The New Yorker:

When Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, in starched cotton khakis and a peaked green cap, strode through the swinging doors of Colonel Daniel Boone Porter’s office in Saigon, shortly before noon on March 23, 1962, he struck Porter as a man no one could keep down. Porter soon had the feeling that if the commanding general were to tell this junior lieutenant colonel he was surrendering direction of the war to him John Vann would say, “Fine, General,” and take charge.

The commanding general in Vietnam then was Paul Harkins, who had made his reputation as the principal staff aide to George Patton in the Second World War. In December, 1961, President Kennedy had committed the arms of the United States to the task of suppressing a Communist-led rebellion and preserving South Vietnam as a separate state governed by an American-sponsored regime in Saigon. The following month, he had decided to create the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), in Saigon, and appoint Harkins to head it. During 1962, the President was to nearly quadruple the number of American military men in South Vietnam, from thirty-two hundred to eleven thousand three hundred. Interviewing and assigning the newcomers was taking up far more of Colonel Porter’s time than he wanted to spend on it. His office, which was high-ceilinged, and opened onto a veranda, was in an old French cavalry compound hidden behind trees along a wide boulevard, noisy with traffic, that connected downtown Saigon with its Chinese suburb of Cholon. The compound was the headquarters of III Corps of the Saigon government’s army, formally known as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN. (“Arvin,” as the American officers called it, was supplemented on the provincial, district, and village levels by two territorial forces: the Civil Guard and the Self-Defense Corps militia.) Porter was the adviser to the Vietnamese brigadier general in command of the corps, and the other officers in his detachment worked with the corps’s staff section.

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