The Battle of Ap Bac

by Neil Sheehan

  It was almost noon, and the Viet Cong guerrillas had set a new record for the war. They had knocked out five helicopters in a single day. They had also foxed Vann a second time. He was more determined than ever to make these men pay for making him look foolish.

  Vann might have taken some comfort had he known that things were not going so well on the other side. The commander of the 261st Main Force Battalion and the province committee had intended to punish the Saigon army and then maneuver into an orderly retreat. They had wanted to repeat on a bigger scale the ambush of the Ranger platoon on October 5. As the action unfolded, they lost the option of withdrawal. By midday the guerrilla battalion commander had his 350 men locked into an unequal contest from which there was no possibility of retreat until darkness fell at 7:30 P.M. He had hesitated to pull back through Tan Thoi after downing the four helicopters in the morning because, as a result of Vann’s decision, the 7th Division troops approaching that hamlet from the north were not deflected to rescue the reserve company and the helicopter crews. At 12:15 the division battalion finally reached Tan Thoi. Instead of making a careful reconnaissance and then an assault, the ARVN commander let his infantry blunder into a firefight with the company of the 514th Regionals entrenched in the dikes around the edges of the place. The provincial guerrillas had the ARVN stymied, but the Tan Thoi escape route was blocked nonetheless. The only unobstructed side of the battlefield at this point was on the east, and this area was open rice paddy and swamp. Any attempt to cross it in daytime was bound to end in another massacre by the fighter-bombers.

  The positions of the two reinforced guerrilla companies in Bac and Tan Thoi were mutually supporting. They were also mutually dependent. Men running from one hamlet would probably cause the troops in the other to panic too. Even if the men in the second hamlet did not panic, they would come under too much pressure from too many sides in too confined a space to resist effectively. Both Vann who was trying to destroy them and the guerrilla battalion commander who was attempting to save his men knew what the alternatives were. The 350 guerrillas could stand and fight and some of them would die, but if they held until darkness most of them would live. Or they could break and run and most of them would die. It takes the experience of having fought against superior odds and a capacity for clear thought amid violence and confusion to see the alternatives of a battle this starkly. Vann and the guerrilla battalion commander had that experience and that capacity. Vann was doing his best to make these men break and run so that he could kill them. The Viet Cong leader was using every skill he had learned from his years against the French and from his study of the earlier battles of this war to inspire his men to stand and fight and survive to fight again.

  Ordinary men see their immediate peril rather than the larger one to come. The platoon of guerrilla regulars on the far side of the stream south of Bac and the district platoon with them began to crack before noon. The platoon leader of the regulars was slightly wounded during the morning’s fight and was carried back to the company first-aid station in Bac. While the platoon was not bothered again by the Civil Guards after they beat back the initial flanking maneuver, they felt exposed with the reserve company at their rear. They apparently did not realize that their comrades along the irrigation dike had rendered the reserve company harmless by killing or wounding more than half of its 102 men. They knew from the local guerrilla scouts that another Civil Guard battalion was marching northeast toward them. One of their BARs malfunctioned and they could not repair it. They reported to their company commander in Bac that their position was “in bad shape” and asked to withdraw with the district platoon which had joined them. He gave permission, planning to place both platoons in new foxholes at the bottom end of the irrigation dike, where they could still protect his flank to the south. The men did not exercise good camouflage discipline in retreating. A VNAF air controller in an L-19 saw some of them and called in a fighter-bomber. Although few of the men were killed or wounded by the strafing, it dispersed them, and most started up the stream toward the seeming safety of Tan Thoi rather than reporting to the company commander at Bac. A scout team sent to locate and lead them back succeeded in finding them, but the men were frightened and refused an order to return. The company commander had to weaken his main line of defense in the irrigation dike toward which the M-113s were slowly moving by withdrawing a squad to provide some cover on the south flank. He assumed, as Vann and the American lieutenant had been urging, that Major Tho’s Civil Guards would push into the southern tree line vacated by the two platoons and attack him. A single squad is scant protection against a battalion. Had the Civil Guards assaulted with any vigor they undoubtedly would have turned this flank and pushed into the rear of the foxholes along the irrigation dike, rendering the position in Bac untenable.

  The worried company leader in Bac requested reinforcements from the company in Tan Thoi to replace his lost platoon of regulars. The battalion commander refused. The province guerrillas in Tan Thoi might have the ARVN battalion stalled, but they were one reinforced company confronted by three companies of a battalion. The battalion might be strengthened at any moment by a fourth company, a Ranger unit that was another element of the 7th Division reserve and that was just a ten-minute march away from the hamlet. In view of these odds the guerrilla battalion commander could not bring himself to do anything that might unsettle the men in Tan Thoi. The entire situation was so precarious and the two positions so interdependent that he did not dare risk any action that might trigger the loss of one of them. Bac would have to be held, he told his company commander there, by the men who had stayed.

  The guerrillas in the irrigation dike at Bac had suffered a mere five wounded in the whole morning’s fight, but their resolve was also eroding under the air and artillery bombardment and the prospect of having to accomplish what seemed impossible—stopping the armored carriers with the weapons they held in their hands. The artillery had resumed firing again, and again inaccurately, around noon. The nearest ground observer was with the battalion at Tan Thoi. He could do no more than adjust into the general area of Bac by watching the smoke columns of an occasional white-phosphorus round. Since the abortive helicopter rescue, Vann was no longer under any illusion as to where the guerrillas were entrenched, and he repeatedly tried to have the high-explosive shells adjusted onto the western tree line. Despite reiterated promises from division headquarters that a correction was about to be made by a VNAF observer in an L-19, the division artillery officer never got the observer to accomplish it. The shells landing within the hamlet were mainly smashing the peasant houses.

  Vann had the theoretical option of sending the captain who was his artillery advisor to take charge of one of the firing batteries and then to direct the shells himself from the spotter plane. It was an option that even Vann did not dare try to exercise. Seizing control of the artillery would have meant removing a major weapon from the hands of the Saigon officers. Dam, his chief artillery officer, and the battery commander concerned would all have refused and Vann would have had to back down, which was why he never seriously considered the option as an alternative. At this early stage of the war the advisors were under too many strictures from above to remain advisors and not reach openly for command functions, and their Saigon counterparts knew it, to attempt a radical step like this. Vann had no choice but to keep demanding that the division artillery officer contact the VNAF observer in the L-19. The rub was that he couldn’t make the Vietnamese on his side make their system work. What was true of the artillery also held for air power on this day when Vann needed it most.

  The Vietnamese forward air controllers (FACs) in other L-19s and the Vietnamese and American fighter-bomber pilots of the hybrid air force created by General Anthis and his 2nd Air Division staff had been doing all day what they always did when told that the infantry were receiving fire from a hamlet. They were attacking the thatched-roof dwellings of Bac and Tan Thoi and the smaller livestock shelters beside the peasant houses, shattering the fr
ail structures with their bombs and rockets and burning them down with napalm. Having never been on the ground to learn how the guerrillas fought, they had no sense that they were engaged in a futile exercise. A man in an airplane does not easily grasp the logic of a landscape beneath him. He does not naturally deduce that if the guerrillas are in the houses inside the hamlet, they will not be able to shoot at the infantry out in the rice field: the foliage around the hamlet will block their view. The optical relationship between a man in a diving plane and the profusion of a rural landscape also seems to automatically focus a pilot on the largest man-made structure he can see. The French Air Force had done the same thing during its war, bombing the peasant houses while the Viet Minh watched from foxholes under the trees on the dikes. When the U.S. Air Force was to bomb North Vietnam in the later years of this war the pilots were also inadvertently to blow up schools and pagodas, because these were normally the largest buildings in a rural Vietnamese community.

  Vann had not thought to appeal to Prevost for help to get the planes to hit the dike because he was under the misimpression that Prevost had left for the corps headquarters in Can Tho to set up a regional air control center. Prevost had actually been packing to leave when he heard the news of the helicopters being shot down. He had immediately driven to the command post at Tan Hiep and borrowed a VNAF L-19 sitting on the airstrip to survey the battlefield. With Vann also in the air, the two men had missed contact. Vann could not simply guide an air strike himself by talking directly to an American pilot. He was forbidden to do so. Because the VNAF had been zealous to guard its prerogatives and Anthis and his staff in Saigon had supported their protégé, Harkins had not responded to Vann’s urging that they adopt a workable system to allow Americans to take charge when the fighter-bomber pilots were American, as was the case with many of the pilots today. The Vietnamese FACs retained sole authority to control the strikes. Vann implored Dam to tell the VNAF FACs to stop incinerating houses and to have the fighter-bombers lay the napalm down the tree line. Words in any language did not seem to influence the automatonlike behavior of the airmen.

  What Vann scorned as ineffective was not easy for the guerrillas to endure. The rushing through the air of the incoming artillery, the shaking earth from the explosions of the shells and bombs, the heat from the flaming thatch, the way the napalm did make it difficult to breathe by suddenly sucking the oxygen out of the air, the devil’s din of .50 caliber machine guns, 20mm rapid-fire cannon, salvos of rockets, and the roaring of aircraft engines when the fighter-bombers swept overhead on their strafing runs—all of this was hard on the nerves as well as on the ears. And shortly before 1:00 P.M. the guerrillas saw the M-113s slowly approaching across the rice fields. It was nearly seven hours until darkness, so there was no avoiding a fight with these terrifying machines. The men in the foxholes began reliving in their minds the scenes of killing the behemoths had wrought in past battles.

  Their predicament was that, lacking antitank weapons, the Viet Cong leadership had not been able to devise any sound tactics for dealing with the M-113s. To attempt to give their troops enough courage to stand up to the armored tracks with small arms and grenades, they had developed a list of the supposed weaknesses of the carriers and had lectured on these in training classes. All of their observations were fallacious with the exception of two: they had noticed that the machine gunner was unprotected from the waist up when he stood in the command hatch on top to fire the .50 caliber, and they thought that the driver could be shot through his visor slit. There was no visor slit, but this observation still had a valid application. The drivers habitually drove with their heads sticking out of the hatch in front because it was easier and more fun, they could go faster, and the risk of being hit in previous actions had not been great enough to persuade them to “button up.” If they drove fully shielded with the hatch down, they had to look out through a reflecting mirror device. The device was bulletproof. Driving with it took practice, however, and vision was limited to about 100 degrees to the front. This meant that the driver had less freedom of maneuver and had to go more slowly. The Viet Cong leaders had also lectured their troops on the importance of subjecting the M-113s to massed fire, exactly as with aircraft. Each squad or platoon was to pick out the nearest carrier and to bring all of its weapons to bear simultaneously.

  The M-113 had been sent to Vietnam by American armor officers imbued with the U.S. Army doctrine of superior firepower. The .50 caliber gunner did not need a protective shield, they thought, because he would be able to suppress any opposition with a few bursts from this most lethal of machine guns. The .50 caliber had twice the effective range and three times the destructive force of the .30 caliber weapons the guerrillas possessed. The theory was reasonable provided that the gunner could see his intended target and could handle the machine gun well enough to hit consistently. The difficulty is that firing a .50 caliber is like riding an unruly horse. The recoil tends to drive the barrel up into the air and off the target. The problem is accentuated for a lightly built Vietnamese gunner. Unless the M-113 gunner was carefully trained to brace a foot against the hatch rim and rear back on the gun to keep the barrel pointed down, his shooting tended to be erratic. Most of Ba’s gunners had not been adequately trained.

  The Viet Cong battalion commander had about seventy-five men and his two .30 caliber machine guns in the foxholes along the section of the irrigation dike toward which the M-113s were headed. He had sited one machine gun at the southern corner—at the right end of the tree line as one faced the hamlet—where the dike was high. He had sited the second machine gun on the left, about three-quarters of the way up toward the northern end, at another point where the dike jutted out into the rice field. The two machine guns could catch anything in between in a crossfire.

  To try to keep up the resolve of his troops, he had been resorting all morning to mutual encouragement. When the company in Bac shot down the helicopters, he passed the news of their “victories” to the company in Tan Thoi to raise their confidence for the imminent engagement with the 7th Division battalion. After the men at Tan Thoi stopped the battalion, he circulated word of their “victory” to the men getting ready to battle the M-113s at Bac. The company commander at Bac and the platoon and squad leaders there had been controlling their men by using the six-foot-wide irrigation ditch behind the dike as their communications trench. They now waded once more from foxhole to foxhole through the waist-deep water, hugging the bank to stay out of sight of the planes, and briefed each man again on the supposed weaknesses of the armored tracks, seeking to convince the men that they could beat the machines if they used their heads as well as their weapons. In any case, they emphasized to each guerrilla, there was no place to go until dark. If they must die, they said, it was preferable to die with dignity, to perish fighting, rather than to run and be chopped down like buffalo. They had every man inspect his weapon to be certain it was functioning. Porters brought more boxes of captured American ammunition down the ditch in small sampans to replenish the company’s supply. A couple of wounded infantrymen were evacuated in the boats, and volunteers from the local guerrillas took their places. The three remaining wounded from the morning’s action were cadres and apparently Party members, as were all of the officers and most of the noncoms in the company. To set an example, they refused to leave the line and go to the first-aid station. The cadres composed a slogan and had the men repeat it from foxhole to foxhole: “It is better to die at your post. It is better to die at your post.”

  The carriers were taking so long to negotiate the remaining canals between them and Bac that Bowers, who was watching them from behind the paddy dike in front of the guerrillas, asked himself if they were taking a break for lunch. From overhead Vann fretted at their slow progress too. He wondered if he was ever going to get the M-113s to Bac. In between discouraging looks at the stalemated battalion at Tan Thoi and the sluggish movement of the second Civil Guard battalion up from the southwest, he circled over the armored tracks in
the L-19, haranguing Mays, who had kept the radio he and Scanlon had been sharing, to hurry Ba along. Easy fords over the canals could not be found, and brush and trees had to be cut to fill each one. The troops took their time. Because they fought for pay, they had no desire to risk their lives unnecessarily. Unless prodded, their normal work pace was like a permanent slowdown strike, based on the usually sound assumption that if they tarried long enough, the Viet Cong would go away. Ba, in no hurry today for his own reasons, did not push them. It was not until 1:00 P.M. that he was able to raise Major Tho on the radio and obtain an order to attack the Viet Cong at Bac.