The Vietcong around Ap Bac on 2 January mustered 320 fighters, who had been tipped off that an attack by Saigon forces was coming. What John Vann did not know – though he would have welcomed the prospect – was that communist province chiefs had ordered Dieu and his comrades not to pull back as usual when the ARVN struck, but instead to stand and fight. Thus, foxholes and bunkers had been dug along the treeline fronting the hamlet. The defenders were well-armed and ammunitioned, mostly with captured American weapons: .30-calibre machine-guns, Browning automatic rifles, M-1 carbines, .45 Thompson sub-machine-guns. Most of the twelve hundred peasants in the adjoining hamlets of Ap Bac and Tan Thoi fled into the nearby swamps on hearing that a battle was imminent, but some thirty stayed to carry ammunition and casualties. The board was set for Vann’s game to be played.
Who were the human checkers on his side that morning? From beginning to end of the war, South Vietnam’s soldiers took most of its strain, grief and losses. Nothing did more to alienate peasants from the Saigon government than the draft, which stole workers from the paddy fields and made many newly-minted soldiers oppressors of country people in a region that was not their own, and thus to which they owed nothing. There were ghastly tales of ARVN callousness, some possibly true: of two riflemen wagering a pack of cigarettes on who could hit a child riding a water buffalo. In the war’s early years, 1955–59, only twenty-to-twenty-two-year-olds were conscripted, for twelve months. This was then increased to two years, and in 1964 to three. Once inducted, many South Vietnamese never escaped from green fatigues except in a wheelchair or body bag. A common factor between the US and the two Vietnams was that in all three societies, children of privilege were excused from military service. In the South their families paid a bribe, while in the North the offspring of senior cadres were dispatched to higher education abroad. Though the Southern army consumed 15 per cent of the nation’s GDP, its soldiers were paid a pittance. Most were posted to fighting units after five or six weeks’ perfunctory training, assured that they could learn on the job. An officer spoke for most of his comrades when he said: ‘The communists seemed to know why they were fighting, and we did not. Our political training emphasised Diem’s personality but not much else.’
John Vann’s plan for the morning of 2 January 1963 might have won a staff college commendation, had all its human elements acted as programmed. Instead of performing a balletic pincer movement, however, they descended on the battlefield as randomly as toys kicked out of a box. Early-morning fog delayed the infantry airlift, so that Civil Guard troops advancing on foot were first to bump the Vietcong, soon after 0700. When their leaders were shot down, they hugged the earth during a long, desultory exchange of fire. The government province chief, who was personally directing them, refused to order forward his second battalion. Soon after 1000, against Vann’s orders H-21s carrying an infantry company clattered down onto the paddy within easy shot of the ‘Victor Charlies’. Vietcong recruits were told they should not fear helicopters, soft targets made of cardboard pasted to metal frames. That morning at Ap Bac, this must have seemed true: communist fire quickly downed two of the old H-21s and mortally injured a third. A Huey that tried to rescue their American crews was shot full of holes, before toppling alongside the other wrecks.
The hapless infantry were going nowhere, stuck on open ground swept by enemy fire. Almost every helicopter in the sky above the battlefield was taking hits, and neither air strikes nor misdirected artillery fire made much impact on the defenders of Ap Bac. From a circling L-19 spotter plane Vann watched in raging frustration as his operation floundered in mud, blood and chaos. Ly Tong Ba, a captain commanding a company of armoured personnel-carriers, refused to advance to rescue the stranded infantry and aircrew: Vann’s histrionics over the radio roused his pride against succumbing to hectoring. ‘I’ve got a problem, Topper Six,’ Capt. Jim Scanlon, the adviser with Ba, radioed Vann ruefully. ‘My counterpart won’t move.’
‘Goddammit, doesn’t he understand this is an emergency?!’
‘He says “I don’t take orders from Americans.”’
Vann bellowed into the handset, ‘Ba! If you don’t get your vehicles across the canal I shall tell General Le Van Ty to sling you in jail!’
The Vietnamese belatedly ordered forward his company, which spent the ensuing two hours struggling to cross dykes and canals: the little captain forever afterwards argued that neither Vann nor Scanlon recognised the difficulties of overcoming the water obstacles. When the M-113s’ .50-calibre machine-gunners finally engaged, several were shot off the exposed steel hulls by Vietcong whose positions were so skilfully camouflaged in the banana and coconut groves that few attackers glimpsed an enemy all day. When one carrier attempted to use its flamethrower, the crew proved to have mixed the fuel wrongly, so that the jet drooped to a trickle. Around 1430 the armoured crabs began to pull back; a further two helicopters were forced down by enemy fire.
Vann’s L-19 made repeated deck-level passes as he strove in vain to identify Vietcong positions, and to energise the stalled ground movements. At 1805 a mass parachute drop from seven USAF C-123s yielded a crowning disaster: the troops landed half a mile off their intended DZ, within easy range of Vietcong in Tan Thoi, whose fire ploughed into them, killing nineteen paras and wounding thirty-three, including two Americans. When darkness fell, the communists still held almost all the ground they had occupied at first light, and experienced no difficulty in slipping away to the sanctuary of the nearby Plain of Reeds.
The guerrillas did not have the day’s fight all their own way, losing eighteen men killed and thirty-five wounded, most to artillery and air strikes. On Saigon’s side, however, three Americans had been killed and five wounded, along with sixty-three Vietnamese dead and 109 wounded. Back in May’s Landing, New Jersey, a seven-year-old boy cried out in excitement as he watched a TV clip of a helicopter door-gunner in action, ‘Look, there’s my daddy!’ Just six hours later, a telegram arrived to report the death of his father, crew chief William Deal, in a Huey outside Bac.
The media experience of next day, 3 January, however, exercised a greater influence on the history of the war than did the battle itself. Paul Harkins, MACV’s supremo, descended on IV Corps headquarters to cheerlead a renewed assault on Ap Bac. He told David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, ‘We’ve got [the Vietcong] in a trap, and we’re going to spring it in half an hour.’ Unfortunately, the journalists knew that the enemy were long gone, and thus that the South Vietnamese ‘assault’ was a pantomime. Harkins’ remark suggested that the general was either a fool or a wilful deceiver – probably the former, because he never looked further into any situation than he wished to see.
A few miles away, matters got worse. Neil Sheehan and Nick Turner of Reuters reached the previous day’s battlefield to find the Southern soldiers unwilling to handle their own and the Americans’ dead: the disgusted journalists themselves loaded the corpses aboard helicopters. Then, as they talked to US brigadier-general Robert York, an Alabaman World War II veteran, artillery support for the new ‘assault’ started to thump in around them, blasting up geysers of mud. York said to Sheehan, ‘Jesus Christ, run for your life, boy.’ They bolted across the rice paddy before throwing themselves to the ground, Sheehan convinced that he was about to die. When the shelling stopped they rose covered with filth. York remained almost pristine, however, having adopted a press-up posture in the dirt. He shrugged, ‘I didn’t want to get my cigarettes wet.’ Sheehan said ruefully, ‘Never mess with a man who’s so calm under fire.’ Fifty rounds had landed in the vicinity, killing four ARVN soldiers and wounding twelve. The enraged infantry battalion commander drew his pistol and shot in the head the young lieutenant acting as forward observer for the artillery.
The defeat at Bac was less militarily significant than – for instance – a 1960 action at Tua Hai in Tay Ninh province, in which the communists also beat a much larger government force. The difference was that at Tua Hai there had been no foreign witnesses, while now the sharpest correspondents in Vietnam were in the bleachers. Sheehan wrote