We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam

by Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway

  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, sporadically, throughout the night of November 17 and early morning of November 18.

  At dawn the grim results became apparent: the shattered bodies of American and North Vietnamese soldiers were intermingled along the trail. Some bodies were in the trees, where artillery had blown them. Patches of blackened grass hid the bodies of soldiers of both sides who had been charred by napalm strikes.

  The Americans had lost 151 men; another 130 were wounded. Four men were missing in action after the final tally, and their bodies were not recovered until April 1966, when I led the 3rd Brigade back into X-Ray and Albany.

  One of the company commanders later wrote of that morning in LZ Albany: “It was a hell of a grim sight to see North Vietnamese and American bodies all over, intermingled. It was a hell of a fight; some North Vietnamese were bayoneted. It took the better part of 18 and 19 November to recover the dead and wounded.”

  Years later when Joe and I talked with the North Vietnamese commander, Lieutenant Colonel An, he revealed a keen memory of that terrible afternoon and night: “My commanders and soldiers reported there was very vicious fighting. I tell you frankly, your soldiers fought valiantly. They had no choice. It was hand-to-hand fighting. Afterward, when we policed the battlefield, when we picked up our wounded, the bodies of your men and our men were neck to neck, lying alongside each other. It was most fierce.”

  There was one last disastrous attempt to further bloody the Americans: Lieutenant Colonel An ordered another of his units to attack the twelve howitzers in Landing Zone Columbus, where Tully’s battalion was waiting. The artillery gunners cranked down their cannon barrels and poured a storm of beehive rounds (shells filled with small razorlike pieces of metal) into the attackers. The enemy was beaten off with heavy losses.

  That marked the end of what the Army would dub the Pleiku Campaign. By November 27 the last American units had returned to their base at An Khe on Route 19, some seventy-five miles away from the now empty battlefields of the Ia Drang.

  In December I was promoted to colonel and assigned to command the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division. In the next eight months we fought the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong across the Central Highlands, from the South China Sea to the borders of Cambodia and Laos.

  During that time I kept in close contact with Joe, alerting him when we were planning a new operation. Although Joe had seen war at its worst, he never shied away from one of my invitations to a new operation, a new battle: He marched with one or another of my battalions—usually his old friends in the 1st Battalion 7th Cavalry, especially those of Tony Nadal’s Alpha Company—on most of my operations. Joe told me later that after the Ia Drang he believed he was bulletproof—after all, he came out of the battle without a scratch when so many all around him were killed or wounded. Only when he realized he was pushing his luck, taking foolish chances, did a healthy fear reassert itself.

  Joe and I talked even then about the possibility that one day we would write a book about the Ia Drang. But we each had our careers, and as I moved up the ranks and Joe remained overseas doing three more tours in Vietnam and covering half a dozen other wars and revolutions for UPI, that plan remained on the back burner for both of us.

  Late in 1976 Joe came through Washington, D.C., for briefings on his way to be the UPI bureau chief in Moscow in the Soviet Union. By now I was a three-star general and the deputy chief of staff for personnel (DCSPER) of the Army. We had dinner at my quarters at Fort Myer. After dinner that evening in November 1976, Joe and I shook hands and agreed that we would begin the research on the book as soon as I finished my Army career and he returned home after many years of foreign assignments.

  Early one morning in January 1982, after Joe had finally come home to the job of UPI bureau chief in Los Angeles after sixteen years overseas, and I had retired from the Army and was living in Crested Butte, Colorado, Joe called and asked if I was ready to begin serious work on the book. He told me that the Vietnam War scenes in a movie (American Graffiti II) had triggered a frightening emotiona
l response in him and he thought the best way to deal with the nightmares was to fulfill our obligation to tell the Ia Drang story. He said he had been sitting in his den in LA, arguably the safest place he had lived in many years, when that film caught his eye. Next thing he knew he was watching a mass air assault of 1st Cavalry Division troops in Vietnam, dozens of Huey helicopters disgorging Cavalry troopers, and enemy mortar shells exploding among them. “I was shaking like a leaf and crying like a baby,” he told me. “I had no idea where that came from but sat up all night thinking about it. I knew if I tried to run from it it would catch me and eat me alive. So I decided to face it the only way I knew how: by fulfilling my promise.”

  Joe flew to Gunnison Airport and I drove him to my house on Mount Crested Butte on a cold, snowy winter day. The research began in earnest then and there. We wrote a questionnaire to send out to the dozen or so Ia Drang veterans we had addresses for, made some phone calls, and began the work. We had no idea that our chosen task would continue for nearly ten years.

  Our big breakthrough came in August 1990. Joe was working for U.S. News & World Report magazine in their Washington, D.C., headquarters. He had proposed to his editor, John Walcott, that he return to Vietnam, with me in tow, to do research for a cover article on the forthcoming twenty-fifth anniversary of the now-forgotten Ia Drang battles.

  During that trip, which ended on September 5, 1990, we met and interviewed Senior Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap and the historian of the Vietnamese People’s Army, Maj. Gen. Hoang Phuong. We were also received by Prime Minister Do Muoi, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, and Vice Chairman of the State Planning Committee Le Xuan Trinh. We had moved heaven and earth in a failed attempt to get an interview with Senior Gen. Chu Huy Man, who had commanded the division in the Central Highlands in 1965. I sent a note and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch to General Man, asking to see him. He did not respond, but kept the whiskey. It is clear now that the Vietnamese were puzzled that a retired American general wanted to pursue the story of a battle he had fought and to meet the commanders who had fought against him. They were suspicious, and I believe the Defense Ministry in Hanoi advised General Man and General An to avoid us. During our time in Hanoi on that first trip we were housed in the Defense Ministry guesthouse just fifty yards from General Man’s office. We were frustrated by the government’s refusal to give us what we sought—interviews with my opposite numbers—while giving us access to everyone else.