We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young

by Harold G. Moore

  The M-79 grenade launchers proved extremely effective for blowing a man out of a tree. By the time we reached the wood line we had killed enough enemy and driven the remainder far enough into the jungle that the firing subsided to an occasional sniper round. About the same time, Captain Forrest radioed that more wounded had come into the clearing from the west and requested that I hold up so he could med-evac them. This process repeated itself as stragglers continued to filter in. Battalion headquarters had been advised and at 6:25 P.M. orders were received to wrap up in a two-company perimeter and prepare to sweep north to link up with the 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry at daybreak. At nightfall, we still had 22 wounded in our perimeter. They were made as comfortable as possible for the long wait until morning.

  Reinforcements were also on the way for the battalion command perimeter at the head of the column. During the afternoon, Captain Myron Diduryk’s battle-weary veterans of the fight at Landing Zone X-Ray, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, got a warning to prepare for a night air assault into a hot landing zone. The Bravo Company troopers, delighted to have survived the hellish fighting on X-Ray and enjoying a well-deserved rest and a lot of cold beer back at Camp Holloway, were stunned when told that they were being thrown back into a desperate situation so suddenly.

  Specialist Jon Wallenius, Bravo Company mortar observer, was doing some serious celebrating. He had not only survived X-Ray without a scratch, but this day, November 17, was his birthday. “I was twenty-two years old. We were fed and showered and new clothes were available. I spent the afternoon at the Enlisted Men’s Club drinking beer with the platoon, exchanging stories and celebrating my birthday. Around four P.M. Diduryk came in and told us to ‘saddle up.’ We were going to rescue the battalion.”

  “At about 1600 hours,” Lieutenant Rick Rescorla recalls, “Captain Diduryk walked up. ‘Get the Company together. Battalion’s catching hell. We may have to go in. You’re the only platoon leader left in the Company. Help all the platoons get their shit together.’ Men spilled out of the Clubs and double-timed to their equipment. They worked quickly, throwing on their harnesses. No protests, but their eyes filled with disbelief. Again? Diduryk then issued the shortest frag order in Bravo Company history: ‘We’ll be landing from the southeast. Open fire at anything on your left. Run to your right.’ A hostile landing with one side of the landing zone held by the North Vietnamese. Sitrep [situation report] from the ground: Grim. Expect to be sandwiched between friendly and enemy fires.”

  At about 5:45 P.M., Rescorla gathered the platoons. “They pressed in close, listening intently for the word. [SFC John A.] Uselton, the mortar platoon sergeant, [Staff Sergeant William E] Martin, [Specialist 4 Andrew] Vincent, [Specialist Jon] Wallenius, the towering [Sergeant Larry L.] Melton. Eighty or more. Young faces, old hollow eyes. ‘You know the battalion is in the shit,’ I said. ‘We have been selected to jump into that shit and pull them out. If you fight like you did at X-Ray you’ll come through it. Stay together. Come out of those choppers ready to get it on.’

  “Across the field the first lift ships were sweeping in. ‘Head ’em up,’ Captain Diduryk growled. I turned and walked ahead, Fantino trailing with the PRC-25. The road stretched out past the permanent hooches of the rear echelon at Holloway. Word spread that we were on a suicide flight. Tumbling out of cozy bunks, Holloway’s finest lined the road to watch us depart. Hawaiian shirts, aviator shades, jeans, beer cans in hands. Cooks and bottle washers, the shit-burners, projectionists, club runners. Same Army, different species. The Company picked up pace, a tight, dirty brown column.”

  A few of the men carried AKs, trophies from X-Ray. “No one had shaved,” noted Rescorla, “but our weapons sparkled. ‘What outfit are you?’ one spectator asked. ‘The Hard Corps of Bravo Company, 2nd of the 7th.’ ‘Where are you headed?’ ‘To kick ass,’ I yelled back. A deep rumble ran through the ranks, men yelling, cursing. Not a man among us would swap places with these lard asses. As we passed I asked Fantino: ‘How we looking back there?’ His reply: ‘No stragglers, sir. Every swinging dick is with us.’ As we made a column-right to the pickup point, I looked back at our crew. No outfit in the Army had ever rendered a route step any better than these men at this moment. We piled onto the Hueys without the usual loading instructions and skidded away into the fading gray light.”

  At 6:45 P.M. the first lift ships roared into the small Albany clearing and Captain Myron Diduryk’s troopers bailed out into the tall grass. The cavalry had ridden to the rescue. But the killing and dying and terror continued unabated outside the American perimeter as the long night began.

  * Two PFCs with the last name Martin served in Captain Tully’s Bravo Company—PFC Roger Martin and PFC Flemming Martin. Both were wounded in action in LZ Albany and the authors have not been able to determine which of them is the PFC Martin of Tully’s article.

  21

  Escape and Evade

  One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.

  —FRANÇOIS, DUE DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD,

  Maximes, 1665

  In the confusion of a battle as fast-paced, fluid, and disorganized as this one along the trail to the Albany clearing—with leaders killed, wounded, or separated from their men, and unit integrity disintegrating in the tall grass and the storm of enemy fire—soldiers drift away or are forced to move away. This is, perhaps, the ultimate terror: to be lost and alone in a hostile land where the next man you meet wants only to kill you.

  The Army solution to the problem calls for the soldier to conceal himself until sure of his ground, and then move as stealthily as possible toward friendly lines. The Army term for this difficult and dangerous pursuit is “escape and evasion” or “E and E.” Getting back inside friendly lines in the middle of a firefight is problematic: You are just as likely to be shot and killed by your friends as you are by the enemy.

  Late in the afternoon of November 17, E and E was definitely on the minds of many American survivors crawling through the elephant grass in the killing zone along the route of march toward the Albany clearing. Most of them would not make it back alive into the American perimeters at the head and tail of the column. But, against all odds, at least a dozen American officers and soldiers, all of them wounded, stumbled through circuitous routes that took them back to Landing Zone Columbus. Their stories, especially those of James Young and Toby Brave-boy, stand as testimony to courage, tenacity, and a tremendous will to live.

  Although Lieutenant Colonel Bob McDade and his executive officer, Major Frank Henry, tried to bring in the air strikes close to the head of the column, some strikes hit as far down the line of march as Headquarters Company, where Lieutenant John Howard, a wounded sergeant, and four other Americans were fighting off the enemy from behind an anthill. Howard says, “The A-lEs made a pass and dropped napalm approximately fifty yards to our left. Although they killed some of the NVA, I’m sure they also hit some of our own troops because we were all mixed together, friendly and enemy, at that point. It was utter chaos. The A-1Es made a wide sweep and started to come back around for a second pass.”

  Lieutenant Howard quickly saw that this next pass might come directly over them, and they had to get out of the way of the napalm. “We decided that we would run down a hill toward a dry streambed to get away from the path of the next strike. The six of us jumped up and ran, crossing the streambed about a hundred yards away, and jumped into a large hole about fifteen feet across that looked like an artillery crater. As we were running down the hill the A-1Es were making their second pass and the North Vietnamese were firing at the planes above, not paying any attention to us.

  “After getting into the hole we realized that we were now in no-man’s-land on the outside of the enemy and far away from any friendly troops. Intense firefights were still going on a few hundred yards away, but after staying there for maybe an hour, we did not see any more enemy in that area.”

  Not far away, another desperate little band of Americans was forming and
trying to find a way out of the death trap. That group was led by Lieutenant Howard’s friend Lieutenant Bud Alley, the communications-platoon leader. Alley had collected five other wounded men, including his platoon sergeant; the assistant operations sergeant, James Gooden; and one soldier from Captain George Forrest’s Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry.

  Alley says, “One of the clerks was pretty bad shot up and he was panicked. We tried to carry him but he was too big; we couldn’t handle him. One other guy with me had one of his eyes shot out; had it patched but said he could see. A young enlisted man. We made our way to a ditch. There were other guys in that ditch when I got there.

  “I remember one of them said: ‘Lieutenant, how about saying a prayer?’ We did; then we took off up the ditch to the left, again trying to find a senior person, somebody who could tell us what to do. There was the guy with the eye shot out; Gooden shot in the chest; another guy shot in the arm and leg. We continued to crawl and we realized that we can’t go back into that shit; the best thing we can do is go to the artillery if we can make it back.”

  On the other side was a wide field of elephant grass. “We could see that someone had walked down fields of fire across that field. We skirted around that area real carefully. Somewhere we hit a mud puddle or two and drank the water. It was right at dark when we got outside the American artillery impact area. All of the guys who started out were still with me. It was dark and the flares were out.”

  Alley and his group crawled, walked, and ran more than two miles through the darkness to the artillery base at Landing Zone Columbus. They knew there was no safe way to approach an American perimeter that was on hundred-percent alert. Alley says, “We were exhausted. We tried to move out of the way of any line of attack. There had been sounds behind us all the way. We got into some real thick elephant grass, made a little burrow right in the middle, and crashed at that point. The sky was lighted with flares and it seemed to us like the Air Force was dropping everything but the atom bomb around Albany. I really thought we were the only survivors from the whole battalion. We had no water, no first aid, no bandages. I took my shirt off and gave it to one of the guys for his wounds.”

  Lieutenant Howard and the other five men, all wounded, decided after dark that the best way to reach safety was to retrace their steps, first to Landing Zone X-Ray and then to the artillery base at Columbus. Columbus was only about two miles away as the crow flies, but crows don’t fly at night. Even though it would add perhaps four extra miles to their route, Howard believed he could locate X-Ray, and once he got there he could then retrace the original route of march back to Columbus.

  As they moved, Howard’s group could hear Vietnamese voices and the clanking of weapons. They took a sharp turn, and thought they had lost the enemy behind them, but after another hour they heard more enemy voices.

  Now, instead of trying to turn away again, Howard and his group just kept moving toward the sounds of distant artillery and helicopters landing and taking off. They reached Columbus before daybreak.

  Lieutenant Alley and his group bedded down in their clump of grass waiting for the sun. Alley says, “Once dawn came, the most dangerous thing was trying to get in that perimeter. I moved fifty or a hundred yards away from the rest of them, so if the guys on guard fired on me the others with me wouldn’t get hit.”

  Alley crawled up as close as he could to the perimeter. “I could hear Americans talking in their foxholes. I yelled and asked them to get an officer over right quick. When he came I told him who I was, that I was wearing no shirt and I was going to stand up. I stood with my hands raised. Told him I had a group of people to bring in, please hold your fire. I went back and got them and we came in.”

  Alley and his group had been inside the Columbus perimeter just a minute or two when Lieutenant Howard and his group came in behind them, no more than twenty-five or thirty yards to the left of where Alley had crossed the line. Howard and his group had also hidden in the grass outside Columbus. At daybreak they spotted two Americans sitting outside a foxhole eating C-rations. Howard stepped into the open and yelled, “Garry Owen!” and “Friendly troops.” The reply was “Come on in.”

  Their ordeal, at least, was over. A helicopter came in and took the seriously wounded out. Alley recalls a medic giving him a shot—“I was shaking like a leaf.” John Howard and Bud Alley later rode a helicopter back to Holloway. They discussed how both groups had heard North Vietnamese units moving behind them and in the same direction, toward the American artillery positions at LZ Columbus.

  Alley says, “We thought we should tell someone about this. So we hitched a chopper ride to 3rd Brigade headquarters at Catecka and reported our stories to the S-2, intelligence officer. There was so much confusion they seemed not to care. We returned to Holloway, and next day we rejoined what was left of our outfit.”

  A few hours later, on the afternoon of November 18, a North Vietnamese battalion of the 33rd Regiment attacked the perimeter at LZ Columbus.

  An even more remarkable escape-and-evasion saga was that of Specialist 4 James Young of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cav, the attached unit on the end of the column. It may be remembered that Young had volunteered for a dangerous mission to find an American machine gun that was shooting up the Alpha Company position. Out in the tall grass Young was shot in the head and badly wounded before he discovered that the American machine gun was manned by North Vietnamese. The Missouri country boy looked back to find that enemy troops had cut him off from the American lines.

  Says Young, “They were shooting at our men, but hadn’t spotted me yet. I had two or three frag grenades, a smoke grenade, three hundred to four hundred rounds of ammo, my M-16, two canteens, a notebook, and a little mirror. That was it. Bullets were striking around me. I saw the grass out to my front start moving and suddenly I saw a North Vietnamese. I let him get close, fired on full automatic, hit him in the stomach and chest. I could see more coming. I threw a frag and a smoke grenade and got out of there.”

  Young was being forced to move away from his company. “Those guys in the grass had cut me off. I began moving in hopes of getting to that artillery base we had passed. I sprayed the treetops as I went, hoping to get those snipers, or at least keep their heads down. I was running and dodging, zigzagging so they couldn’t get an easy shot. I ran five hundred to six hundred yards and stopped to rest. I could hear the enemy shooting and coming in my direction. I had killed one of them and put a grenade in their position so I figured they weren’t too happy with me.”

  Jim Young’s skills, learned while deer hunting in the Missouri backwoods at an early age, now began to pay off for him. He hit a stream and waded up it for a hundred yards, filling his canteens and drinking all the water he could hold. He left the water at a rocky place where he would leave no trail, moved to an open valley where he would have a clear view of his backtrail, crossed, and took a break, concealed in the brush. It was a game of foxes and hounds, and Jim Young was the fox. He set out again, moving down the valley, hearing the sound of the battle receding to his rear.

  It was getting late. Young moved up the mountain, took out his notebook, and started a diary. “I wrote the date and what had happened to me. I figured it was a good chance I wasn’t going to make it back and maybe they will find this and at least my mama and daddy would know what happened to me. Artillery started coming in on the mountain. I got between two large trees; had not seen or heard any sign of the enemy. I started looking for a place to hide for the night. I stumbled around those slopes in the dark, falling over rocks, cussing and raising hell but I did some praying too. I found me a good place to hide from the enemy and the artillery if they fired again. A low place by a tree with grass so thick I could crawl in and no one would see me.

  “Late in the night I did go to sleep. I was cold and tired and trying to keep ants and bugs out of my head wound. I had a real bad headache. When I would take a drink of water I would throw up. Next morning when I woke up I lay there quite a time just
listening. Didn’t hear anything except helicopters landing and taking off. I could hear gunfire between me and the ambush site and I wasn’t about to try to get through there. If friendly fire didn’t get me, the VC would. My next diary entry was: ‘18 November: I’m on a very large hill with artillery coming in on it along with mortars, but I can’t spot them.’”

  From the map it is clear that Young had climbed one of the three six-hundred- to seven-hundred-foot-high hills east of LZ Albany. Now he decided to head in the direction he thought was south. He walked a long way, then got off the trail he had been on because it became too narrow. He grew concerned that he was either near or across the Cambodian border, because he had not seen or heard any helicopters or aircraft and he knew they avoided the border. Young then reversed course.

  “Later, choppers flew over me. I tried to signal them with my small mirror but had no luck. Late in the day I got close enough to again hear choppers landing and taking off. I estimated I was less than a mile from a landing zone [Columbus]. The enemy made an attack on the troops there in late afternoon or early evening. They had attacked from my side of the perimeter. Friend-lies were shooting at the enemy, and their bullets were hitting all around me. There wasn’t much cover in the valley so I went to the top of the hill, found a large log, and got behind it. Then the Americans started dropping artillery and mortars. Then the jets and choppers came in bombing and strafing and shooting rockets.

  “It was close enough that I was real scared. They were hitting the valley and my hill to cut off the enemy and I was right in the middle. By the time the battle was over it was dark and I knew better than to try to walk in then. Any sound of movement would bring immediate fire. Artillery and mortar fire landed around me all night. There were flares lighting up the area and I didn’t dare move. I covered myself with brush and leaves so no one could see me. Another miserable night. I was wet and cold. Ants all over me again and I had a real bad headache. Ants got inside my clothes. If I didn’t move around much they were OK, but if I moved they bit me. Had to keep them out of my eyes and ears and my head wound. Shooting off and on all night long. The guys were pretty trigger-happy.”