We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (3 page)

I had something in my bag of tricks that Custer did not: the awesome firepower of initially two, and later four, full batteries of 105mm howitzers located in two clearings less than five miles away; clusters of rocket-firing helicopter gunships swarming overhead; and close-air support from Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps fighter-bombers. The noise of battle soon was deafening and the thick smoke rising 5,000 feet into the sky marked clearly where we were and what was happening here.

Throughout an afternoon of pitched fighting—where acts of incredible heroism were common—the helicopters continued to come, bringing in the rest of my battalion and a reinforcing company, B Company of our sister battalion, the 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry. The brave aviators set their Hueys down in that clearing under heavy fire and off-loaded fresh troops and more ammunition and water, and began ferrying out the growing number of our wounded. The dead, wrapped in their own green rubber ponchos, would have to wait. Their silent ranks, lined up near the command post, grew by the hour.

Just before dark I got a radio call from my operations officer, Capt. Greg “Matt” Dillon, who had spent the afternoon orbiting overhead in my command helicopter relaying our radio communications back to Brigade Headquarters in the Catecka Tea Plantation. Dillon told me when it was full dark he would be coming in with two helicopters loaded with ammunition and water and would bring with him the artillery and helicopter liaison officers.

He relayed an unusual request. “…Galloway wants to come in with us. Okay?” I had met Joe Galloway, a twenty-three-year-old war correspondent for United Press International, a few days before when we ran a long sweep operation searching for the enemy east of Plei Me Camp. He stayed with my companies day and night, not grabbing a helicopter back to the rear for hot chow and a shower. I liked that.

I told Dillon: If he’s crazy enough to want to come in here, and you’ve got room, bring him. When they landed in the darkness I welcomed Joe to X-Ray and told him what we were up against. I noted that he carried a pistol on his belt and an M16 rifle on his shoulder, and looked like he could take care of himself in a fight. He was an unexpected reinforcement.

The fighting here raged on for two more days, until the afternoon of November 16, when the enemy suddenly evaporated and began their withdrawal toward sanctuary in Cambodia. Their commander left behind hundreds upon hundreds of his dead in a huge semicircle around us. We were ordered back to Camp Holloway outside Pleiku to rest and refit, and the helicopters began lifting out my men.

Joe walked over to say farewell to me. We stood and looked at each other and suddenly there were tears cutting through the red dirt on our faces. I choked out these words: “Go tell America what these brave men did here; tell them how their sons died.” He did so. His stories and photographs of the battle at LZ X-Ray filled the front pages of newspapers around the world in coming days.

Around three-fifteen p.m. I stepped aboard a Huey piloted by Maj. Bruce Crandall, who commanded B Company 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion. I had flown in on Crandall’s Huey and now I would fly out on it—the last man of my battalion to leave this bloody ground.

Behind us in the crowded, stinking clearing called X-Ray remained two other 1st Cavalry Division battalions that had marched into X-Ray earlier in the fight to strengthen our defenses: Lt. Col. Bob Tully’s 2nd Battalion 5th Cavalry and Lt. Col. Bob McDade’s 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry.

That night Tully and McDade were alerted to march out of X-Ray the next morning, November 17, because headquarters had arranged for B-52 bombers from Guam to saturate the Chu Pong Massif with their huge payloads of 500-pound bombs. The target was too close to have any American troops within a mile and a half and they had to leave.

McDade was told to take his battalion to the clearing called Albany, two miles north, while Tully had orders to go to a landing zone called Columbus, two miles northeast, where two of the four artillery batteries that supported us day and night during our fight were located.

We might have thought the fighting was over, the enemy defeated and gone. But Lt. Col. Nguyen Huu An, the North Vietnamese commander on the ground, thought otherwise. He had a fresh reserve battalion, the 8th Battalion 66th Regiment, sitting in the jungle alongside the route to LZ Albany. They had missed out on the fight at X-Ray and were eager to get their turn at killing Americans.

Just after one p.m. the exhausted 2nd Battalion troopers were in a 600-yard-long narrow column that snaked through the high elephant grass and much denser forest near the Albany clearing. McDade had called a halt when his reconnaissance platoon captured two North Vietnamese scouts and saw a third escape into the jungle. He and his command group went forward to interrogate the prisoners, and McDade ordered forward the commanders of his other companies to receive instructions on how they would deploy as they marched into the clearing.

McDade’s men dropped where they stood. They had been without sleep for four days and nights and the heat had taken a further toll. Men sat back on their packs, eating C rations, smoking, some falling into exhausted sleep. Alongside them, unseen in the thick brush and grass, the 8th Battalion and elements of the headquarters of the 33rd North Vietnamese Regiment deployed in a hasty L-shaped ambush.

The enemy announced their presence with a barrage of mortar shells and charged into the dozing American column with rifles blazing. Machine gunners and snipers hidden in the trees and atop the ever-present termite mounds opened up. It was every man for himself in a running gun battle that raged throughout the afternoon and, sporadically, throughout the night of November 17 and early morning of November 18.

At dawn the grim results became apparent: the shattered bodies of American and North Vietnamese soldiers were intermingled along the trail. Some bodies were in the trees, where artillery had blown them. Patches of blackened grass hid the bodies of soldiers of both sides who had been charred by napalm strikes.

The Americans had lost 151 men; another 130 were wounded. Four men were missing in action after the final tally, and their bodies were not recovered until April 1966, when I led the 3rd Brigade back into X-Ray and Albany.

One of the company commanders later wrote of that morning in LZ Albany: “It was a hell of a grim sight to see North Vietnamese and American bodies all over, intermingled. It was a hell of a fight; some North Vietnamese were bayoneted. It took the better part of 18 and 19 November to recover the dead and wounded.”

Years later when Joe and I talked with the North Vietnamese commander, Lieutenant Colonel An, he revealed a keen memory of that terrible afternoon and night: “My commanders and soldiers reported there was very vicious fighting. I tell you frankly, your soldiers fought valiantly. They had no choice. It was hand-to-hand fighting. Afterward, when we policed the battlefield, when we picked up our wounded, the bodies of your men and our men were neck to neck, lying alongside each other. It was most fierce.”

There was one last disastrous attempt to further bloody the Americans: Lieutenant Colonel An ordered another of his units to attack the twelve howitzers in Landing Zone Columbus, where Tully’s battalion was waiting. The artillery gunners cranked down their cannon barrels and poured a storm of beehive rounds (shells filled with small razorlike pieces of metal) into the attackers. The enemy was beaten off with heavy losses.

That marked the end of what the Army would dub the Pleiku Campaign. By November 27 the last American units had returned to their base at An Khe on Route 19, some seventy-five miles away from the now empty battlefields of the Ia Drang.

In December I was promoted to colonel and assigned to command the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division. In the next eight months we fought the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong across the Central Highlands, from the South China Sea to the borders of Cambodia and Laos.

During that time I kept in close contact with Joe, alerting him when we were planning a new operation. Although Joe had seen war at its worst, he never shied away from one of my invitations to a new operation, a new battle: He marched with one or another of my battalions—usually his old friends in the 1st Battalion 7th Cavalry, especially those of Tony Nadal’s Alpha Company—on most of my operations. Joe told me later that after the Ia Drang he believed he was bulletproof—after all, he came out of the battle without a scratch when so many all around him were killed or wounded. Only when he realized he was pushing his luck, taking foolish chances, did a healthy fear reassert itself.

Joe and I talked even then about the possibility that one day we would write a book about the Ia Drang. But we each had our careers, and as I moved up the ranks and Joe remained overseas doing three more tours in Vietnam and covering half a dozen other wars and revolutions for UPI, that plan remained on the back burner for both of us.

Late in 1976 Joe came through Washington, D.C., for briefings on his way to be the UPI bureau chief in Moscow in the Soviet Union. By now I was a three-star general and the deputy chief of staff for personnel (DCSPER) of the Army. We had dinner at my quarters at Fort Myer. After dinner that evening in November 1976, Joe and I shook hands and agreed that we would begin the research on the book as soon as I finished my Army career and he returned home after many years of foreign assignments.

Early one morning in January 1982, after Joe had finally come home to the job of UPI bureau chief in Los Angeles after sixteen years overseas, and I had retired from the Army and was living in Crested Butte, Colorado, Joe called and asked if I was ready to begin serious work on the book. He told me that the Vietnam War scenes in a movie (
American Graffiti II
) had triggered a frightening emotional response in him and he thought the best way to deal with the nightmares was to fulfill our obligation to tell the Ia Drang story. He said he had been sitting in his den in LA, arguably the safest place he had lived in many years, when that film caught his eye. Next thing he knew he was watching a mass air assault of 1st Cavalry Division troops in Vietnam, dozens of Huey helicopters disgorging Cavalry troopers, and enemy mortar shells exploding among them. “I was shaking like a leaf and crying like a baby,” he told me. “I had no idea where that came from but sat up all night thinking about it. I knew if I tried to run from it it would catch me and eat me alive. So I decided to face it the only way I knew how: by fulfilling my promise.”

Joe flew to Gunnison Airport and I drove him to my house on Mount Crested Butte on a cold, snowy winter day. The research began in earnest then and there. We wrote a questionnaire to send out to the dozen or so Ia Drang veterans we had addresses for, made some phone calls, and began the work. We had no idea that our chosen task would continue for nearly ten years.

Our big breakthrough came in August 1990. Joe was working for
U.S. News & World Report
magazine in their Washington, D.C., headquarters. He had proposed to his editor, John Walcott, that he return to Vietnam, with me in tow, to do research for a cover article on the forthcoming twenty-fifth anniversary of the now-forgotten Ia Drang battles.

During that trip, which ended on September 5, 1990, we met and interviewed Senior Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap and the historian of the Vietnamese People’s Army, Maj. Gen. Hoang Phuong. We were also received by Prime Minister Do Muoi, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, and Vice Chairman of the State Planning Committee Le Xuan Trinh. We had moved heaven and earth in a failed attempt to get an interview with Senior Gen. Chu Huy Man, who had commanded the division in the Central Highlands in 1965. I sent a note and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch to General Man, asking to see him. He did not respond, but kept the whiskey. It is clear now that the Vietnamese were puzzled that a retired American general wanted to pursue the story of a battle he had fought and to meet the commanders who had fought against him. They were suspicious, and I believe the Defense Ministry in Hanoi advised General Man and General An to avoid us. During our time in Hanoi on that first trip we were housed in the Defense Ministry guesthouse just fifty yards from General Man’s office. We were frustrated by the government’s refusal to give us what we sought—interviews with my opposite numbers—while giving us access to everyone else.

We returned home and Joe wrote the story, which appeared as the cover article in the October 29, 1990, issue of
U.S. News & World Report
. America was poised to enter a new war, in the Persian Gulf, but had not yet dealt with how it felt about the last war—Vietnam. Joe’s article touched a nerve and brought bags of mail to the magazine. Later it earned Joe and
U.S. News & World Report
its first National Magazine Award, the magazine world’s equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize, in fifty years.

In the spring of 1991, after covering the Gulf War for the magazine, Joe was in New York for the luncheon where the National Magazine Awards were presented. He ran into Harry Evans, a former consulting editor of
U.S. News & World Report
and newly named president of Random House. Evans told Galloway: “I want that book.” Joe responded: “What book?” Evans shot back: “The book you are going to write on the Ia Drang battles. I don’t even need an outline. Your article is outline enough.”

Fourteen months later, on November 11, 1992, Veterans Day, our book
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
was published to critical acclaim, and it spent eighteen weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list.

But the adventure wasn’t over. It was only beginning. We returned to Vietnam half a dozen times in the decade that followed. We fulfilled our desire to walk the old battlefields and put some of our ghosts to rest. Not for nothing had the Vietnamese, after the battles, referred to the Ia Drang Valley as the Forest of the Screaming Souls.

We had to go there to mute their cries, even if we were the only ones who could still hear them after so many years. We had to go there because only we knew how and where they had fallen and how they died—filthy, sweaty, thirsty, caked in the red dirt of a foreign land—calling out to God, their mothers, their buddies.