A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (79 page)

Paradises, it seemed, were nevertheless mixed as well as difficult to reach. Her house on the hill was infested with cockroaches, centipedes, and rats. The Army exterminators fumigated the insects, and Mary Jane learned to live with those that persisted. She found the rats much harder to tolerate. She was not aware of them at first because they lived inside the walls and normally waited until the house was still at night to come out and forage. She learned of them when she got up at dawn one morning to get John some breakfast before he left for an unusually early appointment. A big gray rat was crouched under the kitchen table. It looked at her and did not run. She screamed for John. He came bounding downstairs in his shorts and bare feet, and the rat took off toward the den. Most men would have been content to run the rat out of the kitchen
and let it go back to its nest, because rats get viciously aggressive when cornered. Not Vann. He grabbed a small steel kitchen stool and a cane and, while Mary Jane watched, aghast, chased the rat and drove it into a corner of the den. When the terrified rat leaped at him with its teeth chattering, he knocked it down with the stool and slashed at it with the cane to force it back into the corner, thrusting and slashing, as the rat kept leaping at him, until he finally had it pinned to the wall with the stool. Then he beat the rat to death with the cane. Mary Jane was trembling afterward. Vann was out of breath, but not frightened. He seemed satisfied.

The rats defied the best efforts of the Army exterminators to get rid of them with traps and poisoned bait. Mary Jane tried to ignore them, because she did not want to leave the house, but they disturbed her peace of mind. She could hear them scurrying inside the walls in the daytime. She walked warily whenever she got up at night or again at dawn, and she was watchful of Patricia and John Allen at night too to make sure neither of them would be bitten.

One of the Japanese maids set the house on fire in the spring of 1950 while melting some floor wax in a pan on an electric hot plate. The blaze started as John was coming home from a game of golf. He seized a fire extinguisher and tried unsuccessfully to put out the flames as Mary Jane grabbed the children and their family papers and ran to the nearby house of another Army couple to summon help. Although the local Japanese and Army fire teams arrived quickly, much of the house was damaged or ruined by smoke and water, as well as by the fire itself, and the fire fighters chopped great holes in the walls to soak them and prevent the fire from creeping through the entire structure. The holes exposed the nests of dozens of rats.

The division engineers inspected the house the next day and decided it was not worth repairing because of the extent of the damage and the infestation of rats. The Vanns moved closer to the center of Osaka to a house that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for a wealthy Japanese family before World War II. This house was even larger, three stories. It had fine wood paneling, a sunken bathtub of blue tile large enough for four, and a kitchen tiled throughout—floor and walls and counters. There was also a small swimming pool in the garden. The opulence of the place kept Mary Jane from complaining, but she did not like the severity of the architecture, and the house tended to be dark. She missed the banks of azaleas and the Japanese light and charm of her house on the hill.

Then, in the middle of the night, John went off to war. Ninety thousand
North Korean soldiers, their columns led by Soviet-built tanks, crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded South Korea in the predawn of another historic Sunday, June 25, 1950. Patricia was old enough in the summer of 1950 to remember her mother waking her and John Allen to say goodbye. Her father was carrying his helmet and wearing a pistol on his belt. Her mother was crying. He crouched down to take her and John Allen in his arms and kiss them. He said he was going to be away for a while. Patricia laughed. She felt happy that he was leaving, because this figure of authority who demanded perfect behavior would be gone. Her mother asked why she was laughing. Patricia did not answer. In later years, when she realized that he might not have come back, she had a sense of guilt about her reaction.

Trains and ships were John Vann’s preoccupation during the first weeks after the 25th Infantry Division was ordered to move to Korea as rapidly as possible and join the forces Douglas Mac Arthur was assembling there to stop the advance of the North Korean Army down the peninsula. First Lieutenant Vann was appointed assistant supply and evacuation officer—i.e., the man in charge of transportation. Overnight he found himself coordinating the train and ship schedules and expediting the loading and unloading of 15,000 officers and men and the artillery, trucks, tanks, armored half-tracks, and sundry other combat gear of the 25th Infantry. The capacity to refresh himself in an hour or two of sleep was to prove helpful, for he was to get no more than that a night for the next two months. Eighty trains were required to move the three infantry regiments and the associated division units from their occupation bases dispersed around the southern third of the island of Honshu to the ships at Yokohama. The task was not simply one of loading men and equipment onto trains and then ships. The logistics section of the division staff, G-4, to which Vann was assigned, had to load enough ammunition, food, and other supplies with the troops to sustain them during their initial days in combat. Once across the Korea Strait, Vann again had to help keep order amid seeming chaos during the unloading at the port of Pusan at the bottom of the Korean peninsula. Everything had to be done on the run, and everything had to be improvised, because no one in authority at MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo or in Washington had anticipated the North Korean invasion.

Vann’s job as trainmaster and stevedore-in-chief was more important under the circumstances than the leadership of a company in battle that he immediately craved. (He knew a staff assignment would not look
impressive on an infantry officer’s record when the war was over, regardless of how vital it might be.) The problem was to get American troops into South Korea while there was still a South Korea to save. Mac Arthur’s field commander, Lt. Gen. Walton Walker, was racing the tank-led columns of North Koreans to try to organize a defensive perimeter above Pusan before the enemy overran all of Korea. Vann won his first Bronze Star Medal for the imagination and drive he displayed in hurrying the division on and off the trains and ships and into the war during those initial all-or-nothing weeks. Although the 25th Infantry received its movement order on June 30, the day after Mac Arthur flew to Korea to see the fighting and reported to Washington that the South Korean Army was falling apart, it took a week of planning and assembling units before Vann was given his first trainload to send to Yokohama and then two more weeks until the last elements of the division unloaded at the Pusan docks on July 19. The next day the North Koreans seized the town of Taejon, halfway down the peninsula from the 38th Parallel.

The war in Korea was to cause the deaths of 54,246 Americans and to take millions of Korean and Chinese lives. An estimated 120,000 civilians were to die in South Korea in the first year of the war alone. Ironically, the leaders of the United States had not wanted to keep South Korea until they saw they were going to lose it. They had also helped to bring on the war by communicating their lack of interest to opponents they did not understand.

The conflict originated in the division of the country at the end of World War II along the 38th Parallel line into separate Soviet and American occupation zones. Japan had previously held all of Korea as a colony. The Soviets organized a regime in the North under Kim II Sung, an anti-Japanese guerrilla leader who had gravitated to Communism because the Chinese Communists and the Russians had been his natural allies. The United States set up a rival regime in the South under Syngman Rhee, a right-wing Korean patriot who had led an exile movement from Hawaii and the American mainland. While Rhee and Kim had antithetical ideas on Korean society, they were both fervid nationalists intent on reunifying the country. They constantly harassed each other with subversion and violent incidents and plotted civil war to decide who would rule a united land.

Korea has a tragic history because of its position as a way station between the Japanese archipelago and China and Russia on the Asian mainland. The proximity of northeastern Korea to Russia’s Far Eastern naval base at Vladivostok gave Stalin an interest in the country. The Truman administration, on the other hand, twice formally decided that
South Korea was one of the few places on the rim of the “Soviet bloc” that the United States would not defend. The second decision was made by the National Security Council and approved by the president just fourteen months before the war began. It affirmed the original reasoning that American air and naval dominance was sufficient to protect Japan and that South Korea was thus of “little strategic interest.”

Although these decisions were made in secret, their content was publicized. Mac Arthur first placed South Korea outside the American defense perimeter in Asia in an interview with a British correspondent in early 1949. Acheson then did so in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington in January 1950. American actions spoke consistently, especially in contrast with Soviet behavior. The last of the U.S. occupation troops were withdrawn in mid-1949. Rhee’s army was left with secondhand infantry weapons, outmoded artillery, and a 482-man American military advisory group. Rhee asked for up-to-date artillery, tanks, and fighter-bombers, which the Russians were investing in his enemy in the North. He was denied them. He asked for a guarantee that the United States would come to the rescue of South Korea if it was invaded. He was denied that too. The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up a secret contingency plan, again approved by the president, to withdraw all Americans if there was an invasion.

During the winter of 1949 and the spring of 1950, Kim gradually convinced Stalin that he could finish off his rival with minimal risk of American intervention. Kim was so certain the United States would not intervene that his military commanders were told they did not have to consider the possibility. Mac Arthur’s headquarters, which was responsible for intelligence in Northeast Asia, failed to take note of the increased skirmishing between the two sides that spring and the buildup of North Korean assault troops and tanks along the 38th Parallel. The surprise may have contributed to the complete reversal of policy in Washington.

The moment the invasion occurred, Truman and Acheson overlooked the local rivalry that was the immediate cause of the war and forgot about the signals they had been sending. They saw the attack across the 38th Parallel, as Acheson described their reaction in his memoirs, “in its worldwide setting of our confrontation with our Soviet antagonist.” Kim was a mere hireling and his assault on Rhee’s South Korea was the first truly bold move in a master plan by Stalin for world conquest. “To back away from this challenge, in view of our capacity for meeting it, would be highly destructive of the power and prestige of the United States,” Acheson wrote. “By prestige I mean the shadow cast by power,
which is of great deterrent importance.” As events were to show, transforming shadow into substance was to prove more difficult than Acheson imagined, and at the moment the soldiers were struggling with the shortfall between ultimate capacity to meet the challenge and current preparedness.

That Kim II Sung was stopped before he achieved his goal demonstrated the resourcefulness in adversity of Americans like Vann whom World War II had lifted out of their obscure worlds and set to work at the cutting edge of the nation’s newest frontier. They had to hold the line until the higher echelons of the Army caught up with the needs of this war, and they had little indeed to hold it with during those first months. The experience forged Vann’s attitude toward war. Korea taught him that war was not an enterprise in which one neatly calculated applications of force. War was a hurly-burly of violence in which men prevailed through imagination and the fortitude to struggle on despite reverses.

Much of the unpreparedness of the Army was later to be blamed on the meager military budgets of the late 1940s and on the spending priority given to the Air Force and the Navy for an atomic striking force to annihilate the cities and industries of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China (added to the target list after the Communist victory there in 1949) in the event of a third world war. The Army had adequate weapons, however, and more than enough manpower in its nearly 600,000-man force of mid-1950 to have halted and smashed the North Koreans in a matter of weeks. The blame lay with the leaders of the Army. They had been neglecting their primary obligation of maintaining an Army that was ready to fight. The troops were not trained and organized. The weapons they needed were in disrepair or in warehouses and storage parks. Of the Army’s ten active divisions, only the one in Europe was up to strength. The other nine lacked the normal third battalion in their infantry regiments and also had just two instead of three firing batteries in the artillery battalions.

The deterioration had been severe among the four divisions in Japan, with MacArthur focused on his proconsul’s task of restructuring Japanese society into a democratic mold. Walton Walker had headed MacArthur’s ground forces in Japan since 1948 as commanding general of the Eighth Army, but he had idled on his reputation as Patton’s best corps commander during World War II. His training program had not progressed much beyond the mimeograph machines at his headquarters. His troops had not been unduly distracted from what most, in these years without the draft, had enlisted to enjoy—submissive Japanese women and cheap whiskey—and many were now to die simply
because they did not have the physical stamina to march and fight.

Vann’s division commander, Maj. Gen. William Kean, had been less complacent than some of his contemporaries. General Kean was one of those unsung workaday generals who rise to an emergency. The 25th Division suffered from all the equipment deficiencies typical of the Eighth Army—trucks that would not start, radios that would not transmit, rifles that jammed, no extra machine-gun barrels to replace barrels that burned out in combat, no maps for a country where no one had expected to fight. (Copies of old Japanese maps had to be airdropped to the troops after they reached Korea.) One of Kean’s battalions left Japan with only the battalion commander’s radio working; another battalion had exactly one recoilless cannon. Nevertheless, after he had taken charge of the division in 1948 Kean had insisted that his units do a minimum of training. His troops were in better physical condition than the average soldier in the Eighth Army and, with the exception of one regiment, they had some confidence in themselves and their officers.