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

dark green Army tunic, was another warrior whom Alsop admired, William DePuy. Bill DePuy was also a slight man, but his features at fifty-two were the tawny, hard ones of a soldier who enjoys his trade and keeps himself fit for it. He had been a model of the generation of majors and lieutenant colonels who had led the battalions in Europe during World War II and then gone to war in Vietnamas generals accustomed to winning. He combined intelligence and skill at articulating his ideas with an impetuous self-confidence and courage. He had been convinced of the invincibility and universal application of the system of warfare the U.S. Army had derived from World War II. The system consisted of building a killing machine that subjected an enemy to the prodigious firepower that American technology provided. DePuy had been the main architect of the building and deployment of the machine in Vietnam. He had been chief of operations on Westmoreland’s staff in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson had persevered in Kennedy’s commitment and embarked upon a full-scale war. DePuy had planned the strategy of attrition that was supposed to achieve victory over the Vietnamese Communists. The machine was going to decimate the Viet Cong guerrillas and kill off the troops of the North Vietnamese Army faster than the men in Hanoi could send them down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into the South. The machine was going to make the Vietnamese soldiers on the Communist side die until the will of the survivors and their leaders was broken. Westmoreland had rewarded DePuy for his talent at strategic planning with the leadership of the 1st Infantry Division, “the Big Red One.” DePuy had set himself apart from his fellow generals by turning the firepower of the machine loose with even more lavishness than they did and by ruthlessly dismissing any subordinate commander who did not meet his standard of aggressiveness in battle. He and Vann had clashed because Vann had considered the war-of-attrition strategy the cause of needless death and destruction and a waste of American soldiers and munitions. Vann had been particularly contemptuous of DePuy’s practice of it. From Washington in 1972, however, DePuy watched Vann wield the firepower of the artillery, the helicopter gunships, the jet fighter-bombers, and the B-52 Stratofortresses to beat back the North Vietnamese Army at Kontum. When Vann was killed, DePuy paid him a DePuy tribute. “He died like a soldier,” DePuy said, and came to sit at his funeral alongside their mutual advocate, Joseph Alsop.
    Senator Edward Kennedy was late. He got to the funeral shortly before the service was to begin at 11:00 A.M. He entered the chapel as unostentatiously as was possible for a Kennedy—by having one of the ushers seat him in a pew in the back. The last of the Kennedy brothers had turned against the war that his elder brother John had set the nation to fight. He had not kept the faith, as Vann had, with the call of his brother’s inaugural address, which was engraved on the granite of John Kennedy’s tomb at Arlington: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet anyhardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to insure the survival and success of liberty.” Liberty as defined by John Kennedy and the statesmen of his Presidency had meant an American-imposed order in Kennedy’s “New Frontier” beyond America’s shores. The price of trying to organize the world had been the war in Vietnam, and that price had gone too high for Edward Kennedy to bear. His brother Robert had also begun to turn against the war before he too had been assassinated and buried in a simple grave near John’s elaborate tomb. Edward Kennedy and John Vann had become friends, because Edward Kennedy had shared Vann’s concern for the anguish of the Vietnamese peasantry and had, like Vann, attempted to persuade the U.S. government to wage war with reason and restraint.