The Battle of Ap Bac

The future looked bright for Captain Kenneth Good. His superiors had recommended the thirty-two-year-old West Point graduate to leave his role advising troops with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to serve as an American representative on a guerrilla warfare team in Malaya. Once the popular Good had completed his duty in Asia, the road seemed clear for his future posting to the prestigious U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 

“That man would have been a general one day,” Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, Good’s commanding officer, predicted to Associated Press bureau chief Malcolm W. Browne. “He was one of the most competent, knowledgeable officers in the country.”

Good’s position as senior adviser to the Second Battalion, Eleventh Regiment of the ARVN’s Seventh Division, however, was the last he ever held. A bullet from a Viet Cong gunner struck Good in the shoulder during a fierce engagement near a small village named Bac—later cited as Ap (meaning “hamlet”) Bac in newspaper accounts—in the Dinh Tuong Province, located approximately forty miles southwest of Saigon. Although he received immediate aid and joked with his comrades despite his wound, Good later died from loss of blood and shock.

Good was one of three Americans killed in the January 2,1963, battle that saw VC forces, cleverly concealed in well-dug foxholes and bunkers, shoot down five U.S. helicopters and inflict casualties of approximately eighty killed and more than a hundred wounded on South Vietnamese forces under the command of Colonel Bui Dinh Dam. “Troops of nearly every description were involved on the government side; there were regular army troops, paratroopers, civil guards, self-defense corpsmen and others,” Browne recalled.

Also available to aid in the fighting were American-made M113 armored personnel carriers equipped with powerful .50-caliber Browning machine guns. Unfortunately, as Browne later learned, a M113 on the move made for a “very unstable platform” for the unfortunate soldier manning its top-mounted Browning. A gunner could fire a long burst and wind up missing his target at a range of only a hundred yards. 

The well-prepared enemy held their fire as the first few flights of U.S. Army H-21 Shawnee helicopters ferried in troops to the designated landing zone. Then, a chopper crewman recalled, the treeline “seemed to explode with machine-gun fire. It was pure hell.” The lumbering, banana-shaped H-21s made fine targets for the VC and were riddled with bullets. The ARVN troops they dropped off to fight had nowhere to hide. “When those poor Vietnamese came out of the choppers, it was just like shooting ducks for the Viet Cong,” recalled a U.S. officer.

Unprotected by any armor shielding, eight gunners on the M113s were cut down by well-aimed fusillades. Looking over the battlefield, an American adviser pointed out to a reporter that the enemy had selected its fighting positions with great care, so much so that it looked like a “school solution” from the infantry training school at Fort Benning on how a unit should prepare a defensive position. The VC units involved—more than 300 men of the 514th Regional Battalion and the 261st Main Force Battalion—took their time, before leaving the battlefield, to collect their dead and wounded, as well as grabbing expended brass shells to reload for later use.

Peter Arnett of the Associated Press and David Halberstam of the New York Times had a bit of luck when it came to arranging transportation to the scene of the fighting. Steve Stibbens, a U.S. Marine combat correspondent for Stars and Stripes newspaper, had been visiting with Arnett in the cramped AP office in Saigon when Halberstam walked in. Tipped off to the fierce fighting, the two civilian reporters convinced Stibbens to change into his U.S. Marine Corps uniform and drive them out of the capital to the battlefield in his Ford Falcon automobile. “The uniform helped get us past roadblocks and checkpoints on the way to Tan Hiep airstrip, the staging point for the Ap-Bac action,” Stibbens remembered.

Arnett reported that the road became “jammed with long lines of cars and buses undergoing security checks at heavily guarded bridges and villages.” Arriving at Tan Hiep, the trio came upon a chaotic scene, with jeeps, trucks, and helicopters jockeying for space on the small runway. For the first time in the war, Colonel Daniel Boone Porter told the reporters, the enemy forces “had stood their ground and fought back rather than hitting and melting away into the countryside.”

Inspecting the battlefield, Arnett recalled that he saw twenty-one holes in one of the downed U.S. helicopters. “On its deck lay the open wallet of one of the dead Americans, a 21-year-old door gunner,” he wrote. “There was a picture of his wife and child.” Watching a procession of ARVN casualties limp off a medical-evacuation helicopter, veteran war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, who had flown to Tan Hiep on a Helio L-28 spotter aircraft, saw soldiers wrapped with “bandages across chests, wads of bandage on arms or legs, eyes covered with the bandage—the wretched cordwood of wounded men, their faces frozen with shock.”

Later, a chopper pilot Tregaskis knew described Ap Bac as “about the worst engagement I was ever in.” United Press International reporter Neil Sheehan asked Brigadier General Robert York, who had come to assess the situation, for his opinion. York gave a curt and honest answer: “What the hell’s it looks like? They got away—that’s what happened.”

As for Sheehan, who had to dodge friendly artillery rounds that fell short of their target, taking cover with York, he considered what had happened “the biggest story we had ever encountered in Vietnam.” Although unnamed in press accounts, Vann, the senior American adviser to the Seventh Division, had lambasted the ARVN’s lack of aggressiveness, describing what had occurred as “a miserable damn performance, just like it always is.” He added that the South Vietnamese “won’t listen—they make the same mistakes over and over again in the same way.”

What happened at Ap Bac degenerated into another war of words between the young Saigon reporters and top U.S. military officials in Vietnam, with the press considering the engagement a defeat for President Ngo Dinh Diem’s government, while the top brass viewed Ap Bac as an ARVN victory. General Paul Harkins, who visited the battlefield the day after the initial fighting, had confidently predicted to newsmen at the scene, “We’ve got them in a trap and we’re going to spring it in half an hour.”

No trap sprung; the guerillas had slipped away into the countryside and the remaining ARVN soldiers appeared to be too discombobulated to track them down. Hearing the general’s remark, Halberstam wondered, as he would on many other occasions in Vietnam, if “Harkins believed what he was saying, or whether he felt it should be said.”

In a later statement, the general defended the mettle of ARVN soldiers, indicating that anyone who criticized their fighting abilities was “doing a disservice to thousands of gallant and courageous men who are fighting so well in the defense of their country.” Although U.S. ambassador Frederick Nolting acknowledged there had been some “snafus” that were the fault of Vietnamese commanders, he downplayed the battle’s significance, believing “it was blown out of all proportions by the American press.”

Nolting also criticized Vann for “spilling his guts to the American press and having it spread all over the headlines that the South Vietnamese Army, despite all that the Americans had done to train and supply them, were basically cowards and they couldn’t win. I don’t believe that.” The ambassador added that Vann’s comments to reporters were “emotional and not fair.”

Hoping to put a positive spin on the battle, Admiral Harry Felt, Harkin’s superior due to his position as commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, commented upon a visit to Saigon from his headquarters in Hawaii that he did not believe what he had been reading in the newspapers about Ap Bac. Felt insisted to the press that South Vietnamese forces had won the battle. Spying Sheehan in the crowd, Felt told him: “So you’re Sheehan. I didn’t know who you were. You ought to talk to some of the people who’ve got the facts.” A stubborn Sheehan was ready with an answer: “You’re right Admiral, and that’s why I went down there every day.”

Felt later told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that Sheehan’s work typified the “bad news . . . filed immediately by young reporters without checking the facts.” A top-secret report authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior military leaders within the U.S. Defense Department, said the journalist’s reports were merely “ill-considered statements made at a time of high excitement and frustration by a few American officers.”

Veteran combat reporter Tregaskis, the author of the best-selling World War II book Guadalcanal Diary and a dedicated supporter of the American involvement in Vietnam, admitted that there probably were many mistakes made at Ap Bac, as “there always are in a battle.” He protested that critical news stories produced by “younger and brasher correspondents” such as Sheehan could do a lot of harm with the American public.

Tregaskis acknowledged that Ap Bac had been a setback to the South Vietnamese cause, but he also pointed out that the VC had suffered a similar defeat earlier at Phuoc Chau, where the ARVN had crushed a guerrilla force, leaving behind 127 dead with very few casualties on its own side. “At Ap Bac, the VC, apparently a very well-disciplined and well-dug-in outfit did it to our side—but not quite as badly [as Phuoc Chau],” Tregaskis noted. “That’s the way war goes, a bloody business any way you look at it.”

Of course, as Browne noted, the VC certainly regarded Ap Bac as a triumph for its cause. The 514th emblazoned the hamlet’s name in gold letters on its battle flag and propaganda posters from the Communists, “professionally printed in four colors, bloomed throughout the [Mekong] delta, all glorifying the fighters at Ap Bac.”

A few weeks after the engagement, Browne wrote an analysis of the battle that offered U.S. officials, who spoke to him with the understanding they would not be named, the opportunity to talk about their frustrations. “It’s the same old story,” one official told the AP bureau chief. “Americans don’t know Asia exists until some Americans start getting killed.”

Most people Browne talked to believed that the negative political and public reaction to the “bloody clash” in the Mekong Delta came about through “a basic ignorance of the situation.” A high-ranking official conceded that the conflict in Vietnam may have been presented to the American public in an “over-simplified form,” with some believing that the war against the Communists had already been won. “On balance things are going well, but it’s not that simple,” the official told Browne.

A military adviser made sure to point out to the reporter that military leaders in Washington, DC, had been told several times that “this is not a simple war that you win in conventional ways. They see it in a thousand reports every day and they’ve learned the correct jargon about guerrilla warfare—how politics are important and all that. They think they understand, but they don’t. The questions they ask show it.”

Browne also acknowledged the anger felt by some Americans in Vietnam about the press coverage: “The setbacks are always on page one, but the victories—some of them less spectacular—see little print. This is going to be a long, hard struggle, and it’s time people got used to the idea.”