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

by Neil Sheehan

  “Walrus, this is Topper Six, over,” he called. Mays acknowledged.

  “Is that goddam 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, goddammit?” 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 Bac, although he knew the men would not 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 did not 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, recross it, and work their way east to Bac from that point? Ba agreed.

  Ba 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 Bac.

  Vann turned his attention to the plight of the aviators 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 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 the 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 did not respond to the regimental headquarters that relayed the instructions to him. Vann still felt they owed it to the wounded aviators 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 spotter-plane pilot told Vann he was crazy and wanted to commit suicide, but he agreed to fly. Three of the Hueys were capable of strafing. (A fourth had taken a hit in a critical area and was considered unsafe to fly until repaired.) If the spotter plane attracted little or no shooting and the guerrillas were apparently no longer at Bac in force, the Hueys 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 did not 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 was 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 did not 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 did not 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 did not 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 a bait as they could in front of the guerrillas. Vann was not 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 planes 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 machines between his aircraft and the western tree line, as the pilot of the crashed Huey had sought to do. Simultaneously the three Hueys appeared and started machine-gunning and rocketing 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 Hueys were again wasting half of their firepower on the southern tree line. This mistake and the inefficacy of their light 7.62mm machine 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 thirty 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 craft in the air. With guidance from Vann’s pilot he was able to turn and fly back about three-quarters of a mile 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 Saigon army 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. 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 P.M. 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 hamlet from the north were not deflected to rescue the reserve company and the helicopter crews. At 12:15 the division battalion finally reached Tan Thoi. 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 Regionals entrenched in the dikes around the edges of the 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 Bac and Tan Thoi were mutually supporting. They were also mutually dependent. Men running from one hamlet would probably cause the troops in the other to panic too. Even if the men in the second hamlet 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 was doing his best to make these men break and run so that he could kill them. The Viet Cong leader was using every 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 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 Bac. While the platoon was not 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 did not 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 BARs malfunctioned and they could not repair it. They reported to their company commander in 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 the irrigation dike, where they could still protect his flank to the south. The men did not exercise good camouflage discipline in retreating. A VNAF 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 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 urging, 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 Bac untenable.

  The worried company leader in Bac requested reinforcements from the company in Tan Thoi to replace his lost platoon of regulars. The battalion commander refused. The province guerrillas in Tan Thoi might have the ARVN battalion stalled, but they were one 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 ten-minute march away from the hamlet. In view of these odds the guerrilla battalion commander could not 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 did not dare risk any action that might trigger the loss of one of them. Bac would have to be held, he told his company commander there, by the men who had stayed.

  The guerrillas in the irrigation dike at Bac had 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. The nearest ground observer was with the battalion at Tan Thoi. He could do no more than adjust into the general area of 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 hamlet were mainly smashing the peasant houses.

  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 plane. It was an option that even Vann did not dare try to exercise. Seizing control of the artillery would have meant removing a major weapon from the hands of the Saigon officers. Dam, his chief artillery officer, and the battery commander concerned would all have 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 Saigon 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 VNAF 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 most.

  The Vietnamese forward air controllers (FACs) 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 hamlet. They were attacking the thatched-roof dwellings of Bac and Tan Thoi 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 airplane does not easily grasp the logic of a landscape beneath him. He does not naturally deduce that if the guerrillas are in the houses inside the hamlet, they will not be able to shoot at the infantry out in the rice field: the foliage around the hamlet will block their vie
w. The optical relationship between a man in a diving plane 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 Minh 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 buildings in a rural Vietnamese community.

  Vann had not thought to appeal to Prevost for help to get the planes 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 being 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 could not 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 Anthis and his staff in Saigon had supported their protégé, Harkins had not responded to Vann’s urging that they adopt a workable system to allow Americans to take charge when the fighter-bomber pilots were American, as was the case with many of the pilots today. The Vietnamese FACs retained sole authority to control the strikes. Vann implored Dam to tell the VNAF FACs to stop incinerating houses and to have the fighter-bombers lay the napalm down the tree line. Words in any language did not seem to influence the automatonlike behavior of the airmen.