Kyle Lindahl
Historical Event Research
ENG 102-Summer 2010
Instructor: Laura Darrow
I researched the Battle at the Hamlet Ap Bac, which is one of the many very significant battles that happened during the Vietnam war. In the following text I’m going to tell you a little bit about the battle itself so you have will be able to understand better. Also, I will go into detail how learning about this battle helped me understand Tim O’Brien’s Book The Things They Carried “How to tell a war story” very well.
On January 2nd 1963 the Battle at the Hamlet of Ap Bac began. It took place about forty miles from Saigon along the Hamlet of Ap Bac. Troops from the seventh Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam teamed up with American forces. Together they battled the well-established Viet Cong 261st and 514th battalions. (Long, 1).
The battle strategy was to drop off the AVRN a few miles north of Ap Bac by helicopter. While the AVRN is being dropped off two Civil Guard battalions are suppose to flank the Viet Cong from the south. It was rumored that the detonator was surrounded by one hundred twenty Viet Cong, but there was actually somewhere around three hundred sixty soldiers. Unfortunately, the weather conditions were not suitable for a helicopter landing, so they had to wait for the weather to clear up. (Battle at the Hamlet of Ap Bac).
The Army of the Republic of Vietnam and American forces killed eighteen Viet Cong and wounded thirty-nine. American forces suffered three deaths and eight more soldiers wounded. The ARVN’s casualties were much greater a devastating eighty deaths with another one hundred wounded. (Battle of Ap Bac).
Doing the research on the Battle of Ap Bac made me agree more with what Tim O’Brien was saying in his book The Things They Carried. I think his writing is saying that there is no way to tell a true war story because it is impossible. Impossible because you have to be there and experience it for yourself to fully understand. If you have then you know there is no upside to war. There are not any good aspects to it. O’Brien writes about it his book, “ A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at all the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.” (O’Brien, 68-69).
Even though I did the research and all that I still don’t know what happened at the Battle of Ap Bac. I don’t know what happened because I wasn’t there. I know the statistics and the battle plan, but I don’t know about the struggle each and every soldier went through. I won’t ever know the names of those who died or be able to hear their stories. So I agree completely with O’Brien that there is no true way to tell a war story. It is one of those things you have to experience to understand, but I don’t see why you would want to. War doesn’t sound very nice to me.



Works Cited
Battle at the hamlet of ap bac. (2009). Retrieved from http://www.vietnam-war.info/battles/hamlet_of_ap_bac2.php
Battle of ap bac . (2010, July 2). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ap_Bac
Jennifer Long, JL. (2009, June 11). Battle of ap Bac. Retrieved from http://timelines.com/1963/1/2/battle-of-ap-bac
O'Brien , Tim. The Things They Carried. 1st. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. 246. Print.

Link to more about Vietnam war: http://www.vietnam-war.info/facts/