by Neil Sheehan
What Vann scorned as ineffective was not 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 P.M. the guerrillas saw the M-113s slowly approaching across the rice fields. 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 Viet Cong leadership had not been able to devise 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 machine gunner was unprotected from the 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. There was no 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 had not 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 Viet Cong leaders had also lectured their troops on the importance of subjecting the M-113s to massed fire, exactly as with aircraft. 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 did not 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 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 Ba’s gunners had not been adequately trained.
The Viet Cong battalion commander had about seventy-five 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 hamlet—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 crossfire.
To try to keep up the resolve of his troops, he had been resorting all morning to mutual encouragement. When the company in Bac shot down the helicopters, he passed the news of their “victories” to the company in Tan Thoi 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 “victory” to the men getting ready to battle the M-113s at Bac. The company commander at Bac and the platoon and squad leaders there had been controlling their men by using the six-foot-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 planes, 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 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 infantrymen were evacuated in the boats, and volunteers from the local guerrillas took their places. The three remaining wounded from the morning’s action were cadres and apparently Party members, 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 to the first-aid station. The cadres composed a slogan and had the men repeat it from foxhole to foxhole: “It is better to die at your post. It is better to die at your post.”
The carriers were taking so long to negotiate the remaining canals between them and Bac that 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 Bac. In between discouraging looks 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 could not be found, and brush and trees had to be cut to fill each one. The troops took their time. Because they fought for pay, they had no desire to risk their lives unnecessarily. Unless prodded, their normal work pace was like a permanent slowdown strike, based on the usually sound assumption that if they tarried long enough, the Viet Cong would go away. Ba, in no hurry today for his own reasons, did not push them. It was not until 1:00 P.M. that he was able to raise Major Tho on the radio and obtain an order to attack the Viet Cong at Bac.
As the carriers neared the last canal, about five hundred yards from the helicopters and seven hundred from the irrigation dike, the guerrilla battalion commander decided 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 was not 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.
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 did not believe there were any Viet Cong left at Bac. From the top of his vehicle, 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, he could see the lunch fires of the Civil Guardsmen cooking the rice and chicken they
had looted from the peasants. “Well, it’s all over now,” Scanlon thought to himself. “All we have left to do is to police up those chopper crews and the wounded.”
The troops of the M-113 company seemed to have the same thought. They were even more dilatory than before in cutting trees and brush to fill this last canal. Scanlon got the impression that this time it was less the calculated shunning of combat than the conclusion that their earlier delaying and the usual tactic of the Viet Cong in withdrawing had brought them the unspoken accommodation with their enemy that they sought. Instead of setting to work, most of the crews and the rifle squads stood on the canal bank and watched an air strike by a couple of planes that had just arrived. Planes bombing hamlets the guerrillas had evacuated was still a spectacle worth seeing. With the wounded Americans and Vietnamese at Bac on his mind, Scanlon walked up to one group of soldiers and told them to get busy. The men smiled at him. He went to his vehicle, took out an ax, and handed it to one of them. They reluctantly began to cut trees.
Seeing that it was going to take another forty-five 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 guerrillas were tarrying in the hamlet, two .50 calibers and a company of infantry could handle them. Ba consented. He was no longer tense. Having reached Tho, he had the authorization he needed, and it also appeared to him that the Viet Cong had, in any case, departed.
Mays thought there still were guerrillas at Bac. Knowing how Vann kept track of who was doing what on a battlefield, he did not believe that Vann would have incorrectly identified 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 could not conceive that any sizable number of guerrillas would stay in the hamlet 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. “No, goddammit,” Vann said in exasperation. “Get the carriers over there!” Vann did not have to explain to another professional soldier what else was in his mind. Mays understood him. Vann thought the Viet Cong remained at Bac 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 hamlet and assaulted, any guerrillas in Bac would fire a flurry of shots and run.
It was 1:45 P.M., three hours and twenty minutes since Vann had originally sent his emergency call to this company of armored tracks a mile away, before three carriers—Ba’s command vehicle 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 vehicle 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 crewmen inside the safety of the armored hulls in case there was any shooting. The guerrilla 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 carriers swept across the rice field toward the downed helicopters, the guerrilla mortar crew fired their last three shells at the two machines. Mays dismissed the explosions and spouts of paddy water as another spastic delaying tactic. “We’ve put the fear of God into them and they’re moving out,” he thought. 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 tree line, the one in which Braman had been wounded. He motioned to 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 crewmen 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 of the H-21s, 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 did not pause, and Mays controlled his nerves and stayed right behind him despite the cracks of the incoming bullets. Cho’s .50 caliber and the heavy machine gun on the other M-113 slammed like jackhammers in response to the guerrillas’ fire. Mays could make out amid the din the answering drumrolls of defiance from the Viet Cong machine gunner at the right-hand corner of the irrigation dike.
He and Bowers climbed into the helicopter to carry Braman to safety after his nearly three-and-a-half-hour wait for rescue. The boy was dead. Bowers was stunned and could not believe it at first. He turned Braman over and examined his body. The boy had not been hit a second time, and his shoulder wound showed no sign of having hemorrhaged. A couple of hours later, when things calmed down again, Bowers was to be overcome by the thought that perhaps he had made a mistake in leaving Braman in the helicopter, whatever the risk of another wound or infection from the paddy water. “Maybe 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 movement 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 vehicle, and Bowers helped Mays hustle the aviators 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 for 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. Cho had come down from the .50 caliber to talk to 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 a bung, bung, bung. Mays called Vann, who was circling overhead in the L-19, on his portable radio. He reported that he had rescued three of the pilots and that two of the helicopter crewmen were dead. The radio then went silent. A Viet Cong bullet had clipped away the aerial where Mays had attached it on top of the carrier.
The second pair of M-113s were 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 machine 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 Korean War. Again as with Bowers and Mays, the desire of the Army to build up its forces in Europe to meet the perceived Soviet challenge 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 w
as flush with the faith of the U.S. 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 a rice paddy with his .45 caliber service pistol in his hand and bullets from guerrilla weapons he could not see ricocheting off the M-113 beside him.
Scanlon’s pair of armored tracks swung around the left side of the helicopters as Ba had ordered them to do and drove directly toward the guerrilla machine gun dug in on the point three-quarters of the way up to the left where the irrigation dike jutted out into the rice field. When the M-113s came abreast of the aircraft the .50 caliber gunners loosed a couple of bursts at the tree line and were answered by the same concentration of raking fire that had opened on Mays’s two vehicles over on the right. The carriers stopped, the clamshell rear hatches dropped down, and the infantry squads piled into the paddy and fanned out. The drivers started again, and men and machines began an assault, the infantrymen holding their rifles at their hips and spraying clips of ammunition like water from a hose, guiding their aim by the path of the tracer bullets. The maneuver was automatic. The Saigon 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 guerrillas had been unlucky enough not to be able to 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, unholstering 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.