A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (77 page)

The civilian general of the mountains of the Highlands and the rice deltas of the Central Coast with his staff at II Corps headquarters at Pleiku. To Vann’s left is his chief of staff, Col. Joseph Pizzi; to Vann’s right is his military deputy, Brig. Gen. George Wear.
U. S. Army
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John Vann, in the golf jacket he wore to ward off the chill of flying in his helicopter, at the command post of an ARVN airborne brigade battling the North Vietnamese Army for control of Rocket Ridge between Tan Canh and Kontum.
Matt Franjóla
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John Vann strides through Bong Son town in a vain effort to encourage the defenders as it and the rest of northern Binh Dinh Province on the coast collapse before the Communist forces.
Matt Franjóla
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Calling in the B-52s: John Vann telling U. S. military advisors in Kontum at the height of the siege of the town how he will defeat the NVA. At right is Brig. Gen. Nguyen Van Toan, the new ARVN II Corps commander, who had been instructed to listen to Vann.
Matt Franjóla
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Camp Holloway Airstrip, June 10,1972: John Vann’s casket is carried to a C-130 transport for the flight to Saigon.
Matt Franjóla
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DEATH OF A SOLDIER

June 16,1972: In the Oval Office of the White House after the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. Left to right: Aaron Frank Vann, Jr., Eugene Wallace Vann, Dorothy Lee Vann Cadorette, Jesse Vann, Thomas Vann, Peter Vann, Mary Jane Vann, President Richard Nixon, John Allen Vann, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, Secretary of State William Rogers.
Official White House Photo
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In September, John telephoned again. He was being assigned to a regular B-29 squadron at Smoky Hill Army Air Field near Salina, Kansas. Although Japan had surrendered on August 14, his term of service was being continued indefinitely because he had had no overseas duty. (Men were being discharged through a point system based on time overseas and in combat.) He could take two weeks of leave at the beginning of October and be in Rochester by October 3. They could be married as quickly as they could get a license and Mary Jane could return with him to Kansas, where they would live in an apartment near the base. Mary Jane said yes. She asked her mother if she would like to spend the money she had been saving for the university on a wedding. When her mother objected, Mary Jane announced that if her parents refused to let her marry John in Rochester, she was going to take the train to Kansas and marry him at the air base. She was eighteen now and no longer needed her parents’ permission. John was twenty-one. There wasn’t time to arrange a proper wedding by early October, her mother argued. They would have to make do, Mary Jane insisted. Her mother agreed because she had no choice. They set the wedding day for October 6 so that the ceremony could be held on the conventional Saturday afternoon when it would be convenient for their friends to attend. Mary Jane called John back and gave him the date. He’d be there in plenty of time, he said.

John was so impressed by the wedding invitation printed in fancy Gothic type that he mailed Mary Jane a list of people who could not come but to whom he wanted invitations sent for pride’s sake. One was his rescuer, Garland Hopkins, who was serving as an Army chaplain in Southeast Asia at the time. John was to have only three people from his side at the wedding: Mollie; her older son, Joe Raby, whom he asked to be his best man; and Myrtle. He did not want to arouse the suspicions of the Aliens by not having anyone from his family. (He invented an
excuse for Frank Vann, who stayed in Norfolk because of the usual shortage of money.)

As Mollie remembered it, her nephew was blunt in his instructions to her: “I leave my mother in your hands, Aunt Mollie,” he said. “You keep her straightened up and don’t let her get drunk or anything like that.” He was afraid alcohol would stir the meanness in her. “She could get to talkin’ if she took too much,” Mollie recalled. “‘Well, you know, Vann is not his real name, you know.’ That was the sort of thing she might say.”

Mollie kept Myrtle sober, but her vanity caused a small crisis. Myrtle took the train from Norfolk to New York and then drove to Rochester with Mollie and Joe Raby the day before the wedding. Mary Allen insisted that John’s mother and aunt stay at her house. John and Joe put up at a hotel. While Myrtle and Mollie were riding to the church the next afternoon with Mary Allen for the 4:30 ceremony, Myrtle discovered a run in her stocking. “I can’t go,” she said to Mollie. “I have a run in my stockin’.”

“You have to go,” Mollie replied. “We can’t get stockin’s now. Weddin’s take place. They go, you know. We’ve got to get there.”

“Mollie, I am not goin’ in that church with a run in my stockin’,” Myrtle insisted.

“No one will ever notice, because they’re so excited by the bride,” Mollie said. “They’re not lookin’ at you. They’re lookin’ at the bride.”

Myrtle was adamant.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get stockings somewhere, Mrs. Vann,” Mary Allen intervened. “We’ll get the stockings for you.”

No one could remember how Mary Allen produced the stockings, whether she stopped at a store or they drove back home for another pair. In any case, Myrtle did a quick change before entering the church.

It was John who held up the ceremony for half an hour. He and Joe Raby got lost driving Mollie’s car to the chapel of the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. The neo-Gothic chapel was a romantic setting, and like many Rochester brides, Mary Jane had chosen to be married there rather than at her own church. The bridal consultant whom the Aliens had hired to oversee the flower arrangements and to tend to Mary Jane’s gown and other fine points of the wedding became convinced she had a jilted bride on her hands and almost lost her self-control. Mary Jane’s pastor from Westminster Presbyterian, who was to perform the ceremony, kept the guests calmer than he was by announcing that they would have to wait a bit because the groom had been delayed. Mary Jane recalled that she seemed to be the only one who was not worried. She was certain that she and John were meant for each other and that he
would come to marry her. The chapel was a difficult place for a stranger to find, and Vann’s knowledge of Rochester was limited to the downtown area. The rehearsal the day before had been held at Westminster Presbyterian. He and Joe finally managed to hail a motorcycle policeman. The arrival of the groom was announced by a siren.

Despite the rush their son-in-law-to-be imposed on them with his sudden-turn ways, the Aliens gave their daughter a wedding that was decidedly not an Atlantic City, Norfolk, affair. The altar was lit by candelabra and flanked on both sides by large baskets of pink and white gladiola set against a background of palms. Mary Jane wore the long-sleeved gown of white satin she had liked best at Sibley’s Bridal Shop. It had a heart-shaped neckline traced by rows of seed pearls. Her necklace was a string of pearls. The skirt of her gown swept behind her in a long train; her full-length veil fell back from a tiara of orange blossoms. Doris was the maid of honor in rose taffeta. Three of Mary Jane’s girlfriends were bridesmaids, and the bride and her attendants carried bouquets of pink pompons, roses, daisies, and snapdragons. Jess, in a formal double-breasted suit with a striped silver morning tie and a carnation in his lapel, gave the bride away.

The groom and the other servicemen among the guests in the chapel lent the wedding its World War II aura, for the war was still in the air even though Japan had surrendered. John was elegant in the semidress uniform of an Army officer of the period. It was called “pinks and greens” and consisted of a long belted jacket of dark green and contrasting trousers of tan cavalry twill with a pinkish hue. Mary Jane noticed that John was nervous during the ceremony and the reception that followed when they cut a four-tiered wedding cake. His nervousness shows in the pictures taken by the photographer the Aliens hired to record the wedding. Perhaps he was a bit intimidated by all of this middle-class pomp and satin and worried whether Mollie would succeed in keeping his mother in line. The photographs also show that he was a happy young man, pleased with the prize he had gained in this young woman. Mary Jane looked a prize worth winning that day. She was a pretty bride. The dark red lipstick women wore in the 1940s emphasized the symmetry of her mouth and her fine, even teeth. The fullness of her brunette hair, set in graceful waves, called attention to her hazel eyes and matched, in its sheen, the satin of her gown.

John Vann had learned a lot in two and a half years in the Army. The most important thing he had learned was that he was a different person in this uniform. When he had this uniform on he wasn’t little Johnny
Vann or LeGay or what’s-his-name, the bastard kid of that good-timer Myrtle down at the end of the bar. He was Lieutenant John Paul Vann of the U.S. Army Air Corps. The Army and the war had freed him in a way that Ferrum could not do from that trash-filled house in Norfolk, and he wasn’t ever going back into it again. No matter what he did in Norfolk, if he became richer than the millionaire oyster dealer who had bought him his first good clothes, he still couldn’t achieve the respectability he felt as a second lieutenant in the Army. In Norfolk, somebody would always remember and point. In this uniform, no one could tell. He was indistinguishable from decent folk as long as he kept it on.