Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  On the morning of 2 April, Easter Sunday, communist tanks were spotted heading south towards the Dong Ha bridge across the Cua Viet River. At 0915 an embattled Gerry Turley found himself appointed as chief adviser to the collapsing 3rd Division, after his American superior fled along with the Vietnamese divisional commander. Turley described the scene: ‘ARVN staff officers and their enlisted men simply stood up, grabbed their personal gear, and left the bunker. The most senior officers left first. Radios were left on and simply abandoned; maps and classified materials lay where last used. Order melted into chaos as frightened men, who had ceased to be soldiers, ran for the nearest vehicle. Frightened American soldiers carrying radios and stereo equipment scurried to the LZ with desperation on their faces. It was a dark and tragic day.’

  Turley was obliged to give one would-be fugitive US officer a direct order to remain – and later had to repeat the order twice more. He himself thought: the weather is against us; the ARVN infantry are disappearing; their artillery won’t shoot back; tanks are coming straight at us. He was so amazed by the instruction that he take charge that, as evidence of authenticity, he demanded the social security number of the full colonel who issued it – a fortunate precaution, because when Abrams arrived back in Saigon to receive dire reports from the north, he exploded in disbelief. The general was told: ‘A Marine lieutenant-colonel adviser at Quang Tri combat base says the situation there is desperate’ – this was Turley. However, Turley’s superior, Maj. Gen. Fred Kroesen at Danang, claimed that the man on the spot was wrong, and had succumbed to panic.

  The furious Abrams said: ‘My impression is that there’s a hell of a lot of marijuana smoking going on … I don’t know all the moves that have got to be made to stop this crap, but … I want this shit stopped!’ However, responsibility for the ‘shit’ rested with the North Vietnamese, and had only just started. ARVN leadership in the north collapsed. Turley said: ‘The key issue is always: who’s in charge? After six years, we still hadn’t figured that out. There was no unity of command. In the north, after we pulled out seventy thousand Americans, the South Vietnamese couldn’t fill the holes.’

  There was a bitter row between US officers on the ground and the USAF when a pilot’s survival radio beeped inside the DMZ after his EB-66 was shot down. While a huge effort was mounted to rescue him, the air force imposed a ban on artillery fire extending fifteen miles around the downed flier’s reported position – which included the corridor through which NVA columns were pouring south. Air-support adviser Major David Brookbank wrote in a bitter after-action report: ‘This gave the enemy an opportunity unprecedented in the annals of warfare to advance at will.’ The missing pilot was eventually recovered on 12 April by South Vietnamese SEALs and their US Navy adviser, after two fixed-wing search aircraft and a Jolly Green Giant helo had been lost to communist missiles. Though seventy thousand Americans remained in Vietnam, only six thousand were combat troops: the battles now developing would be decided by Southern troops and their advisers – and above all by air power.

  It was often said that helicopter aircrew formed the only institutional element of the US Army and Marine Corps in Vietnam whose courage and commitment never flagged. Among the foremost heroes of the 1972 battles were American pilots who took fantastic risks to rescue advisers trapped in the path of the onslaught. A Huey flew with an escort of two Cobras to rescue a five-man FO team from bunker Alpha 2, just below the DMZ. It landed under artillery fire and Lt. Joel Eisenstein sprinted thirty yards to the bunker, where he found Lt. Dave Bruggeman desperately wounded by shrapnel in the head – the young man had given his helmet to a frightened Vietnamese Marine whose own had been stolen. Eisenstein dragged the officer to the chopper, pulled aboard some wounded soldiers, then took off as one Vietnamese, enraged that they could not take him, aimed a ‘Thumper’ at them. The American experienced a spasm of terror: ‘The thought raced through my mind: that son-of-a-bitch is going to blow us out of the sky. If he can’t go, he’s not going to let anyone else go, either.’ The Vietnamese held his fire, but Bruggeman died in the air, in Eisenstein’s arms. Later, when they extracted more Americans from the big base at Ai Tu, the area’s top Saigon officer elbowed his way aboard first.

  In the operations centre at Quang Tri, the VNAF tactical air controller had vanished, along with many others. Turley told Danang that the Dong Ha bridge south must be destroyed ahead of the enemy’s tanks, but this was vetoed by senior US officers: it would be needed for a counter-attack. The Marine then urged the Vietnamese to reinforce the bridge’s defenders, fast. The divisional chief of staff refused. Turley pleaded instead with the brigade commander to act on his own initiative. After a long, expressionless pause, the Vietnamese looked at the map, then at Turley, blinked and said – not without the approval of his commandant in Saigon. The despairing American begged and implored the Vietnamese, who ‘finally said in the most beautiful English “I will give the battalion commander the order to hold Dong Ha.”’ Turley shouted, ‘God, maybe there is a chance after all!’

  The South Vietnamese deployed three LAW anti-armour teams on the south side of the bridge. They watched the invaders hoist their flag on one of its steel girders, even as refugees and stragglers still streamed across. Against orders, Turley instructed Captain John Ripley, an infantry adviser: ‘Somehow blow up the Dong Ha bridge.’ A few days earlier, Ripley was assuaging chronic boredom by assembling a thousand-piece jigsaw of King Kong. Now he hitched a ride on an M-48 tank east through Dong Ha city, the road already strewn with debris and wrecked vehicles from communist shelling. On the north bank of the river, where four years earlier Captain Jim Livingston and his Marine company had deployed before the battle of Daido, an enemy column of twenty tanks was visible. Some of the fugitive Vietnamese troops streaming towards the rear hijacked the American advisers’ jeep with its secure communications. The headquarters log recorded: ‘The 57th Regiment has broken and is in complete rout.’ A Vietnamese Marine major jumped down from a tank and seized a fleeing soldier, shouting, ‘Where are you going?’ The man cried, ‘No use, no use.’ The officer drew his pistol and shot his compatriot dead, but as a deterrent the execution was a failure: hundreds and soon thousands of Saigon’s troops were in flight.

  Yet some stayed – and fought gallantly. At the Dong Ha bridge a corporal named Luom fired a LAW at the lead communist tank – which missed. A second shot exploded below the turret, causing the tank hastily to reverse away; Luom was killed a few weeks later. The invaders diverted their infantry to the old French rail bridge nearby, of which one span had been shattered in 1967, but its fallen wreckage remained negotiable by men on foot. John Ripley called in US naval gunfire which checked the infantry, and thereafter destroyed four enemy tanks. Saigon’s tanks on the south bank began to fire on communist armour across the river.

  Then Ripley and the army’s Major Jim Smock set about destroying the highway bridge, where they found five disconsolate ARVN engineers contemplating a stack of boxes of plastic explosive. Ripley said later: ‘They seemed to be wondering if we were sent to kill them or if they should save us the trouble and kill themselves. No humans … ever looked more hopeless or helpless.’ While the Americans searched in vain for blasting caps, the Southern soldiers vanished. Between the bridge and the explosives was a big fence. Ripley crossed, then Smock heaved over twenty-five boxes, one by one, both men shredding their arms on the barbed wire.

  The Marine clambered out onto the girders and began laying charges, watched from the north bank by the enemy. They started firing at Smock, but oddly not at Ripley, though a T-54 tank eventually lobbed a few shells his way. After three hours of painful, exhausting, nerve-racking labour during which the devout thirty-three-year-old repeatedly muttered to himself, ‘Jesus, Mary, get me there,’ the bridge was set. They found a box of electrical detonators, then ran with the wires back to the ARVN lines, took a battery out of a wrecked jeep of which the tyres were blazing, and triggered a ‘hell-box’. Nothing happened. Desperately they
pressed it again and again, until suddenly there was a huge explosion, and the southern span collapsed into the river. Ripley radioed Gerry Turley: ‘The Dong Ha bridge is down. I say again … The bridge is down. Over.’ Turley logged the message at 1630. Walt Boomer, facing troubles of his own further west, said later with profound gratitude: ‘Ripley saved our lives.’ In Saigon a briefer told Abrams that the Marine had blown the bridge ‘while waiting for clearance’, which prompted relieved laughter among the command group. Ripley later received a Navy Cross: his feat played a critical role in slowing the southward communist advance.

  Further west at Camp Carroll, Southern regimental commander Col. Pham Van Dinh, who had led a battalion at Hue in 1968, claimed to have received a stark message from his local NVA counterpart: ‘Surrender or die.’ He requested a ceasefire to discuss this demand with his officers, thirteen of whom met in his operations room at 1500 on 2 April. He told them: ‘If we continue to fight, many people will be killed. Even if we die or are wounded and win a victory, nobody will take care of us. Now, we must take care of ourselves.’ A lone major urged fighting on, while the rest remained mute. Dinh secured a vote for surrender, then approached his advisers, Lt. Col. William Camper and Maj. Joe Brown. Camper already regarded the regiment, which contained many former deserters, as ‘a disaster looking for a place to occur’. He had met Dinh seven years earlier, and even before the current debacle was shocked by the change in him – the Vietnamese seemed ‘pudgy and apathetic’.

  Dinh himself later admitted to ‘some problems in my head’. His men would not fight any more, he told the advisers, and suggested that they might care to shoot themselves ‘to save us from embarrassment’. Camper said, ‘That’s not what Americans do,’ and momentarily considered shooting the Vietnamese. Then he radioed Turley and said enigmatically that he was leaving his position ‘for reasons he could not explain’. Turley. knowing nothing of what was taking place, said: ‘No, colonel, stay where you are and do your damn job!’ But when the Americans made plain their desperate circumstances, a helicopter ducked in through a hail of communist fire that damaged its hydraulic lines. Covered by five Cobra gunships it retrieved the advisers, who eventually reached Quang Tri. At Carroll, eighteen hundred prisoners and five batteries of artillery fell into communist hands: Dinh was rewarded with a commission in the NVA.

  When Turley reported these developments to MACV, he received an enraged response: ‘Colonel, you’re crazy. [The Southern corps staff] doesn’t know about any such surrender. Camp Carroll has twenty-two guns, two thousand ARVN soldiers … You’ve flipped.’ Shortly afterwards Turley was ordered to leave his post forthwith, fly to Saigon and report personally to Abrams. He was brutally reprimanded, saved from disciplinary action only because he could show his orders in writing. At a time when everywhere from the White House downwards a hunt for scapegoats had begun, it was the Marine’s misfortune that he bore the first ill-tidings.

  The communist assault on FSB Sarge, west of Carroll, started with a storm of rockets. The neighbouring hilltop was swiftly overrun, and its defenders melted away. Walt Boomer, profoundly lonely, never expected to see fellow-adviser Ray Smith again – and had little hope of himself going home either. The shelling of Sarge intensified, casualties mounted, including two young American electronic eavesdroppers killed. After the Marine’s bunker took a direct hit, it was plain the position could not hold, and he urged the Vietnamese CO to pull out. Eventually the major assented: ‘We go now.’ They set off in darkness, accompanied by their walking wounded, and spent the ensuing two days in jungle, never seeing enemies but often hearing them. Then, as they emerged into open country, communist soldiers spotted them, and cut loose.

  Boomer’s Vietnamese companions broke and ran in all directions. The American shouted in English that meant nothing to them: ‘Stop! Don’t run! Don’t leave your wounded!’ He was tempted to shoot his own Vietnamese wireless-operator when he found that the man had thrown away his set – Boomer’s lifeline. As for other fugitives, Boomer said: ‘I can remember clearly the terrified look in their eyes as they streamed past me … At that point it was every man for himself.’ Their small group kept walking – or rather, stumbling at the outer limits of physical and emotional exhaustion – until they reached another firebase, still in friendly hands. To Boomer’s amazement, Ray Smith also appeared, having carried out a wounded Southern officer aided by just one Vietnamese – his battalion’s other sixty-eight survivors declined to help. They knew they must keep moving ahead of the communist tide, but Boomer felt too exhausted to march another mile. Smith tied a rope around his colleague’s wrist and knotted it on his own belt; thus joined, the two staggered on their way through darkness. At dawn they approached Quang Tri. Smith, who still had a wireless, contacted astonished Americans who had assumed them dead, and who now sent a Huey. Half their battalion were dead or captive, however. And the communists had hardly started.

  On 3 April the NVA made its first move in the Central Highlands, against FSB Delta. In the weeks that followed, the key figure in the region’s defence was John Paul Vann – he who had presided over disaster at Ap Bac in January 1963. In the intervening years a transformation had overcome him which few of his old admirers thought benign. From being the shrewd sceptic, the reckless anti-authoritarian, he had become the obsessive warrior. David Elliott said: ‘Vann had gone off his rocker. In his last years he was saying stuff that the old Vann would have completely rejected.’ By forging an unlikely alliance with II Corps’ commander, the heavy, indolent Gen. Ngo Dzu, Vann had secured appointment as its senior American, a civilian with two-star ranking who acted the part of local warlord. Though Abrams disliked Vann, the little man’s messianic commitment had won the admiration of Richard Nixon, Fred Weyand – and Southern officers, who called him ‘Mr B-52’, because of his extraordinary ability to magic up air strikes in desperate situations.

  In the Central Highlands during what proved the last two months of Vann’s wild life, he deployed every ounce of his energy and fury to repel the North Vietnamese. He flew resupply sorties, directed air support, goaded commanders and flew through firefights in a fashion that eventually broke the nerve of his longtime favourite pilot, Bob Richards, so that even copious infusions of whiskey no longer persuaded the flier to play chauffeur to a man indifferent to bullets. Vann treated Vietnam as if the struggle was his personal property, so that many Americans found it impossible to imagine Vann without the war, the war without Vann. His courage was that of a near-madman, yet one who was intelligent enough maybe to know, in his heart, that he was striving to defy destiny.

  A weariness – that of years rather than of mere days or weeks – oppressed many Southern troops as they deployed in the Highlands. Airborne operations officer Captain Doan Phuong Hai recalled as his unit drove up Route 14 towards Kontum that he had been wounded in an action on the same road in 1967, then treated in a local Catholic church by its much-loved French priest ‘Father Joe’. Now, Hai saw that the church’s steeple had collapsed; the structure was reduced to rubble. His 11th Airborne Battalion was deployed to hold Firebase Charlie, six miles south-west of Tan Canh. Its commander, Lt. Col. Nguyen Dinh Bao, known to his officers as ‘Brother Five’, was deeply unhappy about his orders, which as so often required the unit to hold a fixed position, leaving the initiative to the enemy. Patrols soon met strong forces of Northerners, digging bunkers and gun positions within easy range.

  The two sides began exchanging artillery fire. On 6 April the NVA launched a major ground assault on FSB Delta, south of Charlie, which continued all night. The attackers broke through Delta’s perimeter and overran half its positions. By dawn they had been driven out with heavy loss, but the men of the 11th knew that it would be their own turn next. Bao, who was much respected, told his two most trusted subordinates, Major Le Van Me and Captain Hai, to occupy bunkers a distance from his own, so that one of them could assume command if he was killed. He urged parsimony with ammunition, had every available Claymore planted, push
ed out listening posts. Hai wrote: ‘The battalion prepared for terrible times.’

  At night as the enemy build-up continued, they watched convoys of Moltova trucks moving freely down the Ho Chi Minh Trail with headlights blazing. ‘Our guns lacked the range to reach them. We called for air strikes, but none were available. We asked [the unit’s adviser Major John] Duffy for B-52s, but nothing happened.’ Bao had attended jungle-warfare school in Malaysia, where he acquired a British camouflaged parachute smock which he loved to wear. His superstitious soldiers, however, fixed on this garment as a bad omen: they begged him to take it off, though he remained impervious to their pleas.

  In the succeeding days a storm of artillery fire fell on Charlie, followed on 9 April by the first infantry attack. This was repulsed with heavy losses, but the enemy’s 130mm guns inflicted increasing punishment on the defenders. On the 10th, after another pulverising bombardment, the enemy’s 320th Division launched a succession of assaults. Late that night, ‘Brother Five’s’ officers renewed their pleas for him to discard his smock. He said dismissively: ‘All right, I’ll think about it tomorrow – which will be in about thirty minutes. You guys just like to give me a hard time, or maybe you want to get your hands on my smock. Clothes don’t have a fucking thing to do with luck!’