We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young

by Harold G. Moore

  The Americans inside Columbus greeted daybreak of November 19 with a Mad Minute of shooting that sprayed all around Jim Young, hiding up on the slope. When that quieted down he began moving cautiously toward salvation, crossing a wide, shallow creek and finally finding an opening where he could approach the perimeter and be seen for who and what he was. He made it into the Columbus perimeter only a few hours before the Americans pulled out and abandoned it.

  Young talked to some of the men. “They told me where my company was. I had walked in a huge circle, lost, and somehow came back to my own unit on a different landing zone. I walked across the perimeter to my unit. They were as happy to see me as I was to see them. They told me I had been listed [as] missing in action. My family had been sent a telegram saying that and it was a big shock to them. Then they got a telegram saying I was wounded, not missing.

  “One of the men from Headquarters Company of the battalion took all my gear. I wanted to keep my helmet with the bullet hole in it. He said I couldn’t do that so I asked him to hold it for me, that I wanted it back. Then they took me to the first-aid station. They cleaned my head wound, put me on a stretcher, asked me what I had seen and where I had been. I was bothered by the fact that I had not tried to fight my way back in on the day we were ambushed. One of the officers told me I had done the right thing, that I would never have made it back that day. Finally they flew me out to Holloway and on to Qui Nhon.”

  Jim Young adds, “The bullet had knocked a place the size of a quarter out of my skull. Both the bullet and shrapnel from my helmet did damage, pressed pieces of skull down into my brain. At Qui Nhon they had to take the bone frags out of my brain, and whatever it was they did medically, it was the first time that had been done in Vietnam, so they wrote me up in the medical journals.”

  At Qui Nhon a nurse came in and cut off Young’s clothes. “When she took my boots off you should have seen her face. It had been five days since I had my clothes off. I had dropped from a hundred and ninety pounds to a hundred and fifty. They sent me to Denver Fitzsimmons Army Hospital because of the type of wound I had. I wanted to go to a hospital in St. Louis near my home. Continued treatment and tests. In mid-December they let me start clearing from the hospital. Release papers were given to me the twenty-second of December but they said I couldn’t get a new uniform and my back pay till after Christmas. They were going to have their Christmas, but I could, by God, sit and wait. Hell with that. I borrowed some money and some clothes from one of the guys, told the pay office where to send my money, and I took off. I arrived home Christmas Eve, sneaked in, and surprised the family.”

  The last, and most spectacular, escape-and-evasion story would not come to light until a full week after the battle at Albany. A scout helicopter flying in the vicinity of the abandoned Albany battlefield on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving, saw the figure of a man below waving a bloody rag.

  The observer-copilot took aim at the man with his M-16 and was about to shoot him when the pilot noticed that the figure was too large for a Vietnamese. He swerved the chopper to get the observer’s rifle off the man and radioed a report to a Huey gun-ship in the area. The extraordinary saga of the survival of PFC Toby Braveboy, an aptly named part-Creek Indian rifleman from Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th U.S. Cavalry, would now be told.

  On November 17, Braveboy—whose hometown, ironically, was Coward, South Carolina—was walking point for Captain Joel Sugdinis’s 1st Platoon, the unit that disintegrated in the hail of enemy fire on the eastern side of Albany clearing as the enemy began the battle.

  That initial volley of fire shattered Braveboy’s left hand and his M-16, and bullet fragments peppered his arm and thigh. Bleeding, weaponless, and in extreme pain, Braveboy crawled into thick brush and hid. When night fell on the seventeenth he crept out and ran into three other American soldiers, all wounded.

  He crawled away for help, toward the sound of the firing, and ran into more wounded Americans just as a North Vietnamese patrol moving through the area discovered them. Braveboy played dead for several hours, listening to the other wounded Americans around him being executed.

  Finally, when things quieted down, Braveboy, who had lost all sense of direction, again started crawling through the tall elephant grass toward where he thought he would find his company. Bad choice. He was 180 degrees off and moving directly south past the right flank of the Charlie Company survivors.

  At daybreak he went to ground on the north bank of a shallow tributary of the Ia Drang, about five hundred yards from the Albany clearing. He had no food but did have two canteens and a small bottle of GI-issue water-purification tablets. He wrapped his T-shirt around his bleeding left hand and stayed put, tortured by mosquitoes, ants, and the chilling cold of the nights. Each day he watched enemy soldiers pass his hiding place in the brush along the creek bank. He could hear American helicopters overhead.

  On November 22, his fifth day alone, a North Vietnamese soldier on the tail end of a passing column looked into the hole in the brush and saw the American. Braveboy said: “Four walked by me and the last one looked me right in the eye. He stopped and pointed his rifle at me. I raised my wounded hand and shook my head no. He lowered his rifle and walked away. So young. He was just a boy, not more than sixteen or seventeen.”

  The U.S. Air Force had begun targeting fighter-bomber missions on the entire Albany area. Braveboy said, “I don’t know how I survived. The bombs were landing all around me. All I could do was lay flat on the ground and pray they didn’t hit me.”

  After seven days, terribly weak and sinking fast from loss of blood and lack of food, Braveboy heard and then saw a 1st Cav H-13 scout helicopter wheeling and circling at low level nearby. Desperate, Braveboy crawled to a small open area, took his bloody T-shirt off his gangrenous hand, and waved it, swung it around over his head, until Melvus Hall, the observer in Warrant Officer Marion Moore’s scout chopper, saw him and took aim with his M-16.

  When pilot Moore realized the figure was an American, he radioed gunship pilot Captain Jerry Leadabrand, who circled the area, wrote “Follow me!” on a box of turkey loaf C-rations, and dropped it to Braveboy on a low pass. Only after the scout helicopter had swept the area and made certain that there were no enemy nearby did Leadabrand land and pick up Toby Braveboy.

  Braveboy was flown first to Due Co Special Forces Camp for immediate treatment of his wounds. Then he was flown to Camp Holloway for surgery.

  His Alpha Company commander, Captain Joel Sugdinis, says he got the report that Braveboy had been located and picked up by elements of the 1st Squadron, 9th Cav. “He was wounded, scared, and dehydrated but otherwise all right,” Sugdinis recalls.

  Surgeons amputated one of Braveboy’s fingers and did the best they could to save the rest of his hand. Gangrene had set in during his seven-day ordeal in the brush, alone on the battlefield.

  Back home in Coward, South Carolina, his family had been notified that Toby Braveboy was missing and presumed dead. The local newspaper had already run his obituary. After recovering from his wounds, Braveboy was discharged from the Army.

  22

  Night Without End

  Any danger spot is tenable if men—brave men—will make it so.

  —JOHN F.KENNEDY

  Captain Myron Diduryk’s Bravo Company soldiers once again rode to war, courtesy of Major Bruce Crandall’s assault helicopters. In the front seats of one of those Hueys were Chief Warrant Officer Rick Lombardo and his good buddy and copilot, CWO Alex (Pop) Jekel, who thought they had seen and survived everything in Landing Zone X-Ray, but were about to have their horizons expanded one more time.

  Says Lombardo: “Where we were going no one seemed to know except the flight leader, and he didn’t say. We were just following. Dusk was falling and our fuel situation was critical. About three miles out I could see battle smoke and that was where we were headed. I looked at Pop Jekel and said: ‘Here we go again!’ We were the second flight of four to go in. As the first flight approached
the landing zone, tracers started arcing up at them. The radio came alive, people yelling they were hit, or this or that pilot was hit. Our platoon was forced to go around because the first flight was still on the ground. On our approach the sight before me was unbelievable. Grass fires all over the place, tracers crisscrossing the LZ, and the smoke. It looked like Dante’s Inferno.”

  About twenty feet from touchdown Lombardo felt and heard a tremendous bang and a rush of air coming between his legs and dirt blowing all around inside his Huey. “Before my skids touched the ground, the troopers were out. I glanced down and saw my left skid on a body. Couldn’t tell if it was one of ours or one of theirs. Then I realized I no longer had a chin bubble. My feet were on the pedals but there was no Plexiglas beneath them. It wasn’t shattered; it just wasn’t there! All gauges were in the green so we hauled ass out of there. I told Pop to fly so I could get the dirt out of my eyes. I asked if everyone was OK, then I started feeling my legs. I didn’t even have a scratch.”

  Captain Robert Stinnett, thirty-two years old, from Dallas, Texas, had won his ROTC commission out of Prairie View A.&M. College in 1953. On this night he had six years of flying experience under his belt, including two years in the 11th Air Assault Test and 1st Cavalry Division. He personally led the twelve Hueys carrying Diduryk’s Bravo Company troops into Albany. He reports that eight aircraft were hit by ground fire and one aviator was wounded on that dusk troop lift.

  Captain Diduryk wrote of the flight in and the situation on the ground: “Assaulting Albany we picked up 5 bullet holes in the helicopter. Things were bad there. I found out when I landed that the battalion [was] shot up pretty bad. So we came in the nick of time to their rescue. The main part of 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry was on their last ditch stand at Albany. Little Bighorn revisited.”

  Lieutenant Rick Rescorla, 1st Platoon Leader in Bravo Company, recalls: “First pass over Albany I stared down into the smoke and dust. Between the trees [were] the scattered khaki bodies of at least a dozen NVA. They lay face up on the brown gravel of a dry streambed. Firing snapped around us. We circled out to safety. ‘NVA bodies. You see them?’ I yelled. Fantino shook his head. He had been looking out the other side. ‘Lots of American dead down there, sir. Mucho!’ On the second pass I saw the blackened track of the napalm. American bodies and equipment dotted between the anthills and scrub brush. Getting ground fire; the pilot was clearly upset, hunched low. He jabbered into his mike, expressing doubt that we would get down. Darkness was closing in around us. I stood on the skids hovering at least 12 feet over the LZ. Too high.”

  The sound of two bullets hitting forced Rescorla back. “Looking sideways I saw a trickle of blood down the pilot’s sleeve. The chopper dropped a few feet. The pilot yelled at the gunner. The gunner snarled, ‘Get out.’ I hesitated. ‘Get the fuck out!’ Four of us dropped a bone-jarring ten feet. The gunner kicked out the boxes of C-rations and they rained down on us. We were on our own. Lying flat, four of us tried to get our bearings. Sixty yards away three khakis rose like quail and ran for the tree line. Two of us cut loose and they fell headfirst into the brown grass. I popped a round with the M-79 just to make sure. Up ahead we heard sounds of American voices. We sprinted into the perimeter, proudly lugging the precious C-Rats.”

  Now inside the battalion command group perimeter, Rescorla took stock. “The battalion sergeant major sat against a tree with a bandaged chest. ‘We got hit bad, sir. Real bad.’ The wounded were gathered 30 yards from the CP. Only half my platoon had arrived. The other ships turned back because of ground fire and darkness. The perimeter was an oval island of trees. Three platoons could man the perimeter but with the exception of our people and Pat Payne’s Recon Platoon there was no unit cohesion. Colonel McDade slumped against a tree. He looked exhausted. He was exceptionally silent. Major Frank Henry, his executive officer, was reassuringly active. A short fire plug of a man, Henry waved a welcome, working the radios. Captain Joe Price, the fire support coordinator, crouched beside him. Clumps of survivors sprawled inside the perimeter, including several company commanders.”

  Lieutenant Larry Gwin watched the reinforcements arrive: “I saw Rick Rescorla come swaggering into our lines with a smile on his face, an M-79 on his shoulder, his M-16 in one hand saying: ‘Good, good, good! I hope they hit us with everything they got tonight—we’ll wipe them up.’ His spirit was catching. The troops were cheering as each load came in, and we really raised a racket. The enemy must have thought that an entire battalion was coming to help us because of all our screaming and yelling. Major Henry directed that I round up some men and police up all the ammo resupply which the choppers brought in on the last flight. It was lying in crates on the far side of the LZ. Somehow we got it all into the perimeter. As I came back with the last load I passed right by the body of that North Vietnamese I’d killed early in the fight. There wasn’t much left of him and I didn’t give a damn.”

  Lieutenant Pat Payne of the recon platoon was just as happy about the reinforcements as Gwin. “We were all very surprised to see those helicopters come in. We were only securing one side of the LZ so when the guys would jump off the helicopter we hollered at them which way to come. I had the feeling we had actually been rescued, that in fact the cavalry had arrived, just like in the movies. I admired the courage it took to land in Albany. Lieutenant Rescorla was one of the best combat leaders I ever saw during two tours in Vietnam. He walked around and pepped everyone up by telling them they’d done a good job, that there was support now, and that things were under control. He never raised his voice; almost spoke in a whisper. We were awfully glad to see him and the others from Bravo Company.”

  After walking the perimeter, Lieutenant Rescorla was worried. “We had as many men inside the trees as those on the perimeter. I was uncomfortable with that many rifles to my rear, particularly if they started scare shooting. Worse than the tactical layout was the dark malaise that had fallen over the battalion. Even men who were not wounded were melancholy.”

  One of the wounded still suffering alone out in the butchered column was PFC James Shadden of the Delta Company mortar platoon. “By this time it was beginning to grow dark,” Shadden recalls. “I slipped the pin back into the booby-trap grenade in my armpit, thinking now that I might get out alive. Then artillery began to come in. It felt as if the earth would shake out from under me. This continued on into the night. My thirst was almost unbearable; my leg was so painful I could hardly keep from screaming. I thought help would surely come soon.”

  Specialist 4 Jack Smith of Charlie Company was also lying wounded in the tall grass. “At dusk the fighting stopped and I had a chance to have a cigarette. I told myself if I lit a cigarette they will find me and kill me, but I didn’t care anymore. Then I passed out. I woke up in the middle of the night. The Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry sent a group to try to rescue us. A man came up to me and asked if I was wounded. He said they had a few stretchers for the worst wounded. I said, ‘Take me out with you.’ He said, ‘Stand up.’ I stood up and passed out. They couldn’t take me. They left a medic with us. That night the NVA tried to get to us. They were going around killing people. Our weapons-platoon lieutenant, Bob Jeanette, had been horribly wounded. He called in artillery so close to our tree that it killed some of us. But it also killed the North Vietnamese when they came to try to take us out. This happened two or three times during the night.”

  Doc William Shucart, the surgeon of the 2nd Battalion, had been guided to safety in the Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry perimeter at the tail of the column by one of Captain George Forrest’s platoon sergeants, Fred Kluge. Shucart says, “Around dusk, Kluge said he was getting ready to go back up the column. I asked if he was sure he wanted to do that. He said: ‘There are other guys like you out there, lost or wounded, who need our help.’ I said, ‘OK, let’s go.’ I know we had a radio where we were. We were trying to get the medevac ships to come in but they would not. A couple of Huey slicks came down but we were taking fire and
the medevacs wouldn’t come. When you are taking fire is precisely when you need medevac. I don’t know where those guys got their great reputations. I was totally dismayed with the medevac guys. The Huey slick crews were terrific.”

  Among the wounded that Captain Shucart and Sergeant Fred Kluge rescued at dusk were Enrique Pujals and some other Charlie Company soldiers. They spent the rest of the night in George Forrest’s perimeter at the southern end of the column. Lieutenant Pujals made it through the night and was evacuated the next morning—one of the lucky ones.

  Captain Forrest says that late that night he received a radio call from a man identifying himself as “Ghost 4-6” who reported that he was badly wounded, there were dozens of other wounded Americans all around him, and the North Vietnamese were walking around killing them. Forrest sent Sergeant Kluge and a large patrol back up the column at midnight.

  Specialist 4 David Lavender was part of the patrol sent out to find Ghost 4-6 and the wounded. He recalls, “Our sergeants came around seeking volunteers to go back out and retrieve some men who had been wounded and were bleeding to death. There were twenty-three of us went out on this patrol. One of the wounded had a radio, so we were in radio contact. We wandered around till we found these fellows. There were twenty-three to twenty-six men in a group, trying to take care of each other. All hurt very bad. We had a medic with us and the twenty-three of us tried to carry as many of them back as we could. We left our medic there with the ones we left behind. All we could handle was thirteen. We had men slung on our shoulders, in litters, carrying them any way we could.”