We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (5 page)

Ironically, late one night in the battalion command post we listened in on the new PRC-25 field radio to an American forward air controller directing an air strike in Vietnam. We could hear the rattle of gunfire and the explosions of the bombs twelve thousand miles away on a freak bounce of radio waves that briefly brought the real war to the pine barrens of South Carolina where we were playing war games.

For much of this time my battalion was at, or near, its full authorized strength of thirty-seven commissioned officers, one warrant officer, and 729 enlisted men. That changed in the spring of 1965, when we lost eight of our fifteen platoon leader lieutenants. Most were reserve officers who had completed their commitments and were released from active duty; others were transferred or reassigned elsewhere. Between April and July we also lost by discharge or reassignment our intelligence officer, surgeon, personnel officer, air operations officer, supply officer, assistant medical officer, chaplain, and two company commanders.

In early June we were assigned six brand-new second lieutenants. We plugged them into the vacant rifle-platoon leader slots and gave them seven weeks of "get rich quick" on-the-job training in airmobile-air assault tactics. But in early August, shortly before we deployed, all six were yanked out of the battalion to stay at Fort Benning and attend the six-month Infantry Officers Basic Course: Someone had discovered an Army policy that new lieutenants could not be sent into combat before attending. The policy may be sound, but the net result was that the battalion and the troops in the ranks were whipsawed by unnecessary leadership changes.

Each rifle company got three new rifle-platoon leaders, except Alpha, which got two. Each rifle company had a mortar platoon, but we had no officers to lead them. Delta Company had a new recon-platoon leader, Lieutenant John Arlington, and a new mortar-platoon leader, First Lieutenant Raul E. Taboadarequera.

There was precious little time to jam fourteen months' worth of airmobile training into the new lieutenants' heads. We did our best and so did they. When they reported in, I called them all in, together with their platoon sergeants, and told them we were heading for war and time was short. I issued two orders: One, platoon sergeants will teach their new platoon leaders everything they can about airmobility, small unit tactics, the men in the ranks, and the leadership those men deserve.

Two, the new lieutenants will keep their mouths shut except to ask questions, and will listen to and remember everything the platoon sergeant tells them.

In early July the Pentagon announced that the 11th Air Assault Division (Test) had served its purpose; now it would become the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Colonel Brown, with an eye to military heritage and tradition, immediately asked that his two battalions be given the historic colors of the 7th U.S. Cavalry. My battalion was reborn as the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry. Our sister battalion became the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.

In the days when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer commanded the 7th Cavalry the regiment adopted a rowdy Irish drinking song, "Garry Owen," as its marching tune. The words "Garry Owen" made their way onto the regimental crest, and the officers and men of the regiment customarily accompanied each exchange of salutes with a hearty

"Garry Owen, sir!" We picked up the tradition with the 7th Cavalry colors, and the troops accepted it all with enthusiasm.

The officers and pilots of Lieutenant Colonel John B. Stockton's highly spirited 3rd Squadron of the 17th Cavalry now became the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry--and had already absorbed the very essence of cavalry esprit. They wore big cavalry mustaches and black Stetson hats, and they carried their papers in leather saddlebags, despite everything that more conservative elements in the division command could do to stop them. Stockton and his men even smuggled their mascot, Maggie the Mule, to Vietnam in spite of a strict no-pets-allowed order intended to ensure that the mule stayed home.

Unfortunately, my battalion and every other in the division now began to suffer the consequences of President Johnson's refusal to declare a state of emergency and extend the active-duty tours of draftees and reserve officers. The order came down: Any soldier who had sixty days or less left to serve on his enlistment as of the date of deployment, August 16, must be left behind.

We were sick at heart. We were being shipped off to war sadly understrength, and crippled by the loss of almost a hundred troopers in my battalion alone. The very men who would be the most useful in combat--those who had trained longest in the new techniques of helicopter warfare--were by this order taken away from us. It made no sense then; it makes no sense now.

Our last night at Fort Benning was Friday, August 13, 1965. I came home early, around seven p. m., in time for dinner with my wife, Julie, and our five children, who ranged in age from thirteen down to three. I told all of them I would be leaving early the next morning, long before they awoke, and I would be going to the war in Vietnam. Later, I sat on the sofa reading aloud to my daughter, Cecile, six. She looked up at one point and asked: "Daddy, what's a war?" I tried my best to explain, but her look of bewilderment only grew.

My alarm clock was set for 1:30 a. m., and by 3:30 a.m. the battalion had loaded aboard chartered buses bound for the port of Charleston, South Carolina, where the transport ship USNS Maurice Rose waited at dockside.

We sailed from Charleston on Monday, August 16, and it took the better part of a month for the "Ramblin' Rose" to transit the Panama Canal and cross the Pacific to South Vietnam. On that same date, August 16, the last elements of the 66th Regiment of the People's Army left their base in Thanh Hoa, North Vietnam. It would take them nearly two months to cover five hundred miles on foot along the Ho Chi Minn Trail to our meeting place in the Ia Drang Valley.

The Rose dropped anchor in the port of Qui Nhon, in central South Vietnam, in mid-September, and we were welcomed ashore by our advance party. With the help of the 101st Airborne a huge area of scrub jungle just north of the town of An Khe had been secured. An Khe, forty-two miles west of Qui Nhon on Route 19, would be the base camp of the 1st Cavalry Division--just as soon as we cleared the jungle and built that camp. It was precisely what General Harry Kinnard had vigorously opposed for his airmobile troops: a fort in the middle of Indian country.

Kinnard lobbied hard in Washington, Saigon, and Bangkok for his new division to be based inside Thailand, in its own sanctuary. From there it could launch combat operations inside South Vietnam and onto the North Vietnamese lines of communication inside Cambodia and Laos. The negative responses General Kinnard's request elicited weren't even polite. His division would now have to build, garrison, and guard a base camp, and that would reduce the number of troops available to actively pursue and destroy the enemy.

As our Chinook transport helicopters ferried the battalion into An Khe we passed over a small airstrip with a beat-up old three-story yellow building at the northwest end. On the boat coming over I had reread Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy and I recognized that airstrip as the departure point for the French army's Group Mobile 100 on June 24, 1954, as it headed west on Route 19 and straight into the historic Viet Minh ambush that helped seal the fate of French colonial rule in Indochina.

We stepped off the choppers into a tangle of trees, weeds, and brush, in the middle of what would become our airfield, the Golf Course. Brigadier General John M. Wright, assistant division commander, had decreed that the airfield for the 1st Cav's 450-plus helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft would have to be "smooth as a golf course." He wanted no bulldozers scraping the land bare to become a mud hole in the monsoons and a red dust storm in dry season. The men of the division and some two thousand Vietnamese laborers cleared the site by hand, with machetes and axes, and General Wright had his instant Golf Course. They also built a heavily fortified twelve-mile-long and hundred yard-wide defense perimeter, called the Barrier Line, around the base. We lived rough: puptents, C-rations, and showers only when it rained. The battalions took turns manning the picket line of outposts well out from the barrier and running patrols to keep the Viet Cong off guard. My battalion lost two men by drowning on patrol crossings of the Song Ba river during that first month.

In the first days there were a few light probes by the local guerrillas, and nervous troopers shot up a lot of green trees before fire discipline was restored. Alas, one casualty of a nervous sentry was Colonel Stockton's beloved cavalry mascot, Maggie the Mule, who was gunned down by one of my Charlie Company men as she wandered the perimeter on a dark night.

Sergeant Major Plumley reported the death of Maggie to me: "She was challenged and didn't know the password." Plumley added that he would "properly dispose" of the slain mule. He had Maggie's body winched aboard the division chow truck as it made its morning rounds delivering rations to the battalions. Maggie was dropped off with the C-rations at the truck's next stop: Colonel Stockton's 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry. An efficient but hardly diplomatic solution: Maggie's death and subsequent delivery on the chow truck caused some bad blood between the battalions.

Once each day every man of us, under close supervision, choked down a bitter, dime-size yellow malaria pill. It was an automatic Article 15 offense--one subject to nonjudicial punishment--to be caught sleeping outside one's mosquito net, no matter how hot it was. Even so, we began losing men to malaria within two or three weeks. Within six weeks fifty six troopers from my battalion alone had been evacuated to hospitals, suffering serious cases of malaria. The problem was a particularly virulent falciparum strain of the disease, prevalent in the Central Highlands; it was resistant to the antimalarial drugs available to us at that time.

The drain on battalion manpower due to expiring enlistments also continued. At the end of September my battalion had 679 officers and men against an authorized strength of 767. Four sergeants and seventeen enlisted men rotated home in October. In November, six sergeants and 132 men of the battalion were scheduled to leave.

In October we received two officer replacements and two or three NCOs via the "Infusion Program," which transferred to us men already serving in Vietnam in other units, who presumably would be more knowledgeable of the country and the enemy. One of those officers was Captain Thomas C. Metsker, a muscular six-foot-tall Special Forces officer who was a 1961 graduate of The Citadel, where he was a four-year letter man on the track team. Metsker, a Foreign Service brat who had grown up in Japan and Korea, was an impressive young officer.

Tony Nadal now took command of Alpha Company; I made Metsker the battalion intelligence officer and put him high on my list for command of a company. He often joined me on my five-mile morning runs around the internal camp perimeter.

The other new arrival was First Lieutenant William J. Lyons, twenty-five years old, a Californian and a 1962 Ripon College graduate. Like Metsker, Lyons was qualified as a paratrooper and a Ranger; he came to us from an adviser slot with the 41st ARVN Ranger Battalion. He was fluent in Vietnamese. I assigned him to be Bob Edwards's executive officer in Charlie Company. In the late afternoon of November 4, Lyons and Sergeant Roy Hitt, a thirty-threeyear-old Alabama native, were killed in the head-on collision of two Huey helicopters while delivering mail and chow to Charlie Company out on the picket line.

Our battalion conducted two sweep operations in the vicinity of the An Khe base during this period; we suffered a few wounded (by snipers) and captured a huge Viet Cong flag.

In late October the 1st Cavalry Division's 1st Brigade moved up to Camp Holloway at Pleiku and began pursuing enemy forces involved in the attack on Plei Me Special Forces Camp and the attempted ambush of a South Vietnamese relief column.

Colonel Stockton and his helicopter scout-gunship teams quickly got on the trail of the retreating North Vietnamese. On November 1, one of the cavalry teams spotted a dozen or so enemy troops eight miles west of Plei Me. They were fired on, and fled. Minutes later more enemy were spotted. Stockton put riflemen on the ground and within minutes they captured the 33rd People's Army Regiment's field hospital. Fifteen enemy were killed and forty-four others, including patients and hospital staff, were captured, along with tons of medical supplies, rice, documents, and weapons. The North Vietnamese counterattacked that afternoon; the fight had been going on for hours before the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry arrived to reinforce Stockton. There were eleven Americans killed and fifty-one wounded, with enemy casualties estimated at 250.

On that same day, November 1, the lead elements of the 66th People's Army Regiment began crossing into South Vietnam from Cambodia, moving along the Ia (River) Drang. Among the documents captured in the hospital fight was an enemy map of the Ia Drang Valley showing trails used by the North Vietnamese. On November 3, General Dick Knowles directed Colonel Stockton to begin a reconnaissance in force on a specific trail running along the Ia Drang two miles inside the border.

Stockton moved his operations base to the Due Co Special Forces Camp and, concerned that the 1st Brigade had moved so slowly in getting infantry reinforcements to come to his assistance during the hospital fight, prevailed on Knowles to shift Captain Theodore S. Danielsen's Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry to Due Co as well.

That night Stockton set three platoon-size ambushes, one along the Ia Drang trail, the others a mile or so north. The southernmost platoon watched as a reinforced North Vietnamese company approached their ambush on the trail 2.2 miles inside the Vietnam border. The North Vietnamese stopped for a rest break just 120 yards short of the ambush site and then, shortly after nine p. m., resumed the march eastward.

The Americans let the lead elements pass through, but when the heavy-weapons company clattered into the kill zone, the Americans touched off their eight claymore mines, each spewing hundreds of steel ball bearings in a semicircle of death, and poured a storm of rifle and machine-gun fire into those who survived the mine blasts. Captain Charles S. Knowlen then ordered all his ambush parties back to the patrol-base clearing and within half an hour came under heavy attack by a large force of very angry North Vietnamese. When his men radioed that they were in danger of being overrun, Colonel Stockton ordered Captain Danielsen's company helicoptered in as reinforcements.