We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (50 page)

"There was nobody moving, nobody crawling out. There were some other Americans alongside our platoon, under better cover. It is quite possible we were taking some friendly fire, but there was no doubt we were getting enemy fire. The radio we had was on the battalion frequency. I remember hearing conversations that I would not have normally heard on the company net: directions for air support, pilots asking direction where to lay the napalm. I got on once to tell them that their napalm was a little bit hot, a little close to where I thought there were friendlies. It wasn't that close to me but I could see where it landed. I wanted them to know maybe they were hitting friendlies. They told me to get off the net, that they didn't want too many people talking.

"Anyway, I had a radio that was working and a good freq and I wasn't going to give up either one. After I was hit the other channels just went right out of my head and I was afraid to start switching around for fear of losing all contact. Eventually I think they changed channels for the battalion net. I know I stopped hearing all the chatter; later I had communication with some other people.

"By now most everyone near me had been hit, too. I remember the guys who were under deep cover yelling at me: ', get your ass out of there.' I yelled back that it was hard to move, that I was hit pretty bad. They yelled that they would help me crawl and I told them there was no way I was going to leave the radio behind. That's when an amazing thing happened. We had a young private in the company who was constantly up on charges--a goldbrick, a sad sack. Always in trouble. He got up in all that firing, came over, and said: I'll take the radio and help you out of here, Lieutenant.' As he bent over trying to get the radio out from under me he took one right through the heart and fell over dead.

Weeks later, in the hospital, I tried to get him a posthumous medal; but I never heard back. And now I can't remember his name.

"As it grew dark I was still in the same position. I was trying to maintain contact with whoever I had talking to me back at brigade. There was a lull in the battle and suddenly I am talking to an artillery outfit. The North Vietnamese were now running around the area and we could see them moving. Bunches of ten, twenty, more of them circling the perimeter of the landing zone. It was maybe a hundred and fifty yards to the LZ perimeter, and the enemy were between us and them.

"I don't know how I got put on to that artillery unit. It took me a good while to convince them to bring artillery into that area. Finally they tried a white phosphorus round or two. I couldn't see any of their rounds land and WP rounds don't make near as much noise as high-explosive rounds. Finally I persuaded them to start using the HE [high-explosive] rounds and then I could hear it and shift that fire into the area where we could see those enemy troops moving.

"I never really knew how effective that artillery fire I directed was until two things happened. Back in the States a few months later, at St. Albans Naval Hospital in New York I met somebody who had been in that fight, a 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav guy, who came over and thanked me for that artillery fire. I was out walking the halls on my crutches for exercise and he came up on crutches, too. He had an empty trouser leg.

He told me the artillery fire took his leg but it saved his life and he was grateful. I was stunned. Later on, around 1971,1 had to appear as a witness at a court-martial at Fort Leavenworth and I ran into Sergeant Howard of Charlie Company. He and some of his men were together in a position up ahead of me in the fight. Howard told me that every time the enemy got close to them, the artillery would come in close too and really whack them. He said that artillery fire was the only thing that kept the enemy away and kept them alive. It felt good to know that I did some good. And I had to argue with them to give me the HE.

"Somewhere in there I really lose all sense of time. I know before dark and after dark and that's about it. I remember I was on the radio that night talking to someone, telling them that we could hear groups of enemy walk by; we were hearing single rifle or pistol shots; that someone would scream or cry out, and then a single shot. I knew damned well what was going on. The enemy were killing our wounded.

"When the relief patrol came in it was from my south, I think. I guided them to us by firing my .45 pistol. They picked up some American wounded further south who also had a radio on my frequency. When the patrol got to us I could hear the patrol leader saying he never anticipated so many wounded; he was stupefied by the numbers. I know he asked, ''s in charge here?' I heard him but my mind didn't react for what seemed like a long time before finally I could say: ' here.' They brought a medic and he gave me a shot of morphine. That was the first shot I had, the first treatment I had for, I don't know, twelve hours or more. The medic put a tourniquet on my leg.

"The patrol leader told me that he couldn't take everyone, that he didn't have enough people to carry everyone. He said he had to leave me and the others with the medic and only take the worst-hurt. I know the enemy came back at least once after they left. A party of twenty or thirty of them. We could see the enemy moving; it was a very clear night with a bright moon, maybe full or near full.

"After dawn the relief came for us. Somebody gave me a canteen. I was dry as bone. During the night the medic would only give me a sip or two.

When the relief came I know I guzzled a whole canteen. I can remember being triaged somewhere, maybe Holloway. Next thing I know I woke up in a hospital ward at Qui Nhon. A fellow officer, Paul Bonocorsi, from Charlie Company had been shifted out to liaison duty the week before the Ia Drang and he was there checking on C Company people. He told me there had been 108 men on the fit-for-duty report the morning we left for Albany, and only eight on the duty report the day after.

"I arrived at Fort Dix, New Jersey, on Thanksgiving Day, 1965, and was ambulanced over to St. Albans Naval Hospital in the borough of Queens, the hospital closest to my home. I walked out of that hospital on Memorial Day, 1966. I was an outpatient for another three or four months, then was placed on temporary retirement that was made permanent in 1971.

"I was recalled to active duty briefly after that to testify at that court-martial at Leavenworth. That was the case of a Charlie Company enlisted man who got blind, raging drunk the week before Albany. He pointed his rifle at his sergeant and pulled the trigger. It dry-fired; either [it was] unloaded or [it] misfired. Then he went off to try to shoot the company commander. He was sitting in the brig when we were out getting shot to pieces. He was court-martialed and sent to prison but his conviction was overturned on appeal, so they retried him and there weren't many left who could testify."

AFTERMATH

MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES In war, truth is the first casualty. --Aeschylus

Late in the day, November 18, Brigadier General Dick Knowles, whose headquarters was by now besieged by a growing throng of reporters demanding information on exactly what had happened at Landing Zone Albany, convened a news conference at II Corps Headquarters. The word that trickled in from the field was that an American battalion had been butchered in the Ia Drang Valley, and the sharks were gathering.

Knowles, who had been aware of the fighting at Albany since he overflew the battlefield at midafternoon the previous day, says, "I did not get timely information. We did not get it sorted out until the next day [the 18th]. That's when we learned the details." Asked if Colonel Brown had reported what he had seen and heard during an early visit to the Albany perimeter the morning of the 18th, Knowles says, "No." It would appear then that Knowles's headquarters got its first real idea of the scope of the tragedy when Associated Press photographer Rick Merron--who had finagled a ride into Albany--returned to Camp Holloway mid morning of the 18th and staggered into the 1st Cavalry Division press tent, pale and shaken by what he had seen and photographed, and told his colleagues that the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry had been massacred in an enemy ambush. Division public affairs officers swiftly informed Knowles of the report by Merron.

How and why it took more than eighteen hours for the assistant division commander to get the first direct detailed account from the battlefield--and why that information had come, not through command channels, but from a civilian photographer--is a question that lingers.

Knowles says, "Lieutenant Colonel Hemphill had been getting pieces of information from the artillery and from all over that fit into a running description of a fight; but nobody, not even Me Dade, had the full magnitude until the next day. We kept getting body counts and casualty figures all that morning [of the 18th]." The reporters gathering in Pleiku thought they smelled a cover-up. The news conference that followed did little to dispel their suspicions.

Knowles told the news conference that a battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) had had a "meeting engagement" with an enemy force of equal or larger size, and the American battalion had suffered "light to moderate casualties." Knowles reported that the enemy force had suffered four hundred-plus killed and had broken off the engagement and withdrawn. The cavalry battalion had held its ground and won a victory.

The general's summary of what he understood had happened at Albany was greeted by roars of disbelief from the assembled reporters.

In short order the wires were burning up with reports of the heaviest American casualties to date in the Vietnam War; hints of an Army cover-up of a disastrous ambush; reports that the American forces were withdrawing--some accounts said "retreating"--from the valley. Much of the reporting was overstated and oversimplified; some of it was just plain wrong. What had happened at LZ Albany was by no means a classic ambush. The element of surprise worked for the North Vietnamese and against the American column; Colonel An's soldiers had between twenty minutes and an hour to maneuver into position to launch their attack. The battle at Albany encompasses something of all these precise definitions: There were a meeting engagement (with the recon platoon at the head of the column); a hasty attack (on the lead company); and a hasty ambush (of the rest of the column) --all of which occurred within a period of no more than five minutes.

But the reporters were not the only ones who were skeptical about what they had been told, and what they had not been told. That morning, November 18, at 10:15 a. m., the American commander in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, visited 3rd Brigade Headquarters at Catecka.

During a thirty-minute briefing, Colonel Brown failed to mention anything at all about the fight at LZ Albany, limiting his report to an overview of the X-Ray fight. Later in the day Westmoreland stopped in Qui Nhon and toured the Army 85th Evacuation Hospital. In his "history notes" (journal) entry covering November 18, General Westmoreland wrote: "I ... flew down and visited the brigade commanded by Colonel Tim Brown.

He gave me a briefing and we flew over the operational area. I then flew down to Qui Nhon where I visited the men in the hospital. They were mostly personnel of the 1 st Cavalry who had been wounded in the recent operation in Pleiku. While talking to them I began to sense I had not been given the full information when I had visited the Brigade CP.

Several of the men stated they had been involved in what they referred to as an ambush. Most of the men were from the 2nd of the 7th Cavalry."

The Westmoreland history notes entry for the 18th add: "One other thing happened in the afternoon. After returning to my office from a trip to Pleiku, Colonel [Ben] Legare [MACV public affairs chief] came in and informed me that a story had been filed that was highly critical of the 1 st Air Cavalry. This came as no great surprise to me since I had suspected it after talking to the men in the hospital. I then

called General [Stanley] Larsen and told him to get the facts. I told Colonel Legare to send a planeload of press up the next morning in order to get a briefing on exactly what had happened."

General Westmoreland was now concerned that the Cavalry Division had bitten off more than it could chew, and certainly far more than the American public was able to digest so early in the war. He also worried about sending South Vietnamese forces up against the North Vietnamese in the Ia Drang region.

In his journal entry for Friday, November 19, Westmoreland wrote: "General Bill Depuy returned from Pleiku where I sent him because of my concern that the 1st Air Cavalry and the (ARVN) Airborne task force might get involved in more than they could handle, and a bloody nose for the ARVN general reserve would be adverse to government morale. Further, I feared that intense sustained combat would wear down the Cavalry Division to the point that it might not be capable of performing its mission during the next several weeks. I asked Depuy to look into all these factors and get me a report. After talking to all the commanders and advisers concerned, he recommended that the new phase of the operation be confined north of the river [the Ia Drang] since the river is unfordable and thus would reduce the risk of unsuccessful operations, particularly for the ARVN Airborne."

Whatever his own misgivings, Westmoreland was thunderstruck by the impact those first, negative news accounts of the battle at Albany had back home. The general was catching hell from the Pentagon, and he lost no time giving hell to the Saigon bureau chiefs of the various American media.

In his journal entry for November 20, Westmoreland wrote: "I had my monthly background session with the press. I discussed the battle at Pleiku, starting with the attack on Plei Me camp and going through the subsequent phases. I read a wire I received from Secretary of Defense quoting headlines from the Washington Post and Star implying the retreat and withdrawal of the 1st Cavalry Division. I then explained to them I had a great respect for the press. I reminded them that I had resisted censorship of the press and was on record to that effect. I stated that stories such as those in the Washington newspapers were having the following effect: 1. Distorting the picture at home and lowering the morale of people who are emotionally concerned (wives). 2. Lowering morale of troops."