by Neil Sheehan
“I’ll get right back to you, Walrus,” Vann said. He switched frequencies and raised Ziegler at the command-post tent beside the airstrip. He gave Ziegler a capsule account of what had occurred and told him to ask Dam to order Captain Ba to head for Bac immediately with his M-113s. “This situation is absolutely critical,” Vann said. The command post already knew of the downed helicopters from monitoring the radio. Ziegler returned in a few moments. He said that Dam agreed and was issuing the order through the division’s radio channels.
From where he was circling about 1,000 feet over Bac, Vann could see the rectangular shapes of the thirteen carriers. He instructed the pilot to head for them, and as soon as they reached the armored vehicles, he switched frequencies and called Scanlon again. He directed his attention to the column of white smoke beginning to rise above Bac from the houses set afire by the rockets and tracer bullets of the Hueys. “You tell your counterpart that I am relaying an order from his division commander,” Vann said. “He is to head for that column of smoke right away. He is to move out now!”
Captain Ba started the M-113s toward Bac. Almost immediately they were confronted by a canal with high banks. High-banked canals, streams, and rivers were the sole obstacles that seriously impeded movement of the M-113s across the Delta landscape. The amphibious vehicles had no trouble swimming them, but the tracks could not get sufficient grip in the soft mud of the steep bank on the opposite side to pull the ten-ton carriers out of the water. The company of mounted infantry who rode in the M-113s and the crews would have to climb out and hand-cut brush and trees until the canal was filled high enough for one or more of the carriers to cross. The ten-ton weight would quickly crush the brush down into the canal bottom. The last carrier across would then have to tow the next one over by cable and so on until all of the vehicles had traversed the canal. This canal that now confronted them would take about an hour to cross. The alternative was to try to locate another spot where the banks were not so high and the tracks could get a firm grip on the opposite bank. Captain Ba did not move to go and find one. Instead he spent several minutes speaking in Vietnamese over the radio. To Scanlon, who understood some of the language, he seemed to be seeking instructions from his superiors. Then he balked again. He did not want to go. The canal would take too long to cross. “Why don’t they send the infantry?” he said, pointing to lines of riflemen marching along the paddy dikes near them. These infantrymen were the third company of the division battalion that was descending on Tan Thoi from the north and had landed a bit over an hour earlier. Because the lifts of the second and third companies had been delayed for two and a half hours, Vann had arranged for the helicopters to drop them farther south than originally planned and to link up with the first company, which had landed at 7:03 A.M. Scanlon was surprised that Ba was balking. His aggressiveness had been a pleasing contrast to the excessive caution of most ARVN officers.
Ly Tong Ba was a contemporary of his American counterparts, ten months younger than Scanlon. He was fighting with them rather than resisting them and their machines because he was the son of a prosperous Delta farmer who had served the French empire and believed in it. Ba’s father had been conscripted into the French Army and shipped to France near the end of World War I. The Armistice of November 11, 1918, had saved him from death in the trenches, and he had come home to rise to sergeant major in the Garde Indigene. In his later years, he had settled down to farm on a comfortably large, if not grand, scale with two of Ba’s uncles. Together they had owned about 2,500 acres of rice land in the southern Delta. Ba’s playmates had been the sons of the landless agricultural laborers who depended on his father for a livelihood. He had guarded his father’s water buffalos with them, riding the wide backs of the beasts in a conical straw hat to ward off the sun as the peasant boys did in the fields through which he now drove his metal behemoths. He had lost touch with his playmates after his father had sent him to the lycée in Can Tho for a French education. From the lycée he had gone in 1950 to the French-sponsored officer candidate school at Hue. His boyhood friends had been taken in a different direction by their origins. A good many of them had joined the Viet Minh. His father had kept track of the families of his workers until this second Communist-led insurrection had forced him to abandon his lands entirely and seek safety in Can Tho. He sometimes mentioned the names of several of Ba’s “buffalo boy” playmates who had become officers in the Viet Cong.
Ba was an intelligent man, and in a nation whose women are often remarked on for their beauty but whose men are not considered good-looking, he was handsome. His ancestry was that common to the people of the Delta—mainly Vietnamese with some Chinese blood and probably a tinge of Cambodian as well to account for the slightly duskier hue of the skin. His nature was cheerful and he genuinely enjoyed soldiering. He was a bit given to exaggeration and there was some bravado about him, which was perhaps why he had joined the armored cavalry and spent the last years of the French war commanding a platoon of armored cars in North Vietnam. In the interval between the French war and this one he had been well instructed in France and the United States. First there had been a year at the French armored cavalry officers’ school at Saumur in the valley of the Loire and then another year in 1957–58 at the Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
Scanlon was so surprised because Ba had never shown any hesitancy on past occasions. Whenever guerrillas had been sighted, Ba had headed straight for them. The M-113 company was regarded by everyone as a virtually invincible combination of armored mobility and firepower. The Viet Cong were supposed to possess a few 57mm recoilless cannons (technically called recoilless rifles), which could knock out the armored carriers, but none had ever been encountered in action. The .50 caliber heavy machine gun mounted in front of the command hatch on top of twelve of the thirteen carriers in the company was another achievement of John Browning. It was a formidable weapon, capable of plowing through earth parapets and cutting down trees with its big steel-jacketed slugs. The thirteenth carrier, a recent addition, had a flamethrower in a turret in place of the .50 caliber on a swing mount. Each M-113 also carried a squad of a dozen infantrymen, armed with BARs and M-is, who were trained to dismount and attack in unison with the armored vehicles. Ba had been sent off on a number of independent missions because his unit was considered capable of handling anything the Viet Cong might put up against it. His spirited leadership and the shock effect the machines had on the guerrillas, as the slaughter of September 18 had demonstrated, had led to the M-113 company’s killing and capturing more Viet Cong than any other organization in the 7th Division.
Ba’s announcement that he was not going and that the infantry ought to go instead set off half an hour of emotional confrontation. A brief reconnaissance on foot by Mays and Ba after the carriers encountered the first canal revealed a second high-banked canal behind it. The M-113s were up against a double canal that would require two hours to cross at this spot. Ba grasped at this as an excuse to do nothing. He seemed unimpressed by appeals from Scanlon and Mays to his humanitarian instinct—there were three helicopter crews and a company of ARVN infantry who might all be killed or captured. “We can’t get across the canal,” he would say, and repeat that the infantry battalion could reach Bac much faster. Within a few minutes Scanlon and Mays, who were standing with Ba on top of his carrier, were shouting at him and he was shouting back. Vann, circling overhead in the spotter plane, was raging at all three of them, trying to goad the two advisors into moving Ba and attempting to shame Ba into action at the same time. Ba’s English was good, and he could hear everything Vann was saying, because the portable radio Scanlon and Mays were using was not the telephone type. It had a loudspeaker for incoming calls and a pushbutton microphone with which to answer.
Scanlon could measure the rise in Vann’s rage from the way his voice went up a quarter of an octave in shrillness with each exchange. “I told you people to do something and you’re not doing it,” he berated Scanlon. “Why can’t you get the lead out
of that son of a bitch’s ass? He’s got his order from the division commander.” Scanlon in turn berated Ba.
“Are you afraid to go over there?” he asked. Ba said no. “Then why won’t you go?” Scanlon shouted. “We’re just sitting here staring at two canals. I know we can find a place to get across somewhere else if we’d start looking for one.” Ba repeated his excuses.
“Jesus Christ, this is intolerable,” Vann’s nasal shrill broke in again from the radio. “That bastard has armored tracks and .50 cals and he’s afraid of a bunch of VC with small arms. What’s wrong with him?”
“We’re doing the best we can, Topper Six,” Scanlon replied.
“Your best isn’t worth a shit, Walrus,” Vann cursed back. “This is an emergency. Those people are lying out there exposed. I want you to make that son of a bitch move.”
Scanlon knew that Vann was given to tantrums when thwarted. Vann had always seemed to think well enough of Scanlon not to subject him to this verbal lashing before, but this was an unprecedented situation. Scanlon could picture Vann in the backseat of the little plane gritting his teeth, the redness of the rage in his face merging into the redness of the sunburn on his neck, the veins in his neck bulging from the fury within. Scanlon was professional enough to assume that much of the anger was not directed personally at him and Mays, that Vann was making no effort to control his temper because he thought that his only chance for success lay in shaming Ba and in stinging the two advisors into putting more pressure on the Vietnamese captain. Ba was correct, Scanlon noted to himself, in arguing that the infantry could reach Bac sooner than the M-113s. He thought that Vann, like most officers who were not armor specialists, had a poor notion of how time-consuming it was for the carriers to cross canals at the best of fords, and there would be more canals between this one and Bac. Knowing Vann, however, Scanlon guessed that he had other reasons for demanding that the carriers perform the rescue. Scanlon was correct in this guess and wrong in thinking that Vann was ignorant of the problem the carriers had in traversing the canals.
Vann’s knowledge of the extent to which canals could impede the M-113s was one of the factors adding to his rage. He had asked the previous September for portable bridging equipment for the company so that the crews and the mounted infantry would not have to stop to cut trees and brush. Like almost all of his requests, it had gone unfulfilled by Harkins’s headquarters. He had to send the armored vehicles to Bac because he knew that it was futile to try to use the division infantry battalion. Once the battalion commander realized that he was being asked to make a frontal assault on entrenched Viet Cong, which he would soon discern if given the rescue mission, he would see to it that his battalion never reached Bac. By diverting the battalion from its advance on Tan Thoi, Vann would not save the Americans and the pinned-down reserve. All he would accomplish would be to open a covered route of retreat for the guerrillas to the north along the tree lines that ran in that direction. He was damned if he was going to let these Viet Cong escape. They had downed four helicopters and had his blood up. Ba’s armored tracks were the one means he had of both saving the men in front of Bac and destroying the guerrillas.
He was trying to goad Scanlon and Mays and shame Ba into going to Bac, but this was just one of the reasons for his rage. All of this bile was pouring down on them because he was unable to contain any longer the anger and frustration that had been building in him for five and a half months since the fiasco of July 20. His sense of fury at his helplessness had risen each week after Cao had begun to fake the operations outright in mid-October. He had warned that there would be a day of reckoning if Harkins did not make Cao fight and allowed the Communists to continue to harvest American weapons from the outposts. None of this would have happened if the command in Saigon had held up its end of this war. Now the day of reckoning had come and the captain in charge of the M-113s, who had been one of the few decent officers in this stinking army, was behaving like the rest of the cowardly bastards. He, John Vann, was supposed to move thirteen ten-ton carriers across a mile of rice paddies and canals and redeem this disaster by waving a wand from the back of a spotter plane. He kept checking with Ziegler to see if Dam had issued the order to Ba. Dam kept confirming that he had. You never could be certain what these people were saying over the radio. They lied to you and they lied to each other.
What Vann did not realize, because in his fury he was not thinking clearly enough to guess at the cause of Ba’s reluctance, was that the coup phobia of Diem and his family had put Ba in a dilemma. Getting Dam to order Ba to move wasn’t enough. Vann needed to have Major Tho issue the order, but no one on the Saigon side was going to tell him that. Prior to December, Ba’s company had been assigned directly to the 7th Division. Diem had then come to see that although armored personnel carriers were not as useful in a coup as tanks, they were potentially effective tools to help overthrow his regime, or to protect it. He had therefore decided to purchase more anticoup insurance. During his reorganization of the armed forces in December he had removed the two companies of M-113s in the Delta from divisional command and assigned them to the armored regiment under Tho. Dam had ordered Ba to proceed to Bac. Ba could not raise Tho on the radio to find out what Tho wanted him to do, and he was afraid to go without Tho’s approval. From what he could gather, the presidential palace was not going to be pleased with the events at Bac. Tho for Tho’s sake might not want any of his subordinates to get involved. If Ba went and Tho disapproved, Ba was liable to a reprimand and dismissal. His career had already been set back for political reasons. He was a Buddhist and he had been unjustly accused of sympathy with the leaders of the abortive 1960 paratrooper coup. Although he had cleared himself, Diem was watching him and holding up his promotion to major.
Beneath Ba’s bravado, he was a conservative man. He did not lack courage. Neither was he a professional risk-taker like Vann. He had been an officer in a colonial army that had lost its war. He was fighting this second war for the Tory regime of his class. He was doing precisely what could be expected of a man who had grown up in a system where, when in doubt, the best thing to do was to do nothing. He was stalling.
Vann’s bullying over the radio made matters worse. He was increasing Ba’s resistance. Ba had come, out of his pride, to resent the superiority complex of these Americans. Vann had been cordial to him, and their relations had been bluff and easy, except on those occasions when Vann’s manner had become overbearing. Ba had then found him singularly grating. Ba could not know the pent-up emotions that were the larger source of Vann’s abusive language and the extent to which Vann was in turn a prisoner of the American system. In the U.S. Army, when a combat emergency occurred and a senior officer took charge, he issued brisk orders and everyone obeyed instantly. Vann could not help reverting to this procedure in his current predicament.
At the end of the half hour of shouting, Ba relented to the extent of giving Scanlon a carrier to return south and find a crossing site that Scanlon had seen on the way up to this spot where they had met the infantry and been blocked by the double canal. Vann flew off to try to get the Civil Guards to maneuver and dislodge the Viet Cong at Bac.
He had the L-19 pilot make a couple of passes over the first Civil Guard battalion, which had opened the battle by walking into the guerrillas on the far side of the stream south of the hamlet. He could see the Civil Guardsmen lolling around, heads back against the paddy dikes in repose or in a snooze. If there were any Viet Cong left under the trees in front of them, they had clearly stopped shooting, and the Saigon troops were rendering a like courtesy. Vann concluded that the guerrillas in the southern tree line, having halted the Civil Guards, had turned their attention to the reserve company as soon as it had landed behind them. In any case, the Civil Guards were now perfectly situated to flank around to the right and unhinge the position of the Viet Cong along the irrigation dike on the western edge of Bac. Vann radioed Ziegler with a recommendation that Dam have Tho order the Civil Guards to assault around this vulne
rable flank.
Vann’s lieutenant on the ground with the Civil Guards, who now also could not get access to a radio with which to talk to his chief overhead, had been attempting since the helicopters landed the reserve at 10:20 A.M. to persuade the Vietnamese captain in charge of the battalion to do precisely this. The guerrillas in front of them had stopped firing the moment the helicopters had arrived. The lieutenant had drawn the same conclusion as Vann. He had been urging the Civil Guard commander, whose slight leg wound was not incapacitating, to push his troops up through the coconut grove on the right where the district guerrilla platoon had lain in ambush and, using it for cover, to turn the tables on the Viet Cong. The Vietnamese captain kept replying that Major Tho had instructed him to stay where he was in a “blocking position.” The term had lost any connotation of the “hammer and anvil” tactic that Vann had sought to employ on July 20 and had become a euphemism among the Saigon commanders for doing nothing. Tho did not want any more casualties among his Civil Guards. When Dam called him at Vann’s behest and told him to have his troops execute the flanking movement, he ignored the order.
From the plane Vann could see the second Civil Guard battalion still marching up from the southwest, searching hamlets along the way. Tho was in no hurry for it to arrive at Bac. The division infantry battalion moving down from the north had also not yet reached the hamlet of Tan Thoi above Bac.
A voice speaking English with a Vietnamese accent, probably the lieutenant cowering behind the dike at Bac, suddenly came up on Vann’s portable field radio and said that two of the helicopter crewmen were seriously wounded. Vann tried to keep the conversation going and obtain more information. The voice did not reply to his questions.
He told the L-19 pilot to return to the M-113s and circled low over them. The armored tracks were in the same place he had left them. It was 11:10 A.M., forty-five minutes since the Huey had flipped over on its side and crashed and he had radioed Ba to come to the rescue at once with his mobile fortresses. Ba’s refusal to cooperate in this emergency was incredible to Vann. Just before flying off ten minutes earlier to attempt to maneuver the Civil Guards, he had, through Ziegler, appealed to Dam to repeat his order to Ba and this time to raise Ba on the radio himself and personally to order him to head for Bac immediately. Orders from the division commander were normally relayed down through whichever regiment had contact with the M-113s. Dam had confirmed that he had done as Vann had asked. Orbiting just above the vehicle now, Vann could see Mays standing beside Ba on top of Ba’s carrier.
