We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (10 page)

Colonel Brown arrived and I walked him through the plan. He agreed with everything, including the selection of X-Ray as the assault landing zone. He chatted with some of the officers and troopers for a few minutes. Then, just before he left, he did something out of the ordinary. Says Matt Dillon: "Colonel Brown called Moore and me aside. He told us: ' want you two to be especially careful on this operation.' He looked concerned." As we walked Brown to his helicopter he repeated his instructions: "Stay tight" and

"Don't let your companies get separated."

At 9:15 a.m. the two artillery batteries reported they were going into position and would soon be ready to fire. I set 10:30 a.m. as touchdown time. Commanders returned to their companies, the staff to the command post. The Huey air crews were being briefed by their pilots.

Then we got word that because of air movement delays the artillery was not yet in position in LZ Falcon and could not begin the prep fires on the Ia Drang targets before 10:17 a.m. H hour slid back accordingly, and the word was passed down the line. Dillon lifted off in the battalion command helicopter with the fire-support and helicopter-coordination group. Bruce Crandall and I stood beside his chopper, discussing final details. The precise flying time from liftoff at Plei Me to touchdown at X-Ray came up. Crandall's copilot, Captain Jon Mills, a twenty-five-year-old native of the Panama Canal Zone, worked for a couple of minutes over his maps, flight table, and calculator, looked up and said: "Thirteen minutes fifteen seconds." I bet him a beer he couldn't hit it dead on the nose. He took me up on that bet-- he kept an honest log--and collected his beer three nights later at Camp Holloway, near Pleiku. We loaded aboard and Crandall and Mills preflighted the Huey. Then Crandall fired up both his engine and a big fat cigar. We were enveloped in a choking cloud of red dust as all sixteen Hueys strained toward liftoff. Crandall, in the left seat, looked back. I gave him a thumbs-up and pointed westward. He pulled pitch and lifted off, and we were bound for Landing Zone X-Ray.

We flew over a broad, slightly rolling plain dotted with trees thirty to fifty feet tall, interspersed with a few old Montagnard farm clearings, small winding streams, and dry streambeds. We saw no villages and no people. It was Sunday morning but I didn't realize that: over here we paid attention to the date, not the day. In the field in Vietnam all days were the same: hot and wet, or hot and dry, but always dangerous.

Back in Columbus, Georgia, it was Saturday night. My wife had put our five kids to bed and was watching the nightly news on television.

Secretary of Defense Robert Mcnamara announced plans to abolish 751 Army Reserve units, including six reserve divisions. The Yarmouth Castle cruise ship burned and sank at sea, and ninety-one passengers were missing. The New York Times headlined a James Reston think piece washington: war on the installment plan. Joe Namath, who had been paid an unthinkable $400,000 bonus for signing with the New York Jets, was having a great first season in pro football.

The troop doors on the Huey helicopters were open. We flew at two thousand feet to reduce the chances of being hit by enemy small-arms fire as we traversed 14.3 miles of hostile country. We flew in four groups of four helicopters each, with each group in a heavy-left formation, and Crandalps four helicopter gunships guarding our flanks, two on each side slightly forward of us. Captain John Herren, whose Bravo Company troops filled the helicopters, recalls: "It was a misty, cool morning with some low-hanging fog when we lifted off, but shortly after takeoff we broke into the clear and you could see the 105mm artillery pounding the areas around the LZ as we headed in. Vietnam, even in war, was scenic, with the green jungle, heavy forested mountains, and wild-looking rivers crisscrossing the terrain."

About four miles from X-Ray, Bruce Crandall gave the signal and his pilots dropped down to treetop level to fly nap-of-the-earth on the final approach. Birds scattered as we roared along at 110 miles per hour just above their perches. High overhead in the command chopper, Matt Dillon was running the fire support preparations: "The hairiest part of any operation was always the air assault. We had to time the flight and the artillery so close. When the choppers were one minute out the last artillery rounds had to be on the way or you get Hueys landing with the shells. We always sweated because if you shut down the artillery too soon the enemy could be up and waiting when the choppers came in. This one was precisely on time."

We were two minutes out now and could see smoke and dust flying around the landing zone. Minimum fire had been directed on the clearing; if there were enemy they wouldn't be there, but in concealed positions around the clearing's edge. Now the helicopters of the aerial rocket artillery slammed that perimeter with rockets, grenades, and machinegun fire, using twenty-four of the forty-eight 2.75-inch rockets each carried. They saved the other half in case we needed help after we got on the ground. As the ARA ships banked steeply away to take up an orbit nearby, the four escorting gunships left us and dashed ahead to take over the firing that would keep any enemy heads down on our final approach.

Major Bruce Crandall recalls: "We went low-level and arrived right on schedule at the release point into the landing zone. The landing zone was not as clear of obstacles as we would have liked but we got our flight in without any real problems. The only movement we spotted in the landing zone was something that looked like a dog scampering into some underbrush on the far side. It was probably an enemy soldier." Now the door gunners on the lift ships were firing into the tree line as we dropped into the clearing. I unhooked my seat belt, switched the selector switch on my M-16 to full automatic--rock '' roll--and fired bursts into the brush to the left, toward the mountain, as Crandall came in hot and flared over the dry five-foot-tall elephant grass. As the chopper skids touched the ground I yelled, "Let's go!" and jumped out, running for the trees on the western edge of the clearing, firing my rifle.

It was 10:48 a.m. Sergeant Major Plumley, Captain Metsker, Bob Ouellette, and Mr. Nik, the translator, were right behind me. Herren and his men came out of their Hueys in like fashion. In less than ten seconds Crandall's first lift of eight ships had roared back into the air, banked north, and hightailed it back east. The second wave of eight helicopters was now touching down to disgorge its troops.

I ran across twenty-five yards of open ground, then across a waist-deep, ten-foot-wide dry creekbed, and continued running some seventy-five yards into the scrub brush, leading the command group. We stopped to slap fresh magazines in our rifles. So far we had been unopposed. We were in a lightly wooded area, with scraggly trees twenty to fifty feet tall and dry, brown elephant grass between. The area was dotted with large mounds of red dirt, most with brush and grass growing out of the tops. The size of these old termite hills ranged from that of a small automobile to that of a large pickup, and they offered excellent cover and concealment. The valley was a desolate place, with no villages and no civilians, ten miles east of where the Ho Chi Minh Trail turned left out of Cambodia into South Vietnam.

The heavily forested eastern slopes of the Chu Pong rose steep and dark more than a thousand feet above the clearing. The massif's lower slopes were covered with thick green foliage, elephant grass, and tangles of brush. Gullies and long fingers of ground led from the bottom of the mountain and Hot; fast; flared: The pilot lifts the helicopter's nose and drops its tail to lose speed suddenly before landing.

blended into the woods and the dry creekbed where we stood. Plenty of places for people to hide. The creekbed just inside the western edge of our clearing was an excellent route of approach for enemy troops coming from the direction of the mountain or the valley, and for us going the other way. That creekbed was a critical feature.

Heading back toward the clearing, we ran into some of Bravo Company's 1st Platoon troopers, led by Sergeant Larry Gilreath, moving out into the brush. Gilreath yelled: "Moore's fire team has already cleared this area." Plumley grinned. He knew that the troops liked to see the Old Man out with them on the ground, sharing the risks. Gilreath and his men headed deeper into the brush to the west. Plumley and I recrossed the dry creekbed and moved around the clearing, checking on the terrain and on the patrols Herren's troopers were conducting. No enemy contact so far, and I was glad of that. We didn't want a fight before we got the rest of the battalion on the ground.

The clearing was about a hundred yards long, east to west, and kind of funnel-shaped, with the ninety-yard-wide mouth of the funnel on the western edge near that dry creek. The bottom of the funnel was on the forty-five-yard span of the clearing's eastern edge. In the center of the clearing was a copse of scraggly trees, about half the size of a tennis court. All told, the space at X-Ray amounted to no more clear ground than a football field.

Now I stopped and looked up at the steep slopes of the mountain. I had a strong sense that we were under direct enemy observation. That, and the fact that everything had gone so well so far, made me nervous. Nothing was wrong, except that nothing was wrong. I continued reconnoitering.

There were no streambeds on the north, east, or south. The southern edge of the clearing was closest to the mountain and to those draws and fingers reaching out from the high ground. The terrain to the north and east was relatively flat. My attention continued to be drawn back to the south and west.

I did two things now. I ordered Herren's 1st Platoon to intensify its search to the west of the creek, and checked to make sure that the rest of Bravo Company was gathered in the clump of trees near the creekbed and ready for action. Herren had most of his troops on the ground; the rest were on the way in the second lift.

This clearing was the only decent helicopter landing zone between the slopes of Chu Pong and the Ia Drang and for two miles east or west. Our assault landing had, so far as we could tell, achieved total surprise.

The enemy weren't around the clearing waiting for us. But we had been seen arriving and the North Vietnamese were already moving in our direction.

The People's Army commander on the battlefield, then Senior Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An, says, "When you dropped troops into X-Ray, I was on Chu Pong mountain. We had a very strong position and a strong, mobile command group. We were ready, had prepared for you and expected you to come. The only question was when. The trees and brush limited our view of the helicopters landing but we had an observation post on top of the mountain and they reported to us when you dropped troops and when you moved them."

Sergeant Larry Gilreath's memory of this morning is clear and sharp: "The 1st Platoon was told to move straight forward about a hundred and fifty yards from where we landed. And from there each squad would send two or three men out further in all directions. Sergeant John W. Mingo in the 1 st Squad went forward with a couple of men and hadn't been out very long when he found ' boy' wandering around in the area. When Mingo brought him in, my exact words were: ', hell! That ain't no boy.' "

Mingo and his recon squad had spotted the soldier sitting on the ground; surprised, he got up and ran. After a short zigzag chase through the brush, the sergeant tackled him and took him prisoner. Herren passed the word to me. I was pleased that the 1 st Platoon had taken him alive, and not surprised when I learned that it was Mingo who caught him. Mingo was a Ranger Company veteran of the Korean War and knew the value of a live prisoner who was able to talk.

It was 11:20 a. m.; just then, Crandall's sixteen helicopters returned, bringing in the rest of Bravo Company and the 3rd Platoon of Alpha Company plus Captain Tony Nadal's Alpha Company command group. They ran into the scrub brush on the northern edge of the clearing near the creekbed. Things were quiet, nothing happening yet, so most of the troopers broke out their C-rations and ate a quick lunch. I was on my way out to question the enemy prisoner and had not yet seen Captain Nadal to give him any instructions. We had been in X-Ray only thirty-two minutes and the countdown was on.

John Herren left the rest of Bravo Company in the copse with his executive officer, Lieutenant Ken Duncan, and joined me and my party as we rushed across the creek into the brush where Gilreath's men were holding the prisoner. He wasn't much, but he was this battalion's first prisoner in Vietnam: about five feet seven inches tall, maybe twenty years old, scrawny, wild-eyed and trembling with fear. He was unarmed and barefooted; he wore a dirty khaki shirt, partly pulled out of his khaki trousers. There was a serial number on one of the shirt epaulettes. He carried a canteen but it was empty. He had no papers, no food, and no ammunition.

When we took a prisoner on the battlefield in Korea, we never got bogged down in long interrogations. No time for that. All I wanted to know was "How many of you are there?" and "Where are they?" A look of apprehension spread over Mr. Nik's face as he shakily translated the prisoner's words: "He says there are three battalions on the mountain who want very much to kill Americans but have not been able to find any." What the prisoner said fit in neatly with what our intelligence people had told us and with that big red star I had seen on the division headquarters map. I still don't know what that soldier was doing out there in the brush without food, water, or a weapon, but he was a godsend.

Three battalions of enemy added up to more than 1,600 men against the 160-plus Americans currently on the ground here. I turned to John Herren and ordered him to immediately intensify the patrols in the area where we had found the prisoner. I told Herren that as soon as enough of Tony Nadal's Alpha Company troops were on the ground to secure the landing zone, Bravo Company would be cut loose to search the lower slopes of the mountain, with special emphasis on the finger and draw to the northwest.

If those enemy battalions were on the way, we needed to engage them as far off the landing zone as possible.