We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (53 page)

On November 29, 1965, the brass descended on An Khe for detailed briefings on the Ia Drang battles. The party was led by Secretary of Defense Robert S. Mcnamara and included the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle K. Wheeler; the Army Chief of Staff, General Harold K. Johnson; General Westmoreland; and Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief, Pacific (CINCPAC).

I was told to brief Mcnamara and party on the fight at LZ X-Ray. I had heard that the secretary of defense had a fearsome reputation as a human computer, insensitive to people. Mcnamara sat in the front row in the tent briefing room, filled with commanders and staff officers. I talked without notes, using a map and pointer, for perhaps fifteen minutes. When I wrapped up, saying, "Sir, that completes my presentation," there was dead silence.

Mcnamara stood, stepped forward, and without a word extended his hand, looking into my eyes. He asked no questions, made no comments.

After the Mcnamara briefing, still without a new job, I was given a tent and a typist in 3rd Brigade headquarters and got down to work writing my after-action report on X-Ray. It took nine days and three drafts. I arranged for the Air Force to fly a photo recon mission over the Chu Pong massif, the Ia Drang Valley, and the clearing at X-Ray to illustrate the report. On December 9, 1965, I signed the final version and forwarded it to Colonel Tim Brown. Then it went up to Major General Harry Kinnard, who read it and then made certain that copies were distributed to every branch school in the U.S. Army as a teaching tool.

While I was working on the report I received word that Air Force Lieutenant Charlie Hastings, our fearless and superb forward air controller at X-Ray, had been shot down over the Mang Yang Pass while flying an O-1E Bird Dog spotter plane. The good news was that Charlie was alive; the bad news was that he had been severely burned in the crash. He had been evacuated to the Army hospital at Fort Bliss, El Paso, a town full of retired 7th U.S. Cavalry veterans of World War II and Korea. I passed the word to all of them: Charlie Hastings is one of us, a Garry Owen trooper. Take care of him.

The 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry was still carrying four men missing in action after the Albany fight. To the horror of Captain George Forrest, the commander of Alpha Company, 1 st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, it became clear in December that one of his soldiers was also missing at Albany.

He says, "This was a 2nd Platoon soldier, PFC John R. Ackerman. The one thing that had always been drilled into us was accountability: You must account for every man. I was positive we had gotten all our dead and wounded out. When Acker man's name came up, before we left, somebody in his squad said they saw him loaded onto a medevac helicopter.

"Then, in December, we got a letter from his mother saying she had not heard from him. I initiated action through the division personnel officer, searching for any record of him in any of the Army hospitals worldwide. There was no record. It was my worst nightmare come true.

When we went back to the Ia Drang in April 1966, I spent a day stomping around Albany. At that point I got an appreciation for what we had been in, our position on the ground in relation to the main part of the ambush.

"We found PFC Ackerman's remains, right about where the 2nd Platoon had been. We found his boots and helmet. In those days we tied one of our dog tags into the laces of a boot [and] wore the other around our neck.

We found his dog tag with his boots. That put that to rest. On that day they found four more MIAs out there from Mcdade's battalion. You know, all of this breaks your heart," says Forrest.

By then I was the 3rd Brigade commander; the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry was part of my brigade. I decided if we ever went back into the Ia Drang I would personally lead a thorough search for those four missing men. On the morning of April 6, 1966, Sergeant Major Basil Plumley, Matt Dillon, and I took a platoon of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cav and air-assaulted into Landing Zone Albany. No enemy presence. In a matter of minutes we located the remains of eight soldiers, all in one fifteen-by-twenty-yard piece of ground near the three anthills in the center of the clearing.

Some of them were clearly American, as evidenced by fragments of green fatigue uniform material, GI web gear, and GI boots. Their steel helmets lay nearby. Other remains were mixed in; just fragments and bones. We touched nothing, but called in the Graves Registration people, who removed all the remains and associated gear. Four sets of the remains were positively identified as the 2nd Battalion's MIAs; the rest were Vietnamese.

With that operation the 1st Cavalry Division balanced the books and closed a sad chapter on the fight at Albany. Five coffins could begin the long journey home, and five American mothers who had already suffered too much would no longer suffer the agonies of not knowing whether their sons were alive and prisoners, or dead and abandoned in the jungle. And Captain George Forrest and I could sleep a little better at night for the rest of our lives.

"THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY REGRETS ... "

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

--Plato The guns were at last silent in the valley. The dying was done, but the suffering had only just begun. The men of the 1st Cavalry Division had done what was asked of them. The Army field morgues were choked with the bodies of more than 230 soldiers wrapped in their green rubber ponchos.

More than 240 maimed and wounded troopers moved slowly along the chain from battlefield aid station to medical clearing station to field hospital, and onto the ambulance transport planes.

Some whose wounds would heal soon enough for eventual return to duty in Vietnam were flown only as far as Army hospitals in Japan. The most seriously injured were flown to the Philippines; their conditions were stabilized at the hospital at Clark Field, and then they were loaded onto planes that would take them to military hospitals near their homes in the United States.

Sergeant Robert Jemison, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, would spend thirty-two months in Army hospitals. PFC James Young of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, would check out of the Army hospital in Denver with a bullet hole in the side of his skull, borrowed clothes on his back and discharge papers in hand, and make it home to Missouri in time for Christmas, 1965.

Specialist 4 Clinton Poley of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, wearing the terrible scars of three separate bullet wounds and judged seventy percent disabled, got home to Iowa in plenty of time for spring plowing and planting.

But on November 18, 1965, in the sleepy southern town of Columbus, Georgia, half a world away from Vietnam, the first of the telegrams that would shatter the lives of the innocents were already arriving from Washington. The war was so new and the casualties to date so few that the Army had not even considered establishing the casualty-notification teams that later in the war would personally deliver the bad news and stay to comfort a young widow or elderly parents until friends and relatives could arrive. In Columbus, in November and December 1965, Western Union simply handed the telegrams over to Yellow Cab drivers to deliver.

The driver who brought the message of the death in battle of Sergeant Billy R. Elliott, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav, to his wife, Sara, was blind drunk and staggering. As Mrs. Elliott stood in the doorway of her tiny bungalow, clutching the yellow paper, the bearer of the bad tidings fell backward off her porch and passed out in her flower bed. Then the Army briefly lost her husband's body on its journey home.

When a taxi driver woke up the very young, and very pregnant, Hispanic wife of a 1st Battalion trooper at two a.m. and held out the telegram, the woman fainted dead away. The driver ran next door and woke up the neighbors to come help. The new widow could not speak or read English, but she knew what that telegram said.

The knock on the door at the home of Sergeant Jeremiah (Jerry) Jivens of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry came at four a.m. Betty Jivens Mapson was fourteen at the time: "I have told the story before to friends about how the taxi drivers used to deliver the telegrams to families who'd lost loved ones over there. Today it almost sounds unbelievable. Luckily, my Mom's sister lived with us and was with her when the knock came at our door at 4 a.m. My Mom collapsed completely as this stranger handed the telegram to us. How cold and inhuman, I thought."

In Columbus that terrible autumn, someone had to do the right thing since the Army wasn't organized to do it. For the families of the casualties of the 1 st Battalion, 7th Cavalry that someone was my wife, Julia Compton Moore, daughter of an Army colonel, wife of a future Army general, and mother of five small children, including two sons who would follow me to West Point and the Army.

Julie talks of those days as a time of fear; a time when the mere sight of a Yellow Cab cruising through a neighborhood struck panic in the hearts of the wives and children of soldiers serving in Vietnam. As the taxicabs and telegrams spread misery and grief, Julie followed them to the trailer courts and thin-walled apartment complexes and boxy bungalows, doing her best to comfort those whose lives had been destroyed. Two of those widows she can never forget: The widow of Sergeant Jerry Jivens, who received her with great dignity and presence in the midst of such sorrow, and that frightened young Hispanic widow, pregnant with a boy child who would come into this world in March without a father.

When the coffins began arriving home, my wife attended the funeral of all but one of the 1 st Battalion, 7th Cavalry troopers who were buried at the Fort Benning cemetery. The first funeral at Benning for a 1 st Battalion casualty was that of Sergeant Jack Gell of Alpha Company.

Julie turned on the evening news, and there on television was the saddest sight she had ever seen: one of my beloved troopers being buried and Fort Benning had not notified her. She called Survivors Assistance and told them in no uncertain terms that they must inform her of every 1st Battalion death notification and of every funeral for a 1st Battalion soldier at the post cemetery.

Julie recalls, "I was so fearful when I began calling on the widows that I would be very unwelcome, because it was my husband who ordered their husbands into battle. I thought of a million reasons why I should not go, but my father called me and told me to go, so I went. They were so happy to see me and they were so proud of their husbands. That was a little something that they still had to hang onto. There were thirteen widows from the 1st Battalion still living in that little town."

The same duty for the dead of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry was done by Mrs. Frank Henry, wife of the battalion executive officer, and Mrs. James Scott, wife of the battalion sergeant major, since the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Mcdade, was a bachelor at that time.

Kornelia Scott's first visit was to the home of Mrs. Martin Knapp, widow of a sergeant in Delta Company, 2nd Battalion, to offer condolences and assistance.

"There was immense grief and bitterness. So immense, that one widow was bitter that her husband had been killed and mine only wounded. Names, addresses and faces became a blur, especially when we started attending the funerals at Ft. Benning in late November and early December," says Mrs. Scott.

Mrs. Harry Kinnard, wife of the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, and many others went public with their criticism of the heartless taxicab telegrams, and the Army swiftly organized proper casualty-notification teams consisting of a chaplain and an accompanying officer. Nobody intended for this cruelty to happen. Everyone, including the Army, was taken totally by surprise by the magnitude of the casualties that had burst on the American scene at LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany.

But even after the Army teams were formed and the procedure was changed, it was months before a Yellow Cab could travel the streets of Columbus without spreading fear and pain in its wake. My wife remembers: "In December a taxi driver carrying a couple of young lieutenants stopped at my house. I hid behind the curtains, thinking, If I don't answer the door I won't have to hear the bad news. Then I decided: ' on, Julie, face up to it.' I opened the door and he asked me for directions to some address and I just about fainted. I told him: ''t you ever do that to me again!' The poor man told me that he understood, that all the taxi drivers had hated that terrible duty."

Far to the north, in Redding, Connecticut, the village messenger, an elderly man, knocked hesitantly on the door of John J. and Camille Geoghegan. Although the telegram was addressed to Mrs. Barbara Geoghegan, wife of Lieutenant John Lance (Jack) Geoghegan, the messenger knew what it said and he knew that Jack Geoghegan was the only child of that family.

As the Geoghegans read the news, the messenger broke down, quivering and weeping and asking over an dover again if there was anything he could do to help them. Before they could deal with their own grief, the Geoghegans first had to deal with his; they hugged and comforted the messenger and helped him pull himself together for the long trip back to town through the deepening gloom.

Barbara Geoghegan was away that day; she had gone to New Rochelle, New York, to stay with her husband's elderly aunt. The aunt's husband had died on this date two years earlier and the family thought someone should be there to comfort her on so tragic an anniversary. When the Geoghegans telephoned Barbara with the news, she was writing her ninety-third letter to Jack, a letter filled, as usual, with news of their baby daughter, Camille. The next morning, in the mailbox at home, she found Jack's last letter to her. He wrote, "I had a chance to go on R and R, but my men are going into action. I cannot and will not leave them now."

When Captain Tom Metsker left for Vietnam in August of 1965, his wife, Catherine, and baby daughter, Karen, four teen months old, moved home to Indiana to be near her family. Tom's father was in the U.S. Foreign Service, stationed in Monrovia, Liberia. Catherine recalls: "I finally got a teaching job to occupy my time and save some money. The first day was to be Monday, November 15. On that Sunday night, November 14,1 was sick with a cold and fever. How could I start my new job? The phone rang. It was my uncle: There is a telegram for you.' Probably a message from Tom's parents in Liberia, I thought. ' it and read it to me,' I told him. the secretary of the army regrets to inform you ... Tom was dead."