Hell in An Loc Read online

  Hell in An Loc

  The 1972 Easter Invasion and the Battle that Saved South Viet Nam

  Lam Quang Thi

  University of North Texas Press

  Denton, Texas

  ©2009 Lam Quang Thi

  Foreword by Andrew Wiest ©2009 University of North Texas Press

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

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  University of North Texas Press

  1155 Union Circle #311336

  Denton, TX 76203-5017

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lam, Quang Thi, 1932-

  Hell in An Loc : the 1972 Easter Invasion and the battle that saved South Viet Nam / Lam Quang Thi ; foreword by Andrew Wiest. -- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-57441-276-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-57441-359-5 (e-book)

  1. Lam, Quang Thi, 1932-2. An Loc, Battle of, An Loc, Vietnam, 1972--Personal narratives, Vietnamese. 3. Easter Offensive, 1972--Personal narratives, Vietnamese. 4. Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Campaigns--Vietnam--An Loc--Personal narratives, Vietnamese. 5. Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Aerial operations, American--Personal narratives, Vietnamese. 6. Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Regimental histories--Vietnam (Republic). I. Title.

  DS557.8.A5L36 2009

  959.704’34--dc22

  2009020095

  This electronic book made possible by the support of the Vick Family Foundation.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword by Andrew Wiest

  Introduction

  1. The Sieges of the Indochina Wars

  2. Setting the Stage

  3. The Opening Salvos

  4. Prelude to the Battle of An Loc

  5. The First Attack on An Loc

  6. The Second Attack on An Loc

  7. Reinforcing An Loc

  8. The Third Attack on An Loc

  9. Securing Route Nationale 13

  10. End of the Siege

  11. The ARVN 18th Division in An Loc

  12. Assessing the Battle of An Loc

  13. The Aftermath

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Senior ARVN Commanders and U.S. Counterparts

  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  PHOTOS APPEARING

  ARVN commanders responsible for the defense of An Loc

  ARVN soldiers on a T-54 tank in An Loc

  A PT-76 tank destroyed in the New Market

  An ARVN defender with antitank LAWs

  ARVN defenders aiming their LAWs at NVA tanks

  ARVN soldiers with a captured anti-aircraft weapon

  81st Airborne Commando cemetery in An Loc

  President Thieu and General Hung touring An Loc after the siege

  President Thieu talking to ARVN soldiers in An Loc

  MAPS

  Military Regions

  Dien Bien Phu

  Khe Sanh

  Military Region III

  NVA Nguyen Hue Campaign, 1972

  Binh Long Province

  Defense Plan

  First Attack on An Loc

  Second Attack on An Loc

  Paratroopers Heliborne Operations

  Third Attack on An Loc

  Route Nationale 13 Securing Operations

  Tong Le Chan

  Battle of Xuan Loc

  Foreword

  by Andrew Wiest

  The American tragedy that was the Vietnam War is the subject of seemingly endless fascination in both U.S. academic and popular circles. Efforts to interpret the war range from big screen portrayals, including Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump and Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers, to well-documented tomes on the military prosecution of the war, such as John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, that heavily influence present-day tactics in the ongoing Global War on Terror. Any attempts to explain this national fixation on or the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War leads back to the same uncomfortably dark riddle. How did the United States, history’s greatest superpower and a nation that presumably stands for good, on one hand lose a war to a third-rate power like North Vietnam and on the other lose its soul amidst a cacophony of protests, war crimes trials, and assassinations?

  The arbiters of America’s past, whether they be film directors, novelists, historians, or reporters, have provided a dizzying array of potential answers, some controversial and others taken as dogma, to explain American failure in the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson was too distracted by his Great Society. The American media subverted the mission of the military. American society was too fractured, and the nation’s will was too weak. General William Westmoreland never understood the war that was his to command. The U.S. military relied on overly traditional tactics. The U.S. military did not rely enough on traditional tactics. The power of the U.S. Air Force was never truly unleashed. Airpower was used too indiscriminately. The ignominious roll call is, indeed, quite long, leaving no shortage of villainous characters contending for the leading part in the American morality play that is the history of the Vietnam War.

  Much of the historical and cultural debate that swirls around the failure of the American war in Vietnam is complicated by the very fact that its participants all too often view the conflict simply as an American war. Arguably perpetuating the fatal flaw of the U.S. military effort in Vietnam, the American popular and historical consciousness regularly omits the Vietnamese from the story of their own war. What for Americans was but part of a much wider geopolitical chess match was for Vietnam a brutal civil war that fractured the nation along ethnic, social, religious, geographic, and economic fault lines the roots of which extended well beyond the transitory motivations and concerns of the Cold War. While popular portrayal concedes that the conflict in Vietnam can be dated back to 1945 and the re-imposition of French colonialism, actually the struggle can be seen as a part of a broader Vietnamese dynamic of south vs. north competition that extends back at least as far as the 1500s. Viewing such a complex conflict only from the perspective of its final foreign interloper is overly simplistic. A full understanding of the Vietnam War, and of America’s failed crusade, requires coming to terms with Vietnam’s Vietnam War.

  The only Vietnamese who seem to register in the American public consciousness, and who receive coverage in most popular accounts of the war, are America’s enemies—Victor Charlie—the cunning V.C., and the hard-bitten warriors of North Vietnam. Allowing time for and praise of enemy forces in Vietnam makes perfect historical sense, for facing such stalwart adversaries—the inheritors of a martial tradition that had bested everyone from the Mongols to the Chinese—makes America’s failure in its Vietnamese adventure somehow more palatable. By comparison, America’s allies, the South Vietnamese, receive little notice and have become very nearly historically invisible. When not totally ignored in western accounts of the conflict, the South Vietnamese usually receive only damning reference as a collection of cowards and incompetents who served a fatally flawed government that had little connection to Vietnam’s glorious past. In the popular historical mind, then, geopolitical fate forced the United States to back the wrong horse in the Vietnam War, setting the stage for all that followed in America’s great tragedy.

  In recent years, though, western scholars have devoted an increased level of academic scrutiny to South Vietnam that has begun to reshape the history of the conflict. While the new history admits that South Vietnam and its military were flawed instruments, it maintains that the South had a deep connection to Vietnam’s past and was not simpl
y predisposed to failure. Even the briefest of accounts of the South Vietnamese experience of war draw a picture that is uncomfortably at odds with the popular understanding of America’s war in South East Asia. As part of an imperfect alliance and in the service of a flawed state, the South Vietnamese fought for twenty-five years, at the cost of well over 200,000 military and at least 400,000 civilian dead. After the fall of Saigon, millions chose to flee to face an uncertain future abroad as refugees rather than to live under the rule of their brothers from the North. It seems, then, that many in South Vietnam fought long and hard for their own independence and were unwilling to accept defeat.

  The emerging twin historical themes that the war in Vietnam was not simply an American war abroad and that South Vietnam was more than just a victim of history greatly complicate the standard intellectual framework that buttresses the American understanding of the conflict. A new generation of scholars, possessing proper language skills and lacking pre-conceived notions of those who lived through the troubled Vietnam era, must seek to unlock the history of Vietnam at war—a history that includes both North and South and all of their institutional participants and contexts.

  Historians who choose to work on Vietnam at war, though, face a great disadvantage. As a defeated nation, which the victorious North has labored diligently to expunge from history, the South left behind precious few documents or collective accounts of its war. As a result, the historical playing field is heavily weighted toward the North Vietnamese view of the conflict. There does exist, though, a thriving effort within the Vietnamese expatriate community in the United States (the South Vietnamese community) to chronicle its history and to laud its heroes. Written in Vietnamese and published without the national support that undergirds the efforts of their one-time foes, the South Vietnamese documentation of their perspective on the war has remained an underground effort that has gained little popular traction.

  Published primary source material is the lifeblood of history and in the case of most modern wars is readily available. World War I historians can balance the published diary of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig against the War Memoirs of David Lloyd George. World War II historians can easily consult both the published Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery and The Rommel Papers in writing on the war in North Africa. However, only a very few South Vietnamese primary accounts have made their way into the historical mainstream. To reach a fuller and more complete understanding of the Vietnam War, the perspective of the South Vietnamese must be chronicled and preserved, to balance and inform the dominant American and North Vietnamese narratives of the conflict.

  General Lam Quang Thi is one of the few members of the South Vietnamese community who has been able to break into the historical mainstream. His The Twenty-Five Year Century provided a unique look into the motivations behind the career of an officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), an institution that played a major, if almost forgotten, role in very nearly every battle in the Vietnam War. Writing the ARVN into the history of the war is critically important not only to understand how that institution eventually failed but also as a needed corrective to the existing tactical history of the conflict. From Operation Junction City, to the Tet Offensive and Operation Lam Son 719, units of the ARVN were there fighting alongside their American allies, sometimes playing distinctly subsidiary roles but on other occasions taking the lead.

  As the American phase of the Vietnam War neared its end, the U.S./ARVN alliance faced one of its sternest tests of battle against the great North Vietnamese Easter Offensive of 1972. The fighting in many ways stood as a test of the entire American strategy in Vietnam, for in the wake of the increased pace of the American troop withdrawal, the ARVN stood on its own without U.S. combat forces, but with the aid of U.S. advisors and firepower, against an all-out attempt by the North Vietnamese to achieve military victory. For months, bitter fighting raged across the length and breadth of South Vietnam, from the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the north through the Central Highlands, but nowhere was the struggle more brutal than at the village of An Loc, which guarded the western approaches to Saigon.

  After a period of scholarly neglect, historians have now produced several major works that chronicle the events and elucidate the importance of the Easter Offensive. G. H. Turley’s The Easter Offensive, and my own Vietnam’s Forgotten Army, detail the history of the struggle along the DMZ. Dale Andrade’s America’s Last Vietnam Battle: Halting Hanoi’s Easter Offensive takes a broader look at the ebb and flow of the Easter Offensive and includes an authoritative account of the bitter seventy-day siege of An Loc. Most recently, in his The Battle of An Loc, noted historian and veteran of An Loc James Willbanks has provided a thorough and impeccably researched tactical account of the hellish street fighting that took place in and around the battle’s urban epicenter. All of these accounts are of great importance to understanding the latter phase of the American effort in Vietnam, and each in its own way strives to include the story of the ARVN role in the planning and prosecution of the Easter Offensive.

  General Lam Quang Thi’s Hell in An Loc, though, provides historians with something different, something more than another well-researched account of the battle. Instead, he analyzes the fighting from a fresh perspective—the perspective of the all too often voiceless South Vietnamese fighting man. Lam Quang Thi is passionate in his desire to chronicle the valor and sacrifice of the men of the ARVN in defense of their nation in what he sees as perhaps the most critical battle of the Vietnam War. Utilizing new source material, including extensive interviews with many of the South Vietnamese principals in the battle, Hell in An Loc provides an intimate glimpse into the inner workings of a military amid its moment of great crisis. The result is a work that not only has value as a historical monograph but also carries the considerable weight of a primary source. In Hell in An Loc, Lam Quang Thi provides readers with important new information, viewing the struggle from an unabashedly South Vietnamese point of view. As a result, Thi’s revisionist conclusions grate against the dominant narrative of the Vietnam War. However, after years of neglect it is fitting that a South Vietnamese interpretation of events breaks into the historical mainstream to help inform future debate on a war of endless complexity.

  “Dis moi que tu reviens d’Austerlitz, je te dirai que tu es un brave.”

  (Tell me you return from Austerlitz, I will tell you you are a brave man.)

  —Napoleon

  Map 1: Military Regions

  Introduction

  While searching for a title for this book, I was inspired by Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place, in which the late Vietnam historian described in dramatic detail the fifty-five-day horrors at the French camp retranché of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Little did the author know that eighteen years after the French’s humiliating defeat at that small place near the Laotian border, a small plantation town near the Cambodian border was to bear the brunt of a longer and more brutal onslaught and prevail.

  The title to this book is also borrowed in part from the article “The Battle That Saved Saigon” by Philip C. Clarke (Reader’s Digest, March 1973). Its introduction reads:

  Three days before Easter last spring, the North Vietnamese struck South Vietnam with a fury unknown to the Vietnam war since the Tet offensive four years earlier. They poured south across the DMZ, smashed into the central highland from Laos, crossed the border from Cambodia and, with an army of 36,000 men and 100 Russian-made tanks, raced toward Saigon, boasting that they’d be in the city by May 19, Ho Chi Minh’s birthday. From one end of the country to the other, bases and villages fell before the savagery of their onslaught. By April 5, all that blocked them from Saigon was a ragtag band of 6,800 South Vietnamese regulars and militiamen and a handful of American advisors holed up in Anloc, a once-prosperous rubber-plantation town of 15,000 astride Highway 13, which led to the capital, 60 miles to the south. Here is the story of the communists’ thunderous assault on Anloc—and of the resistance that was to change the course o
f the war and made peace a possibility.1

  The South Vietnamese army had indeed won a decisive victory against overwhelming odds. According to Maj. Gen. James F. Hollingsworth, Senior Advisor to ARVN III Corps, “The real credit goes to the little ARVN soldier. He is just tremendous, just magnificent. He stood in there, took all that fire and gave it back.”2

  Special credit should also be given to the American advisors who fought valiantly alongside their counterparts and, more importantly, provided effective air support and coordinated resupply and medevac operations for the beleaguered garrison. Their mere presence constituted a tremendous boost to the morale of ARVN troops because it embodied the U.S. commitment to support South Vietnam in these darkest hours of its history. Recently, a retired U.S. Army officer requested my autograph for my book The Twenty-Five Year Century.3 He also said he was an advisor to an ARVN unit defending An Loc. I told that officer that, if I could borrow from Napoleon’s famous address to his victorious army at Austerlitz, I would tell him he is a brave man.

  An Loc, indeed, had become the symbol of the determination of the South Vietnamese Army and its people to stand at all costs in face of the enemy. A depleted army, outnumbered and outgunned, stood its ground and fought to the end and succeeded, against all expectations, in beating back furious assaults from three NVA divisions, supported by artillery and armored regiments, during three months of savage fighting.

  General Paul Vanuxem, a French veteran of the Indochina War, called An Loc “the Verdun of Viet Nam.” Sir Robert Thompson, special advisor to President Nixon, considered An Loc the greatest military victory of the Free World against Communism in the post-World War II era. Yet, this victory was largely unreported in the U.S. media, which had effectively lost interest in the war after the disengagement of U.S. forces following the Vietnamization of the conflict. With the exception of Trial by Fire—The 1972 Easter Offensive—America’s Last Vietnam Battle (Hippocrene Books, 1995) by Dale Andradé and The Battle of An Loc (Indiana University Press, 2005) by James H. Willbanks, very little in the U.S. literature on the Vietnam conflict has been written about this epic battle. Further, while the above two books provided a wealth of details about the use of U.S. airpower and the role of the U.S. advisors, they didn’t provide equal coverage to the activities and performance of ARVN units participating in the siege. This behavior may be a reflection of what an American reporter called “national narcissism,” the idea that history is just about us, not the other guys.