We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (6 page)

The move saved the day, but it also cooked Stockton's goose: General Knowles said he had ordered Stockton to obtain his explicit permission before committing Ted Danielsen's Alpha Company troops to action. The incident ended with Stockton being transferred to a staff job in Saigon, and the division losing one of its most controversial and successful battalion commanders.

Whatever else ensued, division headquarters did not at that time move to exploit the success of Stockton's ambush and pursue the considerable number of enemy reinforcements who had just arrived off the Ho Chi Minn Trail. Instead, on November 6 orders were issued for the 1st Brigade to return to An Khe and for the 3rd Brigade to take the field in Pleiku province, effective November 10.

The 3rd Brigade battalions, under Colonel Tim Brown, were my 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry; Lieutenant Colonel Robert Mcdade's 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry; and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Tully's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry. Mcdade, a Korean War veteran, had been the division personnel officer (G-1) for nearly two years and had been given command of our sister battalion in late October.

On November 9, Colonel Brown and I went to the division's forward command post in Pleiku for a briefing on the battlefield situation. The intelligence map hanging on the wall had a large red star on the Chu Pong massif above the Ia Drang Valley, west of Plei Me. I asked one of the briefers what significance that star had, and he replied: "Enemy base camp." The next day my battalion was flown from An Khe to brigade field headquarters in the Catecka Tea Plantation, where Colonel Brown's staff briefed us and gave me my mission: to conduct an air assault five miles east of Plei Me, and find and kill the enemy. I was surprised and puzzled. All the 1st Brigade contact with the enemy had been west of Plei Me, yet they were ordering us to beat the bushes in a different direction. Then there was that big red star on the intelligence map, which indicated that the biggest target of all was way out west.

BOOTS AND SADDLES Come on, boys, and grab your sabers Come on, boys, and ride with me.

Give the cry of "Garry Owen," Make your place in history.

--author unknown, Vietnam, 1965

Before our air assault on the target area, Captain Matt Dillon and I flew a brief, high-altitude helicopter recon mission, selecting landing zones and forming the operation plan. During the flight we spotted a small Jarai Montagnard village, and I made a note to warn the troops that there were civilians, either friendly or at least neutral, in the area. And I decided to forgo using artillery or tactical air-prep fires before landing. Most of the clearings in that area were Montagnard slash-and-burn farm fields. Bad enough we had to land helicopters and men to trample through their pitiful yarn and cassava patches; we didn't need to plow them up with the heavy stuff or cause civilian casualties.

We shuttled the battalion in on sixteen Huey troop-transport choppers, called slicks to differentiate them from the rocket- and machine gun-carrying Huey gunships. Plumley and I landed with the first elements of Captain Tony Nadal's Alpha Company. There was no resistance, but the clearing was occupied--by half a dozen Montagnard men and women, all bare to the waist and busy cutting brush. They disappeared swiftly into the heavy jungle. I was glad we had skipped the prep fires.

For the next two and a half days we ran small-unit patrols throughout the area. UPI reporter Joe Galloway, a twenty three-year-old native of Refugio, Texas, marched with us. Earlier, Joe had wangled a helicopter ride into the Plei Me Special Forces Camp while it was under siege and, because of the shortage of fighters, found himself assigned to man a .30-caliber light machine gun. When he hooked up with us, he carried on his shoulder an M-16 rifle, which the Special Forces commander. Major Charles Beckwith, had handed him when the Plei Me fight was over.

Galloway told Beckwith that, strictly speaking, under the Geneva Convention he was "a civilian noncombatant." Beckwith's response: "No such thing in these mountains, boy. Take the rifle."

Galloway remembers: "My first time out with Hal Moore's 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry was a hellish walk in the sun to a remote Montagnard mountain village. We got into a patch of brush and wait-a-minute vines so thick and thorny that every step had to be carved out with machetes.

We covered maybe three hundred yards in four hours, and forded a fast-running, chest-deep mountain stream just as darkness fell, then huddled in our ponchos, wet and freezing, all night long.

"At first light I pinched off a small piece of C-4 plastic explosive from the emergency supply in my pack and used it to boil up a canteen cup of water for coffee. If you lit C-4 very carefully you could be drinking hot coffee in maybe thirty seconds; if you were careless it blew your arm off. Over a first cigarette I watched Moore's men. First, they shaved. Shaved? Up here? I was amazed. Then the colonel himself, blond, jut-jawed, and very intense, a son of Bardstown, Kentucky, and West Point, walked by on his morning rounds with Sergeant Major Plumley.

Moore looked me over and said: ' all shave in my outfit--reporters included.' My steaming coffee water went for a wash and a shave, and I gained a measure of respect for the man."

That day we came to a Montagnard village, deep in the mountains. A toothless old man emerged from the long house, fumbling with the buttons on a tattered old French army tunic and proudly waving a small French tricolor flag, certain that the comrades of his younger days had at last returned. I'm not certain that the situation and our nationality were ever explained to his satisfaction.

Our medics treated the sick and injured, while Tom Metsker and an interpreter sought information on any enemy in the area. They drew a blank on possible enemy, but the medics turned up one young boy with a badly burned arm, who needed hospital treatment. The village leader and the boy's father finally agreed to his evacuation. The medics called in an American helicopter to carry out the child, who had been wounded by fire from another American helicopter.

The boy and his father, carrying a jug of water, a large chunk of raw meat wrapped in green leaves, and a crossbow, climbed aboard quivering with fright. They had crossed from the fifteenth century to the twentieth in a matter of minutes. Galloway, watching and photographing the scene, thought to himself: "Nothing is simple in this war; maybe it never is in any war." We continued patrolling south and east, finding nothing and growing more frustrated by the hour.

Turns out we weren't the only ones who were frustrated. General Dick Knowles was decidedly unhappy with the lack of results. Says Knowles: "Conventional wisdom indicated that the enemy had drifted into an area southeast of Pleiku and we were directed to conduct operations there.

Shortly after the operation started, Major General Stanley (Swede) Larsen, the Corps commander, visited us and asked how things were going.

I told him we had no contact to speak of and didn't expect any.

Whereupon Larsen asked, ' are you conducting operations there?' My response: ''s what your order in writing directed us to do.' The general answered that our primary mission was: Find the enemy and go after him."

Knowles knew what to do with that kind of guidance. In the late afternoon of November 12, he flew south from Pleiku in his command helicopter looking for Colonel Tim Brown, who was with me in the field.

He climbed out of the chopper, cigar in hand, and asked how it was going. Brown, who seldom wasted words, replied: "Dry hole, sir." Knowles turned to me: What do you think? "Nothing here, General; we're just wearing out the troops." He turned back to Brown: "Tim, what do you think about heading west--a long jump into the Ia Drang Valley?" Brown said that would be better than here: "From what I remember, your G-2 said something about a base camp out there."

Knowles gave us the go sign. Later he would say that he gave that order "based on strong instincts and flimsy intelligence." In minutes Knowles and Brown boarded their helicopters and were gone. I told my staff to do a map study of the Ia Drang Valley and begin planning an operation. I had no doubt that my battalion would be chosen to mount the attack into the Ia Drang. To date Brown had given the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry every job in which there was a possibility of contact with the enemy.

The 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, his other battalion, had a new commander and staff and Brown was trying to break them in gently.

Knowles, Brown, and I were comfortable with each other. We had worked together closely for the last eighteen months. They knew their stuff on airmobility and helicopter warfare, and I had gone to school on them.

They knew they could count on me, and I knew they would provide all the support I needed, sometimes even before I knew I needed it. General Harry Kinnard had fostered that kind of leadership in the 1st Cavalry Division. Kinnard came out of the great Airborne school of thought that authority has to be pushed down to the man on the spot, because you never know where leaders will land when units jump out of airplanes.

What was true for parachute operations was likewise true for fast moving airmobile combat units leapfrogging across difficult terrain.

Early on Saturday, November 13, Colonel Brown shifted my battalion to new areas south and southwest of Plei Me, where we again conducted patrols from widely scattered company bases. We set up the battalion command post in an old French fort just outside the fence of the Plei Me Special Forces Camp. The American Special Forces often located their camps on the sites of old French army posts, strategically situated on Communist infiltration routes.

The enemy had not changed, nor had the need to keep track of his movements. In almost every case the French had chosen well, locating these eyes-and-ears posts so that they covered the most logical enemy routes through these rugged mountains. But for the French army, and for their American successors as well, these patrol bases were remote and isolated, far from help, which was tied to bad roads. They were tempting targets, often attacked and. sometimes overwhelmed and overrun.

Each leg of this triangular fort was a heavily overgrown six- to eight-foot-high wall of dirt about ninety yards long. Long years of disuse, and the annual monsoon rains, had crumbled the firing positions, the steps, and the walls themselves. The adjacent Special Forces camp, also triangular, didn't look all that much better. During the late-October siege, Plei Me camp had been attacked by mortars, sappers, and a storm of machine-gun and small-arms fire, and the few flimsy, tin-roofed structures that the enemy hadn't blown up had been beaten up by big pallets of supplies that U.S. Air Force transport planes had dropped in by parachute.

That afternoon Colonel Brown ordered me to send a rifle company back to Catecka Tea Plantation to help secure the defense perimeter around his 3rd Brigade command post for the night. Captain John Herren's Bravo Company drew that assignment. The night before, at 11:23 p. m., an estimated two companies of Viet Cong guerrillas had attacked the brigade headquarters and nearby aviation-fuel storage and engineer facilities. The attack was beaten off in an hour, but seven Americans were killed and twenty-three were wounded. Six enemy dead, clad in black pajamas, were found.

Not a quarter-mile through the tea bushes from Brown's tents stood a lovely white colonial mansion. The French plantation manager lived there, and if you strolled the road you caught glimpses of young women in bikinis taking the sun beside the swimming pool. The mansion had been neither mortared nor attacked the night before. Army intelligence said the French owners paid the Viet Cong a million piasters a year in protection money and paid the Saigon government three million piasters a year in taxes. The plantation billed the U.S. government $50 for each tea bush and $250 for each rubber tree damaged by combat operations.

Just one more incongruity.

That afternoon, Saturday, November 13, Joe Galloway hitched a lift from Pleiku out to Catecka to Brown's headquarters. He says: "Two French correspondents who had ridden out with me wangled an invitation to spend the night with their countryman in the mansion. I dug a foxhole under one of those $50 tea bushes out on the perimeter around brigade headquarters with Bravo Company. Dug it deep, set out some spare magazines for the rifle, and settled in to celebrate my twenty-fourth birthday with a can of C-ration peaches and another can of pound cake.

The word was that Hal Moore's battalion would launch deep into the bush the next morning."

Galloway had the word and the word was right. He may have gotten it before I did. At about four p.m. Captain Tony Nadal and his Alpha Company troopers were out patrolling when they came on the clear waters of the small Glae River. Nadal approved a request for small parties of his men, under guard, to take turns bathing and washing up. "I was going back with First Sergeant [Arthur J.] Newton and a couple of other guys when I heard rockets firing," Nadal remembers.

"We ran back and found our own helicopters had dumped a bunch of rockets on us in two strafing runs. I got on the radio screaming: ' this goddamn thing away from me!' "

Sergeant Major Plumley and I flew to the scene and met with Nadal and Major Roger (Black Bart) Bartholomew, commander of the aerial rocket artillery helicopter company, who had flown in to investigate. It seems that a unit of our sister battalion--2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry--had screwed up the map coordinates when calling for fire support. Four of Nadal's men were wounded and carried out by medical evacuation choppers.

Not long after, Colonel Brown flew in, checked on the situation with Alpha Company, and then called me aside. "Hal, I'm moving your battalion west tomorrow morning," he said, unfolding his map. "Here is your area of operations-- north of Chu Pong in the Ia Drang Valley. Your mission is the same one you have now: Find and kill the enemy." He rapidly outlined the scope of the operation and the resources he could spare: sixteen UH-1D Hueys to move my troops, two 105mm howitzer batteries within range to support us, and at least two days on the ground patrolling.

He added that Alpha Company of the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion would provide the helicopters; the 229th's A Company commander, Major Bruce Crandall, was on the way now. "One more thing, Hal. In that area be sure your companies are close enough for mutual support." After he left, I alerted Captain Nadal to what was coming and flew back to the old French fort. On the way, I jotted notes on what needed to be done and radioed Matt Dillon, my operations officer, telling him to put out a warning order to the other company commanders and support units and get the staff together. We had a lot to do and not much time to do it in.