We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young

by Harold G. Moore

The last units of Brigadier General Chu Huy Man’s B-3 Front crossed into Cambodia. They were beyond reach now. They would reinforce, reequip, rest, and rehabilitate their surviving soldiers, and then, at a time of their choosing in the spring of 1966, reenter South Vietnam and resume their attacks.

  Major Norm Schwarzkopf watched them go and was disgusted with the U.S. policy that permitted the creation of North Vietnamese sanctuaries across the border in supposedly neutral Cambodia. He was not the only military man in the field who was angered by a policy that tied the hands of the American and South Vietnamese forces.

  Major General Harry Kinnard and his boss, Lieutenant General Stanley (Swede) Larsen, both appealed to General Westmoreland and U. S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to do everything in their power to persuade Washington to review and revoke the restrictions on American freedom of action along and across the border.

  Both Lodge and Westmoreland requested that review in November 1965; they got back a cable from William Bundy, assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs at the State Department, copied for Defense Secretary McNamara, Joint Chiefs chairman General Wheeler, and Bundy’s brother, McGeorge, at the White House. Will Bundy’s cable said:

  “Separate message through military channels will contain authorization for self-defense measures applicable to existing Silver Bayonet situation. This will include authority to U.S./ Government of Vietnam units to return fire, to eliminate fire coming from Cambodia and to maneuver into Cambodian territory as necessary to defend selves while actively engaged in contact with PAVN/VC units. It excludes authority to engage Cambodian forces if encountered, except in self-defense, to conduct tactical air or artillery operations against populated Cambodian areas, or to attack Cambodian base areas [emphasis added].… We recognize these distinctions might be most difficult to preserve, but from political standpoint it is essential that this be done.”

  General Kinnard and the 1st Cavalry commanders said even this slight relaxation of the restrictions on hot pursuit into Cambodia was not communicated or explained to them in time to be utilized during the Ia Drang Valley campaign.

  Not long after this, orders came down to all the 1st Cavalry Division brigade and battalion commanders that we were never to speculate or suggest to any reporter that the North Vietnamese were using Cambodia as a sanctuary or that they were passing through Cambodia on their way to South Vietnam. This refusal to admit what we knew was true, and what even the newest reporter knew was true, struck all of us as dishonest and hypocritical.

  General Kinnard says this was the point at which, under political direction, the American military surrendered the initiative to North Vietnam. What it said to Harry Kinnard was that this war would never end in an American victory. Initiative had been sacrificed to the polite diplomatic fiction that Cambodia was sovereign and neutral and in control of its territory. By the time another American president lifted the restrictions and the U.S. military crossed into Cambodia, Kinnard says, it was already too late.

  Bob McDade’s 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry survivors had spent the night at Holloway, getting their first decent sleep in a week. Now, on November 21, they were assigned four deuce-and-a-half trucks, more than enough to hold the hundred-plus men left of this battalion, to take them across the Mang Yang Pass and home. While they stood in ranks waiting to climb on trucks, Lieutenant Rick Rescorla wanted to hold a platoon ceremony to honor the men who had fallen. “I called my appointed bugler and asked him to blow Taps. ‘Present arms,’ I ordered. The bugler blew the sad and bitter notes.”

  Sergeant John Setelin: “On Sunday they loaded the whole battalion, all that was left of the 2/7, on four trucks. That tells you how many of us were going back on our feet, out of maybe four hundred and fifty who started this thing. It took hours to get there and we were as afraid then as any time in X-Ray or Albany. Figured with our luck we would get hit going home. We all sat facing outward, rifles at the ready, watching every bush, every hole, every rock.”

  As the 2nd Battalion pulled into An Khe base they rolled past the tents of the 1st Battalion where we were preparing the personal effects of our dead to be sent home. We cheered them as they passed. That little American flag that had flown at X-Ray now decorated one of the trucks. As they approached the clearing by brigade headquarters, the division band struck up the 7th Cavalry regimental march, “Garry Owen,” and the division color guard dipped the 1st Cav colors in salute. Darkness fell and someone hollered for “the bugle.” Rick Rescorla’s battered old French bugle was unlimbered and the designated bugler blew “Garry Owen” on it to the wild cheers of the battalions.

  Rescorla adds, “Captain Diduryk came up to me. The band was playing Garry Owen. ‘Hard Corps was your platoon nickname, but now I want to use it for our whole company,’ Myron said. ‘I’d also like to use the bugle as Bravo’s bugle for the rest of our tour. OK?’ I agreed, saluted, gave him a ‘Garry Owen, sir,’ and then trudged off to join the survivors making their way slowly up the hill to the mess. About 150 had been killed, 130 wounded, some maimed for life. I recalled those bright, young faces. They would not grow old with us. If I ever got the chance I would say to them: You were a ragtag bunch but Uncle Sam never sent better men into battle. I wasn’t crying. It was the rain. Hell yes, it was only the rain.”

  Doc William Shucart: “I remember us coming back to An Khe on trucks. They had the division band out playing for us. A victory parade. They played ‘Garry Owen.’ It was a very emotional, very stirring sight. I thought: Here we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, got our asses kicked, and they got a band out playing for us. That was the doctor in me thinking that.”

  Captain Joel Sugdinis: “I don’t believe either side won or lost at Albany. The North Vietnamese did leave first, without destroying us. But is that a U.S. victory? I believe each side was severely battered and each side was grateful to still resemble a military organization when it was over. We both went on to fight other battles, being much wiser for the experiences at the Ia Drang.”

  Lieutenant Larry Gwin: “We stayed at Albany for another day and night, cleaning up the unspeakable debris of battle, and we slowly realized we must have inflicted a terrible defeat on the enemy. Victory was the only thing that gave us strength to continue. I’ve tried to forget that day since I’ve come home, but I realized that those hours of close combat are as fresh in my mind now as if they had just been fought. It will take a long, long time to forget that day at Albany.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Bob McDade: “I never thought of it as a victory. We got into a scrap. We gave a good account of ourselves and proved to the men that we didn’t have to be afraid of [the enemy]. The 2nd of the 7th was a good battalion. The men fought bravely.”

  Colonel Tim Brown: “The NVA just plain got the jump on them. These two battalions ran into one another; it was like a saloon fight. One of them pulled his gun before the other did. He got the edge.”

  People’s Army Lieutenant General Nguyen Huu An: “This [Albany] was the most savage battle in the Ia Drang campaign. We consider this our victory. This was the first time our B-3 Front fought the Americans and we defeated Americans, caused big American losses. As military men we realize it is very important to win the first battle. It raised our soldiers’ morale and gave us many good lessons.”

  One of the yardsticks for measuring success in those days was captured enemy weapons. The 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav policed up thirty-three light machine guns, 112 rifles, four mortar tubes, two mortar sights, two rocket launchers, and three heavy machine guns on the field at Albany. It reported 403 enemy killed and estimated 150 NVA wounded.

  These were emotional days for me as commander of 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry. I had been on the list for promotion to full colonel for over a year and my number was coming up on November 23. That meant I would have to give up command of my battalion on that date. I had also been pushing my staff hard as we wrote letters of condolence to the families who had lost loved ones killed in action and prepared recommendations for medals and
awards.

  We had problems on the awards: We had few who could type, so many of the forms were scrawled by hand by lanternlight. Many witnesses had been evacuated with wounds or had already rotated for discharge. Too many men had died bravely and heroically, while the men who had witnessed their deeds had also been killed. Uncommon valor truly was a common virtue on the field at Landing Zone X-Ray those three days and two nights. Acts of valor and sacrifice that on other fields, on other days, would have been rewarded with the Medal of Honor or Distinguished Service Cross or a Silver Star were recognized only with a telegram saying “The Secretary of the Army regrets …” The same was true of our sister battalion, the 2nd of the 7th.

  Every morning during those final bittersweet days of my command of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Sergeant Major Plumley would appear with a group of men bound for the airfield and the plane that would take them home for discharge. Specialist 4 Pat Selleck of the recon platoon says: “Colonel Moore shook our hands and said, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Go back home.’ I was the second or third guy he spoke to and he had tears in his eyes. I remember what he said: ‘I see that you are married; you have a wedding ring on. Just go home, pick up the pieces, and start your life all over again.’ And basically that’s what I did. I came home to a wonderful wife, tried to readjust, did a decent job at it. I did what Colonel Moore said. I tried to put the war behind me. I served. I did my job. I came home. I didn’t ask for anything, no fanfare, no parades. I went back to work, back to school, and did my best. He might be a general, but to me he’s still Colonel Moore. If it wasn’t for him and all his knowledge and training, I don’t think any of us would have survived the Ia Drang Valley.”

  On Tuesday, November 23, the day came for me to turn over command. For the change of command I requested a full battalion formation with officers front and center, the division band trooping the line, honors to the reviewing officer and the colors, and then the pass in review—reminiscent of our weekly Retreat parades back at Fort Benning. I requested that Captain Myron Diduryk’s Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry and Lieutenant Sisson’s platoon of Alpha Company, 2nd of the 7th be included in the parade of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry in token of the fact that they fought bravely alongside us in the battle at X-Ray. And so it was. The band played “Colonel Bogey” and “The Washington Post March” and “Garry Owen.” General Kinnard pinned on my eagles and I spoke briefly and with deep emotion.

  Specialist 4 Ray Tanner of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion: “We stood in formation, with some units hardly having enough men to form up. Colonel Hal Moore spoke to us and he cried. At that moment he could have led us back into the Ia Drang. We were soldiers, we were fighting men, and those of us who were left had the utmost love and respect for our colonel and for one another. As I reflect on those three days in November, I remember many heroes but no cowards. I learned what value life really had. We all lost friends but the bravery they showed on the battlefield will live forever.”

  On Thanksgiving, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav troopers were looking forward eagerly to the traditional Thanksgiving feast of hot turkey and all the trimmings. It was a cold and rainy day that Thanksgiving at An Khe, and it lives on in the memory of some of the battalion veterans.

  Colonel McDade: “It was a grim Thanksgiving. I met General Westmoreland in the company street near the mess hall. I told him everyone was just about ready to eat their Thanksgiving dinners, but he said, ‘Get them all together and let me talk to them.’”

  Sergeant John Setelin of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion remembers the unfortunate consequences of that order: “For Thanksgiving they gave us a hot meal plus a canteen cup of real coffee, not that instant C-ration crap. Turkey and all the trimmings, the best we ever saw. At that time the indoor mess hall wasn’t completed, so we collected our dinners in mess kits and were walking back to our squad tents to chow down. It was starting to rain. Somebody hollered attention, stopped us and ordered us to assemble. There stood General William Westmoreland himself. He made a speech there in the rain and while he talked we watched the rain turn that hot dinner into cold Mulligan stew. Who knew what the hell the man said? Who cared? He ruined a decent dinner.”

  Lieutenant Larry Gwin remembers that General Westmoreland then went off and ate Thanksgiving dinner with the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry.

  On November 29, 1965, the brass descended on An Khe for detailed briefings on the Ia Drang battles. The party was led by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and included the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle K. Wheeler; the Army Chief of Staff, General Harold K. Johnson; General Westmoreland; and Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief, Pacific (CINCPAC).

  I was told to brief McNamara and party on the fight at LZ X-Ray. I had heard that the secretary of defense had a fearsome reputation as a human computer, insensitive to people. McNamara sat in the front row in the tent briefing room, filled with commanders and staff officers. I talked without notes, using a map and pointer, for perhaps fifteen minutes. When I wrapped up, saying, “Sir, that completes my presentation,” there was dead silence. McNamara stood, stepped forward, and without a word extended his hand, looking into my eyes. He asked no questions, made no comments.

  After the McNamara briefing, still without a new job, I was given a tent and a typist in 3rd Brigade headquarters and got down to work writing my after-action report on X-Ray. It took nine days and three drafts. I arranged for the Air Force to fly a photo recon mission over the Chu Pong massif, the Ia Drang Valley, and the clearing at X-Ray to illustrate the report. On December 9, 1965, I signed the final version and forwarded it to Colonel Tim Brown. Then it went up to Major General Harry Kinnard, who read it and then made certain that copies were distributed to every branch school in the U.S. Army as a teaching tool.

  While I was working on the report I received word that Air Force Lieutenant Charlie Hastings, our fearless and superb forward air controller at X-Ray, had been shot down over the Mang Yang Pass while flying an O-1E Bird Dog spotter plane. The good news was that Charlie was alive; the bad news was that he had been severely burned in the crash. He had been evacuated to the Army hospital at Fort Bliss, El Paso, a town full of retired 7th U.S. Cavalry veterans of World War II and Korea. I passed the word to all of them: Charlie Hastings is one of us, a Garry Owen trooper. Take care of him.

  The 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry was still carrying four men missing in action after the Albany fight. To the horror of Captain George Forrest, the commander of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, it became clear in December that one of his soldiers was also missing at Albany. He says, “This was a 2nd Platoon soldier, PFC John R. Ackerman. The one thing that had always been drilled into us was accountability: You must account for every man. I was positive we had gotten all our dead and wounded out. When Ackerman’s name came up, before we left, somebody in his squad said they saw him loaded onto a medevac helicopter.

  “Then, in December, we got a letter from his mother saying she had not heard from him. I initiated action through the division personnel officer, searching for any record of him in any of the Army hospitals worldwide. There was no record. It was my worst nightmare come true. When we went back to the Ia Drang in April 1966, I spent a day stomping around Albany. At that point I got an appreciation for what we had been in, our position on the ground in relation to the main part of the ambush.

  “We found PFC Ackerman’s remains, right about where the 2nd Platoon had been. We found his boots and helmet. In those days we tied one of our dog tags into the laces of a boot [and] wore the other around our neck. We found his dog tag with his boots. That put that to rest. On that day they found four more MI As out there from McDade’s battalion. You know, all of this breaks your heart,” says Forrest.

  By then I was the 3rd Brigade commander; the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry was part of my brigade. I decided if we ever went back into the Ia Drang I would personally lead a thorough search for those four missing men. On the morning of April 6, 1966, Sergeant
Major Basil Plumley, Matt Dillon, and I took a platoon of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cav and air-assaulted into Landing Zone Albany. No enemy presence. In a matter of minutes we located the remains of eight soldiers, all in one fifteen-by-twenty-yard piece of ground near the three anthills in the center of the clearing. Some of them were clearly American, as evidenced by fragments of green fatigue uniform material, GI web gear, and GI boots. Their steel helmets lay nearby. Other remains were mixed in; just fragments and bones. We touched nothing, but called in the Graves Registration people, who removed all the remains and associated gear. Four sets of the remains were positively identified as the 2nd Battalion’s MIAs; the rest were Vietnamese.

  With that operation the 1st Cavalry Division balanced the books and closed a sad chapter on the fight at Albany. Five coffins could begin the long journey home, and five American mothers who had already suffered too much would no longer suffer the agonies of not knowing whether their sons were alive and prisoners, or dead and abandoned in the jungle. And Captain George Forrest and I could sleep a little better at night for the rest of our lives.

  25

  “The Secretary of the Army Regrets …”

  Only the dead have seen the end of war.

  —PLATO

  The guns were at last silent in the valley. The dying was done, but the suffering had only just begun. The men of the 1st Cavalry Division had done what was asked of them. The Army field morgues were choked with the bodies of more than 230 soldiers wrapped in their green rubber ponchos. More than 240 maimed and wounded troopers moved slowly along the chain from battlefield aid station to medical clearing station to field hospital, and onto the ambulance transport planes.

  Some whose wounds would heal soon enough for eventual return to duty in Vietnam were flown only as far as Army hospitals in Japan. The most seriously injured were flown to the Philippines; their conditions were stabilized at the hospital at Clark Field, and then they were loaded onto planes that would take them to military hospitals near their homes in the United States.