A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam Read Online Free PDF Page A

Westmoreland—a fellow member of the West Point class of 1936—walked at the head of the left file of pallbearers. He had served in Vietnam as one of Westmoreland’s deputies, after having commanded the expeditionary force that President Johnson had dispatched to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent that small Caribbean country from going the way of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The paratroopers and Marines under Palmer’s command had made it possible for Ellsworth Bunker, currently the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, to reimpose on the Dominican Republic a government that would function as a surrogate for American interests. Palmer had been one of Vann’s Army patrons since the mid-1950s, when Palmer had been a colonel commanding the 16th Infantry Regiment in Germany and Vann had been a captain in charge of his heavy mortar company. Vann had been the best of his company commanders, if the most difficult to handle, Palmer remembered. Four days prior to Vann’s death, Palmer sent him a note praising his leadership at Kontum. Vann received and read the note just before he died.
    The third general in dress whites was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for military operations, fifty-five-year-old Lt. Gen. Richard Stilwell. Dick Stilwell had been one of those who had not been sorry to see Vann leave the Army in 1963. He had arrived in Saigon in April of that year just as Vann was departing for Washington and his unsuccessful campaign at the Pentagon to try to persuade the ranking military leadership that the United States was failing in Vietnam and had to change its strategy. In 1963, Stilwell had been a brigadier general and chief of operations for Gen. Paul Harkins, Westmoreland’s predecessor in the Saigon command. Stilwell had applied his high intelligence to rebutting the arguments of Vann and those other field advisors who had also believed that the war was being lost. Stilwell’s behavior in 1963 had been predictable to those who knew him. He had an unwavering trust in authority that led him to place loyalty to superiors above other concerns. He aspired to gain the pinnacle of chief of staff, an aspiration he was to be denied. He had graduated near the top of his class at West Point, two years after Westmoreland and Palmer, and had chosen the traditional route for a graduate of academic stature, a commission in the Corps of Engineers. His ambition and his talent as a staff officer had led him to switch to the infantry during World War II, when he and DePuy, who was sitting in the chapel next to Alsop, had served together in the same infantry division in Europe. Two wars later, in mid-1964, Stilwell had moved up in Saigon and become chief of staff to Westmoreland, the new commanding general. DePuy had arrived to assume Stilwell’s former duties as chief of operations, and Stilwell had then overseen DePuy’s work in planning the war-of-attrition strategy that was to have brought victory. Stilwell had gradually realized that he had been wrong about Vann and had come to admire him. As Stilwell was also a man of sentiment, he had asked to be a pallbearer at Vann’s funeral.
    The pallbearer who walked behind Westmoreland was a civilian, a slim and erect man in a navy-blue suit. He wore glasses with clear plastic frames that added a further touch of plainness to his pinched and undistinguished features. One had to notice the unusual steadiness of the myopic pale blue eyes behind the glasses to sense the sternness in this man’s character. The civilian was William Colby of the CIA, covert warrior, soon to be named the Agency’s deputy director for plans, the euphemism for clandestine operations, and then spy master-in-chief as the director of central intelligence.
    Had William Colby been born in the sixteenth century, his character and mindset might have led him into the Society of Jesus and a life asa Jesuit soldier of the Counter-Reformation. Having been born in the twentieth, he had joined the CIA and become a soldier of