Now the North Vietnamese were closing in on Lieutenant John Lance (Jack) Geoghegan’s 2nd Platoon. They were already intermingled with the few survivors of Lieutenant Kroger’s 1st Platoon and were maneuvering toward Bob Edwards’s foxhole. Clinton S. Poley, twenty-three, six foot three, and the son of an Ackley, Iowa, dirt farmer, was assistant gunner on one of Lieutenant Geoghegan’s M-60 machine guns. The gunner was Specialist 4 James C. Comer, a native of Seagrove, North Carolina.
Poley says, “When I got up something hit me real hard on the back of my neck, knocked my head forward and my helmet fell off in the foxhole. I thought a guy had snuck up behind me and hit me with the butt of a weapon, it was such a blow. Wasn’t anybody there; it was a bullet from the side or rear. I put my bandage on it and the helmet helped hold it on. I got up and looked again and there were four of them with carbines, off to our right front. I told Comer to aim more to the right. After that I heard a scream and I thought it was Lieutenant Geoghegan.”
It wasn’t. By now, Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan was already dead. His platoon sergeant, Robert Jemison, Jr., saw him go down trying to help a wounded man. “Willie Godboldt was twenty yards to my right. He was wounded, started hollering: ‘Somebody help me!’ I yelled: ‘I’ll go get him!’ Lieutenant Geoghegan yelled back: ‘No, I will.’ He moved out of his position in the foxhole to help Godboldt and was shot.” Just five days past his twenty-fourth birthday, John Lance Geoghegan of Pelham, New York, the only child of proud and doting parents, husband of Barbara and father of six-month-old Camille, lay dead, shot through the head and back, in the tall grass and red dirt of the Ia Drang Valley. PFC Willie F. Godboldt of Jacksonville, Florida, also twenty-four years old, died before help ever reached him.
Sergeant Jemison, who helped fight off five Chinese divisions at Chipyong-ni in the Korean War, now took a single bullet through his stomach but kept on fighting. Twenty minutes later the order came down for every platoon to throw a colored smoke grenade to mark friendly positions for the artillery and air strikes. Jemison got up to throw one and was hit again, this time knocked down by a bullet that struck him in the left shoulder. He got up, more slowly now, and went back to firing his M-16. Jemison fought on until he was hit a third time: “It was an automatic weapon. It hit me in my right arm and tore my weapon all to pieces. All that was left was the plastic stock. Another bullet cut off the metal clamp on my chin strap and knocked off my helmet. It hit so hard I thought my neck was broke. I was thrown to the ground. I got up and there was nothing left. No weapon, no grenades, no nothing.”
James Comer and Clinton Poley, thirty feet to Jemison’s left, had been firing their M-60 machine gun for almost an hour, an eternity. “A stick-handled potato-masher grenade landed in front of the hole. Comer hollered, ‘Get down!’ and kicked it away a little bit with his foot. It went off. By then we were close to being out of ammo and the gun had jammed. In that cloud of smoke and dust we started to our left, trying to find other 2nd Platoon positions. That’s when I got hit in the chest and I hit the ground pretty hard.
Poley adds, “I got up and then got shot in my hip, and went down again. Comer and I lost contact with each other in the long grass. We’d already lost our ammo bearer [PFC Charley H. Collier from Mount Pleasant, Texas], who had been killed the day before. He was only eighteen and had been in Vietnam just a few days. I managed to run about twenty yards at a time for three times and finally came to part of the mortar platoon. A sergeant had two guys help me across a clearing to the battalion command post by the large anthill. The battalion doctor, a captain, gave me first aid.”
Meantime, Specialist Viera was witness to scenes of horror: “The enemy was all over, at least a couple of hundred of them walking around for three or four minutes; it seemed like three or four hours. They were shooting and machine-gunning our wounded and laughing and giggling. I knew they’d kill me if they saw I was alive. When they got near, I played dead. I kept my eyes open and stared at a small tree. I knew that dead men had their eyes open.”
Viera continues, “Then one of the North Vietnamese came up, looked at me, then kicked me, and I flopped over. I guess he thought I was dead. There was blood running out of my mouth, my arm, my legs. He took my watch and my .45 pistol and walked on. I watched them strip off all our weapons; then they left, back where they came from. I remember the artillery, the bombs, the napalm everywhere, real close around me. It shook the ground underneath me. But it was coming in on the North Vietnamese soldiers, too.”
All this, and much more, took place between 6:50 A.M. and 7:40 A.M. on November 15, 1965. The agonies of Charlie Company occurred over 140 yards of the line. But men were fighting and dying on three sides of our thinly held American perimeter. In the center, I held the lives of all these men in my hands. The badly wounded Captain Bob Edwards was now on the radio, asking for reinforcements. The only reserve I had was the reconnaissance platoon, twenty-two men. Was the attack on Charlie Company the main enemy threat? Delta Company and the combined mortar position were also under attack now. Reluctantly, I told Captain Edwards that his company would have to fight on alone for the time being.
The din of battle was unbelievable. Rifles and machine guns and mortars and grenades rattled, banged, and boomed. Two batteries of 105mm howitzers, twelve big guns located on another landing zone five miles distant, were firing nonstop, their shells exploding no more than fifty yards outside the ring of shallow foxholes.
Beside me in the battalion command post, the Air Force forward air controller, Lieutenant Charlie W. Hastings, twenty-six, from La Mesa, New Mexico, radioed a special code word, “Broken Arrow,” meaning “American unit in danger of being overrun,” and within a short period of time every available fighter-bomber in South Vietnam was stacked overhead at thousand-foot intervals from seven thousand feet to thirty-five thousand feet, waiting its turn to deliver bombs and napalm to the battlefield.
Among my sergeants there were three-war men—men who parachuted into Normandy on D day and had survived the war in Korea—and those old veterans were shocked by the savagery and hellish noise of this battle. Choking clouds of smoke and dust obscured the killing ground. We were dry-mouthed and our bowels churned with fear, and still the enemy came on in waves.
2
The Roots of Conflict
There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword.
—GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT
One month of maneuver, attack, retreat, bait, trap, ambush, and bloody butchery in the Ia Drang Valley in the fall of 1965 was the Vietnam War’s true dawn—a time when two opposing armies took the measure of each other. The North Vietnamese commanders had a deep-rooted fear that the lessons they had learned fighting and defeating the French a decade earlier had been outmoded by the high-tech weaponry and revolutionary airmobile helicopter tactics that the Americans were trying out on them.
The North Vietnamese wanted their foot soldiers to taste the sting of those weapons and find ways to neutralize them. Their orders were to draw the newly arrived Americans into battle and search for the flaws in their thinking that would allow a Third World army of peasant soldiers who traveled by foot and fought at the distant end of a two-month-long supply line of porters not only to survive and persevere, but ultimately to prevail in the war—which was, for them, entering a new phase.
The 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) was born of President John F. Kennedy’s determination that the U.S. Army, which for a decade had focused exclusively on training and arming itself to fight World War III on the plains of Europe, prepare to fight a series of small, dirty wars on the world’s frontiers. Toward that end Kennedy gave the U.S. Special Forces their head—and a distinctive green beret to wear. The Special Forces were good at what they did, counterguerrilla warfare, but clearly they were not the force needed to deal with battalions and regiments of regular soldiers in the Communist armies of liberation. For that matter, neither were the regular infantry divisions of the U.S. Ar
my—hidebound, road-bound, and focused on war in Germany. Something new and totally different had to be created to meet the challenge of the jungles of Indochina.
What would that something be? No one was absolutely certain, but a coterie of young colonels and brigadier generals hiding out in the bowels of the Army’s research-and-development division in the Pentagon had an idea, a dream, and they had been tinkering with it for years.
In the summer of 1957, Lieutenant General James M. Gavin, who won early fame and swift promotion with the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II, was chief of research and development for the Army. He had a vision of a new fighting force, something that he described in a seminal article as “Cavalry—And I Don’t Mean Horses.” His vision centered on the helicopter, that ungainly bumblebee, which made a very limited combat debut in Korea, principally hauling wounded to the rear two at a time.
Jim Gavin’s dream was that someday bigger, faster, and better helicopters would carry the infantry into battle, forever freeing it of the tyranny of terrain and permitting war to proceed at a pace considerably faster than that of a man walking. The helicopter, Gavin believed, held the possibility of making the battlefield truly a three-dimensional nightmare for an enemy commander.
Gavin’s dream was enthusiastically shared by Brigadier General Hamilton W. Howze, chief of Army Aviation, and other pioneers like Colonel John Norton, Colonel George P. (Phip) Seneff, Colonel John J. (Jack) Tolson, Colonel Bob Williams, and Colonel Harry W. O. Kinnard. World War II had proved there were shortcomings and limitations in the practice of airborne warfare; but airmobile warfare could address most, if not all, of those limitations.
By mid-1962, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, pursuing President Kennedy’s vision, seized on the airmobility idea. McNamara ordered the Army to determine if the new UH-1 Huey helicopter, the big CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter, and their sisters in rotary-wing aviation made sense on the battlefield of the future.
An Airmobility Concept Board was created and, in short order, the 11th Air Assault Division (Test) was born at Fort Benning, Georgia, in February 1963. Its commander was Brigadier General Harry Kinnard. The 10th Air Transport Brigade (Test) was activated under the command of Colonel Delbert Bristol, and the Aviation Group (Test) was created under the command of Colonel Phip Seneff. To assess it all was the Test/Evaluation/Control Group, under Brigadier General Bob Williams. These units would encounter no bureaucratic resistance or red tape at Fort Benning: The new assistant commandant there was Brigadier General John Norton. Talk about stacking the deck!
The 11th Air Assault Test began at the bottom and built upward, starting with only three thousand men for individual air-mobility training and testing in platoon-size and company-size elements. By June of 1964, the Army added two more brigades of infantry, plus artillery and support units, and began training and testing battalion, brigade, and division tactics.
At that time, America had not yet recovered from the shock of President Kennedy’s assassination and was only beginning to measure the man who had succeeded him, Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson was passing the first wave of Great Society legislation, which would restructure America, and that was his main agenda. But the trouble in South Vietnam would not go away and could not be safely ignored in an election year.
The country he called “Veet-Nam” was already beginning to gnaw at Lyndon Baines Johnson’s innards. It was not the place Johnson would have chosen to make a stand against the Communists. In 1954, when the French were trembling on the brink of disastrous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and President Eisenhower’s advisers debated the pros and cons of American intervention in Indochina—intervention possibly even including a nuclear strike—then Senator Lyndon Johnson stood up strongly against that folly, arguing against any war on the Asian mainland. Johnson was proud of that.
Johnson had, however, inherited John F. Kennedy’s hyperactive foreign policy as well as Kennedy’s principal advisers, the men he derisively nicknamed the “You-Harvards.” In Kennedy’s thousand days the nation had gone through the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Berlin Wall crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, and the crisis over the tiny, and largely inconsequential, kingdom of Laos. Days before Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet, Ngo Dinh Diem, the autocratic ruler of South Vietnam, was deposed and murdered in a coup d’état that was at least sanctioned, if not sponsored, by Washington.
Kennedy’s successor, new to the job and moving into an election year, could not afford to be seen as soft on communism. President Johnson was approving a slow but steady buildup in the number of American advisers in South Vietnam.
Now, in the summer of 1964, important decisions were also being made in Hanoi, the capital of Communist North Vietnam. In the defense establishment and the ruling councils of the Communist party a group of Young Turks pressed the case for escalating the war so as to liberate the southern half of the country. They argued that simply to continue providing guns and ammunition and encouragement for the Viet Cong guerrillas was not enough: The time had come to intervene on the battlefields of the south with regiments and divisions of North Vietnamese People’s Army regulars.
These better-armed, trained, and motivated soldiers should infiltrate South Vietnam, they argued, and launch hammer blows against the weak and unmotivated South Vietnamese army. In short order, they would liberate all of the land and people south of the 17th Parallel. Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap vigorously opposed the suggested escalation as hasty and premature, and urged that the guerrilla-war phase, which was proving ever more successful, be continued.
President Ho Chi Minh came down on the side of escalation and the army high command drew up a daring plan for the dry-season campaign of 1965. Three regular army regiments would be brought up to strength, trained and equipped, and sent south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia to launch a stunning autumn offensive that would begin in the remote Central Highlands and perhaps end in Saigon.
Hanoi’s planners envisioned a classic campaign to crush the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), starting in October 1965, after the monsoon rains ended in the mountains and plateaus of Pleiku province. They would lay siege to the American Special Forces camp at Plei Me with its twelve American advisers and four hundred-plus Montagnard mercenaries.
That attack, in turn, would draw an ARVN relief column of troops and tanks out of Pleiku and down Route 14, thence southwest on the one-lane dirt track called Provincial Route 5—where a regiment of People’s Army troops would be waiting in a carefully prepared ambush. Once the ARVN relief forces were destroyed and Plei Me camp crushed, the victorious North Vietnamese army regiments would then take Pleiku city and the way would be clear to advance along Route 19 toward Qui Nhon and the South China Sea. Whoever controls Route 19 controls the Central Highlands, and whoever controls the Highlands controls Vietnam. By early 1966, the North Vietnamese commanders were certain, South Vietnam would be cut in two and trembling on the verge of surrender.
The North Vietnamese preparations were well under way by the fall of 1964, while Lyndon B. Johnson campaigned across America promising that “American boys will not be sent to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” That fall the 11th Air Assault Test Division conducted a crucial two-month test in the Carolinas. The theory of helicopter warfare was proved to the satisfaction of the U.S. Army in the largest field exercises since World War II. Now the Pentagon began the process of incorporating the Air Assault Division into the regular ranks of the Army.
As the new airmobile division moved toward becoming a reality, the situation in the theater of its most likely employment—what Lyndon Johnson called “that damned little pissant country,” Vietnam—deteriorated by the day, both politically and militarily. Saigon’s generals took turns staging coups d’état and being the strongman of the month, while the Viet Cong guerrillas expanded their control of the rice-growing Mekong Delta and reached north into the rubber country.
So long as he was presenting himself as the reasonable, p
eaceful alternative to the hawkish Republican challenger, Senator Barry Goldwater, Johnson resisted the recommendations of his advisers for a massive escalation of the American military presence. Once he had beaten Goldwater and was president in his own right, Lyndon Johnson was certain, he could cut a deal in the best Texas tradition with the Vietnamese Communists.
Already frustrated by a series of terrorist incidents aimed at Americans in Vietnam, Johnson exploded when, on the night of February 6, 1965, Viet Cong sappers mortared and mined the U.S. advisers’ compound and air base at Pleiku in the Central Highlands. Eight Americans were killed and more than one hundred wounded. “I’ve had enough of this,” Johnson told his National Security Council.
In retaliation, within hours carrier-based Navy jets struck the first targets inside North Vietnam. By March 2, Operation Rolling Thunder, a systematic and continuing program of air strikes against the North, had begun. While the Navy warplanes safely came and went from aircraft carriers at sea, the U.S. Air Force jets based at Da Nang were clearly vulnerable to enemy retaliation.
When General William C. Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, asked for U. S. Marines to guard the air base, he got them. On March 8, a battalion of Marines splashed ashore on China Beach. On April 1, President Johnson approved General Westmoreland’s request for two more Marine battalions, plus 20,000 logistics troops. He also agreed with General Westmoreland that the Marines should not be limited to strictly defensive duties; now they would fan out and begin killing Viet Cong. For the first time since the Korean War, American combat troops now deployed for action on the Asian mainland.
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young Page 3
