A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan

  The Chu Prong, Brown decided, was as good a place as any to begin. He instructed his best battalion commander, Lt. Col. Harold “Hal” Moore, Jr., forty-three, a West Point graduate from a small town near Fort Knox in western Kentucky, to select a landing zone near the massif and explore its edge. Moore was not to penetrate the Chu Prong in any depth, as the terrain would engulf a battalion. Brown also cautioned him to keep his companies within supporting distance of each other. For all their training, the men of Moore’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, and the other two battalions of the 3rd Brigade had yet to be tested in combat. The troops had seen only a few skirmishes during their two months in Vietnam. Brown was concerned about the shock of a battalion suddenly encountering a large North Vietnamese force.

  Thirty-five minutes after landing without opposition on a Sunday morning, November 14, 1965, a platoon from Moore’s lead company caught a North Vietnamese soldier who was trying to hide in a clump of brush. The man was dressed in a dirty khaki shirt and trousers and was unarmed, carrying only an empty canteen. Moore questioned him through an interpreter. He turned out to be a deserter. He said he had been living on bananas for the past five days. Moore asked him if there were any North Vietnamese troops in the vicinity. Yes, he said. He pointed toward the Chu Prong. The first ridge, a finger that jutted out into the valley, loomed about 200 yards from the clearing Moore was using as a landing zone. There were three battalions in the Chu Prong, the deserter said, and they were eager to kill Americans.

  ***

  “X-Ray,” as Moore had code-named the landing zone, was not hard to distinguish from the air on Monday morning. It was an island in a sea of red-orange napalm and exploding bombs and shells. Peter Arnett and I watched in awe from 2,500 feet, filled with fear at the imminent prospect of going down there. We had caught a ride on a “slick ship” Huey making an ammunition supply run from the artillery position six miles to the east; we were waiting for a pair of jets to finish a strike so that we could land.

  The Huey plummeted, and the pilots dashed in over the trees to minimize exposure, then “flared” the helicopter as soon as we reached the clearing, braking in the air like a parachute popping open. The ammunition was tossed out and stretchers with a couple of wounded hoisted aboard as a bullet thwacked into the fuselage and others buzzed through the open doors. Arnett and I leaped down and ran at a crouch for the partial shelter of a huge anthill nearby where Moore had established his command post.

  Moore was a tall man with blue eyes and craggy features, his emotions soaring in the relief and exhilaration of having just broken a three-and-a-quarter-hour assault on the southern and western sides of the perimeter by another North Vietnamese battalion. “By God, they sent us over here to kill Communists and that’s what we’re doing,” he shouted.

  Many of the North Vietnamese survivors of this latest attack had turned themselves into snipers. They were all around and would not quit. They had climbed into the tops of the trees on the valley floor, dug “spider holes” amid the scrub brush and stands of five-foot-high elephant grass, and burrowed into the tops and sides of the strange, gargantuan anthills, some considerably taller than a man, that were interspersed everywhere. The dry season had begun in the Highlands. The loose-fitting khaki fatigues of the NVA blended well with the brownish yellow of the elephant grass and other parched vegetation, and they camouflaged themselves with branches. Whenever a helicopter landed or someone moved, one of them would cut loose with a Soviet-designed AK-47 automatic assault rifle and often another of Moore’s men would be killed or wounded before the sniper could be silenced.

  The battalion’s entire perimeter was only 300 yards across, and the clearing itself where helicopters could land was much smaller. It would have been quiet and strewn with American corpses had Hal Moore not been such a superlative fighter, a daring but canny man who had served his apprenticeship in Korea. His intuition and a line of field telephone wire a Cav scout helicopter had spotted strung along a trail north of the clearing (the NVA were not well equipped with tactical radios and used field telephones extensively) had convinced Moore on Sunday that the deserter was not lying. He had immediately understood that if the North Vietnamese rushed a force down off the ridge and got right next to the clearing, they could stop him from landing any more helicopters and slaughter those men he did have on the ground. He had to stiff-arm his enemy away from the clearing until he could bring in all or most of his battalion.

  Without waiting for the rest of his second company to arrive, Moore had directed his first company to move up the ridge. He acted not a moment too soon. The three North Vietnamese battalions in the Chu Prong numbered about 1,700 men to Moore’s 450. Two of the battalions were from a regiment that had arrived only at the beginning of November; the third was a composite of survivors from one of the regiments that had unsuccessfully besieged the Plei Me camp. The NVA commander was readying one of the battalions as fast as he could, and its lead troops were about to launch a pell-mell assault down the ridge to try to reach the clearing. The men of the two armies met among the trees where the rain forest began.

  A pitiless struggle started, Vietnamese and Americans killing each other within yards. The close quarters deprived Moore’s men of the advantage of air and artillery, and the Vietnamese did all they could to keep the killing on an infantry-against-infantry basis by staying as close to the Americans as possible, a tactic they called “clinging to the belt.” Had Moore’s men not been superbly armed themselves with the new M-16 automatic rifle and a quick-loading grenade launcher called the M-79 that looked and worked like a single-barrel shotgun, many more of them would have died.

  Tim Brown had been proved right in his concern about a large NVA unit, but he need not have worried about a shock effect on his unseasoned troops. These Americans were as eager as their opponents—too eager in the case of one platoon. The second lieutenant in command fell for a Vietnamese trick: the lure. He carried his men out ahead of the rest of the company in pursuit of an NVA squad that seemed to be fleeing. The lieutenant and his platoon were soon enveloped and cut off on the crest of the ridge.

  Moore had already guessed that the NVA would attempt an envelopment of his whole first company, because that is what he would have tried if he had been the enemy commander. He stopped it by rushing his second company to the flank of the first—and into another remorseless action at a dry creek bed near the base of the ridge—as soon as the next helicopter lift arrived with the remainder of this second company’s troops. He then blocked one more end run against the second company by positioning the men of his third company on the flank of the second as fast as they landed. To do so he had to leave the rear side of the clearing unprotected, because the rest of his battalion—his weapons company with the 8imm mortars and his reconnaissance platoon—were still being shuttled by the helicopters from the assembly point at the Plei Me camp. He assumed correctly that the NVA commander would not think to hook around that far. Moore’s third company spotted the NVA flankers of this last envelopment approaching through the more open terrain close to the valley floor. They hit the Vietnamese with volleys of rifle fire and shattered them with artillery and fighter-bombers and salvos from the aerial-rocket Hueys.

  Hal Moore now ordered the first and second companies to assault up the ridge and rescue the surrounded platoon. They were stymied almost immediately and took heavy losses. Second Lt. Walter Marm, Jr., won the Congressional Medal of Honor by single-handedly destroying a Vietnamese machine gun and killing the eight NVA soldiers manning and protecting the weapon before he was felled with a bullet wound in the face. Brown then reinforced Moore with a rifle company from another battalion late Sunday afternoon when the firing slackened enough to risk landing helicopters again and Moore pulled his troops into a perimeter for the night.

  Shortly after daybreak on Monday the ordeal passed to Moore’s third company, C (“Charlie”) Company, which had managed to keep the Vietnamese at arm’s length through Sunday and had escaped with minor casualt
ies. It had been assigned the south and southwest sides of the perimeter. The company commander had not requested volunteers to man forward listening posts during the night. He decided that they would be blinded by the thick elephant grass in front and that he could get by with artillery concentrations brought to within 100 yards of his line. At dawn, Moore ordered a local reconnaissance by all companies, a standard precaution. C Company’s commander told each of his platoon leaders to send out a squad. The Americans walked right into the soldiers of a fresh NVA battalion creeping toward them on hands and knees. Men died in the long grass as they sought to fall back firing. Others died running out to try to help comrades. The Vietnamese surged into a general assault on C Company, hoping to overrun it quickly and crack open the perimeter.

  The company commander asked Moore for the battalion reserve, the reconnaissance platoon. Moore refused. He had to hold the reserve as a last resort. In the confusion of battle he could not know whether C Company was receiving the main blow or a diversion, and shortly afterward an adjacent company also came under attack. C Company’s commander was shot in the back and gravely wounded as he stood up to throw a grenade at two NVA soldiers who had penetrated his line. Moore then did try to reinforce with a platoon from another company. They could not reach C Company and lost two killed and two wounded in the attempt. The Vietnamese were laying sheets of bullets across the perimeter—low enough to catch a crawling man—from machine guns and the Soviet equivalent of BARs they had set up around the anthills on the south and southwest sides. Soon all of C Company’s officers and most of its noncoms were dead or as seriously injured as the company commander. The attack on the adjacent company worsened.

  The air and artillery seemed to be having no effect. In desperation, Moore radioed all units to toss colored smoke grenades and ordered the supporting fire brought right up to the edge of the perimeter. Several artillery shells landed inside it, and an Air Force F-105 Thunderchief jet dropped two canisters of napalm near the anthill where Moore’s command post was located, burning some of the men there, “cooking off” a stack of M-16 ammunition, and nearly exploding a pile of hand grenades.

  Moore finally had to commit his reconnaissance platoon reserve to prevent the company next to C from cracking. In the meantime a probing attack began against a third section of the perimeter. Moore formed an emergency reserve by withdrawing a platoon from a sector not yet threatened and asked Brown to lift another rifle company to him when the punishment the NVA battalion had been receiving began to tell at last and the volume of fire started to diminish.

  C Company had ceased to exist as a unit by the time the assault lost momentum after two hours and then gradually ebbed through the next hour. Of the approximately 100 men who had seen the first light of Monday, fewer than forty were unwounded. There were great gaps in the line where the dead and injured lay. Not enough North Vietnamese ever got through to seriously threaten the battalion position, because the untested men of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, held and the many who died took as many of their opponents with them as they could. A second lieutenant who had led one of the platoons was dead in his foxhole. Around him were the bodies of five Vietnamese. Out in the elephant grass a Vietnamese and an American who had shot each other lay side by side. The American died with his hands gripped around the throat of the Vietnamese.

  When Arnett and I arrived at X-Ray at midmorning on Monday, Moore still had the artillery and air strikes going full-tilt, because he was afraid the third North Vietnamese battalion the deserter had reported might be about to assault and he was trying to break it up before it could attack. The artillery had fired nearly 4,000 rounds in twenty-four hours, and the fighter-bomber sorties were approaching 300.

  The survivors of the platoon that had been cut off on the ridge were finally rescued early Monday afternoon when the 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry, reached Moore’s perimeter by marching from another landing zone two miles away. A three-company sortie worked its way to the platoon slowly, because of the sniper fire. A captain from the reinforcing battalion was shot in the chest. Seven men from the platoon walked back unscathed to the clearing where twenty-seven had landed the day before. Most of the twelve wounded survivors had to be carried in litters improvised out of ponchos. The overly eager lieutenant was among the eight dead brought back that way. Those who returned owed their lives to the soldierly skills and battle sense of Staff Sgt. Clyde Savage, twenty-two, from Birmingham, Alabama, a squad leader and the only senior noncom to walk out in one piece. He had seized the artillery radio after the observer was shot in the throat and erected a barricade of shrapnel and high explosive around the tiny perimeter the survivors formed on the ridge, calling the shells to within twenty-five yards without dropping one among his frayed band. The survivors managed to beat back three attacks during the night with this powerful assistance. The NVA seem to have then forgotten the lonesome platoon in the confusion of their battle.

  The third assault Moore anticipated came before dawn on Tuesday. It was weaker than the others, staged by perhaps two companies and once more against the south and southwest sides. C Company had been replaced there by a full-strength rifle company, and this time the attackers were detected and decimated before most of them could get near the foxholes. The riflemen finished off those who did get close with grenades and well-placed bursts from their M-16s.

  Moore would not leave on Tuesday afternoon without three of his sergeants. They were from C Company, and he thought they were still out in the elephant grass where they had disappeared the day before. His troops were being relieved by elements of a second fresh battalion. The artillery and air strikes had been suspended to facilitate the flight pattern of the helicopters. One of the relieving battalion commanders was nervous that the NVA might take advantage of the lull to bring mortars into action from the ridges of the Chu Prong. He wanted Moore to hurry up. Moore refused.

  He had not slept in forty-eight hours. He was the victor. The bodies of hundreds of Vietnamese soldiers lay on the ridge and before the foxholes on the valley floor. The Vietnamese had died in such lavish numbers because they had made themselves the attackers and had assaulted without the assistance of any heavy weapons. They had also died because of the worth of Moore’s American soldiers, and now that the fight was over the cost of his victory came home to Moore. Seventy-nine Americans were dead and 121 were wounded. Most of them were men whom Moore had schooled and led for a year and a half. The bodies of the three sergeants from C Company had actually been found earlier on Tuesday and evacuated. Through an error, Moore had not been informed. The thought of abandoning their bodies in this strange place, or the even darker possibility, however remote, that one or all of them might still be out there wounded, was more than he could bear. “I won’t leave without my NCOs,” he shouted, weeping and shaking his rifle with a clenched fist. “I won’t leave without them,” he cried. He ordered the search continued. A rifleman turned out to be missing. Moore held up the movement until the man’s body was discovered and Hal Moore was convinced that he was not leaving any of his soldiers behind.

  When I stopped off at Tim Brown’s forward command post at a tea plantation south of Pleiku on Tuesday evening, he told me that he wanted to pull out of the valley of the Drang. His mission was to find the North Vietnamese and to kill as many of them as possible. Moore’s battalion and the reinforcements Brown had sent him had fulfilled that task manyfold. To hang around in the same area and try for more right away was to play too dangerous a game, Brown said. The NVA seemed to be infiltrating across the border rapidly. Where Moore had encountered one new regiment, more might be hiding. Brown, who had flown into X-Ray several times to stay in touch with the battle and get a grasp of the terrain and the enemy, wanted to lift out all of his troops and probe carefully before seeking battle again.

  “Then why don’t you pull out?” I asked.

  “General Westmoreland won’t let me,” Brown said. “He says that if we withdraw, the newspapers will make it look like we
retreated.”

  The next day one of the battalions that relieved Moore’s, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was ambushed and destroyed as a fighting unit while moving up the valley about two and a half miles north of X-Ray. Its commander was not as canny as Moore and made the mistake of having his troops advance in a column. He also neglected to put out flank security. One element of an NVA battalion quickly formed a classic U-shaped ambush which his two lead companies walked into, while another element struck his third company as it was strung out in the elephant grass and trees. The men of the 2nd of the 7th resisted gallantly, and many Vietnamese also perished in the hand-to-hand fighting that lasted the better part of an afternoon. The two lead companies were grievously hurt, and the third company was massacred; 151 Americans were killed, 121 were wounded, and 4 were missing in action. The 7th Cavalry had been Custer’s regiment at the Little Big Horn. On November 17, 1965, “history repeated itself,” one of the survivors of the third company said.

  McNamara was shaken by the casualties. The Battle of the la Drang—as Moore’s fight and the ambush came to be known; ia, meaning “river” in the language of a local Montagnard tribe, was not translated in the reports of the time—had taken 230 American lives in four days. (The four missing men were also later determined to be dead.) McNamara was shaken by something else the following week—a request from Westmoreland for an additional 41,500 U.S. troops. The general cited as his reason unexpectedly high NVA infiltration. Westmoreland’s troop requirements had already been creeping upward since July, and this latest one would mean putting 375,000 Americans into South Vietnam. McNamara had anticipated Westmoreland asking for more men, but not this soon. He flew to Saigon from a NATO meeting in Paris for a thirty-hour visit to reassess the war.

  His November 30,1965, memorandum to the president was a contrast to the easy confidence of his July report. Westmoreland was going to request even more American troops than he had so far done officially—approximately 400,000 to be sent by the end of 1966. The general might then ask for further deployments, “perhaps exceeding 200,000,” in 1967. Sending Westmoreland the 400,000 men he would definitely ask for “will not guarantee success,” McNamara said. “U.S. killed-in-action can be expected to reach 1,000 a month and the odds are even that we will be faced in early 1967 with a ‘no-decision’ at an even higher level.” The administration could try to negotiate some sort of “compromise solution” and hold the dispatch of any more Americans “to a minimum” in the meantime, McNamara said, but he advised against it. He wanted “to stick with our stated objectives and with the war and provide what it takes in men and materiel.”