We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young

by Harold G. Moore

  “A second later I was spun around, then slammed into the dirt. I rose to my hands and knees and started down the line. Blood ran everywhere. The mortar-platoon sergeant’s .45 pistol had been shot from his hand. His right hand hung limp from his wrist, and blood poured to the ground. Someone tried to dress his wound. Someone raised Lieutenant Lawrence and attempted to steady him. The firing continued.”

  Towles’s tight twelve-man line was shrinking fast. “I turned back toward the wood line and detected movement. I shifted in that direction and spotted North Vietnamese in the underbrush. Enemy turning our flank! Our position was no longer tenable. I turned back with the warning. Sergeant Jerry Baker took charge now; he realized we needed to pull out. He appointed the unwounded and some slightly wounded to help the severely wounded. An instant later he ordered the move.

  “I led this retreat because of my position on the battle line. I rose to my feet and headed in the only direction void of enemy fire—toward our left rear—at a run. Thirty or forty yards and I broke out of the trees into a large clearing of waist-deep grass. The sunlight hurt my eyes. Twenty yards into the field I noticed the man running a half-step to my rear go down. I dove to the ground and turned to see PFC Marlin Klarenbeek struggling with a leg wound.”

  Captain George Forrest was now back with his Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry soldiers at the rear of the column. “I had lost my radio operators, and when I got back and got another radio I found out McDade’s lead elements were in heavy firelights to their front and to their west. I got maybe two transmissions from McDade, then lost contact. We circled up. My parent battalion had come up on my net and I was able to contact Captain Buse Tully, commander of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cav. I have never felt such relief at hearing and recognizing a voice. I knew someone who cared about us was close at hand.”

  Here’s what the Vietnam War looked like in midafternoon of November 17, through the eyes of two of Captain Forrest’s Alpha Company riflemen, PFC David A. (Purp) Lavender of Mur-physboro, Illinois, and Specialist 4 James Young of Steelville, Missouri.

  Says Lavender: “My platoon was bringing up the rear. We started to maneuver and work our way up the column to help those up ahead. Every time we made a move we were hit by mortars. It was something you can’t describe. People were dropping like flies. The first blast killed a young soldier named [PFC Vincent] Locatelli. Every time we moved they dropped mortars on us. I know we must have had twelve or fifteen wounded out of our platoon, including our platoon leader.

  “These were my buddies I had been in the Army with for two years. [The] majority of our whole battalion had been drafted at age twenty-one [and] had been in service for over eighteen months. All of us were near twenty-three years old. They became my brothers over time. Hearing these fellows scream, hearing them killed, stuck in my heart and mind ever since. The most critical part of this fight was the beginning. It was the surprise. They had us in a U-shaped ambush and they had us cut off with mortars.”

  Rifleman Jim Young says: “I sat down and took a nap. We had flankers out a hundred yards or so on left and right, so I thought it was safe to grab some sleep. That little bit of shooting up front got a lot worse. That woke me up. Then our 1st Platoon received mortar fire. Five men wounded. I heard them calling for medics. Mortars kept coming in. Heard them order 1st Platoon to pull back out of the area where those rounds were hitting.”

  Young’s platoon was ordered to get on line and move in reaction to the enemy fire. “Everyone had hit the ground when those mortars began coming in. They told us to move ahead toward the enemy. We got on line and we walked right into an enemy ambush. They were behind trees, anthills, and down on the ground. There was waist-high grass and a lot of trees around us. There were enemy soldiers in that grass. They were hard to see and we had to shoot where we thought they were. The medic had his hands full, couldn’t take care of all the wounded. One man to my right was hit in the heel. His name was Harold Smith.

  “There was a grassy field to my left twenty-five or thirty yards, and a sniper off on my right. I couldn’t see him, but I saw a tracer bullet go across my hand. I felt the wind of that bullet. The same bullet passed over the back of Smith’s neck. He was lucky he had his head down. Our company commander, Captain Forrest, came running along our line. He was stopping and telling everybody where to go. He acted as though he was immune to the enemy fire. I don’t know how he kept from getting hit.”

  Just ahead of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, in the hodgepodge of admin and supply staffers, medics, and communications people that constituted Headquarters Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry marched Doc William Shucart, the 2nd Battalion surgeon; Lieutenant John Howard of the medical platoon; and Lieutenant Bud Alley, the communications-platoon leader.

  Says Shucart: “Before the fight I remember smelling cigarette smoke. Vietnamese cigarettes. I said: ‘I smell the enemy smoking!’ The next thing we knew mortars were dropping all around us, then a lot of small-arms fire was coming in, and then everything just dissolved into confusion. We thought that the head of the column had gotten turned and somehow we were getting shot by our own troops. Guys were dropping all around us. It seems like in a very short time I found myself all alone. We had gotten widely dispersed. I was running around with my M-16. I had a .45 pistol, which was useless, and I picked up somebody’s M-16.

  “I was under direct enemy fire all this time. I got one little zinger up my back; nothing serious, just a grazing wound that left me a nice little scar. This was the most scared I’ve ever been in my life. I was wearing a St. Christopher’s medal around my neck that somebody had sent me. I thought: This is the time to make a deal. Then I thought: I’ve never been very religious. He isn’t likely to want to deal. So I got up and started looking for somebody, anybody. I found one of our radio operators, dead, and got on his radio trying to raise somebody. I remember trying to get them to throw some smoke so I could find them.”

  Lieutenant John Howard remembers: “Soon after the first shots, mortars and grenades started hitting all around us. The small-arms fire then picked up to an intense level and soldiers started going down very quickly with gunshot or shrapnel wounds. There was confusion, and some thought they were being fired at by other American soldiers in the area. This confusion cleared up pretty quickly as the North Vietnamese assault wave moved in so close that we could see them and hear them talking.

  “They suddenly appeared behind anthills and up in the trees, sniping at anyone who moved, and we found ourselves shooting at them in all directions. As we crawled around in the tall elephant grass it was very difficult to tell where anyone was, or whether they were friendly or enemy. One thing I caught on to very quickly was how the NVA were signaling to each other in the high grass by tapping on the wooden stocks of their AK-47 rifles.”

  Lieutenant Bud Alley recalls clearly when “word came back that recon had been shot at. Then that recon had hit an ambush. Then orders to Charlie Company, just in front of us, to move on line and roll up the flank of it. John Howard and I were sitting beside each other. All of a sudden a couple of shots rang out twenty-five yards in front of us. By now we’re all standing up, scared. The call comes back: ‘Medic! Medic!’ The first group of medics in front of us takes off and John Howard takes off with them. Now the leaves begin to shake as bullets are coming in. The infantry in Charlie Company are yelling: ‘Get on line!’ I pushed my guys up on line, twenty-five yards inside the tree line, and suddenly all hell broke loose. There was lots of shooting and it was difficult to maintain the line.

  “A fellow got hit and screamed. My radio operator and I ran up to him and dragged him behind a little tree. He was shot through the wrist and kept screaming. Then he got shot again. I put my M-16 on automatic and fired up high and something fell out of the tree. I crawled down to an anthill where a couple of guys were. I stayed there and found a guy who had a radio. I called in to see what the hell was happening. About then the net went dead; somebody got shot with his fing
er on the transmit key, or something. The last thing I heard on the net was that Ghost 5 got hit; that was Don Cornett, the Charlie Company executive officer.”

  Colonel Tim Brown, the 3rd Brigade commander, the man who had the authority to order in reinforcements, was overhead in his command helicopter asking his ground commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bob McDade, for information on the seriousness of the situation. With Brown was the brigade fire-support coordinator, Captain Dudley Tademy, who was eager to unleash all the artillery, air support, and aerial rocket artillery at his command.

  Brown and Tademy had just left LZ Columbus where they had been talking to Lieutenant Colonel Tully when the first shots were fired at Albany. Colonel Brown was headed back to brigade headquarters at the tea plantation.

  Captain Tademy recalls, “Suddenly I heard Joe Price, the artillery forward observer with McDade’s battalion, saying ‘We have a problem! I need help!’ Price was hollering for everything he could get: air, artillery, ARA. We finally got him to slow down so we could understand what was happening. I notified Colonel Brown that something was going on down there. He tried to get on the command net and talk to McDade. I stayed on the artillery net trying to get some support for them. By then we were overflying their position and we could see puffs of smoke coming out of the woods. When Joe Price would come up on the net I could hear the loud firing over their radio.”

  Major Roger Bartholomew, commander of the aerial rocket artillery helicopters, was in contact with Captain Tademy and flew a zigzag pattern over the forest trying to get a fix on the location of friendly troops so that his helicopters could support them. He had no luck. Captain Tademy had the artillery fire smoke rounds to try to register defensive fires. No luck there either. “It didn’t help because everybody was so mixed up by then on the ground. We had tactical air, ARA, and artillery and still we couldn’t do a damned thing. It was the most helpless, hopeless thing I ever witnessed.”

  Colonel Tim Brown’s helicopter was running low on fuel and the chopper had to return to Catecka to refuel. Brown says, “I knew they were in contact. I did not know how severe, or anything else. While I was talking to McDade I could hear the rifle fire, but he didn’t know what was happening. I asked: ‘What happened to your lead unit?’ He didn’t know. ‘Where’s your trailing units?’ He didn’t know. And he didn’t know what had happened to any of the rest of them. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. We were not in [a] position to shoot a bunch of artillery or air strikes in there because we didn’t know where to put them.”

  Captain John Cash, in the center of the now busy Brigade Headquarters at Catecka, recalls the return of Colonel Brown: “Brown was standing there, on our radio, asking McDade what’s going on, yelling, ‘Goddammit, what is going on out there?’ McDade came back with, ‘Got a couple of KIA’s [killed in action] here and trying to get a handle on the situation. Let me get back to you later. Out.’” Captain Tademy, who was at Brown’s side in the tactical operations center [TOC], says, “I heard McDade talking. Brown kept asking him what was going on. The radio speakers were all blaring. What I was hearing was that things were not going very well in McDade’s area.”

  After his command helicopter had refueled, Brown flew back into the valley. “All of a sudden I heard all kinds of firing while I was talking to McDade on the radio. He started yelling: ‘They’re running! They’re running!’ I thought for one terrible moment he meant that his battalion was running. What it was, the Air Force had dropped napalm on a company-size North Vietnamese unit and they were running, not the Americans. About then I began to figure that McDade was in real trouble.”

  Only now did Colonel Brown begin rounding up reinforcements to send in to help Bob McDade’s 2nd Battalion. Brown ordered Lieutenant Colonel Frederic Ackerson to send a company from his 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry overland from LZ Columbus toward LZ Albany. Ackerson dispatched Captain Walter B. (Buse) Tully’s Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry on the two-mile march toward the tail of McDade’s embattled column. Meanwhile, Brown radioed orders warning McDade’s missing component, Captain Myron Diduryk’s Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav, to prepare to be airlifted from Camp Holloway into Landing Zone Albany.

  Brown acknowledges that it was too little, too late. “I’ve thought a good deal about this action over the years, and I believe that most of the casualties occurred in the first hour of fighting. I think the bulk of it was done right at the very first. They did not have decent security for moving through a jungle.”

  Lieutenant Colonel McDade for his part confirms that he was unable to provide Colonel Brown with detailed reports of what was happening to three of the four companies in his stalled column—most of which were out of sight and out of reach. Says McDade: “In that first hour or so, the situation was so fluid that I was acting more as a platoon leader than a battalion commander. We were trying to secure a perimeter. I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on, myself. I don’t think anybody in the battalion could have told you what the situation really was at that time. I can see where I might have left Tim Brown in the dark about what was going on; I didn’t really know myself until things quieted down.”

  The battalion commander adds, “I could have yelled and screamed that we were in a death trap, and all that crap. But I didn’t know it was as bad as it was. I had no way of checking visually or physically, by getting out of that perimeter, so all I could do was hope to get back in touch. I wasn’t going to scream that the sky was falling, especially in a situation where nobody could do anything about it anyway.”

  Lieutenant Colonel John A. Hemphill was the operations officer at Brigadier General Knowles’s division forward command post at Pleiku. He recalls that he and Knowles flew over the Ia Drang on November 17 and watched the B-52 bombing strike on the Chu Pong massif. They then flew back to Pleiku. Says Hemphill: “When we got back to Pleiku, here came Tim Brown to see Knowles. I brought him to Knowles and he said, ‘I have not heard from or made contact with McDade and I am concerned.’ So we went piling out and flew out in late afternoon, and that’s when I think was the first time we were aware that anything was amiss.”

  Although Knowles does not recall the Brown visit to his headquarters described by Hemphill, he does have a vivid memory of how he first learned that McDade’s battalion was heavily engaged with the enemy. “I had a warrant officer in the support command at Pleiku. His job was to watch the beans, bullets, fuel, and casualties. He had a direct hotline to me; I wanted to know immediately when things got off track. In the afternoon, around two or three o’clock, he called me and said: ‘I got fourteen KIA from McDade’s battalion.’ All the bells went off. I called my pilot, Wayne Knudsen, and John Stoner, my air liaison officer, and went out to see McDade. I stopped at 3rd Brigade before flying on out to Albany. Tim Brown had nothing to tell me.”

  Knowles adds, “We got over Albany and McDade was in deep trouble. I wanted to land. McDade said, ‘General, I can’t handle you. I can’t even get medevac in.’ I couldn’t land. I wanted to get something moving on the ground over there. I told Stoner and Bill Becker, the division artillery commander, ‘This guy doesn’t know what he’s got; put a ring of steel around him.’ I could help him with firepower and did. I then went back to see Tim, who still had no information. I was irked. A hell of a mess; no question.”

  The 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry had been reduced from a full battalion in column line of march to a small perimeter defended by a few Alpha Company survivors, the recon platoon, a handful of stragglers from Charlie and Delta Companies, and the battalion command group at the Albany landing-zone clearing—plus one other small perimeter, five hundred to seven hundred yards south, which consisted of Captain George Forrest’s Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry. In between, dead or wounded or hiding in the tall grass, was the bulk of Bob McDade’s command: the fragments of two rifle companies, a weapons company, and Headquarters Company.

  Each and every man still alive on that field, American and North Vietnamese,
was fighting for his life. In the tall grass it was nearly impossible for the soldiers of either side to identify friend or foe except at extremely close range. Americans in olive-drab and North Vietnamese in mustard-brown were fighting and dying side by side. It may have begun as a meeting engagement, a hasty ambush, a surprise attack, a battle of maneuver—and, in fact, it was all of those things—but within minutes the result was a wild melee, a shoot-out, with the gunfighters killing not only the enemy but sometimes their friends just a few feet away.

  There would be no cheap victory here this day for either side. There would be no victory at all—just the terrible certainty of death in the tall grass.

  20

  Death in the Tall Grass

  I did not mean to be killed today.

  —dying words of the VICOMTE DE TURENNE, at the Battle of Salzbach, 1675

  The North Vietnamese commander on the battlefield, Nguyen Huu An, has a keen memory of that bloody afternoon of November 17, 1965, on the trail to Landing Zone Albany: “My commanders and soldiers reported there was very vicious fighting. I tell you frankly, your soldiers fought valiantly. They had no choice. You are dead or not. It was hand-to-hand fighting. Afterward, when we policed the battlefield, when we picked up our wounded, the bodies of your men and our men were neck to neck, lying alongside each other. It was most fierce.” That it was, and nowhere more fierce than along that strung-out American column where the cavalry rifle companies had been cut into small groups.

  Lieutenant John Howard was with Headquarters Company near the tail of the column. “At some point early in the battle I was situated next to a large anthill. A sergeant not far from me had received a nasty wound to his foot and he was screaming in pain. I crawled over next to him and started to bandage his foot. No sooner had I told him to try to quit screaming than I was hit by a bullet which spun me completely around on the ground. It had hit me on the right side of my stomach. I pulled up my shirt to see how bad it was and, luckily, it had cut through my flesh but had not gone into my stomach. I had a flesh wound about five inches long.”