J. Paul Vann & Battle of Ấp-Bắc

[vinhtruong]

(If the Vietnam War’ Wikileaks under the eyes of many South Vietnamese military personnel, John Paul Vann didn’t really live up his legend as Vietnam’s Lawrence of Arabian. This noble-man just understands the Vietnamese more much than the other outsiders for the rest parts, Vann is just a “pain-in-the-ass” cocky, haughty … thank to the power of a top ranking military advisor of Second Military Corps. Purposefully, the U.S was helping the people of South Vietnam repel communist aggression? Mostly false … The heart of U.S Foreign Policy was “the desire to control foreign markets, labors, and resources.)
John Paul Vann, the civilian general of the mountains of the Highlands and the rice deltas of the Central Coast with his staff at II Corps headquarters at Pleiku. To Vann’s left is his chief of staff, Colonel Joseph Pizzi; to Vann’s right is his military deputy, Brigadier General George Wear.
According to axiom-2 (the US had no legitimate reason to be involved in Vietnamese affairs) But how explanation: on January, 2 , 1963, hereby above photo two H-21 and one Huey were shoot down on the battlefield in Mekong Delta. The networks and major newspapers shouldn’t report. It was as if it did not happen? Unquestionably, the struggle for Vietnamese independence was fast becoming an “American-War” raising serious questions about the nature of U.S involvement in Southeast Asia.

UH-1/HUEY IN VIETNAM: VNAF CHOPPERS, THE LEGACY OF VALOR
The Battle of Ap-Bac, the first Huey to operate in Vietnam were medivacs by HU-1As that arrived in April 1962, before the United States became officially involved in the conflict. These UH-1s supported the ARVN troops, but American crews flew them. In October, the first armed Huey/UH-1C, equipped with 2.75-inch rockets and M.30 caliber machine guns, began flying in Vietnam. During the next decade, the Huey was upgraded and modified based on lessons learned in combat: Bell introduced the UH-1D and UH-1H variants. It was in Vietnam-War that Army and Marine soldiers first tested for troop-assault combat training to the new tactics of “Airmobile Warfare”
The Huey became a symbol of the big U.S. training combat forces in Vietnam and millions of people worldwide watched it fly in TV news reports. At its peak in March 1970, the U.S. military operated more than 3,900 helicopters in the war in Vietnam and two thirds of them were Huey. During the course of the war, the UH-1 went through several upgrades. The UH-1A, B, and C models (short fuselage, Bell 204) and the UH-1D and H models (stretched-fuselage, Bell 205) each had improved performance and load-carrying capabilities. The UH-1B and C performed the gunship and some of the transport duties until 1967, when the new AH-1G Cobra arrived on the scene. After years long for US combat troop training, now, finally by the so called Vietnamization stratagem, the Americans started to pull out of the Vietnam War in 1972, the VNAF took over the burden of helicopter troop-transportation. The ARVN soldiers who rode to the battle in VNAF choppers UH-1Hs, suddenly became the ‘VNAF-Cavalier’ In a typical air assault mission, Huey helicopters inserted infantry deep in enemy territory while Huey gun-ships, equipped with machine guns, rockets, and grenade launchers, often escorted the transports. Within minutes, helicopters could insert entire battalions into the heart of enemy territory – this was AIRMOBILITY.

So hereby, I’m introducing in this book a pair of battles in which Ấp-Bắc and Lam Son 719 were unofficial claims for stirring war, un-legitimate reason to bind with U.S involvement.
Purposefully, an urgent meeting hosted by Skull and Bones 40, Mc George Bundy who snatched two Secretaries, Dean Rush and McNamara to Honolulu jointed with Cabot Lodge and General Paul Harkins on November, 20, 1963 (two days prior to great drawback J.F. Kennedy must be assassinated) – assigned McNamara to initiate a fabrication that so called Hanoi’ provocative: “Gulf Tonkin Incident” for retaliation but not war-declaration, then moving US combat troop later in South Vietnam for CIP’ stratagem.
In the early 1961, there were only fifteen thousand Americans in South Vietnam in advisory and support capacities. By then fewer than one hundred Americans had died, these helicopters were shot down in the rice paddies in Mekong Delta at Ap-Bac battle. Helicopter H-21s Work-horse were already ten years old, still the old rickety; that a H-21’s flight crewmember, Mert Perry’s wife Darlene trying tearfully one day to dissuade him from going on a helicopter borne mission saying; They’re only put together with Elmer’s glue.

Vietnam/Iraq Wars, Two different Wars one Destructive parallel
I hope this article as a great explanation of how the Vietnam-War should be conducted in term of counterinsurgency, and how it relates to the dilemma of today's Iraq war. The article also provided a precise, military point of views on the Vietnam-War as a whole that many others had missed. It is worth reading sometimes an unknown author would presents great wisdom about Vietnam-War that many "smart ass" self-proclaimed military-experts in main stream media won't be able to offer. After reading
this article, you will figure out what will happen to the people of Iraq in the coming days. [Just a little note before you read, under the eyes of many ARVN troops, John Paul Vann didn't really live up his legend as Vietnam's Lawrence of Arabia. This guy just understands the Vietnamese more much than the other outsiders. For the rest parts, he is just a "pain-in-the-ass," cocky, haughty....thanks to the power of a top ranking military advisor of Second Military Corps. This little known aspect of the Vietnam War stemming from axiom-1, some venal journalists as Francois Sully, Robert Shaplen, Walter Cronkite …a typical writer in the book about John Paul Vann and the advisory effort, A Bright and Shining Lie, the big lie is what the author, Neil Sheehan, leaves out of the book in which orientated towards the Permanent Government’s axiom-1 [There was never a legitimate non-communist government in Saigon] and also Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh with his book “Lotus on Sea of Fire” New York Time on 24, 25 September 2001 at Cathedral Riverside, New-York, on his lecture “Embracing The Anger” all focus on only seven guerrillas shot up in the air, then U.S bombardment kill 300.000 Kien Hoa residents. It sound damn lie and unbelievable, this small city having lest than 100.000 but he exaggerated with impact-purpose, because at the end of axiom-1 showed-up for worldwide even United Nations members will vote double votes for Viet Cong Flag flapping on Saigon Palace in time Saigon-fall, more than lest of North and South Vietnam flags.
So most of Sheehan’s book deals with the ARVN and the advisory effort up to the Tet Offensive in 1968, and very little if any detail or mention is given to the many years afterward where the Regional Forces and Popular Forces gave quite a good accounting of themselves against the enemy. Sheehan spends the first 700 pages of his book detailing how bad the ARVN was up to the end of 1967 (parts of which are true and the rest was full of lies and prevarications) then spends several pages on the Tet Offensive in early 1968, in which he fails to emphasize that the main fighting units of the Viet Cong army including their commanders and militia-cadres were eliminated, never again to become a viable fighting force. Some interpret this sound defeat of the Viet Cong as a deliberate attempt by the Hanoi Leaders to eliminate their comrades in the south for strengthened North-Communist power. Based on an essentially political media-movement, the Permanent Government would like these venial-journalists had showed-up the Hanoi loose the tactic but won the strategic for the Axis of Evil scheme. Sheehan then skips five years of the war together with Walter Cronkite effort where the Regional Forces/Popular Forces held their own against the NVA and Viet Cong and defeated them in most of the smaller unnamed battles of the war at the village level with sheer Garant M-1 against automatic AK-47

Harriman’s Highway must be untouchable! Then he picks up again with the 1972 Easter Offensive where Vann was killed, not by enemy contact, but by a helicopter crash during the monsoon rains. I did hear a vague rumor that newsmen leaving, however, as a spy pilot on view of bird, I meditated: “Rumor has it … that he was murdered?” … how can’t explanatory notes at the Kontum City still OK, no once enemy occupied while 3 NVA divisions and 1 Tank Regiment 203rd of Front B-3 couldn’t easier overrun this paralyzed city? And just merely RP and PF in defend their city? Unbelievable … right! Or due to John Paul Vann’s took priority all B-52s concentrated support [reserved of another Corps] in secured protection this little Kontum City which was preplanned of Axis of Evil for Viet Cong anticipated-Capital in the next year for predominantly in 1973 Paris Peace Talk? Barely 30 pages of Sheehan’s book are devoted to Vann’s success with Vietnamization strategy [so why Sheehan’s book got the prize from who proposed? And Walter Cronkite became notorious-expert for prevarication] -As for last year 1971 General named Vietnamese Patton Trí was killed by his helicopter crashed right after airborne, all were get killed included innocent journalist Francois Sully; the rumor leaving, due to his17,000 dared-soldiers destroying all cargo-ammunitions on COSVN, Viet Cong Headquarters where were unloaded by thousand trucks moved supplies from Sihanoukvill-Seaport, then now Lon Nol PM took over, and changed the name Kompong Som-Seaport; so there is just only exit Harriman’s highway for supplies to his NVA’ enemy-buddies go through this corridor in performance axiom-1. - Whereas northern Harriman’s Highway, both SOG, the USAF, and our helicopter H-34s had suspected as much with USAF intelligence determining Oscar Eight contained the largest depot outside North Vietnam. Sergeant John Meyer who ran recon near Oscar Eight, recalled, “The area was really hot. I mean, every team that went in there got the shit shot out of it”. Just before the 1968 raid, U.S signal intelligence each day detected 2,300 radio messages emanating from there to North VN, a volume unparalleled throughout Laos. General Westmoreland believed a certain NVA General [Vo Bam] Field Army headquarters that controlled all enemy operations in South Vietnam’s 1 Corps was located there. Immediately, General Westmorland would plan-opening operation at Oscar-Eight for identifying the size of NVA military building … At once, Westmoreland has to go home with the assigned post Joint Chief of Staff – Was General Westmoreland been fired?
Oscar Eight’s terrain favored the enemy, with the only suitable LZ in a wide bowl, surrounded by jungle high ground containing antiaircraft missiles and bunkered infantry. Too many tactical fighters were shot down included EC-130B at there. The raid began with a dawn Arc Light by nine B.52s. Flying Covey, Master Sergeant Billy Waugh watched nearly a thousand 500 and 750-pound bombs walk across Oscar Eight, setting off 50 secondary explosions. Incredibly, the bombs had barely stopped falling when he could see NVA running from their shelters to roll fuel barrels away from a fire. Waugh radioed SOG Lieutenant Colonel Harold Rose at Khe-Sanh, “I’ve got people out here scurrying around. That sonvabitch is loaded” As the smoke cleared… So in sum, we must say: if you don’t want get trouble … just don’t touch the Harriman’s Highway.

There was hardly mention of RF/PF, the home militias, the little guys in tennis shoes whose inflicted over one-third of the casualties the enemy. Taking the fight to the VC at the hamlet and village level, not all the RF/PF were great soldiers, but many of them were if properly led, just as Vann had told us at advisor school. They were not configured to stand up against a large force of NVA regulars, but they could provide security for the locals in a hamlet or village. The Soldiers either had their families living with them, or in the nearby village. Who better to know when the enemy was coming into a village than those who lived there? There were many times when they knew when the Vietcong were coming into the village at night to recruit or create havoc. And then instead of being ambushed, just a little band of PF’ fighters became the ambusher. They beat the guerrillas at their own game. They took the night away from them. They no longer patrolled endlessly and aimlessly looking for a needle in a haystack, waiting for the NVA troop to initiate contact. They waited for them in the darkness of the night, and kicked hell out of them. In today's military vernacular, we preempted them. That’s how you fight the guerrilla and the terrorist and beat him at his own game. We cringe now watching news clips on TV as young American Soldiers in Iraq are ambushed by snipers and blown up with the new version of the command controlled booby trap, the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) but how would the young American Soldiers be able to distinguish the al-Qaida terrorist from a local Iraqi civilization? The simple answer is, they can’t.
And how do they find the IED? The answer is they can’t unless an informer warns beforehand as to the location. We believe the answer to this problem is found in the type of force that Vann created in Vietnam, coordinated by CORDS (Civil Operations for Revolutionary Development Support) So different was this approach to conventional warfare tactics that Vann insisted it be operated under civilian control on equal footing with the military hierarchy. Vann really wanted the U.S. military advisors to be in command of the gung-ho spirit instead of being advisors, but Robert Komer, the first director [comprehensibility dispatched by Permanent- Government] of CORDS, resisted this idea for axiom-1 as well. Vann’s approach to counter- insurgency was the blending of all civilian agencies in Vietnam under CORDS with a loan of 1820 U.S. military personnel to serve as advisors to local Soldiers to provide security for all aspects of the U.S. effort in Vietnam. These were the front line guys who made up the mobile advisory teams, who moved from one RF/PF unit to another accompanying them on day and night time operations. It seemed to me we are always waiting for the enemy to ambush us in Iraq. The first strike is always thrown by the terrorist, and then we react by sometimes killing Iraqi civilians as the sniper fades away into the crowd. This unfortunate response is, in itself, a tactic of the terrorist/insurgent/enemy combatant. Don’t we need to pre-empt the terrorist as he is preparing the IED to blow up an unsuspecting U.S. Soldier and don’t we need to know that a terrorist cell from outside Iraq has begun operating in a neighborhood? To do so, we need intelligence from the local civilians and Soldiers from the area who understand the language, customs, and dynamics of the local situation, who can easily point out strangers in the area even though they speak the same language, but look different. The best of the MAT teams helped perform all of the above missions because they lived with their Vietnamese counterparts 24 hours a day, ate their food, got to know their families and developed friendships that last even Today, more than three decades after the war. The meaning of “Advisors” did not retreat back to a secure base camp far removed from the people they were trying to help and defend. So where do we get the local Soldiers in Iraq to perform this mission? As a former Advisor, We sat in astonishment when we saw the 500,000 man Iraqi Army being disbanded and sent home immediately after Saddam’s main army collapsed that repeated blows of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge after Diem’s assassination 1963, he did eliminated all counterinsurgency, intelligence forces, Strategy Hamlet Program, Rural revolutionary development … For the most part, they surrendered without firing a shot. Why send home a trained army, although obviously not well trained according to Western standards, but surely part of them could have been used along the guidelines of the MAT team concept in Vietnam? We should realize that all of Saddam’s army could not have been used like we used the RF/PF in Vietnam, but surely some of them could. It was obvious that a large number of Saddam’s conscripted forces were not loyal to him. We could have had local Iraqi soldiers patrolling under the command of small military advisor teams to help flush out enemy combatants and newly arrived in-country al-Qaida terrorists. The advisor teams would provide the coordination and communication with the larger American units in the area. This would enhance security for the civilian efforts and NGOs in Iraq. The Iraqi civilians must feel safe and secure before a new form of government can develop without the imprint of a terrorist stamp.
We had to believe that what Vann said in the 1960s in Vietnam, is relevant today in Iraq as it relates to counterinsurgency. All the high tech gadgetry and firepower that our military has today, leaves us relatively helpless when it comes to fighting the insurgent who blends in with the civilian population. An innocent civilian killed translates into a win for the terrorist. To avoid this, it takes the Soldier on the ground with a rifle taking the fight to the terrorist, in an area that he previously thought was a safe sanctuary. And to do that, you need local Soldiers familiar with the terrain, the language and the customs of the area. John Paul Vann understood that. The Vietnam-War has been misremembered, misunderstood, and misreported in regard to John Paul Vann’s effort with Vietnamization and the fighting ability of the South Vietnamese Soldier. Sheehan has done them a great disservice in his book, A Bright-And-Shining Lie, it seemed to me from which a movie of like title was made as same in Vietnam “Chúng Tôi Muốn Sống” [We want alive] in Vietnam 1955 right for prewar Second Indochinese Wars 1954-1975; the Permanent Government invested some dollar to hire movie-technicians from Philippines for assistance this film purposely as well.
(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Their axe of evils scam: Few know that the Viet Cong lost the war, and that they were no longer a viable force after 1968. The Viet Cong could not have won the war and bested the ARVN troops in battle. The advisory effort in Vietnam wasn’t perfect, but the South Vietnamese forces held their own in the 1972 Easter Offensive by the North. The ARVN was finally defeated in 1975 when they were invaded by the fifth largest army in the world, [all the lies, small and large, add up, financial sponsored by WIB Bones, who create a world view in which the mainstream media is a liberal propaganda machine, from Korea-War until now, the world media elite is a crucial weapon of the notorious Permanent Government] They were invaded by 17 divisions of the North Vietnamese Army to include over 700 tanks that steamrolled everyone in front of them. The North Vietnamese were still being supplied with war materiel by their allies, the Soviets and Chinese, while the allies of the South Vietnamese, the United States, abandoned them in their hour of need. The ARVN were also disadvantaged and vulnerable because they had to defend everywhere, and the NVA could concentrate superior forces at weak points in the South.
The myth perpetuated by the anti-war media was that the South Vietnamese military was no good. We returned to the province capital of Xuan Loc, Vietnam, in 2002 and visited the large communist cemetery there filled with 5000 graves. This is where the last battle of the Vietnam-War was fought, where the 18th ARVN Division defeated three NVA divisions before finally being overrun by 40,000 of the enemy.

Would Vann’s model of counterinsurgency work in Iraq today? That’s a good question, but what is the alternative? Our Soldiers now are getting tired, and our forces are being stretched too thin to continue the mission indefinitely. The architect of the 1975 invasion of South Vietnam, North Vietnamese General Tien Van Dung, in an indirect manner, gave Vann a complement for his conduct of the pacification program. In his book, Great Spring Victory [Đại Thắng Mùa Xuân] he never once mentions revolutionary warfare or the guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong as aiding him in his final assault on the South. That’s because Vann's program of Vietnamization had basically wrested control of the south from the guerrillas who we no longer a viable fighting force. That’s rather ironic, isn’t it? The myth exists today that peasants wearing rubber tire sandals employing guerrilla tactics won the war in Vietnam. Our officials in Iraq are saying it will take three to five years to build an Iraqi Army. With Vann’s model, we could have taken the best of the 500,000 former Iraqi military, and put them under the control of U.S. military advisors. Instead of having young American soldiers patrolling the streets of Baghdad and the smaller cities around the country, surely we could have used Iraqi soldiers advised by several thousand American military personnel. Instead, we sent them home to do what? Unlike Vietnam, there is no outside Army that is going to invade Iraq in division-size strength and overwhelm our military units there. Our powerful and well-trained military units, with the aid of the British, have already won the big battles of the war. Now we need small units of local Soldiers taking the war to the enemy at the village level. I see no other way to preempt the terrorist before he has the time to act. The small suitcase bomb, the suicide bomber, chemical and germ warfare, and the IED, all weapons used by the terrorists in the 21st century, make it necessary to defend everywhere. The terrorist will always go for the target of opportunity, searching for the most vulnerable target. And this appears to be the difficulty of they are of the future the preempting of the terrorist before he can strike. Or, even before that, having the will and knowledge of how to preempt the terrorist.

For pretentiousness, in 2003, I’m very surprised at the book about a pretentious name as Senator Prescott Bush, obviously prepared with the cooperation of his family, was published under the title Duty, Honor, Country; However, so do vanity, ambition, and pretentious. It’s seemed to me that was unfair, unacceptable because scanning in the internet (page 4, 1/22/06) http://www.answer.com/topic/w-averell-harriman Harriman was initiated into the Skull and Bones Society, along with his friend Prescott Bush. Union Banking Corporation (UBC) a company which was closed in 1943 by the U.S government for Trading with the Enemy; P Bush and A Harriman financed the German Nazi’s rise to power—German-owned New York Bank associated with Prescott Bush, George H Walker, and S Pryor)
Deeply in my perception, two figures in my book were really deserved Duty, Honor, Country such as John Paul Vann or William E Colby. The subject of the prizewinning book “A Bright Shinning Lie” by Neil Sheenan, their codes of honor, integrity, and duty lived on as the United States legacy as a power nation on earth was indeed ‘noble’. My book melds biography and US history in a masterly way to tell the story of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann a soldier cast in the American hero mold, the closest the United States came in Vietnam to a Lawrence of Arabia. And, like Lawrence, he was a complicated man with a dark secret that haunted his career.
Lt Colonel John Paul Vann shared many of Mansfield’s misgivings but not his doubts about the necessity of American intervention in Southeast Asia. He, an ardent anti-Communist as well as William Colby who had volunteered for active duty in Vietnam, they believed that U.S military aid and know-how were essential to maintaining a free South Vietnam. In contrast of Mansfield was so much worried the crucial essence of ‘Counter-Insurgency-Project’, or CIP is of the necessity in dealing with the Eurasian Great Game Stratagem. The poor gentleman from Virginia who enlisted in the army at eighteen, Paul Vann rose rapidly through the ranks, a dedicated soldier of great drive and curiosity. General William Westmoreland, who condemned Vann for “sounding off” to the press, nevertheless described his military record in Vietnam as “almost legendary” and later wrote that “no one better understood the Vietnamese than John Paul Vann”.
A picture seen round the World, CBS television cameras capture the moment this Marine set fire to a peasant’s hut in the village of Cam-Ne in August 1965, a scene forcefully reported by CBS correspondent Morley Safer (like Iraq-War – Eleven former Iraqi prisoners of that torture chamber at Abu Ghraib, have filed legal document in Karlsrube, Germany) Shortly Vann wrote a letter to Bob-York: “If there’re our policies, I wouldn’t take part of them…I’m waiting right here until Lodge give me the right direction”. Outspoken professionally and fearless, Vann went to Vietnam in 1962, full of confidence in America’s might and right to prevail. When he was killed there in 1972, he was still dreaming South-Vietnam will win the war because her legitimate self-defense. He was mourned at Arlington by renowned figures across the political spectrum, from peoples of South Vietnam to Generals including General Westmoreland and Abrams.
President Nixon understood his case, June 16, 1972: In the Oval Office of the White House after the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, Nixon expressed his condolences on Vann’s death to Aaron Frank Vann, Jr, Eugene Wallace Vann, Dorothy Lee Vann Cadorette, Jesse Vann, Thomas Vann.

My book reveals the truth of the war in Vietnam as it unfolded before the eyes of John Paul Vann: the arrogance and professional corruption of the U.S military system of the 1960: the nightmare of death and destruction that began with the arrival of the American forces for Skull and Bones’ scam.
In the early years, Vann spoke out against the brutality and ineffectiveness of the U.S strategy. His superiors refused to listen and, frustrated and angry, and dogged by his shameful secret (Lodge in his opposite side was subjected to obey strictly directions from Permanent Government) Vann was assigned as a senior adviser to the ARVN 7th Division, the spearhead of the government’s pacification efforts in the southern delta, and quickly learned the depressing facts of life in the war against the Communist Viet Cong.
At first glance Vann appeared a runty man. He stood 5 feet 8 inches and weighed about 150 pounds. An unusual physical stamina and an equally unusual assertiveness more than compensated for his shortness of stature. His constitution was extraordinary. It permitted him to turn each day into two days for an ordinary man. He required only four hours of sleep in normal times and could function effectively with two hours of sleep for extended periods. He could, and routinely did, put in two eight-hour working days in every twenty-four and still had half a working day in which to relax and amuse himself… Vann had no physical fear. He made a habit of frequently spending the night at ARVN militia outposts and survived a number of assault against these little isolated for the brick and sandbag blockhouses and mud walls, taking up a time to help the militiamen repel the attack. He drove roads than anyone else would drive, to prove they could be driven, and in the process drove with slight injury through several ambushes. He was usually in the golf-jacket that he wore to ward off the chill of flying in his helicopter, landed his chopper at district capitals and fortified caps the midst of assault to assist the defenders, ignoring the shooting and the antiaircraft machine guns, defying the Viet Cong gunners to kill him. In the course of the decade he acquired a reputation for invulnerability. Time and again he took risks that killed other men and always survived. The odds, he said, didn’t apply to him.
A business statistician by trade, Vann documented the failure of the ARVN to bear the brunt of battle in the delta, leaving most of the fighting to the ill-trained and ill-equipped Civil Guard. And when Vann called the battle of Ap-Bac what it was a defeat, and a bad one. With my war experience, Lieutenant Colonel Vann can drive a tank but couldn’t carry a tank on his shoulder, because with his rank was never command a regiment, a brigade, a division …how can he can operate the battle with different units likewise M.113, army, airborne, air force for coordination, synchronization maneuvers of air-ground operation. However in the anticipated conspiracy of Permanent Government had been scrutiny preparedness. Frustrated and angry, Vann later to become a legendary figure in Vietnam and very early on an outspoken critic of the ARVN’ unwillingness to fight, was once reprimanded by General Paul Harkins for being insufficiently sensitive to the Vietnamese need to save face, “I’m not here to save their face,” He answered, “I’m here to save their ass.” General Harkin threatened to fire him.
In April 1963 Vann completed his tour and returned to the United States determined to make the army see what was really happening in Vietnam. But his report, while favorably received by many in the Pentagon, was removed at the last minute from the agenda of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by JCS Chairman, General Maxwell Taylor. Vann retired from the service soon after. Vann left the army that he loved. He returned to Vietnam in 1965 as a civilian worker in the pacification program as a low-ranking USAID official, the former lieutenant colonel worked his way up to become a senior civilian adviser, considered by many the most knowledgeable American in Vietnam, and rose to become the first American civilian to wield a general’s command in war. Because in the farseeing, Skull and Bones evaluated him in promotion due to his loser the Ap-Bac battle in tactical but won by strategic CIP’s scam. The war and his obsession with winning also gradually transformed John Paul Vann. The man who began by declaring that one had to rely on a riffle and kill discriminately in a guerrilla war ended his days calling in the B.52 bombers of the Strategic Air Command. [Like “linebacker campaign”]
Vann died in a helicopter crash in the central highlands in 1972, still trying to fight a battle he believed in, the way he thought it should be done, but he was comforted by the knowledge that what he did was right for his country and his conscience. Is that He deserved “duty, honor, country?” Vann became the subject of a different mystery in 1972 when his helicopter crashed of northern Pleiku province near the outpost where more than couple hundred ARVN troops didn’t hear a single sound of ground fire. The rumor began with different journalist write to a newspaper; rumor has it that he was murdered. At Camp Holloway, Pleiku Airfield, June 10, 1972: John Vann’s casket was carried to a C-130 transport for the flight to Saigon.
It seemed to me that anyone might be harmful if involved to the NVA prevail on Ho Chi Minh Trail will be punishable; another word Harriman protected the Ho Chi Minh trail with any price for his prejudice-stance, axiom-1: “There was never a legitimate non-communist government in Saigon.” I normally hold a great deal of cynicism toward most politicians. For me, politics and integrity seem mutually exclusive: --President Nixon’s announcement that the operation targeted COSVN headquarters violated Power Act. In The United States, a reenergized antiwar movement reacted furiously to the campaign in Cambodia, but in contrast if NVA troops attacked right in the heart of Capital Phnom Penh that’s OK to quiet of antiwar movement shut up – A Vietnamese general having nickname George Patton Do Cao Tri was died in his helicopter before Vann (1971) due to destroyed a huge cargo supplies of NVA on Ho Chi Minh trail. Might be in schedule [time table] 1972, the COSVN’ Capital should be at Kontum province for Communist dominant to their axe of evils scam? They gave a predominant favor for Hanoi in Paris Talk on negotiated table.
In the event “Easter Offensive”, MR-3 soon the 21st Division was sent to reinforce and the 4th Ranger Group to MR-1. Meanwhile MR-2 largest territory was had only two divisions without reinforcement. At Kontum City the equivalent of three NVA Divisions kept the city under siege for nearly two months, just having only single supply route from the south. The airfield had to be closed because of enemy fire, and re-supply was accomplished by airdrop. But the defenders – now the 23rd ARVN Division, a unit far superior to the routed 22nd Division – held on, inflicting casualties on the enemy estimated to exceed 16,000. The performance of the South Vietnamese Air Force had counted for a lot. “VNAF came into its own during the 1972 offensive,” said a USAF advisor. “In the defense of Kontum the VNAF has been magnificent, absolutely magnificent”.
Might be a strategist John Paul Vann credited the Territorial Forces, not the army, very far from Naval-gunfire support, with much of what went right in MR-2 “The RF and PF, in most places, have performed quite well and were a much more stabilizing force than the ARVN,” Vann reported. However Vann was out credited the objective of Permanent Government [George H.W Bush the Second generation of Skull and Bones]
Because the cohesion of Red Menace with Skull and Bones to form a shoot-craps of CIP and NFL was essentially exerted for all their influence in Southeast Asia; if not, officially, the war in Vietnam was being won as 1962 ended. But underneath the optimistic rhetoric of the top command, a few respected civilian and military officials were already beginning to raise serious questions about the progress of the war. Two of the most determined voices of dissent belonged to Mike Mansfield, the new Senate Majority Leader [Skull and Bones side] and Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, [Kennedy’s administrative side] an U.S military adviser to the South Vietnamese armed forces. Obviously, we must understand the natured-qualification of United States which was a “capitalist country.” Now the struggle for Vietnamese independence was fast becoming an “American War” raising serious questions about the nature of U.S involvement in Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile General Harkins confidently told McNamara, “We are on the winning side. If our programs continue, we can expect Viet Cong action to decline”. Oh poor general, how can he knew that Skull and Bones protected with any price for Hanoi’ infiltration through the so called Ho chi Minh Trail [Harriman’s Highway] parallel on it the bloody-veins POL. General Harkins was already familiar with the overall strategic situation in the region. Strongly supported by General Maxwell Taylor, who had recommended his protégé to the Kennedy administration, he plunged into his new assignment with energy and enthusiasm, traveling around South Vietnam almost daily in his small twice engine L-23 transport plane to inspect training centers and Diem’s strategic hamlets revolutionary development program and to measure the progress of the war.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Prelude: In this chapter with my position remain politically neutral, I’m concerning the tactical operation, neglected to write the unexamined political, strategic, ideological matters; however I’m on the attitude of nationality only. This battle shaking the Pentagon experienced to military institution should learn something in this battle as said “People War” to make the army see what was really happening in South Vietnam. And why the struggle for Vietnamese independence was fast becoming an “American-War” raising serious questions about the nature of U.S involvement in Southeast Asia? But according to axiom-2 that the United States had no legitimate reason to be involved in Vietnamese affairs, so I must say “unofficial war” or have been waiting time for create the cause, for instant the “Incident Gulf of Tonkin” in the coming year for official-normalization the war.
Because the networks and major newspapers have been report that U.S was defeated a mini-battle of Ap-Bac. It was as if it did not happen?
Yes, it must be a coincidence; it has to be a coincidence.
It is fair to say that attention to detail is the hall-mark of this battle that was showed-up all the new creatures:
- In the morning of New-Year 2/Jan/1963
- Helicopter Air Assault is New tactical in the World
- M.113 Armor carrier troop assault is New-method in the military deployment force.
- Lieutenant Colonel Vann is New and fast becoming an “American War” in Vietnam.
- Lieutenant Colonel Dam is New-promoted Full Colonel commander 7th Division.
- Captain Richard-Ziegler is New-put a plan Ap-Bac operation into practice.
- I’m just a New flight commander been check-out last week. We were take part in this battle with two H.34 standing by at Tan Hiep airstrip for medical evacuation, re-supplies and few at Tan Son Nhut airbase for reinforcement

Three days after Christmas 1962, the 7th Infantry Division received an order from the ARVN Joint General Staff to seize a Viet Cong radio transmitter that was operating from the hamlet of Tan Thoi fourteen miles northwest of My Tho province. The order originated with General Harkins’s headquarters. The United States had brought the unobtrusive side of its technology to bear on the revolt in the South again. An Army Security Agency team from the 3rd Radio Research Unit at Tan Son Nhut Airbase, eavesdropping from on high in one of those boxy Otters built for Canadian bush flying, had intercepted and pinpointed the guerrilla radio with its monitoring and direction-finding equipment.
Vann and his staff were enthusiastic about the attack. The operation was the first of the New Year the first under a new division commander, and, most important of all, an opportunity to make a new beginning; General Cao’ chief of staff, Col Dam, had succeeded him after Cao’ elevation to general and move to Can-Tho province to head the just-established IV Corps. Col Dam was an unwilling successor. A diminutive and mild-mannered individual, he considered himself a competent administrator but doubted his ability to cope with the emotional burden of command. General Cao persuaded him to take the job because Cao did not want to create an opening for a potential rival and knew that he could control Dam. He was a North Vietnamese Catholic and politically reliable, so President Diem acceded to Cao’ wish. He promoted Dam to full colonel and gave him the 7th Division to lead.
Col Dam preferred honesty in his personal relationship when possible, and he wanted to cooperate with Vann. When Vann urged a resumption of the system of joint planning that General Cao had aborted after the Ranger platoon had been decimated in October, Dam consented. Vann cabled Capt, Richard Ziegler, the former West point football lineman who was his talented planner, to break off a Christmas leave at the Teahouse of the August Moon Hotel in Hong Kong and return on the next flight. Everyone, including Cao, who received the plan in Can-Tho, was satisfied with the result of Ziegler’s work. Dam made only one change. He postponed the attack by 24 hours from its originally scheduled starting time of New-Year’s morning. It would be unwise, he said, to wake the flight crewmembers at 4:00 A.M to fly with a night’s celebration still in their heads.
At dawn on Jan/2/1963, the scene so often repeated in this war took place at the division’s dirt airstrip at Tan Hiep, 6 miles up the Route-4 toward Saigon. The calm and freshness of the Delta at daybreak was fouled by the racket, the engine exhaust, and the whirling dust of helicopters as the squads of infantrymen lined up to climb aboard the flying machines. Vann took off at 6:30 A.M in the backseat of an Army L.19 spotter plane to observe the landing of the first company of a division battalion north of Tan Thoi village.
General Paul Harkins and his Saigon staff regarded the Viet Cong with the contempt conventional soldiers from great powers usually display toward the guerrillas of small nations. They referred to the Viet Cong as “those raggedly-ass little bastards” At Vann’s level in the field there was a contrasting respect for the Communist-led guerrillas. Vann and his field advisors and Harkins and his headquarters staff did share a wish common to American officers in Viet Nam. They hope that the guerrillas wound one day be foolish enough to abandon their skulking ways and fight fairly in a stand-up battle. The desire was expressed wistfully. No American officer, Vann excluded, expected to see it fulfilled. The destruction of the Ranger platoon in October had essentially, been an ambush followed by an effective withdraw under strafing and bombing. The guerrillas had not tried to trade blow all day with the Saigon side. Frustrated as he was by Cao’ refusal on so many occasions to close the trap, Vann could not help but hope that the guerrillas would someday display such foolhardy temerity. It seemed to be the only way he would ever succeed in annihilating a whole battalion. He and other American officers would muse with pity on the fate of any Viet Cong battalion that risked a set-piece battle. The slaughter the Saigon troop would inflict on the lightly armed guerrillas with their M.113, artillery, and fighter-bombers would be unsporting by U.S Army standards.
As Vann watched 10 H-21s, flying Bananas carrying the company of infantry descend to the gray waters of the paddies at 7: 03 A.M and land the troops without incident, he had no way of knowing that he was to be the recipient of the common wish. One of those rare events in a conflict of seemingly endless engagement, no one of which appeared to have any intrinsic meaning, was about to occur, a decisive battle that would affect the course of the war. Today the Viet Cong were going to stand and fight.

The commander of the 261st Main Force Battalion completed his preparations by 10:00 PM on the night before the battle. His name and those of almost all of his officers and noncoms remain unknown because of the clandestine tradition of their revolution. A copy of the secret Viet Cong account of the battle and the events preceding it, captured in an unusual night ambush two months afterward, mentions the names of only one junior officer who led a sortie and some of the lower-ranking men who fought with courage worthy of special note.
Radio intercept from the eavesdroppers in the Otters airplane and other information gathered by Jim Drummond, Vann’s intelligence officer, and his counterpart, Captain Le Nguyen Binh, indicated that Tan Thoi village was being used as some sort of headquarter location. The transmitter was reported to be guarded by a reinforced company of Viet Cong regulars, about 120 men in all. Captain Ziegler’s plan had attack elements converging on Tan Thoi from three directions. The 7th Division infantry battalion of approximately 330 men being landed to the north by the helicopters was to press down on the village. Simultaneously, two battalions of Civil Guards were to march up from the south in separate columns. A company of 13 M-113 armored personnel carriers, with an infantry company mounted in the tracked, amphibious vehicles, was also to thrust up from the south along the west flank of the operational area. The M-113s were positioned so that they could be shifted to the point of contact once the guerrillas began to retreat. Each of the three marching elements, the division battalion and two Civil Guard battalions was capable of handling a reinforced company of guerrillas with the support of artillery and fighter-bombers. In case there was trouble, the M-113 and their mounted infantry constituted a mobile reserve as well as a striking force, and Col Dam had two other infantry companies in reserve at Tan Hiep airstrip which he could dispatch as reinforcements by helicopter. No one expected to find more than 120 Viet Cong. Captain Ziegler privately wondered if there would be that many. They had received intelligence this precise before to discover after they attacked that the guerrillas had moved the radio a couple of days prior the operation.
The intelligence was incorrect on this occasion. Nearly three times that many guerrillas had been assembled in Tan Thoi and the village of Ap Bac just below it (The battle was to become known as the Battle of Ap Bac rather the Battle of Bac because the news dispatches of the fighting included the word ‘Áp’, which means ‘village’ as part of the place name) The commander of the 261st Battalion and his headquarter group had a defending force that amounted to a mixed battalion of about 320 Main Force and Regional guerrillas. They were augmented by approximately 30 villages and hamlet guerrillas to assist as scouts, emergency replacements, and bearers for ammunition and the wounded. The battalion commander and the Viet Cong Committee for the province Dinh Tuong, with whom he was in contact by radio, knew that an attack was coming on the morning of January 2, 1963. They did not know the precise target because they didn’t realize that one of their main radios had been located, but they knew that it would be somewhere in the vicinity of Tan Thoi or Ap Bac area. They had anticipated a campaign, once the dry-season started, against the belt of villages they controlled along the eastern edge of the Plain of Reed. The two hamlets belonged two one of these villages. The hamlets were two miles from a large canal called the Tong Doc Loc, which formed the eastern boundary of the plain. The Viet Cong intelligence agents in Dinh Tuong had first tipped the province leadership to the operation by reporting the arrival of seventy-one truckloads of ammunition and other supplies from Saigon. By New Year’s Day the province committee had receive enough information to deduce that the attack would begin the next morning.
Vann would have taken satisfaction at the reason for the decision by the guerrilla-leaders to stay and fight. They believed they had to do so in order to restore the confidence of their troops and the peasantry who supported them. Vann had thrown their revolution in the northern half of the Delta into crisis the previous summer and fall by the savaging he had given the Viet Cong with the shock effect of the helicopters and the armored carriers and with his shrew orchestration of the planning skill of Ziegler and the aptitude for intelligence of Drummond. The mass killings had led the rank-and-file guerrillas to question the ability of their officers to teach them how to survive and win against this lethal American technology that kept surprising them in their once-safe havens. A number had requested discharge to return to their families. A lot of peasants had also been asking whether the Americans were so much more powerful and ferocious than the French that this revived Viet Mina could not succeed against them. The secret Viet Cong account of the battle spoke of the way these unanticipated defeats had imperiled the Party’s hold over the “liberated areas” that were the basis for the expansion of the revolution into the disputed regions beyond. The peasants needed to be convinced that the Party’s clandestine government had come back to stay and that its guerrilla forces could give them some protection against the depredations of the Saigon troops and the machines of the Americans.
The Viet Cong battalion commanders and the provincial leaders were men in their Forties with records going back to the resistance against the French colonial administration and the Japanese during WWII. They couldn’t turn back, whatever the outcome of the war. They couldn’t flee to the North, even had they wished to do so; disheartened cadres were not welcomed there. They didn’t think of fleeing, because they were unwilling to accept the possibility that their revolution might fail. A passage in one of their clandestine writings of the period, which discussed the need to teach young men and women in junior leadership positions not to be daunted by a prolonged struggle filled with hardships, summed up their own attitude as well: “We should teach them to win without arrogance and to lose without discouragement until we have achieved the liberation of the South and the reunification of our ancestral land”
They studied the American machines, devised tactics they hoped would overcome them, and worked hard at seeking to convince their junior officers, noncoms, and troops that if they didn’t panic, and skillfully employed the arts of fortification and camouflage, the terrain of the Delta would provide ample protection and concealment in which to fight and maneuver. The first result of their efforts had been the ambush of the Rangers at a village just a few miles northwest of Tan Thoi and the shooting down of two of the H-21 helicopters ferrying reinforcements, including the one in which Vann had been riding. The unit chiefly responsible for that small but significant success, the 1st Company of the 514th Regional Battalion, was waiting in Tan Thoi on this second day of the New Year.
President Diem’s reaction to that counterstroke, General Cao’s bootlicking acceptance of his leader’s self-defeating strategy, and the refusal of General Harkins to believe Vann and to challenge Diem had given the Viet Cong a two and-a-half-month respite. Ngo Dinh Nhu, political advisor, brother of Diem had a fit of madness stated on news conference: “I don’t think the Americans are able to advise us on subversive warfare”. And President Diem said: “I am afraid the Americans don’t know as much as we do”. In Washington, President Kennedy assured reporters that: “we would withdraw the troops, any numbers of troops, any time the Government of South Vietnam would suggest it”. And the storm blew over. But the public squabble was sorry testimony to the deteriorating condition of the American-Vietnamese “partnership”. What could not blow over, what ultimately stood in the way of any effective relationship between the United States and the Saigon government, was the erratic temperament of Ngo Dinh Diem and the tolerance he maintained for the unchecked behavior of his rapacious family.
Skull and Bones’ [Harriman] reaction to this battle reached a new climax, the highest point of aroused a lot of controversy, thus bloody end in determined decision. The main drawback to such a Diem’s regime is the cost.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

The guerrilla battalion and company commanders had taken full advantage of the time to replace losses and to train their men in the new tactics and in the use of captured American arms. By January 1963, the Main Force and Regional guerrillas had seized enough modern American weapons from the outpost that Harkins had neglected to have dismantled before commencing his arms largess to be able to pass down to the district and local guerrillas their bolt-action French riffles like Mat-36, 49. Most of the Viet Cong infantrymen now carried semiautomatic M-1 rifles, carbines or Thompson submachine guns. Each company had a standard 30 caliber machine gun that was fed with a belt of ammunition, and virtually all of the platoons had a pair of the Browning Automatic Rifles (BAR) named for John Moses Browning, the American firearms genus who had designed these clip-fed light machine guns and the bigger belt-fed types for the U.S Army. There were plenty of bullets and grenades. The United States and its surrogate regime in Saigon had brought about a qualitative advance in the firepower of their enemy.
Ironically, the Party leadership in the northern Delta had not discovered that General Cao had been faking operations. They thought that the Saigon forces were still trying to encircle and destroy their units as Vann had vainly sought to do earlier. They noticed that the individual assault elements suddenly became larger, from a battalion broken down into two task forces to a whole battalion. They assumed that the ARVN commanders and their American advisors were simply being more cautious in the way they were attempting encirclement.
The villages of Tan Thoi and Ấp-Bắc were in one of the most important “liberated zones” in the northern Delta. The best way to discourage forays by the Saigon forces into the ‘liberated zones’ was to make them unpleasant and unprofitable by effective resistance. The Viet Cong leaders didn’t intend simply to stand and hold ground. They were accepting battle in the expectation that they would be able to fight and maneuvers on their terms. They felt they had progressed to the point where they could risk a test. The risk had to be run sooner or later, and this was as good an opportunity as any. The terrain was advantageous. Despite the fact that it was the dry-season, there were so many streams and canals in this section of the province that the farmers kept the paddies flooded all year.
The Viet Cong in the two villages would also have the advantage of fighting in familiar surrounding with the spirit of local men defending their land. The guerrillas were all men of the Delta, including the officers and the noncoms, who were communist party members. The 514th Regional, whose 1st Company was in Tan Thoi, was the home battalion of Dinh Tuong province. About half of the troops in the 1st Company of the 261st Main Force Battalion, who were waiting in Ap Bac village, were from the My Tho vicinity and another quarter were from the environs of Ben Tre across the upper branch of the Mekong.
This was historically fitting ground for a decisive battle. The peasants in this belt of village along the eastern edge of the Plain of Reeds had followed the Communist since the first insurrection the Party had raised against the French in the Delta in November 1940. The French had crushed that rebellion by razing many of villages with artillery and bombs. The prisoners had been taken up to Saigon on rivers barges and unloaded on the docks at night under searchlight. They had been strung together in the long lines by wires pushed through the palms of their hands. The peasantry of the region had not been intimidated. During the nine years of the Resistance- War they had responded to the call of the Viet Minh.
At 4:00 AM, some of the scout teams of local guerrillas, dispersed in a nest for miles around two villages, passed the word through runners that they could hear truck and boat engines. The battalion commander issued the alert order. The troops, who had rehearsed where they were to go the night before when the battalion commander had decided how to dispose his force, picked up their weapons and hurried to the foxholes the peasants had helped them to dig and camouflage under the trees.
Tan Thoi was connected to Ấp-Bắc right below it by a creek with tree-lines on both banks which permitted concealed movement in daytime. The villages thus constituted two mutually supporting -positions. The battalion commander deployed the stronger half of his force, the 1st Company of his own battalion, reinforced by a couple of riffle squads, and his battalion weapons platoon with a second 30 caliber machine gun and a 60mm mortar, in Ap Bac village because it was the most difficult to defend. His intelligence indicated that if an attack was made against Ấp-Bắc; it would probably come from the south or the west. Just south of the village a branch of the creek ran off to the west and tree line in foxholes on the far bank of the stream, where they had an unobstructed view of the rice paddies to the south.
The western boundary of Ấp-Bắc village was a big irrigation ditch run into the north-south direction. A large dike followed the outer edge of the ditch, and trees grew on top of the dike. The battalion commander positioned the rest of his company of regulars and his weapons platoon in foxholes dug into the dike under the trees. The dike, which was four feet thick in its narrowest sections and thicker elsewhere, was built up above the paddies in front like a levee. Because of their crazy-quilt patterns of land ownership, the peasants had neither dug the ditch nor built the dike straight; the result was that the dike zigzagged out into the rice fields at several points. Firing across the paddies to the west of Ấp-Bắc from foxholes in this dike was comparable to shooting across a high school football field from the third or fourth row of bleachers. The zigzags of the dike out into the paddies also enabled the guerrillas to catch the cross-fires anyone or anything approaching. The battalion commander sited his two machine guns and his BAR at these-outcroppings to achieve what the U.S Army calls “interlocking fields of fire.” He deployed the second half of his force, the 1st Company of the 514th Regional strengthened by a separate provincial platoon, in similar fashion in the irrigation dikes that edged the three exposed sides of Tan Thoi Village.
From the air and from the rice fields outside, these villages gave no indication that they were the twin bastion of a fortress. The tree lines were the usual Delta profusion of banana and coconut groves assorted fruit trees, stands bamboo and water palm, and the hardwoods the peasants let grow to pole height to use for construction. The undergrowth at the bottom was thick. Under the supervision of the officers who had learned this technique during the war against the French, the peasants and the troops dug the foxholes without disturbing the foliage above or at the front and back. The excess dirt was carried away and dispersed. Where the original foliage did not seem dense enough, fresh branches were cut and erected over and around the foxholes. Even from a low-flying L-19 spotter or a helicopter, all appeared natural.
The foxholes were dug sufficiently deep for a man to stand up inside, often clever foxholes tunneled under thick bamboo-clumps, providing them with a natural cover. The machine gun and BAR positions had foxholes that were wider than the others so that two men, the gunner and the loader, could stand in them. The depth of the foxholes enabled the guerrillas to duck down and escape harm from the fighter-bombers and artillery. To kill a man crouched down inside one of these foxholes required a direct hit from artillery shell or a bomb, or a napalm strike close enough to burn or asphyxiate him. Airburst artillery might kill him, but only if the shell was guided with precision to explode it directly above the foxhole or a sufficiently close angle. Unless the guerrilla was reckless enough to raise himself out of the hole when the aircraft passed overhead, strafing with machine guns and rockets was virtually useless.
The irrigation ditch behind the foxhole line became a communications trench. Men could move up and down it out of sight and shot of anyone in front of the dike and the trees on top. The ditch was about six feet across and was flooded waist-deep. The guerrillas could wade in it or shuttle quickly back and forth in one of the wooden sampans the peasants made by burning and hewing out a log. When a plane came over, any Viet Cong in the ditch could hide by ducking beneath the water or under the foliage on either side. The irrigation ditch permitted the troops in the foxholes to be re-supplied with ammunition as needed, the wounded to be evacuated, replacement to be sent into the line, and the officers and noncoms to circulate in relative safety while they controlled and encouraged their men. Most of the women and children and old men among the approximately six hundred inhabitants of Ấp- Bắc, and a like number in Tan Thoi fled to nearby swamps to hide as soon as the alert order was issued. Some of the adults stayed behind to help with the wounded and to serve as runners.

The ground fog that morning was the element of chance in the battle. The fog was bad all over the region. It obscured the landscape from the air, suspending itself above the paddies and enveloping the trees and thatched roofs of Tan Thoi and Ap Bac and most of the others villages. Vann had not been given the approximately 30 transport helicopters required to lift a whole ARVN battalion in one move. The Army was having trouble maintaining the Korean-era H-21 in flying condition. Harkins had also assigned priority to an elaborate operation that same morning code-named Burning Arrow, 1,250 paratroopers jumping and a battalion of infantry landing from helicopters after prodigious bombing, to surprise and wipe out the main Communist headquarters, the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), in the rain forests of War Zone C, the old Duong Minh Chau bastion northwest of Saigon that Bumgardner had driven through eight years earlier.
(Burning Arrow was a failure, the headquarters was not found) With the ten H-21s that he was able to obtain, Vann had to shuttle the division battalion to the landing zone north of Tan Thoi a company at a time.
The fog was especially thick around Tan Hiep airstrip. The helicopter pilots managed to lift off through it with the first company not long before 7:00 AM and to find an open area above the hamlet in which to set down the troops. (This was the initial landing Vann watched from the spotter L.19 Bird-dog) Then the fog thickened still further and the pilots objected to running the risk of a midair collision or getting lost with the second and third companies of the battalion. Vann and Dam therefore had to postpone the second and third lifts for nearly two and a half hours, until 9:30 AM. When the sun was high enough to dissipate the fog, in the meantime the first company had to mark time. Had the movement of the division infantry battalion to Tan Thoi not been delayed, the fight might have begun there and the battle unfolded differently. They delay brought the Civil Guards marching up from the south into action first with the platoon of guerrillas positioned in the tree line along the creek branch just below Ấp-Bắc. That happenstance exploded the battle into the dramatic and illuminating clash that was to have such an impact on the war and to influence Vann’s life so keenly.
The guerrillas knew the Civil Guards were coming. The Viet Cong battalion commander warned the company leader in Ấp-Bắc that his platoon dug in on the far side of the stream was going to fire the first shots. The battalion radio operators, whose radios were captured American models as SCR 300, were following the movements of the Saigon troops by monitoring the frequencies they were using. The ARVN did not practice communications security and transmitted in un-coded language map coordinates that the Viet Cong staff could easily plot on its own maps. Scouts and a platoon of district guerrillas fleeing ahead of the Civil Guards confirmed the radio intelligence. The guerrilla infantrymen in the foxholes under the trees finally saw troop of first Civil Guard battalion walking up toward them in files along the dirt trails and on narrow paddy dikes. The district guerrillas were instructed to rake the Civil Guard from that flank after the Viet Cong regulars had surprised them from the front.
Alert to the possibility that tree line can hold such surprises; the Captain in charge of the Civil Guard battalion became more prudent as his troops got closer. He stopped at a paddy dike about 150 yards away and sent part of one company ahead into the open rice field to reconnoiter. The guerrillas let the Civil Guardsmen get within thirty yards before they started shooting. As the Saigon troops lurched back through the muck and water toward the security of the dike, the district platoon in the coconut grove opened a fusillade from the right. The Civil Guard company commander and his executive officer were killed within a few seconds. The rest of the Civil- Guard battalion at the dike should have given their comrades protecting fire. Instead, many cowered down behind the low mud wall and others stuck their weapons over the top and pulled the triggers without looking, so that those retreating were being shot at from both directions. It was 7:45 AM.
For the next two hours the Captain leading the Civil Guard battalion attempted to dislodge the guerrillas with inconclusive flanking maneuvers. His artillery observer was either incompetent or the field command post of the province military headquarters would not let him adjust the fire, because the occasional salvos he called for landed behind the guerrillas rather than on their foxhole line. The maneuvering ended shortly before 10:00 AM when the captain was wounded slightly in the leg.
Vann did not know about the fight at the southern tree line until it had almost ended. Major Lam Quang Tho, the Dinh Tuong Province chief, who was in charge of these provincial forces and who was theoretically functioning as one of Dam’s regimental commanders for the operation, did not bother to inform Dam that is was occurring. Tho as the man whom Diem had also made commander of the armor regiment at My Tho as additional anti-coup insurance because his family was among the landowning class of the Delta who had allied themselves with the Ngo Dinhs. Tho did not order his second Civil Guard battalion to hurry to the assistance of the first once the shooting started, so that they could attacked together, nor did he do anything to correct the faulty artillery after an American lieutenant accompanying the Civil Guards borrowed a radio to warn him about it. He did not come forward to organize an assault himself, although the scene of the action was less than a two-mile walk from the main road to the south where he had set up his field headquarters. After the casualties reached eight killed and fourteen wounded and the Civil Guard captain was hit in the leg, he did what was normal for a Saigon commander: he asked someone else to fight his war. He radioed a request to Dam to land the two infantry companies Dam was holding at Tan Hiep airstrip as a division reserve in the rice fields behind the southern tree line. Theoretically, dropping the reserve in their rear would force the guerrillas to abandon their positions, Tho did not realize it would also mean landing troops in the open paddies in front of the western tree line of Ap Bac where the rest of the guerrilla regular were waiting in the foxhole dug into the irrigation dike.
Vann was in a L-19 north of Tan Thoi, following the movements of the third company of the division battalion which had landed ten minutes before, when Ziegler came up on the radio from the command post tent at the airstrip. He described Tho’s request and said that Dam wanted Vann to fly down to Ap Bac and select a landing site for the reserve. Vann was suspicious of Ap Bac as soon as he saw the village. It occurred to him that the guerrillas opposing the Civil Guard from the southern tree line might be part of a large force that had retreated ahead of the advancing provincial troops. If so, Ap Bac would be the logical assembly area for them. For the next fifteen minutes he searched the village and the tree lines around it from the backseat of the spotter plane. The Army pilot up front slid the little aircraft back and forth in wide swoops at an altitude of a few hundred feet with the grace of a hawk riding a strong current of air. Occasionally, when Vann requested it, the pilot would shove the throttle forward and nose the plane down for a high-speed pass right over the trees.
As practiced as his eye was by this time, Vann couldn’t see any of the guerrillas. He could tell there were Viet Cong in the southern tree line only because he could see the impact of their bullets striking around the Civil Guard. The guerrillas in the irrigation dike that formed the western tree line watched from their foxholes and let the small green plane make swoop after swoop with impunity, resisting the temptation to fire because they knew what the game was. Despite the tranquility of Ấp-Bắc, Vann remained suspicious of the western tree line. He had his pilot contact another L-19 that was leading the flight of 10 H-21 with first reserve-company from the airstrip. The ungainly H-21s were being escorted by a platoon of five of the new gunship helicopters the Army had deployed to Vietnam the previous fall. These were graceful machines with a trim, aerodynamic shape, fast in maneuver because of a powerful shaft turbine engine. Built by Bell and officially designated the HU-1 Iroquois, the gunship had been affectionately renamed the Huey by the Army airmen. The Huey had an electrically rotated 7.62mm machine gun mounted beneath the fuselage on each side and pods of 2.75-inch rockets above the machine guns. The copilot aimed the machine guns with a cross-hair device and fired them and the rockets with buttons on the device. Vann relayed instruction to the command pilot of 10 H-21 to land the reserve company at a spot three hundred yards from both the western and southern tree lines. He also gave the helicopters a flight route in and out of the landing zone that would minimize their exposure.
Command relationships among the Americans were not firmly established in 1963. The helicopter companies saw themselves as independent of the senior advisors. Vann was disliked by many of the ranking pilots because with his domineering temperament and experience in aviation; he was always trying to assert control over them. They might have disregarded instructions from any advisor, but there was a tendency to go out of their way to show Vann that they knew more than he did about how to fly helicopters and where to land troops in a combat area. The senior pilot in the lead machine ignored Vann’s instructions and heading for a landing spot about 200 yards from the western tree line. The 300 yards specified by Vann is the distance at which 30-caliber small-arms fire is regarded as minimally effective. Because of the drop of s bullet in flight, visibility, and other factors; the 100 yards difference can be infinity the difference between missing and hitting.
While Vann was relaying his instructions, the Viet Cong battalion commander was alerting his troops to prepare to shoot down helicopters. He had been warned of the landing by his radio operators, who were monitoring the ARVN frequencies. It was 10:20 AM and the fog was gone. The large, dark green silhouettes of the ‘Angle Worms’ as the guerrillas called the bent-pipe H-21s, and the ‘Dippers’ their nickname for the Huey, would stand out clearly in the sunshine.
Sgt 1st Class Arnold Bowers, 29 years old, from a Minnesota dairy farm and the 101 Airborne Division, heard the bullwhip crack of the first bullet burst through the aluminum skin of the helicopter while the machine was still 50 feet in the air, Bower’s helicopter was the second in the flight. Vietnam was his first war. During his previous eight and half months in the country he had experienced no combat beyond a few skirmishes with snipers. The whip cracked again and again over the din of the H-21 engines before the wheels of the machine settled into the paddy and Bower jumped out into the knee-high water with a squad of infantry and the ARVN first lieutenant commanding the company. His ears free of the clangor of engines, Bowers could hear a roaring of automatic weapons and rifles from the curtain of green foliage in front. The bullets were snapping all around, buzzing close by his ears and splitting the air overhead. He plunged forward the gray ooze sucking at the boots,, in a reflex of his training that said the best hope for survival lay in moving and shooting until you could get on top of your opponent and kill him. The lieutenant that the ARVN infantrymen thought otherwise, they threw themselves down behind the first paddy dike they could reach about 15 yards from where the helicopter had landed.
Sgt Bowers yelled at the lieutenant that they had to return fire and maneuver to get out of the open or they would all die in the paddy. The lieutenant said that he couldn’t understand Bowers. Back at the airstrip the lieutenant had understood Bower’s English perfectly as they had waited to board the helicopters. The Vietnamese was a graduate of the company-level officers’ course at the Infantry School at Fort-Benning. Usually all Vietnamese officers disregarded Americans fighter-men due to lack combat experience (the advisers’ job was not to give the combat-experienced-Vietnamese tactical advice because they had more fighting experience than most Americans, and it was their country; rather, the obligation of the advisers was to apply American air and artillery firepower when that became necessary, which was frequently, and to provide American logistics, coordination with American units, and American intelligence. The Vietnamese fighter-men were weakest in these areas. The job of the advisers, in other words, was to make the ARVN system work. So why all Vietnamese officers considered US advisors following combat operation likewise a “Big Drawback” for them and this was according Harriman mastermind all was be for US combat training only)
Sgt Bowers was the staff operation sergeant for the advisory detachment, but he was always volunteering for patrols and assaults. Vann, who liked his spunk, had asked him that morning if he wanted to go with the reserve, should it be committed, because the unit lacked a regular advisor, and Bower had said yes. He shouted at the lieutenant again. The lieutenant stared at Bowers, his eyes communicating fear, and pressed his body lengthwise against the low dike and down into the water and muck to expose as little of himself as possible to the bullets. Bowers glanced to the right and saw one of the ARVN sergeants from a helicopter farther back in the flight string leading a squad toward the tree line on the south. They were bent over in a crawl behind the dike. Bowers jumped up, ignoring the bullets, and did the best imitation of a sprint the muck would permit, flinging by-himself down into a quick crawl the moment he passed the sergeant. He intended to keep the squad going before they had a chance to hesitate and stop. Bowers had noticed on earlier operations that the ARVN noncoms, unlike their officers, seemed to welcome help and thought an American sergeant enough of a cut above them so that they could blame him if things went wrong. He had also observed that they were not literate city types, as the officers were but ex-peasant who was more willing to fight
He thought through his next move as he crawled. He would push into the southern tree line with the squad and try to turn the flank of the guerrillas in the western tree line in front. Once they got an initiative underway, others squads might maneuver too. At least he could lay down a base of fire from the protection of the tree line to relieve some of the pressure on the company in the paddies. The guerrillas were concentrating their fire on the main element of the company back toward the lieutenant. The farther they crawled, the fewer bullets cracked overhead or slapped into the dike. They had gone about 150 yards and were close to the tree line. Bowers saw s figure run through the trees and assumed it was a guerrilla messenger. The man was intent on his business and did not see them. Bowers had not been briefed on the situation at Ấp-Bắc village before climbing aboard the helicopters and didn’t realize there were guerrillas on the far side of the stream toward which he was heading. The sight of the runner was an indication to him that some might be there. He wasn’t concerned, even though he wasn’t well armed himself. He had only a carbine and two thirty-round clips of ammunition. Once in the woods the squad could use the tree for cover just like the Viet Cong.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Vann’s an eagle inside a cage: Suddenly the sergeant, who was about 15 to 25 yards behind, started yelling at him in a mixture of Vietnamese and pidgin-English. Bowers looked over his shoulder. The sergeant was gesturing at him to turn back. The Vietnamese pointed to his radio and then back toward the lieutenant, indicating that he had an order to return. “Damn...Damn!” Bowers cursed to himself. He thought he would have a try at overriding the lieutenant. “Đi... Đi” he shouted, Vietnamese for “Go”. American advisors also used it for “Come on!” He waved the sergeant forward with his arm and turned and crawled toward the trees again. After a few yards Bowers glanced over his shoulder. He was making a one-man flanking maneuver. The sergeant and the squad were crawling back toward the lieutenant.
Vann watched helplessly from the L-19 as the helicopters were shot down. The Viet Cong officers had been training their troops for months in the hope of an opportunity like this. During an assault landing late the previous summer an H-21 crew chief had been surprised by the sight of a guerrilla kneeling in the open about 75 yards away. The Viet Cong had his rifle pointed right at the American standing in the door of the helicopter. As the crew chief brought up his carbine to fire, the guerrilla, rather than shooting the American while he had the advantage, swung his rifle in front of the helicopter, shot into the air, brought the rifle back again, swung it in front of the helicopter again, and shot into the air once more. At that moment the astonished crew chief recovered his senses and shot the guerrilla. The story made the rounds of the helicopter crews, and the advisors and everyone laughed. After today those who recalled the story would realize they should have shivered. This guerrilla had made a poor beginning. Others would make better ones. He had been engaged in a skewed version of the technique that wildfowlers use to bring down flight geese and ducks with a shotgun. It’s called “lead”. Applied in war, the idea is to make flying machine and bullets intersect by shooting ahead so that the aircraft, in effect, flies into the bullets. The training cadres whom Vann had found near the Cambodia border on July 20 had been teaching the technique to selected crew for 50 caliber machine guns. The Viet Cong leadership had simultaneously begun to teach all of their troops to use their individual weapons in the same way. Mimeographed pamphlets were distributed which explained how one calculated the length’ of lead by the angle of approach and speed of the aircraft, the wider the angle and greater the speed, the greater the lead. The slow H-21 required the shortest lead, the faster Huey somewhat more, and the fast, fixed wing fighter-bombers which the officers assured their men were also vulnerable, the longest length ahead. The best time to start shooting at the H-21 was when they were at their slowest coming in for a landing. “Usually the proper lead is two-third of the fuselage when the aircraft is landing” one Viet Cong instruction pamphlet said.
The mathematical errors of this guesswork didn’t matter. What counted was to inculcate the habit of shooting ahead. The officers and noncoms drilled the men constantly to make this something that was done without hesitation. To conserve ammunition and to practice with the least chance of discovery, almost all of the drill consisted of dry-firing exercises in the training camps on the Plain of Reeds and in other havens. Cardboard model of H-21, Huey, and fighter-bombers were pulled along a string between two poles to simulate an aircraft in flight. The guerrilla was taught to keep swinging and firing in front once he had begun to shoot ahead, gauging how well he was doing from the paths of the red and green tracer bullets placed every few rounds in the clips of captured American ammunition and in the belts of bullets for the machine guns. The Viet Cong machine gunners and BAR men, whose weapons could knock down fighter-bombers if handled properly, were given the most careful training.
The guerrilla officers emphasized to their troops that they had to restrain themselves until an entire squad or platoon or even company could open up at once. Massed fire offered the best chance of putting enough bullets into an aircraft to cripple or destroy it. A helicopter on the ground unloading troops required no lead, of course. The H-21 flight leader could hardly have obliged the Viet Cong more in the way he disregarded Vann’s instructions. Having been warned that there was “Victor Charlie” in the southern tree line, he assumed there were none in the western one. He first brought the string of helicopters low over the western edge of Tan Thoi. Some of the guerrillas of the 514th Regional there cut loose, raising the adrenaline of their comrades in Ấp-Bắc at the anticipation of the “iron birds” coming into their guns next. The 10 H-21 continued low over the western tree line on top of the irrigation dike at Ap Bac and then turned and landed in a rough sequence of ones and twos in the flooded paddies about 200 yards directly in front. The guerrillas had plenty of time to bring their initial excitement and fear under control and to adjust their fire until they were hitting the machines consistently.
The pilots of the five escorting Huey flung their aircraft down at the guerrillas the moment the shooting began, the copilots lining up the cross hairs of the aiming devices on the trees and pressing the buttons to turn on the machine guns and launch rockets. Normally a strafing pass by the Huey suppressed ground fire, but this time the Viet Cong gave tit for tat. The tracer bullets from their machine guns and BAR started reaching for a “Dipper” as soon as one of the Huey dove for a strafing pass and kept reaching, swinging with the helicopter and following it when the pilot pulled up at the end of the run. Mach of the firepower of the Huey was wasted on the southern tree line.(The guerrillas on the far side of the stream there were not shooting at the H-21 landing the reserve because the trees blocked their view) The Huey copilots also could not see precisely where to aim their machine guns and rockets, because they couldn’t make out the foxholes in the dike through the treetops and the foliage underneath, and they were shaken at this unexpected opposition and the bullets walloping into their own machines.
Every H-21 took multiple hits. The helicopter father back in the flight formation were punished the most severely, as the Viet Cong had fewer airplane to shoot at and could concentrate their fire more effectively. A helicopter, especially one with an aluminum fuselage as large as the H-21, can absorb many bullets and still fly, provided that none strikes a vital component. All of the airplanes managed to take off except one. The pilot radioed that its flight-control sticks would no longer respond. He said that he was shutting down the engine and that he and his copilot and their two enlisted crewmen would join the ARVN in the paddy.
In the short era of innocence when the war was still an adventure, an era that was ending on this day, the helicopter crews adhered to a strict code of camaraderie. The code said that a crew on the ground had to be rescued immediately, even if there were ARVN troops around them. One of the H-21 circled back to pick up the downed crew. The pilots landed in the worst possible place, between the helicopter already in the paddy and the dike. The would-be rescuers had their airplane immediately shot out of commission. The code called for another rescue attempt, now to pick up two crews. The command pilot of the Huey gunship platoon announced over the radio circuit that he was going in for them. Vann the risk-taker, orbiting overhead in the L-19, was angry at the uncalculating recklessness of this chivalry, but he didn’t try to stop it. He knew that the pilots would not need him. The lead Huey circled low over the two H-21s so that the two pilots and the crew chief (The crewmember composed three flight personals) could locate the men on the ground. The four other Huey strafed and rocketed both tree lines in another desperate and confused attempt to suppress the Viet Cong fire. The Huey platoon leader turned his airplane and banked for a landing in the rear of the two H-21s, seeking to obtain what protection he could by putting the downed machines between his helicopter and the tree line that marked the dike. As he was ending his approach, his airspeed fell off toward a hover, and the guerrillas were able to hit most consistently; they put round after round through his machine until a bullet struck the main rotor blade on top. The Huey flipped over onto its right side and crashed into the paddy-water about 50 yards behind the two friend H-21s. The Viet Cong had set a new record for the war. In approximately five minutes of shooting they had brought down four helicopters. A third
H-21 had been so badly damaged that it had been forced to land in a rice paddy field a little over a mile away where the crew had been picked up unharmed. The guerrillas had hit every helicopter out of the fifteen except for only one lucky Huey.
Bowers leaped to his feet and ran to the crashed Huey. The water was shallower over to the right where he had gone with the squad and the paddy wasn’t much more than damp back where the Huey lay, so he was able to make good time. When he reached the wreck the turbine engine was screaming crazily. With the weight of the main rotor blade knocked free it was running amok
Bowers was afraid that at any moment it would heat red-hot, blow up, and ignite the fuel tanks. The pilot in the left seat had managed to climb out and was staggering toward a nearby mound in the paddy which seemed to offer some shelter from the Viet Cong bullets. Bowers shouted at the man, but he didn’t reply. Bowers assumed that he was too dazed to help him rescue the other pilot and the crew chief was still inside. The machine was almost over on its back against the ground. The door on right side had been partially crushed into the paddy, but Bowers was able to push the sliding window open enough to unbuckle the pilot’s seat belt and pull him through. The man was also dazed and had a cut in his leg from the crash. He had enough wits left to put his arm around Bowers’ shoulder and hobble while Bowers helped him over to the mound.
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 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 airplane blew up, Bowers thought, was to drag him through the front. He kicked in the Plexiglas 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 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 just 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 155 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 flying suit Army aviators then wore. The explosion of what sounded like a bazooka rocket fired by 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 father in action on television the day he learned that his daddy was dead. The family was watching e 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 the second H-21 that had been downed. He could see one of the crew lying in the water next to a landing-gear-wheel of the airplane, which was standing in the paddy like its partner. The explosion Bowers had taken for a bazooka rocket announced an attempt by 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 didn’t want to surrender the opportunity lightly. He parted with half a dozen precious shells from the 60mm mortar of his weapons platoon. The only heaviest armament he had. These missed the helicopters too, raising no more than showers of muck and water, because the mortar-men 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, 21 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 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 didn’t 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 then helped him get his flak-jacket off, cut away Braman’s flight suit and examined the wound. It didn’t seem grave. His flak-jacket bullets 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. “Great, he thought, now that he is shot!” The flak-jacket had been useless in stopping the rounds. 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 shoulder 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 wound 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 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.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

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 the men behind the paddy dike like this. He didn’t 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 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 hardier 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 (at Tan Hiep airstrip we are standby for medical evacuation any time the ARVN facts-dispatched) 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 multi-channel 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 forward observer for an 81mm mortar company and had later served as a mortar platoon sergeant before transferring to staff operations. Batteries of 105 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 hadn’t brought one himself (Saigon authority don’t want ARVN troops like the chess on the chess-board underneath the US finger) the lieutenant flatly turned down, saying that he had to keep the radio tuned to his frequency to receive orders from high-command. 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 multi-channel radio, was lying about 10 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 instructions as simple as possible: “Add 100 meters,” he called. In his fear, the observer didn’t seem to hear or understand. Bowers shouted the instruction. Then he asked the company commander to translate his direction into Vietnamese. This Fort Benning graduate again lost his ability to speak English, he keep in mind this guide don’t have the least war experiences. Bowers so nervous 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 couldn’t 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 hour, the prospect of rescue appeared in the form of two AD-6 Skyraider-fighter-bombers. The planes first dropped napalm. It didn’t land on the guerrillas, because Vann don’t have experience like the same shit in the past French did that means he thought Viet Cong stayed in the thatch houses. The pilots instead struck the thatched houses behind the irrigation dike, some of which had already been set afire by the rockets from the Huey. 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. They shrew enough keeping closer to ARVN troops for escaping air strikes. Meanwhile 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 hadn’t 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” Lieutenant shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “Napalm too closed too closed 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 didn’t 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 hadn’t been of any help to him in dealing with the Vietnamese lieutenant. This fighting on the ground wasn’t their game. He looked down the dike. The petrified infantrymen were pressed up against it. He reflected that if the guerrillas did sorties 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 an eagle inside a cage sealing his backseat of the Bird-dog L-19, almost manic with anger and frustration. He had an advisor and three helicopter crews on the ground whether dead or wounded he didn’t know. These American and the ARVN infantry they were with were all in danger of being overrun, and he couldn’t 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 crapped quarters of the L-19 to the frequency of Captains. James Scanlon and Robert Mays, who were with the company of M-113 armored personnel carriers that Lt Colonel Vann had previously seen about a mile to the northwest. Scanlon, 31, short and square built, was the advisor to the armored regiment at My Tho command by Major Tho, the province chief. Captain Mays, 32, a loose-limbed Texan with a measured way of speaking, was Scanlon’s deputy and the regular advisor to Captain 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,” 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.S 309.539” Vann 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 US Army radio procedure the initiator of the conversation end 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 Ap 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 wasn’t hit.
While they were regaining altitude after the pass, Scanlon came back on the air with bad news.
“Topper Six, I’ve got a problem,” he said. “My counterpart won’t move,”
“Goddamn it, 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 but only Saigon authority” Scanlon answered.
“I’ll get right back to you, Walrus,” Vann said. He switched frequencies and raised Ziegler at the command-post tent beside the airstrip. He gave Ziegler a capsule account of what had occurred and told him to ask Col Dam to order Captain Ba to head for Ap Bac immediately with his M-113s. “This situation is absolutely critical” Vann said. The command post already knew of the downed helicopters from monitoring the radio. Ziegler returned in a few moments. He said that Dam agreed and was issuing the order through the division’s radio channels.
From where he was circling about 1,000 feet over Ap Bac, Vann could see the rectangular shapes of the 13 carriers. He instructed the pilot to head for them, and as soon as they reached the armored vehicles, he switched frequencies and called Scanlon again. He directed his attention to the column of white smoke beginning to rise above Ap Bac from the houses set fire by the rockets and tracer bullets of the Huey. “You tell your counterpart that I’m relaying an order from his division commander,” Vann said. “He is to head for that column of smoke right away. He is to move out now!”
Captain Ba started the M-113s toward Ap Bac. Almost immediately they were confronted by a canal with high banks. High-banked canals, stream, and rivers were the sole obstacles that seriously impeded movement of the M-113s across the Delta landscape. The amphibious vehicles had no trouble swimming them, but the tracks couldn’t get sufficient grip in the soft mud of the steep bank on the opposite side to pull the 10 tons carriers out of the water. The company of mounted infantry who rode in the M-113s and the crews would have to climb out and hand-cut brush and trees until the canal was filled high enough for one or more of the carriers to cross. The 10 tons weight would quickly crush the brush down into the canal bottom. The last carrier across would then have to tow the next one over by cable and so on until all of the vehicles had traversed the canal. This canal that now confronted them would take about an hour to cross. The alternative was to try to locate another spot where the bank wasn’t so high and the tracks could get a firm grip on the opposite bank. Captain Ba didn’t move to go and find one. Instead he spent several minutes speaking in Vietnamese over the radio. To Scanlon, who understood some of the language, he seemed to be seeking instructions from his superiors. Then he balked again. He didn’t want to go. The canal would take too long to cross. “Why don’t they send the infantry?” he said, pointing to lines of riflemen marching along the paddy dikes near them. These infantrymen were the third company of the division battalion that was descending on Tan Thoi from the north and had landed a bit over an hour earlier. Because the lifts of the second and third companies had been delayed for two and a half hours, Vann had arranged for the helicopters to drop them farther south than originally planned and to link up with the first company, which had landed at 7:03 AM Scanlon was surprised that Captain Ba was balking. His aggressiveness had been a pleasing contrast to the excessive caution of most ARVN officers.
Captain Ba was a contemporary of his American counterparts, 10 month younger than Scanlon. He was fighting with them rather than resisting them and their machines because he was the son of a prosperous Delta farmer who had served the French empire and believed in it. Ba’s father had been conscripted into the French Army and shipped to France near the end of WWI. The Armistice of November 11, 1918, had saved him from death in the trenches, and he had come home to rise to sergeant major in the “Garde-Indigène.” In his later years, he had settled down to farm on a comfortably large, if not grand, scale with two of Ba’s uncles. Together they had owned about 2,500 acres of rice land in the southern Delta. Ba’s playmates had been the sons of the landless agricultural laborers who depended on his father for a livelihood. He had guarded his father’s water buffalos with them, riding the wide backs of the beasts in a conical straw hat to ward off the sun as the peasant boys did in the fields through which he now drove his metal behemoths. He had lost touch with his play-mated after his father had sent him to the Lycée in Can Tho for a French education. From this Lycée he had gone in 1950 to the French-sponsored officer candidate school at Hue. His boyhood friends had been taken in a different direction by their origins. A good many of them had joined the Viet Mina. His father had kept track of the families of his workers this second Communist-led insurrection had forced him to abandon his lands entirely and seek safety in Can Tho. He sometimes mentioned the names of several of Ba’s “Buffalo boy” playmates who had become officers in the Viet Cong. Ba was an intelligent man, and in a nation whose women are often remarked on for their beauty but whose men are not considered good-looking, he was handsome. His ancestry was that common to the people of the Delta; mainly Vietnamese with some China blood and probably a tinge of Cambodian as well to account for the slightly duskier hue of the skin. His nature was cheerful and he genuinely enjoyed soldiering. He was a bit given exaggeration and there was some bravado about him, which was perhaps why he had joined the armored cavalry and spent the last years of the French war commanding a platoon of armored cars in North Vietnam. In the interval between the French war and this one he had been well instructed in French and the Unites States. First there had been a year at the French armored cavalry officers’ school at Saumur in the valley of the Loire and then another year in 1957-1958 at the Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Scanlon was so surprised because Ba had never shown any hesitancy on past occasions. Whenever guerrillas had been sighted, Ba had headed straight for them. The M-113 company was regarded by everyone as a virtually invincible combination of armored mobility and firepower. The Viet Cong were supposed to possess a few 57mm recoilless cannons (technically called recoilless rifles), which could knock out the armored carriers, but none had ever been encountered in action. The 50 caliber heavy machine gun mounted in front of the command hatch on top of twelve of the thirteen carriers in the company was another achievement of John Browning. It was a formidable weapon, capable of plowing through earth parapets and cutting down trees with its big steel-jacketed slugs. The 13 carriers, a recent addition, had a flamethrower in a turret in place of the 50 caliber on a swing mount. Each M-113 also carried a squad of a dozen infantrymen, armed with BAR and MI-s, who were trained to dismount and attack in unison with the armored vehicles. Ba had been sent off on a number of independent missions because his unit was considered capable of handling anything the Viet Cong might put up against it. His spirited leadership and the shock effect the machines had on the guerrillas, as the slaughter of recent September 18, had demonstrated, had led to the M-113 company’s killing and capturing more Viet Cong than any other organization in the 7th Division.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Ba’s announcement that he wasn’t going and that the infantry ought to go instead set off half an hour of emotional confrontation. A brief reconnaissance on foot by Mays and Ba after the carriers encountered the first canal revealed a second high-banked canal behind it. The M-113s were up against a double canal that would require two hours to cross at this spot. Ba grasped at this as an excuse to do something. He seemed unimpressed by appeals from Scanlon and Mays to his humanitarian instinct; there were three helicopter crews and a company of ARVN infantry who might all be killed or captured. “We can’t get across the canal,” he would say, and repeat that the infantry battalion could reach Ap Bac much faster. Within a few minutes Scanlon and Mays, who were standing with Ba on top of his carrier, were shouting at him and he was shouting back. Vann, circling overhead in the spotter plane, was raging at all three of them, trying to goad the two advisors into moving Ba and attempting to shame Ba into action at the same time. Ba’s English obviously was good, and he could hear everything Vann was saying, because the portable radio Scanlon and Mays were using wasn’t the telephone type. It had a loudspeaker for incoming calls and a push-button microphone with which to answer.
Scanlon could measure the rise in Vann’s rage from the way his voice went up a quarter of an octave in shrillness with each exchange. “I told you people to do something and you’re not doing it” he berated Scanlon. “Why can’t you get the lead out of that son of a bitch’s ass?” He’s got his order from the division commander.” Scanlon in turn berated Ba.
“Are you afraid to go over there?” he asked. Ba said no. “Then why won’t you go?” Scanlon shouted. “We’re just sitting here staring at two canals. I know we can find a place to get across somewhere else if we’d start looking for one” Ba repeated his excuses.
“Jesus Christ, this is intolerable,” Vann’s nasal shill broke in again from the radio. “That bastard has armored tracks and 50 calibers and he’s afraid of a bunch of Viet Cong with small arms. What’s wrong with him?”
“We’re doing the best we can, Topper Six,” Scanlon replied.
“Your best isn’t worth a shit, Walrus,” Vann cursed back. “This is an emergency. Those people are lying out there exposed. I want you to make that son of a bitch move.”
Scanlon knew that Vann was given to tantrums when thwarted. Vann had always seemed to think well enough of Scanlon not to subject him to this verbal lashing before, but this was an unprecedented situation. Scanlon could picture Vann in the backseat of the L-19 like a prisoner or a tiger in the iron-cage gritting his teeth, the redness of the rage in his face merging into redness of the sunburn on his neck, the veins in his neck bulging from the fury within. Scanlon was professional enough to assume that much of the anger wasn’t directed personally at him and Mays that Vann was making no effort to control his temper because he thought that his only chance for success lay in shaming Ba and in stinging the two advisors into putting more pressure on the Vietnamese captain. Ba was correct, Scanlon noted to himself, in arguing that the infantry could reach Ap Bac sooner than the M-113s. He thought that Vann, like most officers who were not armor specialists, had a poor notion of how time-consuming it was for the carriers to cross canals at the best of fords, and there would be more canals between this one and Ap Bac. Knowing Vann, however, Scanlon guessed that he had other reasons for demanding that the carriers perform the rescue. Scanlon was correct in this guess and wrong in thinking that Vann was ignorant of the problem the carriers had in traversing the canals.
Vann’s knowledge of the extent to which canals could impede the M-113s was one of the factors adding to his rage. He had asked the previous September for portable bridging equipment for the company so that the crews and the mounted infantry wouldn’t have to stop to cut trees and brush. Like almost all of his requests, it had gone unfulfilled by General Harkins’s headquarters. He had to send the armored vehicles to Ap Bac because he knew that it was futile to try to use the division infantry battalion. Once the battalion commander realized that he was being asked to make a frontal assault on entrenched Viet Cong, which he would soon discern if given the rescue mission, he would see to it that his battalion never reached Ap Bac. By diverting the battalion from its advance on Tan Thoi, Vann wouldn’t save the Americans and the pinned-down reserve. All he would accomplish would be to open a covered route of retreat for the guerrillas to the north along the tree lines that ran in that direction. He was damned if he was going to let these Viet Cong escape. They had downed four helicopters and had his blood up. Ba’s armored tracks were the one means he had of both saving the men in front of Ap Bac and destroy the guerrillas.
He was trying to goad Scanlon and Mays and shame Ba into going to Ap Bac, but this was just one of the reasons for his rage. All of this bile was pouring down on them because he was unable to contain any longer the anger and frustration that had been building in him for five and half months since the fiasco of July 20. His sense of fury at his helplessness had risen each week after Cao had begun to fake the operations outright in mid-October. He had warned that there would be a day of reckoning if Harkins didn’t make Cao fight and allowed the Communist to continue to harvest American weapons from the outpost. None of this would have happened if the command in Saigon had help up its end of this war. Now the day of reckoning and come and the captain in charge of the M-113s, who had been one of the new decent officers in this stinking army, was behaving like the rest of the cowardly bastards. He, John Paul Vann, was supposed to move 13 ten-ton carriers across only a mile of rice paddies and canals and redeem this disaster by waving a wand from the back of spotter plane. He kept checking with Ziegler to see if Dam had issued the order to Ba. Colonel Dam kept confirming that he had. You never could be certain what these people were saying over the radio. They lied to you and lied to each other.
What Vann didn’t realize, because in his fury he wasn’t thinking clearly enough to guess at the cause of Ba’s reluctance, was that the coup phobia of President Diem and his family had put Ba in a dilemma. Getting Dam to order Ba to move wasn’t enough. Vann needed to have Major Tho issue the order, but no one on the Saigon side was going to tell him that. Prior to December, Ba’s company had been assigned directly to the 7th Division. President Diem had then come to see that although armored personnel carriers were not as useful in a coup as tanks, they were potentially effective tools to help overthrow his regime, or to protect it. He had therefore decided to purchase more anti-coup insurance. During his reorganization of the armed forces in December he had removed the two companies of M-113s in the Delta from divisional command and assigned them to the armored regiment under Major Tho. Col Dam had ordered Ba to proceed to Ap Bac. Ba couldn’t to raise Tho on the radio to find out what Tho wanted him to do, and he was afraid to go without Tho’s approval. From what he could gather, the presidential palace wasn’t going to be pleased with the events at Ap Bac. Tho for Tho’s sake might not want any of his subordinates to get involved. If Ba went and Tho disapproved, Ba was liable to a reprimand and dismissal. His career had already been set back for political reasons. He was a Buddhist and he had been unjustly accused of sympathy with the leaders of the abortive 1960 paratrooper coup. Although he had cleared himself, Diem was watching him and holding up his promotion to becoming major.
Beneath Ba’s bravado, he was a conservative man. He didn’t lack courage. Neither was he a professional risk-taker like Vann. He had been an officer in a colonial army that had lost its war. He was fighting this second war for the Tory regime of his class. He was doing precisely what could be expected of a man who had grown up in a system where, when in doubt, the best thing to do was to do nothing. He was stalling. Vann’s bullying over the radio made matters worse. He was increasing Ba’s resistance. Ba had come, out of his pride, to resent the superiority complex of these Americans. Vann had been cordial to him, and their relations had been bluff and easy, except on those occasions when Vann’s manner had become overbearing. Ba had then found him singularly grating. Ba couldn’t know the pent-up emotions that were the larger source of Vann’s abusive language and the extent to which Vann was in turn a prisoner of the American system. In the U.S Army, when a combat emergency occurred and a senior officer took charge, he issued brisk orders and everyone obeyed instantly. Vann couldn’t help reverting to this procedure in his current predicament.
At the end of the half hour of shouting, Ba relented to the extent of giving Scanlon a carrier to return south and find a crossing site that Scanlon had seen blocked by the double canal. Vann flew off to try to get the Civil Guards to maneuver and dislodge the Viet Cong at Ap Bac. He had the L-19 pilot make a couple of passes over the first Civil Guard battalion, which had opened the battle by walking into the guerrillas on the far side of the stream south of the village. He could see the Civil Guardsmen lolling around, heads back against the paddy dikes in repose or in a snooze. If there were any Viet Cong left under the trees in front of them, they had clearly stopped shooting, and the Saigon troops were rendering a like courtesy. Vann concluded that the guerrillas in the southern tree line, having halted the Civil Guards, had turned their attention to the reserve company as soon as it had landed behind them. In any case, the Civil Guards were now perfectly situated to flank around to the right and unhinge the position of the Viet Cong along the irrigation dike on the western edge of Ap Bac. Vann radioed Ziegler with a recommendation that Dam have Tho order the Civil Guards to assault around this vulnerable flank.
Vann’s Lieutenant on the ground with the Civil Guards, who now also couldn’t get access to a radio with which to talk to his chief overhead, had been attempting since the helicopters landed the reserve at 10:20 AM to persuade the Vietnamese Captain in charge of the battalion to do precisely this. The guerrillas in front of them had stopped firing the moment the helicopters had arrived. The lieutenant had drawn the same conclusion as Vann. He had been urging the Civil Guard commander, whose slight leg wound wasn’t incapacitating, to push his troops up through the coconut grove on the right where the district guerrilla platoon had lain in ambush and using it for cover, to turn the tables on the Viet Cong. The Vietnamese captain kept replying that Major Tho had instructed him to stay where he was in a “blocking-position” The term had lost any connotation of the “hammer and anvil” tactic that Vann had sought to employ on July 20 and had become a euphemism among the Saigon palace commanders for doing nothing. Tho didn’t want any more casualties among his Civil Guards. When Dam called him at Vann’s behest and told him to have his troops execute the flanking movement, he ignored the order.
From the spotter L-19 Vann could see the second Civil Guard battalion still marching up from the southwest, searching villages along the way. Tho was in no hurry for it to arrive at Ap Bac. The division infantry battalion moving down from the north had also not yet reached the village of Tan Thoi above Ap Bac.
A voice speaking English with a Vietnamese accent, probably the lieutenant cowering behind the dike at Ap Bac, suddenly came up on Vann’s portable field radio and said that two of the helicopter crewmen were seriously wounded. Vann tried to keep the conversation going and obtain more information. The voice didn’t reply to his questions. He told the L-19 pilot to return to the M-113s and circled low over them. The armored tracks were in the same place he had left them. It was 11: 10 AM, forty-five minutes since the HU-1B had flipped over on its side and crashed and he had radioed Ba to come to the rescue at once with his mobile fortresses. Ba’s refusal to cooperate in this emergency was incredible to Vann. Just before flying off ten minutes earlier to attempt to maneuver the Civil Guards, he had, through Ziegler, appealed to Dam to repeat his order to Ba and this time to raise Ba on the radio himself and personally to order him to head for Ap Bac immediately. Orders from the division commander were normally relayed down through whichever regiment had contact with the M-113s. Dam had confirmed that he had done as Vann had asked. Orbiting just above the vehicle now, Vann could see Mays standing beside Ba on top of Ba’s carrier.
“Walrus, this is Topper Six, over” he called. Mays acknowledged.
“Is that goddamn counterpart of yours going to respond, Walrus?” Vann asked.
“Negative, Topper Six,” Mays replied. “He still says we can’t get across the canal in time and division ought to send the infantry.”
Vann had endured all he could bear. “Walrus, can you take that company over there? Can you? Can you, goddamn it?” His voice coming over the loudspeaker of Mays’s radio was a shriek.
Mays was puzzled that Vann would ask him if he could assume command of the company. Yes, he could get the M-113s across the canals to Ấp-Bắc, although he knew the men wouldn’t follow him without Ba telling them to do so. He was fearful of Vann in his rage and decided to treat the question hypothetically. “Roger, Topper Six I could do that” he replied.
“Then shoot that rotten, cowardly son of a bitch right now and move out” Vann screamed back.
Mays didn’t answer. He looked at Ba. The two men liked each other. They had become friends over the four months that Mays had been the company’s advisor. Ba also said nothing, but the expression on his face asked: “Would you shoot me?” Mays reminded Ba that they had crossed a canal earlier in the morning which was probably this double canal at a point where it was still a single one. Why didn’t they drive back, re-cross it, and work their way east to Ấp-Bắc from that point? Ba agreed. He slipped on his radio headset and transmitted an order to the company. The drivers started the engines and the tracks of the carriers churned through the muck and water on the way to Ấp-Bắc.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Vann turned his attention to the plight of the flight crewmembers in the rice paddy. The information that two of them were seriously wounded made it imperative, he concluded, to attempt another helicopter rescue, this one better calculated. He flew back to Tan Hiep airstrip to refuel the L-19 and discuss the plan with Ziegler and the senior helicopter pilots. The situation of the reserve company might be easing. Vann thought. As far as he could discern from the air, they were being shot at only every once in a while. Since the Civil Guards on the south were not being fired on, it was possible that the Viet Cong were withdrawing and endeavoring to infiltrate out of area. Vann had the division communications section try to find out if Bowers was alive and instruct the lieutenant to put him on the radio in order to obtain some reliable information. He was unsuccessful, apparently because the lieutenant didn’t respond to the regimental headquarters that relayed the instructions to him. Vann still felt they owed it to the wounded flight crewmembers to act on the possibility that the Viet Cong might be disengaging.
He described his plan. He and the L-19 pilot would be the decoy to learn whether the guerrillas remained in force. They would make several treetop passes to draw fire. The bird-dog pilot told Vann he was crazy and wanted to commit suicide, but he agreed to fly. Three of the Huey gun-ships were capable of strafing. (A fourth had taken a hit in a critical spots in out in-commission and was considered unsafe to fly until repaired) If the spotter aircraft attracted little or no shooting and the guerrillas were apparently no longer at Ap Bac in force, the Huey would machine-gun and rocket the western and southern tree lines to suppress the fire of any Viet Cong who might have stayed behind while an H-21 went in for the pickup. A second H-21 would stay aloft in case of some unforeseen emergency. At this point Vann was still under the misimpression that the guerrillas in the southern tree line had helped to shoot down the helicopters that morning and that they remained a menace. The helicopter pilots, also wanting to save their wounded, accepted the plan.
Bowers didn’t realize it was Vann in the L-19 that appeared all of a sudden and began buzzing the downed helicopters and the tree lines. He assumed it was that daredevil major from the Air Force, Herb Prevost, who always taunting the Viet Cong to shoot him down. Perhaps they would today, Bowers thought. He knew that the Viet Cong were still in the western tree line to his front, because Braman had made a racket inside the fuselage of the H-21 where he was lying a little while before and the guerrillas had immediately fired at it. Bowers had crawled to the helicopter and attracted another burst of shots as he pulled himself through the door and slid over to Braman. He asked him what was wrong. Braman said everything had become so quiet that he thought they had gone off and abandoned him. He didn’t want to raise himself off his back for fear of causing the wound to bleed, so he had banged the heels of his boots against the aluminum floor to try to attract the attention of someone. Bowers assured him that no one had gone anywhere and that he was attracting the attention of the wrong people, who were, as he could hear, still around too. Braman had fortunately not been hit a second time. The large silhouette of the H-21 had again performed the optical trick of causing the guerrillas to shoot high, and the top part of the fuselage had more perforations. Braman’s physical condition seemed to be holding stable. Bowers examined his wound. There was no fresh bleeding, and Braman didn’t appear to be going into shock. He was starting to become emotional because the lonely waiting was weakening his nerve. Bowers gave him another drink of water and once more lay beside him for a while to comfort and calm him. Help must be on the way, Bowers said, and Braman really was safer inside the helicopter as long as he kept quiet. He definitely wouldn’t thank Bowers later if the sergeant carried him out into the paddy where he might take another bullet and the filthy water would infect his wound. Before he left, Bowers placed a canteen at Braman’s side where he could reach it whenever he got thirsty. For some reason the Viet Cong didn’t fire at Bowers when he rolled back out the door for the return crawl to the dike, but he was certain they were watching him.
Vann and the L-19 pilot dangled as tempting the bait as they could in front of the guerrillas. Vann wasn’t satisfied to just buzz the treetops, a reconnaissance tactic that gives some protection because it is difficult to see and shoot up through the foliage at an object flying directly overhead. Instead, he had the pilot fly twice right over the downed helicopters on a course parallel to the western tree line, presenting the easiest of targets. Then they made a third pass at a 45-degree angle over the helicopters, which exposed the little plane to fire from the southern tree line as well. “You son of a gun, Prevost, you sure are looking for it” Bowers said to himself. Not a shot was fired. The Viet Cong had resumed their discipline of not shooting at spotter plane and waited to see what the game was. Bowers picked up the sound of a helicopter approaching from behind and turned to see an H-21 flying directly toward him up the rice field. The pilot was trying to put the downed machine between his aircraft and the western tree line, as the pilot of the crashed Huey had sought to do. Simultaneously a three-Huey appeared and started machine-gunning, rocketed the western and southern tree lines. At that moment Bowers heard the deadly percussion of automatic weapons and rifles begin from under the trees on the irrigation dike as the Viet Cong battalion commander also saw the H-21 and gave the order to open fire. The Huey was again wasting half of their firepower on the southern tree line. This mistake and the inefficacy of their light 7.62mm guns and rockets against troops entrenched beneath trees and foliage meant there was no interruption in the torrent of bullets that rent the air over Bowers’s head on their way toward the H-21 flying up the paddy. The pilot landed about 30 yards behind the wrecked Huey, but immediately radioed that he was pulling out because he was taking so many hits. Some of his controls were shot away, and he had great difficulty keeping his aircraft in the air. With guidance from Vann’s pilot he was able to turn and fly back about one kilometer to where Ba’s M-113s were crossing a canal.
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 ARVN army by un-experienced of US advisors command and control 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, 1962. 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 PM. 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 village from the north were not deflected to rescue the reserve company and the helicopters crews. At 12:15 the division battalion finally reached Tan Thoi’s village. 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 Regional forces readiness entrenched in the dikes around the edges of the camouflage 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 Ap Bac and Tan Thoi were mutually supporting. They were also mutually dependent. Men running from one village would probably cause the troops in the other to panic too. Even if the men in the second village 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 with his rank Lt Col, unqualified commander was doing his best to make these men break and run so that could he kill them? The Viet Cong leader was using every experience 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 Ap 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 Ap Bac. While the platoon wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 BAR malfunctioned and they couldn’t repair it. They reported to their company commander in Ap 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 irrigation dike, where they could still protect his flank to the south. The men didn’t exercise good camouflage discipline in retreating.
My VNAF forward 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 Ap 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 urged, 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 Ap Bac untenable.
The worried company commander in Ap Bac requested reinforcements from the company in Tan Thoi village to replace his lost platoon of regular-forces. The battalion commander refused flatly. The province guerrillas in Tan Thoi might have the ARVN battalion stalled, but they were on 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 10 minute march away from the village. In view of these odds, the guerrilla battalion commander couldn’t 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 didn’t dare risk any action that might trigger the loss of one of them. Ap Bac would have to held, he told his company commander there, by the men who had stayed.
The guerrillas in the irrigation dike at Ap Bac 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 when ARVN out of forward air controlled from Vann. The nearest ground observer was with the battalion at Tan Thoi. He could do no more than adjust into the general area of Ap 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 village were mainly smashed the peasant houses.

(continued)

[vinhtruong]

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 L-19. It was an option that even Vann didn’t dare try to exercise. Seizing control of the artillery would have meant removing a major weapon from the hands of the ARVN officers. Col Dam, his chief artillery officer, and the battery commander concerned would all 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 ARVN 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 VĂF 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 the most.
The VNAF forward air controllers (FAC) 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 village. They were attacking the thatched-roof dwellings of Ấp-Bắc and Tan Thoi villages and the smaller livestock shelters beside the peasant houses, shattering the frail 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 aircraft doesn’t easily grasp the logic of a landscape beneath him. He doesn’t naturally reduce that if the guerrillas are in the houses inside the village, they will not be able to shoot at the infantry out in the rice field: the foliage around the village will block their view. The optical relationship between a man in a diving aircraft 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 Mina 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 building in a rural Vietnamese community.
Vann hadn’t thought to appeal to Prevost for help to get the fighter-bombers 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 been 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 couldn’t 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 General Anthis and his staff in Saigon had supported their protégé, General Harkins hadn’t responded to Vann’s urging that they adopt a workable system to allow American to take charge when the fighter-bomber pilots were American, as was the case with many of the pilots today. The Vietnamese FAC retained sole authority to control the strikes. Vann implored Dam to tell the VNAF FAC to stop incinerating houses and to have the fighter-bombers lay the napalm down the tree line. Words in any language didn’t seem to influence the automatically like behavior of the airmen.
What Vann scorned as ineffective wasn’t 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 Pm the guerrillas saw the M-113s slowly approaching across the rice field. 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 guerrilla commander hadn’t been able to device 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 machines gunner was unprotected from 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, 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 hadn’t 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 guerrilla commanders had also lectured their troops on the importance of subjecting the M-113s to massed fire, exactly as with airplane. 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 didn’t 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 which 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 Captain Ba’s gunners hadn’t been adequately trained.
The guerrilla battalion commander had about 75 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 village – 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 cross-fire. To try to keep up the resolve of his troops, he had been resorting all morning to mutual encouragement. When the company in Ấp-Bắc shot down the helicopters, he passed the news of their “victories” to the company in Tan Thoi village 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 “victories” to the men getting ready to battle the M-113s at Ap Bac. The company commander at Ấp-Bắc and the platoon and squad leaders there had been controlling their men by using the six-feet-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 airplanes, 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 water 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 regular men were evacuated in the boats, and volunteers from the local guerrillas took their places. Three remained wounded from the morning’s action were cadres and apparently Party members just came back from Hanoi, 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 on the first-aid station. The cadres composed a slogan and had the men repeat it from foxhole to foxhole: “It’s better to die at your post. It’s better to die at your post!”
The carriers were taking so long to negotiate the remaining canals between them and Ấp-Bắc that Sergeant 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 Ấp-Bắc. In between discouraging look 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 couldn’t be found, and brush and trees had to be cut to fill each one. The troops took their time due to exhaustion. The guerrillas would go away. Captain Ba, in no hurry today for his own reasons – the “hammer and anvil”, didn’t want to push them. It wasn’t until 1:00 PM that he was able to raise Major Tho on the radio and obtain an order to attack the Viet Cong at Ấp- Bắc. Saigon’s regime don’t want this battle, she want to resolve this solution by rural revolutionary development program for saving lives by the method draining out the water and catch the fish.
As the carriers neared the last canal, about 500 yards from the helicopters and 700 yards from irrigation dike, the guerrilla battalion commander decoded 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 wasn’t 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.
Captain 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 didn’t believe there were any guerrillas left at Ấp-Bắc. From the top of his carrier, 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. The commanding lead-conflict between Vietnamese and U.S advisor created so much discrepancies, I didn’t saying about policy conflict between U.S and Vietnam authority.
Seeing that it was going to take another 45 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 Viet Cong were tarrying in the village, two 50 calibers and a company of infantry could handle them. Ba consented. He was no longer tense. Having reached Major Tho, he had the authorization he needed, and it also appeared to him that the guerrillas had, in any case, departed.
Mays thought there still were guerrillas at Ấp- Bắc. Knowing how Vann kept track of who was doing what on a battlefield 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 couldn’t conceive that any sizable number of guerrillas would stay in the village 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. (“So many cooks spoiled food” and Harriman’s staff –goal was Kennedy administration must let U.S combat troops having practical exercise training for strengthening peace U.S must preparedness for war)
“No, goddamn it,” Vann said in exasperation. “Get the carriers over there!” Vann didn’t have to explain to another professional soldier what else was in his mind. Mays understood him. Vann thought the guerrillas remained at Ấp-Bắc 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 village and assaulted, any Viet Cong in Ấp-Bắc would fire a flurry of shots and run.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

It was 1:45 PM our helicopters H.34 were standby for medical evacuation and getting chance for supplied ammunition. Three hours and 25 minutes since Lt Col Vann had originally sent his emergency call to this company of armored tracks a mile away, before three carriers – Ba’s command carrier 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 carrier 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 crewmembers inside the safety of the armored hulls in case there was any shooting. The Viet Cong 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 M-113s swept across the rice field toward the downed helicopters, the Viet Cong mortar crew fired their last three shells at the two M-113s. Mays dismissed the explosions and spouts of paddy water as another spastic. “We’ve put the fear of God into them and they’re moving out,” he thought. Lt 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 three line, the one in which Braman had been wounded. He motioned to Lt 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 crewmember 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 the H-21, 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 didn’t pause, and Mays controlled his nerves and stayed right behind him despite the cracks of the incoming bullets. Lt Cho’s 50 caliber and the heavy machine gun on the other M-113 slammed like jackhammers in response to the Viet Cong’ fire. Mays could make out amid the din the answering drum-rolls of defiance from the Viet Cong machine gunner at the right-hand corner of the irrigation dike.
He and Bowers climbed into the chopper to carry Braman safety after his nearly 3 and half hours wait for rescue. The boy was dead. Bowers was stunned and couldn’t believe it at first. He turned Braman over and examined his body. The young man hadn’t been hit a second time, and the shoulder wound showed no sign of having hemorrhaged. A couple hours later, when things calmed down again, Bowers was to be overcome by thought that perhaps he had made a mistake in leaving Braman inside the chopper, whatever the risk of another wound or infection from the paddy water. “Might be 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 moment 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 armored carrier, and Bowers helped Mays hustle the flight crewmembers 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 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. Lt Cho had come down from the 50 caliber to talk to Captain 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 some bang, bang, bang, Mays called Vann, who was circling overhead in the L-19, spotted plane grabbed on his portable radio. He reported that he had rescued three of the pilots and that two of the helicopter crewmembers were dead. The radio then went silent. A guerrilla bullet had clipped away the aerial where Mays had attached it on top of the carrier. The second pair of M-113s was 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 carrier 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 Korea War. Again as with Bowers and Mays, the desire of the Army to build up its forces in Europe to meet the perceived the Red menace 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 US 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 the rice paddy with his 45 caliber service pistol in his hand and bullets from guerrilla weapons he couldn’t see ricocheting off the M-113 beside him.
Scanlon’s pair of armored tracks swung around the left side of the choppers as Ba had ordered them to do and drove directly toward the Viet Cong machine gun dug in on the point three-quarters of the way up to left where the irrigation dike jutted out into the rice field. When the M-113s came abreast of the helicopter the 50 caliber gunners loosed a couple of burst at the tree line and were answered by the same concentration of raking fire that had opened on Mays’s two carriers over on the right. The carriers stopped, the clamshell rear hatches dropped down, and the infantry squads piles into the paddy and fanned out. The drivers started again, and men and carriers began an assault, the infantrymen holding their riffles at their hips and spraying clips of ammunition like water from hose, guiding their aim by the path of the tracer bullets. The maneuver was automatic. The ARVN 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 Viet Cong had been unlucky enough not to be able 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, un-holstering 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 father from the carrier was knocked down by a bullet. The 50 caliber gunner was initially confused by the Viet Cong’ fusillade and thought that most of the fire was coming from 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. Captain Ba cursed: “The son of the bitch is just spreading the stuff around in the air over their bastard heads”
The trouble was that neither the gunner, nor Scanlon, nor anyone else could see any Viet Cong. Scanlon couldn’t see anything in front except a wall of green. The only logical place for the Viet Cong 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 wound normally have given away the position 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 carrier gunner lost his nerve, ducked down inside the hatch, and began shooting at the air. These Viet Cong whom Scanlon hadn’t expected to find at Ap 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 get through the rear hatch. The Viet Cong showed no fear of the US advisors’ commandments, Ap Bac was humiliating. It revealed the extent to which US advisor was rife with poor leadership.
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 Lt Cho told him to do so
“Get up, goddamn-it, and aim at the base of the tree line,” because the recoil and tendency were to the clouds. Cho screamed. He grabbed the man by his fatigue shirt and pulled and hauled at him, yelling these instructions in the best, 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. Lt Cho 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 carrier heard him and pulled forward again, but no one would get out to pick-up the wounded soldier. Cho sprang over the side of his M-113 and ran to the man. As Cho reached him, one of the infantrymen from the second M-113, braver than rest, reached him too and help Cho 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, Cho pulled and yelled at this gunner too until he had him up and trying to aim the machine gun. Once again, Lt Cho repeated “Shoot at the bottom of the tree line, try hold steady!”
These two M-113 crews had been intimidated. The drivers backed up behind the fuselages of the two choppers H-21s to hide from the punishment of the Viet Cong’ bullets, the guerrillas ceased firing as soon as the carriers retreated. At first the drivers headed toward the right side of the choppers, where the M-113s Mays was with were engaged. Hearing the heavy firing over there, they thought better of it and turned tail for the canal. Lt Cho hollered at them to stop. He shouted to the driver of the carrier he was on to move forward of the choppers again. The driver shook his head. Cho argued with the sergeant who was the carrier commander and with the other crewmen that they had to go back and attack the guerrillas, that there were pinned-down infantry and wounded from the reserve company who were pinned-down infantry and wounded from the reserve company who were depending on them. The carrier commander 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 “bug-out” He saw Bowers crouched nearby at the corner of a dike, gesturing to him. Scanlon leaped off to join him.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

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 pairs of M-113s had arrived on the left flank of the choppers, 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!’(“tấn-công” in Vietnamese) stood up, waved with his carbine at the ARVN troops to follow, and started forward with the sergeant squad leader in the armored tracks against the Viet Cong in the tree line. They had gone about 20 paces before they had the feeling for the second time that day that they wad alone. Bowers looked behind. He was. Just then the M-113s began to back up, and Bowers hurried back to dike, glad that he hadn’t inspired anyone to follow him. He might have gotten more of these ARVN troops 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 flight personnel were, and Bowers led him over to the spot where they were lying behind the dike in front of the choppers, watching the unfolding of decisive struggle that had begun between the Viet Cong and the armored carriers.
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 M-113 to tow 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 M-113. He intended to tell Ba that they shouldn’t attack frontally but should instead maneuver far around to the right and approach the Viet Cong foxhole line from that end of the irrigation dike. Although they would still face the machine gun and the Viet Cong squad deployed there, they would be coming up against a small number of weapons rather than a whole line. (Mays couldn’t see the squad. He had by now spotted the machine gun and a rifleman in the 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 Viet Cong 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 Viet Cong 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 carrier commanders over his radiophone headset to coordinate all four carriers 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 half-conscious into the carrier. The company was temporary 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 typhoid fever. Cho, despite his aggressiveness in individual actions, was apparently incapable of taking charge, because he didn’t do so. Since Mays had also been unable to speak to Ba before the machine-gun barrel struck him. Ba hadn’t 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 “tấn-công”[assault] and ‘together’ and repeated them to Cho with gestures in body Vietnamese, but for the next 20 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 command both the carrier crew and the riffle squad. The system had been designed by the American 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 hadn’t been that dangerous, the sergeants hadn’t learned to command the carriers 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 carrier mortally wounded, shot through the throat. During the 20 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 carrier 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 100 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 spitting. The operator rotated the tube from side ominously and then focused it straight ahead to begin roasting the Viet Cong. He turned on the device. A spout of flame out about 30 yards and expired in the air. The crew hadn’t 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.
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 airplane, watching the Viet Cong shoot the gunners off the carriers, the machines back away one by one, and the flamethrowers 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 Viet Cong to break and run from the armored tracks; what was unbearable was his inability to regroup 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 Viet Cong 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 radio 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 Harkins for months for an L-19 equipped with radio matching those in the carriers.
The Viet Cong in their foxholes couldn’t 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 Viet Cong’ foxhole line. Still dazed from the blow and shocked by the death of his first sergeant and by his surprise that the Viet Cong were standing and fighting, he couldn’t 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 couldn’t 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 hatch and charging into the tree line. Vann didn’t 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 instructions at Saumur and Fort Knox had warned him that fools ran armored carriers blindly into the woods. The enemy infantry could swam all over the carriers 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 the 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 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 the Viet Cong 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 BAR, and with what firepower the riffle 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 Viet Cong’ foxholes line if they didn’t 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 20 minutes of confused individual actions and the loss of so many sergeant-carrier-commanders told in indecisiveness when resolve was needed most. Ba had difficulty coordinating the carriers, and the crews showed their weakened morale. The assault was hesitant, the attackers uncertain. The drivers wouldn’t 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 Viet Cong’ fire of the 50 caliber gunners and the infantrymen hammering away from on top with clip after of ammunition from their BAR and M-1 riffles. The unaccustomed handicap was also making it impossible for the drivers to keep the carriers 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 wouldn’t stand up behind their weapons. They crouched in the hatch and fired the guns by sticking up their arms, punishing the clouds again.
Lt Cho’s admiration for the soldierly stuff of his enemy was rising with each second. He was fascinated at the way the Viet Cong were keeping their heads and fighting wisely as the squat, dark green brutes closed with them. They didn’t disperse their fire along the entire line of armored tracks. Instead they focused their weapons on whichever carrier happened to be foremost. He watched the bullets dance off the hull when the two carrier 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 carrier that had pushed to the forefront. “By God, you have to hand it to them,” Lt Cho thought to himself. “They are really hanging in there.” The assault faltered. Some of the drivers began to back up. Even the aggressive Captain Ba, in whose carrier Mays was riding, let his crew pull away after the 50 caliber gunner was hit.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Ba’s carrier and one or two others kept pressing forward, despite casualties, and were within 20 to 30 yards of the irrigation dike. Ba’s mercenaries hadn’t bargained for a fight like this, but they were brave enough once they were in the midst of it. The nerve of the Viet Cong was cracking. In a few moments one of the 10-ton behemoths was going to climb the dike and the Viet Cong’ 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 wouldn’t 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.
In contrast, as for the Viet Cong, brave squad leader Dung stopped the monster-M-113s. 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 popeyed 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 metal beasts. The grenade landed on top of the M-113 and erupted with a great bang and flash. Carrier 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 brave guerrilla over on the left named Son also sprang up on the dike and shot a riffle 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 carriers is unknown. It didn’t 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 carriers 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 wouldn’t have obeyed him had he tried to do so. Mays made two last attempts with Lieutenant Cho’ carrier to turn the Viet Cong’ 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 PM in the afternoon. The Viet Cong had accomplished the impossible.
The anticlimax was a macabre farce staged by General Cao. He had flown to Tan Hiep airstrip from his new Corps Headquarters at Can Tho at 11:30 AM 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 President Diem might do to him as the radio brought in reports of more and more casualties. Diem would hold him responsible, because Col 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 carriers were also failing to flush the Viet Cong 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 Ap 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 point the Joint General Staff reserve in Saigon. Vann at once asked Porter to have Cao drop the paratroops in the rice fields and swampland on the east side of Tan Thoi and Ap Bac, the one open flank that the Viet Cong battalion commander couldn’t 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 General 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 the Viet Cong units would disengage and the unwanted battle would be over.”
Vann clambered out of the little Bird-dog L-19 and strode into the command-post tent. He told Cao that on this day he couldn’t spend all of this blood for nothing. He had to close the box around the Viet Cong and destroy them. Porter supported him, both of them urging 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 villages. He became so angry and was jabbing so hard 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. “Goddamn it,” 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 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. Major General 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, didn’t object, because Diem and Nhu order save the lives of Vietnamese peoples by rural revolutionary development project and “Chieu Hoi” [Open Arms] program by persuaded the guerrillas come-joint to government for peace and prosperity.
As for American, General Harkins hadn’t come down to find out why an unprecedented five choppers 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 to drop time. He said, “We will drop at 16:00” – 4:00 PM 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 L-19. He spent the rest of the afternoon asking when the paratroops were going to arrive and attempting to persuade Cao, 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 Ap Bac. As demoralized as Ba’s men were, they could have at least supported the Civil Guards with their 50 caliber, and the Viet Cong couldn’t 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.
The second Civil Guard battalion had, in fact, arrived at Ap Bac in the midst of Ba’s attempt at an organized assault. The commanding officer was a young man, a competent lieutenant. He was that he could come to Ba’s relief immediately by flanking around to the right and working in behind the Viet Cong’ foxhole line from the south as the first battalion should have done. He radioed Tho for permission to attack and, anticipating approval, positioned one of his companies forward to begin as soon as he alerted Ba to his move. Major Tho ordered him to wait. As the afternoon wasted away, after Ba had been beaten and the Viet Cong were being left undisturbed except for air and artillery bombardments, the lieutenant asked permission to attack three more times.
Prevost cleared the way for him by knocking down the machine gun at the right-hand corner of the dike in a single effective air strike of the battle at 3:40 PM, more than an hour too late to help Ba, but with hours left to spare for the Civil Guards, Vann had encountered Prevost at the airstrip right after his argument with Cao over the paratroop drop. He had asked Prevost to do something about the air-control fiasco and, before returning to his own spotter airplane, had gone back to the map and shown Prevost where the foxholes were dug under the trees on the dike and the location of the machine gun. Vann had noticed the gun during the abortive helicopter rescue at the end of the morning. Prevost borrowed another VNAF L-19, and Dam instructed a Vietnamese FAC waiting at the airstrip to ride in the backseat and direct a Farm Gate B-26 Marauder on its way down from the air commando squadron at Bien Hoa
At first Prevost stayed within the rules and let his Vietnamese FAC control the twin-engine bomber. The result was that the FAC and the American pilot wasted the two canisters of napalm the plane was carrying and four of its 100-puond bombs. Prevost then bent the rules by persuading the FAC to give control of the B-26. He directed it through several strafing runs, walking the streams of 50 caliber bullets right along the tree line. The pilot of the B-26 was initially irritated with Prevost for coaching him to take a low and shallow approach and to keep the stick forward as he strafed. The pilot was diving too steeply and then pulling out of his dive too soon. The bullets from the eight 50 caliber in the nose were missing the machine-gun foxhole. The staff at the Joint Air Operations Center at Tan Son Nhut was monitoring the radio traffic. One of the older officers knew Prevost and recognized his voice. “Listen,” he said to the others
“Herb’s telling the guy how to make an attack.” After the pilot had learned to hold down the nose, Prevost had him fire a salvo of rockets precisely into the corner of the dike. The Viet Cong machine gun went silent, the crew killed or wounded. The fire direction center at the Tan Hiep command post then mistakenly called off the B-26 so that the artillery could resume shooting, but it was not the mistake of the division artillery officer that rendered Prevost’s achievement another accomplishment in the void. Each time the Civil Guard lieutenant asked permission to attack, Tho ordered him to wait. Three men in the forward company were killed and two were wounded while waiting.
When Vann radioed Ziegler to ask why airborne battalion had not yet been dropped, and Ziegler inquired of Cao who would look out the door of the tent at the sky and say: “They’re supposed to be here. Air Force is late.” He had actually arranged for the paratroops to be dropped at 6:00 PM, an hour and a half before darkness. He thought this would be convenient, that they would have just enough time to regroup and set up a perimeter defense for the night and no time to get into a fight. There wasn’t Cao to convenience the Viet Cong but Diem and Nhu don’t want no one get kill in vain. They have been processing a campaign psychological welfare for saving lives.
The paratroops began jumping at 6:05 PM from 7th/USAF twin-engine transports, whale-shape C-123 Providers, by monitoring the ARVN radio traffic, the guerrilla battalion commander had known for two hours that they were coming. The important piece of information he had been unable to obtain was the exact location of the designated drop zone. He therefore ordered the company commander at Tan Thoi to prepare to shift some of his troops to counter the landing if the airborne proved threatening. Unlike the exhausted regulars at Ap Bac, the regional guerrillas at Tan Thoi were relatively fresh. Their fight with the 7th Division battalion had never developed into anything more than an exchange of fire. Vann’s favorite battalion advisor and the most popular officer in the detachment, Captain Kenneth Good, a 32 year-old Californian, West-Point class of 1952, had perished because he had gone forward on a reconnaissance to try to get the stalled battalion moving. He had been wounded and needlessly bled to death because like all flight crewmembers stuck in the hot battlefield, no one helicopter received the facts order for medical evacuation meanwhile we were standing by for rescue for all day long. Good was hit wounded about two hours before he was evacuated to the airstrip, where he died in a few minutes. Two and half hours after Good’s death, when the paratroops arrived, the troops of his battalion cheered and the bugler blew a rousing call.
Either the flight leader of the American transport planes or the Vietnamese jumpmaster – the source of the mistake was never explained –committed the error that made Cao accommodate the Viet Cong battalion commander. The paratroopers started leaping from the planes at the end, rather than at the beginning, of their drop zone. The mistake put them off by more than half a mile. Many of them landed in front of the Viet Cong positions on the west and northwest sides of Tan Thoi, instead of safety behind the Civil Guards and the M-113s at Ap Bac as Cao had planned. There was always the risk of such an error in airborne operations. This scenario recalled me on repeated at 1972 in the event “Easter offensive”. I was lead of four gun-ships to cover and pre-strike the LZ for 100 UH-1 (40 VNAF and 60 US, 101 Air Calvary Division) for air assault landing carried one full Airborne brigade to west of My Chanh, Quang Tri, province. USAF smoggy dropped a curtain smoke cover of east flank mountain, but mistaken the wind direction from the ocean. The smoked curtain enveloped all of us. I must give the hot urgent “Everyone trying to land as soon as possible” I shouted. (All these odds and adverse were in the anticipated scope of Harriman strategic staff with the motto “For strengthening peace must having a preparedness for war” that means U.S administration have to train their troops for ready combat operation in any adverse circumstances)

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Which was thus another reason why Porter, Vann, and Cao, Dam had wanted the drop made much earlier in the afternoon. The Viet Cong were able to take the paratroops under fire as they were still descending in their chutes. In contrast to the regular ARVN, the South Vietnam ARVN airborne was hardy soldiers. The French parachute officers had been the doomed knights of the colonial army, romantic men who exalted comradeship and a brave death as somehow redeeming whatever stupidities accompanied their lot. Their Vietnamese men-at-arms who stayed behind kept the memory, and these paratroops tried to react with the pluckiness of their French ideal. Cao had inadvertently committed them to combat under the worst of circumstances. It was impossible to get organized in the thickening dusk while being shot at by an enemy close by. They were unable to do more than launch piecemeal attacks in small units before darkness put an end to the fighting. The Viet Cong made short work of them and inflicted substantial casualties. 19 of the paratroops were killed and 33 wounded, including the 2 American advisors to the battalion, a captain and a sergeant.
To make certain the Viet Cong withdrew during the night, General Cao would not permit a C.47 flare plane that Prevost summoned to drop its flares and illuminate the Viet Cong’s retreat route. Vann wanted to light up the rice fields and swamps all along the east flank of Tan Thoi and Ap Bac to keep them under regular bombardment with 500 rounds of artillery. Cao agreed to fire 100 shells. He then ordered the batteries to shoot four shells per hour. His excuse for banning flares was that the paratroops didn’t want their night defensive positions revealed to the Viet Cong. It was doubtful that the airborne ever made such a request, and Vann protested that the flares wouldn’t illuminate the paratroops because they were on the other side of Tan Thoi. Cao’s logic of facilitating his personal disengagement from this disaster prevailed. The C-47 dropped no flares.
As for VNAF, we badly need the flare ship and orchestrated with artillery when we were in the operation for pick-up the wounded and remains. I had two helicopters right in Tan Hiep airstrip and I must contact to Tan Son Nhưt air base for reinforced. I had planned at least four rotations back and forth to Cong Hoa hospital
At 3:40 PM those M-113s of Ba restored the security in his landing zone; the Viet Cong was pushed far away to northern village Tan Thoi. The LZ was right the tree line with many foxholes where the Viet Cong were been forced to retreat just couple minutes ago. Ap Bac now was safe zone. The 7th Command-post in the tent at airstrip gave the facts orders for evacuation but they didn’t know the numbers we just go ahead and get job done as soon as better. The landing zone was very easy located, just right on three helicopters were shot down, at X.S 309541. On the airway to the LZ, I was informed about 76 wounded and 44 deaths. I contacted on FM 45.5 to my Squadron 211th and requested two more H.34 joint with us for that mission. Two H34s already were on the way to the LZ. In this moment, at north from Saigon, I saw two black spots familiar with me there were two choppers in coming. We flow from south following the M-113s tracks to LZ. Suddenly I found out one H-21 alone parking right in the middle of paddy field, look might be forced landing by ground fired. Below there was Ba Beo-Canal, for the Tong Doc Loc’ Canal that forms the boundary of the Plain of Reeds. I saw three choppers shot downed in paddy water. Those thatched-houses around the stream still burned with smoked. I planned to contact the ground troops in the same time I saw the yellow smoke right in the dike near the tree line. I made the sharp spiral turns and landing first, even Captain Civil Guards commander radioed warning don’t fly to northern on the most tree lines… The yellow smoke gave me confirmation wind direction, at last I landed heading into gusted-strong wind to south-west. I radioed the second H.34 to land near the banana grove for pick up the wounded first, whereas the deaths later. Where the banana trees looked like someone cut all flattop or the rogue elephants driven away.
Down in cabin a sergeant medic radioed how many serious wounded on the stretchers? I respond priority for the heavy risk, and the rest let them sitting or whatever as much as we can to hurry to hospital. Let them know we will come back until no one left!” A medic set up the serious wounded lying on the floor and the lights sitting around, total 15; and the second 13, the third 16 and the fourth 15. I calculated that we will spend fourth lifts, but the last one should be carried the death men. I was hover my helicopter for power check, and nose easy down forward to get air-speed into the wind.
When we landed for the last lift, the darkness almost enveloped us. Unfortunately one helicopter was engine lost power so we have only three choppers. I must share the remains to three choppers in commission. To day, as a Standard Instructor Pilot, I got the chance to flight-check out Lieutenant Dien become aircraft-commander, so I let him on the right seat. Lt Dien just graduated 1961 at Stead AFB, Nevada in H-19B. He was 23 years old. Dien looked down and saw the death man in the panic gestures, opened broader eyes, mouth, bleeding. These poor soldiers were unlucky because the US rating pilots without experience, landing right the easier middle paddy, they waded in the water to the dikes, so they must suffer the Viet Cong snipers climbing on the coconut trees shot down one by one when they reach the hidden spot still hit the buttocks.
On the air space to Cong Hoa hospital, I glanced to right side and discovering his be befuddled by fly; he looked as if he had seen the ghosts (looked very frightened) He told me that “It’s like someone fly the helicopter but not me, I felt my rudder-pedals having stranger pressure on them so what! Looked like someone pulled my left leg?”
I certainly respond: “The maritime wind was very gusty from the sea blowing so reflecting your tail rotor, nothing else for a ghostly feel seemed to whisper in your mind. How did you think if you are the sergeant medic in down cabin now?”
We saw the four blue spot lights on the Cong Hoa helipad. In this situation ghostly-shapes flying about in the dark, I should take control to land.

The ‘raggedy-ass little bastards’ had obliged the Americans, only the 350 Viet Cong had stood their ground and humbled a modern army five times their number equipped with artillery and armored carrier and supported by helicopters and fighter-bombers. The Viet Cong heaviest weapon was the little 60mm mortar that had proved useless to them. Viet Cong suffered 18 killed and 39 wounded, light casualties considering that ARVN troops and their Americans subjected them to thousands of riffle and machine-gun bullets, the blast and shrapnel of 600 artillery shells, and the napalm, bombs, and assorted other ordnance of 13 warplanes and 5 UH-1C model Huey gun-ships. The Huey alone expended 8,400 rounds 7,62mm of machine-gun fire and 100 rockets on the tree lines at Ap Bac. With the weapons they held in their hands the Viet Cong killed or wounded roughly four of their enemies for every man they lost. They inflicted about 80 killed and well over 100 wounded on the ARVN forces and also killed 3 Americans, wounded another 8, and accounted for 5 helicopters [4 H-21 and 1 UH-1B] The Viet Cong managed to cause all of this damage while still conserving their own bullets. From the first shots at the Civil Guards through the last fight with the paratroops they fired about 5,000 rounds of riffle and machine-gun ammunition.
The Ap Bac’ Viet Cong commander fixed the departure hour for 10:00 PM and assembly point as the house of a peasant named “Ten” (this code call-sign by digit number 10) Muoi’s house at the southern and of village Tan Thoi. Since dawn he had been performing the indispensable role of battlefield leader, making the decisions affecting the fate of all that only a soldier or his experience and judgment could make, spending the lives of his men conscientiously to win. Now with the same care he organized their escape to fight again. He had the two reinforced companies shift their units to the vicinity of the house in stages. The company at Ap Bac, which had begun evacuating the foxholes in the section of the tree line facing Ba’s M-113s by late afternoon, worked its way up the stream connecting the two villages. During the fall-back to the assembly point, one platoon of each company was assigned the role of rear guard just in case the ARVN attempted an uncharacteristic night attack. About two hour before departure the Viet Cong commander dispatched local guerrilla scout teams to reconnoiter the retreat routes to the east and to arrange for sampans to be waiting at a canal to transport the wounded to a thatched-hut hospital in one of the nearest base camps. He and the company commanders conferred after the scout teams reported back and selected the safest route. He also sent a squad back down to Ap Bac to recover the bodies of Dung and his comrades so that they could be carried to the battalion base and buried with honor. The man to whose courage they owed their lives had been killed by an air strike or an artillery barrage while his company was withdrawing through an orchard inside the village. The squad returned without the bodies. They said that they had been unable to find Dung and his companions in the darkness and were fearful of making any noise within the village because Ba’s M-113s were bivouacked for the night on the edge of the tree line.
“Comrade Dung couldn’t come!” The Viet Cong account of the battle had said.
At 10:00 PM, night the two companies set off in a column for the base camps on the Plain of Reeds. The village guerrillas and the peasants from Ap Bac and Tan Thoi who had stayed to help during the fight left by a different route for their separate hideouts in the water palm jungles in the vicinity. The regulars of the 261st Main-Force who had held Ap Bac led the way. The men of the weapons platoon marched in the middle of the column, carrying the wounded and the bodies of other dead who had been retrieved for burial. The province guerrillas of the 514th Regional followed, with one of their platoons forming a rear guard. These men were in friendly country, and they were accustomed to marching at night. The wounded were transferred to the sampans. The column continued down the canal to a fording place, waded across, and kept marching until well after daybreak without being detected, reaching the camps safely at 7:00 AM. The Viet Cong had done more than win a battle. They had achieved a Vietnamese victory in the way of their ancestors. The Viet Cong overcome the odds. “They were brave men” I told to myself “They gave a good account of themselves today!” Tonight to conceal the full measure of my anger to US commandeering because of the consequences, the worst details of this debacle, how the Viet Cong had stood and held despite the assault of armored carriers and all of the pounding and burning from the air and artillery. One looked out across the darkness toward Ap Bac, as the token artillery fire sounded in the muffled way that artillery always seems to sound on battlefield at night and an occasional star shell from the batteries illuminated the sky. I paid them a tribute at about the time they were beginning their march to safety from the peasant Muoi’s house. It was fitting that the tribute should come from mine. I do feel that the Americans involved this war transformed the South Vietnam regime become the puppet government and mine became a “New Legion Pilot” from now on, according the axiom-1[there was never a legitimate non-communist government in Saigon] However, in my mind I’ll still having the HONOR on behalf of the soldier of Republic of South Vietnam and the DUTY to protect my men

In conclusion, the nature of the military conflict in this small battle has been under change obviously since Diem and Kennedy’s assassinations. Vietnam War’s creator was William Averell Harriman who’s a Cold-War’ architect as well, and in those books I’ll offered an unusual perspective on the tragic consequences of the war, “the American-War” the U.S in Vietnam, and how it shaped Vietnam’s political, economic climate.

QUEENBEE-1