The Battle of Ap Bac

by Neil Sheehan

  The western boundary of Bac hamlet was a big irrigation ditch that ran in a north-south direction. A large dike followed the outer edge of the ditch, and trees grew on top of the dike. The battalion commander positioned the rest of his company of regulars and his weapons platoon in foxholes dug into the dike under the trees. The dike, which was four feet thick in its narrowest sections and thicker elsewhere, was built up above the paddies in front like a levee. Because of their crazy-quilt patterns of land ownership, the peasants had neither dug the ditch nor built the dike straight. The result was that the dike zigzagged out into the rice fields at several points. Firing across the paddies to the west of Bac from foxholes in this dike was comparable to shooting across a high school football field from the third or fourth row of bleachers. The zigzags of the dike out into the paddies also enabled the guerrillas to catch in crossfires anyone or anything approaching. The battalion commander sited his two machine guns and his BARs at these outcroppings to achieve what the U.S. Army calls “interlocking fields of fire.” He deployed the second half of his force, the 1st Company of the 514th Regionals strengthened by a separate provincial platoon, in similar fashion in the irrigation dikes that edged the three exposed sides of Tan Thoi.

  From the air and from the rice fields outside, these hamlets gave no indication that they were the twin bastions of a fortress. The tree lines were the usual Delta profusion of banana and coconut groves, assorted fruit trees, stands of bamboo and water palm, and the hardwoods the peasants let grow to pole height to use for construction. The undergrowth at the bottom was thick. Under the supervision of the officers who had learned this technique during the war against the French, the peasants and the troops dug the foxholes without disturbing the foliage above or at the front and back. The excess dirt was carried away and dispersed. Where the original foliage did not seem dense enough, fresh branches were cut and erected over and around the foxholes. Even from a low-flying L-19 spotter or a helicopter, all appeared natural.

  The foxholes were dug sufficiently deep for a man to stand up inside. The machine-gun and BAR positions had foxholes that were wider than the others so that two men, the gunner and the loader, could stand in them. The depth of the foxholes enabled the guerrillas to duck down and escape harm from the fighter-bombers and the artillery. To kill a man crouched down inside one of these foxholes required a direct hit from an artillery shell or a bomb, or a napalm strike close enough to burn or asphyxiate him. Airburst artillery might kill him, but only if the shell was guided with precision to explode it directly above the foxhole or at a sufficiently close angle. Unless the guerrilla was reckless enough to raise himself out of the hole when the aircraft passed overhead, strafing with machine guns and rockets was virtually useless.

  The irrigation ditch behind the foxhole line became a communications trench. Men could move up and down it out of sight and shot of anyone in front of the dike and the trees on top. The ditch was about six feet across and was flooded waist-deep. The guerrillas could wade in it or shuttle quickly back and forth in one of the wooden sampans the peasants made by burning and hewing out a log. When a plane came over, any Viet Cong in the ditch could hide by ducking beneath the water or under the foliage on either side. The irrigation ditch permitted the troops in the foxholes to be resupplied with ammunition as needed, the wounded to be evacuated, replacements to be sent into the line, and the officers and noncoms to circulate in relative safety while they controlled and encouraged their men.

  Most of the women and children and old men among the approximately six hundred inhabitants of Bac, and a like number in Tan Thoi, fled to nearby swamps to hide as soon as the alert order was issued. Some of the adults stayed behind to help with the wounded and to serve as runners.

  The ground fog that morning was the element of chance in the battle. The fog was bad all over the region. It obscured the landscape from the air, suspending itself above the paddies and enveloping the trees and thatched roofs of Tan Thoi and Bac and most of the other hamlets. Vann had not been given the approximately thirty transport helicopters required to lift a whole ARVN battalion in one move. The Army was having trouble maintaining the Korean-era H-21s in flying condition. Harkins had also assigned priority to an elaborate operation that same morning code-named Burning Arrow—1,250 paratroopers jumping and a battalion of infantry landing from helicopters after prodigious bombing—to surprise and wipe out the main Communist headquarters, the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), in the rain forests of War Zone C, the old Duong Minh Chau bastion northwest of Saigon that Bumgardner had driven through eight years earlier. (Burning Arrow was a failure. The headquarters was not found.) With the ten H-21s that he was able to obtain, Vann had to shuttle the division battalion to the landing zone north of Tan Thoi a company at a time.

  The fog was especially thick around Tan Hiep airstrip. The helicopter pilots managed to lift off through it with the first company not long before 7:00 A.M. and to find an open area above the hamlet in which to set down the troops. (This was the initial landing Vann watched from the spotter plane.) Then the fog thickened still further and the pilots objected to running the risk of a midair collision or getting lost with the second and third companies of the battalion. Vann and Dam therefore had to postpone the second and third lifts for nearly two and a half hours, until 9:30 A.M., when the sun was high enough to dissipate the fog. In the meantime the first company had to mark time. Had the movement of the division infantry battalion to Tan Thoi not been delayed, the fight might have begun there and the battle unfolded differently. The delay brought the Civil Guards marching up from the south into action first with the platoon of guerrillas positioned in the tree line along the creek branch just below Bac. That happenstance exploded the battle into the dramatic and illuminating clash that was to have such an impact on the war and to influence Vann’s life so keenly.

  The guerrillas knew the Civil Guards were coming. The Viet Cong battalion commander warned the company leader in Bac that his platoon dug in on the far side of the stream was going to fire the first shots. The battalion radio operators, whose radios were captured American models, were following the movements of the Saigon troops by monitoring the frequencies they were using. The ARVN did not practice communications security and transmitted in uncoded language map coordinates that the Viet Cong staff could easily plot on its own maps. Scouts and a platoon of district guerrillas fleeing ahead of the Civil Guards confirmed the radio intelligence. The guerrilla infantrymen in the foxholes under the trees finally saw the troops of the first Civil Guard battalion walking up toward them in files along the dirt trails and on narrow paddy dikes. The district guerrillas were hurriedly placed in a coconut grove off to the right. They were instructed to rake the Civil Guards from that flank after the Viet Cong regulars had surprised them from the front.

  Alert to the possibility that tree lines can hold such surprises, the captain in charge of the Civil Guard battalion became more prudent as his troops got closer. He stopped at a paddy dike about 150 yards away and sent part of one company ahead into the open rice field to reconnoiter. The guerrillas let the Civil Guardsmen get within thirty yards before they started shooting. As the Saigon troops lurched back through the muck and water toward the security of the dike, the district platoon in the coconut grove opened a fusillade from the right. The Civil Guard company commander and his executive officer were killed within a few seconds. The rest of the Civil Guard battalion at the dike should have given their comrades protecting fire. Instead, many cowered down behind the low mud wall and others stuck their weapons over the top and pulled the triggers without looking, so that those retreating were being shot at from both directions. It was 7:45 A.M.

  For the next two hours the captain leading the Civil Guard battalion attempted to dislodge the guerrillas with inconclusive flanking maneuvers. His artillery observer was either incompetent or the field command post of the province military headquarters would not let him adjust the fire, because the occasional salvos he called for lan
ded behind the guerrillas rather than on their foxhole line. The maneuvering ended shortly before 10.00 A.M. when the captain was wounded slightly in the leg.

  Vann did not know about the fight at the southern tree line until it had almost ended. Maj. Lam Quang Tho, the Dinh Tuong Province chief, who was in charge of these provincial forces and who was theoretically functioning as one of Dam’s regimental commanders for the operation, did not bother to inform Dam that it was occurring. Tho the man whom President Diem had also made commander of the armor regiment at My Tho as additional anticoup insurance because his family was among the landowning class of the Delta who had allied themselves with Diem and his family. Tho did not order his second Civil Guard battalion to hurry to the assistance of the first once the shooting started, so that they could attack together, nor did he do anything to correct the faulty artillery after an American lieutenant accompanying the Civil Guards borrowed a radio to warn him about it. He did not come forward to organize an assault himself, although the scene of the action was less than a two-mile walk from the main road to the south where he had set up his field headquarters. After the casualties reached eight killed and fourteen wounded and the Civil Guard captain was hit in the leg, he did what was normal for a Saigon commander: he asked someone else to fight his war. He radioed a request to Dam to land the two infantry companies Dam was holding at Tan Hiep airstrip as a division reserve in the rice fields behind the southern tree line. Theoretically, dropping the reserve in their rear would force the guerrillas to abandon their positions. Tho did not realize it would also mean landing troops in the open paddies in front of the western tree line of Bac where the rest of the guerrilla regulars were waiting in the foxholes dug into the irrigation dike.

  Vann was in an L-19 north of Tan Thoi, following the movements of the third company of the division battalion which had landed ten minutes before, when Ziegler came up on the radio from the command-post tent at the airstrip. He described Tho’s request and said that Dam wanted Vann to fly down to Bac and select a landing site for the reserve. Vann was suspicious of Bac as soon as he saw the hamlet. It occurred to him that the guerrillas opposing the Civil Guards from the southern tree line might be part of a larger force that had retreated ahead of the advancing provincial troops. If so, Bac would be the logical assembly area for them. For the next fifteen minutes he searched the hamlet and the tree lines around it from the backseat of the spotter plane. The Army pilot up front slid the little aircraft back and forth in wide swoops at an altitude of a few hundred feet with the grace of a hawk riding a strong current of air. Occasionally, when Vann requested it, the pilot would shove the throttle forward and nose the plane down for a high-speed pass right over the trees.

  As practiced as his eye was by this time, Vann could not see any of the guerrillas. He could tell there were Viet Cong in the southern tree line only because he could see the impact of their bullets striking around the Civil Guards. The guerrillas in the irrigation dike that formed the western tree line watched from their foxholes and let the small green plane make swoop after swoop with impunity, resisting the temptation to fire because they knew what the game was. Despite the tranquillity of Bac, Vann remained suspicious of the western tree line. He had his pilot contact another L-19 that was leading the flight of ten H-21s with the first reserve company from the airstrip. The ungainly H-21s were being escorted by a platoon of five of the new “gunship” helicopters the Army had deployed to Vietnam the previous fall. These were graceful machines with a trim, aerodynamic shape, fast in maneuver because of a powerful shaft turbine engine. Built by Bell and officially designated the HU-1 Iroquois, the gunship had been affectionately renamed the Huey by the Army airmen. The Huey had an electrically rotated 7.62mm machine gun mounted beneath the fuselage on each side and pods of 2.75-inch rockets above the machine guns. The copilot aimed the machine guns with a cross-hair device and fired them and the rockets with buttons on the device. Vann relayed instructions to the command pilot of the ten H-21s to land the reserve company at a spot three hundred yards from both the western and southern tree lines. He also gave the helicopters a flight route in and out of the landing zone that would minimize their exposure.

  This is John Vann’s sketch map of the Battle of Ap Bac, which he drew for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He reproduced the map on a colored slide so that he could cast the tree lines of Bac and Tan Thoi on the screen in the Pentagon conference room of the American military leaders. He left the slide in his papers.

  The X in the circle marks the original target of the operation—the radio transmitter operating from Tan Thoi. The three companies of the 7th Division infantry battalion are shown closing on that hamlet. Vann has used an alternate name, Babeo, for the Tong Doc Loc Canal that forms the boundary of the Plain of Reeds. The arrow on the lower right shows the first Civil Guard battalion engaged with the guerrilla platoon in the tree line along the creek branch just south of Bac. The next arrow to the left designates the second Civil Guard battalion still moving up from the south, while the company of M-113s is shown sweeping along the outer west flank of the operational area. The time preceding the date is twenty minutes before the helicopters were to land the reserve company in the open rice paddies between the western edge of Bac, where the company of the 261st Main Force Viet Cong Battalion was waiting, and another tree line Vann has sketched along a canal farther to the west.

  Command relationships among the Americans were not firmly established in 1963. The helicopter companies saw themselves as independent of the senior advisors. Vann was disliked by many of the ranking pilots because, with his domineering temperament and experience in aviation, he was always trying to assert control over them. They might have disregarded instructions from any advisor, but there was a tendency to go out of their way to show Vann that they knew more than he did about how to fly helicopters and where to land troops in a combat area. The senior H-21 pilot in the lead machine ignored Vann’s instructions and headed for a landing spot about two hundred yards from the western tree line. The three hundred yards specified by Vann is the distance at which .30 caliber small-arms fire is regarded as minimally effective. Because of the drop of a bullet in flight, visibility, and other factors, the one-hundred-yard difference can be infinity—the difference between hitting and missing.

  While Vann was relaying his instructions, the Viet Cong battalion commander was alerting his troops to prepare to shoot down helicopters. He had been warned of the landing by his radio operators, who were monitoring the ARVN frequencies. It was 10:20 A.M. and the fog was gone. The large, dark green silhouettes of the “Angle Worms,” as the guerrillas called the bent-pipe H-21s, and the “Dippers,” their nickname for the Hueys, would stand out clearly in the sunshine.

  Sgt. 1st Class Arnold Bowers, twenty-nine years old, from a Minnesota dairy farm and the 101st Airborne Division, heard the bullwhip crack of the first bullet burst through the aluminum skin of the helicopter while the machine was still fifty feet in the air. Bowers’s helicopter was the second in the flight. Vietnam was his first war. During his previous eight and a half months in the country he had experienced no combat beyond a few skirmishes with snipers. The whip cracked again and again over the din of the H-21’s engines before the wheels of the machine settled into the paddy and Bowers jumped out into the knee-high water with a squad of infantry and the ARVN first lieutenant commanding the company.

  His ears free of the clangor of the engines, Bowers could hear a roaring of automatic weapons and rifles from the curtain of green foliage in front. The bullets were snapping all around, buzzing close by his ears and splitting the air overhead. He plunged forward, the gray ooze sucking at his boots, in a reflex of his training that said the best hope for survival lay in moving and shooting until you could get on top of your opponent and kill him. The lieutenant and the ARVN infantrymen thought otherwise. They threw themselves down behind the first paddy dike they could reach about fifteen yards from where the helicopter had landed.

  Sergeant Bowers yelled
at the lieutenant that they had to return fire and maneuver to get out of the open or they would all die in the paddy. The lieutenant said that he couldn’t understand Bowers. Back at the airstrip the lieutenant had understood Bowers’s English perfectly as they had waited to board the helicopters. The Vietnamese was a graduate of the company-level officers’ course at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. Bowers was the staff operations sergeant for the advisory detachment, but he was always volunteering for patrols and assaults. Vann, who liked his spunk, had asked him that morning if he wanted to go with the reserve, should it be committed, because the unit lacked a regular advisor, and Bowers had said yes. He shouted at the lieutenant again. The lieutenant stared at Bowers, his eyes communicating fear, and pressed his body lengthwise against the low dike and down into the water and muck to expose as little of himself as possible to the bullets.

  Bowers glanced to the right and saw one of the ARVN sergeants from a helicopter farther back in the flight string leading a squad toward the tree line on the south. They were bent over in a crawl behind the dike. Bowers jumped up, ignoring the bullets, and did the best imitation of a sprint the muck would permit, flinging himself down into a quick crawl the moment he passed the sergeant. He intended to keep the squad going before they had a chance to hesitate and stop. Bowers had noticed on earlier operations that the ARVN noncoms, unlike their officers, seemed to welcome help and thought an American sergeant enough of a cut above them so that they could blame him if things went wrong. He had also observed that they were not literate city types, as the officers were, but ex-peasants who were more willing to fight.