We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (3 page)

Three regular army regiments would be brought up to strength, trained and equipped, and sent south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia to launch a stunning autumn offensive that would begin in the remote Central Highlands and perhaps end in Saigon.

Hanoi's planners envisioned a classic campaign to crush the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), starting in October 1965, after the monsoon rains ended in the mountains and plateaus of Pleiku province. They would lay siege to the American Special Forces camp at Plei Me with its twelve American advisers and four hundred-plus Montagnard mercenaries.

That attack, in turn, would draw an ARVN relief column of troops and tanks out of Pleiku and down Route 14, thence southwest on the one-lane dirt track called Provincial Route 5--where a regiment of People's Army troops would be waiting in a carefully prepared ambush. Once the ARVN relief forces were destroyed and Plei Me camp crushed, the victorious North Vietnamese army regiments would then take Pleiku city and the way would be clear to advance along Route 19 toward Qui Nhon and the South China Sea. Whoever controls Route 19 controls the Central Highlands, and whoever controls the Highlands controls Vietnam. By early 1966, the North Vietnamese commanders were certain, South Vietnam would be cut in two and trembling on the verge of surrender.

The North Vietnamese preparations were well under way by the fall of 1964, while Lyndon B. Johnson campaigned across America promising that "American boys will not be sent to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." That fall the llth Air Assault Test Division conducted a crucial two-month test in the Carolinas. The theory of helicopter warfare was proved to the satisfaction of the U.S. Army in the largest field exercises since World War II. Now the Pentagon began the process of incorporating the Air Assault Division into the regular ranks of the Army.

As the new airmobile division moved toward becoming a reality, the situation in the theater of its most likely employment--what Lyndon Johnson called "that damned little pissant country," Vietnam--deteriorated by the day, both politically and militarily.

Saigon's generals took turns staging coups d'etat and being the strongman of the month, while the Viet Cong guerrillas expanded their control of the rice-growing Mekong Delta and reached north into the rubber country.

So long as he was presenting himself as the reasonable, peaceful alternative to the hawkish Republican challenger, Senator Barry Goldwater, Johnson resisted the recommendations of his advisers for a massive escalation of the American military presence. Once he had beaten Goldwater and was President in his own right, Lyndon Johnson was certain, he could cut a deal in the best Texas tradition with the Vietnamese Communists.

Already frustrated by a series of terrorist incidents aimed at Americans in Vietnam, Johnson exploded when, on the night of February 6, 1965, Viet Cong sappers mortared and mined the U.S. advisers' compound and air base at Pleiku in the Central Highlands. Eight Americans were killed and more than one hundred wounded. "I've had enough of this," Johnson told his National Security Council.

In retaliation, within hours carrier-based Navy jets struck the first targets inside North Vietnam. By March 2, Operation Rolling Thunder, a systematic and continuing program of air strikes against the North, had begun. While the Navy warplanes safely came and went from aircraft carriers at sea, the U.S. Air Force jets based at Da Nang were clearly vulnerable to enemy retaliation.

When General William C. Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, asked for U.S. Marines to guard the air base, he got them. On March 8, a battalion of Marines splashed ashore on China Beach. On April 1, President Johnson approved General Westmoreland's request for two more Marine battalions, plus 20,000 logistics troops. He also agreed with General Westmoreland that the Marines should not be limited to strictly defensive duties; now they would fan out and begin killing Viet Cong.

For the first time since the Korean War, American combat troops were now deployed for action on the Asian mainland.

In a major speech on April 7, the President urged that the North Vietnamese negotiate a reasonable settlement, and offered them a piece of a huge Mekong River economic development project that Washington would finance. Hanoi replied that there could be no negotiations while American planes were bombing North Vietnam.

By April 15, the White House was entertaining Westmoreland's request for the dispatch of an additional 40,000 American troops to South Vietnam to raise the ante. In mid June, Westmoreland urgently asked that the number of U.S. troops in the pipeline be doubled. He now wanted approval of a force of 180,000 men, most of them American, some of them South Korean, by the end of 1965. And the general was projecting that he would need at least an additional 100,000 or more in 1966.

President Johnson was inclined to give Westmoreland what he wanted, but he was also determined that this war would be fought without unduly distressing the American public. Surely so rich and powerful a nation could afford both a brushfire war and his Great Society programs.

Johnson decided, against the advice of his military chiefs, that the American escalation in South Vietnam be conducted on the cheap: There would be no mobilization of reserve and National Guard units; no declaration of a state of emergency that would permit the Army to extend for the duration the enlistments of the best-trained and most experienced soldiers. Instead, the war would be fed by stripping the Army divisions in Europe and the continental United States of their best personnel and materiel, while a river of new draftees, 20,000 of them each month, flowed in to do the shooting and the dying.

With the U.S. Marines beginning combat operations in the northern part of South Vietnam, and the newly arrived 173rd Airborne Brigade now operating in the central part of the country, Hanoi's military planners were forced to take a new look at the winter-spring campaign planned for Pleiku province. Senior General Chu Huy Man, who commanded the campaign, says that in June 1965, the People's Army high command decided to postpone the audacious plan to seize the Central Highlands and attack down Route 19 to the coast.

"That plan was postponed for ten years," General Man says. "It was completed in 1975." The new plan would follow the opening sequence of the original: The People's Army forces would lay siege to Plei Me Special Forces Camp, ambush the inevitable South Vietnamese relief column when it ventured out of Pleiku city, and then wait for American combat troops to be thrown into the battle to save the South Vietnamese.

"We wanted to lure the tiger out of the mountain," General Man says, adding: "We would attack the ARVN--but we would be ready to fight the Americans." Major General Hoang Phuong, now chief of the Institute of Military History in Hanoi and a veteran of the Ia Drang battles, recalls: "Headquarters decided we had to prepare very carefully to fight the Americans. Our problem was that we had never fought Americans before and we had no experience fighting them. We knew how to fight the French.

We wanted to draw American units into contact for purposes of learning how to fight them. We wanted any American combat troops; we didn't care which ones."

The Americans that Man and Phuong would meet in due course had not yet left the United States in June of 1965, but they smelled something in the wind. In early May 1965, commanders of the 11th Air Assault Division began receiving informational copies of the after-action reports of the 173rd Airborne Brigade's battles and operations in Vietnam. By late May, battalion, brigade, and division commanders and staff were reporting to heavily guarded classrooms at the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia, for top-secret map exercises. The maps the games were played on covered the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.

By mid-June the Pentagon ordered the division commanders to begin an intensive eight-week combat-readiness program that focused on deployment to South Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Mcnamara announced on June 16 that the Army had been authorized an airmobile division as part of its sixteen-division force.

In early July, the Pentagon announced that the 11th Air Assault (Test) Division would be renamed the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and that it would take over the colors of that historic division that had distinguished itself in combat in the Korean War and in the Pacific theater in World War II--not to mention horse-cavalry skirmishes with bandits along the Mexican border in Texas and New Mexico in the early 1920s.

In a televised address to the nation on the morning of July 28, 1965, President Johnson described the worsening situation in South Vietnam and declared: "I have today ordered the Airmobile Division to Vietnam."

On that day, convinced that the President's escalation without a declaration of emergency was an act of madness, General Harold K. Johnson, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, drove to the White House with the intention of resigning in protest. He had already taken the four silver stars off each shoulder of his summer uniform. As his car approached the White House gates, General Johnson faltered in his resolve; he convinced himself that he could do more by staying and working inside the system than by resigning in protest. The general ordered his driver to turn around and take him back to the Pentagon.

This decision haunted Johnny Johnson all the rest of his life.

In South Vietnam, the 320th Regiment of the People's Army of Vietnam was midway through a two-month-long siege of Due Co Special Forces Camp in the Central Highlands. A young Army major, H. Norman Schwarzkopf, West Point class of 1956, was adviser to the South Vietnamese Airborne battalion that was hip deep in the fighting at Due Co. A quarter-century later, General Norm Schwarzkopf would date the birth of his famous hot temper to those days, when he begged and pleaded on the radio for someone to evacuate his wounded South Vietnamese soldiers, while American helicopters fluttered by without stopping.

That week, the 33rd People's Army Regiment left Quang Ninh province in North Vietnam on the two-month march down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. Brigadier General Chu Huy Man was already in the South overseeing Viet Cong operations against the U.S. Marines in the Da Nang-Chu Lai region, but he had orders to return to the Western Highlands to establish the B-3 Front, a flexible and expandable headquarters charged with tactical and administrative control over both the People's Army and Viet Cong units operating in the Highlands. Man's new assignment was to prepare a warm welcome for the Americans in Pleiku province.

The first leg of the new, high-tech Airmobile division's journey to the war zone would be decidedly low-tech. Beginning in August, the 1st Cavalry would ride to war in a mini-fleet of World War II-era troopships, and their helicopters would sail to South Vietnam aboard a flotilla of four aging aircraft carriers.

The cavalry troopers launched into a flurry of packing equipment, getting their shots, writing wills, getting last minute dental and health problems cleared up, resettling their wives and kids off-post, and taking short leaves if they could be spared. In early August an advance party of 1,100 officers and men flew to Vietnam to begin preparing a new home for the division at An Khe, a sleepy hill town halfway up Route 19 between Qui Nhon on the coast and Pleiku in the mountains.

One of the battalions preparing to ship out was mine. My name is Harold G. Moore, Jr., but "Hal" will do just fine. In 1957, as a young major fresh out of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and assigned to the Pentagon office of the chief of research and development, I was in on the birth of the concept of airmobility. I was the one-man airborne branch in the Air Mobility Division for two and a half years. In that job I worked for Lieutenant General Jim Gavin, Colonel John Norton, Colonel Phip Seneff, and Colonel Bob Williams.

I had already worked for Harry W.O. Kinnard when he was a lieutenant colonel heading the Airborne Test Section at Fort Bragg in 1948. As a twenty-six-year-old first lieutenant, I volunteered to test experimental parachutes for Kinnard. It was a certainty that Kinnard would always remember me: On my first jump a new steerable parachute I was testing hung up on the tail of the C-46 aircraft, and I was dragged, twisting and trailing behind the plane, at 110 miles per hour, 1,500 feet above the drop zone. The tangled mess finally broke free a few minutes later, and my reserve chute got me to ground safely. When I reported in to Kinnard all he said was: "Hello, Lucky."

While I was pulling a three-year tour of NATO duty in Norway in the early 1960s, I heard rumors that the Kennedy administration was taking a hard new look at the airmobility concept. In August of 1963, I finished the NATO tour and began a year of schooling at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. I had been a lieutenant colonel for four years and was fighting for battalion command on my next assignment.

By then the Army had created the 11th Air Assault Test Division, with Major General Harry Kinnard commanding. I wrote my old boss a letter asking for an infantry battalion in his new division. (In those days a division commander could select brigade and battalion commanders simply by asking for them by name. Since the mid-1970s, such commanders are chosen by Army selection boards on a competitive basis.) In April 1964, as I was finishing the War College, the Pentagon informed me that Kinnard had requested that I be assigned to command the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry, which had been detached from the 2nd Infantry Division and assigned to the 11th Air Assault Test.

On Saturday, June 27, I arrived at Fort Benning, Georgia. It had been arranged that I would take the five-day battalion commander refresher course before actually taking command. But any thoughts of a refresher went out the door when Colonel Thomas W. (Tim) Brown, the 3rd Brigade commander and my new boss, arrived and told me to turn my course books back in. "You take command of your battalion at nine a.m. Monday and we are going out on a three day field exercise right after." He gave me the phone number of Captain Gregory (Matt) Dillon, the battalion S-3, or operations officer. Dillon told me that the barracks and headquarters were on Kelly Hill, five miles out on the reservation from the main post at Benning. My wife and five children were staying with her parents in nearby Auburn, Alabama, until we got quarters on the post.