The Battle of Ap Bac

by Neil Sheehan

  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 vulnerable 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.

  “Walrus, this is Topper Six, over,” he called. Mays acknowledged.

  “Is that goddam counterpart of yours going to respond, Walrus?” Vann asked.

  “Negative, Topper Six,” Mays replied. “He still says we can’t get across the canal in time and division ought to send the infantry.”

  Vann had endured all he could bear. “Walrus, can you take that company over there? Can you? Can you, goddammit?” His voice coming over the loudspeaker of Mays’s radio was a shriek.

  Mays was puzzled that Vann would ask him if he could assume command of the company. Yes, he could get the M-113s across the canals to Bac, although he knew the men would not follow him without Ba telling them to do so. He was fearful of Vann in his rage and decided to treat the question hypothetically. “Roger, Topper Six, I could do that,” he replied.

  “Then shoot that rotten, cowardly son of a bitch right now and move out,” Vann screamed back.

  Mays did not answer. He looked at Ba. The two men liked each other. They had become friends over the four months that Mays had been the company’s advisor. Ba also said nothing, but the expression on his face asked: “Would you shoot me?” Mays reminded Ba that they had crossed a canal earlier in the morning which was probably this double canal at a point where it was still a single one. Why didn’t they drive back, recross it, and work their way east to Bac from that point? Ba agreed.

  Ba slipped on his radio headset and transmitted an order to the company. The drivers started the engines and the tracks of the carriers churned through the muck and water on the way to Bac.

  Vann turned his attention to the plight of the aviators in the rice paddy. The information that two of them were seriously wounded made it imperative, he concluded, to attempt another helicopter rescue, this one better calculated. He flew back to Tan Hiep to refuel the L-19 and discuss the plan with Ziegler and the senior helicopter pilots. The situation of the reserve company might be easing, Vann thought. As far as he could discern from the air, they were being shot at only every once in a while. Since the Civil Guards on the south were not being fired on, it was possible that the Viet Cong were withdrawing and endeavoring to infiltrate out of the area. Vann had the division communications section try to find out if Bowers was alive and instruct the lieutenant to put him on the radio in order to obtain some reliable information. He was unsuccessful, apparently because the lieutenant did not respond to the regimental headquarters that relayed the instructions to him. Vann still felt they owed it to the wounded aviators to act on the possibility that the Viet Cong might be disengaging.

  He described his plan. He and the L-19 pilot would be the decoy to learn whether the guerrillas remained in force. They would make several treetop passes to draw fire. The spotter-plane pilot told Vann he was crazy and wanted to commit suicide, but he agreed to fly. Three of the Hueys were capable of strafing. (A fourth had taken a hit in a critical area and was considered unsafe to fly until repaired.) If the spotter plane attracted little or no shooting and the guerrillas were apparently no longer at Bac in force, the Hueys would machine-gun and rocket the western and southern tree lines to suppress the fire of any Viet Cong who might have stayed behind while an H-21 went in for the pickup. A second H-21 would stay aloft in case of some unforeseen emergency. At this point Vann was still under the misimpression that the guerrillas in the southern tree line had helped to shoot down the helicopters that morning and that they remained a menace. The helicopter pilots, also wanting to save their wounded, accepted the plan.

  Bowers did not realize it was Vann in the L-19 that appeared all of a sudden and began buzzing the downed helicopters and the tree lines. He assumed it was that daredevil major from the Air Force, Herb Prevost, who was always taunting the Viet Cong to shoot him down. Perhaps they would today, Bowers thought. He knew that the Viet Cong were still in the western tree line to his front, because Braman had made a racket inside the fuselage of the H-21 where he was lying a little while before and the guerrillas had immediately fired at it. Bowers had crawled to the helicopter and attracted another burst of shots as he pulled himself through the door and slid over to Braman. He asked him what was wrong. Braman said everything had become so quiet that he thought they had gone off and abandoned him. He did not want to raise himself off his back for fear of causing the wound to bleed, so he had banged the heels of his boots against the aluminum floor to try to attract the attention of someone. Bowers assured him that no one had gone anywhere and that he was attracting the attention of the wrong people, who were, as he could hear, still around too. Braman had fortunately not been hit a second time. The large silhouette of the H-21 had again performed the optical trick of causing the guerrillas to shoot high, and the top part of the fuselage had more perforations.

  Braman’s physical condition seemed to be holding stable. Bowers examined his wound. There was no fresh bleeding, and Braman did not appear to be going into shock. He was starting to become emotional because the lonely waiting was weakening his nerve. Bowers gave him another drink of water and once more lay beside him for a while to comfort and calm him. Help must be on the way, Bowers said, and Braman really was safer inside the helicopter as long as he kept quiet. He definitely wouldn’t thank Bowers la
ter if the sergeant carried him out into the paddy where he might take another bullet and the filthy water would infect his wound. Before he left, Bowers placed a canteen at Braman’s side where he could reach it whenever he got thirsty. For some reason the Viet Cong did not fire at Bowers when he rolled back out the door for the return crawl to the dike, but he was certain they were watching him.

  Vann and the L-19 pilot dangled as tempting a bait as they could in front of the guerrillas. Vann was not satisfied to just buzz the treetops, a reconnaissance tactic that gives some protection because it is difficult to see and shoot up through the foliage at an object flying directly overhead. Instead, he had the pilot fly twice right over the downed helicopters on a course parallel to the western tree line, presenting the easiest of targets. Then they made a third pass at a 45-degree angle over the helicopters, which exposed the little plane to fire from the southern tree line as well. “You son of a gun, Prevost, you sure are looking for it,” Bowers said to himself.

  Not a shot was fired. The Viet Cong had resumed their discipline of not shooting at spotter planes and waited to see what the game was. Bowers picked up the sound of a helicopter approaching from behind and turned to see an H-21 flying directly toward him up the rice field. The pilot was trying to put the downed machines between his aircraft and the western tree line, as the pilot of the crashed Huey had sought to do. Simultaneously the three Hueys appeared and started machine-gunning and rocketing the western and southern tree lines. At that moment Bowers heard the deadly percussion of automatic weapons and rifles begin from under the trees on the irrigation dike as the Viet Cong battalion commander also saw the H-21 and gave the order to open fire. The Hueys were again wasting half of their firepower on the southern tree line. This mistake and the inefficacy of their light 7.62mm machine guns and rockets against troops entrenched beneath trees and foliage meant there was no interruption in the torrent of bullets that rent the air over Bowers’s head on their way toward the H-21 flying up the paddy. The pilot landed about thirty yards behind the wrecked Huey, but immediately radioed that he was pulling out because he was taking so many hits. Some of his controls were shot away, and he had great difficulty keeping his craft in the air. With guidance from Vann’s pilot he was able to turn and fly back about three-quarters of a mile to where Ba’s M-113s were crossing a canal.