The Battle of Ấp Bắc

Phan Vũ

Neil Sheehan reported Ấp Bắp Battle in his book A Bright Shining Lie, Book III from page 203 to page 265. The date was January 2, 1963. The terrain was composed of two hamlets: Tân Thới Hamlet and Ấp Bắc (Northern Hamlet). They were bordered by Bà Bèo Canal in the North, Tổng Đốc Lộc in the East, National Freeway 4 in the South. In the West, there were three canals (Tân Hội Canal, Nhỏ Canal and Lán Canal), all three canals parallel to National Freeway 4 (see map). Tân Thới Hamlet was at 14 miles north of Cai Lậy District.

Balance of forces:
The Vietcong forces in Ấp Bắc and Tân Thới Hamlet were about 320 men, composed of the 261st Battalion (in Ấp Bắc) and the 514th Battalion of Regional guerrillas (in Tân Thới Hamlet), and some 30 more as scouts. The total was about 350 Vietcong. As weapons, they were armed with M-1, semi-automatic Garand, carbines, Thompson submachine guns, some Browning Automatic Rifles and two .30 caliber machine guns.
In Brief, the Vietcong had two battalions, the 261st and the 514th Battalions. The number of two battalions could not be 350 men. It should be double.

The GVN forces had the 1st and the 2nd Battalions of Civil Guard. Captain Lý Tòng Bá was commander of M-113 Armored Personnel Carriers. There were 12 M-113s armed with .50 mm machine guns and the thirteenth had a flamethrower. Each M-113 carried a squad of infantrymen. The .50 caliber heavy machine guns mounted in front of the command hatch on top of the carrier was "a formidable weapon, capable of plowing earth parapets and cutting down trees with its big steel-jacketed slugs." However the weakness of the carriers was that without protective shields the machine gunners (real targets) were not protected from their waist up and that the carriers could not go fast on the deep, soft and muddy paddies.

About Captain Lý Tòng Bá:
Sheehan wrote, "Bá was an intelligent man... His nature was cheerful and he genuinely enjoyed soldiering... He had joined the armored cavalry and spent the last years of the French war, commanding a platoon of armored cars in the North Vietnam...He had been well instructed in France and the United States. First there had been a year at the French armored cavalry officers' school at Saumur in the valley of the Loire and then another year in 1957-1958 at the Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, USA.

Nature of the terrain:
It was an immense, deep, soft and muddy bog. Rice could grow; but there were few plants and trees. Mud could go up to the waist of a man if he set foot on it. In some place the more a man moved, the more he would go down. No American advisor knew it, even John Paul Vann.
However Vietcong leaders were aware of it and they wanted to lure the American Advisors to drop Government soldiers to that strap. And they got it.

Battle
Vietcong commanders ordered their men to dig foxholes along banana and tree lines and the 4-foot thick dikes that zigzagged out into the fields. Please look at the map. The 514th Battalion of Regional guerrillas protected Tân Thới Hamlet against the advancing of the 1st Battalion of Civil Guards. The 261st Battalion of Vietcong infantry spread along the western banana lines of the Ấp Bắc Hamlet. They were waiting for the arrival of M-113s. Their advantages were that first they chose the terrain to fight (here the deep, muddy and open rice paddies) and second they were hidden and secured in their deep foxholes under banana foliages (surprise ambush)

Ten H-21s shuttled the 2nd Battalion of Civil Guard to the landing zone north-west of Tân Thới Hamlet a company at a time from 7:00 a.m. to 9:20 a.m. The landing zone was an open rice field where there was no bushes to cover those Civil Guards.
The 1st Battalion walked up from the south to Tân Thới Hamlet. At 7:45 a.m. it encountered the first guerrillas and tried to dislodged them. Reaching Tân Thới hamlet at 12:15, the battalion wiped out the 514th Regionals entrenched in the dikes around the edges of the place. The escape route of the remaining guerrillas was blocked: on the east it was open rice paddy and swamp. They had to go north with the 261st VC Battalion.

The M-113s started from Cai Lậy District at 7:00 a.m. They arrived at Tân Hợi Canal at 8:00 a.m. They crossed it and then Nhỏ Canal. They reached Lán Canal at 10:30 a. m. This canal was large, borderless and very muddy. Captain Bá and his men were wading around to cut trees and plants they could find to lay them down at the best fords. Sheehan wrote, "Vann, like most officers who were not armor specialists, had a poor notion of how time-consuming it was for the carriers to cross canals at the best of fords..." (Sheehan 232). After the first carrier had traversed the canal on the platform of cut trees, it had to tow others one by one. It was 11:30 when all the 13 M-113s were at the other side of Lán Canal.

During that time there was a bickering between Vann, Scanlon and Bá. The reason of it was the 5 downed H-21s. These choppers which dropped Civil Guards at 200 yards from guerrilla foxholes were hit by Vietcong .30 caliber machineguns.  Vann wanted to rescue the Americans and the wounded. Vann was trying to goad Scanlon and Mays and shame Bá; But Bá was not able to rescue them because Bá and his men were busy finding and cutting trees and they had not crossed the Lán canal. In his book 25 years on the Battlefields, Lý Tòng Bá wrote that Scanlon was afraid of getting down onto the mud with him and the soldiers to find and cut trees. He stayed idle in the carrier and replied to Vann that Bá was not willing to cross the canal to rescue the downed Americans. He lied to Vann about the truth.

Shortly before 1:00 p.m. the Vietcong saw the M-113s slowly approach across the rice fields. They started to fire and killed at once machine gunners, carrier leaders. Bá suffered from the first surprise attack: he lost 8 seasoned soldiers (Lt. Nguyễn văn Nho,  Sergeant Major Nguyễn văn Nào...) However there were 8 VC dead. He ordered replacements and using firepower at maximum. While Bá was firing the 0.50 machine gun, he threw grenades at VC at 20 yards from the carriers. He told the bugle soldier to sound signal to attack. Bá and his men were brave enough in the middle of the battle. The nerve of the guerrillas was cracking. With the fire covering of the carriers, one of the ten-ton behemoths was going to climb the dike. The crews of every carrier took heart and surge forward. The Vietcong officers and noncoms were not able to shoot down the panic. They jumped out of the foxholes and ran away. The butchery began. Ấp Bắc  was cleared of Vietcong at 4:30 p.m.. Bá's controlled Ấp Bắc Hamlet and Tân Thới Hamlet at 16:30. The Vietcong had tried to accomplish the impossible. Alas, they failed bitterly.

At 18:00 the paratroops began jumping from seven U.S Air Forces north of Ấp Bắc to cut off Vietcong's retreat trail.

Now let's read Sheehan's reports:                    
Who's Neil Sheehan?
He's an American living in freedom and democracy from the day one of his life. He was a journalist, who knew what Communism was and how they ruled countries such as the Soviet Union, Cuba...He knew that the Saigon people were eager to protect their freedom and democracy, that the Hanoi population were oppressed by the Vietnamese Communists or Vietcong, and that he also knew that "the National Liberation Front was Communist-dominated." He wrote, "If I were a lad of eighteen faced with the same choice-- whether to support the GVN or the NLF--and a member of a rural community, I would surely choose the NLF." (Sheehan 524) Sheehan was wrong to think that the majority of the people supported the NLF. Didn't he know that Communism wasn't a revolution? It was despotism. He sided with tyrants. Why?
Neil Sheehan, an American intellect was deeply duped by a VC spy, a VC General Phạm Xuân Ẩn. (A Perfect Spy by Larry Barman). After April 30, 1975, the NLF disappeared without an announcement and their leaders fled abroad. What a pity!.

Sheehan's report contained Vietcong's preparations and combat with specific details: "The machine [the Communist regime] was going to make the Vietnamese soldiers on the Communist side die until the will of the survivors and their leader was broken." (Sheehan 11). Sheehan did not know that the Vietnamese in the north was governed by the stomach policy (food book)."The battalion commander deployed the stronger half of his force, the 1st Company of his own battalion, reinforced by a couple of rifle squads, and his battalion weapons platoon with a second .30 caliber machine gun...where they had an unobstructed view of the rice paddies to the south." (Sheehan 209). "The battalion commander deployed the second half of his force, the 1st Company of the 514th Regionals, strengthened by a separate provincial platoon, in similar fashion in the irrigation dikes that edged the three exposed sides of Tân Thơi." (Sheehan 210)
"At 10.00 p.m. the two companies set off in a column for the base camps on the Plain of Reeds....The province guerrillas of the 514th Regionals followed...The column continued down the canal ...and kept marching until well after daybreak without being detected, reaching the camps safely at 7:00 a. m." (Sheehan 264).

Who gave Sheehan those specific details? Actually, Sheehan arrived at Cai Lậy District late that evening when Captain Lý Tòng Bá completely occupied those two hamlets and Vietcong had fled away.
Sheehan highly praised the VC forces on this battle. "They had done more than win a battle. They had achieved a Vietnamese victory in the way of their ancestors. They had overcome the odds." (Sheehan 264) Sheehan, Vietcong-bootlicking reporter (Sheehan's word, page 207), did turn a Vietcong defeat into a victory. His long report was a fiction story, full of garbage, and Neil Sheehan was a bright shining liar.

Now we read Sheehan's report on the Saigon forces:
Sheehan stayed in peaceful Saigon and protected by Vietnamese soldiers while working as a reporter; but he demeaned and insulted the Government soldiers:
Sheehan wrote, "The United States and its surrogate regime...(208) Bá grasped at this [two hours to cross the Lán Canal] as an excuse to do nothing. He seemed unimpressed.. to his humanitarian instinct..John Paul Vann shamed Bá into action." (231) "Because they [Civil Guards] fought for pay, they had no desire to risk their lives unnecessarily." (245).

When Neil Sheehan was staying in Saigon, he made friend with Phạm Xuân Ẩn, a VC General spy. After the war was over, he sponsored Phạm Xuân Ẩn's son and raised fund for him to study laws in the American University. The Anti-Vietnam War activists were free to support the side they wanted. But why did freedom-loving Americans side with the Communist tyrants? Why did they hate the liberty-yearning South Vietnamese? We are now Vietnamese Americans and we cannot understand them.
The below map was in Lý Tòng Bá's book: