A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (71 page)

The family moved again in the fall of 1937, this time back to Atlantic City, the other working-class section where Frank Vann could find a house. Johnny was thirteen and about to enter the eighth grade in junior high school. The move brought him his first best friend. He seems to have been a loner before. The need to hide so much, to struggle against the want and the torment, and the frequent moves appear to have prevented him from forming close friendships with anyone except his
brothers and visiting cousins. This first friend was a boy quite different in temperament and childhood experience. In adult life the friend was to content himself with a brief career on the Norfolk police force and then an air-conditioning business in Florida. His name was Edward Crutchfield, called Gene for his middle name of Eugene. He was six months younger than Vann and a grade behind. Crutchfield’s memory was that they somehow fell into conversation one day on the street. He suspected there were several reasons that they became friends: Crutch-field knew nothing of Vann and his family before they met, and Crutch-field’s home was a real one in contrast to Vann’s; they did not compete in sports (Crutchfield was huskier and played baseball) or clash in any other way; and Crutchfield was a good listener.

Crutchfield called him John rather than Johnny, because he had introduced himself as John Vann and seemed to prefer being addressed by his formal first name. As they saw more of each other, Crutchfield noticed that although John washed and was always clean, he wore virtually the same clothes day after day. He apparently did not have enough to change. His shoes were not the sort a boy would have chosen and looked like hand-me-downs. John also appeared thin for a boy so remarkably fit, Crutchfield thought. Crutchfield’s mother gave Gene two apples shortly after they met, and he passed one on to his new acquaintance. John thanked him and then wolfed down the apple as though it were going to disappear if he did not eat it instantly.

He ate politely if quickly when Crutchfield invited him home for supper. Crutchfield was proud of his home and especially of his mother, and he could tell that John was impressed. The Crutchfields were one of the few working-class families in Atlantic City who could afford to own a house rather than rent. Crutchfield’s father was the diesel engineer on a small vessel the Army Corps of Engineers operated out of Fort Norfolk for coastal surveys and related projects. He drank, but not enough to lose his job or deprive the family of groceries. Crutchfield’s mother compensated for her husband’s vice with a strength of character and the affection with which she practiced the art of motherhood. She tried to serve a particularly fine supper whenever one of her sons was going to bring home a chum, and she did not disappoint Gene the first evening he invited John.

The two boys developed a habit of playing at a lumberyard in Atlantic City when the place was deserted after working hours, because John could practice tumbling on a huge sawdust pile there. Crutchfield was fascinated by the intensity with which his friend drove himself to achieve perfection in backflips and other tumbling exercises for the competitions
at school. John would climb to the top of the sawdust heap, fling his body into the air and spin end over end to land at the bottom, clamber up the sawdust slope and hurl himself into the air again, and do it again, and again.

Late one afternoon the boys spotted a car parked on a narrow road that ran through the lumberyard, hidden from the view of anyone outside by the work sheds and stacks of boards. The license plate displayed the MD letters of a doctor. The movements they could see inside the car from a distance indicated that a couple were making love. They sneaked up to watch the performance. As they slowly raised themselves alongside a door and peeked through a window, they were both surprised. Myrtle was entertaining a client her son had not known about. They crept away without disturbing the assignation. John did not attempt to hide how profoundly upset he was. His friend knew who the woman inside the car was, because John had taken Crutchfield to his house a few days before and introduced him to Myrtle. He had pretended that she was just like Crutchfield’s mother. He had also introduced Crutchfield to Frank Vann, making believe that Frank Vann stood in the same relationship to him as the natural father he had met at Crutchfield’s home. Crutchfield had observed how shabby the house was, but John had been careful not to give the game away by inviting Crutchfield to supper.

After his mortification in the lumberyard, John ceased to pretend and shared his pain. “Why couldn’t I have a nice mother like yours, Gene?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, John, I don’t know what to say,” Crutchfield replied.

“I appreciate your being the good friend to me that you are,” John said. “I really appreciate it.”

Crutchfield wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how.

On another day they were walking through the alley beside the house when John stopped in front of an empty whiskey bottle that Myrtle had discarded. He kicked it. “There’d be more food in the house if she didn’t spend the money on that,” he said. He explained how Frank Vann handed Myrtle almost all of his money. He cursed Frank Vann for his weakness. His face got angrier. He kicked the bottle again. “She never did want me anyway,” he said.

Each time that depression overcame John, Crutchfield would hear those words. Vann never admitted his illegitimacy to his friend. Crutchfield discovered it from one of his own cousins who knew of Spry. The discovery gave John’s words more meaning.

Crutchfield began to understand too why his friend practiced backflips with such intensity on the sawdust heap. He was releasing some of the
rage that Myrtle built up in him. Other boys also felt the anger in him. They would snicker about Myrtle “messin’ around” with men—but not to John’s face. They were afraid to provoke him. He had a reputation as a fighter that said you couldn’t land a punch on Johnny Vann. The fistfights Crutchfield saw did not last long. Some boy who did not know John would decide to test his reputation. The other boy would swing and John would duck and hit him hard. John’s opponent would swing again and find more air and then panic and flail wildly as John’s fists kept flashing and striking. He also had a way of tripping his opponent after the other boy had swung and landing another punch as the opponent went down. Crutchfield was amazed at the speed of John’s reactions. He seemed to sense danger. Some of the boys who knew the family attributed his speed to practice at dodging Myrtle. In one fight John whipped a bigger boy who was a grudge-keeper. A few days later Crutchfield and John were walking around the corner of a building when the boy lunged out of a narrow indentation in the wall. John was on the inside, close to the wall, and the boy was well hidden until he leaped. It should have been impossible for him to miss, but John dodged and tripped him and punched him as the boy pitched to the ground. “You dumb son of a bitch, don’t you ever learn?” John shouted at the prostrate grudge-keeper.

John did not provoke fights, Crutchfield observed. While he was assertive, he wanted to be accepted by his contemporaries. He seemed to relish a challenge only if the other boy was bigger or was a bully who had picked on one of his brothers. He sought out any older boy who bothered Frank Junior, or Gene and beat them if a warning did not suffice. One bully whom he punished made friends with his brothers after the fight and became an additional protector. Crutchfield never saw him lose a fight and never knew him to lack confidence in the outcome beforehand. “He doesn’t worry me,” John would say of his opponent as a scrap threatened in the schoolyard or a neighborhood lot.

He played a game that frightened Crutchfield. He would run halfway across the street and jump right in front of an oncoming vehicle, bluffing the driver into slamming on the brakes to avoid hitting him. Before the startled driver could shout a curse, he would have dashed the rest of the way across.

“Stop it, John, you’re going to get killed,” Crutchfield yelled at him the first time he saw the game.

John laughed. “It’s lots of fun,” he called from the other side of the street. He leaped in front of a bus on the way back to Crutchfield. He
liked trucks and buses best and would pick a big bus out of the traffic.

One evening in the fall of 1938 when they had been friends about a year, Crutchfield came by to pick up John. He was waiting on the porch. Crutchfield could hear Myrtle inside the house screaming obscenities at Frank Vann. “Let’s get out of here,” John said. “She’s raising hell.”

He told Crutchfield that he was in despair. He couldn’t stand living at home any longer. He didn’t know what to do. He was thinking of running away. It seemed to be the only alternative. Crutchfield had seen enough to be convinced that John would run away, and if he did there was no knowing what would happen to him. Even if he did not run away, Crutchfield thought, the anger that Myrtle kept building within him would sooner or later burst out in self-destructive acts that would get him into trouble with the law. A young minister had taken over the Methodist church to which Crutchfield and his family belonged. He was stirring the whole congregation with his energy and ideas. Crutchfield took John to see him.

The minister’s name was Garland Evans Hopkins. He was a man of charisma and contradictions, and he became the closest figure to a father Vann ever knew. Hopkins was a scion of one of those antique Virginia families—the Evanses on his mother’s side—who were rich in pedigree and short in coin. He saw himself as an aristocratic champion of the downtrodden. He was to attain a reputation of sorts before his premature death twenty-seven years later. The Methodist Church sent him to Palestine in 1947 to assess the conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and the Zionist Jews who were creating the state of Israel. Hopkins came away from the experience convinced that the victims of Hitler’s Holocaust were in turn victimizing the Palestinian Arabs. He became the principal American advocate of Palestinian rights in a period when it was fashionable to sympathize only with Israel and built the first major organization to lobby for the Arab cause and to promote relations with the Arab states—the American Friends of the Middle East. The CIA clandestinely financed the organization but Hopkins ran it.

When Gene Crutchfield brought his troubled friend to Hopkins in 1938, Hopkins was twenty-four years old and in charge of LeKies Memorial, the Methodist church in the Atlantic City neighborhood. He had taken over the parish the year before and wore a mustache to try to make himself look older. It complemented his horn-rimmed glasses and added a bit of distinction to an otherwise unimpressive medium height and build. Hopkins’s father and grandfather had been Methodist ministers,
but tradition was not the reason he had dropped out of law school and entered the ministry. He had been attracted by the ideas then being promoted within the Methodist Church in Virginia. They were ideas of the kind that are now taken for granted in American life—nutrition and welfare support for dependent children; free medical care for the impoverished and the aged; the right of workers to organize a union, to receive a minimum wage, to strike; interracial cooperation. In the Virginia of Hopkins’s youth all of these ideas were new and “liberal,” and they were radical where labor and race were concerned. His first assignment in the ministry had been as social-work director at a church in a Richmond slum which was being used as a center to experiment with relief and welfare programs. He had then been sent to LeKies to put his experience to work in Atlantic City.

The Depression had fostered receptivity to change at the lower level in the urban South. The working-class congregations of the period liked having a minister who was “progressive.” The content of Hopkins’s sermons was not the only innovation that had made him so popular at LeKies. His dynamism suffused every aspect of church life from worship to social work, and he led in whatever he did. The choir improved, because Hopkins was an accomplished pianist and taught its members to sing better. The church did not have a Boy Scout troop, and so he started one, made himself the scoutmaster, took the boys on camping trips, and joined them in earning merit badges for lifesaving and other skills. He told terrifying ghost stories around the campfire. The boys were as enthusiastic about him as their parents were.

It is apparent from what Crutchfield saw and from the subsequent relationship between Hopkins and Vann that the fourteen-year-old boy unburdened himself to the young minister as he had not done to any other man. Crutchfield had been struck by the high intelligence Vann displayed in understanding the relationship between Myrtle and Frank Vann and wanting to break free. Another boy caught in his predicament might not have been able to perceive the source of his troubles so clearly. Hopkins saw that this was not only a boy who wanted to be rescued, but one whom it would be particularly sad to lose. In a letter written not long after they met he spoke of what “an exceptionally bright boy” Vann was. He brought Vann into his congregation toward the end of 1938 by having him join eleven other young people and adults who stood up at a Sunday service and professed Christian faith. Hopkins also persuaded him to enter the LeKies Boy Scout troop. Vann’s troubles had led him to drop out of the first troop he had joined at his grammar school.

The question of whether he would survive emotionally until Hopkins could separate him from Myrtle hung in the balance for a while. Crutch-field recalled that in his roller-coaster emotional state John would appear at a Scout meeting one week and then fail to show up for the next and have some irrational excuse. Hopkins’s counseling summoned up more of the strength within him, and Hopkins held out the possibility of going away to a Methodist boarding school the following fall if he successfully completed ninth grade at the junior high in Norfolk. Vann’s prowess at athletics also helped bring him through his trial. In the spring of 1939 he won first place for his age and weight class in the junior high sports carnival, a medley of track and tumbling events. He brought home his gilded cup and ribbons. Myrtle kept them. She was beginning to take pride in her eldest son. She photographed the cup for her album. Under the picture Vann proudly lettered the words
MY CUP
.