We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (51 page)

During General Westmoreland's November 18 trip to Pleiku, I finally delivered the briefing that I had refused to leave the battlefield and fly to Saigon to deliver. At 8:45 a.m. my surviving company commanders and staff and I were lined up and waiting when two jeeps pulled up and Westmoreland arrived, accompanied by General Cao Van Vien, chief of the South Vietnamese Army Joint General Staff, Major General Harry Kinnard, and Barry Zorthian, chief of the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO). I had served with General Westmoreland in the late 1940s on Airborne duty at Fort Bragg, and General Vien had been a classmate of mine in 1956-1957 at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.

We went into a borrowed Quonset hut and each of us who had played a role in the fight at LZ X-Ray briefed General Westmoreland and the others.

Things went smoothly, except for one moment. During Captain Matt Dillon's portion of the briefing he mentioned a report by our men that they had seen the body of an enemy soldier they suspected was Chinese-- he was large, and was dressed in a uniform different from that of the NVA--which disappeared from the battlefield before we could retrieve it.

Westmoreland reacted angrily and forcefully, telling us all: "You will never mention anything about Chinese soldiers in South Vietnam! Never!"

The men of the battalion were lined up by their small puptents.

Westmoreland walked down the line of troopers, stopping and chatting with various men, asking them where they were from and making small talk about sports. Then I asked General Westmoreland to address them. Standing atop the hood of his jeep, he thanked the men for their courage and performance in battle. He added that the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry would be recommended for a Presidential Unit Citation for the extraordinary heroism displayed in combat.

Westmoreland's sensitivity to the issue of Chinese advisers traveling with the North Vietnamese on the battlefield may well have been provoked by an article by Charles Mohr in the November 17, 1965, issue of The New York Times. Filed from Saigon, the article reported that prisoners captured in late October around Plei Me Special Forces Camp had appeared at a news conference in Saigon, telling reporters that they had entered South Vietnam through Cambodia and had received assistance from Cambodian militiamen. Mohr's article added that the prisoners told the reporters that each of the North Vietnamese People's Army regiments had one Chinese Communist adviser. "An official American spokesman commented, ' don't have positive knowledge of Chinese advisers but it is a distinct possibility.' "

Clearly that article had touched a raw nerve at the White House, and just as clearly the command posture at MACV had changed radically in the previous twenty-four hours. There would be no more discussion of Chinese involvement in the fighting in South Vietnam. President Johnson remembered Korea, and his fear of Chinese intervention in Vietnam led him to exercise unprecedented personal control over the selection of bombing targets in North Vietnam. The Air Force was forbidden to operate within thirty miles of the Chinese border for fear of provoking an incident.

The question of Chinese advisers was no less sensitive to the North Vietnamese. The battlefield commander in the Ia Drang, then-Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An, says that it was a point of pride that the People's Army--which had Chinese army advisers down to the regimental level during the French war--did not have any foreign advisers in the field at any time during the war with the Americans. Asked about U.S. Army Signal Intelligence intercepts of radio transmissions in the Mandarin Chinese dialect in the vicinity of his headquarters on the Chu Pong massif on November 14, 1965, An said: "We had that language capability and sometimes used it to confuse whoever might be listening."

Congratulations on a job well done had been pouring in ever since our return to Camp Holloway. I assembled the battalion and read to them this message from the Army Chief of Staff, General Harold K. Johnson, to Major General Harry Kinnard: "On behalf of all members of the United States Army, I salute the intrepid officers and men of the 1st Cav Div for their superb action in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley. Your Sky Soldiers and their brave Vietnamese allies carry the hopes of free men everywhere as they repel the heavy enemy attacks. The Army and the nation take pride in your display of courage, determination and fighting skill. The brave and resolute performance of the 1st Cavdiv in this battle is in keeping with the finest traditions of the American soldier."

Out on the Albany battlefield, as night fell on November 18, all the American dead had still not been recovered. Bob Me Dade and his men hunkered down for another miserable night on that blood-soaked ground.

Captain Joel Sugdinis says: "We remained at Albany all day on the 18th without contact, and again pulled in tight in a defensive perimeter for the night. We did not put out observation posts or patrols, but relied on harassment and interdiction fires around the perimeter to thwart any enemy approach. No one came. The next morning, the 19th, we continued to police the battlefield but the smell of decaying bodies was getting very bad." Lieutenant Rick Rescorla ran into a sergeant from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry and learned that Lieutenant Larry Hess had been killed. "He was a classmate of mine, OCS Class of April 1965, the son of an Air Force officer and just twenty years old. We pulled out of Albany that

day. Several soldiers [were] still unaccounted for, but the press corps had started arriving. Just before we left a member of the press asked: "What's the official name of this place?' ' Little Bighorn,' a lieutenant said cynically. ''t say that,' Captain Joe Price protested. ''s been no defeat here.' "

Washington was now thoroughly awakened to the ferocity of the fighting at X-Ray and Albany and to the large numbers of American dead and wounded beginning to arrive from the battlefields. The war was entering a new and much more deadly phase; President Johnson wanted to know what that meant and what it would cost. Defense Secretary Robert S. Mcnamara, then headed for Europe on NATO business, was told to return by way of Saigon and conduct one of his famous fact-finding missions. He was instructed to focus on the Ia Drang battles and report to the President with his recommendations.

After just two days' rest at Camp Holloway, the men of 1 st Battalion, 7th Cavalry were ordered back into the field-- trucked back to the Catecka Tea Plantation to mount perimeter guard around 3rd Brigade headquarters. At LZ Albany, on November 19, helicopters began lifting out the survivors of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry for the short flight to LZ Crooks, just six miles away. At Crooks the exhausted troops were ordered to take over a section of the defense perimeter alongside Colonel Bob Tully's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry. Mcdade's battalion had still not accounted for all its men. The battalion was reporting 119 killed, 124 wounded, and 8 missing in action. When the final division headquarters report was made on March 4, 1966, the total Albany casualties for the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Alpha and Bravo companies, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, and attached artillery observers were: 151 killed, 121 wounded, and 4 missing in action.

Mcdade's men were exhausted and shaken by the fire storm they had endured at Albany and felt that they should have been withdrawn from the field before nightfall on November 19. As darkness fell, says Sergeant John Setelin of Bravo Company, "we thought if we hung around out there it was all going to happen to us again. That night it got so quiet you could hear a mouse piss on cotton. Every time we did hear a noise in the bush we fired on it. Finally, the 2nd Battalion, 5th Cav people came over and said if we didn't quit shooting they were going to take our ammunition away." The Crooks perimeter passed a generally quiet night with only two rounds of incoming mortar fire and no casualties.

My own battalion, standing guard around the brigade headquarters and airstrip at Catecka, was not so lucky. Sergeant Ernie Savage was in charge of the handful of survivors of Lieutenant Henry Herrick's 2nd Platoon, the Lost Platoon from LZ X-Ray. They had dug deep foxholes in their sector of the Catecka perimeter. At around nine p. m., as I sat in the operations tent, Captain Jerry Whiteside, the artillery coordinator, came in with grief and apprehension written all over his face. He said, "Colonel, our artillery just had a short round land in your Bravo Company lines."

That errant 105mm howitzer shell exploded among the foxholes in Sergeant Savage's sector. PFC Richard C. Clark, nineteen, of Kankakee, Illinois, was asleep on the ground next to the foxhole he shared with Specialist 5 Marlin Dor man. Clark was killed instantly. Specialist 4 Galen Bungum still grieves over what happened. "I just couldn't believe this. He was right next to me inia Drang when we were trapped. We made it through that, we got out of there, and then he gets killed by our own artillery.

Why did Richard Clark have to die that way?"

The next day a dozen or so of my troopers stood waiting for me outside the operations tent in the chill early-morning fog. They were scheduled to leave that day enroute to the United States for discharge upon completion of their terms of service. I had told Sergeant Major Plumley I wanted to speak to each such group before departure. This was the first group to go since the Ia Drang. These young men, each wearing the thousand-yard stare in his old man's eyes, had gone willingly into the inferno at X-Ray knowing that he had only a few days or a week left on Army duty. We had been together for seventeen months now and I knew them well.

I told them how proud I was of each of them, and how they should always hold their heads high for what they had done against such great odds. I told them I would remember them always. Then I walked down the line shaking each man's hand, personally thanking them for what they had done for their country, for their comrades in battle, and for me. It was an emotional moment. They formed in a column of twos and marched off, straight and tall, to the helicopters waiting to take them back to what they called The World.

At LZ Crooks, Bob Mcdade's 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry troopers at last were climbing aboard helicopters that would fly them back to Camp Holloway. Captain Myron Diduryk wrote: "On the 20th, back to Pleiku where we got new fatigues, boots, underwear; had showers, good food, and genuinely rested." Specialist 4 Dick Ackerman remembers it well: "Received new uniforms, boots (they ran out of my size before they got to me), got showers and felt 100 percent better. We spent the night there and next day went back to An Khe base."

Some of the 2nd Battalion officers elected to keep their old fatigues with their name tags and patches. Rick Rescorla says, "We returned to Holloway and for awhile we were buoyed up with the fact that we had survived. All gloomy memories were shoved below the surface. That night, Saturday, Dan Boone, Doc Shucart and a few of us drifted down to the Vietnamese Officers Club. We had showered but still wore our stinking fatigues. The contrast with Albany made the opulent surroundings unreal.

The Vietnamese wives and girlfriends were brilliant in red, green, and blue dresses. Some of our group had the nerve to ask the girls to dance, but most of them sniffed our fatigues and retreated to the powder room.

You couldn't blame them."

Out at the tea plantation, on November 20, the 1 st of the 7th prepared to travel by truck convoy up Provincial Route 5 and Route 14 to Pleiku, and then east on Route 19 over the Mang Yang Pass to An Khe base camp.

We would have to drive through the place where the Viet Minh ambushed French Group Mobile 100 in 1954. I was determined there would be no repeat of history this day. We rehearsed counterambush tactics before loading aboard the deuce-and-ahalfs--twoandahalf-ton Army trucks. The sergeant major and I rode in the back of the first truck in line. The battalion command helicopter would shadow the convoy overhead, with Matt Dillon, Jerry Whiteside, and Charlie Hastings on the radios, just as they were that first day in X-Ray, ready to bring down fire support. The 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry supplied two Huey gunships and two H-13 scout helicopters to fly the route ahead of us. Just before we pulled out I was informed that the division band would play us into An Khe base on our arrival there.

The trip from Catecka to An Khe was hot, dusty, and completely uneventful. When we arrived the division band was nowhere in sight. The 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry had come back to a no-key welcome, but who gave a shit? We were home, and the division commander, Major General Kinnard, came by to visit with the men. When we got to Delta Company and Sergeant Warren Adams, I stopped the division commander and described in detail the damage Adams had done to the enemy with his machine-gun platoon at X-Ray. I told him that Adams had been "acting first sergeant"

of Delta Company for more than eighteen months and fully merited an immediate battlefield promotion to first sergeant. Both the general and the sergeant were taken by surprise. But General Kinnard gave the order, and Adams was promoted the next day.

At noon, November 20, Colonel Tim Brown turned over control of the Ia Drang Valley operation to the division's 2nd Brigade, commanded by Colonel William R. (Ray) Lynch.

Lynch was a battlefield veteran of World War II and Korea. He and his three battalions now assumed responsibility for the continuing operations in Pleiku province.

Late in the afternoon of the twentieth, the 3rd and 6th battalions of the South Vietnamese Airborne Brigade made contact with a battalion of General Chu Huy Man's battle weary People's Army troops hard by the Cambodian border, north of where the Ia Drang crosses. The hapless North Vietnamese battalion had been a bit slow on the withdrawal toward sanctuary in Cambodia and now they would pay the price.

The radio message received by the American gunners who had twenty-four 105mm howitzers set up on LZ Golf and LZ Crooks described the target: "Enemy in the open!" The American advisers with the Vietnamese Airborne task force adjusted the artillery fire by radio, ripping the enemy battalion apart. They reported that at least 127 bodies were strewn over the killing field when the barrage lifted, and that the South Vietnamese were amazed and delighted at the pinpoint accuracy of the American artillerymen. A Vietnamese radio message was received by one of the batteries firing during the action. Translated, it said: "Artillery too close! Artillery too close! But very nice! Keep shooting!"