We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam Read online

  We Are Soldiers Still

  A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam

  Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (USA Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway

  This book is dedicated

  to the memory of two who loved us best:

  Julia Compton Moore

  1929–2004

  Theresa Null Galloway

  1948–1996

  Contents

  Foreword by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf

  Preface

  Chapter 1 Back to Our Battlefields

  Chapter 2 Conversations with the Enemy

  Chapter 3 You Killed My Battalion!

  Chapter 4 Traveling in Time

  Chapter 5 The Backbone of the Army

  Chapter 6 Back to the Ia Drang!

  Chapter 7 A Night Alone on the Battlefield

  Chapter 8 Back to the Hell That Was Albany

  Chapter 9 Walking the Ground at Dien Bien Phu

  Chapter 10 The Never-Ending Story

  Chapter 11 Lessons on Leadership

  Photographic Insert

  Chapter 12 On War

  Epilogue

  Appendix: Two Heroes for America

  Acknowledgments

  An Appeal

  Searchable Terms

  Photography Credits

  About the Authors

  Other Books by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  For each generation and each war there is a defining book that tells the story and recaptures the experience of those who fought that war with such accuracy and truth that old veterans read it through tears and cherish it as a prized possession. My old, good friends Hal Moore and Joe Galloway gave us such a gift with their magnificent Vietnam history, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young.

  Never the sort to rest on their laurels, that unlikely duo—a general and a reporter who stood and fought side by side in a terrible battle and became best friends—has now given us another gift with this story of their journey back to the remote Ia Drang battlefields, in company with the North Vietnamese Army commanders who fought against them.

  Together these old enemies who were becoming new friends walked the ground soaked with the blood of hundreds of Americans and thousands of North Vietnamese, each searching out places and nightmares etched in their hearts and minds.

  Our professional Army is a small, tight-knit community and Hal Moore and Joe Galloway are quiet heroes within that community. Just how small is that world? Well, Hal Moore as a young major in the early 1950s taught infantry tactics to Cadet Norm Schwarzkopf at West Point. He persuaded me to select the Infantry as my branch of service, even as my father, a major general, urged me to choose the high-tech Ordnance Corps, telling me I would never make general as a mud-foot Infantryman.

  In the summer of 1965 I was a newly promoted major and adviser to a South Vietnamese airborne brigade in the Central Highlands, marching my battered troops out of the Duc Co area across thirty-five miles of dangerous country. Along came a young reporter for United Press International named Galloway, who marched with us. He turned up again, a quarter century later, at my headquarters in Saudi Arabia on the eve of the Persian Gulf War. We spent a couple of days together as I visited American and allied forces on the eve of the war, and then I sent him out to ride with the 24th Infantry Division tanks on their 250-mile end run around the Iraqi divisions in Kuwait. In my estimation Galloway is the finest combat correspondent of our generation—a soldiers’ reporter and a soldiers’ friend.

  We Are Soldiers Still is the ideal follow-up to Moore and Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. Through their eyes, and half a dozen journeys back to Vietnam since the war, we see the evolution of that country and people as they find peace after a thousand years of war. And we see a surprising concern and tenderness for each other among men who once had done their best to kill each other. If those men, veterans of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War, can become friends and pray together for all who died on that ground on both sides, then the war really is over and we can all be at peace.

  Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, USA Ret.

  PREFACE

  It has been more than forty years since those nightmarish days of November 1965, when an understrength 450-man battalion of the 7th U.S. Cavalry launched an audacious helicopter air assault into the heart of enemy territory in the Ia Drang Valley.

  Before it was over three more battalions would join us in a close-quarters, no-holds-barred fight to the death in two small clearings in the jungles of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.

  Two-hundred thirty-four young American soldiers perished in and around Landing Zones (LZ) X-Ray and Albany in the first major battle between the newly arrived Americans and North Vietnamese regulars sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in division strength. The North Vietnamese lost an estimated two thousand killed in the month of November in those battles and several others that preceded them.

  It was the first such collision between two fine armies, and it would stand as the bloodiest of the entire ten-year war when the total American death toll of 305 killed in action that month in that place is considered.

  Those of us who survived, miraculously, amidst so much death and dying all around never forgot those days and nights, even though some had served in World War II and Korea and some went on to serve two or three more tours in that long, bitter war and other wars that followed.

  Some of us have lived long enough to see our sons and now our daughters—even our grandchildren—wear the uniform and carry the battle to other enemies in places like Panama, the Persian Gulf, Haiti, Afghanistan, and, yes, Iraq. This reminds us eerily of the conflict of our own youth in Vietnam.

  With the publication in 1992 of We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, the stories of those battles, which had nearly vanished from the memory of most Americans, were recaptured. The release in 2002 of the movie We Were Soldiers brought yet more recognition of the courage and selfless sacrifice of so many Ia Drang soldiers on both sides.

  All along our war and our battles remained fresh in our memories and our nightmares. We had a lot of unfinished business that could only be conducted on those long-ago battlefields. We had old ghosts, old demons that tugged at hearts and minds and sent some of our comrades in search of a name for what ailed us, and help dealing with that ailment.

  Years after our battles and our return home the Veterans Administration and its medical specialists put a name to a condition many Vietnam veterans experienced, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and began, belatedly, offering group therapy to help veterans deal with the condition.

  Our old commander, then Lt. Col. Hal Moore, had vowed years before that one day we would go back to the Ia Drang, to those blood-soaked clearings in the Vietnamese jungles, and walk that ground and do our duty of confronting our demons and freeing the souls of all who had perished there. The general declared that he intended to spend the night there and he wouldn’t listen to reason or the refusals of the victorious Vietnamese Communists who now controlled all of Vietnam, north and south.

  So much has come to pass in all our lives in these four decades. Some who survived the worst that hand-to-hand combat threw at them have died, and we miss them terribly. Many would be surprised, thirty years later, to receive medals of valor for their actions in the Ia Drang. Two of our favorite people, helicopter pilots Maj. Bruce Crandall, a.k.a. Ancient Serpent Six, and Capt. Ed “Serpent 1 6” Freeman, waited even longer before they were decorated w
ith our nation’s highest award for bravery above and beyond the call of duty—the Medal of Honor. Freeman’s came first, in 2001, then Crandall’s in 2007. They joined Col. Walter J. “Joe” Marm, USA ret., who also earned his Medal of Honor in the Ia Drang but received it in 1966.

  Life, as they say, went on day by day for all of us. We took the good with the bad and kept moving ahead, each in his own way, always with an inner understanding that we had already seen both the best and worst that men can do to other men, and that nothing—not even the passage of four decades—can fully erase those images.

  Joe Galloway likes to say that every day he has lived since November 15, 1965, has been a bonus, a gift from God, and it is so for virtually all of us. Joe, who covered his last war in 2006 in the rocky deserts and narrow belts of green along the rivers of Iraq, finally put away his helmet and fatigues and retired to his home place in Refugio County, Texas. He had done four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam between the beginning in 1965 and the end in 1975. In between and afterward Joe also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War, the 1971 guerrilla uprising in Sri Lanka, Indonesia’s invasion of Portuguese Timor, Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf, 1990–1991, the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1995, and two tours in Iraq, in 2003 and 2005–2006.

  Riding with the M1A1 Abrams tanks of the Army’s 24th Division in the 250-mile charge across the western Iraq desert in the Gulf War, Joe remembers offering up a prayer: “Dear God, don’t let there be another Ia Drang Valley waiting up ahead. I’ve already seen that and these young men and women don’t need that experience.”

  During those years Joe watched and reported the changes occurring in America’s military—the shift from a draftee Army to an all-volunteer force, the shift from training to fight a long guerrilla war to an Army armed and equipped and trained to fight tank wars against conventional enemies similarly armed. Then, with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he saw that Army swiftly take down Saddam Hussein’s army and government in a three-week blitzkrieg but prove utterly unprepared and untrained to fight the insurgency that arose to bloody the Americans with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the middle of a burgeoning civil war that has dragged on for five long years now.

  In his long journey as a witness to war Joe never again saw combat so vicious and hand-to-hand—never again saw wholesale slaughter so intense—as that he witnessed, photographed, and fought in so long ago in the Ia Drang Valley. An interviewer recently asked him if he had learned anything from going to war for so long. Joe responded: “Yes. I learned how to cry.” He added that he also learned that some events are so intense and immediate and life-changing that you cannot simply stand motionless; cannot remain a mere witness; cannot be a neutral observer. You will take a hand, lend a hand, stand up and get involved because you must.

  Our old commander Hal Moore’s vow that he would again, someday, return to walk the remote battlegrounds of the Ia Drang Valley and, yes, to spend one last night in that place the Vietnamese call the Forest of the Screaming Souls, came to pass on our third trip back to Vietnam a quarter century after America’s long, bitter war there had ended. It is that story and more we tell in this book.

  What all of us know in our hearts is that we are soldiers still. Some of us revisit the battlefield in nightmares. Some of us wear scars, visible and invisible, that mark us as changed men who walk unseen among our neighbors, who have never known what it is like to hold a dying boy in their arms and watch the life fade from his questioning eyes.

  The world may now know something of the events that changed us, but thankfully most are spared the experiences that are ours and the burden that is the province of men who have killed other men at the bidding of political leaders more concerned with personal pride and national honor than with peace.

  Yes, we were soldiers once, when we were young. Now that we are old we are soldiers still. We are soldiers who mourn for young men and women dying on other battlefields in other parts of our world four decades and more after our war ended so badly. A generation of political leaders who studiously avoided service in our generation’s war seemingly learned nothing from that history and thus consign a new generation of soldiers to “preemptive” wars of choice, condemning them to carry their own memories of death and dying through their lives.

  May God bless and keep all soldiers, young and old, and may that same God open the eyes of all political leaders to the truth that most wars are a confession of failure—the failure of diplomacy and negotiation and common sense and, in most cases, of leadership.

  We who still dream of war in our troubled nights hope against hope for peace and its blessings for all.

  ONE

  Back to Our Battlefields

  For us it was an irresistible urge that gnawed at us for nearly three decades—a need to return and walk the blood-drenched soil of the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam, where two great armies clashed head-on in the first major battle of a war that lasted ten years and consumed the lives of 58,256 Americans and perhaps as many as 2 million Vietnamese.

  Joe and I had tried twice before, in 1991 and again in 1992, to reach the Ia Drang during our research trips to Vietnam. The Vietnamese government officials in Hanoi had flatly refused permission for such a journey, uncertain whether we had some hidden agenda among the restive Montagnard tribal people in the Central Highlands where our battlefields were located. Or perhaps because our battlefields were located just five miles from the Cambodian border and Khmer Rouge guerrillas had been raiding across the border in that area, creating havoc in the thinly scattered villages near that border.

  When we suggested on our 1992 visit that we might simply hire a car and set off south to visit the Ia Drang, our Foreign Ministry minder pointedly said if we left Hanoi on such a mission we would be “followed by a car full of people; not very nice people; and we won’t be able to help you then.” Only with the publication of Joe’s cover article on the Ia Drang in U.S. News & World Report and the release of our book—both translated into Vietnamese and very carefully read in Hanoi—did the roadblocks fall in the fall of 1993.

  We had proved by our writings that our only desire was to accurately report what had happened in the Ia Drang Valley, and we were just as interested in their version of this slice of history as we were in our own. Visit by visit, article by article, our hosts warmed to us personally and to our quest for the ground truth about battles that had deeply affected our lives and theirs.

  There was another important factor: The world had changed. Communism had died in the Soviet Union and was being transformed in neighboring China. The rise of the Asian tigers—capitalist neighbors like Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, whose economies were booming—had not gone unnoticed by Hanoi. They were maneuvering to gain initial diplomatic recognition by Washington and were seeking foreign investment and most-favored-nation trade terms. This would not come for another year. Communism was alive in Vietnam but it was busy putting on a new face.

  Now, in October 1993, a chartered Soviet-made Hind helicopter was lifting off the runway at the old Camp Holloway airfield at Pleiku in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The two Vietnamese civilian pilots confessed up front that they had no idea where, in that rugged plateau that butted up against the Cambodian border, the football-field-sized clearing code-named Landing Zone X-Ray was located. So Bruce Crandall, one of the most experienced pilots in Army Aviation, and I knelt in the narrow space between them in the cockpit, unfolded my old and detailed Army battle map, and, using Joe Galloway’s even more ancient Boy Scout compass, pointed the way to the place where our nightmares were born.

  In the back of the rattling old helicopter was an assemblage of American and North Vietnamese military men, old soldiers all, who were journeying together to a place where we had all done our very best to kill each other in one month of ambush and assault and set-piece battles in November 1965. It was here that the men of America’s 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and those of the 66th, 32nd, and 33rd regiments of
the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) had tested each other in the crucible of combat. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 North Vietnamese regulars had been killed or wounded. A total of 305 Americans had died and another 400-plus had been wounded in that time of testing. No one who fought there, on either side, talked seriously about who won and who lost. In such a slaughterhouse there are no winners, only survivors.

  What had now brought this little group of survivors together to travel back to a painful shared history? It was, of all things, a book published a year earlier that opened long-closed doors and allowed us to make this needed journey. The book was We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, written by Joe and myself.

  We were bound, in this thirty-five-mile flight, for the jungled mountain plateau near the Cambodian border where I had led my beloved troopers of the 1st Battalion 7th U.S. Cavalry in a helicopter air assault into a battle where we would be vastly outnumbered at times. That any of us survived is testimony to the fighting spirit of the great young Americans—the majority of them draftees—who, when their backs were to the wall, fought like lions and died bravely.

  Had I commanded the men on the other side I would have said much the same thing of the North Vietnamese peasant boys drafted into their own army and sent south down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to intervene in the war raging in the southern half of the country. They, too, fought bravely and were not afraid to die in the storm of napalm, bombs, artillery shells, and machine-gun and rifle fire we brought down on them. Now their commander, Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, and I were in the air, returning together to that ground hallowed by the sacrifices of our men. This time we came in peace, old enemies in the process of becoming new friends—something that would have been inconceivable just two years before.

  These seminal battles that opened the waltz in Vietnam—which would stand as the bloodiest of the entire Vietnam War—had been largely forgotten in the long years of combat that followed before helicopters lifted the last Americans off the roofs in downtown Saigon in April 1975.