“Let’s get the hell out of here!” York shouted while more shells exploded in the paddy about thirty yards from us. With York in the lead, we ran away from the hamlet down the narrow, sun-baked top of the dike, trying to escape from the impact area. The shells followed us. We had sprinted only a short distance when one exploded close by and the blast almost knocked us off our feet. “Get down!” York yelled. We threw ourselves into the slime and huddled up against the dike with the shells crashing all around us.
Cao had decided to fake an attack on Bac now that the Viet Cong were gone. He wanted the palace to think that he was doing something to recoup. For this reason he had ordered the additional infantry battalion to Bac to make the attack along with some of Ba’s troops. He had then taken a helicopter over to Tho’s field command post on the main Delta road to the south and instructed Tho to fire a barrage to soften up the enemy for “the assault.” Cao had not flown over Bac to see whether any of his men were inside the hamlet. Tho in turn had simply told his deputy to order the batteries to open fire. Cao and Tho might have been stopped had the ARVN second lieutenant who was the artillery forward observer with the new division battalion been more proficient at reading a map. The artillery officer had been worried and had radioed the lieutenant to check on the position of the battalion. The lieutenant had replied with map coordinates that had put the battalion about three-quarters of a mile southwest of Bac.
Unlike Cao and Tho, the second lieutenant paid for his error. Enraged at the shells killing and wounding his men, the battalion commander pulled his service pistol and shot the lieutenant in the head as soon as the barrage began. Before the lieutenant’s radio operator could again make contact with the artillery officer to halt the bombardment, four soldiers had been killed and twelve wounded by the nearly fifty shells fired. There would have been more casualties had the mud and water not limited the bursting range of the shrapnel. Some or all of us four would also have been killed or wounded had York not shouted at us to jump up and run farther down the dike during a lull of about thirty seconds at one point. The next two shells exploded right where we had been lying. As it was, a shard of shrapnel as big as a fist sliced into the dike ten feet in front of Turner.
I located one of Ba’s sergeants who spoke French from his days in the colonial forces and translated York’s instructions to radio the airstrip for helicopters to evacuate the wounded. Ba and the advisors and Herb Prevost, who had also flown in for a look, were off in the hamlet with the infantry. York supervised the loading of all of the wounded and dead the troops could gather.
At the airstrip we found General Harkins. He had flown down from Saigon for a briefing by Vann. I had seen him and spoken to him many times previously and nothing about his appearance was unfamiliar, but the sight of him suddenly took me aback on that day after Ap Bac, perhaps the more so because I, like Turner and Golding, was covered with filth. I was twenty-six years old, and Turner and Golding were also in their twenties. The bombardment was our first experience at the wrong end of artillery, and we had burrowed into the ooze in terror to try to hide from the shells. York was the only one who was still presentable. In a feat of self-control, he had propped himself up on his elbows and kept the front of his fatigue shirt clean. “I didn’t want to get my cigarettes wet, son,” he said when I noticed his unsoiled shirt right after the shelling and asked him how he had managed it.
Harkins was a world apart from the four of us. He was dressed in his office uniform, a short-sleeved shirt and trousers of tan tropical worsted, an outfit called “suntans.” The tabs of his shirt collar were held in place by matching bands of four silver stars. The brim of his parade-ground cap was covered with gold braid. He was wearing street shoes, carrying a swagger stick, and using the long white cigarette holder he favored. He questioned York about the shelling incident before boarding his twin-engine Beechcraft to fly back to Saigon. David Halberstam of the New York Times and Peter Arnett of the AP told me that they had approached Harkins a little earlier and asked him what he thought of the battle. “We’ve got them in a trap and we’re going to spring it in half an hour,” he said. Halberstam and Arnett had looked at Harkins in amazement. They had just come back from circling over Bac and Tan Thoi in a helicopter. They could see that the hamlets were quiet. They had also learned from reports the pilots were receiving over the radio and from Vann and the advisors at the airstrip that the Viet Cong were long gone.
There was something obscene about all of this to me and the other reporters. Amid this maiming and dying, a Vietnamese general who should have been serving in an opera company rather than an army was heaping macabre farce upon macabre farce while an honor guard waited upon him. An American general with a swagger stick and a cigarette holder, whose four stars on his collar tabs said that he commanded the fighter-bombers and helicopters and the flow of arms and ammunition that made this battle and this war possible, but who would not deign to soil his suntans and street shoes in a rice paddy to find out what was going on, was prattling about having trapped the Viet Cong.
As soon as Harkins had left, Vann came over to say that he was sorry about the shelling. “Jesus Christ, John,” I asked, “what in the hell happened?”
Vann had not yet learned that Cao was principally to blame for the bombardment. “It was that goddam poltroon Tho,” he said. This last idiocy seemed to break the restraint he had always imposed on himself with reporters. He went into a tirade at the stupidities and acts of cowardice of the last two days.
“It was a miserable damn performance,” he said. ‘These people won’t listen. They make the same goddam mistakes over and over again in the same way.” He railed on about the escape that Cao had arranged for the Viet Cong. “We begged and pleaded and prayed for the paratroops to come in on the east, but when they finally came in they were deliberately put on the western side.”
What Vann did not say, his subordinates said for him. The level of indiscretion was commensurate with the level of disgust. The helicopter pilots also talked freely. They were equally incensed because the lives of their people had been thrown away and their aircraft squandered.
Like the other reporters, I tried to shield Vann and his advisors and the pilots by quoting them anonymously. I attributed Vann’s remarks to “one American officer.” A headline writer for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the hometown newspaper of Vann’s wife, Mary Jane, picked up his forthright description of how the Saigon forces had disgraced themselves. The newspaper ran my dispatch across the top of its front page under the headline “A Miserable Damn Performance.” Mary Jane’s mother, Mary Allen, who still lived in Rochester, recognized her son-in-law’s flair for the candid phrase. Vann had been stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, adjacent to El Paso, prior to volunteering for Vietnam. Mary Jane was living there with the children. Her mother mailed her a clipping of the article with a notation over the headline: “This sounds like a remark John would make.”
Harkins almost cut short Vann’s ambitious endeavor to change policy on the war. When the general returned to Tan Hiep the next morning, January 4, for another briefing, he wanted to fire Vann. The “playbacks” of our dispatches as they had been printed and broadcast in the United States had come in over the teletype. Prior to Ap Bac, the Kennedy administration had succeeded in preventing the American public from being more than vaguely conscious that the country was involved in a war in a place called Vietnam. The public had been focused on places like Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and the Congo as the scenes of the nation’s foreign policy crises. Ap Bac was putting Vietnam on the front pages and on the television evening news shows with a drama that no other event had yet achieved. Harkins was embarrassed and enraged by the stories. The dispatches, replete with details of cowardice and bungling and salty quotations like Vann’s “miserable damn performance” remark, were describing the battle as the worst and most humiliating defeat ever inflicted on the Saigon side and as a dramatic illumination of all of the flaws in Diem’s armed forces. President Kennedy and Secreta
ry McNamara wanted an explanation. Harkins was also under pressure from the regime to make Vann a scapegoat. Diem and his family and their trusted adherents were in a fury over the loss of face. Cao’s excuse to the reporters when he finally talked to us on January 3 was that Vann and Dam had drawn up a faulty plan and failed to show it to him beforehand so that he could correct it. In his excuse to the palace he blamed the whole debacle on Vann. Madame Nhu said that everything would have gone splendidly had it not been for an American colonel who had flown around the battlefield all day in a little plane, countermanding the orders of her brother-in-law’s senior officers.
“We’ve got to get rid of him,” Harkins said to Maj. Gen. Charles Timmes, his principal Army subordinate as chief of the Military Assistance and Advisory Group. Timmes had been on a tour of the northern part of the country on the day of the battle, and the morning of the fourth was his first opportunity to fly to Tan Hiep. He had arrived shortly after the commanding general. Harkins took him aside right away and ordered him to replace Vann immediately as senior advisor to the 7th Division. Vann technically worked for Timmes. The field advisors were still being assigned to the MAAG in these early years, even though they took their operating instructions from Harkins’s headquarters. Timmes had served Harkins loyally and earned his confidence. Harkins therefore did not feel a necessity to maintain the bland and courteous exterior he normally preserved in personal dealings. He let Timmes see how angry he was.
Timmes was alarmed at Harkins’s order. The son of a doctor in Queens, Charlie Timmes had always wanted to be a soldier and had repeatedly tried and failed to gain admission to West Point as a youth. He had instead gone to Fordham and unhappily practiced law for a meager livelihood during the Depression until he could turn a reserve commission into active duty as a lieutenant with the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1939, finally transferring to the Army itself three months before Pearl Harbor. Although he had amply proved himself as a para-troop battalion commander during World War II, he tended to be awed by the West Point insiders like Harkins, perhaps because of his rebuffed attempts to enter their fraternity. He was convinced that Harkins’s optimistic view of the war was the correct one and that Vann’s reports were too grim. Yet as a fighting soldier himself, he liked Vann. Outbursts were part of the man’s character. Timmes was ready to forgive Vann’s flaws in order to profit from his other qualities. It also struck him that if he relieved Vann in these circumstances, he would undermine the morale of the rest of the division advisors. They would conclude that if they took risks to win the war and trouble with the Vietnamese resulted, he and Harkins would discard them and ruin their careers. Above all he wanted to stop Harkins from committing a rash act that would provoke a new scandal in the press.
“You can’t do it,” he said to Harkins. “They’ll crucify you.” He reminded Harkins that the MACV public affairs officers had promoted Vann as the “hotshot” of the advisory effort and that Vann also had a flair for handling the press and that the reporters were fond of him. They would be certain to leap on his dismissal, whether justified or not, as a craven act of surrender to the Saigon regime. It would be a public relations disaster.
Timmes saw that his argument was having the desired effect. Harkins had calmed down and was listening to him. Timmes mentioned the danger of also undermining the morale of the other advisors, but he stressed the certainty of a scandal. “Please, let me handle it,” he urged. Vann had just three months left to serve in Vietnam. Timmes proposed leaving him at My Tho for a decent interval and then relieving him and sending him off to tour the Central Highlands and the Central Coast region on the pretext that Timmes needed an independent estimate of how the war was going there. Harkins agreed.
A few days later, Timmes tested Porter’s attitude by telling him that Harkins was furious at Vann and wanted Porter to dismiss him. Timmes and Porter had known each other for years and were friends. Porter became extremely upset. “I’d fire myself before I fired John Vann,” he said. The implicit threat was that if he was told to relieve Vann, he would ask to be relieved himself. That would give the reporters further grist for a scandal, and as Porter was not scheduled to leave until mid-February, Vann had some protection for the immediate future.
Vann also defused some of Harkins’s anger with the duplicity he could employ convincingly when it suited his purpose. He swore that he had not talked to us. We had overheard his briefings for Harkins and others, he said, but through no fault of his because he did not control access to the command-post area. Access was a responsibility of the Saigon officers, and they had been “too polite” to order us to leave. He claimed that our unwelcome presence had also allowed us to eavesdrop on his transmissions from the spotter plane by listening to the headquarters radios during the battle. No one in Harkins’s entourage had the wit to call Vann’s bluff by checking to find out if any reporters had been present at the command post during the battle to overhear him on the radio.
Harkins’s displeasure eased. He did not veto a recommendation by Porter to award Vann the Distinguished Flying Cross for braving Viet Cong fire in the spotter plane. (In mid-December 1962, President Kennedy had relented on his fiction of the nonwar in Vietnam to the extent of authorizing combat decorations up to the third-highest award—the Bronze Star for Valor. The Distinguished Flying Cross was the equivalent award for heroism in the air.) Harkins also tried to indicate to Vann that he realized he had not given Vann a band of fearless Gurkhas to advise and that he was willing to forgive Vann’s impolitic behavior. One of Harkins’s staff officers passed him a newspaper clipping of a cartoon on Ap Bac by Bill Mauldin, the creator of the archetypal GIs of World War II, Willie and Joe. In the cartoon an ARVN infantryman was huddled down inside a foxhole. An American sergeant, exposing himself to Viet Cong bullets, knelt beside the foxhole with his hands stretched out in supplication. “When I say attack, don’t just lean forward,” the sergeant said to the cowering Saigon soldier. “Send it to Col. Vann,” Harkins wrote on the memo routing slip, initialed it, and had the slip and the cartoon dispatched to Vann at My Tho.
Had he been able to understand what a complicated man he was dealing with and what grief Vann was to cause him, Harkins undoubtedly would have fired Vann, let Porter go in the bargain, and accepted crucifixion by the news media as the lesser evil. Vann had no intention of behaving himself in the future. He would dissemble only to win. His professional conscience would not permit him to fake the score if he thought that lying would bring defeat for his country.
Vann’s first step was to attempt to turn the Battle of Ap Bac to his advantage. He held up the debacle as proof that this army he had been sent to help guide was ludicrously inadequate to the task of holding South Vietnam for the United States. He put together an after-action report on Ap Bac that was the longest and most detailed report of its kind in the history of the war thus far.
He had each of the advisors write accounts of their experiences to append as testimony to the main body of his report. Scanlon surpassed Vann’s expectations with six and a half pages of single-spaced type. Together with the reports of Mays and Bowers, Scanlon’s narrative made for unsettling reading. The advisor to Major Tho wrote five pages on the nonperformance of the province chief and attached a copy of a separate two-page letter he had sent to Tho the day after the battle, with Vann’s permission. It amounted to a sarcastic letter of reprimand, enumerating Tho’s acts “for your [Tho’s] further convenience, enlightenment and corrective training.” Prevost produced fourteen pages of observations.
After Ziegler had edited all sixteen of these individual accounts to be sure they were as crisp as possible, Vann topped them with the main body of his report—twenty-one pages of descriptive chronology and analysis. He communicated his “miserable damn performance” feelings without using words like “debacle” or “defeat.” He knew that any display of emotion would weaken his report and permit Harkins and other superiors who did not wish to hear this bad news to point to the emotion as evidence that his
judgment was impaired. He wrote in the restrained language mandatory for Army reports. The authenticity of the personal accounts by the advisors and the hour-by-hour recitation of bumble after bumble and wretched act after wretched act in his chronology and analysis broke the bonds of this bland Army language and conveyed what he wished to say. He signed the finished product—ninety-one pages with map overlays of the action—and sent it off to Porter at Cao’s IV Corps headquarters in Can Tho a week after the battle. Army procedure called for Porter to write a memorandum of comment, officially referred to as an indorsement, on the report before forwarding it to Harkins’s headquarters.
Porter’s memorandum to Harkins was an astonishing document for a white-haired colonel of his sobriety. The memorandum read like a charge sheet for a court-martial, to which Porter was attaching Vann’s report as evidence for the prosecution. “The subject after-action report is possibly the best documented, most comprehensive, most valuable, and most revealing of any of the reports submitted … during the past 12 months,” he began. “The conduct of this operation revealed many glaring weaknesses,” he said, and reminded Harkins that Vann and his fellow division senior advisors had already called attention to “most” of these weaknesses on an individual basis in their reports on “the bulk of other operations” by the 7th Division and its two associate ARVN divisions in the Delta and the belt of provinces that ringed Saigon on the north. Porter next abstracted from Vann’s report the worst flaws in the performance of Diem’s forces during the battle and listed them in a string of alphabetized subparagraphs. The list was a quick-step march through almost every mortal sin known to the profession of arms. It went on in a litany of:
Failure …
Unwillingness …
Futility …
Failure …
Failure …