Once Upon a Distant War by William Prochnau

Author:William Prochnau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

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John Paul Vann also played a very dicey game in the months after Ap Bac, adding another twist to the charmed-life legend. Time and again Harkins almost fired him, his fury boundless at his insubordinate subordinate. Vann ignored him. He seemed foolhardy, flaunting that old death wish almost as surely as he had when rumbling alone at night through Viet Cong territory, grenades rattling loose in his jeep.

One day John Sharkey walked in on Vann as he briefed officers from Harkins’s office. Seeing him, Vann launched into a tirade: “Now you goddamn reporters, you watch what you say, hear?! I don’t like you runnin’ around down here pokin’ around and criticizing everything.” Sharkey flared briefly. Dammit, he thought, I’m getting morally mugged by this guy. Then he shrugged. Vann was doing some normal protection of his backside, a rare event. His leaks had become a flood. What really irritated Sharkey was that they weren’t coming his way. They flowed in only one direction: toward David Halberstam and the power of The New York Times.

“Both were outsiders trying to be somebody,” Neil Sheehan wrote later of the two men who seemed to have fashioned the perfect trade. “Through Halberstam, Vann was to achieve his greatest impact on events during the opening phase of the American war. What Halberstam learned from Vann was to help make him one of the most famous journalists of his time.”

For Halberstam the first months of 1963 became a bonanza. He commuted to the Seminary, returning with a roar of delight: “Jesus Christ, have I got a helluva story!”

In one he reported that the ARVN’s sham battles had become epidemic. General Cao had begun using American intelligence to avoid rather than make contact with Viet Cong units. He used it to find the “battlegrounds” he liked best—those where the enemy didn’t exist. Halberstam gave dates and places of the phony firefights. The source was so thinly covered he could have disguised him just as well by using his initials: according to JPV.

Vann’s brazenness began to worry Halberstam. He felt guilty about the degree to which he was putting the man at risk. Not only were the stories cutting off his path to general, they imperiled any kind of army future. Halberstam implored him to be more careful. Vann ignored him. He was a man with a mission larger than his career. He was more than an army officer, he told Halberstam. “I’m also an American citizen with a duty to my country.”

To the twenty-eight-year-old reporter the words rang so romantic, so patriotic, they seemed braver than the jeep rides in the night. John Paul Vann would sacrifice himself to get the facts to the American people. He was a genuine hero, a legend in his time.

Vann was very good at adding that extra narcotic lure.

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