A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (45 page)

Vann clambered out of the little plane and strode into the command-post tent. He told Cao that on this day he could not spend all of this blood for nothing. He had to close the box around the guerrillas and destroy them. Porter supported him, both of them arguing that Cao had no choice as a responsible commander. “You have got to drop the airborne over there,” Vann said, poking his finger at the big operations map where it showed the open flank on the east side of the two hamlets.
He became so angry and was jabbing so hard at the map that he almost toppled over the easel on which it rested.

Cao would have none of this soldier’s logic. “It is not prudent, it is not prudent,” he kept replying. It was better, he said, to drop the paratroops on the west behind the M-113s and the Civil Guards where they could tie in with these other units. “We must reinforce,” he said.

Vann was later to sum up Cao’s logic with the tart remark: “They chose to reinforce defeat.”

He lost his temper one more time. “Goddammit,” he shouted, “you want them to get away. You’re afraid to fight. You know they’ll sneak out this way and that’s exactly what you want.”

Embarrassed at being driven into a corner, Cao pulled a huffy general’s act on Vann, the lieutenant colonel. “I am the commanding general and it is my decision,” he said. Brig. Gen. Tran Thien Khiem, the chief of staff of the Joint General Staff, who had flown down from Saigon at Cao’s request and was present during the argument, did not object. Harkins had not come down to find out why an unprecedented five helicopters had been lost, nor had any of his subordinates appeared, so there was no American general in the tent to brandish his stars for Vann and Porter. Cao then attempted to mollify Vann by pretending to move up the drop time. He said, “We will drop at sixteen hundred hours”—4:00
P.M.
civilian time. Knowing that it was useless to argue further and hoping that he might at least get a paratroop battalion early enough to be of some use, Vann went back to his spotter plane.

He spent the rest of the afternoon asking when the paratroops were going to arrive and attempting to persuade Cao and Dam and Tho to turn what was about to become the biggest defeat of the war so far into its biggest victory. They still had the opportunity to redeem the day. All they had to do was to pull the two Civil Guard battalions and Ba’s company together for a combined attack on Bac. As demoralized as Ba’s men were, they could have at least supported the Civil Guards with their .50 calibers, and the guerrillas could not have withstood the total force. Neither Cao nor Tho, who were the men in control, could see that the sensible and moral course was to press ahead and accept the further and proportionately minor casualties that would be necessary to give meaning to the sacrifice of those who had already been killed and maimed.

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 wounded 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.