We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (9 page)

We had a very small group escorting us, maybe forty people total. Some intelligence officers and operations officers on staff. It was a very small, very mobile command group."

Senior General Chu Huy Man, former chief political commissar of the People's Army and until recently a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, is now near eighty years of age. He retired from the army only in 1990. His rank of senior general, the highest in the Vietnamese army, is equivalent to the rank of five-star general in the American army; only five men, including Vo Nguyen Giap, have ever achieved it.

Man's personal story: "I joined the revolutionary movement in 1930, just after the Indochina Communist Party was formed. I was imprisoned in Kontum by the French. In 1945, during the Autumn Revolution, I joined the army and became a regimental commander. I commanded a number of regiments and was involved in most of the campaigns of the French war.

During Dien Bien Phu, I was political commissar of the 316th Division column. General Nguyen Huu An was one of my regimental commanders in the Dien Bien Phu attack. I moved to South Vietnam in 1964.1 was at first stationed in the delta of central Vietnam, then moved to the Central Highlands in 1965." General Man says the arrival of the first American combat troops in South Vietnam, especially the 1st Cavalry Division, forced a major change in plans for the fall-winter offensive as early as June of 1965.

"We used our new plan to lure the tiger out of the mountain. First we attack Plei Me, then the ARVN reinforcements come into our ambush. Then, I was confident, the Americans will use their helicopters to land in our rear, land in the Ia Drang area. It was our intention to draw the Americans out of An Khe. We did not have any plans to liberate the land; only to destroy troops." Man says he employed five battalions in Phase I--one reinforced battalion to besiege Plei Me camp and four to prepare the Route 5 ambush--while a sixth battalion remained in reserve. "We didn't have enough troops," Man says, explaining the failure of the ambush.

The personality of the campaign changed drastically as the North Vietnamese broke off their attack on Plei Me and abandoned the ambush attempt. General Man ordered his 320th and 33rd regiments back to the Chu Pong base-camp area to rest and regroup. The 320th reached a position along the Cambodian border south of Chu Pong practically untouched, but the hard-luck 33rd Regiment, which had suffered heavy casualties and was battle-weary, would endure additional blows on its retreat west, harassed relentlessly by the Air Cavalry troops of the 1st Brigade.

Captured documents and prisoner interrogations revealed that by the time it reached the Chu Pong base area, the 33rd PAVN Regiment was reporting that some forty percent of its officers and men, including two of the three battalion commanders, had been killed. The 33rd had lost virtually all of its eighteen 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine guns and eleven mortars, and the 1st Battalion, 33rd Regiment, which conducted the siege of Plei Me, was down to only one company of effectives. General An says that the 33rd Regiment was given some replacements and built back to a strength of about nine hundred when it reached the base camp. But the general's hopes and plans now revolved around the newly arrived 66th Regiment, which had had no part in the Plei Me attacks.

General Man's three regiments regrouped in the Ia Drang-Chu Pong base area. The region had been a Viet Minh sanctuary during the long war with the French. The Viet Minh's successors, the Viet Cong, had made limited use of the Ia Drang as a hiding place during the years since 1954.

General Man could think of no more ideal place for his secret base and staging area for the 1965-1966 campaign. It had ample water for cooking, cleaning, drinking, and caring for casualties. It had deep, wooded defiles and jungle-covered valleys for basing troops, locating hospitals, and storing supplies. Under the jungle canopy were excellent training areas and wide trails on which troops could move, even during the day, without being detected from the air. Best of all, the Ia Drang Valley was convenient to the inviolable sanctuary across the Cambodian border.

The North Vietnamese porters had hauled, on their sturdy bicycles and pack horses, huge quantities of rice, peanuts, and salt, as well as big cans of cooking oil, to stockpile for the troops. Others brought in tons of ammunition, weapons, EE-8 field phones, and WD-30 communication wire.

One huge North Vietnamese supply depot was spread over a square mile across the Ia Drang, less than three miles north of a large clearing at the base of the Chu Pong massif.

The 66th Regiment of the B-3 Front was composed of the 7th, 8th, and 9th battalions, each at or near its full strength of forty officers and 515 enlisted men. Still on the trail and scheduled to arrive in mid-November was a battalion of 120mm mortars and a battalion of badly needed antiaircraft guns. General Man could also call on the local veterans of the H-15 Main Force Viet Cong Battalion, six hundred strong, for duty as porters, guides, and fighters.

October and early November had not been the best of times for General Man. If the old plan to take Pleiku and attack down Route 19 to the coast had indeed been abandoned by Hanoi, and a new one substituted whose focus was to learn how to fight the new American combat troops, the lesson was proving very costly. The game of foxes and hounds, as played by John B. Stockton's 1st Squadron of the 9th Cavalry, had been won hands down by the hounds.

But General Man was about to get what he says he wanted: decisive engagement with a battalion of American cavalry soldiers right in his own backyard. And where were the enemy when the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry came calling? Uncomfortably close. According to Man, An, and Phuong, most of the 33rd Regiment was dispersed in a two-mile line along the eastern face of the Chu Pong. The 9th Battalion, 66th Regiment was five hundred yards south and west of a large clearing near the base of the mountain. The 7th Battalion, 66th Regiment was on the ridge line above that clearing, not more than ninety minutes' marching time away. The 8th Battalion, 66th Regiment was half a day's march to the northeast across the Ia Drang. The H-15 Viet Cong Battalion was perhaps eight hours distant. The 320th Regiment was over on the Cambodian border, ten miles northwest.

General An says: "When you landed here, you landed right in the middle of three of our battalions of the 66th Regiment, our reserve force. It was the strongest we had. [At] full strength the battalions each had about four hundred fifty men. Also, there was a headquarters battalion.

The regiment's total strength was about sixteen hundred men."

When it came time to give a code name, for map and radio identification, to that clearing we finally chose for our landing at the base of Chu Pong, Captain Dillon, my operations officer, did the honors. He normally picked short words-- the names of animals or birds; one-digit numbers; the letters of the alphabet as expressed by the NATO phonetic system.

That day, he went with the letter "X"--or

"X-Ray," in the NATO alphabet.

The North Vietnamese in 1965 also used code letters, to shield the identities of their regiments. General An says the code letter for the 66th Regiment at that time was "X."

Thus was the stage set.

XRAY INTO THE VALLEY

The great joy of the Cavalry was to be so far away, out in the clean air, the open spaces, away from those damned councils. Buford ... felt the beautiful absence of a commander, a silence above him, a windy freedom.

--Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels Sergeant Major Plumley and I rolled out of our ponchos at the old French fort outside the barbed wire at Plei Me Special Forces Camp. It was 4:30 on Sunday morning, November 14, and the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry had work to do today. We walked back to the operations tent, which was manned around the clock. No change in our orders had come through overnight. But over a cup of coffee, Matt Dillon passed along one interesting piece of information that the radio relay intercept team attached to our headquarters had come up with. Says Dillon: "They had made an intercept of a coded message in Mandarin dialect, like a situation report, from a position somewhere on a line from Plei Me camp directly through a clearing at the base of Chu Pong mountain. The intelligence lieutenant had a map with a line drawn on it. He said that the radio transmitter was somewhere on this line. I don't remember how long that message was--that

74 X-RAY didn't really bother me. It was the direction it came from. The lieutenant said he thought that possibly there was a North Vietnamese regiment somewhere out there near Chu Pong mountain."

Plumley and I shaved, breakfasted on C-rations, and drank some black coffee. Then I got my pack and ammunition ready and cleaned my M-16 rifle and .45-caliber pistol. As day broke that morning it was cool and fresh at Plei Me, with patches of wispy ground fog. This was the middle of the dry season and the sun just peeking over the horizon promised that the day would be a hot one.

John Herren and his Bravo Company troops were flying in from brigade headquarters in Chinook helicopters; I walked out to the dirt strip to meet him and brief the air-reconnaissance party. The same Chinooks that brought in Bravo Company then picked up the big guns of Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 21st Artillery, to move them out to Landing Zone Falcon where they would support our air assault deeper into the valley.

Herren's men moved off to relax in the brush south of the airstrip. They had time to eat, refill their canteens, and check and clean their weapons. Unfortunately they were not as fresh as they should have been.

Brigade headquarters had kept them on hundred-percent alert all night.

I walked over to Bruce Crandall's Huey and quickly briefed those who would accompany us on the recon flight over the Ia Drang Valley. Colonel Tim Brown had told us generally where he wanted us to operate after the landing, but we now had to select a landing zone, and preferably one that would take as many of our sixteen Hueys as possible at one time.

All of us would have preferred not to make an air-recon flight at all.

We didn't want to spook the enemy in, the area and possibly alert them to an imminent landing. But we could not choose a landing zone for this assault simply by looking at a 1:50,000 map; we had to overfly the area.

We would minimize the chances of discovery by flying high, around 4,500 feet, and pass well to the southeast of the Chu Pong massif on a straight-line flight to the vicinity of Due Co Special Forces Camp. After orbiting the camp for five minutes we would fly a slightly different return route. Our hope was that any enemy commander in the area would reckon that the two lift ships and the two gunships were on other business in other areas. With binoculars we would be scanning for the right clearing: one with few obstacles and plenty of space.

The flight went precisely as planned. We took no antiaircraft fire and saw no enemy activity; on our return to Plei Me camp we quickly settled on three possible landing zones: X-Ray, Tango, and Yankee. Major Henri (Pete) Mallet, the 3rd Brigade operations officer, flew in with a half page "frag" from Colonel Brown. One of our landing-zone options, Yankee, was about one mile south of the designated area of operations.

It was on sloping ground but could take only six or eight Hueys. A possibility. Tango was in the middle of the valley and closer to the Ia Drang by a mile or so, which was good. But it was too small--it could handle only two or three Hueys at once--and, worse yet, it was almost a well, encircled by very tall trees. The pilots hated wells. To land, they had to slow almost to a hover, then drop into the well. Hovering helicopters are juicy targets. We crossed off Tango. That left X-Ray. It was flat; the trees around it weren't all that tall; and it locked as though it could take up to eight helicopters at one time.

I told the command group that I had tentatively decided on the clearing called X-Ray but wanted some more information. Turning to Captain Rickard, the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Scout section leader, I asked him to take his tiny two-man H-13 observation helicopters on a fast nap-of-the earth flight through the target area to pick up more details on X-Ray, Yankee, and the surrounding area.

By now all the company commanders had assembled at A frag, or fragmentary order, is an abbreviated version of a commander's directive concerning his plan for a military mission.

the battalion command post. While we waited for the scout helicopters to return with their reports, I again urged the company commanders to make certain every rifleman had at least the basic load of three hundred rounds of ammo and two hand grenades plus as much additional ammunition as he felt he could carry. Each of the M-79 grenadiers should have at least thirty-six of the fat little 40mm rounds. Each squad should be carrying two of the new LAW (light antitank weapon) rockets for bunker-busting and taking out machinegun crews. And I reminded the commanders of follow-on units waiting for their turn to ride into the landing zone to stay tuned to the command net and listen to what was going on so they wouldn't be in the dark about the situation at X-Ray when they finally got there.

Now the scout pilots returned and reported. Landing Zone Yankee could be used, the scout pilots reported, but it would be risky because it was covered with old tree stumps. X-Ray definitely could take eight to ten Hueys at a time. Finally, they said they had spotted commo wire--a phone line-- running east to west on a trail north of X-Ray. That tipped the balance in favor of X-Ray, because it offered certain evidence that there were enemy soldiers in the immediate area. X-Ray would be the assault landing zone, with Tango and Yankee as alternates.

At 8:50 a. m., on the west end of the Plei Me strip, I issued orders to the assembled company commanders, liaison officers, pilots, and staff: Assault into LZ X-Ray to search for and destroy the enemy. Bravo Company lands first, accompanied by my command group, then Alpha, then Charlie, and then Delta companies. Bravo and Alpha will move northwest on my order. Charlie Company will move southwest toward the mountain, likewise on my order. Delta Company will control all mortars. The recon and machinegun platoons will be battalion reserve. Artillery will fire eight minutes each on Yankee and Tango for deception, then a twenty-minute preparatory fire on X-Ray and adjacent areas. Thirty seconds of aerial rocket artillery and thirty seconds of helicopter gunship prep fire would follow. The battalion rear command post, run by my executive officer, Major Herman Wirth, and our supply point and medical-aid station would both shift forward to Landing Zone Falcon, where the two artillery batteries were located.