We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (48 page)

Individual troopers looked as if they had not yet received the order to move out. Mortar men were dead, sitting upright against anthills, rounds still on their backs, as if they were caught during a break. Here and there, between American bodies, lay smaller khaki figures. Coming around an anthill I saw a concentration of NVA khaki bodies. A movement. I fired twice and we advanced slowly. Three of them. Two riflemen dead.

One, wearing a pith helmet, was very young with a soft, round-featured face, lying belly up. He was dying, eyes

flickering, shirt soaked with blood. They had all been wounded and had drawn close together, a team of some kind. Charlie or Delta had given them their first crippling wounds."

On the dying enemy soldier Rescorla noticed something shiny. A big, battered old French army bugle carrying a manufacture date of 1900 and the legend

"Couesnon & Cie, Fournisseurs de L'Armee. 94 rue D'Ancoieme.

Paris." On some long-ago battlefield, perhaps Dien Bien Phu, the victorious Viet Minh had taken it as trophy. And marked their own legend: two crude Chinese characters tattooed onto the brass bell with nailpoint. Rough translation: "Long and powerful service!" Now, here in the valley of the Ia Drang, in the tall elephant grass, the trophy had changed hands again. The 7th Cavalry had a bugle once more, and Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion would blow it time and again on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Captain Dudley Tademy, 3rd Brigade fire-support coordinator, remembers flying out to Albany at first light the next morning. "Tim Brown, myself, Mickey Parrish. Took a while to get in through the smoke hanging over the whole area. Not much had really taken place in terms of policing the area. The image that is still vivid in my mind is the carnage. Folks were still sitting around in a daze; they hadn't done much, hadn't even taken ponchos and covered up these bodies. I could handle the conversation; I could handle grown men crying; but we are talking twelve hours later. Sitting there feeling sorry for themselves.

Colonel Brown was very pissed off. Even if you get caught in a bad situation you have to do something to recover. It was young kids who paid the price. In later years I used to stress that to my young battery commanders: ' isn't us who die in combat; it's those young kids who die. Those kids we are responsible for training and leading. It's our job to get the job done and get those kids home safe.' "

Colonel Brown recalls that visit to Albany on November 18: "The next morning I finally got into that place. They were busy figuring out who was dead, who was wounded. They never got an accurate count for forty-eight hours or so. I stayed out there wandering around looking while they were bringing the bodies back in. Myron Diduryk was checking them off. I never saw Mcdade. I asked where he was, where the command post was, but it was all confusion and nobody could tell me where he was. Diduryk seemed to have things under control. When I got back I sent Shy Meyer back out to see if he could make any more sense of it than I had."

Captain Buse Tully of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cav and Captain George Forrest of the same battalion's Alpha Company had laagered their companies together overnight in the tail-end perimeter, venturing out only on the after-midnight patrol to find Ghost 4-6 and all those wounded Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav soldiers. Captain Tully wrote: "With daylight, resupply and medevac ships arrived and we moved out toward the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav position. The battle area was a scene of carnage. One of the few North Vietnamese found alive, when offered assistance, attempted to throw a hand grenade. He was shot. We also found GIs who obviously had been given the c oup de grace; hands tied behind their backs and bullet holes in the backs of their heads.

The link up had been made ac nine a.m. From then until two p.m. we patrolled out of / Jbany, picking up dead and wounded personnel and enemy and friendly weapons. The job wasn't finished when we had to leave in order to make it back to LZ Columbus and our parent battalion's control by nightfall."

Both the 1st Battalion, 5th Cav companies made the march back to Columbus without incident, closing in at five p. m., well before dark, on November 18. Columbus was a good-sized rectangular clearing, running north-south. George Forrest's A Company moved into position on the northwest while Buse Tully's B Company men secured the southern end of the clearing. Tully immediately put out observation posts forward of his three-platoon defenses. Then he told his men to break out C-rations and take a well deserved breather. Both the meal and the break were rudely interrupted at 5:35 p. m., when the outposts spotted the lead elements of a North Vietnamese force maneuvering toward Columbus. With that warning, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Ackerson, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Cav, had time to get his men in their holes, alert the artillery batteries, and get set for the assault, which came in from the east and southeast. According to then-Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An, the NVA battlefield commander, that attack should have been launched against Columbus at two p. m., when half of Ackerson's battalion would still have been marching back from Albany. General An said the commander of the attack battalion of the 33rd Regiment was unable to mass his men, who had dispersed over a wide area of the valley to avoid air strikes, in time to make the deadline. An said his commander also had problems finding a section of the Columbus perimeter where there was sufficient cover to hide his preparations for the attack. The result was a delay of over three and a half hours.

When the attack finally did kick off it was met with a hail of rifle and machine-gun fire from Ackerson's battalion as well as from the artillerymen who had cranked their 105mm howitzers down and were firing canister rounds at pointblank range. The Air Force was quick to provide tactical air strikes close to the perimeter. By nine p.m. the 1 st Battalion, 5th Cavalry had beaten off and broken the attack.

An says: "The 33rd Regiment could not destroy this position, but they forced the artillery to withdraw, and the artillerymen left behind about a thousand rounds. We captured a thousand rounds of 105mm ammunition, but we had no guns of that size and never used it." The North Vietnamese commander reckons that even though the attack failed, his men forced the abandonment of Columbus the next day. That's not the way Colonel Tim Brown, 3rd Brigade commander, sees it: "We were in our last days. The 2nd Brigade had already been ordered up. We were just swinging out west so that Colonel Ray Lynch [commander of the 2nd Brigade] could take over. We were also moving artillery out in that direction. Lynch was going to put his brigade headquarters at Due Co Special Forces Camp. So we were in the process of getting out, but not yet."

In furtherance of that plan, at midday on November 18 Brown had sent Lieutenant Colonel Bob Tully's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cav on an air assault into a clearing designated Landing Zone Crooks (6.5 miles northwest of Columbus). Once they had secured Crooks, Brown airlifted the artillery from LZ Falcon to Crooks. From there the artillerymen would provide initial support to the 2nd Brigade and to the South Vietnamese Airborne battalions that were planning to move south from Due Co camp on November 19 and take up blocking positions along the Cambodian border to harass the North Vietnamese on their retreat from the Ia Drang Valley.

On November 19, Brown moved the artillery and the 1st Battalion, 5th Cav from Columbus to a new landing zone designated Golf, 7.5 miles northwest. Now all the pieces were in place for continued operations against the enemy, with Brown's 3rd Brigade handing off the job to Colonel Ray Lynch's 2nd Brigade and to the ARVN Airborne task force.

Back in the Albany area, policing of the battlefield continued.

Survivors and witnesses most often use the word "carnage" for the terrible things they saw in the brush and tall elephant grass.

Specialist 4 Jon Wallenius of the Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry mortar platoon, and most of the rest of Myron Diduryk's men were involved in this macabre and depressing duty. "It was incredible carnage. We went to areas where lots of artillery had come in during the night and we saw our guys had been blown up in the trees. The bodies were already decomposed and it had only happened the night before. We were in shock. It was the first, last, and only time I ever saw anything like it and I pray never again. The stench was unbelievable. We started hauling in the whole bodies first; then we brought in the pieces and parts. Two Chinooks came in and we loaded one with about twenty corpses, neatly arranged in litters. The pilot began preparing to take off. One of our officers pointed an M-16 at the pilot and told him to keep the bird on the ground; we weren't through. Bodies were loaded floor to ceiling.

When the ramp finally closed blood poured through the hinges. I felt sorry for the poor bastards who would have to unload this chopper back at Holloway."

One of the last wounded Americans recovered from the battlefield that day was PFC James Shadden of the Delta Company mortar platoon. "The next morning and all day long the sun had no mercy. The ants and flies were crawling all over my wounds. My tongue and throat had turned to cotton.

I had grown so weak I could hardly move. Captain Henry Thorpe came to me about six p.m. the evening of the eighteenth and said: ' didn't know where you were.' Well, I didn't know where he was either. After a few days at the 85th Evac Hospital, I was flown back to the hospital at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where I stayed almost a year recovering."

The nightmares born of this battle have never faded.

THE SERGEANT AND THE GHOST We have good corporals and good sergeants and some good lieutenants and captains, and those are far more important than good generals.

--William Tecumseh Sherman Every battle has its unsung heroes, and the desperate fight that raged up and down the column of Americans scattered along the trail to the Albany clearing is no exception. Two of them met after midnight, November 18, when Platoon Sergeant Fred J. Kluge, thirty-two years old, 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, led a patrol into the heart of the killing zone in search of the voice on the radio calling himself Ghost 4-6. Kluge eased into a small cluster of wounded and desperate Americans and quietly asked: "Who's in charge here?" There was a long silence and then the faint reply: "Over here." Second Lieutenant Robert J. Jeanette, who had been wounded at least four times that afternoon but had held on to his radio and called deadly barrages of artillery down on groups of North Vietnamese circling the Albany clearing, thought he had been saved. So he had, but not just yet.

Ghost 4-6 and Sergeant Kluge are the stuff of legend, and various versions of their sagas have circulated for years among the survivors of Albany. Literally dozens of men reckon they owe their lives to either the sergeant or the Ghost. Both insist that they only did their jobs, that the real heroes were among all the others who fought in Albany that day and night.

Sergeant Fred J. Kluge was a seventeen-year-old high school dropout when he enlisted in the Army in 1950. He fought in the Korean War with the 187th Regimental Combat Team. Between the wars, Korea and Vietnam, he taught map reading and small-unit infantry tactics in Army schools. In 1965 Kluge was on his way to the Special Forces but ended up in the 1st Cavalry Division, assigned as a platoon sergeant in Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, Captain George Forrest commanding.

When the fighting broke out on the march to Albany clearing, Sergeant Kluge helped establish the perimeter at the rear of the column, and then single-handedly began finding and guiding to safety the Americans staggering out of the chopped-up column. Sergeant Kluge's account:

"We started getting more and more wounded in from the column up ahead. I would go out and collect them. They were staggering out of the kill zone, dazed, badly wounded, shot up. I just moved off in that direction a good ways so I could guide them back. The column up forward of us was gone; it had disintegrated. There was just independent little skirmishes going on, little pockets of men fighting back. I moved on up to where I could see into the kill zone and pick up those people coming out. Some of them were running, some crawling. Almost all of them were wounded.

"I could see the enemy up in the trees--and J could see them on the ground, moving along in groups of three or four, bent over low. They were moving like they had a destination to reach. Some of them shot at me, but mostly they were just moving along. What it looked like to me was their flanking units moving into the ambush zone.

"I picked up the surgeon of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav, Doc Shucart, about this time. I told him what we had going and he started dealing with the wounded. By now I started getting some choppers in. The medic, Specialist 5 Daniel Torrez, told me that one of my squad-leader sergeants had put a bandage on his leg but Torrez didn't think he was really wounded. I went over and he was laying down, his pants leg slit up the side and a bandage wrapped around his leg. I asked him: ' bad are you hit?' He said, ', not too bad, just a flesh wound.' I said: "Well, how about Torrez and me take a look?' He said no, he didn't want anybody messing with it. I tore that bandage off and there was no wound at all. Right then and there I beat the shit out of him. I ripped his stripes off his arms and demoted him on the spot. I didn't have that authority, of course, but I sure relieved him of his job. I got his assistant squad leader and put him in charge. All this time the doctor had gone on treating the wounded.

"Another captain, I believe an Air Force captain, came in our perimeter around then and asked what he could do. I put him with the doctor. The evac choppers were landing about fifty yards from where I had set up--about two hundred yards from the kill zone. We had three or four choppers come in, one at a time, and I got all my wounded out, but more were coming out of the kill zone all the time, more than I was getting evacuated.

"A pilot called me over and told me there was a clearing two hundred yards further back that was much bigger, where they could bring in two or three choppers at a time. I had my platoon pick up the wounded, and I sent a squad on ahead to recon that clearing, and we moved on back. It was a nice big clearing, with a big anthill in the center. We set up a perimeter around that clearing and I went forward again to guide the people coming out of the ambush.