for snipers; by the end of the day, 14 South Vietnamese M113 crewmen had been killed due to their exposure. The two leading M113s were able to pull up beside the downed helicopters, but one driver was killed while driving with his head outside the hatch, and Ba was knocked unconscious inside his carrier. Scanlon, with the help of Bowers, ran forward to aid the wounded men and carry them back to the M113 formation. At that point, South Vietnamese M113 crews backed off while firing their .50 caliber machine guns aimlessly into the sky. When Ba recovered, his company launched a frontal assault on the VC's foxhole line. Just when the M113 crews closed in on their objective, a VC squad leader and his men jumped out of their foxholes and tossed grenades at the lead formation of the attack force. Cohesion and morale among the crews of the armored formation quickly deteriorated as South Vietnamese sergeants, who served as both commanders and machine gunners of the carriers, were killed and were replaced by less experienced, poorly trained men. In a last-ditch effort to overrun the VC's stronghold, an M113 equipped with a flamethrower was sent forward to within of the VC position to fire the western tree line. The flamethrower had a range of up to , but when the operator fired the device, the flame died after only . It was later discovered that the crew had mixed the incorrect amount of jelling agent with the gasoline. The final attack mounted by the M113 company failed. At around 14:30, defeated and with their morale sagging, the 4th Mechanized Rifle Squadron disengaged from the fight and withdrew. By that stage, Vann was frustrated by the Civil Guard soldiers of Task Force B because they appeared to be in no hurry to reach Ap Bac, as they searched one house at a time while marching up from the southwest flank of the battlefield. In his final effort to defeat the VC, Vann flew into Tan Hiep and asked Cao to deploy an airborne battalion on the east side of Ap Bac, the most logical retreat route for the Viet Cong. Vann hoped to trap the Viet Cong inside the hamlets by blocking their retreat routes on all sides and annihilating them using an elite battalion of South Vietnamese paratroopers. To Vann's disappointment, Cao strongly opposed the idea and decided