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

by Neil Sheehan

  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 World War II. They could not turn back, whatever the outcome of the war. They could not flee to the North, even had they wished to do so; disheartened cadres were not welcomed there. They did not 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 did not 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 hamlet just a few miles northwest of Tan Thoi and the shooting down of two of the 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.

  Diem’s reaction to that counterstroke, Cao’s bootlicking acceptance of his leader’s self-defeating strategy, and the refusal of Harkins to believe Vann and to challenge Diem had given the Viet Cong a two-and-a-half-month respite. 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 outposts 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 rifles. 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 (BARs) named for John Moses Browning, the American firearms genius 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 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 hamlets of Tan Thoi and Bac 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 did not intend simply to stand and hold ground. They were accepting battle in the expectation that they would be able to fight and maneuver 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 hamlets would also have the advantage of fighting in familiar surroundings 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 Bac hamlet, were from the My Tho vicinity and another quarter were from the environs of Ben Tre just across the upper branch of the Mekong.

  This was historically fitting ground for a decisive battle. The peasants in this belt of villages along the eastern edge of the Plain of Reeds had followed the Communists 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 the hamlets with artillery and bombs. The prisoners had been taken up to Saigon on river barges and unloaded on the docks at night under searchlights. They had been strung together in 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 A.M. some of the scout teams of local guerrillas, dispersed in a net for miles around the two hamlets, 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 Bac right below it by a creek with tree lines on both banks which permitted concealed movement in daytime. The hamlets 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 rifle squads, and his battalion weapons platoon with a second .30 caliber machine gun and a 60mm mortar, in Bac hamlet because it was the most difficult to defend. His intelligence indicated that if an attack was made against Bac, it would probably come from the south or the west. Just south of the hamlet a branch of the creek ran off to the west, and a tree line jutted out along it. He placed a platoon of infantry under this 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 Bac hamlet was a big irrigation ditch that ran in a 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 Bac 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 in crossfires anyone or anything approaching. The battalion commander sited his two machine guns and his BARs 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 Regionals strengthened by a separate provincial platoon, in similar fashion in the irrigation dikes that edged the three exposed sides of Tan Thoi.

  From the air and from the rice fields outside, these hamlets gave no indication that they were the twin bastions of a fortress. The tree lines were the usual Delta profusion of banana and coconut groves, assorted fruit trees, stands of bamboo and water palm, and the hardwoods the peasants let grow to pole height to use for construction. The undergrowth at t
he 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. 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 the artillery. To kill a man crouched down inside one of these foxholes required a direct hit from an 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 at 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 resupplied with ammunition as needed, the wounded to be evacuated, replacements 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 Bac, 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 Bac and most of the other hamlets. Vann had not been given the approximately thirty transport helicopters required to lift a whole ARVN battalion in one move. The Army was having trouble maintaining the Koreanera H-21s 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 A.M. 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 plane.) 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 A.M., 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. The 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 Bac. 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 Bac 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, 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 uncoded 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 the troops of the first Civil Guard battalion walking up toward them in files along the dirt trails and on narrow paddy dikes. The district guerrillas were hurriedly placed in a coconut grove off to the right. They were instructed to rake the Civil Guards from that flank after the Viet Cong regulars had surprised them from the front.

  Alert to the possibility that tree lines 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 A.M.

  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 A.M. 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. Maj. 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 it was occurring. Tho was the man whom Diem had also made commander of the armor regiment at My Tho as additional anticoup 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 attack 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 landi
ng troops in the open paddies in front of the western tree line of Bac where the rest of the guerrilla regulars were waiting in the foxholes dug into the irrigation dike.

  Vann was in an 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 Bac and select a landing site for the reserve. Vann was suspicious of Bac as soon as he saw the hamlet. It occurred to him that the guerrillas opposing the Civil Guards from the southern tree line might be part of a larger force that had retreated ahead of the advancing provincial troops. If so, Bac would be the logical assembly area for them. For the next fifteen minutes he searched the hamlet 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.