Saturday, May 6, 1972
Dangerous Defeat In Central Highlands
PLEIKU, South Vietnam --By happenstance, this reporter came straight from the scene of Hanoi's heavy defeat in the north to the scene of the Saigon government's most dangerous defeat in the Central Highlands. The inglorious phase of the fighting here ended some days ago.Yet the story is still worth telling.Normally, to begin with, it is a stirring experience to drop in on the II Corps advisory headquarters of John Paul Vann, the brave and brilliant man who is also the most experienced American in this country. This time, however, it was a mite chilling. The signs were clear from the moment of arrival that all was far from well in II Corps.The central sign was the darkly looming problem of Col. Le Duc Dat. For Saigon political reasons, Col. Dat had been imposed upon a reluctant II Corps as the commander of the ARVN 22nd Division.A likable, intelligent officer, Col. Dat nonetheless had the fatal, once common conviction, already so sharply disproved by the fighting elsewhere, that North Vietnamese would always beat South Vietnamese. It was an acutely dangerous conviction, for forces amounting to three North Vietnamese divisions were already in movement, with Kontum City as their ultimate goal.On the road to Kontum lay Col. Dat's main base at Tan Canh, known hereabouts as "Tango Charlie." By the afternoon of April 22, "Tango Charlie" was already under heavy artillery fire. Yet a resigned fatalism was the chief response.Next morning, John Paul Vann therefore flew his little bubble helicopter up to "Tango Charlie" landing under fire as usual, with two purposes. One was to stiffen Col. Dat. The other -for Vann already saw bad trouble coming -was to pre-plan the helicopter evacuation of the 22nd Division's American advisers, if the need arose.The need duly arose simply because events at "Tango Charlie" then took exactly the opposite course of similar events, in the northern provinces. In the north, at the most critical time, the ARVN units had had almost no air support. They had killed the enemy's tanks with their own light antitank weapons. And they had repelled the North Vietnamese infantry with murderous obstinacy.On the night of April 23 and the next morning, "Tango Charlie" had all the air support Col. Dat could ask for. Air support killed about half of the enemy's tanks, but the rest came on relentlessly. The tanks were not killed on the ground either, so "Tango Charlie" fell to a simple tank assault, considerably before the North Vietnamese infantry even appeared upon the scene.John Vann promptly took personal charge of rescuing the U.S. advisers from the enemy's midst. He and other far younger pilots, Bob Richards and Dolph Todd, flew uncounted missions in the fragile bubble helicopters Vann thinks best for such tasks of skill and daring.Both helicopters were hard hit by enemy fire. In the end, Vann's own helicopter was destroyed in a ground accident and he was slightly injured. Before the enemy could reach them, he and his little party were lifted off by still another chopper. Yet, with all the skill and courage shown, only part of the American advisory group got out that first day.In such hard cases, however, one must pray for miracles but not rely upon them. And until you have agonizingly listened, hour after hour, to the cool radio chatter of brave men skillfully coping with this kind of hard case, you do not know the almost literal truth of the old phrase about having your heart in your mouth.Such, then, is the story of the fall of "Tango Charlie" which opens the road to Kontum City. For the Saigon government, it could half nullify all successes attained elsewhere. But one must wait and see about that."Dangerous Defeat in Central Highlands", by Los Angeles Times, published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes on Saturday, May 6, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 Pacific Stars and Stripes.