The US Army sucked up much of the precarious electricity supply, so that when air-conditioners went down, the reporters sweated profusely onto their shirts, typewriter keys, stories. They made small fortunes from submitting expenses at the official currency-exchange rate while changing dollars on the black market, though Sheehan stayed clean because he was fearful of expulsion. Halberstam later urged him to title his Vietnam book The Last Frontier, ‘because it was the last place to have fun, to fool around with somebody else’s country’. Though the correspondents loved the place, most adopted an increasingly earnest view of their mission, having identified a chasm between the relentless optimism of the US military, especially its 1962–64 commander Gen. Paul Harkins, and the realities as they observed them.
From an early stage, MACV propagated wilful falsehoods and suppressed inconvenient truths, such as the fact that US aircrew were flying combat missions in VNAF cockpits, belatedly revealed when the Indianapolis News published letters home from Air Force captain ‘Jerry’ Shank which made nonsense of official denials. Shank wrote: ‘What gets me the most is that they won’t tell you people what we do over here … We – me and my buddies – do everything. The Vietnamese “students” we have on board are airmen basics … They’re stupid, ignorant sacrificial lambs, and I have no use for them. In fact I have been tempted to whip them within an inch of their life.’ The use of napalm was unacknowledged until photos of its flame sheets appeared in the press. Peter Arnett later revealed the use of CS lachrymatory gas, which was seized upon by hostile propagandists to mean poison gas, in the face of deafening MACV and Pentagon silence.
Halberstam, then twenty-eight, started out as a True Believer, but by the autumn of 1962 had grown sceptical, writing in the New York Times: ‘This is a war fought in the presence of a largely uncommitted or unfriendly peasantry, by a government that has yet to demonstrate much appeal to large elements of its own people. The enemy is lean and hungry, experienced in this type of warfare, patient in his campaign, endlessly self-critical, and above all, an enemy who has shown that he is willing to pay the price.’ When in December Halberstam informed his office about reporting restrictions imposed by Nhu and his creatures, the Times forwarded the protest to the State Department, which shrugged that Americans in Vietnam were guests of a sovereign state. This much was true: that when the regime persistently dismissed advice and imprecations from the US embassy, MACV and the CIA, it scarcely acted out of character in refusing to indulge hostile – and, in Diem’s eyes, considerably depraved – liberal journalists. Come to that, Jack Kennedy once telephoned the Times’s publisher to lean on him to shift its correspondent.
As for the American military’s pronouncements, Time’s Lee Griggs composed a song about its chief, to the tune of the hymn ‘Jesus Loves Me’:
We are winning, this I know,
General Harkins tells me so.
In the mountains, things are rough,
In the Delta, mighty tough,
But the V.C. will soon go,
General Harkins tells me so.
Homer Bigart wrote in a June 1962 valedictory dispatch for the New York Times that unless Diem mended his ways, either US combat troops would have to be committed, or the Saigon government replaced by a military junta. Newsweek’s François Sully was the daddy of them all, a Frenchman born in 1927 who had been around Saigon since 1945. He was by no means universally beloved by colleagues, and was suspected by some of being a communist, but his connections on both sides were impressive. In one of Sully’s last dispatches before being expelled by Diem, he cited Bernard Fall’s view that the politics were far more important than the tactics, yet the US Army was training the Southerners to resist a Korean-style invasion. Marine helicopters, he said, could not provide the Vietnamese with an ideology worth dying for. The piece was accompanied by a photo of Diem’s female militia captioned ‘The enemy has more drive and enthusiasm.’
Neil Sheehan said of the 1962–63 Saigon press corps: ‘We were a pretty serious bunch of guys: we found ourselves in conflict – very serious conflict – with the [US] command. You got pretty angry with the generals’ lying.’ Sheehan marvelled at the courage of some reporters, the cowardice of others: one New York paper’s reporter, he later recalled, ‘wouldn’t leave Saigon – he bribed operators for carbons of other correspondents’ despatches’. Then there were the adventurers, most of whom arrived somewhat later: a British freelancer ‘carried an M16 and killed people. Sean Flynn exulted about what a glorious thing street-fighting was.’ In Sheehan’s first weeks he himself toted a pistol in the field, ‘then I realised this was crazy’. He also stopped carrying a camera, because he decided that if you kept peering through a viewfinder, you didn’t see what was happening around you – and what might kill you.
Sheehan’s generation of reporters enjoyed a notable advantage over most of their successors in the twenty-first-century war-corresponding business: having themselves served in uniform, they were familiar with weapons and military ways. Nonetheless they recoiled from the racism they observed in many American soldiers, exemplified by a special forces colonel who said, ‘You don’t need to know the gook’s language ’cos he’s gonna be dead. We’re going to kill the bastards.’ Several of the correspondents’ group, Halberstam and Sheehan foremost among them, made national reputations in Vietnam, though some Americans, not all of them uniformed, went to their graves believing that the reporters betrayed their country while winning plaudits from media counterparts around the world.
The news story that unfolded on 2 January 1963 started out as a firefight between Diem’s soldiers and the Vietcong, but turned into a far more significant struggle between the US high command and the Saigon press corps, believers against unbelievers. The killing part was unleashed by Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, since mid-1962 senior adviser to the ARVN 7th Division. Vann, a wire-thin stick of ferocious energy and aggression, was weary of inconclusive encounters with the enemy. After US airborne electronic interceptors pinpointed transmissions from the Vietcong regional 514th Battalion in Ap Bac – ‘north hamlet’ – fourteen miles north-west of My Tho, the colonel was thrilled when Harkins’ headquarters ordered him to orchestrate a massive concentration of force to trap and destroy it: two local Civil Guard battalions; an infantry unit heli-lifted by ten American H-21 ‘flying bananas’, or ‘angle-worms’ as the Vietcong knew them; VNAF Skyraider ground-attack aircraft; five Bell Iroquois ‘Huey’ UH-1 gunships; a company of APCs – tracked armoured personnel-carriers; a battalion of paratroopers.
American intelligence was significantly mistaken about enemy strength in Ap Bac, estimated at 120 guerrillas. In addition to a reinforced company of the 514th VC Battalion, there was also present an over-strength company of the main force 261st, on its way to an operation elsewhere. This was considered an elite unit: women said that if you had to marry a soldier, it was best to choose one from the 261st. Its men were thoroughly experienced, having an average of more than two years’ service, senior cadres as much as five years. The total number of full-time Vietcong guerrilla fighters in the South had more than doubled since the previous year, to fifty thousand, the overwhelming majority in the Mekong delta. Although they relied heavily on captured arms, an increasing volume came by sea. Disguised fishing trawlers from the North delivered 112 tons of arms and ammunition in 1962, and this total would rise steeply to 4,289 tons in 1963–64 – far more than moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The 261st Battalion was largely composed of ‘returnees’ from exile