“Finally, I said, ‘OK, we’re coming in.’ We got everyone on their feet and we started in. We had got within a few feet of where Forrest was standing and, sure enough, somebody opened up on us from the Bravo Company 1/5 lines. It was a private in a foxhole and he fired a whole magazine at us. He was firing low, got one guy in the hip and two others in their legs. When he finally emptied his magazine we screamed at him and got it stopped, and we came on in. Turned out that guy had been asleep in his hole when they put the word out and nobody woke him up to tell him. When he woke up and saw that column approaching he figured we were NVA and he opened fire. There’s always the one guy who don’t get the word and that’s the guy who shoots you up coming home. Always.
“And that was that. It was around four A.M., and for the rest of the night we stayed in the perimeter and racked out. I fell asleep. Somebody woke me up before daybreak. The choppers were starting to come in for the wounded. Then Bravo Company 1/5 saddled up. We waited till all the wounded were evacuated and moved off behind Bravo through the ambush site. We never did get inside the Albany clearing. I could see it, maybe a hundred and fifty yards away. We identified our dead and brought them out.
“We went on up, like we promised, and got Ghost 4-6 and Daniel Torrez the medic and that group of wounded. I spoke briefly with Ghost 4-6: ‘I told you I would come back for you, didn’t I?’ He still had a great attitude. I don’t know if he lived or died, but if anyone had the will to get through, it was certainly that man.
“They brought in Hueys and Chinooks to pick up the dead. There were bodies everywhere, many of them messed up by the air strikes, bomb strikes, artillery, ARA. I never saw anything in Korea that bad. Captain Forrest sent me out with a roster of the names of the men in our company and a man from each of the other two platoons and we walked the battlefield looking at all the American dead. Then our men and the men from Bravo Company 2/7 got the duty of bringing them all in for evacuation. It was terrible, terrible. Some of them were in pieces from the air and artillery. We had to use entrenching tools to put them on the ponchos to carry them in. We ran out of ponchos so we had to reuse the same ones over and over and they became slippery with blood. When I would see the carrying parties drop one I would go over and use Colonel Hal Moore’s words to me at X-Ray: ‘Show a little respect. He’s one of ours.’
“A week after we got back to base camp I came down with malaria and spent three months in Japan recuperating. When I came back to Alpha Company, Captain Forrest had moved on to some other job. One night I was sitting in the NCO Club at An Khe drinking a beer with some other sergeants. There was a sergeant from Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav there and he said, ‘You know, we won that battle.’ Someone else said, ‘How do you reckon that?’ And the Bravo Company sergeant said: ‘I know because I counted the dead and there were a hundred and two American bodies and a hundred and four gooks.’”
Lieutenant Robert J. Jeanette, Ghost 4-6, weapons-platoon leader of Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was a big-city boy: grew up in the Bronx, went to the City College of New York. He joined the ROTC program there and was commissioned in the Army in February of 1964. After Officer Basic and Airborne training, Jeanette was posted to Fort Benning in the late spring of 1964. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, iirst as a rifle-platoon executive officer, then as platoon leader. When the battalion got to Vietnam the twenty-three-year-old Jeanette was put in command of the weapons platoon of Charlie Company. Lieutenant Jeanette tells his story:
“My weapons platoon had, I think, three 81mm mortars. We were not really equipped as a rifle platoon. Some of us carried sidearms. I had an M-16 rifle. I think there was one or two M-60 machine guns. Everything was real peaceful up to the point where we were almost at the Albany clearing, the pickup zone. Then we began hearing some small-arms fire up ahead. My platoon set up a little perimeter.
“We stayed put right there for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then the word came down for us to form a skirmish line and move on up to the north. The LZ was to our west, and they were taking small-arms fire up there pretty heavily. We did not get very far with our maneuver. The volume of fire was increasing and now it completely enveloped us.
“There was essentially not much visibility unless you were standing up, and by now nobody was standing up. We could not see the enemy maneuvering at this time. I remember trying to set up a perimeter and fire direction. I was trying to find out where the rifle platoons were. They were reporting a lot of casualties on the radio, saying their medic had gone down, and asking for an aid man. I was crawling forward through the grass trying to move up a bit and see where those other Charlie Company people were. That’s when I met my friend, the only enemy I had seen to that point. He fired at me and I fired back. I got off one round and my M-16 jammed. He was still firing at me and I scooted back fast.
“When I got back to my perimeter I picked up a .45 pistol from somebody. By now our group was taking some casualties. Until now the firing had enveloped us but it was not, seemingly, aimed directly at us. Right after I got back, they found us. We were catching automatic weapons, rifle fire, and some light mortar or rifle grenades, airbursts right over our position. I don’t remember where our mortar tubes were at this point. Our orders from Captain Fesmire, relayed by Lieutenant Don Cornett, had been to move out in a rifle skirmish line; nothing said about setting up our tubes. We may have left them when we moved out on that very brief maneuver.
“Now we were taking plenty of casualties; we were firing back as best we could, but we really had no visible targets. I tried to get the men to sweep the trees around us. My platoon was all still on our perimeter, all in the same area, spread out but still together. It was becoming very obvious we were surrounded and trapped, because now we began to take fire from all sides, every direction. Two guys volunteered to try to break through and get help. I don’t know what happened to them.
“Then I was hit the first time. That round hit me in the right knee. That afternoon I was hit two or three more times, some of it shrapnel from those airbursts. One was a rifle round that hit me square in my steel helmet, right in front. It penetrated but was deflected all the way around. I had a deep crease on my head, could feel the blood running down. Damned if I know how the next wound happened. From the time I was hit in the knee I was flat on my back on the ground. But somewhere in there I was shot in the buttocks. There was no medic, no one to bandage me. I just lay there losing blood. That went for everyone else there as well.
“There was nobody moving, nobody crawling out. There were some other Americans alongside our platoon, under better cover. It is quite possible we were taking some friendly fire, but there was no doubt we were getting enemy fire. The radio we had was on the battalion frequency. I remember hearing conversations that I would not have normally heard on the company net: directions for air support, pilots asking direction where to lay the napalm. I got on once to tell them that their napalm was a little bit hot, a little close to where I thought there were friendlies. It wasn’t that close to me but I could see where it landed. I wanted them to know maybe they were hitting friendlies. They told me to get off the net, that they didn’t want too many people talking.
“Anyway, I had a radio that was working and a good freq and I wasn’t going to give up either one. After I was hit the other channels just went right out of my head and I was afraid to start switching around for fear of losing all contact. Eventually I think they changed channels for the battalion net. I know I stopped hearing all the chatter; later I had communication with some other people.
“By now most everyone near me had been hit, too. I remember the guys who were under deep cover yelling at me: ‘Lieutenant, get your ass out of there.’ I yelled back that it was hard to move, that I was hit pretty bad. They yelled that they would help me crawl and I told them there was no way I was going to leave the radio behind. That’s when an amazing thing happened. We had a young private in the company who was constantly up on charges—a goldbrick, a sad s
ack. Always in trouble. He got up in all that firing, came over, and said: ‘I’ll take the radio and help you out of here, Lieutenant.’ As he bent over trying to get the radio out from under me he took one right through the heart and fell over dead. Weeks later, in the hospital, I tried to get him a posthumous medal; but I never heard back. And now I can’t remember his name.
“As it grew dark I was still in the same position. I was trying to maintain contact with whoever I had talking to me back at brigade. There was a lull in the battle and suddenly I am talking to an artillery outfit. The North Vietnamese were now running around the area and we could see them moving. Bunches often, twenty, more of them circling the perimeter of the landing zone. It was maybe a hundred and fifty yards to the LZ perimeter, and the enemy were between us and them.
“I don’t know how I got put on to that artillery unit. It took me a good while to convince them to bring artillery into that area. Finally they tried a white phosphorus round or two. I couldn’t see any of their rounds land and WP rounds don’t make near as much noise as high-explosive rounds. Finally I persuaded them to start using the HE [high-explosive] rounds and then I could hear it and shift that fire into the area where we could see those enemy troops moving.
“I never really knew how effective that artillery fire I directed was until two things happened. Back in the States a few months later, at St. Albans Naval Hospital in New York I met somebody who had been in that fight, a 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav guy, who came over and thanked me for that artillery fire. I was out walking the halls on my crutches for exercise and he came up on crutches, too. He had an empty trouser leg. He told me the artillery fire took his leg but it saved his life and he was grateful. I was stunned. Later on, around 1971, I had to appear as a witness at a court-martial at Fort Leavenworth and I ran into Sergeant Howard of Charlie Company. He and some of his men were together in a position up ahead of me in the fight. Howard told me that every time the enemy got close to them, the artillery would come in close too and really whack them. He said that artillery fire was the only thing that kept the enemy away and kept them alive. It felt good to know that I did some good. And I had to argue with them to give me the HE.
“Somewhere in there I really lose all sense of time. I know before dark and after dark and that’s about it. I remember I was on the radio that night talking to someone, telling them that we could hear groups of enemy walk by; we were hearing single rifle or pistol shots; that someone would scream or cry out, and then a single shot. I knew damned well what was going on. The enemy were killing our wounded.
“When the relief patrol came in it was from my south, I think. I guided them to us by firing my .45 pistol. They picked up some American wounded further south who also had a radio on my frequency. When the patrol got to us I could hear the patrol leader saying he never anticipated so many wounded; he was stupefied by the numbers. I know he asked, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ I heard him but my mind didn’t react for what seemed like a long time before finally I could say: ‘Over here.’ They brought a medic and he gave me a shot of morphine. That was the first shot I had, the first treatment I had for, I don’t know, twelve hours or more. The medic put a tourniquet on my leg.
“The patrol leader told me that he couldn’t take everyone, that he didn’t have enough people to carry everyone. He said he had to leave me and the others with the medic and only take the worst-hurt. I know the enemy came back at least once after they left. A party of twenty or thirty of them. We could see the enemy moving; it was a very clear night with a bright moon, maybe full or near full.
“After dawn the relief came for us. Somebody gave me a canteen. I was dry as bone. During the night the medic would only give me a sip or two. When the relief came I know I guzzled a whole canteen. I can remember being triaged somewhere, maybe Holloway. Next thing I know I woke up in a hospital ward at Qui Nhon. A fellow officer, Paul Bonocorsi, from Charlie Company had been shifted out to liaison duty the week before the Ia Drang and he was there checking on C Company people. He told me there had been 108 men on the fit-for-duty report the morning we left for Albany, and only eight on the duty report the day after.
“I arrived at Fort Dix, New Jersey, on Thanksgiving Day, 1965, and was ambulanced over to St. Albans Naval Hospital in the borough of Queens, the hospital closest to my home. I walked out of that hospital on Memorial Day, 1966. I was an outpatient for another three or four months, then was placed on temporary retirement that was made permanent in 1971.
“I was recalled to active duty briefly after that to testify at that court-martial at Leavenworth. That was the case of a Charlie Company enlisted man who got blind, raging drunk the week before Albany. He pointed his rifle at his sergeant and pulled the trigger. It dry-fired; either [it was] unloaded or [it] misfired. Then he went off to try to shoot the company commander. He was sitting in the brig when we were out getting shot to pieces. He was court-martialed and sent to prison but his conviction was overturned on appeal, so they retried him and there weren’t many left who could testify.”
AFTERMATH
24
Mentioned in Dispatches
In war, truth is the first casualty.
—AESCHYLUS
Late in the day, November 18, Brigadier General Dick Knowles, whose headquarters were by now besieged by a growing throng of reporters demanding information on exactly what had happened at Landing Zone Albany, convened a news conference at II Corps Headquarters. The word that trickled in from the field was that an American battalion had been butchered in the Ia Drang Valley, and the sharks were gathering. Knowles, who had been aware of the fighting at Albany since he overflew the battlefield at midafternoon the previous day, says, “I did not get timely information. We did not get it sorted out until the next day [the 18th]. That’s when we learned the details.” Asked if Colonel Brown had reported what he had seen and heard during an early visit to the Albany perimeter the morning of the 18th, Knowles says, “No.” It would appear then that Knowles’s headquarters got its first real idea of the scope of the tragedy when Associated Press photographer Rick Merron—who had finagled a ride into Albany—returned to Camp Holloway midmorning of the 18th and staggered into the 1st Cavalry Division press tent, pale and shaken by what he had seen and photographed, and told his colleagues that the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry had been massacred in an enemy ambush. Division public affairs officers swiftly informed Knowles of the report by Merron.
How and why it took more than eighteen hours for the assistant division commander to get the first direct detailed account from the battlefield—and why that information had come, not through command channels, but from a civilian photographer—is a question that lingers. Knowles says, “Lieutenant Colonel Hemphill had been getting pieces of information from the artillery and from all over that fit into a running description of a fight; but nobody, not even McDade, had the full magnitude until the next day. We kept getting body counts and casualty figures all that morning [of the 18th].” The reporters gathering in Pleiku thought they smelled a cover-up. The news conference that followed did little to dispel their suspicions.
Knowles told the news conference that a battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) had had a “meeting engagement” with an enemy force of equal or larger size, and the American battalion had suffered “light to moderate casualties.” Knowles reported that the enemy force had suffered four hundred-plus killed and had broken off the engagement and withdrawn. The cavalry battalion had held its ground and won a victory. The general’s summary of what he understood had happened at Albany was greeted by roars of disbelief from the assembled reporters.
In short order the wires were burning up with reports of the heaviest American casualties to date in the Vietnam War; hints of an Army cover-up of a disastrous ambush; reports that the American forces were withdrawing—some accounts said “retreating”—from the valley. Much of the reporting was overstated and oversimplified; some of it was just plain wrong. What had happened at LZ Albany was by no means a
classic ambush. The element of surprise worked for the North Vietnamese and against the American column; Colonel An’s soldiers had between twenty minutes and an hour to maneuver into position to launch their attack. The battle at Albany encompasses something of all these precise definitions: There were a meeting engagement (with the recon platoon at the head of the column); a hasty attack (on the lead company); and a hasty ambush (of the rest of the column)—all of which occurred within a period of no more than five minutes.
But the reporters were not the only ones who were skeptical about what they had been told, and what they had not been told. That morning, November 18, at 10:15 A.M., the American commander in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, visited 3rd Brigade Headquarters at Catecka. During a thirty-minute briefing, Colonel Brown failed to mention anything at all about the fight at LZ Albany, limiting his report to an overview of the X-Ray fight. Later in the day Westmoreland stopped in Qui Nhon and toured the Army 85th Evacuation Hospital. In his “history notes” (journal) entry covering November 18, General Westmoreland wrote: “I … flew down and visited the brigade commanded by Colonel Tim Brown. He gave me a briefing and we flew over the operational area. I then flew down to Qui Nhon where I visited the men in the hospital. They were mostly personnel of the 1st Cavalry who had been wounded in the recent operation in Pleiku. While talking to them I began to sense I had not been given the full information when I had visited the Brigade CP. Several of the men stated they had been involved in what they referred to as an ambush. Most of the men were from the 2nd of the 7th Cavalry.”
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young Page 40