A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Sheehan, Neil

  Bowers rushed back for the crew chief, an older black sergeant named William Deal. The engine was still screaming, and an occasional Viet Cong bullet cracked into the fuselage. Deal was strapped into a side seat behind the extra machine gun he had been firing at the guerrillas. He was hanging almost upside down because of the angle of the fuselage. The only hope he had of getting Deal out before the aircraft blew up, Bowers thought, was to drag him through the front. He kicked in the Plexiglás of the cockpit windshield and climbed inside. He assumed that Deal had been knocked unconscious by the impact. The plastic crash helmets the pilots and other helicopter crewmen wore were equipped with internal earphones and a mike for the intercom and radio. The wire from Deal’s helmet was tangled. Bowers released the chin strap and removed the helmet in order to be able to haul Deal free once he had unbuckled the seat belt. The moment he took off the helmet, Bowers discovered that he was trying to save a dead man. Deal had been shot in the head and apparently killed instantly.

  The engine had stopped screaming, having evidently burned itself out without blowing up. Bowers decided he would pull Deal from the wreck anyway. Bowers was strong from the farm and the Army and he looked like a country boy. His people were third-generation Irish and Germans who had migrated to Minnesota from Iowa via the coal mines of North Dakota. He was taller than Vann, with angular features and long arms, but was built in the same slight and wiry way Vann was at 150 pounds. Deal was a big man. Dragging him was hard work. Bowers had him out in the paddy and was pulling him toward the mound, his hands under Deal’s armpits and his fingers gripping the tough nylon of the gray flight suit Army aviators then wore. The explosion of what sounded like a bazooka rocket fired by the guerrillas at the helicopters told Bowers that he was behaving stupidly. “Hell, I can’t do anything for him. He’s dead,” Bowers said to himself. He laid Deal’s body down in the paddy. He felt no sense of disrespect, because the ground was not flooded here.

  In this first of America’s televised wars, Deal’s seven-year-old son back home in Mays Landing, New Jersey, saw his daddy in action on television the day he learned that his father was dead. The family was watching a news broadcast, and a film clip of an earlier helicopter operation was shown. “Look, that’s my daddy!” the boy yelled to his mother. Six hours later a telegram came from the Pentagon.

  Bowers crawled forward toward the second H-21 that had been downed. He could see one of the crew lying in the water next to a wheel of the aircraft, which was standing in the paddy like its partner. The explosion Bowers had taken for a bazooka rocket announced an attempt by the Viet Cong battalion commander to cap the success of his men. He was trying to burn the carcasses of the helicopters in the rice field. He had sent a squad out along another tree line that ran parallel to the helicopters on the north side, hoping that the squad would be able to set the helicopters ablaze with rifle grenades. These are fired by mounting the grenade on the end of the barrel and launching it with the propellant force of the powder in a blank cartridge. Bowers had heard the first of these grenades blow up. To the chagrin of the guerrillas and their leader, the helicopters were out of range. The few grenades they fired detonated harmlessly in the air. To burn the helicopters would be another act of great psychological value, and the battalion commander did not want to surrender the opportunity lightly. He parted with half a dozen precious shells from the 60mm mortar of his weapons platoon, the heaviest armament he had. These missed the helicopters too, raising no more than showers of muck and water, because the mortarmen were still amateurs in 1963. By the time Bowers reached the H-21 the mortaring had also ceased.

  The young man hunkering down in the water beside the wheel was the rear-door machine gunner, a private first class. He said that the pilots were with the ARVN behind the paddy dike and had abandoned him and his buddy, the crew chief, Spec. 4 Donald Braman, twenty-one years old, who was still inside and wounded. “I can’t get him out. Every time I try to climb back in there they start shooting at me,” he said, pointing toward the guerrillas in the tree line in front. Bowers told the soldier to crawl over to the dike where the pilots were lying near the Vietnamese lieutenant and said that he would look after his friend.

  As Bowers popped up and pulled himself through the door, several of the guerrilla riflemen saw him and started firing. The silhouette of the H-21 standing in the paddy made the Viet Cong tend to shoot high. They also naturally lost sight of Bowers once he was inside. The strings of bullets tearing through the upper part of the fuselage were frightening, but Bowers reasoned that he had a good chance of not being hit as long as he stayed down on the aluminum floor where Braman was lying between the two doors. In a few minutes, the guerrillas ceased wasting their ammunition on a dead machine.

  Braman was coherent and did not appear seriously hurt. He had been shot while quixotically firing his carbine at the Viet Cong from the helicopter door when the H-21 landed. He had emptied one clip and was bending over to reload when he had been struck in the shoulder. Ironically, all four crewmen from the first H-21 disabled, whom Braman’s helicopter had been trying to rescue, had escaped into the paddy unhurt. Bowers cut away Braman’s flight suit and examined the wound. It did not seem grave. The full-metal-jacketed bullet, apparently captured American ammunition, had made a clean wound, entering at the top of the shoulder and exiting just below the shoulder blade. There was some bleeding from the exit hole, but not much. The soldiers of most armies carry a first-aid bandage in a pouch on their belt. Bowers used Braman’s bandage to dress the top of the wound. He took his own bandage and also dressed the bullet’s exit below the shoulder blade, tying the cotton thongs of the bandage around Braman’s neck and shoulders so that they would hold the pad in place. He then made Braman lie on his back to put pressure on this lower bandage and stop the bleeding. Bowers decided that Braman would be just as safe inside the helicopter as he would be in the paddy and better off because the filthy water would not get into the wound and infect it. He explained this to Braman. The youth said he understood.

  Bowers gave Braman a drink from his canteen and then lay beside him for a few minutes chatting. He could see that Braman was trying to keep up his nerve and he wanted to help him. Braman had taken his wallet out of his pocket and placed it on the floor at his side. He picked it up with his good arm and showed Bowers a snapshot of his wife in one of the plastic photo holders.

  “Gee, I sure hope I get home to see her again,” Braman said. Bowers assured him that he would. “Don’t worry, you’re not hurt bad,” he said. “You’ll be all right and we’ll get you out of here soon.” He told Braman that he had to go, but would stay nearby and not desert him. He crawled back to the door on the far side and rolled out into the paddy, drawing another flurry of shots.

  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 ha
rdier 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 8imm 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 Sky raider 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.” V
ann 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.