We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (15 page)

Before we left, as we waited for our helicopter to return and pick us up, our small group gathered once more in a circle and said a farewell prayer to the dead of this haunted place of battle.

We flew back to Pleiku and that evening our party gathered for a farewell dinner. Several of the Vietnamese would leave us here and return home to Hanoi the following day. The menu for all of us—except Plumley, who had brought his own large paper sack of rations from home, small tins of Vienna sausage and potted meat, boxes of Saltine crackers, and a squirt bottle of yellow mustard—was rice, soup, baguettes, and Ba Muoi Ba “33” beer.

Colonel Hao, during the hours while he and the others waited for news that we were safe, had written a poem which he read to us. It is reprinted, in translation, here. It touched our hearts. General An and I exchanged personal gifts during this dinner: I gave him my wristwatch. He took off his old green pith helmet with its single star on a red background and handed it to me. It is a cherished reminder of how two old enemies found friendship on their battlefield of long ago, and it hangs in a place of honor on the wall of my den.

Here is the poem Colonel Hao read to us that night:

To remember the days of war

We have come to you this afternoon

Our old battlefield still here.

Yet how do we find your graves

Now hidden by 30 years of growth.

In your youth like the leaves so green

Your blood soaks the earth red

For today’s forest to grow.

Words cannot describe how we miss you

Our fingers trace the bark for clues of days past.

We imagine you resting for a thousand peaceful autumns

Feeling the loss of each of you.

We come to rejoin a span of bridge

For the happiness of those living.

On a calm autumn afternoon in Ia Drang

Veterans join hands.

After 30 years we relive that battle

Between two sides of the frontline.

Now we stand at each other’s side

Remembering generals and soldiers of years past

Bring back the months and years of history

Untroubled by ancient rifts

We look together toward the future

Hoping that generations to come will remember.

Our people know love and bravery

We leave old hate for new friendships.

Together we will live in peace

So that this land will remain ever green

Forever in peace and harmony.

NINE

Walking the Ground at Dien Bien Phu

O
n the troopship that carried my battalion to Vietnam in the summer of 1965 I brought a box of books, most of them histories of the French experience and war in Indochina, to read or reread in my search for useful information about the place we were bound for and the people we would fight. Among the books was Bernard Fall’s superb
Hell in a Very Small Place
, a study of the pivotal 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, where the French had bet everything they had and lost. I also devoured another fine history by Fall, a French-born American scholar, titled
Street Without Joy
, about the French war against the Viet Minh in the southern part of Vietnam. The lessons taught by Dr. Fall were all about treating the Vietnamese with respect as an enemy who was tough, tenacious, and a damned fine fighter.

Although most Americans were contemptuous of French fighting abilities and the usefulness of any lessons that might be learned from their experience and their defeat in Indochina, somehow I felt there was a relevance for the war we were about to fight in Vietnam; that what had happened at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu might shape battlefield decisions I would be called on to make in the months to come.

The French had a century and a half as the colonial occupier of Indochina and somehow had not learned those lessons. For nine long years, beginning in 1945, the Viet Minh nibbled away at the French in hit-and-run guerrilla attacks that began with small squads armed with ancient weapons and, under command of a former schoolteacher, Vo Nguyen Giap, slowly grew in size, skill, and ability. At the end, in the Dien Bien Phu Valley, over 13,000 French and colonial soldiers were pinned down and slowly destroyed by a Viet Minh army of some 50,000 troops supplied by 40,000 porters who hauled rice and ammunition and manhandled modern artillery pieces through the rugged mountain trails from the China border—capabilities the French commanders thought were simply impossible and unthinkable.

General Giap had urged Joe and me to visit Dien Bien Phu during our conversations in 1991 and 1993, telling us that he simply didn’t understand why the Americans had not carefully studied the French war in Vietnam and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, particularly since, by the end, the United States was financing more than 70 percent of the cost of the French military actions and providing much of the equipment and ammunition in that war. He told us if we Americans had studied what happened to the French surely we would never have come halfway around the world to take their place in Vietnam and pursue a long bloody war that ended just as badly for us as it had for the French.

In the years since the end of our war in Vietnam I had read a great deal about both the French war and ours and could see parallels, especially the fact that both the French and we Americans were foreign armies on Vietnamese soil fighting against a Vietnamese enemy determined to drive us out, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost. Early in the rebellion against the French, General Giap quite accurately assessed the inevitable outcome for them, and his analysis was very much on point when applied to the Americans:

“The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma. He has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long, drawn-out war….”

In the spring of 1954 I had just returned from commanding two companies fighting the bitter hill battles during the stalemate part of the Korean War—a time when negotiations for an end to the war were under way at Panmunjom and both sides were deeply entrenched in defensive bunkers and trenches trying to hold what they had and nibble away at what the enemy held. It was a terrible war, where the frigid Korean winter was almost as bad an enemy as the Chinese. The Chinese battered us with endless artillery barrages and sudden head-on assaults launched in darkness by wave after wave of thousands of tough enemy troops firing their fearsome and very effective burp guns, which were ideal for close-quarters combat. They came through our walls of defensive artillery and mortar fire and our heavy machine-gun fire seemingly without concern for their heavy casualties. There were no flanking movements or envelopment attempts. It was hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle with whistles and bugles blowing. It was unforgettable. I had been assigned to West Point as an Infantry tactical officer teaching and training cadets at my old alma mater, and now my attention was drawn to the daily radio news reports of the Viet Minh siege of Dien Bien Phu in the remote mountains of the northern part of Vietnam.

What I was hearing that spring made my blood run cold. It was another bunker and trench war, this time in the tropics. The principal adviser and supplier of the Vietnamese Communist guerrillas was none other than Communist China. The artillery pieces now hammering away at the French strongpoints there were 105mm howitzers the Chinese had captured from U.S. forces in Korea. All I was hearing was so familiar, so terrible, and it brought back the nightmares of my own experiences. I was glued to the radio as, day by day, the Viet Minh dug and tunneled and drew their noose ever tighter around the besieged French and colonial troops. Once again I could hear that awful cry “Enemy in the trenches!” and know that the combat now would be hand-to-hand, man-to-man. My wife, Julie, couldn’t understand my fascination with so distant a foreign battle and I couldn’t explain it to her. My heart went out to those French troops because I knew exactly what they were going through. I had been there.

In the years after Dien Bien Phu and the French defeat I read each new book that came out on that war and that battle, little knowing that I was preparing myself to fight my own last-ditch battle against the same tough commanders who had been the victors at Dien Bien Phu—Gen. Chu Huy Man, who as a brigadier general commanded a division there, and Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, who as a major commanded a regiment there.

This battle that ended the French war in Vietnam would resonate in important ways in the battle that began the American war in Vietnam in Landing Zone X-Ray eleven years later. The lessons I drew from my study of Dien Bien Phu and from my experiences in Korea were key to a pivotal decision I made on the first day at X-Ray. As the fighting raged that first afternoon the enemy boiled down off the mountain and launched attack after attack directly at our lines. I gave brief thought to the fact that as my companies arrived by helicopter I had fed all of them into sections of the perimeter that faced the mountain and the withering attacks of the enemy forces. My rear was wide open and undefended. If the enemy commander ordered some of his units to work their away around behind us they would have an open shot straight into the clearing and could strike my troops from the rear. It was then that I thought of Dien Bien Phu and Korea and how these Vietnamese commanders and their Chinese mentors had come straight into the French and American positions with little concern for trying the flanks or attempting to envelop those positions by attacking from all directions. This was how my opposite number had conducted the attacks in X-Ray so far, and while I kept my eyes open for any sudden change in his tactics I felt comfortable leaving our back door open until more troops arrived and we had the luxury of defending in every direction. It may seem a small thing, but given the enemy’s far greater numbers and how thinly we were spread, holding that ragged semicircle facing the mountain, it was critical to our survival.

When the opportunity presented itself in October 1999 to visit Dien Bien Phu and walk that historic battleground, my response was swift and affirmative. Joe and I headed back to Vietnam on what would be our last trip there together, taking General Giap’s advice to someday visit that remote valley where forty-five years earlier his peasant soldiers won a victory and a war that gave them their own country.

As we stepped off the Vietnamese civilian airliner at Dien Bien Phu on October 19, I stood and slowly turned through 360 degrees, taking in the brooding mountains that surrounded and looked down on this long, narrow valley. I marveled at the arrogance and stupidity of the French commander in Indochina, Gen. Henri Navarre, who bet everything he had on one card, and lost it all. When we landed the only threat left at Dien Bien Phu was a scattering of water buffalo, held at bay by half a dozen Vietnamese posted along the runway when one of the twice-weekly flights arrived or left.

It was near this concrete landing strip, in a dark damp bunker, that newly promoted French Brig. Gen. Christian de Castries surrendered to Viet Minh soldiers pointing rifles at him and ended an agonizing fifty-five-day siege that cost both sides thousands upon thousands of casualties. It also marked the end of French colonial rule in Indochina. What struck me hardest was how vulnerable the French troops had been from the first day, scattered over twelve defensive positions around and across the narrow three-mile-wide by eleven-mile-long north-south valley.

Navarre’s original plan in November 1953 was to parachute six battalions into Dien Bien Phu—then a tiny crossroads village of no more than a dozen huts some 260 miles northwest of Hanoi—to block any Viet Minh threat against neighboring Laos and, hopefully, disrupt Giap’s supply lines and the opium trade with mountain tribes that provided revenue to help finance the guerrilla war. But the stakes grew much higher with the scheduling of the Geneva Conference on Indochina for the spring of 1954. Navarre desperately wanted to give the French government—under heavy pressure at home to negotiate an end to the increasingly unpopular and costly war—a victory to strengthen their bargaining position. The Viet Minh leader Ho Chi Minh and his commander, Giap, wanted exactly the same thing.