We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (41 page)

Lieutenant Bud Alley recalls clearly when "word came back that recon had been shot at. Then that recon had hit an ambush.

Then orders to Charlie Company, just in front of us, to move on line and roll up the flank of it. John Howard and I were sitting beside each other. All of a sudden a couple of shots rang out twenty-five yards in front of us. By now we're all standing up, scared. The call comes back: "Medic! Medic!' The first group of medics in front of us takes off and John Howard takes off with them. Now the leaves begin to shake as bullets are coming in. The infantry in Charlie Company are yelling: ' on line!' I pushed my guys up on line, twenty-five yards inside the tree line, and suddenly all hell broke loose. There was lots of shooting and it was difficult to maintain the line.

"A fellow got hit and screamed. My radio operator and I ran up to him and dragged him behind a little tree. He was shot through the wrist and kept screaming. Then he got shot again. I put my M-16 on automatic and fired up high and something fell out of the tree. I crawled down to an anthill where a couple of guys were. I stayed there and found a guy who had a radio. I called in to see what the hell was happening. About then the net went dead; somebody got shot with his finger on the transmit key, or something. The last thing I heard on the net was that Ghost 5 got hit; that was Don Cor nett, the Charlie Company executive officer."

Colonel Tim Brown, the 3rd Brigade commander, the man who had the authority to order in reinforcements, was overhead in his command helicopter asking his ground commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Mcdade, for information on the seriousness of the situation. With Brown was the brigade fire-support coordinator, Captain Dudley Tademy, who was eager to unleash all the artillery, air support, and aerial rocket artillery at his command.

Brown and Tademy had just left LZ Columbus where they had been talking to Lieutenant Colonel Tully when the first shots were fired at Albany.

Colonel Brown was headed back to brigade headquarters at the tea plantation.

Captain Tademy recalls, "Suddenly I heard Joe Price, the artillery forward observer with Mcdade's battalion, saying ' have a problem! I need help!' Price was hollering for everything he could get: air, artillery, ARA. We finally got him to slow down so we could understand what was happening. I notified Colonel Brown that something was going on down there. He tried to get on the command net and talk to Mcdade. I stayed on the artillery net trying to get some support for them. By then we were overflying their position and we could see puffs of smoke coming out of the woods. When Joe Price would come up on the net I could hear the loud firing over their radio."

Major Roger Bartholomew, commander of the aerial rocket artillery helicopters, was in contact with Captain Tademy and flew a zigzag pattern over the forest trying to get a fix on the location of friendly troops so that his helicopters could support them. He had no luck.

Captain Tademy had the artillery fire smoke rounds to try to register defensive fires. No luck there either. "It didn't help because everybody was so mixed up by then on the ground. We had tactical air, ARA, and artillery and still we couldn't do a damned thing. It was the most helpless, hopeless thing I ever witnessed."

Colonel Tim Brown's helicopter was running low on fuel and the chopper had to return to Catecka to refuel. Brown says, "I knew they were in contact. I did not know how severe, or anything else. While I was talking to Mcdade I could hear the rifle fire, but he didn't know what was happening. I asked: ' happened to your lead unit?' He didn't know. ''s your trailing units?' He didn't know. And he didn't know what had happened to any of the rest of them. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. We were not in [a] position to shoot a bunch of artillery or air strikes in there because we didn't know where to put them."

Captain John Cash, in the center of the now busy Brigade Headquarters at Catecka, recalls the return of Colonel Brown: "Brown was standing there, on our radio, asking Mcdade what's going on, yelling, ', what is going on out there?' Mcdade came back with, ' a couple of

KIAs [killed in action] here and trying to get a handle on the situation. Let me get back to you later. Out.'" Captain Tademy, who was at Brown's side in the tactical operations center (TOC) says, "I heard Mcdade talking. Brown kept asking him what was going on. The radio speakers were all blaring. What I was hearing was that things were not going very well in Mcdade's area."

After his command helicopter had refueled, Brown flew back into the valley. "All of a sudden I heard all kinds of firing while I was talking to Mcdade on the radio. He started yelling: ''re running! They're running!' I thought for one terrible moment he meant that his battalion was running. What it was, the Air Force had dropped napalm on a company-size North Vietnamese unit and they were running, not the Americans. About then I began to figure that Mcdade was in real trouble."

Only now did Colonel Brown begin rounding up reinforcements to send in to help Bob Mcdade's 2nd Battalion. Brown ordered Lieutenant Colonel Frederic Ackerson to send a company from his 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry overland from LZ Columbus toward LZ Albany. Ackerson dispatched Captain Walter B. (Buse) Tully's Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry on the two-mile march toward the tail of Mcdade's embattled column.

Meanwhile, Brown radioed orders warning Mcdade's missing component, Captain Myron Diduryk's Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav, to prepare to be airlifted from Camp Holloway into Landing Zone Albany.

Brown acknowledges that it was too little, too late. "I've thought a good deal about this action over the years, and I believe that most of the casualties occurred in the first hour of fighting. I think the bulk of it was done right at the very first. They did not have decent security for moving through a jungle."

Lieutenant Colonel Mcdade for his part confirms that he was unable to provide Colonel Brown with detailed reports of what was happening to three of the four companies in his stalled column--most of which were out of sight and out of

reach. Says Mcdade: "In that first hour or so, the situation was so fluid that I was acting more as a platoon leader than a battalion commander. We were trying to secure a perimeter. I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on, myself. I don't think anybody in the battalion could have told you what the situation really was at that time. I can see where I might have left Tim Brown in the dark about what was going on; I didn't really know myself until things quieted down."

The battalion commander adds, "I could have yelled and screamed that we were in a death trap, and all that crap. But I didn't know it was as bad as it was. I had no way of checking visually or physically, by getting out of that perimeter, so all I could do was hope to get back in touch.

I wasn't going to scream that the sky was falling, especially in a situation where nobody could do anything about it anyway."

Lieutenant Colonel John A. Hemphill was the operations officer at Brigadier General Knowles's division forward command post at Pleiku. He recalls that he and Knowles flew over the Ia Drang on November 17 and watched the B52 bombing strike on the Chu Pong massif. They then flew back to Pleiku. Says Hemphill: "When we got back to Pleiku, here came Tim Brown to see Knowles. I brought him to Knowles and he said, ' have not heard from or made contact with Mcdade and I am concerned.' So we went piling out and flew out in late afternoon, and that's when I think was the first time we were aware that anything was amiss."

Although Knowles does not recall the Brown visit to his headquarters described by Hemphill, he does have a vivid memory of how he first learned that Mcdade's battalion was heavily engaged with the enemy. "I had a warrant officer in the support command at Pleiku. His job was to watch the beans, bullets, fuel, and casualties. He had a direct hotline to me; I wanted to know immediately when things got off track. In the afternoon, around two or three o'clock, he called me and said: ' got fourteen KIA from Mcdade's battalion.' All the bells went off. I called my pilot, Wayne Knudsen, and John Stoner, my air liaison officer, and went out to see Mcdade. I stopped at 3rd Brigade before flying on out to Albany. Tim Brown had nothing to tell me."

Knowles adds, "We got over Albany and Mcdade was in deep trouble. I wanted to land. Mcdade said, ', I can't handle you. I can't even get medevac in.' I couldn't land. I wanted to get something moving on the ground over there. I told Stoner and Bill Becker, the division artillery commander, ' guy doesn't know what he's got; put a ring of steel around him.' I could help him with firepower and did. I then went back to see Tim, who still had no information. I was irked. A hell of a mess; no question."

The 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry had been reduced from a full battalion in column line of march to a small perimeter defended by a few Alpha Company survivors, the recon platoon, a handful of stragglers from Charlie and Delta Companies, and the battalion command group at the Albany landing-zone clearing--plus one other small perimeter, five hundred to seven hundred yards south, which consisted of Captain George Forrest's Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry. In between, dead or wounded or hiding in the tall grass, was the bulk of Bob Mcdade's command: the fragments of two rifle companies, a weapons company, and Headquarters Company.

Each and every man still alive on that field, American and North Vietnamese, was fighting for his life. In the tall grass it was nearly impossible for the soldiers of either side to identify friend or foe except at extremely close range. Americans in olive-drab and North Vietnamese in mustard-brown were fighting and dying side by side. It may have begun as a meeting engagement, a hasty ambush, a surprise attack, a battle of maneuver--and, in fact, it was all of those things-- but within minutes the result was a wild melee, a shootout, with the gunfighters killing not only the enemy but sometimes their friends just a few feet away.

There would be no cheap victory here this day for either side. There would be no victory at all--just the terrible certainty of death in the tall grass.

DEATH IN THE TALL GRASS I did not mean to be killed today.

--dying words of the Vicomte de Turenne, at the Battle of Salzbach, 1675

The North Vietnamese commander on the battlefield, Nguyen Huu An, has a keen memory of that bloody afternoon of November 17, 1965, on the trail to Landing Zone Albany: "My commanders and soldiers reported there was very vicious fighting. I tell you frankly, your soldiers fought valiantly. They had no choice. You are dead or not. 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." That it was, and nowhere more fierce than along that strung-out American column where the cavalry rifle companies had been cut into small groups. Lieutenant John Howard was with Headquarters Company near the tail of the column. "At some point early in the battle I was situated next to a large anthill. A sergeant not far from me had received a nasty wound to his foot and he was screaming in pain. I crawled over next to him and started to bandage his foot. No sooner had I told him to try to quit screaming than I was hit by a bullet which spun me completely around on the ground. It had hit me on the right side of my stomach. I pulled up my shirt to see how bad it was and, luckily, it had cut through my flesh but had not gone into my stomach. I had a flesh wound about five inches long." Bullets continued to hit all around Howard. He grabbed the sergeant and told him they needed to move around to the other side of the anthill.

"On the other side we joined up with four other soldiers who were grouped together in the grass. We continued to fire at North Vietnamese soldiers behind trees and anthills and tried to figure out what we should do next."

Although they were now out of sight of each other, Lieutenant Bud Alley, the 2nd Battalion communications officer and Howard's friend, was not far away. "It was consternation," says Alley. "Men on either side of me were being shot. At that point I had not seen any of the enemy. All I could see was the trees and our guys. I tried to move up to my right. I moved into a hail of bullets. Everyone was trying to keep moving up toward the landing zone. I was at a big anthill, pinned down by a machine gun. Fellow on my right, a Puerto Rican, was wounded. I traded the Puerto Rican PFC my .45 pistol for his machine gun.

"I took the machine gun and moved around left of the anthill and tried to move forward, firing to my front. I crawled up on a man behind a little tree; then two enemy automatic weapons opened up, cutting that little tree down. He screamed and hit me in the back. I rolled over on top of him and he had both hands over his face. He told me: ''t worry about me; I'm dead.' He opened his hands and he had a bullet hole right in the center of his forehead. He pulled two grenades and threw those grenades. I started crawling back to the big anthill where I had come from. I knew we weren't going forward. By the time I got back to the anthill, the wounded guy, a dead guy or two, another wounded guy, and my radio repairman were there all huddled behind that anthill. Which way do we go?"

William Shucart, the battalion surgeon, was also in that section of the column. "I got up and started looking for somebody, anybody. I ran on, and encountered a couple of enemy soldiers. This meeting scared the shit out of me and them both. I got the M-16 up and fired before they did.

That was the end of that. Then I looked over and saw this sergeant leaning against a tree. He said, ' I give you a hand, Captain?' Calm as could be. That was Sergeant Fred Kluge of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cav. We went back to a larger group at the rear of the column, maybe fifteen or twenty guys, with several wounded. We were in an area with a lot of wounded and no supplies, only a few styrettes of morphine and some bandages."

Just forward of the headquarters section of the column, Charlie Company was beginning to die. Specialist 4 Jack Smith was with the lead elements in the Charlie Company formation, near Lieutenant Don Cornett, the acting company commander, when the company charged into the teeth of the enemy machine guns. In the first seconds Smith saw one of the radio operators fall dead with a bullet through the chest, his eyes and tongue bulging out. The men of Charlie Company were firing in all directions.