The Vietnamese on both sides of the war in the South were not fooled by this stage managing. They knew that the Viet Minh had returned and that they were participating in a historic replay. The guerrillas called themselves by the original name the Viet Minh had used—Giai Phong Quan (Liberation Army). The flag of this new national front was a slightly altered copy of the Viet Minh flag. In the middle of its split field of red and blue was the five-pointed gold star of the Vietnamese Revolution. The fear the U.S. intelligence officers had expressed back in the mid-1950s had come true, but as another of those prophecies about Vietnam that Americans made self-fulfilling. The United States had sought to destroy the old Viet Minh and had renamed it the Viet Cong. In the process the United States had created a new Viet Minh, far more formidable than the old Viet Minh the French had faced in the South.
On my first helicopter assault operation in the early summer of 1962 with a battalion from Vann’s 7th Division, I hoped, as young reporters will, for action to write about, hoped that I would witness a fight that day between the ARVN and the Viet Cong. In my mind, as in the minds of other Americans recently come to Vietnam like Vann, the Viet Minh were a distinctly different generation of guerrillas from the Viet Cong. The Viet Minh of my thoughts had been patriots, by and large nationalist revolutionaries who happened to have been led by Ho and his lieutenants because the Communists had “captured” the independence movement during the war against France. That war had ended and the French had gone. The United States had then intervened in South Vietnam to promote nationalism. The Viet Cong guerrillas were misguided peasants who had been gulled into following the wrong side by Communists who were the enemies of good men everywhere.
A Marine helicopter I was riding in was the fourth or fifth in the flight. Our objective was a Viet Cong base area on the Plain of Reeds. I heard bursts of automatic-weapons fire from the door gunners on the aircraft ahead as mine was settling into a field of waist-high reeds. Looking out the open door over the gunner’s shoulder, I saw half a dozen figures bounding away through the reeds less than a hundred yards beyond. They had weapons in their hands and small packs on their backs, and were wearing some sort of green uniform and dark sun helmets with a turtle-shell shape, like those I had seen Viet Minh guerrillas wearing in photographs of the French war. These were Viet Cong regulars from one of the Main Force battalions. The aim of the Marine gunners was poor. All of the guerrillas managed to escape toward a woods along a canal about half a mile away.
The ARVN captain commanding the battalion dallied for at least fifteen minutes, studying his map and talking over the radio to higher headquarters, before he ordered the troops to move out from the landing zone. He was an older officer. He spoke French and carried a cane, an affectation of French field commanders. The battalion stopped at a cluster of peasant huts a few hundred yards from the woods. An old man and some children were the only people present. The parents of the children were apparently hiding. The ARVN captain started questioning the old man, obviously about the guerrillas. He kept using the term “Viet Minh,” over and over again. The old peasant replied with the same term. “Why is he calling the guerrillas the Viet Minh?” I asked a Vietnamese reporter for one of the foreign news agencies who was with me. “I thought we were after the Viet Cong.”
“The Americans and the government people in Saigon call them the Viet Cong,” he said, “but out here everyone still calls them the Viet Minh.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because they look like the Viet Minh, they act like the Viet Minh, and that’s what these people have always called them,” he said.
The ARVN captain knew that the Viet Minh were back; that was why he had been so cautious. Cao knew that the Viet Minh were back; that was why he was more afraid than he would normally have been. Diem knew that the Viet Minh were back; that was another reason why he wanted to keep his army intact. Only the Americans knew neither the Vietnamese they were depending on to work their will, nor the Vietnamese enemy they faced.
In his innocence of the antecedents of this war he had been sent to Vietnam to win, Vann still thought at the end of 1962 that the solution was a military one—forcing the ARVN to attack and break up the battalions of guerrilla regulars like those I had seen on the Plain of Reeds. He also could not yet bring himself to abandon his scheme to manipulate Cao into a fighting general who would serve this task.
On December 22, 1962, Diem announced a restructuring of the ARVN command system. The country had previously been divided into three army corps regions. Diem split the third corps region into two sections. He left Saigon and the belt of provinces that ringed the capital from the west to the north and east under the original III Corps headquarters. He established a new IV Corps to cover the Mekong Delta itself, with a headquarters at Can Tho in the center of the Delta. He gave Cao the twin stars of a brigadier general for his prudence in holding down casualties (the ARVN followed the French system in which general-officer ranks begin with two stars) and put him in charge of the new IV Corps. The change also raised the stakes for Vann. Diem enlarged the 7th Division’s zone by adding two provinces to the five the division already had. The effect was to make the division responsible for the entire northern half of the Delta, where an estimated 3.2 million people lived.
Vann heard what was coming and drove up to Saigon a few days before Diem’s announcement with a memorandum for General Harkins. He asked for an appointment and personally delivered his message, explaining that he had written it for the commanding general’s eyes alone. The memorandum was phrased in the diplomatic language that Vann could use well when diplomacy suited him. He reminded the general of the gambit that he had, with Harkins’s approval, employed on Cao—building “a ‘military leader image’ in the eyes of news reporters, subordinate commanders, and visiting U.S. VIPS.” Unfortunately, Vann continued, “General Cao has not yet developed a real aggressive attitude on his own. He needs a strong advisor to stimulate him.” Vann came to his point. Dan Porter, the wise and persistent Texan, was moving to Can Tho to become Cao’s new advisor there but was scheduled to end his tour and go home in February. Harkins had designated Col. John Powers Connor, who was shortly due from the United States, to replace Porter. Colonel Connor was a gracefully built and pleasantly conventional man. His Army nickname was “Poopy.” Vann did not think that he would “stimulate” Cao. He also observed that Connor’s lack of experience in Vietnam would put him at a disadvantage. Vann proposed another advisor for Cao, an officer he had served under as an instructor at the Ranger Command at Fort Benning in 1951 after leading his Ranger company in Korea. “At the risk of seeming impertinent, I suggest that your efforts this spring will be materially improved if Colonel Wilbur Wilson becomes the Senior Advisor to General Cao,” Vann wrote. “Colonel Wilson’s experience and personality are tailored to bring out the best in General Cao, and the Delta area offers the best opportunity to break the back of the Viet Cong.”
The thought of subjecting Cao to the stimulation of Wilbur Wilson must have amused Vann, as serious as he was in his suggestion. He admired Wilson, as he did Porter, but for different qualities. Wilbur Wilson was a legend in the U.S. Army of his time. He was a strapping, lantern-jawed paratroop officer, fifty-three years of age in 1962, known as “Coal Bin Willie,” a nickname he had gained from one of his eccentricities of discipline. When inspecting barracks he insisted that the coal stacked in the bins at the back slope down at a perfect angle. He would not tolerate a single piece out of line. This was one of several tricks he had put together over the years to train and discipline troops to perfection. He was not a martinet, despite his eccentricities. He had the good commander’s knack for instilling pride in his troops, and he showed them kindness and consideration. His rough side, a frankness to the point of brutality, was reserved for his equals and his superiors. He had spent the past year as senior advisor in the corps region that encompassed the mountains of the Central Highlands and several coastal provinces of Central Vietnam. There had been co
mparatively little fighting there in 1962 and no opportunity for Wilson to apply his full talents. Oddly enough, his ARVN counterpart in that corps region, a whiskey-drinking ex-paratrooper in the colonial forces, had grown tired of American officers being hypocritically nice to him and appreciated Wilson’s directness.
Harkins thanked Vann for his memorandum and ignored it. The mild-mannered Colonel Connor was assigned to be Cao’s advisor. During his first nine months, Vann had met and been frustrated by the Vietnamese he thought he was supposed to help. In two and a half weeks, at a hamlet called Bac, in the first great battle of the American war in Vietnam, he was to learn the mettle of the Vietnamese he had been sent to defeat.
BOOK THREE
THE
BATTLE
OF
AP BAC
THREE DAYS after Christmas 1962, the 7th Infantry Division received an order from the ARVN Joint General Staff to seize a Viet Cong radio transmitter that was operating from the hamlet of Tan Thoi fourteen miles northwest of My Tho. The order originated with General Harkins’s headquarters. The United States had brought the unobtrusive side of its technology to bear on the revolt in the South again. An Army Security Agency team from the 3rd Radio Research Unit at Tan Son Nhut, eavesdropping from on high in one of those boxy Otters built for Canadian bush flying, had intercepted and pinpointed the guerrilla radio with its monitoring and direction-finding equipment.
Vann and his staff were enthusiastic about the attack. The operation was the first of the new year, the first under a new division commander, and, most important of all, an opportunity to make a new beginning. Cao’s chief of staff, Lt. Col. Bui Dinh Dam, had succeeded him after Cao’s elevation to general and move to Can Tho to head the just-established IV Corps. Dam was an unwilling successor. A diminutive and mild-mannered individual, Dam considered himself a competent administrator but doubted his ability to cope with the emotional burden of command. Cao persuaded him to take the job because Cao did not want to create an opening for a potential rival and knew that he could control Dam. Bui Dinh Dam was a North Vietnamese Catholic and politically reliable, so Diem acceded to Caos wish. He promoted Dam to full colonel and gave him the 7th to lead.
Dam preferred honesty in his personal relationships when possible, and he wanted to cooperate with the Americans. When Vann urged a resumption of the system of joint planning that Cao had aborted after the Ranger platoon had been decimated in October, Dam consented. Vann cabled Capt. Richard Ziegler, the former West Point football lineman who was his talented planner, to break off a Christmas leave at the Teahouse of the August Moon Hotel in Hong Kong and return on the next flight. Everyone, including Cao, who reviewed the plan in Can Tho, was satisfied with the result of Ziegler’s work. Dam made only one change. He postponed the attack by twenty-four hours from its originally scheduled starting time of New Year’s morning. It would be unwise, he said, to wake the American helicopter pilots at 4:00 A.M. to fly with a night’s celebration still in their heads.
At dawn on January 2, 1963, the scene so often repeated in this war took place at the division’s dirt airstrip at Tan Hiep six miles up the road toward Saigon. The calm and freshness of the Delta at daybreak was fouled by the racket, the engine exhaust, and the whirling dust of helicopters as the squads of infantrymen lined up to climb aboard the flying machines. Vann took off at 6:30 A.M. in the backseat of an Army L-19 spotter plane to observe the landing of the first company of a division battalion north of Tan Thoi.
General Harkins and his Saigon staff regarded the Viet Cong with the contempt conventional soldiers from great powers usually display toward the guerrillas of small nations. They referred to the Viet Cong as “those raggedy-ass little bastards.” At Vann’s level in the field there was a contrasting respect for the Communist-led guerrillas. Vann and his field advisors and Harkins and his headquarters staff did share a wish common to American officers in Vietnam. They hoped that the guerrillas would one day be foolish enough to abandon their skulking ways and fight fairly in a stand-up battle. The desire was expressed wistfully. No American officer, Vann included, expected to see it fulfilled. The destruction of the Ranger platoon in October had essentially been an ambush followed by an effective withdrawal under strafing and bombing. The guerrillas had not tried to trade blows all day with the Saigon side. Frustrated as he was by Cao’s refusal on so many occasions to close the trap, Vann could not help but hope that the guerrillas would someday display such foolhardy temerity. It seemed to be the only way he would ever succeed in annihilating a whole battalion. He and other American officers would muse with pity on the fate of any Viet Cong battalion that risked a set-piece battle. The slaughter the Saigon troops would inflict on the lightly armed guerrillas with their M-113s, artillery, and fighter-bombers would be unsporting by U.S. Army standards.
As Vann watched ten H-21 Flying Bananas carrying the company of infantry descend to the gray waters of the paddies at 7:03 A.M. and land the troops without incident, he had no way of knowing that he was to be the recipient of the common wish. One of those rare events in a conflict of seemingly endless engagements, no one of which appeared to have any intrinsic meaning, was about to occur—a decisive battle that would affect the course of the war. Today the Viet Cong were going to stand and fight.
The commander of the 261st Main Force Battalion completed his preparations by 10:00 P.M. on the night before the battle. His name and those of almost all of his officers and noncoms remain unknown because of the clandestine traditions of their revolution. A copy of the secret Viet Cong account of the battle and the events preceding it, captured in an unusual night ambush two months afterward, mentions the names of only one junior officer who led a sortie and some of the lower-ranking men who fought with courage worthy of special note.
Radio intercepts from the eavesdroppers in the Otters and other information gathered by Jim Drummond, Vann’s intelligence officer, and his counterpart, Capt. Le Nguyen Binh, indicated that Tan Thoi hamlet was being used as some sort of headquarters location. The transmitter was reported to be guarded by a reinforced company of Viet Cong regulars, about 120 men in all. Ziegler’s plan had attack elements converging on Tan Thoi from three directions. The 7th Division infantry battalion of approximately 330 men being landed to the north by the helicopters was to press down on the hamlet. Simultaneously, two battalions of Civil Guards were to march up from the south in separate columns. A company of thirteen M-113 armored personnel carriers, with an infantry company mounted in the tracked, amphibious vehicles, was also to thrust up from the south along the west flank of the operational area. The M-113s were positioned so that they could be shifted to the point of contact once the guerrillas began to retreat. Each of the three marching elements—the division battalion and the two Civil Guard battalions—was capable of handling a reinforced company of guerrillas with the support of the artillery and fighter-bombers. In case there was trouble, the M-113s and their mounted infantry constituted a mobile reserve as well as a striking force, and Dam had two other infantry companies in reserve at Tan Hiep which he could dispatch as reinforcements by helicopter. No one expected to find more than 120 Viet Cong. Dick Ziegler privately wondered if there would be that many. They had received intelligence this precise before to discover after they attacked that the guerrillas had moved the radio a couple of days prior to the operation.
The intelligence was incorrect on this occasion. Nearly three times that many guerrillas had been assembled in Tan Thoi and the hamlet of Bac just below it. (The battle was to become known as the Battle of Ap Bac rather than the Battle of Bac because the news dispatches of the fighting included the word ap, which means “hamlet,” as part of the place name.) The commander of the 261st Battalion and his headquarters group had a defending force that amounted to a mixed battalion of about 320 Main Force and Regional guerrillas. They were augmented by approximately thirty village and hamlet guerrillas to assist as scouts, emergency replacements, and bearers for ammunition and the wounded.
The
battalion commander and the Viet Cong committee for the province, with whom he was in contact by radio, knew that an attack was coming on the morning of January 2, 1963. They did not know the precise target because they did not realize that one of their main radios had been located, but they knew that it would be somewhere in the vicinity of Tan Thoi and Bac. They had anticipated a campaign, once the dry season started, against a belt of villages they controlled along the eastern edge of the Plain of Reeds. The two hamlets belonged to one of these villages. The hamlets were two miles from a large canal called the Tong Doc Loc, which formed the eastern boundary of the plain. The Viet Cong intelligence agents in My Tho had first tipped the province leadership to the operation by reporting the arrival of seventy-one truckloads of ammunition and other supplies from Saigon. By New Year’s Day the province committee had received enough information to deduce that the attack would begin the next morning.
Vann would have taken satisfaction at the reason for the decision by the guerrilla leaders to stay and fight. They believed they had to do so in order to restore the confidence of their troops and the peasantry who supported them. Vann had thrown their revolution in the northern half of the Delta into crisis the previous summer and fall by the savaging he had given the Viet Cong with the shock effect of the helicopters and the armored carriers and with his shrewd orchestration of the planning skill of Ziegler and the aptitude for intelligence of Drummond. The mass killings had led the rank-and-file guerrillas to question the ability of their officers to teach them how to survive and win against this lethal American technology that kept surprising them in their once-safe havens. A number had requested discharge to return to their families. A lot of the peasants had also been asking whether the Americans were so much more powerful and ferocious than the French that this revived Viet Minh could not succeed against them. The secret Viet Cong account of the battle spoke of the way these unanticipated defeats had imperiled the Party’s hold over the “liberated areas” that were the basis for the expansion of the revolution into the disputed regions beyond. The peasants needed to be convinced that the Party’s clandestine government had come back to stay and that its guerrilla forces could give them some protection against the depredations of the Saigon troops and the machines of the Americans.
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam Page 27