That case history is the Iraq war. In the fall of 2002, with the Bush administration prematurely celebrating victory in toppling the Taliban government in Afghanistan and putting al-Qaeda terrorists on the run and seemingly hell-bent on invading Iraq, I gave serious thought to the issues and kept coming back to these questions: Why? Why Iraq? Why now? Why us? What do we gain? What are we risking?
With all that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were telling the American people, I could find no satisfactory answers to my questions and no good reason to go to war with Iraq. Their new doctrine of preemptive military action ran counter to American principles and American history. With very few exceptions—the war with Mexico in the 1840s and the Spanish-American War in the 1890s come to mind—Americans don’t start wars. We have to be pushed into wars. Now we were being pushed into a war by our own elected civilian leaders and the question was still: Why?
I listened carefully to the voices urging us to fight and the reasons they gave for doing so and they just didn’t add up. The president was not a man of the world like his father. He seemed to have little knowledge of and little interest in foreign affairs and history, especially the long, violent history of the Middle East. Joe was fond of quoting an old Bengali proverb that seemed to apply equally to this situation: “There are a thousand roads into Bengal but no road out.” There was little doubt in my mind that our soldiers and Marines—now a professional all-volunteer military—could again take down the army of Saddam Hussein, much as they did in one hundred hours in the Persian Gulf War. But then what? How would we find the road out of Mesopotamia and how many bodies of American soldiers would line its sides?
My military service began as World War II was ending. My first war was Korea, which began with an American diplomatic mistake when Secretary of State Dean Acheson failed to mention South Korea as one of the places we cared enough about to fight for in a speech the Russians and Chinese heard loud and clear. Korea ended in a draw and cost the lives of 50,000 American troops, some of whom died under my command on bleak, frozen hills with names like Old Baldy and Pork Chop that in the end were worth little or nothing.
My next war was Vietnam, where my battalion had the dubious honor of fighting the first major battle against the regiments commanded by a man who later became my friend. That war dragged on for ten long years and ended with a hasty withdrawal just ahead of defeat. More than 58,000 great young Americans were killed and another 300,000 were wounded, and for what? It was the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people. Three American presidents were entangled and trapped in that debacle.
Now another war loomed and my antennae quivered. My instincts told me Iraq was another mistake; that another American president was marching us off into the quicksand even as his lieutenants made the rosy and ignorant predictions—which come easily to those who have never worn a uniform and never heard a shot fired in anger—of just how swift and successful it was going to be; how little it would cost us in both lives and money; and how great an achievement it would be to topple a brutal dictator and plant democracy in the heart of a volatile region where it had never flourished before.
Joe worked in Washington covering military and national security affairs. He had just finished a brief one-year tour as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell at the State Department. His bullshit detector was quivering even more furiously than my antennae. I told Joe and others that it was my estimation that Iraq was not worth the life of even one American soldier; that we were about to become entangled in yet another war that could only end badly. Even worse, this new adventure of the president and his men would draw troops and resources away from the vital mission of finishing off al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden—the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks on America and killed more than 3,000 innocent people on our soil—in Afghanistan. If history proved anything it was that you never left unfinished business in Afghanistan. Just ask Alexander the Great or Queen Victoria or Leonid Brezhnev, who all suffered bitter defeat in the bleak mountains and trackless deserts of that wild country.
That was my answer in the fall of 2002 before all this began. It is still my answer in the fall of 2007, when more than 160,000 American troops soldier on in a seemingly endless war in Iraq that has, to date, cost the lives of 4,000 of those troops and left more than 60,000 of them wounded or injured. The short and sweet war the president and his men envisioned six years ago has cost us $500 billion to date, and there are estimates that the true cost if it ended tomorrow may exceed $2 trillion. Even at that it has been fought on the cheap by an Army and Marine Corps far too small for the job at hand, with training and equipment never intended for this kind of war. The deployments of these great young men and women on two, three, and four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan have worn them and their families down, just as they have ground down the tanks and Humvees and helicopters and aircraft so vital to their mission.
We are into the sixth year of this unnecessary war and our military is on the verge of breakdown. The demands of Iraq have eaten up our strategic reserves and we now have no forces available to cope with emergencies in a world made far more dangerous and hostile to the United States by Mr. Bush’s misadventure. I remember with sorrow how low our Army sank in the wake of the withdrawal from Vietnam and how hard and costly it was to repair and rebuild that Army into the vibrant and competent force that swept Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army out of Kuwait in less than a week in 1991.
Those who brought us to this war with such certainty about how easy and quick it would end should be assigned to write long essays on these words from Erasmus: Dulce bellum inexpertis (War is delightful to those who have no experience of it). George W. Bush should have old Erasmus’s words carved over the entrance to the planned $500 million Bush Presidential Library in Dallas. War is never easy or cheap. Never. When any political leader thinks of starting one he should first seek advice from those who bear the scars and memories of combat and the wives and children of the fallen who live their lives with forever broken hearts.
In the spring of 2005 I traveled to West Point to make my final address to the Corps of Cadets, sixty years since my own graduation and departure from those brooding gray granite walls that loom over the Hudson River. I thought of the thousands upon thousands of fresh-faced young lieutenants who had the virtues of Duty, Honor, Country burned into their hearts in this place before they marched into the pages of history during two long centuries of our nation’s wars. I knew that some of the most recent graduates had already returned from Iraq to rest under new white marble tombstones in the West Point Cemetery, and I grieved for them.
In that farewell talk to the Corps, whose ranks filled Eisenhower Hall, I spoke of the hard duty at war that awaited them and of the lessons in leadership distilled from my own years of service and time in combat. I told them that of all the tenets of leadership, the greatest of them all was love—that they must love the soldiers they lead more than self, more than life itself. In a long question-and-answer session following my speech I was asked about Iraq and about then Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. In this place—where cadets live by a code that says they never lie, cheat, steal, or quibble—I was bound to speak the truth as I knew it.
The war in Iraq, I said, is not worth the life of even one American soldier. As for Secretary Rumsfeld, I told them, I never thought I would live long enough to see someone chosen to preside over the Pentagon who made Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara look good by comparison. The cadets sat in stunned silence; their professors were astonished. Some of these cadets would be leading young soldiers in combat in a matter of a few months. They deserved a straight answer.
The expensive lessons learned in Vietnam have been forgotten and a new generation of young American soldiers and Marines are paying the price today, following the orders of civilian political leaders as they are sworn to do. The soldiers and those who lead them will never fail to do their duty. They never have in our history.
This is their burden. But there is another duty, another burden, that rests squarely on the shoulders of the American people. They should, by their vote, always choose a commander in chief who is wise, well read in history, thoughtful, and slow—exceedingly slow—to draw the sword and send young men and women out to fight and die for their country. We should not choose for so powerful an office someone who merely looks good on a television screen, speaks and thinks in sixty-second sound bites, and is adept at raising money for a campaign.
If we can’t get that part right then there will never be an end to the insanity that is war and the unending suffering that follows in war’s wake—and we must get it right if we are to survive and prosper as free Americans in this land a million other Americans gave their lives to protect and defend.
EPILOGUE
The Ia Drang brothers in arms and the families of many of those who fell in our battles still gather each year on Veterans Day in Washington, D.C., and in smaller gatherings around the country of veterans of particular units.
In 2005 for the fortieth anniversary of the battles we pulled out all the stops and some 1,200 Ia Drang veterans, families, friends, and supporters came together for a celebration and dinner in the nation’s capital.
These reunions of the brothers are filled with joy, sorrow, and healing but each year, as the years march on, there are a few more familiar faces missing, a few more no longer there to stand up when the roll is called and shout out their name, rank, unit, and where they fought in the Ia Drang.
In the winter of 2007 many of us proudly gathered at the White House to see President George W. Bush hang the blue ribbon and gold medallion of the nation’s highest award for heroism above and beyond the call of duty around the neck of one of our own, Lt. Col. Bruce Crandall, Ancient Serpent Six. The same president had hung the same medal around the neck of Crandall’s wingman and good buddy, Maj. Ed “Too Tall to Fly” Freeman, six years before. Another president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had awarded the Medal of Honor to then Lt. Joe Marm in 1966.
Our story—once almost lost to history—has been told in a best-selling book and a widely acclaimed movie and in countless documentaries and feature articles in a hundred hometown newspapers. Surely, some ask, the passage of the years and the recognition of your deeds in battle have brought closure and healing and peace to all of you? Would that this were true but it is not.
The memories of young men dying and suffering and killing in the horror of hand-to-hand combat in the tall elephant grass under the burning tropical sun are as fresh in our minds as yesterday. Just ask Bill Beck or Clinton Poley or Jon Wallenius or any of us. Ask those who lost a loved one in that valley—ask Barbara Geoghegan Johns or Col. Glen Kennedy or Delores Diduryk—if time really heals all wounds.
We think of our fallen comrades, forever young as we grow old, and of how they died before they had even begun to live. We were all young then and had no real understanding then of all they would never know—the joy of a good woman’s love, of watching our children grow, of savoring all that is good and bad in a long life. We who were fortunate enough to survive have tasted all those experiences and now we know all that they gave up when they laid down their precious lives for us. Far from fading in memory, the pain and sorrow only grow more acute.
We are reminded of the words of an old friend and comrade, the late Capt. B. T. Collins, who came home from Vietnam missing an arm and a leg: “We are the fortunate ones! We survived when so many better men all around us gave up their precious lives so that we might live. We owe them a sacred obligation to use each day to its fullest potential, working to make this world a better place for our having lived and their having died.”
We are invited to speak at West Point and the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy and the military service schools and to individual units of today’s Army and Marine Corps, and we almost always say yes because we feel an obligation to give something back to our country and our troops in a time when we are, again, at war and these young men and women will be fighting that war and other wars. We owe that to this new generation of warriors just as we owe it to our fallen comrades.
Each of us, in his own way, continues to serve our country because We Are Soldiers Still….
APPENDIX
Two Heroes for America
Two of the most beloved members of the Ia Drang fraternity—one a battlefield hero, the other a home-front hero—are recently gone and their leaving has left empty places in our hearts that can never be filled. One was a big burly Englishman who took great joy from finding the love of his life near the end of his life, and from mortal combat and poetry and the study of the world’s religions. The other was a petite woman who was an Army daughter, an Army wife, and an Army mother whose moment of trial arrived with the flood of telegrams announcing a death in battle to Army families in a small southern Army town in Georgia in the fall of 1965. She followed in the wake of the yellow cabs delivering that terrible news and comforted the grieving wives and children of soldiers who fell in the Ia Drang Valley under command of her husband. She helped persuade the Army to change its casualty notification procedures and establish a strong family support system for the future.
Cyril R. “Rick” Rescorla, the finest platoon leader I ever saw in action during two wars, died as he lived—a hero saving lives—on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center in New York. My beloved wife, Julia Compton Moore, died on April 18, 2004, in a hospice in Auburn, Alabama, comforted by her children and grandchildren and mourned by thousands of veterans and their families who counted her a close friend and were warmed and comforted by her smile.
It was just past 8:46 a.m. on 9/11. The chief of security for Morgan Stanley Brokerage stood at the window of his office on the forty-fourth floor of Building Two of the World Trade Center in New York. The nightmare he had so accurately predicted eight years before had come true: Terrorists had flown an airliner into Building One just across the way. Plumes of smoke belched from the blazing skyscraper. The squawk box that connected him to the Port Authority Police advised him to keep all his people—2,700 on twenty-two floors of Building Two and another 2,000 in Building Five across the street—at their desks. There’s no need to panic, the authorities told him.
“Bugger that!” was his response in the slang of his native England. He grabbed a bullhorn and began working his way down, floor by floor, ordering Morgan Stanley’s huge staff to immediately evacuate the building and once they hit the streets to run, not walk, toward safety. Rick Rescorla, who had been a larger-than-life hero all his sixty-two years of living, was just doing what came natural to him: taking care of everyone in sight. We had known him as 2nd Lt. Rick Rescorla, platoon leader in Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion 7th U.S. Cavalry in both the big battles in the Ia Drang Valley and in a score of other battles in 1965 and 1966 across the Central Highlands. It was his company that was airlifted into LZ X-Ray to reinforce us late on the first day of battle. Bravo Company had been held in reserve until the second day of battle, when I ordered them to replace the battered remnants of my Charlie Company on the southeast side of the landing zone.
Rick was the finest platoon leader I had ever seen in combat and his company commander, Capt. Myron Diduryk, was the finest at his job as well. We joked, proudly, that they were the 1st Cavalry’s Foreign Legion. Diduryk was born in Ukraine and came to America as a young boy after World War II. Rescorla was born and grew up in the little tin-mining and seaport town of Hayle in Cornwall in southwest England. That night, after they had tightened the perimeter and shortened the defense lines and dug new, deeper fighting holes and were waiting in the darkness for the attack they knew was coming, Rescorla slipped from hole to hole talking to his men. When spirits were lowest he even sang to them—Old Cornish and Welsh mining tunes and British army songs from the Zulu Wars. He lent them strength from his own fearless heart.
His troops and those of Bravo Company’s other platoons drove off four consecutive human wave attacks before the sun came up on Novemb
er 16, 1965, at a cost of five Americans lightly wounded. The bodies of over 200 North Vietnamese soldiers were piled around their fighting holes and in the tall elephant grass out front.
Later in the morning Rick led the final push to clear the perimeter of the last enemy snipers roped into the trees and hiding behind the termite hills. It is a photograph of Rick Rescorla snapped on that final push that graces the cover of our book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. The young lieutenant holding his M16 rifle with bayonet fixed, dirty, unshaven, and weary is captured in a classic Infantry lieutenant’s “Follow Me” pose.
Later that day Bravo Company evacuated X-Ray with my 1st Battalion troops, leaving the rest of the 2nd Battalion behind, along with the 2nd Battalion 5th Cavalry. Rescorla and his men were headed for some hot chow and hot showers and clean uniforms back at Camp Holloway in Pleiku. But their break was all too brief. The 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry walked into an ambush near a clearing called LZ Albany and by nightfall on November 17 were surrounded and fighting for their lives. The brigade commander, Col. Tim Brown, ordered Bravo Company to go to the rescue. They were lifted by helicopter from Holloway to Albany, in a daring night insertion under fire. They had to jump ten feet into the darkness from the hovering choppers. Rescorla strode into the perimeter shouting: “Good. Good. Good. We’ve got them surrounded now!” He was not only a breath of fresh air but the symbol of new life and strength for men sheltering in shallow fighting holes and crawling to avoid the enemy snipers, if they had to move at all.
Before the fighting was done this battalion and its reinforcements suffered 151 men killed in action, some 130 wounded, and another 4 missing in action whose bodies would not be recovered until April of the following year. As he helped police the bloody battleground the following morning Rescorla retrieved a battered old French army bugle from the body of a North Vietnamese soldier. It was dated before the turn of the century, and had been crudely marked with Chinese characters by its new owners, who had captured it at Dien Bien Phu or in some other desperate last-ditch battle that ended badly for its original owners. Now it belonged to the Cavalrymen of Rescorla’s platoon and, in the months following Ia Drang, they would signal their attacks by blowing that bugle in many another battle across the Central Highlands and on the broad coastal plains of the Bong Son.
We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam Page 17