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

secured in power. By 1961 the guerrillas had become so strong that President Kennedy had had to commit the arms of the UnitedStates to prevent Diem’s government from being overthrown. The Americans and the Saigon government called the guerrillas the Viet Cong, an abbreviation of the words for Vietnamese Communists. (The advisors had shortened the term to VC for everyday usage, except in the lingo of field radio traffic, in which the VC became Victor Charlies.) The guerrillas referred to themselves as the Liberation Army and called this second war the Liberation War. They said that both wars were part of the Vietnamese Revolution—this second war a renewal of the struggle to achieve the original goals of the war against the French.
    There was no guerrilla with a mine on the way to My Tho on May 21, 1962. Vann reached the new quarters of the 7th Division Advisory Detachment on the main road half a mile north of the town without incident. The Saigon soldier guarding the iron grillwork gate swung it open and let his jeep into the courtyard. The place had been a school for aspiring men of God and then briefly an orphanage before its recent conversion to the profane work of war. The advisors called their quarters the Seminary because of its original purpose, and two white masonry crosses atop the former chapel at the far end of the courtyard still proclaimed this holy intent to passersby. The American military authorities, who had become the major renter and bankroller of construction in the country, had leased the building from a Roman Catholic diocese in exile from North Vietnam and in need of funds. When Frank Clay, whom Vann was to succeed, had arrived in My Tho the year before, the detachment had consisted of only seven officers and a sergeant, with three of the officers living with the division’s component regiments in other provincial towns. A large house in My Tho had been more than sufficient. After Clay had learned that the detachment was to multiply twentyfold in the spring of 1962 and to keep growing (it would slightly exceed 200 officers and men by the end of 1962), he had arranged for the leasing and renovation of the Seminary as the best available building in the area.
    The main two-story structure was pleasant if undistinguished French colonial architecture of brick sheathed in white stucco and roofed with red tile. It was roughly L-shaped, with the long back of the L running down beside a narrow river. The first floor at the base of the L had been remodeled into an office section. The rest of the ground floor had then been renovated into sleeping rooms for the officers, a mess hall, showers and toilets, and a bar and service club. The mess hall doubled as a theater for the movies every second night that, with charcoal-broiled steaks on Sunday and bargain-priced liquor every evening, were among the privileges of American military life overseas. Vann and a few of thesenior officers rated small bedrooms on the second floor above the office section. The remainder of the second floor was divided into dormitory bays for the enlisted men. The advisors used the courtyard as a parking lot for their jeeps and three-quarter-ton trucks. The courtyard was also the scene of the volleyball contests that Vann started right after his arrival. He had a net erected over a basketball court the seminarians had laid out there.
    The Viet Cong had come a few nights after the advisors had first moved into the Seminary in early May to tell the Americans they were not beyond the guerrillas’ reach. A group had sneaked through the banana groves across the road and started shooting at the mess hall in the middle of a movie. The sergeants, some of whom were old enough to have been through World War II or Korea, had been amused at the sight of captains who had never before been under fire running around in undershorts, T-shirts, and steel helmets, waving .45 caliber service pistols, with which it is difficult to hit a man in the daytime.