We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (6 page)

Man told us that from his viewpoint the North Vietnamese won the Ia Drang battles. “Here we showed you very high spirit; very high determination. This is the first time we try our tactics: Grab them by the belt buckle! The closer we come to you the less your firepower is effective. After the Ia Drang battles we are sure we will win the limited war. We will destroy American strength and force them to withdraw.”

The general deferred answers to our more detailed questions about the troop dispositions and tactics used at X-Ray and Albany to his old friend General An, who was the battlefield commander on the scene at the time. Before we left, General Man said in his opinion the meeting had been “open and friendly” and that augured well for better relations between our countries. He turned to Joe and added: “Also, today I got to meet a very famous reporter. I think your pen is stronger than my artillery. I hope your book will bring much better understanding to the American people and government. [They] can learn some lessons from your book on how to keep the peace.”

Joe and I spent a sleepless night, he hunched over his computer transcribing the tape of our interview of General Man while I turned over in my mind all that had been said. What we got from the general was the larger picture, the thinking and strategy of a divisional commander and his superiors as they reacted to the arrival of American troops with high-tech weaponry, fleets of helicopters to ferry troops and supplies and even haul artillery pieces to remote battlefields. They struggled to find a way for a peasant army whose soldiers carried all their weapons, ammunition, and food on their backs—supplied by laborers who hauled 400-pound loads on bicycles down the Ho Chi Minh Trail—and moved swiftly through the jungled mountains by old-fashioned foot power to neutralize the American advantages. They had come to a simple but bloody way to level the playing field: Grab us by the belt buckle. Move in past the deadly rings of our artillery and napalm and 500-pound bombs and right into our positions. Then the American firepower is neutralized and the fighting is hand-to-hand, man-to-man, and nothing else matters but spirit and determination.

The next day we strolled back across the Defense Ministry courtyard, past the cage with the scruffy monkey sitting forlornly on his perch begging for peanuts and bananas, back to the same formal reception room, this time to meet the one man I wanted most of all to talk with: Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, my opposite number, the man who directed the furious attacks against us at X-Ray and again at Albany from a camouflaged bunker on the slope of the Chu Pong Massif that towered above us. General An, a much taller and more robust officer than his old friend and mentor General Man, arrived with a rolled-up sketch map of the Ia Drang battlefields under his arm. He wore thick eyeglasses and his smile sparkled off a couple of gold teeth. After handshakes and introductions, An welcomed us with these words: “There’s no hatred between our two peoples. Let the past bury the past. Now we look to the future. I am quite happy to see you coming to our country.”

We spent over four hours closeted with General An and he had almost as many questions about our actions, orders, and plans as we did about his plans, orders, and thinking in the battles. One point worth noting: For all these twenty-six years since the fight, An thought it was my battalion, 1st Battalion 7th Cavalry, which he fought first in Landing Zone X-Ray and then “wiped out” in the ambush at Landing Zone Albany. He expressed total surprise when I told him that on November 16, 1965, the surviving 250 troops of my battalion were withdrawn by helicopter to Pleiku to rest and refit, and it was the 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry that left X-Ray on the morning of November 17 on the fateful march to the Albany clearing two miles away. I was pleased that my withdrawal escaped his notice at the time because such maneuvers are fraught with danger in combat.

“Only today I learn that it was the Second Battalion; before I believed it was your battalion, General Moore,” An told us. “I thought we finished your battalion off in Albany. I learn more details about this battle that I never knew. I think this battle on seventeen November [LZ Albany] was the most important battle of the whole campaign. Your soldiers were surprised when we attacked them but they fought valiantly. I tell you frankly your soldiers fought heroically; they had no choice. After the fighting when we policed the battlefield, when we picked up our wounded, I saw the bodies, yours and ours, neck to neck lying alongside each other. It was most fierce fighting.”

Late on November 17, after X-Ray had been evacuated and abandoned, An said he was in his command post on the edge of Chu Pong Mountain. “It was a very rocky area. There were no trenches, no shelters. We could not dig through rocks. When I looked up at the sky I saw thirty-six B-52s. I counted them myself.” He said the bombs from those B-52s struck half a mile to a mile away from his headquarters.

That same day, November 5, 1991, we had another long interview with Major General Phuong, the chief army historian. He provided the greatest detail on the battles at X-Ray and Albany of the three enemy generals we interviewed.

General Phuong had a detailed sketch map and again brought his little green notebook filled with notes he had taken when he reached the Ia Drang battlefield on November 16, 1965. He told us that the surviving North Vietnamese commanders gathered after the fight and together they went over each action in the battles and the lessons that should be learned from them.

All three of the old enemy generals, who, like us, had spent much of their lives and careers in combat, emphasized that the greatest lesson to be learned from war is to cherish peace. They expressed their hopes that our research and writing would bring that lesson to the American people.

That night, after Joe had transcribed a long day of taped interviews, we lingered over warm scotches in dirty glasses and talked of all that we had heard that day in answer to the lingering questions we had about our battles. In this same old guesthouse, on our first visit a year earlier, we had talked about our fears that we would not be well received by either the enemy commanders we had come to interview or by the people of Hanoi, whose memories of America’s Christmas bombing raids by B-52s in 1972 could not be pleasant ones. We were surprised by how warmly we had been welcomed then by ordinary people in the streets of Hanoi, and now by the men who had fought us in a historic battle. As we mused about this Joe said that in a strange way we were blood brothers to these men—that each of us had cared passionately enough about duty, honor, country, and our cause to kill and die. He voiced a final thought: In a world where most people couldn’t care less how or whether you live or die perhaps we have much more in common with such men as these, our old enemies, men like ourselves.

THREE

You Killed My Battalion!

A
fter being refused permission to journey to our old battlefields in the Ia Drang on two previous visits to Vietnam, suddenly the official government objections on grounds of safety and security vanished.

Shortly after publication of
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
in the fall of 1992, we were approached by a producer at ABC Television’s
Day One
program. Terry Wrong told us he would like to make a documentary on the battles and the veterans that would involve taking a group of us back to Vietnam and to the battlefields.

After a series of studio interviews in New York, those chosen to make the trip to Vietnam included me, Joe Galloway, CSM (ret.) Basil Plumley, former A Company 1/7 Cavalry assistant machine gunner Bill Beck, former executive officer of A Company 2/7 Cavalry Lt. Larry Gwin, former helicopter commander Lt. Col. (ret.) Bruce Crandall, former A Company 1/5 Cavalry commander Lt. Col. (ret.) George Forrest, former C Company 2/7 Cavalry clerk Jack Smith, former A Company 1/7 Cavalry commander Col. (ret.) Tony Nadal, former B Company 1/7 Cavalry commander Col. (ret.) John Herren, and former B Company 1/7 Cavalry Sgt. Ernie Savage. Joining us would be the
Day One
crew: anchor Forrest Sawyer, producer Terry Wrong, interpreter Quyen Thai, and two crews, each with a cameraman and a soundman.

Before we left the United States for Hanoi, the Vietnamese government Foreign Press Office asked if there was anything else we wanted to do or anyone else we wanted to see on our trip. Joe immediately suggested that we ask that Senior Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap meet us at the Vietnam Military Museum in Hanoi and give us a briefing on his conduct of the campaign against the French at Dien Bien Phu. We sent a cable back asking for this.

We landed at Hanoi’s airport on October 13, 1993, an hour behind schedule, and were met by our Vietnamese minders as we stepped off the plane. They were agitated and rushed us through the formalities in a matter of minutes. “General Giap is waiting for you at the museum,” one of them explained.

It was clear that there had been major changes since our last two visits to Hanoi. The airport—still surrounded by the big water-filled craters that American bombs had dug in the rice paddies—had been expanded and was jam-packed with humanity, where just months before it had been smaller and much sleepier. Change did not end there. The highway to the capital had been widened, potholes had been repaired, and new homes and shops were being built along the roadside. Now there was real traffic to contend with on the highway and the streets of Hanoi—more cars and a plague of small, noisy, smoky motorbikes had joined the quiet stream of bicycles that had owned those streets before.

The death of Communism and the old Soviet Union had clearly had a salutary effect on a nation that had once been an important client state and the recipient of much Soviet assistance. That support had evaporated and Vietnam was now cautiously searching for another way forward that involved some of the benefits of capitalism, especially foreign investment.

The Vietnamese Communist Party, shaken but still very much in control, had decided to ease up and see what happened. After nearly four decades of rigid party control Hanoi residents were now experimenting big-time with capitalism and a more free market. A state-owned shop that once displayed four cans of evaporated milk in a dusty window had been transformed into the Hong Kong Kung Fu Video and Coffee Shop and its tiny tables were jammed with young Vietnamese watching Bruce Lee movies. On the sidewalk in front four new businesses were in operation selling trinkets, tea and cakes, tins of Russian caviar, and bottles of brandy. Change was in the air.

This ancient Red River Delta capital was bustling and busy where it had been quiet and somnolent on our previous two trips. A hundred privately owned restaurants had sprung up where once there had been fewer than half a dozen. People were building small brick and stucco two-and three-story shop houses alongside the airport road.

At the museum, with its welcoming array of gray-and-green-painted cannons, antiaircraft guns, and old Russian tanks, we were welcomed by a smiling General Giap. It was hard to square the image of this small, amiable gray-haired former schoolteacher with the fact that this was the man who, along with the former waiter Nguyen Ai Quoc, a.k.a. Ho Chi Minh, had built an army out of an unarmed gaggle of peasant boys and girls and led them with great skill against the Japanese, the French colonialists, the United States, and, more recently, against their former ally and neighbor, Communist China.

Giap greeted Joe and me as old friends in token of our two previous meetings and shook hands with the rest of our traveling squad during a brief stop in a museum reception room. He welcomed them as fellow soldiers to a Vietnam now at peace. Joe and I had talked through our feelings about these meetings with our old enemies on the earlier trips. For us this was research, capturing the words and thoughts of these men for history. Some of the others in our group of veterans were less comfortable with the idea; they were still angry at those who tried to kill them so long ago, and had in fact killed many of their friends. Some, like former-soldier-turned-journalist Jack Smith, expressed their feelings in the early discussions with the enemy commanders. Others listened quietly but tensely to the explanations of the North Vietnamese officers that their troops had no choice but to kill wounded Americans they found as they searched the battlefield at night for their own wounded and dead. How could we pass them by when they were still armed and might shoot us? asked one of the enemy generals. Most of the Americans would find peace on this journey.

We had asked for this briefing because of the importance of Dien Bien Phu and the defeat of the French in setting the stage for America’s beginning involvement in the affairs of the two Vietnams. Giap had told us earlier that if we Americans had studied the lessons clear for all to see in the wake of Dien Bien Phu we would never have come here. He was right about that. Even more puzzling was the fact that we Americans had paid the tuition—by the end of the French war in Indochina the United States was financing about 70 percent of the cost of that war—but had not learned the right lessons. Any serious study of our war in Vietnam has to begin with the French war—and those were the books I read on the troopship that brought my battalion to South Vietnam in the summer of 1965.

Giap led the way to a large room in back where a huge twenty-by-thirty-foot sand-table exhibit depicted in full detail the battlefield of Dien Bien Phu, the scene of his greatest victory over the French in 1954.

The general, speaking through an interpreter, told us he made one daring decision that changed the course of the siege and history, a decision that he said could have cost him his life. After the French bet everything they owned in Indochina on drawing Giap and his Viet Minh army into a decisive battle in the remote mountain valley, Giap drew a tight cordon around their positions. Another army of peasant laborers pulled and pushed old American 105mm artillery pieces captured by the Chinese in Korea along a sixty-mile dirt road through the mountains.

His soldiers tunneled and trenched and burrowed in the red earth, drawing the noose ever tighter around the French strongpoints and positions, while the big howitzers were set into positions on the forward slopes of the mountains surrounding the doomed French garrison.