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 later, ‘We knew this was the biggest story we had ever encountered.’ The dispatches of himself and Halberstam quoted anonymously an American adviser who condemned the Southern showing on 2 January as ‘a miserable damn performance’, at a moment when Harkins was still insisting that Bac was a victory. Few people, including the general, doubted that the dismissive words came from John Vann, and he demanded the colonel’s head.
MACV finally decided that it would be more prudent to allow this galvanic but famously indiscreet officer to complete his tour in March as scheduled. Vann’s influence on the war would thereafter wax and wane until its dramatic termination almost a decade later, but in 1963 he played a critical role in providing authoritative briefings to Sheehan, Halberstam and others about the bungling and pusillanimity that characterised Southern operations, and the deceits practised to conceal these. The colonel warned Maj. Gen. Bruce Palmer that Harkins was allowing himself to be duped by Saigon’s officers, who routinely assaulted objectives they knew to be untenanted by the enemy. It was nonetheless the Harkins version that Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara chose to believe. Frances Fitzgerald later wrote in her influential history Fire in the Lake: ‘The United States had … made the Saigon government into a military machine whose sole raison d’être was to fight the Communists. The only difficulty was that the machine did not work.’ The ARVN was not an army ‘but a collection of individuals who happened to be carrying weapons’. This was an overstatement, but contained a core of truth.
The Ap Bac affair prompted extensive media comment. Arthur Krock wrote in his syndicated column on 9 January: ‘No amount of US military assistance can preserve independence for a people who are unwilling to die for it.’ Richard Hughes, a Hong Kong-based Australian veteran who wrote for the London Sunday Times, said that he saw clear parallels with US follies in China after World War II. The best the Americans were promising, he said, was a ten-year war to preserve a ‘reactionary, isolated, unpopular’ regime. The only way out, he suggested, was for the Saigon government to admit communists to a coalition.
Within Vietnam, word spread swiftly about the fiasco. A Vietnamese officer wrote that Ap Bac ‘greatly hurt ARVN morale’. Ly Tong Ba, who rose to become a general, later denounced Neil Sheehan, ‘who only wrote articles filled with malicious arguments and inaccuracies’. He also argued that his own adviser on the ground at Bac, Jim Scanlon, was as ‘terrified’ of Vann as of the Vietcong, which prompted him also to paint a false picture of events. The press coverage was seized upon by MACV officers, and by others who deplored ‘negative’ reporting, as highlighting the difficulties of fighting a war covered by a media which recognised no obligation to favour ‘our side’ – meaning the US and its South Vietnamese client – as had been the patriotic duty of every correspondent in World War II, when the press was additionally constrained by censorship.
It remains as difficult now as it was then to see virtue in Gen. Harkins’ attempts to deny the real state of affairs. The maxim obtains for all those who hold positions of authority, in war as in peace: lie to others if you must, but never to yourselves. MACV’s chief could make a case for talking nonsense to Halberstam and Arnett, but he was peddling the same fairy tales in top-secret cables to Washington. Nonetheless, a valid criticism persists of the media’s coverage throughout the war: the critics got bang to rights the shortcomings of the Diem regime and its successors, but gave nothing like the same attention to the blunders and horrors perpetrated by the communists. Halberstam, Sheehan and the rest conscientiously and sometimes brilliantly fulfilled their duty, to tell what they saw and heard; Saigon’s apologists, exemplified by Time magazine, destroyed their own credibility by denying unpalatable realities. The South was only half the rightful story, however. Much of the media showed itself ignorant of or blind to the tyranny prevailing in the North, which was inflicting worse hardships on its own people.
An Australian surgeon who served as a civilian volunteer down at Vung Tau wrote later: ‘It seems fair to say what is usually left unsaid, that if the economic aid to South Vietnam had not been prevented by the activities of the Vietcong, the people of the country which today is war-torn and unhappy would have been well-fed, in better health and better-educated.’ Frances Fitzgerald concluded her powerful 1972 account of America in Indochina with an expression of yearning for North Vietnamese victory, for a moment when ‘“individualism” and its attendant corruption give way to the discipline of the revolutionary community’. American officials, she wrote, might attribute this to the triumph of brainwashing by ‘hard-core Communists’.
