The Battle of Ap Bac

by Neil Sheehan

  The second Civil Guard battalion had, in fact, arrived at Bac in the midst of Ba’s attempt at an organized assault. The commanding officer was a young man, a competent lieutenant. He saw that he could come to Ba’s relief immediately by flanking around to the right and working in behind the guerrillas’ foxhole line from the south as the first battalion should have done. He radioed Tho for permission to attack and, anticipating approval, positioned one of his companies forward to begin as soon as he alerted Ba to his move. Tho ordered him to wait. As the afternoon wasted away, after Ba had been beaten and the guerrillas were being left undisturbed except for air and artillery bombardments, the lieutenant asked permission to attack three more times.

  Prevost cleared the way for him by knocking out the machine gun at the right-hand corner of the dike in the single effective air strike of the battle at 3:40 P.M., more than an hour too late to help Ba, but with hours left to spare for the Civil Guards. Vann had encountered Prevost at the airstrip right after his argument with Cao over the paratroop drop. He had asked Prevost to do something about the air-control fiasco and, before returning to his own spotter plane, had gone back to the map and shown Prevost where the foxholes were dug under the trees on the dike and the location of the machine gun. Vann had noticed the gun during the abortive helicopter rescue at the end of the morning. Prevost borrowed another VNAF L-19, and Dam instructed a Vietnamese FAC waiting at the airstrip to ride in the backseat and direct a Farm Gate A-26 Invader on its way down from the air commando squadron at Bien Hoa.

  At first Prevost stayed within the rules and let his Vietnamese FAC control the twin-engine bomber. The result was that the FAC and the American pilot wasted the two canisters of napalm the plane was carrying and four of its 100-pound bombs. Prevost then bent the rules by persuading the FAC to give him control of the A-26. He directed it through several strafing runs, walking the streams of .50 caliber bullets right along the tree line. The pilot of the A-26 was initially irritated with Prevost for coaching him to take a low and shallow approach and to keep the stick forward as he strafed. The pilot was diving too steeply and then pulling out of his dive too soon. The bullets from the .50 calibers in the nose were missing the machine-gun foxhole. The staff at the Joint Air Operations Center at Tan Son Nhut were monitoring the radio traffic. One of the older officers knew Prevost and recognized his voice. “Listen,” he said to the others, “Herb’s telling the guy how to make an attack.” After the pilot had learned to hold down the nose, Prevost had him fire a salvo of rockets precisely into the corner of the dike. The Viet Cong machine gun went silent, the crew killed or wounded. The fire direction center at the Tan Hiep command post then mistakenly called off the A-26 so that the artillery could resume shooting, but it was not the mistake of the division artillery officer that rendered Prevost’s achievement another accomplishment in the void. Each time the Civil Guard lieutenant asked permission to attack, Tho ordered him to wait. Three men in the forward company were killed and two were wounded while waiting.

  Whenever Vann radioed Ziegler to ask why the airborne battalion had not yet been dropped, and Ziegler inquired of Cao, Cao would look out the door of the tent at the sky and say: “They’re supposed to be here. Saigon is late.” He had actually arranged for the paratroops to be dropped at 6:00 P.M., an hour and a half before darkness. He thought this would be convenient, that they would have just enough time to regroup and set up a perimeter defense for the night and no time to get into a fight. Cao was to convenience the Viet Cong.

  The paratroops began jumping at 6:05 P.M. from seven U.S. Air Force twin-engine transports, whale-shaped C-123 Providers. By monitoring the ARVN radio traffic, the guerrilla battalion commander had known for two hours that they were coming. The important piece of information he had been unable to obtain was the exact location of the designated drop zone. He therefore ordered the company commander at Tan Thoi to prepare to shift some of his troops to counter the landing if the airborne proved threatening.

  Unlike the exhausted regulars at Bac, the regional guerrillas at Tan Thoi were relatively fresh. Their fight with the 7th Division battalion had never developed into anything more than an exchange of fire. Vann’s favorite battalion advisor and the most popular officer in the detachment, Capt. Kenneth Good, a thirty-two-year-old Californian, West Point class of 1952, had perished because he had gone forward on a reconnaissance to try to get the stalled battalion moving. He had been wounded and needlessly bled to death because the ARVN captain he was with failed to report that he was hit. It was two hours before he was accidentally discovered by another advisor and Vann could have him evacuated to the airstrip, where he died in a few minutes. Two and a half hours after Good’s death, when the paratroops arrived, the troops of his battalion cheered and the bugler blew a rousing call. No one advanced or fired a shot to assist the airborne.

  Either the flight leader of the American transport planes or the Vietnamese jumpmaster—the source of the mistake was never explained—committed the error that made Cao accommodate the guerrilla battalion commander. The paratroops started leaping from the planes at the end, rather than at the beginning, of their drop zone. The mistake put them off by more than half a mile. Many of them landed in front of the Viet Cong positions on the west and northwest sides of Tan Thoi, instead of safely behind the Civil Guards and the M-113s at Bac as Cao had planned. There was always the risk of such an error in airborne operations, which was another reason why Porter and Vann had wanted the drop made much earlier in the afternoon. The guerrillas were able to take the paratroops under fire as they were still descending in their chutes.

  In contrast to the regular ARVN, the Saigon airborne were hardy soldiers. The French parachute officers had been the doomed knights of the colonial army, romantic men who exalted comradeship and a brave death as somehow redeeming whatever stupidities accompanied their lot. Their Vietnamese men-at-arms who stayed behind kept the memory, and these paratroops tried to react with the pluckiness of their French ideal. Cao had inadvertently committed them to combat under the worst of circumstances. It was impossible to get organized in the thickening dusk while being shot at by an enemy close by. They were unable to do more than launch piecemeal attacks in small units before darkness put an end to the fighting. The guerrillas made short work of them and inflicted substantial casualties. Nineteen of the paratroops were killed and thirty-three wounded, including the two American advisors to the battalion, a captain and a sergeant.

  To make certain the guerrillas withdrew during the night, Cao would not permit a C-47 flare plane that Prevost summoned to drop its flares and illuminate the Viet Cong’s retreat route. Vann wanted to light up the rice fields and swamps all along the east flank of Tan Thoi and Bac and to keep them under regular bombardment with 500 rounds of artillery. Cao agreed to fire 100 shells. He then ordered the batteries to shoot four shells per hour. His excuse for banning flares was that the paratroops did not want their night defensive positions revealed to the guerrillas. It was doubtful that the airborne ever made such a request, and Vann protested that the flares would not illuminate the paratroops because they were on the other side of Tan Thoi. Cao’s logic of facilitating his personal disengagement from this disaster prevailed. The C-47 dropped no flares.

  The “raggedy-ass little bastards” had obliged the Americans. The 350 guerrillas had stood their ground and humbled a modern army four times their number equipped with armor and artillery and supported by helicopters and fighter-bombers. Their heaviest weapon was the little 60mm mortar that had proved useless to them. They suffered eighteen killed and thirty-nine wounded, light casualties considering that the Americans and their Vietnamese protégés subjected them to thousands of rifle and machine-gun bullets, the blast and shrapnel of 600 artillery shells, and the napalm, bombs, and assorted other ordnance of thirteen warplanes and five Huey gunships. The Hueys alone expended 8,400 rounds of machine-gun fire and 100 rockets on the tree lines at Bac. With the weapons they held in their hands the guerrillas killed or wou
nded roughly four of their enemies for every man they lost. They inflicted about 80 killed and well over 100 wounded on the Saigon forces and also killed three Americans, wounded another eight, and accounted for five helicopters. (The Saigon side later officially admitted to 63 killed and 109 wounded, holding down their losses by misstating the number of casualties suffered by the reserve company in front of Bac.) The guerrillas managed to cause all of this damage while still conserving their own bullets. From the first shots at the Civil Guards through the last fight with the paratroops they fired about 5,000 rounds of rifle and machine-gun ammunition.

  The battalion commander fixed the departure hour for 10:00 P.M. and the assembly point as the house of a peasant named Muoi at the southern end of Tan Thoi. Since dawn he had been performing the indispensable role of battlefield leader, making the decisions affecting the fate of all that only a soldier of his experience and judgment could make, spending the lives of his men conscientiously to win. Now with the same care he organized their escape to fight again. He had the two reinforced companies shift their units to the vicinity of the house in stages. The company at Bac, which had begun evacuating the foxholes in the section of the tree line facing Ba’s M-113s by late afternoon, worked its way up the stream connecting the two hamlets. During the fall-back to the assembly point, one platoon of each company was assigned the role of rear guard just in case the ARVN attempted an uncharacteristic night attack. About two hours before departure the battalion commander dispatched local guerrilla scout teams to reconnoiter the retreat routes to the east and to arrange for sampans to be waiting at a canal to transport the wounded to a thatched-hut hospital in one of the nearest base camps. He and the company commanders conferred after the scout teams reported back and selected the safest route. He also sent a squad back down to Bac to recover the bodies of Dung and his comrades so that they could be carried to the battalion base and buried with honors. The man to whose courage they owed their lives had been killed by an air strike or an artillery barrage while his company was withdrawing through an orchard inside the hamlet. The squad returned without the bodies. They said they had been unable to find Dung and his companions in the darkness and were fearful of making any noise within the hamlet because Ba’s M-113s were bivouacked for the night on the edge of the tree line. “Comrade Dung could not come,” the Viet Cong account of the battle said.

  At 10:00 P.M. the two companies set off in a column for the base camps on the Plain of Reeds. The village and hamlet guerrillas and the peasants from Bac and Tan Thoi who had stayed to help during the fight left by a different route for their separate hideouts in the water palm jungles in the vicinity. The regulars of the 261st Main Force who had held Bac led the way. The men of the weapons platoon marched in the middle of the column, carrying the wounded and the bodies of other dead who had been retrieved for burial. The province guerrillas of the 514th Regionals followed, with one of their platoons forming a rear guard. These men were in friendly country, and they were accustomed to marching at night. The sampans were waiting at the canal by the time the column reached it. The wounded were transferred to the boats. The column continued down the canal to a fording place, waded across, and kept marching until well after daybreak without being detected, reaching the camps safely at 7:00 A.M. They had done more than win a battle. They had achieved a Vietnamese victory in the way of their ancestors. They had overcome the odds.

  Vann paid them a tribute at about the time they were beginning their march to safety from the peasant Muoi’s house. It was fitting that the tribute should come from him. He had been the vehicle of destiny in this battle. Without him, Ba might have delayed long enough to have reached the hamlet after it was too late to fight. In his determination to destroy these men, Vann had goaded the armored personnel carriers to Bac. He had forced the battle to its climactic humiliation of the Saigon side and had consummated the triumph of the Viet Cong.

  With Nicholas Turner, a New Zealander who was the Reuters correspondent in South Vietnam, and Nguyen Ngoc Rao, the Vietnamese reporter for the UPI, I had driven down to Tan Hiep that night to find out what was happening. The news we had received in Saigon of five helicopters lost and an airborne battalion dropped in the midst of a battle, all so extraordinary, had made us decide that we had to get to Tan Hiep despite our fear of being stopped and taken prisoner or killed at one of the roadblocks the guerrillas sometimes set up along the route at night. We had probably taken a greater risk in racing Turner’s little Triumph sedan along the two-lane tarmac at seventy miles an hour.

  Cao was incapable of talking to us. I found him pacing to and fro in front of the command-post tent, running both of his hands back over his hair again and again in a kind of nervous crisis. When I walked up to him and asked a question, he stared at me for a moment and then said something incoherent and turned away.

  One of Vann’s captains located him for us. Vann drew us off into the darkness at the edge of the airstrip, away from the dim light cast out of the headquarters tent by the naked bulbs that hung inside on wires from the generator. He did not want Cao and Dam and the other ARVN officers to see him talking to us. He was frank, but he was still struggling that night to conceal the full measure of his anger from us because of the consequences if we published the worst details of this debacle. He spoke of how the guerrillas had stood and held despite the assault of the armored tracks and all of the pounding and burning from the air and the artillery. He looked out across the darkness toward Bac, as the token artillery fire sounded in the muffled way that artillery always seems to sound on battlefields at night and an occasional star shell from the batteries illuminated the sky despite Cao’s ban on flares.

  “They were brave men,” he said. “They gave a good account of themselves today.”

  A Note on Sources

  To write this account of the Battle of Ap Bac, I compared John Vann’s exhaustive after-action report with the equally thorough Viet Cong report that was later captured. I expanded on the information in both documents with interviews and with my own observations of the battlefield at the time. My own UPI dispatches on Ap Bac stimulated memory as well as adding more material. Vann’s report and the Viet Cong document tended to corroborate each other, a fact of which Vann was proud.

  Some nitty-gritty, such as Vann’s radio call sign, “Topper Six,” and that of the advisors to the M-113 company, “Walrus,” again came from the marvelous record keeping of Colonel Ziegler. He saved his pocket notebooks with the jottings he had made during Ap Bac and other actions.

  Information on the home areas of the men of the 1st Company of the 261st Main Force Viet Cong Battalion comes from a personnel roster of the unit that was also captured after the battle. Unfortunately, the original copy of the roster, with the names of the ordinary guerrillas and the aliases of the ranking cadres, has been lost and all that remains is an American analysis of it which mentions the places of origin.

  The principal interviews for “The Battle of Ap Bac” were those with Candidate Gen. Ly Tong Ba, Sgt. Major Arnold Bowers, Lt. Col. Robert Mays, Colonel Porter, Colonel Prevost, Lt. Col. James Scanlon, and Colonel Ziegler.

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