Read Online A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan - Free Book Online

accentuated by a high forehead and by his habit of wearing his sandy hair close-cropped on the sides and on top in the fashion of American military men of the 1950s and ’60s. His gray-blue eyes caught one’s attention and gave an indication of his character. They were the eyes of a falcon, narrow and deep-set under bushy brows. His body was lithe, all muscle and bone, and wonderfully quick. He had been a gymnast and a track star in school and in his early Army years. He prized his body; he did not smoke and rarely drank, and kept fit with basketball and volleyball and tennis. At thirty-seven he could still perform a backflip somersault.
    Vann responded without hesitation to Porter’s questions about his career experience. When he had volunteered to go to Vietnam he hadrequested one of the sought-after positions as chief advisor to an ARVN infantry division. There were nine divisions in the country, three of them in Porter’s corps region. (A corps is a military organization composed of two or more divisions.) Vann had been a lieutenant colonel only ten months, however, and by date of rank, which could be waived at Porter’s discretion, there were other officers who stood ahead of him.
    He was cocky about his ability to handle the job as he and Porter now discussed it. The cockiness of this bantam did not put off Porter, a senior colonel of infantry, large-boned in build and white-haired at fifty-two, whose restrained manner tended to obscure his knowledge of his profession and the firmness of his own character. Since being commissioned a second lieutenant in the Texas National Guard thirty years earlier, he had learned that cockiness was useful provided the officer also knew what he was doing. He was looking for a bold and unconventional man to replace Lt. Col. Frank Clay, son of the former proconsul in occupied Germany, Gen. Lucius Clay, and the current senior advisor to the most important division in the corps, the 7th Infantry Division in the northern Mekong River Delta. Clay’s tour was due to end that summer.
    Porter had read Vann’s record of previous assignments and schooling carefully. He had noticed that Vann had commanded a Ranger company on behind-the-lines operations during the Korean War and had also displayed a capacity for management in a number of staff assignments. He was a specialist in logistics, unusual for an infantry officer who had proved his ability to lead in combat, and had a master’s degree in business administration from Syracuse University. Porter wanted an officer who was an organizer and a fighter, because both talents were required to put together a coordinated war effort in the northern part of the Mekong Delta. The more they talked, the more Porter thought that Vann might do. His boldness and the likelihood that he would take an imaginative approach counted with Porter. Although Porter had been in South Vietnam less than three months himself, he had traveled widely and had gone out on a number of operations against the Communist-led guerrillas. Everything he had seen had convinced him that if the Vietnamese on the Saigon side were going to prevail, they needed Americans who would show them how to fight their war and also find a way to goad them into fighting it.
    He told Vann that he could consider himself the prospective replacement for Clay, but that Porter was going to reserve a firm decision until shortly before Clay left. In the meantime Vann would be on probation, undergoing seasoning and doing odd jobs.
    After lunch, Porter gave Vann his first odd job. He explained thatsome idiot who had preceded them—who had mentally never left a Pentagon office and had since probably gone back to one—had set up a computerized supply system for the ARVN divisions and the territorial forces in the corps. The Vietnamese lieutenant colonel who was the corps G-4 (the designation for the assistant chief of staff for logistics) and his officers had no idea of how to send a supply request to a