The Battle of Ap Bac

by Neil Sheehan

  As the carriers neared the last canal, about five hundred yards from the helicopters and seven hundred from the irrigation dike, the guerrilla battalion commander decided to risk half a dozen of his carefully hoarded 60mm mortar shells to try to stop them. Several shells exploded close enough to two of the M-113s to frighten the crews and the mounted riflemen sitting on top next to the open main hatch, but none hit their mark. A mortar is an indirect-fire weapon that throws its projectile up in an arc. It obviously was not going to be of much use against these machines. If the guerrillas were to survive, they would have to perform with small arms and grenades a feat that had never been achieved before.

  Mays thought the mortar shells were coming from another ARVN unit overshooting a target. “Topper Six, request you shut off friendly mortar fire,” he radioed.

  “I’d like to, Walrus, but they’re not ours,” Vann said, in a bit of the gallows humor he always seemed to be able to summon up at such moments.

  When Mays passed along Vann’s answer a few minutes later to Scanlon, who was on another carrier, he appreciated the humor, but thought Vann must be mistaken in thinking the shells had come from the guerrillas. Scanlon did not believe there were any Viet Cong left at Bac. From the top of his vehicle, the scene there appeared tranquil. There was no shooting around the helicopters, and off to the right, just below the southern tree line where the guerrilla platoon had been that morning, he could see the lunch fires of the Civil Guardsmen cooking the rice and chicken they had looted from the peasants. “Well, it’s all over now,” Scanlon thought to himself. “All we have left to do is to police up those chopper crews and the wounded.”

  The troops of the M-113 company seemed to have the same thought. They were even more dilatory than before in cutting trees and brush to fill this last canal. Scanlon got the impression that this time it was less the calculated shunning of combat than the conclusion that their earlier delaying and the usual tactic of the Viet Cong in withdrawing had brought them the unspoken accommodation with their enemy that they sought. Instead of setting to work, most of the crews and the rifle squads stood on the canal bank and watched an air strike by a couple of planes that had just arrived. Planes bombing hamlets the guerrillas had evacuated was still a spectacle worth seeing. With the wounded Americans and Vietnamese at Bac on his mind, Scanlon walked up to one group of soldiers and told them to get busy. The men smiled at him. He went to his vehicle, took out an ax, and handed it to one of them. They reluctantly began to cut trees.

  Seeing that it was going to take another forty-five minutes to bring all of the carriers across the canal, Mays asked Ba to turn the company of mounted infantry over to his command. He could strip a couple of .50 caliber machine guns off the carriers and double-time over with the infantry in five minutes. The expedient would get Vann off their backs. If any guerrillas were tarrying in the hamlet, two .50 calibers and a company of infantry could handle them. Ba consented. He was no longer tense. Having reached Tho, he had the authorization he needed, and it also appeared to him that the Viet Cong had, in any case, departed.

  Mays thought there still were guerrillas at Bac. Knowing how Vann kept track of who was doing what on a battlefield, he did not believe that Vann would have incorrectly identified the source of the mortar fire. Because the mortaring had ceased so quickly, Mays assumed it was merely a delaying tactic to cover a withdrawal. He could not conceive that any sizable number of guerrillas would stay in the hamlet with the M-113s so long in view during the slow approach.

  He was surprised at Vann’s answer when he called him on the radio and proposed dismounting the infantry and a couple of machine guns. “No, goddammit,” Vann said in exasperation. “Get the carriers over there!” Vann did not have to explain to another professional soldier what else was in his mind. Mays understood him. Vann thought the Viet Cong remained at Bac in force, and he wanted Mays to hurry the M-113s over there and flush them out so that he could kill them as they tried to flee across the open ground to the east. There was no question in Mays’s mind, and he knew there was none in Vann’s, that once the M-113s reached the hamlet and assaulted, any guerrillas in Bac would fire a flurry of shots and run.

  It was 1:45 P.M., three hours and twenty minutes since Vann had originally sent his emergency call to this company of armored tracks a mile away, before three carriers—Ba’s command vehicle and two others—were across the last canal. One of the other two carriers was that of Lieutenant Cho, the most aggressive of Ba’s platoon leaders. Mays climbed onto Cho’s vehicle and set off toward the helicopters with these first two M-113s while Ba was towing a fourth across with a cable. He wanted to get the wounded American helicopter crewmen inside the safety of the armored hulls in case there was any shooting. The guerrilla battalion commander issued an order for every man to give his weapon a final check. The fight that had been so slow in coming began quickly.

  As this first pair of carriers swept across the rice field toward the downed helicopters, the guerrilla mortar crew fired their last three shells at the two machines. Mays dismissed the explosions and spouts of paddy water as another spastic delaying tactic. “We’ve put the fear of God into them and they’re moving out,” he thought. Cho was up manning the .50 caliber machine gun, and Mays was sitting beside him on top of the M-113. He sighted three of the pilots behind the paddy dike in front of the H-21 nearest the tree line, the one in which Braman had been wounded. He motioned to Cho to have the carrier driver swing the machine around to the right front of the aircraft and pull up beside the pilots. He leaned over and asked them where their wounded and their enlisted crewmen were. Officers are naturally expected to assume responsibility for their men and the wounded in an emergency. Two of the pilots, the survivors of the Huey, seemed dazed, and the third, a warrant officer from one of the H-21s, said that he didn’t know, which angered Mays. Just then Sergeant Bowers splashed over through the paddy and said that he had a wounded crewman to evacuate from the helicopter right behind them. Mays vaulted off the M-113. He had taken a step through the paddy when the Viet Cong battalion commander gave the order to fire. The tree line crashed with the opening volley. Bowers did not pause, and Mays controlled his nerves and stayed right behind him despite the cracks of the incoming bullets. Cho’s .50 caliber and the heavy machine gun on the other M-113 slammed like jackhammers in response to the guerrillas’ fire. Mays could make out amid the din the answering drumrolls of defiance from the Viet Cong machine gunner at the right-hand corner of the irrigation dike.

  He and Bowers climbed into the helicopter to carry Braman to safety after his nearly three-and-a-half-hour wait for rescue. The boy was dead. Bowers was stunned and could not believe it at first. He turned Braman over and examined his body. The boy had not been hit a second time, and his shoulder wound showed no sign of having hemorrhaged. A couple of hours later, when things calmed down again, Bowers was to be overcome by the thought that perhaps he had made a mistake in leaving Braman in the helicopter, whatever the risk of another wound or infection from the paddy water. “Maybe if I’d given him some company we might have kept up his hope and he’d still be with us,” he was to think. The notion that he was somehow responsible for Braman’s death was to haunt Bowers in the years ahead.

  A rash movement by Mays brought Bowers out of his shock. Mays stood up in the helicopter. A guerrilla rifleman spotted him through one of the windows and nearly caught him with a couple of quick shots. Mays shouted that they had better get the three pilots into the M-113. They plunged back through the paddy to the vehicle, and Bowers helped Mays hustle the aviators into the armored hull through the rear hatch, which dropped down like a clamshell door. Mays decided it was foolish to try to rescue any others at this point. Bowers had told him of Deal’s death and had said that except for Braman, none of the airmen had suffered wounds that required immediate evacuation. Bowers declined Mays’s offer of safety in the M-113, saying that he was going to attempt to rally the survivors of his Vietnamese infantry company, and took off at a crouch
down the dike.

  When Mays stepped back inside, he learned that they had lost the driver to a bullet through the head. Cho had come down from the .50 caliber to talk to Ba on the radio. Had Cho not relinquished the gun, Mays thought, he would probably be dead like the driver. The aluminum-alloy armor of the M-113 muffled the sound of the strings of bullets ricocheting from the sides of the hull. They bounced off with a bung, bung, bung. Mays called Vann, who was circling overhead in the L-19, on his portable radio. He reported that he had rescued three of the pilots and that two of the helicopter crewmen were dead. The radio then went silent. A Viet Cong bullet had clipped away the aerial where Mays had attached it on top of the carrier.

  The second pair of M-113s were on their way from the canal with instructions from Ba to drive around to the left side of the helicopters in order to give the men in the paddy cover from that flank. Scanlon had grabbed a hook on the back while the second machine was pulling away and swung himself aboard.

  Vietnam was Scanlon’s first war too. Like Bowers and Mays, he had been pushed into the military by the Korean War. Again as with Bowers and Mays, the desire of the Army to build up its forces in Europe to meet the perceived Soviet challenge there had kept him from seeing any combat in Korea. He had stayed in because the life of an American officer in the 1950s, with its sense of mission and travel, was a lot more interesting and meaningful than his civilian life as a dividends clerk in a St. Louis brokerage. Scanlon was a paratrooper as well as a tanker, and he was flush with the faith of the U.S. Army that the best defense is an offense and that aggressiveness wins battles and wars. This faith was the reason he now found himself in a rice paddy with his .45 caliber service pistol in his hand and bullets from guerrilla weapons he could not see ricocheting off the M-113 beside him.

  Scanlon’s pair of armored tracks swung around the left side of the helicopters as Ba had ordered them to do and drove directly toward the guerrilla machine gun dug in on the point three-quarters of the way up to the left where the irrigation dike jutted out into the rice field. When the M-113s came abreast of the aircraft the .50 caliber gunners loosed a couple of bursts at the tree line and were answered by the same concentration of raking fire that had opened on Mays’s two vehicles over on the right. The carriers stopped, the clamshell rear hatches dropped down, and the infantry squads piled into the paddy and fanned out. The drivers started again, and men and machines began an assault, the infantrymen holding their rifles at their hips and spraying clips of ammunition like water from a hose, guiding their aim by the path of the tracer bullets. The maneuver was automatic. The Saigon troops had been trained to do it by Scanlon and the other American instructors. They had done it in the past on several occasions when a bunch of guerrillas had been unlucky enough not to be able to flee before the carriers arrived and had then been sufficiently foolhardy to shoot at the M-113s. The maneuver was designed to supplement the machine guns by bringing to bear the full firepower of the infantry squad. Scanlon was one of the first out the door, unholstering his pistol as he cleared the hatch and began to slog forward through the paddy next to the armored track. He didn’t intend to shoot anyone himself. The pistol was merely an officer’s accouterment and a means of self-defense. Pulling it from the holster was just another reflex action. His job was to teach these men how to fight, and he wanted to be out there where he could see what was happening.

  One of the riflemen a couple of steps farther from the carrier was knocked down by a bullet. The .50 caliber gunner was initially confused by the guerrillas’ fusillade and thought that most of the fire was coming from a banana grove higher up on the left which also extended out into the paddy and where there were, in fact, no Viet Cong. He sprayed it with the machine gun while the last of the infantrymen were clearing the rear hatch. The recoil immediately bucked the barrel up into the air, and Scanlon saw the slugs cutting the tops off banana trees. The bullets lashing the front of the M-113 in another burst from the Viet Cong machine gun made the gunner realize his error, and he swung to the tree line on the irrigation dike ahead again, sweeping along it and cutting some of the saplings there in half. “The bastard is just spreading the stuff around in the air over their heads,” Scanlon cursed.

  The trouble was that neither the gunner, nor Scanlon, nor anyone else could see any guerrillas. Scanlon couldn’t see anything in front except a wall of green. The only logical place for the guerrillas to be was at the base of the wall, but the foliage was so thick there that his eyes couldn’t even pick up the muzzle flashes that would normally have given away the positions of the machine gun and the other weapons.

  A BAR man firing from beside the .50 caliber on top of the carrier was also hit before the assault had advanced many yards. The machine gunner lost his nerve, ducked down inside the hatch, and began shooting at the clouds. These guerrillas whom Scanlon had not expected to find at Bac were not behaving in the fashion he had come to expect Viet Cong to behave when confronted by M-113s. The sight of them fleeing panic-stricken before the armored tracks in previous actions had always reminded him of a covey of quail flushing from cover when the hunters walked in past the pointing dogs with their shotguns at the ready. It dawned on him that he and all of the infantry were going to be killed and wounded unless they returned to the shelter of the armored hulls right away. Scanlon spoke rudimentary Vietnamese. He called to the driver to stop, shouted and gestured to the infantrymen to return, and hurried back inside himself through the rear hatch.

  The reflex of aggressive action and the virtue of firepower were so ingrained in Scanlon by his training that it was beyond him to think the best thing to do was to back off, analyze the situation, and come up with a more sensible solution than a bull-headed assault. He had always been taught that when you couldn’t see the other fellow, the answer was to lock horns with him. In the jargon of the tactical instructors, the solution was to “resolve the firefight.” He thought that if he could get the .50 caliber gunners to work over the base of the tree line they could intimidate the Viet Cong while the drivers took the vehicles close enough for them to locate the guerrillas’ automatic weapons. Once located, these mainstays of the Viet Cong defense could be knocked out by the .50 calibers and the infantry could make another assault from the protection of the armored hulls. The rest of the guerrillas would then “bust like a covey.”

  The .50 caliber gunner wouldn’t stand up and aim the gun again when Scanlon told him to do so. “Get up, goddammit, and aim at the base of the tree line,” Scanlon screamed. He grabbed the man by his fatigue shirt and pulled and hauled at him, yelling these instructions in the best Vietnamese he could muster until he had the gunner up behind the .50 caliber firing it once more.

  The driver of the second M-113 began to back up. Scanlon saw that this crew was abandoning one of their infantrymen who had fallen wounded into the paddy. He shouted and waved his arms. The driver of the other vehicle heard him and pulled forward again, but no one would get out to pick up the wounded soldier. Scanlon sprang over the side of his M-113 and ran to the man. As he reached him, one of the infantrymen from the second M-113, braver than the rest, reached him too and helped Scanlon to pick him up and carry him in through the rear hatch and lay him on the floor. While they were rescuing this wounded soldier, yet another infantryman who was still in the paddy was hit and a BAR man on this second M-113 was struck. The .50 caliber gunner on the second M-113 had also lost his nerve and was cowering in the hatch and perforating the sky. After they had carried in the other wounded soldier, Scanlon pulled and yelled at this gunner too until he had him up and trying to aim the machine gun. “Shoot at the bottom of the tree line,” Scanlon shouted.

  These two M-113 crews had been intimidated. The drivers backed up behind the fuselages of the two H-21s to hide from the punishment of the guerrillas’ bullets. The Viet Cong ceased firing as soon as the machines retreated. At first the drivers headed toward the right side of the helicopters, where the M-113s Mays was with were engaged. Hearing the heavy firing over th
ere, they thought better of it and turned tail for the canal. Scanlon hollered at them to stop. He motioned to the driver of the carrier he was on to move forward of the helicopters again. The driver shook his head. Scanlon argued with the sergeant who was the vehicle commander and with the other crewmen that they had to go back and attack the Viet Cong, that there were pinned-down infantry and wounded from the reserve company who were depending on them. The sergeant said they already had three wounded among their own people on the carrier and that was enough. The driver resumed the retreat to the canal. Scanlon wanted no part of a “bugout.” He saw Bowers crouched nearby at the corner of a dike, gesturing to him. Scanlon leaped off to join him.

  Bowers had decided that he might as well link up with one of the officer advisors, because he had no further hope of doing anything useful with the unhurt survivors of his reserve company. He had tried to inspire an assault a few minutes before and felt foolish for having done so. As Scanlon’s pair of M-113s had arrived on the left flank of the helicopters, he had sought to lead the survivors in one of those classic tank-infantry team maneuvers in which he had been trained. The motto of the Infantry School at Fort Benning is “Follow Me!” Bowers in its best tradition had run down the paddy dike bent over and shouting “Attack!” in Vietnamese, stood up, waved with his carbine at the Saigon infantrymen to follow, and started forward with the armored tracks against the guerrillas in the tree line. He had gone about twenty paces before he had the feeling for the second time that day that he was alone. He looked behind. He was. Just then the M-113s began to back up, and Bowers hurried back to the dike, glad that he had not inspired anyone to follow him. He might have gotten more of these Vietnamese soldiers killed accomplishing nothing, which was how they had been dying around him all day. He told Scanlon that Braman and Deal were dead and that Mays had picked up three of the pilots. Scanlon asked him where the other aviators were, and Bowers led him over to the spot where they were lying behind the dike in front of the helicopters, watching the unfolding of the decisive struggle that had begun between the guerrillas and the armored machines.