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

like a man anyone could keep down when he strode through the swinging doors of Col. Daniel Boone Porter’s office in Saigon ten years earlier, shortly before noon on March 23, 1962. Porter soon had the feeling that if the commanding general were to tell this junior lieutenant colonel in starched cotton khakis and a peaked green cap that he was surrendering direction of the war to him, John Vann would say, “Fine, General,” and take charge. In light of the figure he was to become, it was a small irony that he almost hadn’t made it to Vietnam. The plane he should have taken to Saigon in March 1962, with ninety-three other officers and men, had disappeared over the Pacific. He had missed the flight because, in his eagerness to go to war, he had forgotten to have his passport renewed. A clerk had noticed that the passport had expired during the final document check, and he had been instructed to step out of the boarding line. Shortly after the plane vanished, the Red Cross had telephoned Mary Jane to inform her that her husband had been lost in the Pacific. Mary Jane had said that he was all right, that he had telephoned and was taking a later flight. She must be mistaken, the Red Cross worker had persisted. Her husband was missing. Passenger rosters didn’t lie.
    Everything was in the flux and confusion of commencement then. President Kennedy had just created the new U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) in Saigon in February 1962, and appointed Gen. Paul Harkins to head it. Harkins had made his reputation as the principal staff aide to George Patton, the battlefield genius of World War II. The president was to nearly quadruple the number of American military men in South Vietnam that year, from 3,200 at the beginning of 1962 to 11,300 by Christmas. Far more of Porter’s time than he wanted to spend was being taken up with interviewing and assigning these newcomers.His office was in an old French cavalry compound hidden behind the trees along a wide boulevard, noisy with traffic, that connected downtown Saigon with its Chinese suburb of Cholon. The compound was the headquarters of a corps of the Saigon government’s army, formally known as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and colloquially as the Arvin, following the American military’s penchant for converting initials into acronyms. Porter was the advisor to the Vietnamese brigadier general in command of the corps, and the other officers in his detachment worked with the corps’ staff sections. In Vietnam in 1962, air conditioners were not yet as routine fixtures as typewriters in every U.S. Army headquarters. Porter and the advisors under him had their desks, as the French had before them, in high-ceilinged offices that opened onto verandas erected at each level of the three-story buildings of brick and stucco. The verandas looked out over a neglected parade ground of weeds and dirt, but viewing was not their primary function. They had been designed as walkways and as reflectors to catch any rare freshet of cool air and move it past the swinging louver doors—like the saloon doors in cowboy movies—to the outsized electric fans hanging from the ceilings.
    This short lieutenant colonel standing in front of Porter had an ability to convey self-confidence. He had also managed to keep his khaki shirt and trousers unrumpled, despite the heat, and he gave a brisker salute than most officers would have before he accepted Porter’s invitation to sit down. Otherwise, there was little that was impressive about him. He reminded Porter of one of those banty roosters Porter used to watch darting among the hens in the farmyards around Belton, in central Texas, where Porter’s father had owned a feed and farm merchandise store. When he took off his cap as he sat down one could see better what a homely man he was. His straight-ribbed nose was too large for his narrow face. The nostrils flared over a wide and equally straight mouth. These features were