We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (14 page)

This sort of experience leaves scars. I had nightmares and for years afterward I was sour on life, by turns angry, cynical, and alienated. Then one day I woke up and saw the world as I believe it really is—a bright and warm place. I looked afresh at my scars and marveled not at the frailty of human flesh but at the indomitable strength of the human spirit. This is the miracle of life.

Then…came an event which changed me: An opportunity to go back to Vietnam. With ten other Ia Drang veterans I traveled back to the jungle in the Central Highlands and for several days walked the X-Ray and Albany battlefields. What struck me was the overwhelming peacefulness of the place, even in the clearing where I fought. I broke down several times. I wanted to bring back some shell casings—some physical manifestation of the battle—to lay at the foot of the Wall here in Washington.

But search as I did I could not find any. The forces of nature had simply erased it. And where once the grass had been slippery with blood there were flowers blooming in that place of death. So I pressed some and brought them back. Flowers—that’s all that I could find in that jungle clearing that once held terror and now held beauty. What I discovered with time and in time may seem obvious, but it had really escaped me all those years on my journey home from Vietnam and my experience there: The war is over. It certainly is for Vietnam and the Vietnamese. As I said on a
Nightline
broadcast when I came back, This land is at peace, and so should we be.

This has allowed me, on evenings like this, to step forward and take pride in the service I gave my country. But never to forget what was and will always be the worst day of my life: The day I escaped death in the tall grass of the Ia Drang Valley.

During his speech that evening Smith told the assembled Ia Drang brotherhood: “You all should know that I was recently diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. If it is from Agent Orange, which it may be, then it’s not the first time that damned war has tried to kill me.”

Smith, the son of the pioneer radio and television broadcaster Howard K. Smith, died a few months later, on April 7, 2004. He had found the peace that had eluded him for so many years on our trip back to the Ia Drang.

Just how brutal and close the combat was in Albany is nowhere better seen than in the story of Sgt. John Eade, a native of Toledo, Ohio, who now lives in Boston. Back then Eade was a squad leader in the 2nd Platoon of A Company 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry. Eade was one of a very few survivors of his platoon—a horribly wounded man who staggered out of the jungle and trees and into the Albany clearing the morning after the battle. He was evacuated and, for four decades, had no contact with any of the rest of us until Gwin found him. His story is pieced together from his own account and a story written by the reporter Jules Crittenden for the
Boston Herald
in November 2005.

Alpha Company was the only one of the line companies to actually make it into the Albany clearing before the enemy attack was launched. As company headquarters set up in the copse of trees in the middle of the landing zone, 2nd Platoon was ordered into the trees on the left side of the clearing and the 1st Platoon swung right and into the trees on that side. Few men of either group made it back alive.

Eade says his platoon was immediately pinned down when the enemy attacked, swarming over them through the trees and high grass. “For the first hour and a half it was intense hand-to-hand,” he recalled. “It was like a gang fight…small groups of us versus small groups of them. It got down to knives. It got down to choking people.” Eade said he and three of his men, Wilbert Johnson, Barry Burnite, and Oscar Barker Jr., were able to move and tried to flank the North Vietnamese. “We bit off more than we could chew,” he said. Burnite was a machine gunner and Johnson, a black trooper, was his assistant gunner. When the machine gun was blown up and Burnite was hit in the chest with shrapnel in the same blast, Johnson dragged Burnite over thirty yards through the jungle in a futile attempt to save him.

Now it was Eade, Johnson, and Barker holed up and fighting among the trees. Johnson was killed and Eade was shot in the stomach and the right shoulder and a burst of shrapnel sprayed his legs and feet and a large piece penetrated one foot. He couldn’t walk and was bleeding badly till Barker stuffed one of Eade’s dirty socks in the hole in his shoulder. Eade was now firing his M16 rifle with his left hand. By three p.m. much of the fighting around them had subsided.

“I knew and he knew that everyone else was dead,” Eade said. He urged Barker to try to save himself; to run across the fifty yards of open ground between them and the command post. “He refused to go.” Not long after that Barker was shot in the chest and Eade had to watch him die a long, slow death. Eade was now alone. He could have played dead but that was not his way. “Playing dead was a way to die. It made no sense to me. Our job was to hold that position and kill the enemy.”

In the command post they could see large groups of North Vietnamese moving through the 2nd Platoon area. The few survivors who had made it out told the officers they didn’t think anyone was alive there. They called a napalm strike on Eade’s area. He says it was the right decision even though it set him on fire. “I managed to roll in the dirt and put it out.” With all his other problems, Eade said, being set on fire was inconsequential. Besides, the napalm served a purpose. “It flushed them out and gave me an opportunity to reduce the numbers,” Eade added.

Late that day Eade was surprised by the sudden appearance of three enemy soldiers behind him. “There were three North Vietnamese looking at me, one with a pistol.” He shot and killed two of them, but the one with the pistol shot him in the face, destroying his right eye socket and shattering parts of his sinus. The bullet knocked Eade unconscious. When he came to the Vietnamese with the pistol was gone and it was dark. Parties of North Vietnamese moved through his area until midnight, collecting their dead and wounded. Eade couldn’t use his rifle for fear of giving away his position, but he collected up grenades from the bodies of his fallen comrades and used them on the enemy.

The middle of the morning on November 18, 1965, Eade heard rustling in the brush and prepared to fight again until he spotted the shape of an American helmet moving toward him. “I yelled at them: Give me some water! I was really thirsty. He looked at me and said: You’re shot in the stomach. I can’t give you water. So I asked him for some morphine. I told him I had used mine up on the other wounded (and) it really hurts. He said: You’re shot in the head. I can’t give you morphine. So I said: Well, then give me a cigarette. He gave me that.”

Eade spent a year in the Army Hospital at Valley Forge. While he was there Barry Burnite’s mother came to see him. “She asked me how did her son die. I kind of told her the truth and I kind of didn’t. I cleaned it up a bit. The uncontrollable grief of that woman has stayed with me my whole life. Her pain and grief was more than I could bear to look at. I can never think about it without wanting to cry.”

Now on this long-awaited return to Albany, Gwin, Forrest, and Smith began searching, each for his own piece of this ground. Each of them searching out the places where their own nightmares were born.

Here Gwin peered, with tears in his eyes, into the camera lens and declared: “There is no glory in war—only good men dying terrible deaths.” Forrest looked at the tangle of brush and tall grass where the enemy ambush had snapped on that long column of American soldiers and thought back to the 600-yard run he had made right through the heaviest of the fighting to get back to his soldiers, his company, at the tail end of the column. His two radio operators, running behind him, were both killed. Forrest lost seventeen of his men killed at Albany and had tormented himself for many years wondering what he might have done to save them. The truth was that Forrest’s company suffered the fewest casualties of any company that fought at Albany, in large part because their commander knew he had to get back to his men, and did.

It is only a couple of miles from X-Ray to Albany but we found a world of difference. The deep peace we found at X-Ray was not to be found at Albany. It was eerie and haunted by the spirits of soldiers who died in that grass and jungle, separated from each other. Here lay wounded Americans, intermingled with wounded North Vietnamese, and only the enemy moved among them in the darkness collecting theirs and killing ours. That and the American artillery shells and napalm canisters that killed friendly and enemy alike. In the tropical heat we shuddered with cold chills and heard the faint echoes of men screaming in pain and begging for mercy in their last seconds on earth.

Gwin said, “What I saw at Albany set me back. The place is evil—dank with jungle rot and an inch of water over the landing zone. I passed foxholes, still there, their square forms filled with putrescent and stagnant water. Shell holes and bomb craters were clearly visible and some of the trees were still blackened by the napalm attacks.”

None of the three enemy commanders, General An, Colonel Thuoc, and Colonel Hao, had fought at Albany. An, in his bunker on the slopes of Chu Pong, thought his troops had ambushed my battalion in Albany. He had not known, until we told him, that at Albany his men fought our sister battalion, the 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry. He had not noticed my battalion’s departure from X-Ray by helicopter the day before, or our reinforcements from 2/7 Cavalry marching in overland to replace us. By the time the enemy attack began on November 17 the survivors of my battalion were back at Camp Holloway outside Pleiku, freshly shaved and showered and wearing our first issue of the new Army jungle fatigues. The American commander in Vietnam, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, climbed onto the hood of a jeep and addressed us, telling us we had won a great victory at LZ X-Ray. Even as he spoke to us the slaughter was beginning at LZ Albany and Westmoreland would not hear a word of the bad news until the next day, when he toured the 85th Evacuation Hospital at Qui Nhon and the scores of wounded told him of the desperate fighting at Albany.

That afternoon at Camp Holloway Brig. Gen. Richard Knowles, assistant division commander of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), called a news conference at Camp Holloway to address rumors of an ambush that had chewed up an American Infantry battalion in the Ia Drang the day before. Knowles told the crowd of reporters assembled in a big Army tent that there had been no ambush at LZ Albany. He called it a “meeting engagement” and said that there had been no massacre of Americans. Casualties were, he said, light to moderate. Joe Galloway, who had flown out to Albany that morning and saw Chinook cargo helicopters being stacked full of American bodies, stood on trembling legs and roared: “That’s bullshit and you know it, General.”

Back in Saigon General Westmoreland, furious because he had been briefed extensively on the victory at X-Ray by the Cavalry commanders, who spoke not a word of the unfolding debacle at Albany, picked up the phone and called the Field Force Vietnam (corps) commander, Lt. Gen. Stanley “Swede” Larsen, and demanded an explanation. Larsen said he would investigate and report back. Larsen flew to Pleiku and sat down with 1st Cavalry Division commander Maj. Gen. Harry W. O. Kinnard, assistant division commander Brigadier General Knowles, and the 3rd Brigade commander, Col. Tim Brown. He asked why none of them had told General Westmoreland about the battle at Albany. “Each of them told me that they had not told General Westmoreland about the battle because they did not know about it,” Larsen told Joe years later in a telephone discussion. Afterward General Larsen provided Joe a signed affidavit detailing these events. “They were lying and I left and flew back to my headquarters and called Westy and told him so, and told him I was prepared to bring court-martial charges against each of them. There was a long silence on the phone and then Westy told me: No, Swede, let it slide.”

With that began a years-long Army effort to cover up what had transpired in this haunted jungle clearing halfway around the world from home. The memoirs of Westmoreland and others speak glowingly of the battle at X-Ray but not a word is written of the battle they wanted to forget. Joe told me once that he dates the rot at the heart of our effort in Vietnam to that very moment when Westmoreland told Larsen to “let it slide.” Valuable lessons are there to be learned from every battle, even the disasters or maybe especially the disasters. But you can’t learn a thing from a battle you have tried to hide, for whatever reason. I thought about all this, and I know Joe did, as we walked this soggy ground where so many young Americans had been slain in what may have been some of the most vicious hand-to-hand fighting of the entire Vietnam War. Where wounded men held their breath and played dead as they heard the wounded man just a few feet away in the darkness beg for his life and receive a bullet in the head as an answer. In this place Charlie Company 2/7 Cavalry, Smith’s outfit, began the day with 110 men and officers. The next day only 8 of those men were marked present for duty. The rest were either dead or wounded.

My first visit to this Albany battleground came in April 1966 when, after I succeeded Colonel Brown as commander of the 3rd Brigade, I led an operation back into X-Ray and Albany. We came here to Albany searching for the four Americans still listed as missing in action since November 17, 1965. Captain Forrest had moved on from company command in 1/5 Cavalry to a division staff job, but he came along on this operation because one of the missing men belonged to his company. That man had been marked down as wounded and evacuated but later Forrest received a letter from his mother saying she had not heard anything from her son in six weeks. Forrest turned the Army hospital system upside down but could not find a trace of his trooper. Now he again loped down that 600-yard-long trail where so many had died, right back to the end where his company had fought. There in the high elephant grass he found the bones, tattered uniform, and dog tags of his missing soldier, lying where he had fallen in the first burst of firing. We also located bones and identification of the other three missing 2/7 Cavalry soldiers. Graves registration crews collected all four for the beginning of their long-delayed journey home.