A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan Page A

that the reason was not a lack of Viet Cong moving about the countryside at night. He told Porter they had a lot of work ahead of them with this army. These soldiers, the regulars and the territorials, had a sense of inferiority toward the enemy. They were afraid to risk a fight on a man-to-man basis with the guerrillas. He noticed that almost every time he heard the approach of what might be a bunch of Viet Cong walking down the trail and into the snare, one of the Saigon soldiers would give the ambush away by coughing, or snapping the bolt of a weapon, or making some other noise. This occurred too often to be accidental. Porter had suspected an attitude of inferiority. He was glad that for the first time in this war the United States had an infantry officer with experience and perspective who insisted on working at the cutting edge. To solve any of these problems they needed information and understanding. Vann was giving him both, because Vann had rank and credentials. What he reported could not be dismissed by the generals and the headquarters staff colonels as the imaginings of a green captain.
    Vann fulfilled his vow to Ziegler that every unit participating in an operation would have an American advisor attached to it. The advisors serving with the territorials were assigned to various training centers and not to specific units. The division battalions taking part were also usually split into two task forces each, to increase the chances of running into guerrillas. The American captain advising the battalion commander obviously could not be with both. Vann overcame the problem by calling for volunteers before an operation. His purpose went beyond acquiring proxy control. He thought that the Saigon troops might behave more aggressively if the commander always had an American officer or sergeantby his side to encourage and assist him. American élan, he hoped, would prove infectious.
    John Vann’s élan was infectious within the advisory detachment. The atmosphere had been enthusiastic under Clay. He was the sort of brave, considerate, and hardworking officer who is admired and liked in any army. (He had twice won the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest decoration, leading tanks against the Germans in North Africa and Italy.) Under Vann the atmosphere became supercharged. When the advisors returned to the Seminary, exhausted after a couple of days in the sun and the muck of the paddies, the familiar voice would call out in a high-pitched rasp: “Come on, let’s get those volleyball teams out there.” He had rested less than anyone, but in a few minutes he would have them all out in the courtyard in front of the net. If his team began to lose, he would yell and bang his fist against one of the posts holding up the net in frustration and to goad his side to greater effort. He would never give up trying to out jump a six-foot, 185-pound Hawaiian captain named Peter Kama, who was to serve under him ten years later in the Central Highlands.
    The war was still an adventure in 1962—”the greatest continuing war games we’ve ever come up with,” as one officer put it—no matter what problems Vann and his detachment faced in trying to improve the fighting qualities of the Saigon troops. The frequent presence of danger and the occasional shooting created the tension and zest of war without the unpleasantness of dying. The Vietnamese were doing the dying almost exclusively. Fewer than twenty Americans had been killed in Vietnam by late May 1962 when Vann reached My Tho, and no one in the 7th Division Advisory Detachment had been unlucky enough to die. The older men were hoping to retrieve the excitement of wars past. The young men were eager to prove themselves worthy of their first. Maj. Gen. Charles Timmes was chief of the original Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) in South Vietnam, now a subordinate command responsible for training and equipment programs. Timmes had earned his Distinguished Service Cross