by Neil Sheehan
At about the same time that Scanlon was jumping off the retreating pair of M-113s to join Bowers in the paddy, Ba was arriving on the right flank where Mays was located with another pair. He had used his carrier to tow two more across the canal and, leaving one behind to continue the towing process, had rushed off with the other to take charge of the fight. Ba was in the lead M-113 of his pair, sitting up against the open cover of the command hatch behind the .50 caliber. He normally directed the company from that position. His vision was unobstructed and he liked to fire the gun when he had an opportunity. Mays saw him coming and reached down for the push-button microphone on the radio in Cho’s carrier. He intended to tell Ba that they should not attack frontally but should instead maneuver far around to the right and approach the guerrilla foxhole line from that end of the irrigation dike. Although they would still face the machine gun and the guerrilla squad deployed there, they would be coming up against a small number of weapons rather than a whole line. (Mays could not see the squad. He had by now spotted the machine gun and a rifleman in a foxhole behind it, because the vegetation on the dike was thinnest at that point.) The maneuver would be like “crossing the T” in a naval battle. They would be reducing the guerrillas’ firepower drastically while taking maximum advantage of their own, and in the same stroke they would minimize their exposure. Once they had killed the machine-gun crew, Mays believed, they could bring the foxhole line under flanking fire from this right end and drive the guerrillas out of it.
When Ba’s carrier drew near and Mays was about to speak to him, Ba stepped down into the hatch for a moment, probably to make an adjustment to the radio. Cho had told him of the resistance they were receiving, and Ba was talking to him and to the other vehicle commanders over his radiophone headset to coordinate all four machines for an assault. His carrier happened to hit a mound or to jolt its way across one of the low paddy dikes just as Ba stepped down. The .50 caliber gun swiveled on its mount and the heavy barrel smacked Ba on the forehead, knocking him half-conscious into the vehicle.
The company was temporarily leaderless. Ba’s executive officer, a competent and experienced man who could have assumed command immediately and with whom Mays could have communicated because he spoke English, was in the hospital at the time with typhoid fever. Cho, despite his aggressiveness in individual actions, was apparently incapable of taking charge, because he did not do so. Since Mays had also been unable to speak to Ba before the machine-gun barrel struck him, Ba had not given Cho any instructions to flank around the right end. Cho’s English was limited to a few words, and Mays’s Vietnamese was of similar non-fluency. Mays knew words like “assault” and “together” and repeated them to Cho with gestures in body Vietnamese, but for the next twenty minutes no coordinated action was taken. The four carriers and three or four others that joined them during that time (the crews of the pair Scanlon had been with and two or three others stayed back at the canal out of cowardice) made individual sorties against the tree line, all of which were beaten back.
The twenty minutes were critical. The men most often killed or wounded during these confused actions were the .50 caliber gunners. They were the easiest for the Viet Cong to hit, because they were silhouetted against the sky on top of the armored tracks. The gunners also usually happened to be the sergeants who commanded both the carrier crew and the rifle squad. The system had been designed by the Americans so that machine and infantry would function smoothly in a team. The noncoms had taken to commanding their vehicles and rifle squads from behind the machine gun for the same reasons of unobstructed vision and the fun of firing the gun that had led Ba to choose this perch as the place from which to direct the company. Since the Americans had told them they could put unlimited faith in the efficacy of the .50 caliber and earlier actions had not been that dangerous, the sergeants had not learned to command the vehicles and squads from a more protected spot. Once the shooting started, everyone acted out of training with no thought of the consequences until it was too late. The company first sergeant, who was Ba’s closest friend in the unit, climbed up behind the .50 caliber as soon as he had done what he could for his dazed captain. He ordered the M-113 forward into an attack on the machine gun at the right corner of the tree line and after a few moments of firing fell back into the vehicle mortally wounded, shot through the throat. During the twenty minutes that Ba was too stunned to command his company he was progressively losing the capacity to control the individual carriers. The dead and wounded vehicle commanders were replaced by less experienced men, and the morale of the crews began to crack.
The moment had come for American technology to fill the human gap. The M-113 with the flamethrower mounted on top in place of a .50 caliber churned forward, the long tube sticking out from the rotating turret like a cannon. “Hey, this is going to be it. This guy will just hose down that tree line and burn them out,” Scanlon bragged to one of the helicopter pilots lying beside him behind the paddy dike. The flamethrower carrier drove up to within a hundred yards of the tree line, sufficiently close for the burning jet of jellied gasoline to reach the frightened men whose bullets were bouncing off this armored fire-spitter. The operator rotated the tube from side to side ominously and then focused it straight ahead to begin roasting the guerrillas. He turned on the device. A spout of flame shot out twenty to thirty yards and expired in the air. The crew had not mixed enough of the jelling agent with the gasoline to keep the jet of flame burning properly.
“Oh God, the force and effect of a Zippo lighter,” Scanlon moaned. (Zippo is the brand name of a popular cigarette lighter.)
The pilot, who had been wounded in the arm, was more philosophical. “It figures,” he said. “Everything else went wrong, so what the hell.”
Vann was nearly out of his mind with frustration as he circled overhead in the rear seat of the spotter plane, watching the guerrillas shoot the gunners off the carriers, the machines back away one by one, and the flamethrower fail too. It was the most maddening moment in this utterly maddening day. He was cursing Ba for not assembling all of his M-113s for a simultaneous assault and cursing Harkins for making it impossible for him to influence the course of the battle. He was as surprised as everyone else at the refusal of the guerrillas to break and run from the armored tracks; what was unbearable was his inability to recoup from this unexpected setback. He wanted to tell Mays and his jackass of a counterpart that if they were getting too much fire for the .50 caliber gunners to expose themselves, they should button up the hatches and charge into the tree line, dumping out the infantry to kill the guerrillas in the foxholes as soon as they ran up the dike. With Mays no longer responding to his calls over the field radio, Vann had no alternative means of talking to him or Ba. The radios installed in the M-113s had different frequencies than the regular radios in the L-19s, which was why Vann and the advisors had been using portables. Vann had been fruitlessly asking Saigon for months for an L-19 equipped with a radio matching those in the carriers.
The Viet Cong in the foxholes could not afford to curse. They were battling now to avoid annihilation. Ba had finally recovered enough from the concussion of the .50 caliber barrel slamming into his forehead to pull seven to eight carriers together and begin a coordinated assault on the right front of the guerrillas’ foxhole line. Still dazed from the blow and shocked by the death of his first sergeant and by his surprise that the guerrillas were standing and fighting, he could not think clearly enough to respond to Mays’s repeated calls over the radio to flank around the right end. He was too stunned to even realize that he ought to force the four or five carriers hanging back at the canal to come forward and bolster his attack. He could not think beyond making the frontal assault he had been taught most often to do. He instinctively rejected the tactic that Vann wanted him to take of buttoning up the hatches and charging into the tree line. Vann did not know that as an armor officer Ba had been taught, with good reason, never to attempt this tactic that would appear intelligent to an infantryman. The instructors at S
aumur and Fort Knox had warned him that fools ran armored vehicles blindly into a woods. The enemy infantry could swarm all over the vehicles the moment they were in the trees, toss a grenade inside as soon as someone opened a hatch to get out, or shoot the crew like rats popping out of holes in a box as they tried to climb free. It was also obvious to Ba that there was water on the far side of the dike. If he charged up the near side, the carriers would acquire enough momentum to run over the dike and plunge into the irrigation ditch. The water would rush in through the air-intake vents and flood the engines, and the carriers would be stuck at a crazy angle, unable to use their machine guns, with guerrillas all around them. In his befuddled state the only solution that occurred to Ba was to shoot his way into the tree line with the .50 calibers and the BARs, and with what firepower the rifle squads could add by banging away over the armored sides; mount the dike carefully enough not to run across it into the irrigation ditch; and then roll up the guerrillas’ foxhole line if they did not break once their perimeter had been breached.
The armored tracks ground forward through the muck and water of the paddy in a ragged line. The twenty minutes of confused individual actions and the loss of so man sergeants told of indecisiveness when resolve was needed most. Ba had difficulty coordinating the vehicles, and the crews showed their weakened morale. The assault was hesitant, the attackers uncertain. The drivers would not stick up their heads anymore. They were all down inside, trying to steer through the bulletproof reflecting mirrors. The lack of practice and the limited vision made them go more slowly than they should have and increased the exposure to the guerrillas’ fire of the .50 caliber gunners and the infantrymen hammering away from on top with clip after clip of ammunition from their BARs and M-1 rifles. The unaccustomed handicap was also making it impossible for the drivers to keep the vehicles abreast of each other and thus bring the combined firepower of the seven or eight carriers to bear at once. A couple of the substitute .50 caliber gunners would not stand up behind their weapons. They crouched in the hatch and fired the guns by sticking up their arms, punishing the clouds again.
Bowers’s admiration for the soldierly stuff of his enemy was rising with each second. He was fascinated at the way the guerrillas were keeping their heads and fighting wisely as the squat, dark green brutes closed with them. They did not disperse their fire along the entire line of armored tracks. Instead they focused their weapons on whichever vehicle happened to be foremost. He watched the bullets dance off the hull when the two machine guns and the other weapons held an M-113 in a crossfire until they had killed or wounded the crewman manning the .50 caliber or hit a BAR gunner or a rifleman. The driver would hesitate and stop at the casualty. The Viet Cong would then cease fire for a few moments to conserve ammunition or shift their torrent of bullets to the next machine that had pushed to the forefront. “By God, you have to hand it to them,” Bowers thought to himself. “They are really hanging in there.” The assault faltered. Some of the drivers began to back up. Even the aggressive Cho, in whose vehicle Mays was riding, let his crew pull away after the .50 caliber gunner was hit.
Ba’s carrier and one or two others kept pressing forward, despite casualties, and were within fifteen to twenty yards of the irrigation dike. Ba’s mercenaries had not bargained for a fight like this, but they were Vietnamese and some of them were brave enough once they were in the midst of it. The nerve of the guerrillas was cracking. In a few moments one of the ten-ton behemoths was going to climb the dike and the guerrillas’ will to resist would snap. The crews of every carrier that had been beaten off would take heart and surge forward. The Viet Cong officers and noncoms would not be able to shout down the panic. Their men would jump out of the foxholes and run and the butchery would begin again as it had so often in the past.
Squad Leader Dung stopped the machines. He leaped from his foxhole and stood up right in front of the metal beasts. Their ugliness was part of the terrifying effect these evil contrivances had always had on him and his comrades. The fore ends angled down into broad snouts with popeyes on top where the two headlights for night driving protruded. Yanking a grenade from his belt, he pulled the pin, cocked his arm, and hurled it at one of the monsters. The grenade landed on top of the M-113 and erupted with a great bang and flash. Carried beyond their fear by his courage, the men of his squad abandoned the protection of their foxholes to join him, throwing their grenades at the carriers too. A guerrilla over on the left named Son also sprang up on the dike and shot a rifle grenade down the line at the armored tracks. From where he was lying out in the paddy, Bowers saw two of the grenades burst in the air just above the carriers. Dung was apparently unhurt, but three of his comrades were killed, and all the other members of his squad were wounded by bullets from the armored tracks or by shrapnel from their own grenades. Whether the shrapnel also killed or wounded any more men aboard the machines is unknown. It did not matter. The deafening clap and the flare of the exploding grenades were enough to shatter what spirit the crews had left. Ba allowed the driver of his carrier to back up, and the one or two vehicles persevering with him followed. The assault had failed. Ba was too stunned and emotionally drained to organize another attack. His crews were so demoralized they would not have obeyed him had he tried to do so. Mays made two last attempts with Cho’s carrier to turn the guerrillas’ flank by killing the machine-gun crew on the right end. Both sorties were driven back with the loss of two more .50 caliber gunners and riflemen. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon. The Viet Cong had accomplished the impossible.
The anticlimax was a macabre farce staged by Cao. He had flown to Tan Hiep airstrip from his new corps headquarters at Can Tho at 11:30 A.M. that morning, right after hearing the news that four helicopters had been downed. He arrived alarmed at the publicity that would ensue from the helicopter losses and became increasingly distraught over what Diem might do to him as the radio brought in reports of more and more casualties. Diem would hold him responsible, because Dam was his man. He was furious with Vann and Dam for putting him into what was, from his point of view, the worst possible predicament. They had thrust him into a situation where he was being forced to fight the Viet Cong. When the information from Ba’s company indicated that the machines were also failing to flush the guerrillas and give him easy killing, he began scheming to extricate himself from this battle and shift the blame for the losses to someone else.
Vann first heard of Cao’s plan to rescue Cao in a radio call from Dan Porter while he was still circling over Bac, watching the final sortie by Cho’s carrier against the machine gun at the right corner. Porter had flown to Tan Hiep with Cao that morning. He informed Vann in voice code that Cao had requested a battalion of paratroops from the Joint General Staff reserve in Saigon. Vann asked Porter to have Cao drop the paratroops in the rice fields and swampland on the east side of Tan Thoi and Bac, the one open flank that the guerrilla battalion commander could not retreat across during the day, but that would become the logical escape route after dark.
“Topper Six, I’ve already told him to do that and he says he’s going to employ them on the other side,” Porter replied.
“I’ll be right there, sir,” Vann said, and instructed the pilot to return to the airstrip as fast as possible. He knew instantly what Cao’s game was. As he was to put it in his after-action report for Harkins, Cao intended to use the airborne battalion not to trap and annihilate the Viet Cong but rather “as a show of force … in hopes that the VC units would disengage and the unwanted battle would be over.”
Vann clambered out of the little plane and strode into the command-post tent. He told Cao that on this day he could not spend all of this blood for nothing. He had to close the box around the guerrillas and destroy them. Porter supported him, both of them arguing that Cao had no choice as a responsible commander. “You have got to drop the airborne over there,” Vann said, poking his finger at the big operations map where it showed the open flank on the east side of the two hamlets. He became so angry and was jabbing so ha
rd at the map that he almost toppled over the easel on which it rested.
Cao would have none of this soldier’s logic. “It is not prudent, it is not prudent,” he kept replying. It was better, he said, to drop the paratroops on the west behind the M-113s and the Civil Guards where they could tie in with these other units. “We must reinforce,” he said.
Vann was later to sum up Cao’s logic with the tart remark: “They chose to reinforce defeat.”
He lost his temper one more time. “Goddammit,” he shouted, “you want them to get away. You’re afraid to fight. You know they’ll sneak out this way and that’s exactly what you want.”
Embarrassed at being driven into a corner, Cao pulled a huffy general’s act on Vann, the lieutenant colonel. “I am the commanding general and it is my decision,” he said. Brig. Gen. Tran Thien Khiem, the chief of staff of the Joint General Staff, who had flown down from Saigon at Cao’s request and was present during the argument, did not object. Harkins had not come down to find out why an unprecedented five helicopters had been lost, nor had any of his subordinates appeared, so there was no American general in the tent to brandish his stars for Vann and Porter. Cao then attempted to mollify Vann by pretending to move up the drop time. He said, “We will drop at sixteen hundred hours”—4:00 P.M. civilian time. Knowing that it was useless to argue further and hoping that he might at least get a paratroop battalion early enough to be of some use, Vann went back to his spotter plane.
He spent the rest of the afternoon asking when the paratroops were going to arrive and attempting to persuade Cao and Dam and Tho to turn what was about to become the biggest defeat of the war so far into its biggest victory. They still had the opportunity to redeem the day. All they had to do was to pull the two Civil Guard battalions and Ba’s company together for a combined attack on Bac. As demoralized as Ba’s men were, they could have at least supported the Civil Guards with their .50 calibers, and the guerrillas could not have withstood the total force. Neither Cao nor Tho, who were the men in control, could see that the sensible and moral course was to press ahead and accept the further and proportionately minor casualties that would be necessary to give meaning to the sacrifice of those who had already been killed and maimed.
