SAIGON
MALCOLM WILDE BROWNE SUBMERGED HIS lanky body in the muck of the rice paddy. Clawing the oozing mud, he pressed his face closer to the gray water of the flooded field. Only the stinking water, his buttons, and his gold belt buckle kept him from going deeper. Before his eyes, three-foot stalks of green rice were dancing to a tune played by Viet Cong machine gun fire. Browne was an American wire service reporter who had made a split-second decision to spend the day with a South Vietnam army unit. The H-21 Shawnee helicopter had unloaded the platoon in the paddy just outside a communist-guerrilla-controlled village. The American crew avoided an actual landing for fear of being glued to the rice paddy muck. As it hovered, Browne had to choose as the soldiers jumped from the whup-whupping banana-shaped troop carrier: Fly back to Saigon or join a platoon of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)? A bullet banged through the Shawnee, leaving a hole the size of a fifty-cent piece—proof that a firefight loomed with the Viet Cong insurgents. Browne jumped. If things went wrong and he was captured by the Viet Cong, his gold belt buckle might serve as ransom. He always wore it.
From the air, dazzling green rice paddies seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. They were the breathtaking heart of Vietnam’s beauty that captured Browne’s heart and soul. Close up, however, the paddy reeked of excrement, human and animal. Farmers’ toilets served as the primary source of fertilizer. As he walked with the soldiers toward the village, Browne was shin-deep in the paddy and the mud sucked at his boots with every step. His red socks, which he always wore, were drenched. He bought a bin of red socks from an army post exchange, so he never worried about one lost in the wash. He splashed down when the machine gun, likely a U.S. .30 caliber Browning, opened up from the village tree line. The Viet Cong armed itself with American weapons stolen from overrun South Vietnamese army bases.
The ARVN platoon leader was screaming at his cowering infantrymen. Attack! Advance! They would not move. The hip-high ripening rice hid them from mortars and the machine gun. Frustrated, the platoon leader sought to inspire his troops by an individual assault on the enemy position. He rose to his feet and yelled for his soldiers to follow. Through centuries of wars, the daring leader rallied his troops with just this maneuver. A massive statue portraying an infantry leader, mouth open and hand beckoning, stands at the U.S. Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia. Graduates of that school, American army officers and sergeants, had been training ARVN troops since 1961. Indeed, some of the ARVN officers were sent to Fort Benning for infantry training where the motto was: “Follow Me.” Browne had witnessed the number of U.S. military advisers grow from 750 in 1961 to more than 16,000 in 1963. They were the sharp point of the spear brandished by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His million-a-day U.S. aid program was designed to defeat the Viet Cong, who were directed by a Hanoi government backed by Communist Russia and China. Vietnam was the hot spot in the cold war. Kennedy has placed big bets on a man he knew personally—Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam.
Browne watched the South Vietnamese lieutenant rally the ARVN platoon with his classic one-man charge. His bravery should have inspired his cringing troops to rise and follow, but they did not budge. After a few yards, the platoon leader’s head exploded. The sudden halo of red burned into Browne’s memory. Brave but foolish, Browne thought. He huddled with the soldiers until the Viet Cong guns were silenced hours later. Load after load of bombs and rockets from A-1 Skyraiders shattered the village and tree line where the Viet Cong were positioned.
The muscular, propeller-driven Skyraiders were flown by U.S. Air Force pilots, volunteers trained in the secret Jungle Jim program Kennedy created in 1961. These American pilots flew most of the combat missions as part of the also-secret Operation Farm Gate. Their role was a clear contradiction of President Kennedy’s assurance that there were no American combat troops in Vietnam. At a January 15, 1962, White House news conference, a reporter asked, “Mr. President, are American troops now in combat in Vietnam?” The president answered no.
Browne exposed Kennedy’s lie by loitering at the end of runways at Bien Hoa air base and clocking the Americans at the Skyraider controls. He was photographing the American pilots when the military police descended on him and ripped the film from his camera. Browne was arrested and held for a brief time; he detailed the event in an AP dispatch. He was the leader of a small but feisty band of reporters sending dispatches that sharply contradicted Kennedy, the American delegation in Saigon, and Diem and his family, who constituted the government in Saigon. Almost every Kennedy policy in South Vietnam was conducted in secrecy, a shadow war hidden from possible treaty violations but particularly from American voters. For example, in 1961 Kennedy personally approved Operation Ranch Hand, the most extensive use of chemical warfare since World War I. Over the next eight years, more than 20 million gallons of defoliants and herbicides were sprayed by U.S. Air Force planes over South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Ostensibly the chemicals were used to remove roadside and riverside jungle areas that were Viet Cong ambush locations. But in 1962 Kennedy also approved use of the herbicide Agent Orange to kill crops that might benefit the always-underfed communist guerrillas. There were concerns at the State Department that the killing of crops was a violation of a Geneva Convention prohibition against chemical weapons. Not known at the time was that dioxin, a toxic chemical compound in Agent Orange and the other herbicides being used, had a lethal and lasting effect on the Vietnamese and American troops. In addition to skin eruptions, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, dioxin could last in the human bloodstream for months and years, causing birth defects. As many as 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed to the American herbicides. Between 400,000 and 500,000 defects were reported in their children. Millions of American veterans became entitled to Veteran Administration payments because of Agent Orange.
While Browne reported on defoliation by U.S. Air Force crews—“Only You Can Prevent a Forest” was the unit’s slogan—reporters in Saigon were unaware of the crop-killing program while Kennedy was president. Eventually, more than 8,000 acres of rice and other crops became so contaminated by Agent Orange that they were destroyed by the U.S. Air Force years later. As the results of U.S. programs filtered back to the White House, Kennedy had misgivings over the killings of the innocents caught up in the conflict. “We were killing lots of other people at the same time we were trying to kill the Viet Cong,” said Michael Forrestal, a White House aide focused on the conflict. It bothered Kennedy, and the president sought to reduce the heavy use of herbicides, napalm, and land mines. The Pentagon objected to qualms from the commander in chief. “Our army supported all those activities and thought they were necessary and militarily justified,” Forrestal said. Kennedy rolled over.
Thomas Hughes, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, thought the president and his brother Bobby were obsessed with hiding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Few in Congress had any idea of the costly infusion of American aircraft, helicopters, ships, supporting troops, and military advisers. Keeping Congress and American voters ignorant avoided public criticism of Kennedy’s Operation Beef-up, as it was code named by the Pentagon. “They had an interest in covert activities, in James Bond type of activity,” Hughes said. “They saw it as a third way this side of military involvement and this side of diplomatic exclusiveness. They romanticized about doing things in secret that could not be done openly, including some very strenuous covert activity. They were very interested in it.” The secret buildup was a direct result of Kennedy’s rejection of an all-too-public introduction of American combat troops.
Since U.S. support for Diem began in 1954, American military chiefs were urging U.S. combat troops to replace the inept and reluctant Saigon army in the fight with the Viet Cong. Kennedy, like Eisenhower, said no.
When the first large contingent of combat helicopters arrived in Saigon on December 11, 1961, reporter Stanley Karnow spotted them on the flat top deck of the USS Core. Aboard were thirty-two Shawnee transport helicopters and four hundred men from Fort Lewis, Washington, to man them. Karnow was having a drink with a U.S. Army press officer on the roof of the Majestic Hotel when the Core steamed into Saigon harbor. “I grabbed the officer’s arm, shouting, ‘Look at that carrier.’” The officer squinted at the massive ship. “I don’t see nothing,” the officer said. Kennedy, McNamara, and Rusk had taken elaborate measures to squelch press reports. “Supersedes all previous messages,” said a State Department cable before the Core’s arrival. “Do not give other than routine cooperation to correspondents on coverage of current military activities in Vietnam. No comment at all on classified activities.” So when Karnow and other journalists reported the terribly obvious arrival of the helicopter-ladened Core, Kennedy erupted in a rage. Roger Hilsman at the State Department recounted the president’s early morning blast by using “@2#34ljhf! 8!” instead of Kennedy’s actual curses in a memo on the telephone conversation.
Kennedy’s personal prodding led the Central Intelligence Agency to launch Project Tiger, a secret counterintelligence program against Hanoi. Between 1961 and 1963, William Colby, then the CIA station chief, parachuted more than 250 South Vietnamese agents across the border. Of those, 217 perished. Few survived more than a week in North Vietnam. Those that did were assumed to be double agents for the Hanoi government. U.S. Navy ships conducted secret attacks on the North Vietnamese coastline and on islands controlled by Hanoi. These American naval operations were at the heart of the Gulf of Tonkin encounter in 1964. By contrast, Hanoi infiltrated spies into almost every branch of the Saigon government as well as into the American embassy, the military, the press corps, and other operations of interest to the communist north.
Browne of the AP would get wind of these secret efforts. The New York–born reporter was a supporter of war against the communists. However, Browne resented the U.S. duplicity in Saigon and Washington over the extent of American military involvement. Browne’s reporting directly challenged the credibility of the president of the United States as well as that of the American civilian and military leadership in Saigon. But official Washington brushed off his accounts. Vietnam was a back-page story in a backwater country since Browne had arrived in 1961. Front pages were devoted to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s policy of intimidation of the young American president. Berlin and Cuba were far more important. “Vietnam was peripheral,” said George W. Ball, Kennedy’s undersecretary of state.
Through secrecy, Kennedy hoped to keep it that way. In 1963, however, Vietnam was being elevated to center stage, and Browne would turn out to be the drama’s leading reporter. Browne was the bureau chief for the Associated Press in Saigon. As boss, he could decide where and when to go, whether to stay or to leave. By 1963, after three years of combat trips, Browne felt that all of them blurred together. All seemed to end when he boarded a Shawnee for the trip back to Saigon. The American crew always tried to jump to at least 700 feet on takeoff. Even with a loss of power at that altitude, the big bird could be nosed over and flutter the big rotors to a safe landing.
On one memorable return trip, Browne watched the crew eating cookies as the Shawnee screeched for altitude. The smell of kerosene filled the cabin. About a foot above Browne’s shoulder, a bullet sliced the transport’s main hydraulic line. The Shawnee’s two massive rotors quit. They were below 700 feet and the chopper plunged straight down into a rice paddy. Browne was knocked out by the crash. He was awakened by the crew chief’s jostling. They were under fire. He was to grab a rifle and exit the wreck. Browne had served as a soldier with the U.S. Army and could handle most military weapons. Bloody and shaken, he scrambled out of the wreck and shot in the direction of the Viet Cong. It soon grew quiet. As the crew chief predicted, a rescue chopper arrived within an hour.
Dried mud and blood on Browne’s torn shirt did not rate a second glance from the cab driver at Tan Son Nhat. All sorts came through the main airport for both civilian and military operations in Saigon. At his cramped office on rue Pasteur in the city center, Browne tried to bang out a report on the day’s events on an old Underwood typewriter. A withered human hand hung on the wall, a grisly reminder of a grisly war. The bathroom, which doubled as photographer Horst Faas’s darkroom, was full of a photo enlarger and film chemicals. Browne was too rattled to write anything decent. He chain-smoked, lighting, inhaling, stubbing out one cigarette after another, hoping the tobacco would inspire deft wording. A chemist before turning to journalism, Browne understood the effect of nicotine. Nothing came. Clumsy clichés helped end the dispatch.
As he finished, the phone rang. An intelligence agent with a diplomatic cover invited Browne to a black-tie cabaret at the Caravelle Hotel. Also attending were some senior Saigon army officers he had been trying to interview. And there were beautiful, exotic Vietnamese women. Millions of American men would become entranced by these women. Saigon “has the most stylish women in all Asia,” Kennedy was told in a letter by John Kenneth Galbraith, who was then the American ambassador to India. The president had asked him to look around in Saigon in 1961. “They are tall with long legs, high breasts and wear white silk pajamas and a white silk robe split at the sides to the armpits to give the effect of a flat panel fore and aft. On a bicycle or scooter they look very compelling.”
Browne would later wed a Saigon beauty. But he was single the night he accepted the cabaret invitation. He showered, bandaged his cuts, and donned a new tailor-made tuxedo. Saigon tailors whipped up all sorts of outfits for journalists at thirty dollars each. The Paris chanteuse Juliette Gréco was the star of the cabaret that evening. The sound of her sultry voice and cold drinks relaxed Browne. Through the hotel window he could see streams of red tracers from gunfire arching over the Saigon River. Yellow flashes marked shell impacts. Not too far beyond the river, past the rubber plantations, there were slinking tigers, screeching baboons, and trumpeting elephants. “Good-bye my heart,” Juliette sang in French. This almost perfect day of adrenaline-drenched journalism ended in resentment. When Browne arrived at his apartment he found three radiotelegrams slipped under the door. They were callbacks, rockets from New York and Tokyo headquarters of the Associated Press, messages that wire service reporters detested. One implied he had missed the story that day: United Press International, the competing American wire service, reported three helicopters downed.
“Unipress has three choppers down but your crash has only one. If correct need matcher sappest, foreign.” The AP foreign desk, using pidgin cablese, jargon to cut down cable charges for each individual word. The desk was demanding two more crashed helicopters in a new story as soon as possible. These rockets took different forms and delivered different messages. But most had an insulting undertone from desk editors, people who would never spit rice paddy water, much less survive a helicopter crash and come out shooting. Browne began making phone calls.
Browne was the dean of American reporters in Saigon in 1963, and his reports were the factual foundation of developments in South Vietnam. Almost every newspaper editor in the world reprinted his dispatches, which were delivered at sixty words per minute from a clacking teletype machine in their newsrooms. Almost all American newspapers were sharing the costs for members of the Associated Press cooperative. Most global news pages contained AP reports in the language in which the newspaper was published. Dispatches were also translated for foreign broadcasters. For U.S. television news editors without reporters in Saigon, Browne and the AP were the core of evening news shows, which in 1963 lasted only fifteen minutes. Newspapers of the period were still the most important source of information. Network news was brief and superficial and far from as influential as it is today.
For the editors of the two U.S. newspapers with reporters based in Saigon—the New York Times and the Chicago Daily News—the AP dispatches were the yardstick for their own reporter’s accounts. Cabled questions from foreign news desks usually began by noting what Browne had reported that day. Or they would reference dispatches from United Press International, a feisty independent American wire service with a more limited circulation. It was the same for reporters with weekly news magazines, including Time and Newsweek. AP and UPI provided the daily yardstick and formed opinion around the globe. Because of the AP’s relation with the American press and Browne’s seniority, almost every new or visiting reporter made the rue Pasteur AP bureau the first stop in Saigon. To preserve time for his own work, Browne printed guidelines for new reporters. There was a list of what to take to the field, including combat boots. Browne stopped wearing canvas sneakers after a sharpened bamboo stake—a hidden punji stick—sliced through the rubber sole and deep into his foot. These simple Viet Cong booby traps would fell countless of Americans, including Army Captain Colin Powell, in later years. Mainly, Browne’s guidelines were designed to help reporters find their way around the potholes of Saigon reporting.
“Don’t believe any official report. Write only what you see. Don’t trust information you get from anyone without checking in the best you can,” Browne’s AP booklet lectured. “This goes not only for Vietnamese and American officers, but from any source and for that matter, even your colleagues. You will find quickly that most ‘facts’ in Viet Nam are based at least in part on misinformation or misunderstandings.
“Beware in particular of any information at all you get from certain officials who can be counted on to tell bald-faced, 180-degree whoppers nearly every time. A list of these officials and their relative credibility indices is available at the AP office. Unfortunately, some of them are in high positions.” By 1963, the top of the bald-faced whopper list included Nolting and the commander of American forces in Vietnam, General Paul Donal Harkins. They were in charge of implementing Kennedy’s secret support of the Saigon government.
In 1963, U.S. secrecy and the hostility of President Ngo Dinh Diem’s government had goaded the Western press corps into combat with the official line on the course of the conflict. With Browne leading the way, most reporters presented the American-backed South Vietnam government as fumbling, even losing the nine-year-old war with the communist government of North Vietnam. The source of this controversial assessment often came from American army officers sent to train ARVN troops. Captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, and a surprising number of generals were frustrated by their inability to create a fighting force. These American officers would recount their dismay to Browne and other reporters. Many ARVN soldiers would cower during firefights, refusing to fire their weapons, much less attack. Saigon commanders seemed determined to avoid battlefield confrontation with the Viet Cong. Losses could result in removal from command.
A big problem was President Diem. Even though Diem would meet with reporters, they left most sessions at the palace with empty notebooks. Diem was portrayed as an out-of-touch mandarin more interested in diverting the military to deal with the many coups plotted by dissident generals. The president had dodged a full-bore attempt at overthrow in 1960 and a more modest effort in 1962 that was really more of an assassination attempt by aircraft. Diem, the American journalists reported, was cut off from reality by his ruthless brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and Nhu’s wife, the beautiful and profane Madame Nhu. Brother Nhu used a secret police force to jail countless potential political opponents. His wife directed a morality crusade that generated hostility for Diem. As a Roman Catholic celibate who once aspired to the priesthood, Diem endorsed his sister-in-law’s attempts to proselytize in a nation that preferred ancestor worship as a religion. Beneath the surface, the police state was boiling with public resentment in Saigon, U.S. readers were told. Nhu and his wife were widely hated in Saigon and this rubbed off on Diem.
Some policies were worse in parts of the countryside where 8.5 million tillers of the paddies were forced to live in one of 3,225 fortified hamlets. The peasants were often forced to witness the destruction of their own homes by fire and explosives. They were compelled to build housing in the Strategic Hamlets, which were far from their farms and the graves of their ancestors. Behind barbed wire and pointed stakes, they would supposedly be safe from Viet Cong intimidation. The hamlets were armed with outdated weapons and radios to call for help if the Viet Cong attacked. This program was a brainchild of the Central Intelligence Agency and was overseen by Counselor Nhu. By 1963, some of these forts had come to serve as supply depots for the Viet Cong. In the rice-rich Mekong Delta, scores of these hamlets had been overrun by the Viet Cong.
Browne’s AP led the way in reporting the costly shortcomings of the program. One AP account likened them to World War II style concentration camps. Often the peasants defected back to their own farms. Still, the program disrupted the Viet Cong domination of villages, from which they got food and recruits. Hanoi saw it as a much more effective program than the American media did. Eventually, the Strategic Hamlet Program was abandoned. But for President Kennedy in 1963, the program remained a top priority. Almost 64 percent of the population was in these hamlets, Kennedy was told.
To visitors and official Washington, Ambassador Nolting insisted that President Diem’s flaws could be corrected. Diem was the only leader suitable for this nine-year-old struggle against the Viet Cong and its sponsors in Hanoi. Counselor Nhu and his wife could be tamed. Kennedy sent Nolting to Saigon with orders to woo President Diem into following U.S. policy suggestions. Previous American ambassadors made blunt demands for democratic policies that Diem would simply ignore, but Nolting’s change of approach did little to influence Diem toward a broader, more democratic government.
Number two on Browne’s list of liars was Harkins. A polo-playing chum of General George S. Patton Jr., he wound up on the Patton staff during World War II. He was best known before Saigon for ousting the most talented members of the nationally ranked football team at the U.S. Military Academy. Harkins was the commandant at West Point in 1951 when he learned of a cheating ring there, and he forced cadets—they pledged never to lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do—to snitch on other cheaters. Of the ninety cadets discharged, most were members of the Army football team, the Black Knights. Legendary coach Earl “Red” Blaik accused Harkins of bias. The scandal produced more intense but largely unvoiced emotion among graduates of West Point. The Black Knights of the Hudson were supposedly a symbol of unstinting military courage. This was a gutsy move by Harkins that riled the Army establishment. He was admired by Army General Maxwell Taylor, who recommended Harkins for the post in Saigon. Taylor was Kennedy’s military adviser and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Harkins, class of 1929 at West Point, had abandoned his cadet honor code in Saigon. Honesty was unacceptable at his headquarters. By 1963, his staff constantly rewrote, suppressed, or destroyed reports from U.S. advisers in the field with misgivings about the South Vietnamese army. The more senior advisers—colonels and generals—were ordered by Harkins to keep their doubts to themselves. Success and looming victory were the constants in Harkins’s reports to Washington. “I am an optimist,” Harkins told reporter Stanley Karnow. “I am not going to allow my staff to be pessimistic.” Up the chain of command that ended in the Oval Office of the White House, Harkins reported an ill-nourished, ill-equipped, and poorly trained communist guerrilla army that would soon be vanquished. The communists would collapse in the face of what Harkins called an “explosion” by Saigon troops on North Vietnam’s border. While he frequently touted this plan to Washington, it never actually came off.
American military tactics, artillery, and airpower provided to Diem’s army were the key. This overwhelming American military technology would crush the hungry warriors wearing black pajamas favored by Vietnamese farmers, both north and south. “Raggedy-assed little bastards” was the description of the communist guerrillas favored at Harkins’s headquarters. In Washington, success in crushing the Viet Cong trumped all other complaints against the Diem government. And in 1962, American training and supplies helped the Saigon army rout the Viet Cong guerrillas in a number of engagements. Diem concentrated his forces in the central highlands, long seen as the key to military control of South Vietnam. Years later, Hanoi would concede Diem’s forces that year had gained the upper hand. It was a different story in the south, where Diem viewed the Mekong Delta as a less strategic battlefield. But as 1963 began, the delta hit the front pages of American newspapers as the place where the reality of the Saigon army’s incompetence and the corruption of its leadership emerged dramatically. This all started with an American-designed planned assault by Saigon’s best division on a Viet Cong stronghold spotted by sophisticated U.S. radio intercepts. The target was Ap Bac and an adjoining hamlet, farm villages surrounded by paddies, dikes, and canals in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam.
Waves of American Shawnee helicopters whisked the ARVN 7th Division infantry to the battlefield. American pilots in Skyraiders pounded the village with napalm and rockets. Forward observers were landed to direct howitzer rounds on the enemy. Paratroopers came last, leaping from American transports to reinforce the infantry. U.S. Army Huey helicopters armed with machine guns and rockets flew low to strafe the Viet Cong as they fled the scene. A company of armored personnel carriers with .50 caliber machine guns in their turrets always terrorized the enemy. In the previous year, such combined assaults—particularly when the American M113 armored personnel carriers were used—had led to Viet Cong panic and slaughter. Running in the open made easy targets. Army lieutenant colonel John Paul Vann had worked out the tactics with his ARVN counterparts. He directed the operation from a plane flying over the battlefield. With each Saigon unit were U.S. Army officers and sergeants to advise and prod the ARVN troops. They were also in radio contact with the circling Colonel Vann.
As the tropical sun burned away the morning fog, the Viet Cong were braced for the assault, virtually hidden in tree lines along dikes. January 2 was the day the insurgents decided to stand and fight. Vietnamese who worked on the ammunition buildup for the Saigon attack alerted the commander of the 261st Main Force Battalion. Hanoi policy hides his name from history. The 261st was seasoned by twenty years of insurgency against foreign occupation. They had fought the Japanese during World War II, the French from 1945 to 1954, and now the Americans. They were armed with crates of stolen American ammunition for stolen M1 Garand rifles, Browning Automatic Rifles, Thompson submachine guns, and belt-fed machine guns. There was even a handful of U.S. 60mm mortars that would arc explosives at the attackers. This band of 320 men were also trained in basic infantry tactics used by American troops during World War II and the Korean War. They were taught how to aim ahead of helicopters and airplanes to compensate for their speed. Cardboard cutouts of the American aircraft were placed on poles. Runners carried them past soldiers being taught to lead or aim ahead. Interlocking fields of fire were laid out to catch the attackers in withering cross fires. American radios stolen from Strategic Hamlets enabled the 261st to monitor almost every move by ARVN attackers that day. The primary emphasis was on mass firing, where all weapons are brought to bear on a single target. Hundreds of soldiers all aiming at a single target—in the air or on the ground—created a wall of lead that had a devastating potential.
The sophistication of the 261st was instantly on display on that January 2 morning. All fourteen Shawnee helicopters were hit by the mass fire as they landed troops in waves on the Ap Bac battlefield. Most of them absorbed the gunfire and American crews flew them to safety. But as the battle unfolded, four of the Shawnee troop transports and a Huey Gunship were downed by disciplined Viet Cong gunfire. Saigon’s 7th Division troops and civil guard units were pinned down in the paddies after they jumped from the Shawnees. Some were killed and many were wounded when they refused to shoot back or move from the rice paddies where they landed. The gray paddy water turned red. Eleven American crewmen aboard the downed Shawnees were also pinned down.
“Di, di, di!” yelled American Army Sergeant First Class Arnold Bowers, the Vietnamese phrase for “Come on.” He was aboard one of the second wave of Shawnees crippled by ground fire. Bowers tried to get the cowering ARVN troops to attack. They would not budge. Bullets snapped and whizzed everywhere. Fear was in charge. Forward observers for air support and artillery were frozen into inaction. Napalm was dropped off target. Artillery rounds landed nowhere near the 261st and its invisible foxholes. Army Captain Kenneth Good, West Point class of 1952, tried to rally another ARVN unit burrowed into a paddy. Good, thirty-two, was wounded and bled to death when the ARVN unit commander failed to call for help. When the company of M113 personnel carriers arrived, they failed to inflict the terror of past battles. Instead, the Viet Cong fire-killed and wounded gunners on the armored vehicles, effectively silencing the powerful .50 caliber machine guns. Stymied by the massed gunfire, the M113s withdrew. The ARVN reserve force, the paratroopers, was dropped in the late afternoon by Americans flying the lumbering C-123 Providers. A mistake in targeting the jump zone landed many too close to the Viet Cong guns. A total of nineteen were killed and thirty-eight wounded, including two American advisers who jumped along with the unit.
Initial accounts of the emerging disaster appeared in American newspapers published on January 3. The day’s competition belonged to Browne of the AP and his staff, including Peter Arnett. “Vietcong Downs Five U.S. Helicopters, Hits Nine Others,” said the New York Times headline. The subhead read: “Defeat Worst Since the Buildup Began, Three Americans Are Killed in Vietnam.”
Arnett of the AP confronted the senior American adviser to the defeated ARVN forces the next day. Colonel Vann had spent hours screaming at South Vietnamese commanders over the radio from his airborne command post. Vann landed at one point to accuse the senior 7th Division commander of avoiding combat and deliberately letting the Viet Cong slip away in the night. Vann was at the end of his rope when Arnett asked him what had happened. “A miserable damned performance, just like always,” Vann snapped. The quote became headline material, but Vann was not identified as the source. Neil Sheehan, the lone UPI reporter, wound up with the most comprehensive account of the Ap Bac fiasco later in the week. He was flown to the battlefield where ARVN bodies were beginning to bloat in the sun. The village itself was an empty, smoldering ruin.
The 261st had slipped away during the night with its dead and wounded. They lost eighteen killed and thirty-nine wounded, Sheehan would learn decades later. Saigon forces had eighty killed and more than a hundred wounded. Sheehan was walking the battlefield with U.S. Army Brigadier General Robert York. “What happened here?” Sheehan asked. “What the hell’s it look like,” York snapped. “They got away. That’s what happened.”
General Harkins rarely visited the front line of the guerrilla war. But he arrived at the ARVN command post the day after the world learned that United States was up against something more than “raggedy-ass little bastards.” Harkins sought to salvage the disaster with the most feeble form of spin. “We’ve got them in a trap,” Harkins told reporters, “and we’re going to spring it in half an hour.”
That was what Malcolm Browne would call a bald-faced, 180-degree whopper.