We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young

by Harold G. Moore

  In a major speech on April 7, the President urged that the North Vietnamese negotiate a reasonable settlement, and offered them a piece of a huge Mekong River economic-development project that Washington would finance. Hanoi replied that there could be no negotiations while American planes were bombing North Vietnam.

  By April 15, the White House was entertaining Westmoreland’s request for the dispatch of an additional 40,000 American troops to South Vietnam to raise the ante. In mid-June, Westmoreland urgently asked that the number of U.S. troops in the pipeline be doubled. He now wanted approval of a force of 180,000 men, most of them American, some of them South Korean, by the end of 1965. And the general was projecting that he would need at least an additional 100,000 or more in 1966.

  President Johnson was inclined to give Westmoreland what he wanted, but he was also determined that this war would be fought without unduly distressing the American public. Surely so rich and powerful a nation could afford both a brushfire war and his Great Society programs.

  Johnson decided, against the advice of his military chiefs, that the American escalation in South Vietnam be conducted on the cheap: There would be no mobilization of reserve and National Guard units; no declaration of a state of emergency that would permit the Army to extend for the duration the enlistments of the best-trained and most experienced soldiers. Instead, the war would be fed by stripping the Army divisions in Europe and the continental United States of their best personnel and materiel, while a river of new draftees, 20,000 of them each month, flowed in to do the shooting and the dying.

  With the U.S. Marines beginning combat operations in the northern part of South Vietnam, and the newly arrived 173rd Airborne Brigade now operating in the central part of the country, Hanoi’s military planners were forced to take a new look at the winter-spring campaign planned for Pleiku province. Senior General Chu Huy Man, who commanded the campaign, says that in June 1965, the People’s Army high command decided to postpone the audacious plan to seize the Central Highlands and attack down Route 19 to the coast.

  “That plan was postponed for ten years,” General Man says. “It was completed in 1975.” The new plan would follow the opening sequence of the original: The People’s Army forces would lay siege to Plei Me Special Forces Camp, ambush the inevitable South Vietnamese relief column when it ventured out of Pleiku city, and then wait for American combat troops to be thrown into the battle to save the South Vietnamese.

  “We wanted to lure the tiger out of the mountain,” General Man says, adding: “We would attack the ARVN—but we would be ready to fight the Americans.” Major General Hoang Phuong, now chief of the Institute of Military History in Hanoi and a veteran of the Ia Drang battles, recalls: “Headquarters decided we had to prepare very carefully to fight the Americans. Our problem was that we had never fought Americans before and we had no experience fighting them. We knew how to fight the French. We wanted to draw American units into contact for purposes of learning how to fight them. We wanted any American combat troops; we didn’t care which ones.”

  The Americans that Man and Phuong would meet in due course had not yet left the United States in June of 1965, but they smelled something in the wind. In early May 1965, commanders of the 11th Air Assault Division began receiving informational copies of the after-action reports of the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s battles and operations in Vietnam. By late May, battalion, brigade, and division commanders and staff were reporting to heavily guarded classrooms at the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia, for top-secret map exercises. The maps the games were played on covered the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.

  By mid-June the Pentagon ordered the division commanders to begin an intensive eight-week combat-readiness program that focused on deployment to South Vietnam. Secretary of Defense McNamara announced on June 16 that the Army had been authorized an airmobile division as part of its sixteen-division force.

  In early July, the Pentagon announced that the 11th Air Assault (Test) Division would be renamed the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and that it would take over the colors of that historic division that had distinguished itself in combat in the Korean War and in the Pacific theater in World War II—not to mention horse-cavalry skirmishes with bandits along the Mexican border in Texas and New Mexico in the early 1920s.

  In a televised address to the nation on the morning of July 28, 1965, President Johnson described the worsening situation in South Vietnam and declared: “I have today ordered the Airmobile Division to Vietnam.”

  On that day, convinced that the President’s escalation without a declaration of emergency was an act of madness, General Harold K. Johnson, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, drove to the White House with the intention of resigning in protest. He had already taken the four silver stars off each shoulder of his summer uniform. As his car approached the White House gates, General Johnson faltered in his resolve; he convinced himself that he could do more by staying and working inside the system than by resigning in protest. The general ordered his driver to turn around and take him back to the Pentagon. This decision haunted Johnny Johnson all the rest of his life.

  In South Vietnam, the 320th Regiment of the People’s Army of Vietnam was midway through a two-month-long siege of Due Co Special Forces Camp in the Central Highlands. A young Army major, H. Norman Schwarzkopf, West Point class of 1956, was adviser to the South Vietnamese Airborne battalion that was hip deep in the fighting at Due Co. A quarter-century later, General Norm Schwarzkopf would date the birth of his famous hot temper to those days, when he begged and pleaded on the radio for someone to evacuate his wounded South Vietnamese soldiers, while American helicopters fluttered by without stopping.

  That week, the 33rd People’s Army Regiment left Quang Ninh province in North Vietnam on the two-month march down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. Brigadier General Chu Huy Man was already in the South overseeing Viet Cong operations against the U.S. Marines in the Da Nang-Chu Lai region, but he had orders to return to the Western Highlands to establish the B-3 Front, a flexible and expandable headquarters charged with tactical and administrative control over both the People’s Army and Viet Cong units operating in the Highlands. Man’s new assignment was to prepare a warm welcome for the Americans in Pleiku province.

  The first leg of the new, high-tech Airmobile division’s journey to the war zone would be decidedly low-tech. Beginning in August, the 1st Cavalry would ride to war in a mini-fleet of World War II-era troopships, and their helicopters would sail to South Vietnam aboard a flotilla of four aging aircraft carriers.

  The cavalry troopers launched into a flurry of packing equipment, getting their shots, writing wills, getting last-minute dental and health problems cleared up, resettling their wives and kids off-post, and taking short leaves if they could be spared. In early August an advance party of 1,100 officers and men flew to Vietnam to begin preparing a new home for the division at An Khe, a sleepy hill town halfway up Route 19 between Qui Nhon on the coast and Pleiku in the mountains.

  One of the battalions preparing to ship out was mine. My name is Harold G. Moore, Jr., but “Hal” will do just fine. In 1957, as a young major fresh out of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and assigned to the Pentagon office of the chief of research and development, I was in on the birth of the concept of airmobility. I was the one-man airborne branch in the Air Mobility Division for two and a half years. In that job I worked for Lieutenant General Jim Gavin, Colonel John Norton, Colonel Phip Seneff, and Colonel Bob Williams.

  I had already worked for Harry W. O. Kinnard when he was a lieutenant colonel heading the Airborne Test Section at Fort Bragg in 1948. As a twenty-six-year-old first lieutenant, I volunteered to test experimental parachutes for Kinnard. It was a certainty that Kinnard would always remember me: On my first jump a new steerable parachute I was testing hung up on the tail of the C-46 aircraft, and I was dragged, twisting and trailing behind the plane, at 110 miles per hour, 1, 500 feet abov
e the drop zone. The tangled mess finally broke free a few minutes later, and my reserve chute got me to ground safely. When I reported in to Kinnard all he said was: “Hello, Lucky.”

  While I was pulling a three-year tour of NATO duty in Norway in the early 1960s, I heard rumors that the Kennedy administration was taking a hard new look at the airmobility concept. In August of 1963, I finished the NATO tour and began a year of schooling at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. I had been a lieutenant colonel for four years and was fighting for battalion command on my next assignment.

  By then the Army had created the 11th Air Assault Test Division, with Major General Harry Kinnard commanding. I wrote my old boss a letter asking for an infantry battalion in his new division. (In those days a division commander could select brigade and battalion commanders simply by asking for them by name. Since the mid-1970s, such commanders are chosen by Army selection boards on a competitive basis.) In April 1964, as I was finishing the War College, the Pentagon informed me that Kinnard had requested that I be assigned to command the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry, which had been detached from the 2nd Infantry Division and assigned to the 11th Air Assault Test.

  On Saturday, June 27, I arrived at Fort Benning, Georgia. It had been arranged that I would take the five-day battalion-commander refresher course before actually taking command. But any thoughts of a refresher went out the door when Colonel Thomas W (Tim) Brown, the 3rd Brigade commander and my new boss, arrived and told me to turn my course books back in. “You take command of your battalion at nine A.M. Monday and we are going out on a three-day field exercise right after.” He gave me the phone number of Captain Gregory (Matt) Dillon, the battalion S-3, or operations officer. Dillon told me that the barracks and headquarters were on Kelly Hill, five miles out on the reservation from the main post at Benning. My wife and five children were staying with her parents in nearby Auburn, Alabama, until we got quarters on the post.

  On Monday, June 29, as scheduled, I took command of my battalion. I was forty-two years old, a West Point graduate of the class of 1945, with nineteen years’ commissioned service, including a fourteen-month combat tour in Korea. In a brief talk to the troops afterward I told them that this was a good battalion but it would get better. “I will do my best,” I said. “I expect the same from each of you.”

  Even before taking command, I had a long talk with the most important man in any battalion: the sergeant major. Basil L. Plumley, forty-four years old and a six-foot-two-inch bear of a man, hailed from West Virginia. The men sometimes called him Old Iron Jaw, but never in his hearing.

  Plumley was a two-war man and wore master parachutist wings with five combat-jump stars. He was what the young Airborne types call a four-jump bastard: Plumley had survived all four combat jumps of the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II: Sicily and Salerno in 1943, and then in 1944, D day at Normandy, and Market-Garden in the Netherlands. For that matter, he also made one combat parachute jump in the Korean War, with the 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment. He ended World War II a buck sergeant and was promoted to sergeant major in 1961.

  The sergeant major was a no-bullshit guy who believed, as I did, in tough training, tough discipline, and tough physical conditioning. To this day there are veterans of the battalion who are convinced that God may look like Sergeant Major Basil Plumley, but He isn’t nearly as tough as the sergeant major on sins small or large. Privately, I thanked my lucky stars that I had inherited such a treasure. I told Sergeant Major Plumley that he had unrestricted access to me at any time, on any subject he wished to raise.

  After the ceremony the company commanders and battalion staff got a look at their new boss and a word on my standards. They were fairly simple: Only first-place trophies will be displayed, accepted, or presented in this battalion. Second place in our line of work is defeat of the unit on the battlefield, and death for the individual in combat. No fat troops or officers. Decision-making will be decentralized: Push the power down. It pays off in wartime. Loyalty flows down as well. I check up on everything. I am available day or night to talk with any officer of this battalion. Finally, the sergeant major works only for me and takes orders only from me. He is my right-hand man.

  Personal descriptions of the key players in the 11th Air Assault Division, and in my battalion that year, will be useful to the reader. These men appear and reappear throughout this story.

  Major General Harry W. O. Kinnard, division commanding general. Harry Kinnard, a native Texan, was forty-nine years old that year. He was West Point, class of 1939, and Airborne qualified in 1942. Kinnard was one of the shooting stars of the 101st Airborne in World War II. He was Brigadier General Tony McAuliffe’s operations officer, G-3, at the Battle of Bastogne in the Bulge, and the man who suggested that General McAuliffe specifically respond to a German surrender demand with one historic word: “Nuts!” Kinnard became a full colonel at age twenty-nine.

  Brigadier General Richard T. Knowles, assistant division commander. Dick Knowles was forty-five; a Chicago native, he held an ROTC commission from the University of Illinois. Knowles served in Europe in World War II in a tank destroyer group. In Korea he made the Inchon landing with an Army artillery battalion attached to the 1st Marine Division. Later, in North Korea, he earned the Silver Star leading a counterattack that routed seventy-five North Koreans who had penetrated his battalion perimeter. He originally came to the 11th Air Assault as a colonel commanding the division artillery. When Knowles was promoted to brigadier general he shifted to assistant division commander for operations, and in this capacity he spent most of his time in the field supervising the training and operations of the division. Knowles was slender, six feet three inches tall, and enthusiastic; he always arrived with a pocketful of good cigars.

  Colonel Thomas W. Brown, 3rd Brigade commander. Tim Brown was forty-four years old and six feet one inch tall; he was West Point class of January 1943, a native New Yorker and another World War II paratrooper who had served with the 11th and 13th Airborne divisions. He and I were students together at the Infantry School Advanced Course in 1951-1952, and we served together in the 7th Infantry Division in the Korean War. In 1952-1953 he was a battalion commander in the 32nd Infantry Regiment, while I commanded two companies and was operations officer of the 17th Infantry Regiment. Brown was quiet, cool, incisive, and perfectionistic. In the true Kinnard mode, he gave his battalion commanders guidance, then gave them the freedom to run their units. He had commanded the brigade since early 1963 and participated in the early development of airmobile doctrine, tactics, and techniques.

  The officers of my new battalion were the usual great Army mix of men who had come to their jobs from West Point, ROTC, Officer Candidate School, and military schools like The Citadel. Most of the young second lieutenants had come in through OCS and college ROTC programs. There were three rifle companies in the battalion—Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie companies—each at full strength supposed to have six officers and 164 enlisted men. They were my maneuver elements.

  Each rifle company had three rifle platoons plus one platoon of three 8 lmm mortar squads for fire support. Each rifle platoon, in turn, had three rifle squads plus a weapons squad of two M-60 machine guns for fire support.

  In addition, the battalion had a combat support company, Delta Company, consisting of a reconnaissance platoon, a mortar platoon, and an antitank platoon. We converted the unneeded antitank platoon into a machine-gun platoon for Vietnam duty. Delta Company was authorized five officers and 118 enlisted men.

  The Battalion Headquarters and Headquarters Company (HHC) was authorized fourteen officers, a warrant officer, and 119 enlisted men. HHC comprised command, staff, communications, medical, transportation and maintenance, and supply personnel. The medical platoon in HHC included the battalion surgeon, a captain, and a Medical Service Corps lieutenant in charge of operations. They ran the battalion aid station in garrison and in the field, and supplied each of the platoons in the other companies with medical-aid men—those conscientiou
s and courageous medics who were invariably called Doc.

  Some of the battalion officers:

  Captain Gregory P. (Matt) Dillon, operations officer. Matt, the thirty-two-year-old son of a World War I Navy chief petty officer, was a native New Yorker who was married and had two children. He was commissioned out of ROTC at the University of Alabama where he was a dash man on the track team. He had twice commanded companies, including B Company of this battalion. He was blessed with a clear head and a quick mind and he was a “people person.” The battalion “3,” or operations officer, in any unit is the commander’s alter ego, the detail man who turns concepts into plans and then pulls together all the many pieces of a complicated military operation. Matt Dillon was my “3” for two years in both battalion and brigade command and he was simply superb.

  Captain Gordon P. (Rosie) Rozanski, the commander of Headquarters Company. Later, in Vietnam, he would serve as battalion supply officer, or S-4. Rosie, twenty-six years old, hailed from Elysian, Minnesota, and was commissioned out of OCS. He was a bachelor who was cheerful, blunt, unflappable. He was responsible for selecting and securing battalion headquarters in the field; for feeding the officers and men in the headquarters and support sections; and for maintaining and securing a huge inventory of weapons and communications and electrical gear.

  Captain John D. Herren, the commander of Bravo Company. Herren, a pipe-smoking twenty-nine-year-old bachelor, was an Army brat—his father was an Army lieutenant general—and a graduate of West Point, class of 1958. He was calm, thoughtful, friendly, and steady: No one ever saw John Herren get flustered.

  Captain Robert H. (Bob) Edwards, the commander of Charlie Company. Bob was twenty-seven years old, married, a native of New Jersey. He was a Distinguished Military Graduate of the ROTC program at Lafayette College in 1960. Slender, five feet nine inches tall, Edwards was very bright and very quiet; he spoke briefly and to the point. He was exceptionally competent and so were the men and officers he commanded in Charlie Company.