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

by Neil Sheehan

  As practiced as his eye was by this time, Vann could not 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 Guards. 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 tranquillity of Bac, Vann remained suspicious of the western tree line. He had his pilot contact another L-19 that was leading the flight of ten H-21s with the 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 instructions to the command pilot of the ten H-21s 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 H-21 pilot in the lead machine ignored Vann’s instructions and headed for a landing spot about two hundred yards from the western tree line. The three hundred yards specified by Vann is the distance at which .30 caliber small-arms fire is regarded as minimally effective. Because of the drop of a bullet in flight, visibility, and other factors, the one-hundred-yard difference can be infinity—the difference between hitting and missing.

  While Vann was relaying his instructions, the Viet Cong battalion commander was alerting his troops to prepare to shoot down helicopters. This is John Vann’s sketch map of the Battle of Ap Bac, which he drew for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He reproduced the map on a colored slide so that he could cast the tree lines of Bac and Tan Thoi on the screen in the Pentagon conference room of the American military leaders. He left the slide in his papers.

  The X in the circle marks the original target of the operation-the radio transmitter operating from Tan Thoi. The three companies of the 7th Division infantry battalion are shown closing on that hamlet. Vann has used an alternate name, Babeo, for the Tong Doc Loc Canal that forms the boundary of the Plain of Reeds. The arrow on the lower right shows the first Civil Guard battalion engaged with the guerrilla platoon in the tree line along the creek branch just south of Bac. The next arrow to the left designates the second Civil Guard battalion still moving up from the south, while the company of M-113s is shown sweeping along the outer west flank of the operational area. The time preceding the date is twenty minutes before the helicopters were to land the reserve company in the open rice paddies between the western edge of Bac, where the company of the 261st Main Force Viet Cong Battalion was waiting, and another tree line Vann has sketched along a canal farther to the west.

  He had been warned of the landing by his radio operators, who were monitoring the ARVN frequencies. It was 10:20 A.M. 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 Hueys, would stand out clearly in the sunshine.

  Sgt. 1st Class Arnold Bowers, twenty-nine years old, from a Minnesota dairy farm and the 101st Airborne Division, heard the bullwhip crack of the first bullet burst through the aluminum skin of the helicopter while the machine was still fifty feet in the air. Bowers’s helicopter was the second in the flight. Vietnam was his first war. During his previous eight and a 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’s engines before the wheels of the machine settled into the paddy and Bowers 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 the 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 his 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 and the ARVN infantrymen thought otherwise. They threw themselves down behind the first paddy dike they could reach about fifteen yards from where the helicopter had landed.

  Sergeant 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 Bowers’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. Bowers was the staff operations 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 Bowers 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 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-peasants who were 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, other 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 a 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 Bac hamlet before climbing aboard the helicopters and did not 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 was not concerned, even though he was not well armed himself. He had only a carbine and two thirty-round clips of ammunition. Once in the woods
the squad could use the trees for cover just like the Viet Cong.

  Suddenly the sergeant, who was about fifteen to twenty 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!” Bowers cursed to himself. He thought he would have a try at overriding the lieutenant. “Di, di!” 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 seventy-five 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 flighting geese and ducks with a shotgun. It is 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 Cambodian border on July 20 had been teaching the technique to selected crews 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-21s was when they were at their slowest coming in for a landing. “Usually the proper lead is two-thirds of the fuselage when the aircraft is landing,” one Viet Cong instruction pamphlet said.

  The mathematical errors of this guesswork did not 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 models of H-21s, Hueys, 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 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 were “Victor Charlies” 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 Regionals there cut loose, raising the adrenaline of their comrades in Bac at the anticipation of the “iron birds” coming into their guns next. The ten H-21s continued low over the western tree line on top of the irrigation dike at Bac and then turned and landed in a rough sequence of ones and twos in the flooded paddies about two hundred 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 Hueys 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 Hueys suppressed ground fire, but this time the Viet Cong gave tit for tat. The tracer bullets from their machine guns and BARs started reaching for a “Dipper” as soon as one of the Hueys 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. Much of the firepower of the Hueys was wasted on the southern tree line. (The guerrillas on the far side of the stream there were not shooting at the H-21s 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 could not 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 helicopters farther back in the flight string were punished the most severely, as the Viet Cong had fewer aircraft 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 aircraft managed to take off except one. The pilot radioed that its controls 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 Saigon troops around them. One of the H-21s 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 aircraft 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 did not try to stop it. He knew that the pilots would not heed him. The lead Huey circled low over the two H-21s so that the two pilots and the crew chief (the Hueys had three-man crews) could locate the men on the ground. The four other Hueys strafed and rocketed both tree lines in another desperate and confused attempt to suppress the Viet Cong fire. The Huey platoon leader turned his aircraft 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 about fifty yards behind the two 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 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 one 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 was not 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 did not reply. Bowers assumed that he was too dazed to help him rescue the other pilot and the crew chief, who were still inside.

  The machine was almost over on its back against the ground. The door on the 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’s shoulder and hobble while Bowers helped him over to the mound.