We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam
Page 4
Phuong told us, and showed us on my old Ia Drang battle map, that when the fighting began at Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang he was about three miles away from the battlefield. He said he could see the smoke and hear the artillery and air strikes. I asked if he then moved toward the fighting. He grinned and replied: “Oh no! I went in the opposite direction.” Phuong told us that the North Vietnamese drew valuable lessons from the Ia Drang, lessons that they applied, with flexibility, throughout the rest of the war. Phuong’s report, written in the immediacy of the moment after he had interviewed the surviving North Vietnamese commanders, was printed as a small pamphlet and quickly disseminated to the NVA and Viet Cong troops. It was titled simply: “How to Fight the Americans.”
During our interview, he frequently referred to a small notebook that was filled with his handwritten account of his interviews with the North Vietnamese Army commanders in the fall of 1965. The notebook also contained meticulously hand-drawn maps of the battle areas. He seemed delighted by our intense interest in something he knew a great deal about, and was more than willing to share with fellow historians. We would have given a lot for a copy of his journal but had to settle for him reading to us from those pages covered with his notes.
The high point of our trip was our talk with General Giap, an architect along with Ho Chi Minh of the modern Vietnamese revolutionary movement in the 1930s. In the ensuing decades Giap built a formidable guerrilla army out of a mob of peasant farmers who answered the call to arms, and wielded that army with a brilliance and ruthlessness that helped pin down the Japanese occupiers in World War II, defeated the French, then the Americans, and even later the Chinese Communists when they briefly invaded Vietnam.
On September 2 we awaited his arrival at the front door of a formal government reception hall. Giap arrived in a small Russian-made Lada sedan accompanied by his aide, a burly army colonel. Giap, then seventy-nine years of age, was a small, slender man no more than five feet two inches tall. He wore a simple, well-worn brown army uniform with red shoulder tabs bearing four tiny gold stars. He had a kind face, sparkling eyes, and an open, friendly manner. There was nothing in his demeanor that spoke of a man who sent millions of his countrymen to their deaths in the wars of his lifetime. He appeared in good physical condition and moved swiftly and surely.
He shook my hand firmly and said: “I have heard about you during the war and I am glad to welcome you here, not as a commander of the 1st Air Cavalry but as a friend of the Vietnamese people.” To Joe he remarked: “Your name I know as well. You are the war correspondent who carried a rifle like a soldier.”
We moved into a large, twenty-by-thirty-foot air-conditioned reception hall. Giap and I sat side by side in two ornately carved chairs at the head of a large, low table, with Joe on our right and our interpreter, Le Tien, on our left. Giap’s aide placed a tape recorder on the table and snapped it on. Joe did the same with our recorder. Giap did most of the talking, emphasizing his points with a strong, sure voice, using his hands and arms for emphasis. Several times he put his right hand on my left arm while making a point.
Giap made it clear that the Vietnamese people had been prepared to fight the Americans for however long it took to expel us from Vietnam, if it took ten years, or twenty years, or even longer. Over and over he emphasized that the Vietnamese were fighting for their freedom and independence; that we Americans were just the latest invaders and not the last, either. Giap told us that Vietnam’s history contained the lessons that should have kept us out of there: “If the Pentagon had learned from the Dien Bien Phu battle perhaps they would have avoided going to war with us later.”
The general, who was a schoolteacher before he joined Ho Chi Minh in the jungles to fight the Japanese, returned several times to lessons he thought the American commanders and political leaders should have learned, from Dien Bien Phu to the Ap Bac battle in the Mekong Delta in 1962, when American helicopters were first employed, to the Tet Offensive. He said he loved to read, mainly history, and talked knowledgeably about George Ball’s writings on Vietnam, and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie. He groused about the difficulty of getting good books in Hanoi.
The general turned steely eyed when he spoke, with passion, of the relative strengths of the two warring nations: “You Americans were very strong in modern weapons, but we were strong in something else.” He said we were the invader, the aggressor, while the North Vietnamese fought a “people’s war, waged by the entire people,” and they could fight everywhere or nowhere, and the choice was up to them. He expressed amazement that the Americans had no overriding strategy or goal in the war, only the tactics and weapons of a modern army and President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration that we were not there to defeat North Vietnam, only to protect and preserve the South Vietnamese government. “Our goal was to win,” Giap told us, leaving unsaid the fact that they did.
As our conversation with Giap came to an end, he inscribed and signed several books about him written in English that we had brought with us. He grumbled that some of them were less than accurate and one he dismissed as not only wrong but insulting. On impulse, I took off my wristwatch, an inexpensive Timex, and handed it to the general, telling him through the interpreter that it was a token of my appreciation—a gift from one old soldier to another. Giap held the watch in both his hands, looking at it with amazement, as tears gathered in his eyes and mine. Then he turned and clutched me to himself in a full embrace. It was my turn to be stunned as this former enemy—arguably one of the greatest military commanders of the twentieth century—held me like a son in his arms for a long moment.
We walked slowly together to the front steps and said our good-byes. His aide opened the door of the little khaki-colored Russian sedan and saw Giap comfortably seated before they drove off into the Hanoi traffic.
It would take another year and another trip to Hanoi before we finally got what we had wanted all along: the opportunity to sit down with the two senior commanders who had fought against us so long ago in the Ia Drang, Senior Gen. Chu Huy Man and Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, both still on active duty, to my amazement. Both of these men had fought at Dien Bien Phu in 1954—Man as a division commander, An as a regimental commander—and were long past retirement age had they been American generals. In their army, officers down to the rank of colonel often remain on active service as long as they are physically capable. General Giap, now in his mid-nineties, is still considered on active duty even today.
In 1991, at the time of our meeting, Man was chief political commissar of the entire People’s Army; his protégé, General An, was commandant of the Senior Military Academy, their version of our Army War College. At the time of the battles Man was a brigadier general commanding what was essentially a full division of North Vietnamese Army regulars from his headquarters near the Cambodian border, and An was a senior lieutenant colonel who commanded the troops fighting me from a command bunker on the slopes of the Chu Pong Massif.
Now, on November 4, 1991, at a reception room in the Defense Ministry compound in Hanoi, a short walk from our now-familiar quarters in the shabby old guesthouse in that same compound, we came face-to-face with General Man, then seventy-eight years old, a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, chief political commissar of the People’s Army, and one of only two generals Hanoi ever granted the rank of “senior general.” Man was wearing a neatly tailored uniform with the four stars of his rank. He was about five feet three inches tall and of medium build. He brought to our meeting a printed map of the Central Highlands with details of the Pleiku Campaign and the Ia Drang battles clearly marked. Four other army officers accompanied Man, including the deputy commander of army archives and a lieutenant colonel from the army political department.
During the war we knew little, if any, details about the background of the enemy commanders we were fighting. The North Vietnamese commanders had grown up in a secretive system where nothing was revealed that might be of use to an enemy. Joe seized the opportunity to ask i
f Man would tell us about himself, share his biography with us. He readily agreed and told us some salient details of his life story. He was born in 1913 in the Central Highlands and joined the Indochina Communist Party in 1930, shortly after it was formed. He said he had been put in prison in Kontum by the French for revolutionary activities in the highlands not long after. The experience made him a committed lifelong revolutionary. Man said he had joined the Viet Minh army in 1945, and commanded a number of different regiments in the struggle against the French.
By the time of the pivotal battle at Dien Bien Phu, Man had risen to become commander of the 316th Division. One of the regimental commanders in his division was a young major named Nguyen Huu An—and their careers would be intertwined from that point forward, from there to the Ia Drang and on through the entire war with the Americans. In 1975 in the final campaign against South Vietnam, Man told us, he commanded the attack on the port city of Danang from the south while his old friend and protégé, General An, attacked from the north. He said there were some 100,000 South Vietnamese soldiers in Danang at the time.
Man said that he was sent south in 1964, first to the coastal area of Central Vietnam; then to the Central Highlands; then, as commanding general of the Central Front, he organized attacks against the newly arrived U.S. Marines, including a fierce fight the Marines called Operation Starlight in the summer of 1965. From there he returned to the highlands to command the newly organized B-2 Front, a division-size command of some 30,000 troops, in what we call the Pleiku Campaign and the Vietnamese call the Tay Nguyen Campaign.
The general was very solicitous of our welfare, asking if we were being treated well and if our quarters were adequate. I told him both the accommodations and the atmosphere were a good deal better than they were in the Ia Drang Valley. Man laughed and replied: “We are sitting here on these chairs but we consider this a valley, too—a new valley.”
Man told us that the original plan for the Central Highlands was to besiege Plei Me Special Forces Camp and lure a South Vietnamese army rescue column down Route 14, where it would be ambushed and wiped out. Then his forces would capture Pleiku and move down Highway 19 to the coast, effectively cutting South Vietnam in half. But with the arrival of U.S. Marines in Danang in the spring and later reports that a new experimental Air Cavalry Division, the 1st Cavalry Division, was being sent to Vietnam, Man said, that plan was put on hold in the late summer of 1965.
He told us, with a smile, that this plan was dusted off ten years later and parts of it put into effect in launching the final offensive that led to the fall of South Vietnam—launching the campaign with a surprise attack that took a key city in the Central Highlands, Ban Me Thuot, and began rolling up the South Vietnamese army and moving toward the eventual capture of Saigon. But in the fall of 1965 the revised plan was to besiege Plei Me Special Forces Camp as bait, destroy the inevitable South Vietnamese relief column, and wait for the newly arrived 1st Cavalry helicopter soldiers to get involved. “We used the plan to lure the tiger out of the mountain…I had confidence the Americans will use their helicopters to land in our rear, land in the Ia Drang area,” Man told us. He said his command post was to the south of the Chu Pong Massif and LZ X-Ray and was subject to bombing by American B-52s that struck within a thousand yards of his position. He said the explosions left him temporarily unable to hear anything, but he recovered. Man said, however, that his troops were widely dispersed and very adept at digging in, and thus casualties from the big bombers were few.
Man told us that from his viewpoint the North Vietnamese won the Ia Drang battles. “Here we showed you very high spirit; very high determination. This is the first time we try our tactics: Grab them by the belt buckle! The closer we come to you the less your firepower is effective. After the Ia Drang battles we are sure we will win the limited war. We will destroy American strength and force them to withdraw.”
The general deferred answers to our more detailed questions about the troop dispositions and tactics used at X-Ray and Albany to his old friend General An, who was the battlefield commander on the scene at the time. Before we left, General Man said in his opinion the meeting had been “open and friendly” and that augured well for better relations between our countries. He turned to Joe and added: “Also, today I got to meet a very famous reporter. I think your pen is stronger than my artillery. I hope your book will bring much better understanding to the American people and government. [They] can learn some lessons from your book on how to keep the peace.”
Joe and I spent a sleepless night, he hunched over his computer transcribing the tape of our interview of General Man while I turned over in my mind all that had been said. What we got from the general was the larger picture, the thinking and strategy of a divisional commander and his superiors as they reacted to the arrival of American troops with high-tech weaponry, fleets of helicopters to ferry troops and supplies and even haul artillery pieces to remote battlefields. They struggled to find a way for a peasant army whose soldiers carried all their weapons, ammunition, and food on their backs—supplied by laborers who hauled 400-pound loads on bicycles down the Ho Chi Minh Trail—and moved swiftly through the jungled mountains by old-fashioned foot power to neutralize the American advantages. They had come to a simple but bloody way to level the playing field: Grab us by the belt buckle. Move in past the deadly rings of our artillery and napalm and 500-pound bombs and right into our positions. Then the American firepower is neutralized and the fighting is hand-to-hand, man-to-man, and nothing else matters but spirit and determination.
The next day we strolled back across the Defense Ministry courtyard, past the cage with the scruffy monkey sitting forlornly on his perch begging for peanuts and bananas, back to the same formal reception room, this time to meet the one man I wanted most of all to talk with: Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, my opposite number, the man who directed the furious attacks against us at X-Ray and again at Albany from a camouflaged bunker on the slope of the Chu Pong Massif that towered above us. General An, a much taller and more robust officer than his old friend and mentor General Man, arrived with a rolled-up sketch map of the Ia Drang battlefields under his arm. He wore thick eyeglasses and his smile sparkled off a couple of gold teeth. After handshakes and introductions, An welcomed us with these words: “There’s no hatred between our two peoples. Let the past bury the past. Now we look to the future. I am quite happy to see you coming to our country.”
We spent over four hours closeted with General An and he had almost as many questions about our actions, orders, and plans as we did about his plans, orders, and thinking in the battles. One point worth noting: For all these twenty-six years since the fight, An thought it was my battalion, 1st Battalion 7th Cavalry, which he fought first in Landing Zone X-Ray and then “wiped out” in the ambush at Landing Zone Albany. He expressed total surprise when I told him that on November 16, 1965, the surviving 250 troops of my battalion were withdrawn by helicopter to Pleiku to rest and refit, and it was the 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry that left X-Ray on the morning of November 17 on the fateful march to the Albany clearing two miles away. I was pleased that my withdrawal escaped his notice at the time because such maneuvers are fraught with danger in combat.
“Only today I learn that it was the Second Battalion; before I believed it was your battalion, General Moore,” An told us. “I thought we finished your battalion off in Albany. I learn more details about this battle that I never knew. I think this battle on seventeen November [LZ Albany] was the most important battle of the whole campaign. Your soldiers were surprised when we attacked them but they fought valiantly. I tell you frankly your soldiers fought heroically; they had no choice. After the fighting when we policed the battlefield, when we picked up our wounded, I saw the bodies, yours and ours, neck to neck lying alongside each other. It was most fierce fighting.”
Late on November 17, after X-Ray had been evacuated and abandoned, An said he was in his command post on the edge of Chu Pong Mountain. “It was a very rocky area. There
were no trenches, no shelters. We could not dig through rocks. When I looked up at the sky I saw thirty-six B-52s. I counted them myself.” He said the bombs from those B-52s struck half a mile to a mile away from his headquarters.
That same day, November 5, 1991, we had another long interview with Major General Phuong, the chief army historian. He provided the greatest detail on the battles at X-Ray and Albany of the three enemy generals we interviewed.
General Phuong had a detailed sketch map and again brought his little green notebook filled with notes he had taken when he reached the Ia Drang battlefield on November 16, 1965. He told us that the surviving North Vietnamese commanders gathered after the fight and together they went over each action in the battles and the lessons that should be learned from them.
All three of the old enemy generals, who, like us, had spent much of their lives and careers in combat, emphasized that the greatest lesson to be learned from war is to cherish peace. They expressed their hopes that our research and writing would bring that lesson to the American people.
That night, after Joe had transcribed a long day of taped interviews, we lingered over warm scotches in dirty glasses and talked of all that we had heard that day in answer to the lingering questions we had about our battles. In this same old guesthouse, on our first visit a year earlier, we had talked about our fears that we would not be well received by either the enemy commanders we had come to interview or by the people of Hanoi, whose memories of America’s Christmas bombing raids by B-52s in 1972 could not be pleasant ones. We were surprised by how warmly we had been welcomed then by ordinary people in the streets of Hanoi, and now by the men who had fought us in a historic battle. As we mused about this Joe said that in a strange way we were blood brothers to these men—that each of us had cared passionately enough about duty, honor, country, and our cause to kill and die. He voiced a final thought: In a world where most people couldn’t care less how or whether you live or die perhaps we have much more in common with such men as these, our old enemies, men like ourselves.