One of the strengths of the 2nd Battalion was Sergeant Major James Scott. He had made the landing at Normandy and was wounded in combat three times between June and December of 1944. He served thirteen months in combat in Korea and had been with the 2nd Infantry Division at Fort Benning for six years. “I had twenty-four years service in 1965; I could have retired, but that was no time to quit, when you know you are going to be needed and you have some experience. Colonel White, the battalion commander that summer, was a World War II veteran. We talked a lot about obtaining experienced personnel.”
Scott had his eye on Sergeant First Class Charles Bass, who was in a 2nd Division unit but had not been ordered to Vietnam because he had just returned from a tour there as an adviser to the South Vietnamese army. “He had plenty of experience. I met him on the street in Columbus, Georgia, and he said: ‘Promise me a promotion and I’ll volunteer to go with you.’ I told him he knew there was no way I could guarantee a promotion but I’d see that he was on top of the list. So he came to us as our operations sergeant. He and I shared a tent in Vietnam. The other senior NCOs would come and pick his brain. Charles could talk for hours about how you navigate by artillery fire; never underestimate this enemy—they have patience; be alert to their AK-47s, a good weapon. Watch those anthills. Fire into the trees and anthills when you arrive and when you depart. This Vietnamese enemy is good; he is dedicated to his cause. That was frightening to hear, but it was all truth.”
Lieutenant S. Lawrence Gwin was young, blond, six feet two inches tall; he was one of those who heard John F. Kennedy’s clarion call and answered it. He was commissioned regular army out of Yale University ROTC in June 1963. Not only was he Ranger and parachute qualified, but he also had three months’ schooling in the Vietnamese language. In September 1965 he was advising a South Vietnamese battalion in the Mekong Delta when he was suddenly transferred north and assigned to 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry as the executive officer of Alpha Company, under Captain Joel Sugdinis.
Gwin says, “McDade took over and for several weeks he quietly observed, giving only what I would call sotto voce orders. There was a clean sweep in the battalion command structure. Major Frank Henry replaced Pete Mallet. The S-3 was replaced by Captain Jim Spires, whom I liked because he had also been an adviser. The S-2 was Lieutenant Mike Kalla, fairly new at the game. So we went up to Pleiku with a fairly unfamiliar command structure. Basically this battalion was a terrific group of soldiers with solid NCOs. The shortcomings: They were from the 2nd Division, not a cavalry outfit. They were untrained in airmobile operations. Luckily, Captain Sugdinis had transferred in from Delta Company 1/7; he was a West Point graduate, well trained and an outstanding officer.”
The one person who lives in a commander’s back pocket is his radio operator, connected by that six-foot-long black plastic-covered electrical umbilical cord. Jim Epperson, then twenty-six, a native of Oakland, California, had been John White’s radio operator; now he was Bob McDade’s. “White was a leader-type person,” Epperson recalls. “Perhaps a bit more nitpicky. He ran us more like we were a stateside unit. McDade was more laid-back. He had come to us from a staff position, hadn’t been with troops for a long time. I got along with both of them, but McDade was a little more personable. I liked McDade because I used to get double C-rations, mine and his. All he would eat was pound cake and fruit. Regular C-rats tore his stomach up bad, so he just didn’t eat. He was tall [and] slender, and wore a gold bracelet.”
Lieutenant Colonel McDade has this to say about his battalion: “Until I took command of 2/7 I had no real dealings with the organization. My impression was that everybody seemed competent. I don’t think they had had much experience at the time, but then again not many other outfits had either. It was an outfit that hadn’t been tested. General Kinnard sent Major Frank Henry down to be with me because he had heavy airmobile and helicopter experience, having worked very closely with Kinnard as his aide. That was to give us the helicopter expertise Frank Henry had; my experience was purely as an infantryman.”
Back at Holloway this Wednesday, November 17, we spent the morning finishing the cleanup of men, weapons, and gear, issuing clothing, reorganizing our depleted ranks, and beginning to process the paperwork for men due to return to the United States for discharge from service within the next week or ten days. Now the men were relaxing. Some slept. Some wrote letters. Some drank beer. Some did a bit of all those things.
Rick Rescorla says, “Bravo 2/7 spent a comfortable night rolled up in poncho liners, sleeping in platoon formations alongside the road near the Holloway landing zone. Awakening on the morning of 17 November, relaxed by the promise that we would be heading back to An Khe, the mood was ‘We’ve done our bit; it’s home to beautiful An Khe. Meanwhile, hang loose and wait for the rest of 2/7 battalion, clean weapons, wolf down hot rations. No sweat.’ By midafternoon, weapons under guard, men were swilling beer at the NCO and EM [enlisted men’s] clubs or gulping candy bars and soda at the store.”
Thirty-one miles southwest of Camp Holloway, in the Ia Drang Valley, the column of American troops pulled out of X-Ray at nine A.M. as directed. The word among Bob McDade’s troopers was that it was going to be a walk in the sun, a stroll over to another landing zone, where the helicopters would come in and extract them, the first leg of the journey home to An Khe base camp. The word was wrong.
ALBANY
18
A Walk in the Sun
I will tell you one thing that sticks in my mind: This was the least airmobile operation that occurred probably in the entire Vietnam War. It was right back to 1950 Korea or 1944 Europe. All we got were verbal orders: Go here. Finger on map. And we just marched off like we were in Korea.
—COLONEL ROBERT A. MCDADE
Call it fate. Call it Custer’s luck. Whatever it was, it sure as hell had nothing to do with airmobility. The two battalions that had inherited Landing Zone X-Ray were about to abandon it, and they were leaving the same way they had arrived: on foot. Whatever the 1st Cavalry Division’s 435 helicopters were doing this sunny Wednesday morning, November 17, 1965, they were not available to move Lieutenant Colonel Bob Tully’s 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry to LZ Columbus or Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade’s 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry to the spot on the map that was designated LZ Albany. Grumbling and groaning, the men of both battalions loaded their packs. The word had come down: The big Air Force B-52 bombers were already airborne out of Guam, and their target was the near slopes of Chu Pong mountain. Friendly forces had to be well outside a two-mile safety zone by midmorning when upward of two hundred tons of five-hundred-pound bombs would begin raining down from thirty-six thousand feet. At nine A.M. Bob Tully’s men moved out, heading northeast.
Says Tully: “We spent the night there with McDade’s battalion. I was told to go to Columbus. We were the lead out of LZ X-Ray and moved out the same way we came in—two companies up, one back. We used artillery to plunk a round out four hundred yards or so every half-hour so we could have a concentration plotted. That way, if we ran into problems we could immediately call for fire.”
Ten minutes later Bob McDade’s soldiers moved out. The 3rd Brigade’s commanding officer, Tim Brown, was on the ground in X-Ray at the time, watching the movement. Brown’s instructions to McDade were to follow Tully’s battalion. A little more than halfway to LZ Columbus, McDade’s battalion would head northwest for LZ Albany. This clearing, at map coordinates YA 945043, was 625 yards south of the Ia Drang.
Chief Warrant Officer Hank Ainsworth, a twenty-eight-year-old native of Weatherford, Oklahoma, had ten years in the Army, the last year and a half as a Huey pilot in the 11th Air Assault Division and the 1st Cavalry Division. Hank was pilot of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry command helicopter this day: “I was assigned the mission to take the 2/7 command chopper on a recon flight. We flew an area north of X-Ray the morning of 17 November. People on board were looking at two or three different LZs for potential use. They picked Albany, the smallest of those we overflew, real
ly a one-ship LZ. We flew low-level, three or four hundred feet above the trees, checking the route they would take going in there. I saw absolutely nothing to indicate there was enemy on the ground. We drew no fire.”
As 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav headed out of X-Ray that morning, what was its mission? The operations journals of the 3rd Brigade and the 1st and 2nd battalions, 7th Cavalry are not available in the National Archives and have not been located despite an ongoing search by the Center for Military History that dates back to September 1967. Why these crucial documents disappeared remains a mystery. The division after-action report of March 1966 states that the 2nd Battalion “was to sweep to the west and northwest toward a map location that appeared it would make a possible landing zone. The map location YA 945043 was named ALBANY.”
Colonel Tim Brown, the 3rd Brigade’s commander, remembers: “My intentions were that Albany was just an intermediate thing, that McDade was to go on through to LZ Crooks. I wanted to move 2/7 on to Crooks rather than have them all (2/5 and 2/7 and 1/5) congregate on Columbus. We had to support the South Vietnamese who were coming up, so I was going to just swing on out west. The mission hadn’t changed; we were still out there to try to find the enemy. So I had them move out by foot. I could move them out by air later if I had to. Albany was just a spot on the route; just pass through and on to Crooks.”
The clearing that was called Landing Zone Crooks was 8.1 miles northwest of X-Ray, at map coordinates YA 872126. Across those miles, as the crow flies, lay the Ia Drang Valley. LZ Albany was two miles northeast of X-Ray and 6.8 miles southeast of Crooks.
Shy Meyer says that because of the B-52 strikes the two battalions on X-Ray had to be moved: “The proposal was for 2/7 to move over north and find a suitable LZ. I don’t think there was even an Albany plotted on the map. Later, when I had to brief the press, it was clear to me that this thing could not have been a classic ambush, since the enemy did not know where we were going. Hell, nobody knew where this battalion was going.”
Lieutenant Colonel Bob McDade, the 2nd Battalion’s commander, was in the dark, too. “We really didn’t know a goddamned thing, had no intelligence, when Tully and I left X-Ray. We had no idea what to expect out there. They told me to go to a place called Albany and establish an LZ; nobody said we would have to fight our way to that LZ, just go and establish it. There are other things that follow from this. There is the time pressure. They say, Get there and organize the LZ. So you plow through; you don’t feel your way or creep along. So I just blundered ahead. ‘That is my objective, so let’s go.’ We were on foot going toward Albany all morning. We had word we were to stop and hold for an hour or so while the B-52 strikes went in. We sat on our asses, then started again.”
Captain James W Spires, McDade’s battalion S-3, or operations officer, recalls that their mission was to stop any NVA movement along the Ia Drang. “It was thought they were coming in along that route from Cambodia to attack our fire bases. It was thought that eventually we would be extracted out of that LZ or from another in that vicinity.” Asked about intelligence information or any alert of danger, Spires says: “Nothing specific that I was aware of; no reports of anything in there.”
Sergeant Major Scott: “On 17 November, early that morning, I heard we would move to another landing zone. I asked Sergeant Charles Bass, ‘What’s our mission?’ He said: ‘One of three possibilities: Engage the enemy; evacuate the area for the B-52s; or be picked up and transported back to An Khe.’”
Captain Dudley Tademy, Colonel Tim Brown’s 3rd Brigade fire support coordinator (FSC), was to coordinate all the supporting fires: tactical air, artillery, aerial rocket artillery. “My place of duty was wherever Tim Brown was. The FSC stays in the hip pocket of the commander, immediately available to respond to any developing situation. We habitually took off early in the morning and stayed out all day in the command chopper.
“We did have B-52s scheduled to come in on the massif, and we had to get off that LZ. They were moving toward another location, unnamed, just another circle on the map. We needed to get those folks out of that hole they were in, LZ X-Ray. We had had troopers sitting there for four days.”
Sergeant Major Scott was with the battalion command group as the battalion left X-Ray: “We started moving out in formation, in company column. We had medical people, the chaplain’s assistant, the personnel section, some of the cooks and bakers. The first sergeant and commander of Headquarters Company were with us, too. Captain [William] Shucart was the battalion surgeon. He and the medical-platoon leader [Lieutenant John Howard] and [the assistant medical-platoon sergeant, ] Staff Sergeant [Charles W.] Storey, were with the column, too.”
Just before Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion moved out, its commander, Captain Joel Sugdinis, put out an unusual order. His executive officer, Lieutenant Larry Gwin, remembers it well: “The company had been on hundred-percent alert for over fifty-two hours. We were in such a state of exhaustion that Captain Sugdinis directed that each man take two APC tablets, aspirin with caffeine, a move designed to increase the mental alertness of the troops. The recon platoon under Lieutenant Pat Payne was attached to us and was designated as the point because they’d led the battalion overland into LZ X-Ray the previous day over some of the same terrain. Sugdinis said: ‘The enemy situation is unclear, but there are NVA in the area. We proceed to Albany, secure an LZ for possible return to Pleiku.’ We were tactically deployed and expecting to run into somebody. We had been told by Sugdinis to stay alert.”
Before taking over Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, Sugdinis had served in the 1st Battalion. When Colonel Brown asked for an officer to take over Alpha Company, Sugdinis was immediately nominated. Joel, twenty-eight and a West Point graduate, had a wealth of troop duty behind him, including two years in the 11th Air Assault Test and 1st Cavalry. He also had seen a year of combat—1962-1963—as an adviser to a Vietnamese infantry battalion. Sugdinis says: “When I requested artillery support to precede our movement to Albany, battalion informed me that we would not recon by fire because it would reveal our presence, or something like that. I was not told that 2nd of the 5th Cav would recon by fire as they moved.
“As point or lead element in the 2/7, I put my company into a ‘V’ formation. I put the recon platoon, now attached, in the lead or center, and each of my two remaining rifle platoons in echelon to the right and to the left. I placed my own command group in the center on the heels of the recon platoon. We were to initially follow the 2/5 Battalion, which we did.”
Captain Henry (Hank) Thorpe, a North Carolinian, was a mustang—that is, he had won a direct commission from the ranks in the early 1960s. He was in command of Delta Company, which followed behind Sugdinis’s men in the column. Says Thorpe: “We were just told to follow the outfit in front. It was a walk in the sun; nobody knew what was going on.”
Following Delta were Captain John A. (Skip) Fesmire’s Charlie Company troopers, who also began the move in a wedge formation. “During the first halt in the movement, it became immediately apparent that controlling this type [of] formation in the tall grass would be difficult if a firefight were to break out,” Fesmire recalls. “Charlie Company platoon and squad leaders had PRC 6’s [Korean War-vintage walkie-talkies], but they were unreliable. Furthermore, once a soldier was down in the tall grass, squad leaders had a tough time locating them. Therefore, after the first halt, I put the company in a column formation with platoons in column. We were not the lead element, nor the trail element. We were following D Company, which was the combat support company.”
Second Lieutenant Enrique V. Pujals, of Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, had led the 3rd Platoon of Captain Fesmire’s Charlie Company for about one month. “My impression was that it was simply a get out as fast as you can thing, because of the B-52 strike. Our company was to move in company column with platoons in column. It sounded like one of those ‘admin marches’ at Benning right after an exercise ended.”
Specialist 4 Jack P. Smith, twenty, Washington, D.C., who had joined the
Army to do some growing up after he flunked out of college, was assigned to Fesmire’s company: “The order came for us to move out. I guess our commanders felt the battle was over. The three battalions of PAVN were destroyed. There must have been about 1,000 rotting bodies out there. As we left the perimeter, we walked by them. Some of them had been out there for four days.”
The next unit of the 2nd Battalion in the line of march was the battalion Headquarters Company of logistics and admin clerks; the battalion aid station medics; supply people; the chaplain’s assistant; communications officer and his radio repairmen; and the like.
Second Lieutenant John Howard, a native Pennsylvanian, was a Medical Service Corps officer and administrative assistant to the battalion surgeon. He recalls spending the night of November 16 in X-Ray beside Staff Sergeant Storey. “Charlie Storey came over to me before we moved out of X-Ray that morning and asked me to help him light his cigarette, because he was too nervous to hold the match. I tried to calm him down with casual conversation but he remained very nervous. I think he was having some kind of premonition,” Howard says.
Lieutenant Alley, the battalion communications officer, was also with Headquarters Company. “We were told that this would be a tactical move. There was still a lot of stuff on the battlefield: equipment, supplies, captured stuff that had to be policed up and blown up. All in a hurry-up situation. I was personally carrying an RC-292 antenna, in addition to my regular combat load. I weighed about a hundred and forty pounds; my normal combat load was forty or fifty pounds; the 292 antenna weighed sixty pounds. The temperature must have been ninety-six, and the humidity was the same. We were moving as fast as we could through the elephant grass and scrub oaks, some high canopy. We were humping, everyone tired as could be.”
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young Page 29