We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam

Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (USA Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway

This book is dedicated
to the memory of two who loved us best:

Julia Compton Moore
1929–2004

Theresa Null Galloway
1948–1996

Contents

Foreword by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf

Preface

Chapter 1 Back to Our Battlefields

Chapter 2 Conversations with the Enemy

Chapter 3 You Killed My Battalion!

Chapter 4 Traveling in Time

Chapter 5 The Backbone of the Army

Chapter 6 Back to the Ia Drang!

Chapter 7 A Night Alone on the Battlefield

Chapter 8 Back to the Hell That Was Albany

Chapter 9 Walking the Ground at Dien Bien Phu

Chapter 10 The Never-Ending Story

Chapter 11 Lessons on Leadership

Photographic Insert

Chapter 12 On War

Epilogue

Appendix: Two Heroes for America

Acknowledgments

An Appeal

Searchable Terms

Photography Credits

About the Authors

Other Books by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

F
or each generation and each war there is a defining book that tells the story and recaptures the experience of those who fought that war with such accuracy and truth that old veterans read it through tears and cherish it as a prized possession. My old, good friends Hal Moore and Joe Galloway gave us such a gift with their magnificent Vietnam history,
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young.

Never the sort to rest on their laurels, that unlikely duo—a general and a reporter who stood and fought side by side in a terrible battle and became best friends—has now given us another gift with this story of their journey back to the remote Ia Drang battlefields, in company with the North Vietnamese Army commanders who fought against them.

Together these old enemies who were becoming new friends walked the ground soaked with the blood of hundreds of Americans and thousands of North Vietnamese, each searching out places and nightmares etched in their hearts and minds.

Our professional Army is a small, tight-knit community and Hal Moore and Joe Galloway are quiet heroes within that community. Just how small is that world? Well, Hal Moore as a young major in the early 1950s taught infantry tactics to Cadet Norm Schwarzkopf at West Point. He persuaded me to select the Infantry as my branch of service, even as my father, a major general, urged me to choose the high-tech Ordnance Corps, telling me I would never make general as a mud-foot Infantryman.

In the summer of 1965 I was a newly promoted major and adviser to a South Vietnamese airborne brigade in the Central Highlands, marching my battered troops out of the Duc Co area across thirty-five miles of dangerous country. Along came a young reporter for United Press International named Galloway, who marched with us. He turned up again, a quarter century later, at my headquarters in Saudi Arabia on the eve of the Persian Gulf War. We spent a couple of days together as I visited American and allied forces on the eve of the war, and then I sent him out to ride with the 24th Infantry Division tanks on their 250-mile end run around the Iraqi divisions in Kuwait. In my estimation Galloway is the finest combat correspondent of our generation—a soldiers’ reporter and a soldiers’ friend.

We Are Soldiers Still
is the ideal follow-up to Moore and Galloway’s
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
. Through their eyes, and half a dozen journeys back to Vietnam since the war, we see the evolution of that country and people as they find peace after a thousand years of war. And we see a surprising concern and tenderness for each other among men who once had done their best to kill each other. If those men, veterans of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War, can become friends and pray together for all who died on that ground on both sides, then the war really is over and we can all be at peace.

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, USA Ret.

PREFACE

I
t has been more than forty years since those nightmarish days of November 1965, when an understrength 450-man battalion of the 7th U.S. Cavalry launched an audacious helicopter air assault into the heart of enemy territory in the Ia Drang Valley.

Before it was over three more battalions would join us in a close-quarters, no-holds-barred fight to the death in two small clearings in the jungles of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.

Two-hundred thirty-four young American soldiers perished in and around Landing Zones (LZ) X-Ray and Albany in the first major battle between the newly arrived Americans and North Vietnamese regulars sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in division strength. The North Vietnamese lost an estimated two thousand killed in the month of November in those battles and several others that preceded them.

It was the first such collision between two fine armies, and it would stand as the bloodiest of the entire ten-year war when the total American death toll of 305 killed in action that month in that place is considered.

Those of us who survived, miraculously, amidst so much death and dying all around never forgot those days and nights, even though some had served in World War II and Korea and some went on to serve two or three more tours in that long, bitter war and other wars that followed.

Some of us have lived long enough to see our sons and now our daughters—even our grandchildren—wear the uniform and carry the battle to other enemies in places like Panama, the Persian Gulf, Haiti, Afghanistan, and, yes, Iraq. This reminds us eerily of the conflict of our own youth in Vietnam.

With the publication in 1992 of
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
, the stories of those battles, which had nearly vanished from the memory of most Americans, were recaptured. The release in 2002 of the movie
We Were Soldiers
brought yet more recognition of the courage and selfless sacrifice of so many Ia Drang soldiers on both sides.

All along our war and our battles remained fresh in our memories and our nightmares. We had a lot of unfinished business that could only be conducted on those long-ago battlefields. We had old ghosts, old demons that tugged at hearts and minds and sent some of our comrades in search of a name for what ailed us, and help dealing with that ailment.

Years after our battles and our return home the Veterans Administration and its medical specialists put a name to a condition many Vietnam veterans experienced, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and began, belatedly, offering group therapy to help veterans deal with the condition.

Our old commander, then Lt. Col. Hal Moore, had vowed years before that one day we would go back to the Ia Drang, to those blood-soaked clearings in the Vietnamese jungles, and walk that ground and do our duty of confronting our demons and freeing the souls of all who had perished there. The general declared that he intended to spend the night there and he wouldn’t listen to reason or the refusals of the victorious Vietnamese Communists who now controlled all of Vietnam, north and south.

So much has come to pass in all our lives in these four decades. Some who survived the worst that hand-to-hand combat threw at them have died, and we miss them terribly. Many would be surprised, thirty years later, to receive medals of valor for their actions in the Ia Drang. Two of our favorite people, helicopter pilots Maj. Bruce Crandall, a.k.a. Ancient Serpent Six, and Capt. Ed “Serpent 1 6” Freeman, waited even longer before they were decorated with our nation’s highest award for bravery above and beyond the call of duty—the Medal of Honor. Freeman’s came first, in 2001, then Crandall’s in 2007. They joined Col. Walter J. “Joe” Marm, USA ret., who also earned his Medal of Honor in the Ia Drang but received it in 1966.

Life, as they say, went on day by day for all of us. We took the good with the bad and kept moving ahead, each in his own way, always with an inner understanding that we had already seen both the best and worst that men can do to other men, and that nothing—not even the passage of four decades—can fully erase those images.

J
oe Galloway likes to say that every day he has lived since November 15, 1965, has been a bonus, a gift from God, and it is so for virtually all of us. Joe, who covered his last war in 2006 in the rocky deserts and narrow belts of green along the rivers of Iraq, finally put away his helmet and fatigues and retired to his home place in Refugio County, Texas. He had done four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam between the beginning in 1965 and the end in 1975. In between and afterward Joe also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War, the 1971 guerrilla uprising in Sri Lanka, Indonesia’s invasion of Portuguese Timor, Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf, 1990–1991, the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1995, and two tours in Iraq, in 2003 and 2005–2006.

Riding with the M1A1 Abrams tanks of the Army’s 24th Division in the 250-mile charge across the western Iraq desert in the Gulf War, Joe remembers offering up a prayer: “Dear God, don’t let there be another Ia Drang Valley waiting up ahead. I’ve already seen that and these young men and women don’t need that experience.”

During those years Joe watched and reported the changes occurring in America’s military—the shift from a draftee Army to an all-volunteer force, the shift from training to fight a long guerrilla war to an Army armed and equipped and trained to fight tank wars against conventional enemies similarly armed. Then, with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he saw that Army swiftly take down Saddam Hussein’s army and government in a three-week blitzkrieg but prove utterly unprepared and untrained to fight the insurgency that arose to bloody the Americans with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the middle of a burgeoning civil war that has dragged on for five long years now.

In his long journey as a witness to war Joe never again saw combat so vicious and hand-to-hand—never again saw wholesale slaughter so intense—as that he witnessed, photographed, and fought in so long ago in the Ia Drang Valley. An interviewer recently asked him if he had learned anything from going to war for so long. Joe responded: “Yes. I learned how to cry.” He added that he also learned that some events are so intense and immediate and life-changing that you cannot simply stand motionless; cannot remain a mere witness; cannot be a neutral observer. You will take a hand, lend a hand, stand up and get involved because you must.