Captain Paul Patton Winkel, whose great-grandfather rode with William Tecumseh Sherman, was a Bravo Company 229th platoon leader attached to Bruce Crandall’s task force for the Ia Drang operation. He talks about what went into the making of that first generation of airmobile aviators: “We trained from July, 1964, until our arrival in Vietnam with the 1st Cavalry in precision flying—four aircraft in V formation at 80 to 120 knots barely above treetop level, flowing with the contour lines of the ground. Radio work, navigation, foul-weather flying. Timing, timing, always timing. Crossing the release point at a critical second. Coordinating with gun ships, artillery, infantry. Practice, practice, practice. On the ground with the troops, high overhead, reconnaissance, reporting. This all paid off. Many of us are alive today because we learned our lessons well.”
By now the word had gone out to Tony Nadal and Bob Edwards to pull their men in from the bush and assemble them in the largest clearings available in their areas for helicopter pickup at first light the next day. Both companies were operating about six miles south of Plei Me. John Herren’s Bravo Company was already assembled at brigade headquarters and would lift out of there.
My staff and I and the liaison officers talked about the hundred and one details that have to be analyzed in a combat operational plan: the terrain; possible landing zones in that rough scrub-and-jungle region; weather forecasts; the enemy; manpower strength in each of our companies; logistics, supporting firepower; and helicopter lift capabilities.
Bruce Crandall’s lift ships, the sixteen Hueys, would arrive at Plei Me fort by 9:30 A.M. Five big Chinook helicopters would arrive even earlier than that to sling a battery of six 105mm howitzers beneath them and take them to Falcon, where they would join another battery of six guns already in place. I ordered an early-morning recon flight, of two Huey slicks and two gun-ships, over the Ia Drang Valley. Matt Dillon; Bruce Crandall; John Herren; the artillery battery commander, Captain Don Davis; the Cavalry Scout section leader, Captain Rickard; the fire support coordinator, Captain Jerry Whiteside; the forward air controller, Lieutenant Charlie Hastings; and I would fly the mission.
“Since Bravo Company is already in one location and will be brought back early, it will be the assault company,” I told the gathering. “Plan for a twenty-minute artillery prep followed by thirty seconds of aerial rocket artillery, then thirty seconds by the gunships. Bravo Company will land right after the gunship run. I will go in with Bravo in the lead assault ship. Tell the commanders to have their men carry the maximum load of ammunition, one C-ration and two canteens per man. That’s it for now. Questions?” There were none.
It was eight P.M. and things were buzzing in the command post (CP), which consisted of four small tents, each about ten feet in diameter—one for the battalion surgeon and aid station; one for S-2 and S-3 (intelligence and operations); one for S-l and S-4 (personnel and logistics); and one for the headquarters company commander. The rest of us slept on the ground, rolled up in our ponchos. Chow in the field was almost always C-rations—cans of ham and lima beans, or spaghetti and meatballs, or beans and franks, zipped open with the little P-38 can openers we all wore on the dog-tag chains around our necks.
Sergeant Major Plumley and I ate and then walked around the inner perimeter of the old French fort, occasionally climbing the dirt berms to peer out into the darkness. Headquarters was guarded by the recon platoon and the machine-gun platoon from Delta Company. We stopped and talked with some of the troopers on the perimeter. It was a quiet night, the bird calls and the croaking of the geckos mingling with the muted hissing of the kerosene camp lanterns that lighted the scene inside the blacke-dout tents.
I thought again of the French soldiers who had built and guarded this crumbling post on the frontiers of a now-dead colonial empire. Some things change, but not the rhythms of military life. How different a scene would it have been for a French commander preparing to launch an operation fifteen years earlier?
My thoughts turned to tomorrow’s operation. I felt strongly that the enemy had been using the Ia Drang Valley as a jumping-off point for the attacks on Plei Me and likely had returned there to regroup and treat their wounded. The Ia Drang had plenty of water for drinking and for cooking rice. Best of all, for the PAVN, was its location on the border with Cambodia. The Vietnamese Communists came and went across that border at will; we were prohibited from crossing it.
I knew that the 1st Cavalry’s 1st Brigade, the Plei Me garrison, the division’s helicopter cavalry squadron, and our heavy air and artillery fire support must have taken a heavy toll on them over the last three weeks. The intelligence people were telling me their best guess: possibly one battalion at the base of the Chu Pong massif two miles northwest of the area we were aiming for; possibly enemy very near a clearing we were considering for the assault landing zone; and a possible secret base a half-mile east of our target area. If even one of those possibles was an actual, we would get a violent response.
How ready was my battalion for combat? We had never maneuvered in combat as an entire battalion, although all three rifle companies had been in minor scrapes. Most of the men had never even seen an enemy soldier, dead or alive. We had killed fewer than ten men, black-pajama guerrillas, in the get-acquainted patrols and small operations since our arrival in An Khe.
The four line companies had twenty of their authorized twenty-three officers, but the enlisted ranks had been badly whittled down by expiring enlistments, malaria cases, and requirements for base-camp guards and workers back in An Khe. Alpha Company had 115 men, 49 fewer than authorized. Bravo Company, at 114 men, was 50 short. Charlie Company had 106 men, down by 58. And the weapons company, Delta, had only 76 men, 42 fewer than authorized. Headquarters Company was also understrength, and I had been forced to draw it down further by sending men out to fill crucial medical and communications vacancies in the line companies.
I didn’t like being short-handed, but things had been no different in the Korean War and somehow we made do. You just suck it up and do it, and we would do it the same way in the Ia Drang. The officers and NCOs would do what they could to take up the slack, just as we had done in Korea.
I could only hope that the enemy had been hurt badly in the earlier fighting and was, likewise, short of men. At least I could rely on strong fire support to help stack the deck. The weather forecast—clear sunny days and moonlit nights—practically guaranteed air support, and two batteries of twelve 105mm howitzers would be dedicated entirely to our use.
But my main concern focused on the fact that we would have only sixteen Huey slicks to ferry the battalion into the assault area, an average fifteen-mile one-way flight from the various pickup points. What that meant was that fewer than eighty men—not even one full company—would hit the landing zone in the first wave, and would be the only troops on the ground until the helicopters returned to Plei Me, loaded another eighty, and returned. Later lifts would carry more men—ninety to one hundred—as they burned off fuel and grew lighter in weight.
It was a thirty-minute round trip and at the expected rate it would take more than four hours to get all of my men on the ground. The Hueys would also have to divert to refuel during this process, costing even more time; and if the landing zone was hot and any of the sixteen helicopters were shot up and dropped out, that, too, would immediately impact on the timetable.
I ran an endless string of “what if’s” through my mind that night as I leaned against the earthen wall of the old French fort. Time so spent is never wasted; if even one “what if” comes to pass a commander will be a few precious seconds ahead of the game. My worst-case scenario was a hot LZ—a fight beginning during or just after our assault landing—and I certainly had to assume the enemy would be able to provide it. In any assault into an enemy-held area—whether it’s a beachhead or a paratroop drop zone, and whether you have to cross a major river or, as in our case, land in the base area—the hairiest time is that tenuous period before your troops get firmly established and organized, a
nd move out. This is when you are most vulnerable.
I ran through what I could do to influence the action if the worst came to pass. First, I would personally land on the first helicopter, piloted by Bruce Crandall. That would permit me a final low-level look at the landing zone and surrounding terrain, and with Crandall in the front seat and me in the back we could work out, on the spot, any last-minute diversion to an alternate landing zone, if necessary, and fix any other problems with the lift.
In the American Civil War it was a matter of principle that a good officer rode his horse as little as possible. There were sound reasons for this. If you are riding and your soldiers are marching, how can you judge how tired they are, how thirsty, how heavy their packs weigh on their shoulders?
I applied the same philosophy in Vietnam, where every battalion commander had his own command-and-control helicopter. Some commanders used their helicopter as their personal mount. I never believed in that. You had to get on the ground with your troops to see and hear what was happening. You have to soak up firsthand information for your instincts to operate accurately. Besides, it’s too easy to be crisp, cool, and detached at 1, 500 feet; too easy to demand the impossible of your troops; too easy to make mistakes that are fatal only to those souls far below in the mud, the blood, and the confusion.
With me in that first ship would be Sergeant Major Plumley; Captain Tom Metsker; my radio operator, Specialist Bob Ouellette; and our interpreter, Mr. Nik, a Montagnard.
The second aspect of my plan to deal with any problems at the landing zone was as follows. I would put my fire support team overhead, in the battalion-command helicopter with Matt Dillon coordinating. From 2, 500 feet overhead Dillon would have radio contact with 3rd Brigade Headquarters, with the battalion rear command post at Plei Me, and with all the company pickup zones. He could monitor all that was said over the battalion command network. Jerry Whiteside would direct the artillery and the rocket gunships. Charlie Hastings would deal with the Air Force fire support. And Mickey Parrish would deal with Bruce Crandall and the helicopter people.
Third, I had to maximize the impact of the eighty men who would be on the ground alone during the first critical half-hour. Standard operating procedure in the new science of airmobile warfare dictated that the lead elements scatter out over 360 degrees and secure the entire perimeter. Not this time. I had been thinking about a new technique that seemed tailor-made for this situation. Bravo Company would assemble in a central location in the landing zone as a reserve and strike force. Four seven-man squads would be sent out in different directions to check out the perimeter and surrounding area. If one of those squads encountered enemy forces I could then shift the rest of the company in that direction and carry the fight to the enemy well off the landing zone.
Around 10:30 P.M. Plumley and I walked back to the operations tent to check on preparations. Everything was going fine. Plumley suggested we get some sleep, saying it might be a long while before we got another chance. We walked back to where we had left our packs, got out our ponchos, rolled up in them on the ground—weapons close at hand—and went to sleep.
4
The Land and the Enemy
He who controls the Central Highlands controls South Vietnam.
—Vietnamese military maxim
The Central Highlands is a beautiful region; from the heavily populated coastal areas with their white, sandy beaches and flat rice paddies bounded by dikes, it climbs into the rougher, stream-cut foothills and finally on into the two-thousand- to three-thousand-foot-high mountains of the interior, where the French built their coffee and tea plantations. In 1965 the Highlands were the domain of the Green Berets, the U.S. Special Forces. But before the military men and before the French this was the homeland of the many different tribes of Montagnards, or mountain people, each tribe with its own dialect and territory, living a life little changed since the Bronze Age, when they were driven out of southern China to settle the mountain ranges of Indochina, the Malay Archipelago, and even some of the Indonesian islands.
They practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, creating small clearings in the thick jungle, tilling and cultivating corn and cassava and yams in the thin mountain soil until, in three or four years, it was exhausted, and then moving on. The Montagnards live communally in thatch-roofed longhouses built on stilts. They had always steered clear of the lowland Vietnamese, who called them savages and treated them with contempt and harshness. The hatred was returned in kind, and the Montagnards willingly soldiered against the Vietnamese, first for the French and then for the Americans. They were brave, loyal, and deadly mercenaries who were highly effective soldiers in their home territory.
The principal communications and supply route across the Highlands is the fabled Colonial Route 19, which runs from the port of Qui Nhon west to Pleiku, the capital of the Highlands, and on into Cambodia. The 1st Cavalry Division base camp at An Khe was halfway between Qui Nhon and Pleiku, about forty miles from each of those key cities.
Shortly after we arrived in Vietnam, Sergeant Major Plumley and I took a jeep and a shotgun guard and drove ten miles west of An Khe on Route 19, into no-man’s-land, to the PK 15 marker post. There, the Viet Minh had destroyed most of the French Group Mobile 100 in a deadly ambush eleven years earlier. We walked the battleground, where a bullet-pocked six-foot-high stone obelisk declares in French and Vietnamese: “Here on June 24, 1954, soldiers of France and Vietnam died for their countries.” In my hand was Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, which describes the battle. Plumley and I walked the battleground for two hours. Bone fragments, parts of weapons and vehicles, web gear and shell fragments and casings still littered the ground. From that visit I took away one lesson: Death is the price you pay for underestimating this tenacious enemy.
North of Route 19 and west of the spectacular Mang Yang Pass, the land is hilly and mountainous, with some primary jungle and occasional broad plateaus. The few secondary roads are unpaved, and impassable in the monsoon season. In the Laos-Cambodia-South Vietnam tri-border region there are dense triple-canopy rain forests where the sun never penetrates, the soil is always wet, and tangles of wait-a-minute vines wait for the walker. South of Pleiku and Route 19, north of Ban Me Thuot and west of the Plei Me Special Forces Camp is scrub jungle with stunted hardwood, crisscrossed only by rushing mountain streams, animal trails, and Montagnard paths.
The dominant terrain feature is the Chu Pong massif, rising to just over 2, 400 feet, a jumble of mountains, valleys, ravines, and ridges that runs westward for more than fifteen miles, the last five of them inside Cambodia. North to south the massif measures between ten and thirteen miles. The limestone heights of the Chu Pong are full of springs, streams, and caves. Along the massif’s north side runs the Ia Drang. (Ia means “river” in one of the Highlands dialects.) The Ia Drang is born of the marriage of two smaller streams near the Catecka Tea Plantation on Colonial Route 14 between Pleiku and Plei Me camp. By the time it reaches the Chu Pong area it is swift and deep, and during the monsoon it is a raging torrent. It flows to the west, on into Cambodia, where eventually it empties into the Mekong River and returns to Vietnam far south in the delta.
The soldiers commanded by Brigadier General Chu Huy Man had been training for more than eighteen months. When they joined the People’s Army, each recruit was issued two khaki shirts, two pairs of khaki trousers, a sewing kit, and a pair of “Ho Chi Minh” sandals cut from used truck tires. Those uniforms were expected to last for five years. Basic training lasted thirteen weeks, six days a week, six A.M. to 9:15 P.M. The instructors emphasized weapons and tactics, the hows of warfare, while the political commissars had time set aside each day to lecture on the whys of this war. The recruits were reminded constantly that their fathers had beaten the French colonialists; now it was their duty to defeat the American imperialists. They were imbued with Ho Chi Minn’s dictum: “Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence.”
After basic training, some were selected for six months
of NCO school and would emerge as new corporals. For the rest, advanced infantry training included familiarization with all weapons, the use of explosives, ambush tactics, reconnaissance tactics, adjusting mortar fire, and patrol tactics. In June of 1964, Man’s soldiers moved up into the mountains of North Vietnam, terrain similar to that in the Western Highlands of South Vietnam. Here physical conditioning was emphasized; they scaled steep slopes while wearing rucksacks loaded with fifty to sixty pounds of rocks. Their advanced training now also focused on the art of camouflage. They got rudimentary instruction in antiaircraft defenses: Fire on full automatic straight in front of the aircraft’s line of flight, so that the helicopter or airplane will fly into a wall of bullets.
When the time came for them to begin the arduous two-month journey down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos, General Man’s regiments broke down into battalions for security purposes, each moving separately and at least three days ahead of the next. Each soldier carried four pounds of rice—seven days’ rations—plus another eight pounds of foodstuffs that were expected to last him the whole trip: two pounds of salt; two pounds of wheat flour; and four pounds of salt pork. One man in every squad carried the aluminum cookpot that the squad’s rice would be boiled in. Each man also carried fifty antimalaria pills, one for each day on the trail, and a hundred vitamin B1 tabs to be taken at the rate of three per week. Despite the pills, virtually every man who walked the trail contracted malaria and, on average, three or four soldiers of each 160-man company would die on the journey. Malaria, diarrhea, accidents, poisonous snakes, and American air raids all took their toll.
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young Page 7