We Are Soldiers Still

Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061982835
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

"Powerful.... A candid, highly informative, and heartfelt tale of forgiveness between former fierce enemies in the Vietnam War." — St. Petersburg Times

The #1 New York Times bestseller We Were Soldiers Once... and Young brought to life one of the most pivotal and heartbreaking battles of the Vietnam War. In this powerful sequel, Lt. Gen Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway bring us up to date on the cadre of soldiers introduced in their first memoir.

Returning to Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley more than four decades after the battle, Moore and Galloway renew their relationships with ten American veterans of the fabled conflict—and with former adversaries—exploring how the war changed them all, as well as their two countries. We Are Soldiers Still is an emotional journey back to hallowed ground, putting a human face on warfare as the authors reflect on war's devastating cost. The book includes an Introduction by Gen H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

ONE

Back to Our Battlefields

For us it was an irresistible urge that gnawed at us for nearly three decades—a need to return and walk the blood-drenched soil of the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam, where two great armies clashed head-on in the first major battle of a war that lasted ten years and consumed the lives of 58,256 Americans and perhaps as many as 2 million Vietnamese.

Joe and I had tried twice before, in 1991 and again in 1992, to reach the Ia Drang during our research trips to Vietnam. The Vietnamese government officials in Hanoi had flatly refused permission for such a journey, uncertain whether we had some hidden agenda among the restive Montagnard tribal people in the Central Highlands where our battlefields were located. Or perhaps because our battlefields were located just five miles from the Cambodian border and Khmer Rouge guerrillas had been raiding across the border in that area, creating havoc in the thinly scattered villages near that border.

When we suggested on our 1992 visit that we might simply hire a car and set off south to visit the Ia Drang, our Foreign Ministry minder pointedly said if we left Hanoi on such a mission we would be “followed by a car full of people; not very nice people; and we won’t be able to help you then.” Only with the publication of Joe’s cover article on the Ia Drang in U.S. News & World Report and the release of our book—both translated into Vietnamese and very carefully read in Hanoi—did the roadblocks fall in the fall of 1993.

We had proved by our writings that our only desire was to accurately report what had happened in the Ia Drang Valley, and we were just as interested in their version of this slice of history as we were in our own. Visit by visit, article by article, our hosts warmed to us personally and to our quest for the ground truth about battles that had deeply affected our lives and theirs.

There was another important factor: The world had changed. Communism had died in the Soviet Union and was being transformed in neighboring China. The rise of the Asian tigers—capitalist neighbors like Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, whose economies were booming—had not gone unnoticed by Hanoi. They were maneuvering to gain initial diplomatic recognition by Washington and were seeking foreign investment and most-favored-nation trade terms. This would not come for another year. Communism was alive in Vietnam but it was busy putting on a new face.

Now, in October 1993, a chartered Soviet-made Hind helicopter was lifting off the runway at the old Camp Holloway airfield at Pleiku in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The two Vietnamese civilian pilots confessed up front that they had no idea where, in that rugged plateau that butted up against the Cambodian border, the football-field-sized clearing code-named Landing Zone X-Ray was located. So Bruce Crandall, one of the most experienced pilots in Army Aviation, and I knelt in the narrow space between them in the cockpit, unfolded my old and detailed Army battle map, and, using Joe Galloway’s even more ancient Boy Scout compass, pointed the way to the place where our nightmares were born.

In the back of the rattling old helicopter was an assemblage of American and North Vietnamese military men, old soldiers all, who were journeying together to a place where we had all done our very best to kill each other in one month of ambush and assault and set-piece battles in November 1965. It was here that the men of America’s 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and those of the 66th, 32nd, and 33rd regiments of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) had tested each other in the crucible of combat. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 North Vietnamese regulars had been killed or wounded. A total of 305 Americans had died and another 400-plus had been wounded in that time of testing. No one who fought there, on either side, talked seriously about who won and who lost. In such a slaughterhouse there are no winners, only survivors.

What had now brought this little group of survivors together to travel back to a painful shared history? It was, of all things, a book published a year earlier that opened long-closed doors and allowed us to make this needed journey. The book was We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, written by Joe and myself.

We were bound, in this thirty-five-mile flight, for the jungled mountain plateau near the Cambodian border where I had led my beloved troopers of the 1st Battalion 7th U.S. Cavalry in a helicopter air assault into a battle where we would be vastly outnumbered at times. That any of us survived is testimony to the fighting spirit of the great young Americans—the majority of them draftees—who, when their backs were to the wall, fought like lions and died bravely.

Had I commanded the men on the other side I would have said much the same thing of the North Vietnamese peasant boys drafted into their own army and sent south down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to intervene in the war raging in the southern half of the country. They, too, fought bravely and were not afraid to die in the storm of napalm, bombs, artillery shells, and machine-gun and rifle fire we brought down on them. Now their commander, Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, and I were in the air, returning together to that ground hallowed by the sacrifices of our men. This time we came in peace, old enemies in the process of becoming new friends—something that would have been inconceivable just two years before.

These seminal battles that opened the waltz in Vietnam—which would stand as the bloodiest of the entire Vietnam War—had been largely forgotten in the long years of combat that followed before helicopters lifted the last Americans off the roofs in downtown Saigon in April 1975.

Joe, a war correspondent who had stood and fought beside us in Landing Zone X-Ray, and I had made two trips to Vietnam in search of the story of those who fought against us. These trips resulted first in a cover article Joe wrote in U.S. News & World Report on October 29, 1990, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of our battles, and then in a contract to write our history of the battles. It was not lost on our former enemy commanders that we had dealt honestly with them and quoted them accurately in both the article and the book.

When ABC television and the Day One program offered to take us back to Vietnam to make a documentary film, the Vietnamese authorities in Hanoi agreed to all that we proposed, including the long-denied trip back to the battlefields in the Central Highlands.

Why this obsession with a remote clearing so far from anywhere? What had happened here years before that indelibly seared the experience into the minds and hearts of men who had fought in other battles and other wars? Those dark November days of 1965 still powerfully grip the imagination of those of us who survived the battles of the Ia Drang on both sides.

Late on Saturday, November 13 of that year, my undersized battalion of only 450 men—most of them draftees led by a hard corps of career Army sergeants who had fought as Infantrymen in Korea and World War II—was ordered to make an air assault by Huey helicopters deep into enemy-controlled territory just five miles from the Cambodian border.

The orders to me were simple: We believe there is a regiment (about 1,500 troops) of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers in the area of the Chu Pong Massif, a craggy spine of tumbled peaks over 2,300 feet high that ended at a clearing not far from the Drang River but reached back over ten miles into Cambodia. Take your battalion in there and find and kill them.

That evening I sat on a dirt wall at an old French fort near the Special Forces A-Team Camp at Plei Me village with Sgt. Maj. Basil L. Plumley, my right arm in this battalion. We had trained these soldiers for eighteen months at Fort Benning, Georgia, brought them to Vietnam on a troopship, and now we talked about what was coming.

My immediate boss, Col. Tim Brown, who commanded the 3rd Brigade of the Air Cavalry Division, had only twenty-one Huey helicopters assigned to him for this operation. He was giving me sixteen Hueys to ferry my 450 men into the wilderness at the base of the Chu Pong Massif. It would take at least five round-trips to get all my men on the ground; three hours or more, given the flight time to and from Plei Me Camp’s dirt airstrip and time-outs for the helicopters to return to Camp Holloway in Pleiku to refuel.

The first lift or two would be extremely vulnerable if the intelligence was right and there was an enemy regiment in the neighborhood. The intelligence proved to be right in that regard, but it seriously understated the threat to us: There were three regiments of North Vietnamese scattered around our objective. We would be outnumbered twelve to one at times and our survival was by no means guaranteed.

On the early morning of Sunday, November 14, we scouted possible landing zones in the Chu Pong area, looking for clearings large enough to land at least six or eight troop-carrying helicopters at once. Our choices were very limited in that tangle of jungle and mountains. I settled on a football-field-sized clearing at the very base of the mountain, and gave it the code name Landing Zone X-Ray.

On that field and on another similar clearing two miles away and closer to the Drang River, code-named Landing Zone Albany, the Vietnam War began in earnest. Over the next four days and nights 234 American soldiers perished in desperate hand-to-hand combat along with thousands of attacking North Vietnamese troops.

We set down on X-Ray at 10:48 a.m. in two waves of eight helicopters each. It would be at least thirty minutes before we would see those birds coming back with the second lift of my soldiers. Sgt. Maj. Basil L. Plumley and I were on the first chopper to set down on the field and we all jumped out with M16s and M60 machine guns blazing into the tall grass and scrub trees that encircled the clearing, just in case the enemy was waiting there for us.

They were not there, but they weren’t far away up the slopes of the mountain. Within minutes we had captured a frightened North Vietnamese soldier hiding in a hole. He told us there were three battalions of the enemy on Chu Pong who wanted very badly to kill Americans but had not been able to find any—until now.

I gave orders to Capt. John Herren and his B Company troops to swiftly push out from the clearing so that any fighting would at least begin in the woods and, thus, I could protect the landing zone that was literally our lifeline. Only if we held that clearing could the helicopters return with more troops and more ammunition once the battle was joined.

Herren’s men ran straight into clusters of North Vietnamese boiling down off the mountain charging straight into us. It was now 12:45 p.m. and the battle was under way.

Plumley and I moved around the clearing in the open as the din and rattle of gunfire steadily grew into a deafening roar. At times we could see the enemy soldiers maneuvering against us, and all in my little command group were firing back. After my S-2, or intelligence officer, Capt. Tom Metsker, was wounded in the shoulder, Plumley clapped me on the back and told me we needed to find cover right now: “If you go down, sir, we will all go down!”

We shifted quickly over to an old, eroded termite hill—the valley was dotted with these large Volkswagen-sized concrete-hard mounds of red dirt—and got it between us and the sizzling, popping, and deadly AK-47 rifle bullets the enemy was pouring on us like hot rain. In military jargon the termite hill became my command post, or CP, and here we would remain for much of the next three days and two nights as the fight raged all around us.

The second lift of helicopters brought in the rest of Herren’s Bravo Company troops and a big chunk of Capt. Tony Nadal’s Alpha Company soldiers. I ran out and ordered Nadal to deploy his men on the left of Herren’s lines—and told him he had to secure a dry creek bed that came down off the mountain and directly into the side of the clearing. It was a natural highway for the North Vietnamese to come at us and I knew we had to hold it.

Not for the first time the thought crossed my mind that I was commanding a historic Army outfit, the 7th U.S. Cavalry, which had an illustrious and star-crossed past. This was a lineal descendant of the very unit Col. George Armstrong Custer led into another river valley, the Little Bighorn of Montana, nearly a century before with disastrous results. I was determined that what happened to Custer and his men was not going to happen to me and these modern-day Cavalrymen in the Ia Drang Valley.

I had something in my bag of tricks that Custer did not: the awesome firepower of initially two, and later four, full batteries of 105mm howitzers located in two clearings less than five miles away; clusters of rocket-firing helicopter gunships swarming overhead; and close-air support from Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps fighter-bombers. The noise of battle soon was deafening and the thick smoke rising 5,000 feet into the sky marked clearly where we were and what was happening here.

Throughout an afternoon of pitched fighting—where acts of incredible heroism were common—the helicopters continued to come, bringing in the rest of my battalion and a reinforcing company, B Company of our sister battalion, the 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry. The brave aviators set their Hueys down in that clearing under heavy fire and off-loaded fresh troops and more ammunition and water, and began ferrying out the growing number of our wounded. The dead, wrapped in their own green rubber ponchos, would have to wait. Their silent ranks, lined up near the command post, grew by the hour.

Just before dark I got a radio call from my operations officer, Capt. Greg “Matt” Dillon, who had spent the afternoon orbiting overhead in my command helicopter relaying our radio communications back to Brigade Headquarters in the Catecka Tea Plantation. Dillon told me when it was full dark he would be coming in with two helicopters loaded with ammunition and water and would bring with him the artillery and helicopter liaison officers.

He relayed an unusual request. “…Galloway wants to come in with us. Okay?” I had met Joe Galloway, a twenty-three-year-old war correspondent for United Press International, a few days before when we ran a long sweep operation searching for the enemy east of Plei Me Camp. He stayed with my companies day and night, not grabbing a helicopter back to the rear for hot chow and a shower. I liked that.

I told Dillon: If he’s crazy enough to want to come in here, and you’ve got room, bring him. When they landed in the darkness I welcomed Joe to X-Ray and told him what we were up against. I noted that he carried a pistol on his belt and an M16 rifle on his shoulder, and looked like he could take care of himself in a fight. He was an unexpected reinforcement.

The fighting here raged on for two more days, until the afternoon of November 16, when the enemy suddenly evaporated and began their withdrawal toward sanctuary in Cambodia. Their commander left behind hundreds upon hundreds of his dead in a huge semicircle around us. We were ordered back to Camp Holloway outside Pleiku to rest and refit, and the helicopters began lifting out my men.

Joe walked over to say farewell to me. We stood and looked at each other and suddenly there were tears cutting through the red dirt on our faces. I choked out these words: “Go tell America what these brave men did here; tell them how their sons died.” He did so. His stories and photographs of the battle at LZ X-Ray filled the front pages of newspapers around the world in coming days.

Around three-fifteen p.m. I stepped aboard a Huey piloted by Maj. Bruce Crandall, who commanded B Company 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion. I had flown in on Crandall’s Huey and now I would fly out on it—the last man of my battalion to leave this bloody ground.

Behind us in the crowded, stinking clearing called X-Ray remained two other 1st Cavalry Division battalions that had marched into X-Ray earlier in the fight to strengthen our defenses: Lt. Col. Bob Tully’s 2nd Battalion 5th Cavalry and Lt. Col. Bob McDade’s 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry.

That night Tully and McDade were alerted to march out of X-Ray the next morning, November 17, because headquarters had arranged for B-52 bombers from Guam to saturate the Chu Pong Massif with their huge payloads of 500-pound bombs. The target was too close to have any American troops within a mile and a half and they had to leave.

McDade was told to take his battalion to the clearing called Albany, two miles north, while Tully had orders to go to a landing zone called Columbus, two miles northeast, where two of the four artillery batteries that supported us day and night during our fight were located.

We might have thought the fighting was over, the enemy defeated and gone. But Lt. Col. Nguyen Huu An, the North Vietnamese commander on the ground, thought otherwise. He had a fresh reserve battalion, the 8th Battalion 66th Regiment, sitting in the jungle alongside the route to LZ Albany. They had missed out on the fight at X-Ray and were eager to get their turn at killing Americans.

Just after one p.m. the exhausted 2nd Battalion troopers were in a 600-yard-long narrow column that snaked through the high elephant grass and much denser forest near the Albany clearing. McDade had called a halt when his reconnaissance platoon captured two North Vietnamese scouts and saw a third escape into the jungle. He and his command group went forward to interrogate the prisoners, and McDade ordered forward the commanders of his other companies to receive instructions on how they would deploy as they marched into the clearing.

McDade’s men dropped where they stood. They had been without sleep for four days and nights and the heat had taken a further toll. Men sat back on their packs, eating C rations, smoking, some falling into exhausted sleep. Alongside them, unseen in the thick brush and grass, the 8th Battalion and elements of the headquarters of the 33rd North Vietnamese Regiment deployed in a hasty L-shaped ambush.

The enemy announced their presence with a barrage of mortar shells and charged into the dozing American column with rifles blazing. Machine gunners and snipers hidden in the trees and atop the ever-present termite mounds opened up. It was every man for himself in a running gun battle that raged throughout the afternoon and, spor...