by Neil Sheehan
One of the riflemen a couple of steps farther from the carrier was knocked down by a bullet. The .50 caliber gunner was initially confused by the guerrillas’ fusillade and thought that most of the fire was coming from a 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. “The bastard is just spreading the stuff around in the air over their heads,” Scanlon cursed.
The trouble was that neither the gunner, nor Scanlon, nor anyone else could see any guerrillas. Scanlon couldn’t see anything in front except a wall of green. The only logical place for the guerrillas 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 would normally have given away the positions 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 machine gunner lost his nerve, ducked down inside the hatch, and began shooting at the clouds. These guerrillas whom Scanlon had not expected to find at 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 through the rear hatch.
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 Scanlon told him to do so. “Get up, goddammit, and aim at the base of the tree line,” Scanlon screamed. He grabbed the man by his fatigue shirt and pulled and hauled at him, yelling these instructions in the best Vietnamese he could muster 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. Scanlon 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 vehicle heard him and pulled forward again, but no one would get out to pick up the wounded soldier. Scanlon sprang over the side of his M-113 and ran to the man. As he reached him, one of the infantrymen from the second M-113, braver than the rest, reached him too and helped Scanlon 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, Scanlon pulled and yelled at this gunner too until he had him up and trying to aim the machine gun. “Shoot at the bottom of the tree line,” Scanlon shouted.
These two M-113 crews had been intimidated. The drivers backed up behind the fuselages of the two H-21s to hide from the punishment of the guerrillas’ bullets. The Viet Cong ceased firing as soon as the machines retreated. At first the drivers headed toward the right side of the helicopters, 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. Scanlon hollered at them to stop. He motioned to the driver of the carrier he was on to move forward of the helicopters again. The driver shook his head. Scanlon argued with the sergeant who was the vehicle commander and with the other crewmen that they had to go back and attack the Viet Cong, that there were pinned-down infantry and wounded from the reserve company who were depending on them. The sergeant 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 “bugout.” He saw Bowers crouched nearby at the corner of a dike, gesturing to him. Scanlon leaped off to join him.
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 pair of M-113s had arrived on the left flank of the helicopters, 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!” in Vietnamese, stood up, waved with his carbine at the Saigon infantrymen to follow, and started forward with the armored tracks against the guerrillas in the tree line. He had gone about twenty paces before he had the feeling for the second time that day that he was alone. He looked behind. He was. Just then the M-113s began to back up, and Bowers hurried back to the dike, glad that he had not inspired anyone to follow him. He might have gotten more of these Vietnamese soldiers 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 aviators were, and Bowers led him over to the spot where they were lying behind the dike in front of the helicopters, watching the unfolding of the decisive struggle that had begun between the guerrillas and the armored machines.
At 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 carrier to tow two 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 carrier. He intended to tell Ba that they should not attack frontally but should instead maneuver far around to the right and approach the guerrilla foxhole line from that end of the irrigation dike. Although they would still face the machine gun and the guerrilla squad deployed there, they would be coming up against a small number of weapons rather than a whole line. (Mays could not see the squad. He had by now spotted the machine gun and a rifleman in a 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 guerrillas’ 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 guerrillas 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 vehicle commanders over his radiophone headset to coordinate all four machines 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 him half-conscious into the vehicle.
The company was temporarily 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 with typhoid fever. Cho, despite his aggressiveness in individual actions, was apparently incapable of taking charge, because he did not do so. Since Mays had also been unable to speak to Ba before the machine-gun barrel struck him, Ba had not 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 “assault” and “together” and repeated them to Cho with gestures in body Vietnamese, but for the next twenty 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 commanded both the carrier crew and the rifle squad. The system had been designed by the Americans 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 had not been that dangerous, the sergeants had not learned to command the vehicles 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 vehicle mortally wounded, shot through the throat. During the twenty 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 vehicle 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 a hundred 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-spitter. The operator rotated the tube from side to side ominously and then focused it straight ahead to begin roasting the guerrillas. He turned on the device. A spout of flame shot out twenty to thirty yards and expired in the air. The crew had not 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. (Zippo is the brand name of a popular cigarette lighter.)
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 plane, watching the guerrillas shoot the gunners off the carriers, the machines back away one by one, and the flamethrower 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 guerrillas to break and run from the armored tracks; what was unbearable was his inability to recoup 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 guerrillas 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 radios 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 Saigon for months for an L-19 equipped with a radio matching those in the carriers.
The Viet Cong in the foxholes could not 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 guerrillas’ foxhole line. Still dazed from the blow and shocked by the death of his first sergeant and by his surprise that the guerrillas were standing and fighting, he could not 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 could not 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 hatches and charging into the tree line. Vann did not 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 instructors at Saumur and Fort Knox had warned him that fools ran armored vehicles blindly into a woods. The enemy infantry could swarm all over the vehicles 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 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 the 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 guerrillas 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 BARs, and with what firepower the rifle 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 guerrillas’ foxhole line if they did not 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 twenty minutes of confused individual actions and the loss of so many sergeants told in indecisiveness when resolve was needed most. Ba had difficulty coordinating the vehicles, and t
he crews showed their weakened morale. The assault was hesitant, the attackers uncertain. The drivers would not 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 guerrillas’ fire of the .50 caliber gunners and the infantrymen hammering away from on top with clip after clip of ammunition from their BARs and M-1 rifles. The unaccustomed handicap was also making it impossible for the drivers to keep the vehicles 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 would not stand up behind their weapons. They crouched in the hatch and fired the guns by sticking up their arms, punishing the clouds again.
Bowers’s admiration for the soldierly stuff of his enemy was rising with each second. He was fascinated at the way the guerrillas were keeping their heads and fighting wisely as the squat, dark green brutes closed with them. They did not disperse their fire along the entire line of armored tracks. Instead they focused their weapons on whichever vehicle happened to be foremost. He watched the bullets dance off the hull when the two machine 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 machine that had pushed to the forefront. “By God, you have to hand it to them,” Bowers thought to himself. ‘They are really hanging in there.” The assault faltered. Some of the drivers began to back up. Even the aggressive Cho, in whose vehicle Mays was riding, let his crew pull away after the .50 caliber gunner was hit.