A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (35 page)

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.

The Viet Cong battalion commanders and the provincial leaders were men in their forties with records going back to the resistance against the French colonial administration and the Japanese during World War II. They could not turn back, whatever the outcome of the war. They could not flee to the North, even had they wished to do so; disheartened cadres were not welcomed there. They did not think of fleeing, because they were unwilling to accept the possibility that their revolution might fail. A passage in one of their clandestine writings of the period, which discussed the need to teach young men and women in junior leadership positions not to be daunted by a prolonged struggle filled with hardships, summed up their own attitude as well: “We should teach them to win without arrogance and to lose without discouragement until we have achieved the liberation of the South and the reunification of our ancestral land.”

They studied the American machines, devised tactics they hoped would overcome them, and worked hard at seeking to convince their junior officers, noncoms, and troops that if they did not panic, and skillfully employed the arts of fortification and camouflage, the terrain of the Delta would provide ample protection and concealment in which to fight and maneuver. The first result of their efforts had been the ambush of the Rangers at a hamlet just a few miles northwest of Tan Thoi and the shooting down of two of the helicopters ferrying reinforcements, including the one in which Vann had been riding. The unit chiefly responsible for that small but significant success, the 1st Company of the 514th Regional Battalion, was waiting in Tan Thoi on this second day of the New Year.

Diem’s reaction to that counterstroke, Cao’s bootlicking acceptance of his leader’s self-defeating strategy, and the refusal of Harkins to believe Vann and to challenge Diem had given the Viet Cong a two-and-a-half-month respite. The guerrilla battalion and company commanders had taken full advantage of the time to replace losses and to train their men in the new tactics and in the use of captured American arms. By January 1963, the Main Force and Regional guerrillas had seized enough modern American weapons from the outposts that Harkins had neglected to have dismantled before commencing his arms largess to be able to pass down to the district and local guerrillas their
bolt-action French rifles. Most of the Viet Cong infantrymen now carried semiautomatic M-1 rifles, carbines, or Thompson submachine guns. Each company had a standard .30 caliber machine gun that was fed with a belt of ammunition, and virtually all of the platoons had a pair of the Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs) named for John Moses Browning, the American firearms genius who had designed these clip-fed light machine guns and the bigger belt-fed types for the U.S. Army. There were plenty of bullets and grenades. The United States and its surrogate regime in Saigon had brought about a qualitative advance in the firepower of their enemy.

Ironically, the Party leadership in the northern Delta had not discovered that Cao had been faking operations. They thought that the Saigon forces were still trying to encircle and destroy their units as Vann had vainly sought to do earlier. They noticed that the individual assault elements suddenly became larger, from a battalion broken down into two task forces to a whole battalion. They assumed that the ARVN commanders and their American advisors were simply being more cautious in the way they were attempting encirclement.

The hamlets of Tan Thoi and Bac were in one of the most important “liberated zones” in the northern Delta. The best way to discourage forays by the Saigon forces into the “liberated zones” was to make them unpleasant and unprofitable by effective resistance. The Viet Cong leaders did not intend simply to stand and hold ground. They were accepting battle in the expectation that they would be able to fight and maneuver on their terms. They felt they had progressed to the point where they could risk a test. The risk had to be run sooner or later, and this was as good an opportunity as any. The terrain was advantageous. Despite the fact that it was the dry season, there were so many streams and canals in this section of the province that the farmers kept the paddies flooded all year.

The Viet Cong in the two hamlets would also have the advantage of fighting in familiar surroundings with the spirit of local men defending their land. The guerrillas were all men of the Delta, including the officers and the noncoms, who were Communist Party members. The 514th Regional, whose 1st Company was in Tan Thoi, was the home battalion of Dinh Tuong Province. About half of the troops in the 1st Company of the 261st Main Force Battalion, who were waiting in Bac hamlet, were from the My Tho vicinity and another quarter were from the environs of Ben Tre just across the upper branch of the Mekong.

This was historically fitting ground for a decisive battle. The peasants in this belt of villages along the eastern edge of the Plain of Reeds had
followed the Communists since the first insurrection the Party had raised against the French in the Delta in November 1940. The French had crushed that rebellion by razing many of the hamlets with artillery and bombs. The prisoners had been taken up to Saigon on river barges and unloaded on the docks at night under searchlights. They had been strung together in long lines by wires pushed through the palms of their hands. The peasantry of the region had not been intimidated. During the nine years of the Resistance War they had responded to the call of the Viet Minh.

At 4:00
A.M.
some of the scout teams of local guerrillas, dispersed in a net for miles around the two hamlets, passed the word through runners that they could hear truck and boat engines. The battalion commander issued the alert order. The troops, who had rehearsed where they were to go the night before when the battalion commander had decided how to dispose his force, picked up their weapons and hurried to the foxholes the peasants had helped them to dig and camouflage under the trees.