss in lives, a loss that weighed more heavily than the 24,511 Marines who had been lost during World War II. For Brute Krulak was to know, before most of these Marines of Vietnam had died, that all of them were to die in vain.

As the Vietnamese Communists were shifting the focus of combat to the eastern side of the DMZ in May 1967, John Vann was engaged in a bureaucratic battle to help Robert Komer create the pacification organization that was to be known by the acronym CORDS, for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. The battle was one of the few bureaucratic contests of Vann’s career that turned into a relatively easy victory, because Westmoreland saw that it was not in
his interest to resist and overruled his own staff. Komer’s bravado broke any further resistance.

The U.S. Army MPs who protected Westmoreland’s headquarters didn’t believe in the beginning that this slightly balding man of forty-five in a bow tie and a three-button suit was the first civilian general. Komer convinced them, as he was to convince others, in Komer fashion. When Komer arrived at the MACV gate for the first time in the status symbol Westmoreland had provided him, one of three black Chrysler Imperials in Saigon (Westmoreland and his new military deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams, rode around in the other two), the MP on duty threw up the back of his hand in a halt signal. Komer was sitting in the backseat behind his Vietnamese civilian police driver and a Vietnamese police bodyguard. The MP walked over to the rear door of the Chrysler. Komer rolled down the window.

“Sir, who are you?” the MP asked.

“I’m the high panjandrum of pacification,” Komer said, and then identified himself.

“Yes sir, I’ll look you up,” the MP said. He walked back to the guard post and read down his list of VIPs. He picked up the phone and called inside.

The Vietnamese driver and bodyguard started to talk. Komer could tell that they were discussing the delay and that he was losing face. There were more important people in Saigon with whom Robert Komer was determined not to lose face. Komer spoke loudly whether his ever-present pipe was in or out of his mouth. He had laughed with satisfaction when he learned in 1966 while quarterbacking pacification from the White House that Lodge had nicknamed him “the Blowtorch” because of the heat he generated for progress. This morning, as the military policeman was embarrassing him, Komer had on his mind an article that Ward Just, the correspondent for the
Washington Post
, had written a few days earlier. Just had said that Komer might think he was tough in Washington, but he would discover things were different in the military aviary of Saigon. Komer was now a pullet among chicken hawks, Just implied, and the generals and colonels on Westmoreland’s staff were going to have him for lunch.

Komer decided he was going to make Just a false prophet. He had noticed that the MP who stopped him had given an instant wave-through and a snap to attention and salute to a plain olive-green sedan that was ahead of his Imperial. The sedan displayed red plates with the two white stars of a major general.

“That’s it, that does it,” Komer shouted to his assistant, Col. Robert
Montague, as soon as he entered his office in the headquarters. “I want four stars put on my car. Westy has four stars. Abe”—the nickname of Creighton Abrams—”has four stars. I want four stars. Tell the chief of staff to put four-star plates on my car.” Montague picked up the phone and relayed Komer’s instructions.

William Rosson was no longer the chief of staff at MACV. He had gone to Quang Ngai to command the provisional division Westmoreland had formed there. Maj. Gen. Walter Kerwin, Jr., an energetic artilleryman with a sense of the orthodox akin to a regimental striped tie, had taken Rosson’s place. “Dutch” Kerwin spared himself the humiliation of dealing with Komer on this occasion and sent a deputy, an Air Force general.

“Sir, we’ve got a problem, we can’t put four-star plates on your car,” the Air Force general said.

“Why not?” Komer boomed.

The general explained that according to the regulations only a military man of four-star rank was entitled to a four-star plate.

“Those regulations were written before anyone ever thought we’d be fighting a war like this. Put four stars on my car,” Komer said.

The Air Force general had the temerity to suggest that the regulations ought to be taken seriously. He got a further browbeating from Komer. The exchange ended with the general backing out the door saying, “Yes, sir.”

He returned in an hour. “Sir, I think we’ve got a solution to the problem,” he said.

“What is it?” Komer demanded.

“We’re going to design a special plate for you. It has an eagle in the middle and four stars on it, one in each corner. It’s just like the plate the secretary of the Army has.” He looked at Komer and smiled tentatively.

“Fine, put it on,” Komer said.

“Yes, sir,” the Air Force general said with a less tentative smile.

If the MPs at the MACV gate still had to puzzle at the oddball plate, they were awfully quick to give the wave-through and the snap to attention and salute, and in a short time they didn’t need to see an eagle and stars. They knew that the man in the back in the bow tie was Komer.

When Lyndon Johnson had initially appointed him the White House watchman of the “other war” in Vietnam in the spring of 1966, Robert Komer knew virtually nothing about East Asia. It was the one part of the world he had never studied and where he had never traveled during a twenty-two-year career in government, begun in Italy during World War II as a corporal in Army intelligence. Komer, the son of a prosperous
Midwestern family, had graduated from Harvard
magna cum laude
in 1942, returned right after the war to take an M.B.A. at Harvard Business School, and then decided that intelligence, not business, was his calling. As a senior analyst in the Office of National Estimates at the CIA, he had headed staffs on Western Europe, on the Middle East, and on the Soviet Union. After John Kennedy’s election and the offer of a job on the National Security Council staff from McGeorge Bundy, he had served as the White House man for the Middle East. Africa had later been added to his responsibilities, and he had risen to become Bundy’s deputy.

Komer warned Kennedy’s successor that he was ignorant on Vietnam. That did not trouble Lyndon Johnson. He subscribed to the notion of the day that a smart American, especially an American with an Ivy League education, could accomplish anything. The cultural inferiority complex of the Texan tended to magnify Johnson’s faith in men with fancy Eastern educations. “You Harvards,” was how he put it to Komer on occasion. Komer also had much more going for him with the president than his Eastern education. The brassy, ruthless, work-and-ambition-driven qualities in him appealed to Johnson. Bob Komer was a man of the system and yet he was not of the system. He would not hesitate to take a hammer to some bureaucrat’s sacred mold.

Much of what Komer subsequently learned about Vietnam and pacification he learned from Vann and from those who had been influenced by Vann, like Dan Ellsberg and Richard Holbrooke. Komer tapped Ellsberg as a source of information soon after Johnson put him to work on pacification in 1966, because they were acquainted through the fraternity of high-powered government intellectuals. Holbrooke, after leaving Porter’s Saigon embassy staff to return home, had been recruited by Komer to be his civilian assistant at the White House. Ellsberg and Holbrooke had both told Komer how valuable Vann was. Holbrooke then arranged for Vann to come to the White House and talk to Komer while Vann was in Washington on leave in June 1966 to explore the Office of Systems Analysis job at the Pentagon. The talk lasted three hours. Komer found Vann “devastating because he was so knowledgeable” and “terribly embittered” by his years of fruitless preaching. He was struck by the duality in what Vann had said. Victory was a mirage the way the war was currently being run, but “if we did it the right way, we could win.” Ever quick to cultivate a contact who had power or influence, Vann had continued to see Komer on Komer’s frequent trips to South Vietnam and stayed in touch in between with letters and memos.

Although the limitations common to American statesmen kept President
Johnson from reaching for the kind of fundamentally different approach that Vann and Krulak advocated, he did want a pacification program that would complement Westmoreland’s war of attrition. The attempt to achieve it at the end of November 1966 by unifying the civilian agencies in the Office of Civil Operations had proved useful chiefly as an organizing exercise on the civilian side. Vann progressed further than any of the other OCO regional directors in forming his III Corps advisors into a working team, but he too was hampered by continued rivalry between AID, CIA, and USIS and by the decision to leave the province military advisors in Westmoreland’s separate chain of command. In the spring of 1967, Westmoreland’s waiting game paid off. The president decided to formally assign all responsibility for pacification to him. Johnson also decided to send Komer out to South Vietnam that May to manage the effort under Westmoreland. The pacification army that Komer then proceeded to form in the entity known as Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support, or CORDS, lacked Vann’s central concept of an American takeover of the Saigon side and social reform. Otherwise CORDS owed its command system and organizational structure largely to Vann’s thinking.

Johnson granted Komer the personal rank of ambassador for protocol purposes and he was addressed as Ambassador Komer, but his duties in Saigon were hardly those of a diplomat. He was also not a member of Westmoreland’s staff or a special assistant to the general. Bob Komer was
the
deputy commander for pacification, officially “Deputy to COMUSMACV for CORDS.” The distinction was important in a military universe, because it meant that Komer had direct authority over everyone who worked for him and direct access to Westmoreland. He ranked third at MACV after Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland’s military deputy. Everyone else at the headquarters had to report to Westmoreland through Dutch Kerwin, the chief of staff.

Vann had warned Komer that if he arrived with less authority and access, he would be eaten by the chicken hawks. Komer therefore drew up his charter beforehand in a memorandum he showed the president and gave Westmoreland during an earlier trip to Saigon that spring, telling Westmoreland the president approved the deputy commander arrangement. Komer assured the general that Westmoreland had everything to gain. If Komer failed, the president would blame Komer, because he was the president’s choice. “Westy, it’ll be my head,” Komer said. If he succeeded, Westmoreland would succeed at pacification too, because Komer would be his deputy. Komer added a fillip he hoped would appeal to the pride Westmoreland took in his ability as a manager.
He reminded the general that they were both graduates of Harvard Business School. (Westmoreland had been sent there for a thirteen-week course while a brigadier general at the Pentagon back in the 1950s.) A direct line of authority and responsibility was the Harvard Business School solution, Komer said.

The fillip was unnecessary. William Westmoreland wanted to fulfill the wishes of the president when he thought he could do so at no cost to himself, and whereas he might lack astuteness at war, a shrewdness for the politics of bureaucracy was one of the principal reasons he had risen so far. He saw Komer’s point immediately. Furthermore, his empire was being extended to all of pacification and at the same time he was being relieved of the burden of it. He could get on with his big-unit war and leave the problem to Komer. When the question of a staff car later came up he offered Komer the big Chrysler.

The CORDS structure established below Komer was a unique civil-military command that amounted to a special pacification service within the U.S. forces in Vietnam. A new American deputy commander for pacification was appointed in each of the four corps regions. The corps deputy for pacification had the same relationship with the American commanding general at corps level that Komer had with Westmoreland and bore the same abbreviated title Komer did, Dep/CORDS. The corps deputies also reported to Komer and were, in effect, his corps commanders. Under the corps deputies were the fully unified province teams that Vann had proposed two years earlier in his “Harnessing the Revolution.” The RF and PF and other province military advisors were merged with the civilian advisors into a single team led by a PSA—a province senior advisor.

Vann’s friend and former superior as chief of AID’s pacification program, Col. Sam Wilson, made a significant contribution to the formation of CORDS by volunteering to go to Long An Province in the fall of 1966 and run an experimental province team unified like this. He proved that military and civilian could work harmoniously together, and his team now became the model for those being created in every province. Some of the PSAs were military men, others were from the civilian agencies. While there was bureaucratic log-rolling to be sure that all agencies got a share, the PSAs were ideally chosen on the basis of talent and experience. The PSA reported directly to the Dep/CORDS in his corps. At Vann’s urging, Komer established an efficiency-report system to help instill discipline, and orders were issued within CORDS just as they were within the military.