We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (36 page)

We had to support the South Vietnamese who were coming up, so I was going to just swing on out west. The mission hadn't changed; we were still out there to try to find the enemy. So I had them move out by foot. I could move them out by air later if I had to. Albany was just a spot on the route; just pass through and on to Crooks."

The clearing that was called Landing Zone Crooks was 8.1 miles northwest of X-Ray, at map coordinates YA 872126. Across those miles, as the crow flies, lay the Ia Drang Valley. LZ Albany was two miles northeast of X-Ray and 6.8 miles southeast of Crooks.

Shy Meyer says that because of the B-52 strikes the two battalions on X-Ray had to be moved: "The proposal was for 2/7 to move over north and find a suitable LZ. I don't think there was even an Albany plotted on the map. Later, when I had to brief the press, it was clear to me that this thing could not have been a classic ambush, since the enemy did not know where we were going. Hell, nobody knew where this battalion was going."

Lieutenant Colonel Bob Mcdade, the 2nd Battalion's commander, was in the dark, too. "We really didn't know a god damned thing, had no intelligence, when Tully and I left X-Ray. We had no idea what to expect out there. They told me to go to a place called Albany and establish an LZ; no body said we would have to fight our way to that LZ, just go and establish it. There are other things that follow from this. There is the time pressure. They say, Get there and organize the LZ. So you plow through; you don't feel your way or creep along. So I just blundered ahead. ' is my objective, so let's go.' We were on foot going toward Albany all morning. We had word we were to stop and hold for an hour or so while the B-52 strikes went in. We sat on our asses, then started again."

Captain James W. Spires, Mcdade's battalion S-3, or operations officer, recalls that their mission was to stop any NVA movement along the Ia Drang. "It was thought they were coming in along that route from Cambodia to attack our fire bases. It was thought that eventually we would be extracted out of that LZ or from another in that vicinity."

Asked about intelligence information or any alert of danger, Spires says: "Nothing specific that I was aware of; no reports of anything in there." Sergeant Major Scott: "On 17 November, early that morning, I heard we would move to another landing zone. I asked Sergeant Charles Bass, ''s our mission?' He said: ' of three possibilities: Engage the enemy; evacuate the area for the B-52s; or be picked up and transported back to An Khe.' "

Captain Dudley Tademy, Colonel Tim Brown's 3rd Brigade fire support coordinator (FSC), was to coordinate all the supporting fires: tactical air, artillery, aerial rocket artillery. "My place of duty was wherever Tim Brown was. The FSC stays in the hip pocket of the commander, immediately available to respond to any developing situation. We habitually took off early in the morning and stayed out all day in the command chopper.

"We did have B-52s scheduled to come in on the massif, and we had to get off that LZ. They were moving toward another location, unnamed, just another circle on the map. We needed to get those folks out of that hole they were in, LZ X-Ray. We had had troopers sitting there for four days."

Sergeant Major Scott was with the battalion command group as the battalion left X-Ray: "We started moving out in formation, in company column. We had medical people, the chaplain's assistant, the personnel section, some of the cooks and bakers. The first sergeant and commander of Headquarters Company were with us, too. Captain [William] Shucart was the battalion surgeon. He and the medical-platoon leader [Lieutenant John Howard] and [the assistant medical-platoon sergeant] Staff Sergeant [Charles W.] Storey, were with the column, too."

Just before Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion moved out, its commander, Captain Joel Sugdinis, put out an unusual order. His executive officer, Lieutenant Larry Gwin, remembers it well: "The company had been on hundred-percent alert for over fifty-two hours. We were in such a state of exhaustion that Captain Sugdinis directed that each man take two APC tablets, aspirin with caffeine, a move designed to increase the mental alertness of the troops. The recon platoon under Lieutenant Pat Payne was attached to us and was designated as the point because they'd led the battalion overland into LZ X-Ray the previous day over some of the same terrain. Sugdinis said: ' enemy situation is unclear, but there are NVA in the area. We proceed to Albany, secure an LZ for possible return to Pleiku.' We were tactically deployed and expecting to run into somebody. We had been told by Sugdinis to stay alert."

Before taking over Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, Sugdinis had served in the 1st Battalion. When Colonel Brown asked for an officer to take over Alpha Company, Sugdinis was immediately nominated. Joel, twenty-eight and a West Point graduate, had a wealth of troop duty behind him, including two years in the 11th Air Assault Test and 1st Cavalry. He also had seen a year of combat--1962-1963--as an adviser to a Vietnamese infantry battalion. Sugdinis says: "When I requested artillery support to precede our movement to Albany, battalion informed me that we would not recon by fire because it would reveal our presence, or some thing like that. I was not told that 2nd of the 5th Cav would recon by fire as they moved.

"As point or lead element in the 2/7, I put my company into a ' formation. I put the recon platoon, now attached, in the lead or center, and each of my two remaining rifle platoons in echelon to the right and to the left. I placed my own command group in the center on the heels of the recon platoon. We were to initially follow the 2/5 Battalion, which we did."

Captain Henry (Hank) Thorpe, a North Carolinian, was a mustang--that is, he had won a direct commission from the ranks in the early 1960s. He was in command of Delta Company, which followed behind Sugdinis's men in the column. Says Thorpe: "We were just told to follow the outfit in front.

It was a walk in the sun; nobody knew what was going on."

Following Delta were Captain John A. (Skip) Fesmire's Charlie Company troopers, who also began the move in a wedge formation. "During the first halt in the movement, it became immediately apparent that controlling this type [of] formation in the tall grass would be difficult if a firefight were to break out," Fesmire recalls. "Charlie Company platoon and squad leaders had PRC 6's [Korean War-vintage walkie-talkies], but they were unreliable. Furthermore, once a soldier was down in the tall grass, squad leaders had a tough time locating him.

Therefore, after the first halt, I put the company in a column formation with platoons in column. We were not the lead element, nor the trail element. We were following D Company, which was the combat support company."

Second Lieutenant Enrique V. Pujals, of Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, had led the 3rd Platoon of Captain Fesmire's Charlie Company for about one month. "My impression was that it was simply a get out as fast as you can thing, because of the B-52 strike. Our company was to move in company column with platoons in column. It sounded like one of those 'admin marches' at Benning right after an exercise ended."

Specialist 4 Jack P. Smith, twenty, Washington, D. C., who A Walk in the Sun 283

had joined the Army to do some growing up after he flunked out of college, was assigned to Fesmire's company: "The order came for us to move out. I guess our commanders felt the battle was over. The three battalions of PAVN were destroyed. There must have been about 1,000 rotting bodies out there. As we left the perimeter, we walked by them.

Some of them had been out there for four days."

The next unit of the 2nd Battalion in the line of march was the battalion Headquarters Company of logistics and admin clerks; the battalion aid station medics; supply people; the chaplain's assistant; communications officer and his radio repairmen; and the like.

Second Lieutenant John Howard, a native Pennsylvanian, was a Medical Service Corps officer and administrative assistant to the battalion surgeon. He recalls spending the night of November 16 in X-Ray beside Staff Sergeant Storey. "Charlie Storey came over to me before we moved out of X-Ray that morning and asked me to help him light his cigarette, because he was too nervous to hold the match. I tried to calm him down with casual conversation but he remained very nervous. I think he was having some kind of premonition," Howard says.

Lieutenant Alley, the battalion communications officer, was also with Headquarters Company. "We were told that this would be a tactical move.

There was still a lot of stuff on the battlefield: equipment, supplies, captured stuff that had to be policed up and blown up. All in a hurry-up situation. I was personally carrying an RC-292 antenna, in addition to my regular combat load. I weighed about a hundred and forty pounds; my normal combat load was forty or fifty pounds; the 292 antenna weighed sixty pounds. The temperature must have been ninety-six, and the humidity was the same. We were moving as fast as we could through the elephant grass and scrub oaks, some high canopy. We were humping, everyone tired as could be."

At heart almost as much an infantry officer as a medical doctor, Captain William Shucart marched in the column toward Albany. Doc Shucart was one of the most highly regarded officers in the battalion. He went to school at the University of Missouri, then to Washington University Medical School. "I was a resident at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston when I got drafted. Initially I had a medical deferment, but I lost it when I switched to a surgical residency. I was assigned to the burn unit at Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio. I got involved in sports with a bunch of great enlisted men in the afternoons. When the Vietnam thing came up, the Tonkin Gulf, a lot of those guys were sent over. I was single and thought it was an important thing to do. So I volunteered to go to Vietnam. I flew to Long Beach and caught up with a troopship that had left the East Coast earlier."

Shucart adds: "The guys who taught me most about the Army were Lieutenant Rick Rescorla, an Englishman, and Sergeant John Driver, who was an Irishman. Driver did tunnel-rat work; he would drop down in there and yell: ' home?' He didn't throw smoke in first, like everyone else. After his tour, he went back and did OCS, then returned to Vietnam as a lieutenant and got killed. Driver had his own rules of war, and he tried to teach them to me. You know, when you clean a weapon the first rule is always clear the chamber. Not Driver. His first rule was always check to make sure it's your weapon, so you don't end up cleaning somebody else's weapon. He and Rick taught me a lot about being in the infantry. I would march with them to see what life was like. You know, the battalion surgeon thing was a total waste of time. They don't need a medical doctor in that job. I figured the major thing I did was just to provide moral support, not real medical support. There just isn't a hell of a lot you can do in field conditions. I went out on the operations because I liked it."

One of the people Shucart really liked was Myron Diduryk. "He was wonderful. He loved military strategy. He got me reading S.L. A.

Marshall, Men Against Fire, all that. We would talk about what makes men in combat do what they do. He liked to talk like a tough guy off the New Jersey streets, but he was a very thoughtful, very clever guy. I was proud of the people I knew in the officer corps, very impressed with them."

Captain George Forrest, twenty-seven, of Leonardtown, Maryland, commanded Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry. He was bringing up the rear, following Mcdade's admin and support people. Forrest, who earned an ROTC commission at Morgan State University in Baltimore, had commanded his company for three months. He recalls, "Me Dade said we'd be the last company out. I knew we were getting the tough job because we were reinforcements. Mcdade's instructions were very vague. At the time I thought it was because he didn't have a whole lot of information himself. We only had one map, and I had my weapons guy take an overlay and make himself a makeshift map. I told him to plot some fire support for us along this route so if something happens we can support ourselves. I put my company in a wedge formation, sent out some flankers, and moved out."

Although the evacuation of Landing Zone X-Ray had been observed by the North Vietnamese from the ridge line on the Chu Pong massif high above, once the American troopers were deep in the trees and elephant grass they were concealed from overhead observation. People's Army Lieutenant Colonel Hoang Phuong says: "We had many small reconnaissance groups to watch over the area. We had a position on top of the mountain watching your movements, but it was hard to see from there into the jungle. So we le'it people behind to watch the landing areas, the clearings. We organized one platoon which attached men to each landing area to cause trouble for the helicopters."

Colonel Phuong's remarks are corroborated in part by Staff Sergeant Donald J. Slovak. Slovak was the leader of the point squad of the recon platoon--at the very front of the men leading this march. "We saw Ho Chi Minn sandal foot markings, which we called ' tracks' because the sandals were made from old auto tires. We saw bamboo arrows on the ground pointing north, matted grass and grains of rice. I reported all this to Lieutenant Payne."

After an hour on the march, Sergeant Major Scott checked on things. "I moved up and down the column, visiting A and D companies and the medical platoon. I noticed some of the men getting rid of some of their gear--like ponchos or C-rations. They were exhausted. They'd been up two or three nights. I went back to Sergeant Bass and told him we needed a break."

The battalion after-action report, written by Captain Spires, says that after marching "about 2,000 meters the battalion turned northwest." Lieutenant Larry Gwin says that Alpha Company, in the lead, angled left after crossing a small ridge line. Colonel Tully's battalion continued straight ahead toward the artillery base at Columbus clearing.

Lieutenant Gwin describes the battalion's march toward Albany: "The terrain was fairly open, knee-high grass, with visibility about twenty-five yards through the trees. We hit a small ridge line, crossed it, and angled left. The terrain and vegetation became more difficult.