A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (135 page)

Vann’s victory at Fire Base Delta raised his confidence to a sense of near infallibility. He dictated a four-and-a-half-page “Memorandum For: My Friends” to Frenchy Zois and had her make copies and mail them to Sir Robert Thompson and Joe Alsop, to other important men in Washington like Melvin Laird, and to friends elsewhere. He prophesied disaster for the NVA on all fronts in South Vietnam, not just on his own, and said that by the time the offensive was over the position of the Vietnamese Communists would be weakened in Laos and Cambodia too. In his December 1969 meeting with Nixon he had been prudent enough to warn that the Saigon side might “have to give up some territory and some population” in the face of an all-out offensive. He eschewed caution now, publicly committing himself not to give ground. The struggle on his front in II Corps was “going to be a difficult fight and a lot of soldiers are yet to die,” he said, but “we expect to hold our major positions, to include Dak To District… and Tan Canh.” The Saigon side would also retain “the hard-won pacification gains in Binh Dinh” on the Central Coast, where Vann had concentrated since the summer of 1971 on liquidating the Viet Cong and firming the regime’s hold over the unruly northern districts. “I stand ready to be challenged on the foregoing analysis by the events that take place subsequent to this date,” he said in conclusion. His memorandum was dated April 12, 1972. The challenge had begun three days before.

The trouble started in that other battleground of II Corps over on the Central Coast, in those old Viet Minh strongholds in the narrow rice deltas of northern Binh Dinh that Vann boasted of pacifying in his
memorandum. The place seemed insignificant, and Vann thought he had the situation under control. The spot was a former fire support base of the Air Cav called Landing Zone Pony near the western end of the serpentine Hoai An Valley that coils back into the mountains about forty miles northwest of Qui Nhon. Pony was garrisoned by a battalion of RF. The base came under bombardment and ground assault on April 9 and fell the next day. The attackers, not yet fully identified by Vann, contradicted his belief that North Vietnamese troops would find themselves as alien in South Vietnam as American soldiers had been. They were a regiment of the 3rd NVA or “Yellow Star” Division, the same amalgam of NVA infantry and Viet Cong regulars that Hal Moore’s 3rd Brigade of the Air Cav had fought in 1966 on this same battleground. The Yellow Star Division was the real phoenix of Binh Dinh, destroyed and risen more times than the intelligence officers on the Saigon and U.S. side would have wanted to know.

First one and then two battalions of the 40th ARVN Regiment from Landing Zone English near Bong Son town to the north, reinforced by a company of M-113s, were sent down to recapture Pony and prevent the NVA from advancing up the valley to Hoai An District headquarters. Vann flew to Hoai An on April 11 and spent the night in the district compound. In January he had managed to have an acquaintance of many years, Col. Nguyen Van Chuc, an eccentric ARVN engineer who practiced yoga and went about his work with the vigor of an ambitious American, installed as province chief of Binh Dinh. Chuc flew up from Qui Nhon, the province capital. Vann liked the 40th Regiment commander, Col. Tran Hieu Due, who set up a command post in the district compound to direct the counterattack. Due had been an enthusiastic participant in the pacification campaign and seemed a good organizer. General Dzu had just obtained a promotion for him in March at Vann’s urging. There were briefings that night and a planning session. Vann encouraged the ARVN officers and their American advisors and left the next morning feeling good.

Due would not fight. He made no attempt to regain Pony or to hold any of the high ground farther down the valley. Instead, he let his battalions keep falling back toward the district center. His advisor, Lt. Col. David Schorr, could put no spine into him. Chuc, who had been given control over all ARVN and territorial troops in the province at Vann’s insistence on unity of command, could do nothing with Due either. Vann returned to Hoai An twice, landing under mortar fire, each time to no avail. There were twenty-nine PF platoons in the district. They were deserting.

Nor was there tranquillity in other parts of Binh Dinh. This province in which pacification had supposedly progressed so far suddenly became hostile. Two and possibly three battalions of NVA sappers moved down from Quang Ngai and raised havoc under the guidance of the local Viet Cong. The northernmost district headquarters of Tarn Quan was struck. Bridges were blown up hither and yon, two right outside Qui Nhon, and outposts were attacked and harassed everywhere. RF and PF began to desert in other districts besides Hoai An.

On April 18, a week after the encouraging council of war, Due had no more high ground to give away to the NVA. He announced that night that he was abandoning Hoai An. “Friendly troops may bug out at any time. Request guidance. If friendlies bug out before guidance arrives, will bug out with them,” Maj. Gary Hacker, the acting district advisor (he was filling in for another officer on leave), radioed to Qui Nhon. During the day, Due had let the Communist soldiery have the district police station on a hill about 500 yards from the hill where the headquarters compound was located. With the compound under full observation, the NVA were belting it in leisurely fashion with mortars and recoilless rifles. The place stank of dead ARVN soldiers no one would bury.

When every attempt to persuade Due to stay failed, Vann had Dzu authorize a withdrawal for noon on April 19. He preferred to have Due leave in organized fashion rather than bolt. The NVA were interdicting the secondary road from the district center back to Route 1, but not enough to prevent a breakout. The plan was to have the armored personnel carriers lead the column, with the trucks and jeeps and marching infantry behind. There were about forty wounded from the two battalions and the district forces. They were to be carried out in the M-113s. A pair of Cobra gunships would orbit the column, strafing and rocketing, while a command-and-control Huey would hover higher overhead to guide protective artillery and fighter-bomber strikes.

Vann could not come down from the Highlands to supervise the evacuation, because he was starting to have trouble with Rocket Ridge. The NVA had switched from attempting to unhinge the fire-base line to cracking the middle of it and had partially succeeded. They had conquered a position called Fire Base Charlie by alternating artillery barrages with infantry assaults until the ARVN paratroops had run so low on ammunition they had been forced to break out, leaving their seriously wounded behind in the bunkers as they went. Of the 471 ARVN officers and men in the defending airborne battalion, only about half got back to Vo Dinh, and half of these were walking wounded.
Vann explained the Hoai An withdrawal plan over the radio on the morning of the 19th to Lt. Col. Jack Anderson, who was to fly the command and control Huey.

About half an hour before the noon departure time, a couple of mortar rounds exploded near the convoy assembly point below the district compound. Most of the wounded had still not been loaded into the armored personnel carriers. Due jumped into the nearest APC with his staff and took off up the road. The rest of the M-113s and trucks and jeeps raced after him. The district chief, an ARVN major, raced off in his jeep too after kicking his deputy for administration out of the vehicle to make room for his refrigerator. Some NVA were waiting in ambush in a nearby hamlet, but Due’s M-113 and the district chiefs jeep were among the vehicles that crashed through.

Colonel Schorr could have left with Due, but he did not want to abandon Major Hacker and Lt. Thomas Eisenhower, the assistant district advisor, who had been conscientiously burning their classified documents and destroying the radio and other equipment up at the compound. He waited for them to run down the hill. They fled east over the paddy dikes toward Route 1. All around them, ARVN soldiers were reverting to instant peasants, tossing away M-16 rifles and helmets and combat web gear and stripping off boots and uniforms to run across the paddies in bare feet and undershorts. The advisors had not gone far when Schorr fell with a bullet in the leg from the NVA who were chasing them. While Eisenhower gave him first aid, Hacker and two Kit Carson Scouts, Viet Cong defectors who had originally been hired as mercenaries by the U.S. Army and were now serving as bodyguards for the advisors, tried to fend off their pursuers. With so many ARVN undressed, Hacker had difficulty telling friend from foe. He began shooting at any Vietnamese approaching him with a weapon who was not wearing an ARVN uniform. Some of the NVA soldiers started to crawl forward while their companions laid down covering fire.

Colonel Anderson in the command-and-control Huey had been listening to what was happening on the ground; as he flew toward Hoai An up a neighboring valley, he had tuned his radio to the frequency of the portable radio Schorr was carrying. The Cobra gunships would not arrive until noon, too late for the advisors. If Anderson attempted a rescue and was shot down, he and his copilot and crew would also be killed or captured.

The aviation units were the sole combat element of the U.S. Army that did not come apart under the stress of the war in Vietnam. Nearly 6,000 helicopter pilots and crew members perished, but the Army airmen
never cracked. Whether it was the oneness of man and acrobatic flying machine, whether it was the equally shared risk of officer pilot and enlisted crew member, whatever the reason, the men of the helicopters kept their discipline and their spirit. As the French parachutists became the paladins of that earlier war, so the U.S. Army aviators became the dark knights of this one. Almost all career aviators served two tours in Vietnam. Anderson was on his second. He was a tall, big-boned Westerner, the commanding officer of the 7th Squadron of the 17th (Air) Cavalry, and his radio call sign befitted him: it was Ruthless Six. He raised Schorr on the radio and asked for the advisors’ position. He told his copilot and gunners over the intercom that they were going down.

Anderson started to draw fire as soon as he began his descent; he was fifty to seventy-five feet above the rice fields before he spotted the little band, despite a smoke grenade one of the advisors set off to guide him. The helicopter vibrated from the thumping recoil of the .50 caliber machine guns Anderson had installed for his door gunners to replace the 7.62mm guns a Huey normally carried. He was glad he had decided to mount the great machine guns. His gunners knew how to handle them. If they got in and out on this trip, Anderson thought, it would be because the .50s spoke with such authority. He hovered on a dike while Eisenhower helped Schorr aboard and Hacker and the two Kit Carson Scouts then vaulted inside. A couple of mud-covered ARVN in their skivvies appeared out of the paddy and scrambled aboard too. The door gunners were killing NVA soldiers twenty-five yards away.

When they reached the airstrip at Landing Zone English near Bong Son town, they counted the bullet holes in the aircraft. There were only nine. The crew chief, who served as one of the gunners, had several pieces of shrapnel in his leg from a round that had struck an ammunition box and exploded a .50 caliber shell.

Over the next twelve days the two larger districts of Bong Son and Tarn Quan went in the same wretched way Hoai An had. The whole of northern Binh Dinh, where 200,000 people lived, fell to the Communists. Vann took time he could not spare from the battle for the Highlands to fly down to the coast and exhort: another Canute vainly commanding the waves to stand still. Thousands of RF and PF deserted. The two remaining battalions of the 40th Regiment would not even defend their home base at LZ English. The ARVN military police forced the wounded to die on the airstrip at English while they sold seats on the VNAF medical evacuation helicopters to deserters. They split the proceeds with the VNAF pilots before the helicopters took off.

***

All the while, a bigger crash was in the making in the Highlands. Dzu had, with Vann’s encouragement, invested the equivalent of an ARVN division, roughly 10,000 men, in the defense of Tan Canh. He and Vann had placed the headquarters of the 22nd Division with two of its infantry regiments there and reinforced them with separate infantry battalions, the 22nd’s own armored cavalry regiment, and most of a second independent regiment of armor. Because Tan Canh was the most forward position, the alignment was a gamble of the highest order. If the Rocket Ridge line broke and Route 14 running south from Tan Canh to Kontum was cut, these forces around Tan Canh with their accompanying artillery, tanks, APCs, trucks, and other fighting gear would be enveloped and isolated. If the Tan Canh defenses themselves cracked, it would be impossible with troops as unsteady as the ARVN to conduct an orderly retreat down a single mountain road. The division would disintegrate. More was at risk than an ARVN division. If either eventuality occurred, the forces needed to hold Kontum would be lost.

Vann’s military deputy, Brig. Gen. George Wear, told him he was courting a catastrophe. His chief of staff, Col. Joseph Pizzi, a shrewd soldier who had tried to warn of the Chinese peril in North Korea in 1950 while serving as the estimating officer in Eighth Army intelligence, said the same thing. The prudent course would have been to organize a battlefield in depth and seek to exhaust the offensive by withdrawing to successive lines of defense, punishing the NVA for each one. This would have meant giving up Tan Canh and nearby Dak To District headquarters at some point with the hope of later regaining them. Vann was not in a mood to listen. “The sons of bitches will have to fight or die,” he said of the ARVN. Wear and Pizzi persisted. Vann said he would raise their fear at his next Saigon strategy meeting with Abrams.

On his return, he said the answer was no, that Tan Canh and Dak To had to be held for political reasons. The evidence is that he deceived Wear and Pizzi and never did state their case with conviction because he had already committed himself privately to retaining Tan Canh and Dak To and was about to commit himself publicly in his April 12 memorandum. When Abrams came to Pleiku on a rare visit, Wear argued emotionally in a meeting with Vann and Dzu and the commanding general. He told Abrams the Tan Canh position was “a pending disaster.” Vann, who was fond of Wear and was attempting to get him his second star, suggested with irritation that they discuss the matter in private afterward. Abrams was also displeased. He seemed to regard such fears as defeatist.