The Battle of Ap Bac

by Neil Sheehan

  The Vietnamese lieutenant had recovered his ability to speak English when Bowers returned to him. Why had he stopped the flanking movement into the southern tree line? Bowers asked. The lieutenant said that it was too dangerous to divide the company in a situation like this, that they all had to stay together. While crawling back, Bowers saw he had been correct in his original judgment that the company would take a lot more casualties lying out in the paddy field than they would if they maneuvered. Staying put had allowed the guerrillas to first concentrate on the helicopters and then to turn to the company at their leisure. A number of the dead and wounded had been shot in the back and buttocks. Bowers guessed that some of the guerrillas had to be up in the trees to obtain plunging fire that would hit men behind the paddy dike like this. He did not realize that the irrigation dike was sufficiently high to give the Viet Cong a perspective down into the rice field. The guerrilla squad that had worked out along the tree line on the north to try to burn the helicopters had also taken a toll from that left flank. The ARVN survivors, wounded and unwounded, were all now pressing themselves up against the dike lengthwise as the lieutenant was doing. Most of them were not returning the guerrillas’ fire, which had slackened to intermittent shooting. The Viet Cong discouraged those hardier souls who, in imitation of the Civil Guardsmen in the morning, would stick a rifle above the dike wall and pull the trigger a few times blindly. Ten to fifteen well-aimed shots that slapped into the dike or clipped the top were enough to bring the rifle down in a hurry with no threat that it would be raised again.

  Bowers had in mind a way to extricate them all from their predicament and get Braman and the Vietnamese wounded evacuated. He would blast the Viet Cong out of the irrigation dike with artillery or air strikes. Bowers could not see the guerrillas (throughout the whole day he had glimpses of only three Viet Cong, the first the figure running through the southern tree line and later two others on the dike), but from the sound of their weapons and the path of the bullets they obviously had to be under the trees on the dike. The lieutenant had a multichannel field radio. Before boarding the helicopter, Bowers had been given, as a normal precaution, the frequency on which Vann, who was carrying a similar field radio in the L-19, communicated with Ziegler at the division command post, and Vann’s call sign, Topper Six. Bowers was going to contact Vann over the lieutenant’s radio, explain the plight of the company and the helicopter crews, and have Vann relay Bowers’s instructions to the artillery fire direction center or to a forward air controller. Bowers was experienced at such work. He had been trained as a forward observer for an 81mm mortar company and had later served as a mortar platoon sergeant before transferring to staff operations. Batteries of 105mm howitzers and heavy 4.2-inch mortars had been set up along the main Delta road to the south and on a canal to the east so that they could hurl shells out over the entire area of potential action. Bowers told the lieutenant he needed to use his radio, explaining why. Borrowing a radio from the Vietnamese had never been a problem in the past, which was why Bowers had not brought one himself. The lieutenant refused, saying that he had to keep the radio tuned to his frequency to receive orders from division. Artillery or air strikes would save them, Bowers argued. The Viet Cong might sally out of the tree line and overrun the company, he warned. The lieutenant still refused.

  The artillery forward observer assigned to the company, a second lieutenant who had control of the only other multichannel radio, was lying about ten yards from the company commander. He was in contact with the fire direction center at the division command post back at Tan Hiep airstrip, which relayed instructions to the batteries. The observer was sporadically calling in shells, but he was too frightened to raise his head and see where they were landing in order to correct the range and walk them down the guerrillas’ foxhole line as Bowers intended to do. Bowers watched the shells fall into the paddy between the guerrillas and the company. He had been on previous operations with the same observer and knew that his English was limited. Bowers kept his instruction as simple as possible: “Add one hundred meters,” he called. In his fear, the observer did not seem to hear or understand. Bowers shouted the instruction. Then he asked the company commander to translate his directions into Vietnamese. This Fort Benning graduate again lost his ability to speak English. Bowers crawled over to the observer. “Give me the radio,” he said. “I’ll adjust the fire.” The observer and the company commander both replied in English that Bowers could not have the radio. The observer had to talk to the artillery, the company commander said. It became clear to Bowers that the two lieutenants were afraid that if he got on the radio, the end result might be that they would receive orders to do something, which might mean getting up from behind the dike. After eight shells had been called in to no effect, a bullet wounded the soldier who had the observer’s radio strapped to his back. Another bullet knocked out the radio. The observer burrowed deep into the ooze.

  When they had been in the paddy about half an hour, the prospect of rescue appeared in the form of two AD-6 Skyraider fighter-bombers. The planes first dropped napalm. It did not land on the guerrillas. The pilots instead struck the thatched houses behind the irrigation dike, some of which had already been set afire by the rockets from the Hueys. The heat of the napalm was so intense just the same that for a few minutes it was oppressive to breathe all the way out in the rice field. If it was this bad where he was, Bowers wondered how the Viet Cong could bear the heat and suffocating effect of the jellied gasoline. He rose to a crouch to see if the guerrillas would run. Many of the Saigon infantrymen assumed that their ordeal was over and stood up to watch the spectacle of the planes dive-bombing with conventional bombs and strafing and rocketing the flaming houses. Suddenly two soldiers next to Bowers fell dead, hit by rifle fire from the tree line. The others threw themselves back down. Bowers remained in his crouch for another moment or two, not yet convinced the Viet Cong were staying. He searched the tree line for a sign of movement. There was none. The guerrillas were apparently not retreating. For the first time since he had come to Vietnam, Bowers felt some admiration for the Viet Cong. “Come on, give me that radio,” he called to the ARVN lieutenant, who had not moved from behind the dike. “We’ll burn them out. I’ll get the planes to put the napalm right on top of that tree line.” The lieutenant shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “Napalm too close; too close to us.”

  Bowers thought of shooting the lieutenant and taking the radio, as he would have done to a cowardly American officer who was endangering a company of paratroopers, and instantly dismissed the possibility. He was a good noncom who obeyed orders. The Army had told him that in Vietnam he was a mere advisor, that he did not have command authority, that this was “their war.” During a week’s orientation course at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, prior to departure the previous March, he had been instructed to use “tact and diplomacy” with the Vietnamese. The downed helicopter pilots had not been of any help to him in dealing with the Vietnamese lieutenant. This fighting on the ground was not their game. He looked down the dike. The petrified infantrymen were pressed up against it. He reflected that if the guerrillas did sortie out of that tree line, he would never be able to rally these men to return fire. The company would be overrun and they would all be killed. While he was in the helicopter dressing Braman’s wound he had spotted a packet of cigarettes and some matches in an open C-ration box and picked them up and put them into the breast pocket of his fatigue shirt. He had stopped smoking a month before and had bet another sergeant a fifth of whiskey that he would beat the habit. Now he decided he might as well have a smoke. He lay back with his head resting against the dike and lit up.

  Vann was a prisoner in the backseat of the spotter plane, almost manic with anger and frustration. He had an advisor and three helicopter crews on the ground, whether dead or wounded he did not know. These Americans and the ARVN infantry they were with were all in danger of being overrun, and he could not get anyone to come to their rescue.

>   As soon as the Huey crashed he turned the dial on the portable field radio he had wedged between his legs in the cramped quarters of the L-19 to the frequency of Capts. James Scanlon and Robert Mays, who were with the company of M-113 armored personnel carriers that Vann had previously seen about a mile to the northwest. Scanlon, thirty-one, short and square built, was the advisor to the armored regiment at My Tho commanded by Major Tho, the province chief. Mays, thirty-two, a loose-limbed Texan with a measured way of speaking, was Scanlon’s deputy and the regular advisor to Capt. Ly Tong Ba, the commander of the M-113 company. Although Scanlon’s job was to advise the whole regiment, Ba’s company and another M-113 unit attached to the 21st Division in the southern half of the Delta were the most active armored units, and so Scanlon spent most of his time in the field with them.

  “Walrus, this is Topper Six, over,” Vann said, releasing his finger from the button on the telephone-type microphone and earpiece so that Mays or Scanlon could reply. (Walrus was the coded radio call sign for the advisors with the M-113s.)

  “Topper Six, this is Walrus, over,” Scanlon replied.

  “Walrus, I’ve got three repeat three choppers down and a rifle company pinned in the paddies due southeast of you at X-Ray Sierra three zero niner five three niner.” Vann repeated the map coordinates to be certain that Scanlon heard them correctly. “Tell your counterpart”—it was clear in the context of the conversation that Vann was referring to Captain Ba—“to get his tracks over here as fast as he can. Make damn sure he understands the urgency of the situation.”

  “Roger, Topper Six,” Scanlon replied.

  Vann acknowledged Scanlon’s response with a “This is Topper Six, out” (in U.S. Army radio procedure the initiator of the conversation ends it), and told the pilot of the L-19 to nose down for a landscape-level pass over the wrecked Huey and the infantry of the reserve company cowering behind the dike. He could see that the ARVN were making no attempt to return what he described in one report of the battle as “withering fire” from the western tree line of Bac. The banging of the guerrillas’ automatic weapons and the occasional tracers flashing past the fuselage made it apparent that the Viet Cong were trying to add the spotter plane, a much more difficult target than the helicopters because of its short and narrow silhouette, to their bag. Vann had the Army pilot brave the fusillade for several more passes in order to ascertain as best he could the situation of the company and the helicopter crews. The little aircraft was not hit.

  While they were regaining altitude after the last pass, Scanlon came back on the air with bad news. “I’ve got a problem, Topper Six,” he said. “My counterpart won’t move.”

  “Goddammit, doesn’t he understand this is an emergency?” Vann asked.

  “I described the situation to him exactly as you told me, Topper Six, but he says, ‘I don’t take orders from Americans,’ ” Scanlon answered.

  “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 Indigène. 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-1s, 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 push-button microphone with which to answer.