Battle of Ia Drang

• 1. Introduction

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  Joe Galloway, a news reporter who was on the battlefield, later called the Battle of Ia Drang "the battle that convinced Ho Chi Minh he could win."

  The fighting took place in November 1965 at the eastern foot of the Chu Pong Massif, in the central highlands of Vietnam. It was the first major battle between the United States Army and the People's Army of Vietnam, known as the PAVN. It was also the first large-scale helicopter air assault, and the first time Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers served in a tactical support role.

  Two landing zones, LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany, gave the battle its two halves. Why did American commanders set a single battalion down in a small clearing beside a mountain? How did one cut-off platoon survive the night? What turned a march through tall grass into one of the bloodiest sixteen hours of the campaign? And what did each army take away from it?

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• 2. Testing Air Mobility

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  In July 1965, troopers of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) began arriving at Camp Radcliff in An Khê. They called themselves the Air Cav. The division had grown out of an experimental unit, the 11th Air Assault Division (Test), which developed a new way of fighting. Under air mobility, helicopters would deliver, supply and extract forces the size of a battalion. Heavy weapons could not follow the infantry by air. So the soldiers leaned on close air support, artillery and aerial rocket fire, arranged from a distance and directed by local observers. By November, most of the division's three brigades were ready for operations.

  The central highlands looked like an ideal place to try the idea. By 1965 the Viet Cong held nominal control of most of the South Vietnamese countryside, increasingly backed by PAVN regulars from the north. Few reliable roads crossed the highlands, so bases there were relatively safe from the road-bound Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN. Vietnamese communist forces had fought in the region during the First Indochina War, winning at the Battle of Mang Yang Pass in 1954. By 1964 North Vietnam had set up the B3 Front there. By early November 1965 it had gathered the 32nd, 33rd and 66th Regiments, plus the H15 Local Force Battalion. Their commander, Major General Chu Huy Mân, planned to strike South Vietnamese positions in Kon Tum and Pleiku provinces. Attacks to the southwest from these bases threatened to cut South Vietnam in two.

  On the 19th of October 1965, B3 Front commanders launched an attack on the Special Forces camp at Plei Me, about 45 kilometers southwest of Pleiku. The Air Cav's arrival had pushed them to bring forward an assault planned for December. They used only two regiments, the 32nd and 33rd, instead of the three they wanted. The 33rd was to hit the camp while the 32nd lay in wait to ambush the ARVN relief force that would surely come from Pleiku.

  Strong air support helped repel the first attack on the camp. The main relief column, moving south on route 6C, was ambushed at 18:00 on the 23rd. It beat off its attackers after two hours, but the discouraged ARVN soldiers dug in and reached Plei Me only at dusk on the 25th. The PAVN forces withdrew west toward the Chu Pong Massif. At the end of October, General Westmoreland ordered General Harry Kinnard to take his division on the offensive in Pleiku province. On the 1st of November, the 1st Brigade captured a PAVN aid station southwest of Plei Me, and later clashes showed that the 66th Regiment had arrived.

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• 3. Choosing X-Ray

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  On the 13th of November 1965, Colonel Thomas W. Brown told Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore to conduct an airmobile assault the next morning. Brown's orders were explicit. Moore was not to try to scale the mountain.

  Several clearings in the area had been marked as possible helicopter landing zones, each named for a letter of the NATO phonetic alphabet. Moore chose LZ X-Ray, a flat clearing surrounded by low trees at the eastern base of the Chu Pong Massif. A dry creek bed bordered it on the west, and the Ia Drang River lay about 2 kilometers to the northwest. The other candidates included Tango, Yankee, Whiskey, Victor, Columbus and Albany. Artillery support would come from fire support base Falcon, about 8 kilometers to the northeast.

  General Richard T. Knowles stated that he had picked the first landing zone knowing the PAVN lacked anti-aircraft guns and heavy mortars, which had been destroyed in the Plei Me attack. Had the PAVN kept them, they could have set up on the hillsides overlooking the clearing, shot down the helicopters and decimated the troops landing below.

  The clearing was about the size of a misshapen football field, some 100 meters from east to west. Only eight UH-1 Huey helicopters could fit in it at a time. Moore's 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry had three rifle companies and a heavy weapons company. That came to about 450 men, against an authorized strength of 765. Sixteen Hueys, each carrying 10 to 12 equipped troopers, would shuttle them in lifts of just under one company, and each lift would take about 30 minutes.

  Moore planned to land Bravo Company first, along with his command team, followed by Alpha, Charlie and finally Delta Company. Bravo and Alpha would push northwest past the creek bed, and Charlie would move south toward the mountain. Delta, which held the mortar, recon and machine gun units, would serve as the reserve. A large termite hill in the center of the clearing became Moore's command post.

  At 10:48 on the 14th, the first troops of B Company touched down after about 30 minutes of bombardment by artillery, aerial rockets and air strikes. They landed about 200 meters from the PAVN 9th Battalion, 66th Regiment. The landing led the B3 Front to postpone its attack on Plei Me camp. It met the new threat with its 7th and 9th Battalions while the rest of its force waited at staging positions.

  Within about 30 minutes, a squad under Sergeant John Mingo captured an unarmed deserter from the PAVN 33rd Regiment. The prisoner said that three PAVN battalions waited on the Chu Pong Massif, an estimated 1,600 troops. Fewer than 200 Americans were on the ground at that point.

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• 4. The Lost Platoon

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  At 12:15 on the 14th of November, the first shots hit the three platoons of B Company patrolling the jungle northwest of the creek bed. Captain John Herren ordered Lieutenant Al Devney's 1st Platoon and Lieutenant Henry Herrick's 2nd Platoon forward side by side. Lieutenant Dennis Deal's 3rd Platoon followed in reserve. Just before 13:00, the PAVN struck both flanks of Devney's platoon and pinned it down.

  Herrick, meanwhile, was chasing a PAVN squad off to his right. His platoon stretched over about 50 meters and drifted roughly 100 meters from the rest of the battalion. He radioed to ask whether he should enter a clearing or skirt it, worried that going around would cut him off. Then he led his men through. For the first three or four minutes, his platoon inflicted heavy losses on PAVN soldiers streaming from the trees without taking a single casualty. Soon the enemy was closing on both flanks. Herren ordered Herrick to link up with Devney, but Herrick answered that a large enemy force lay between them.

  Herrick told his men to form a perimeter on a small knoll. Within about 25 minutes, five of them were dead, Herrick among them. Before he died he radioed that he was hit, handed command to Sergeant Carl Palmer, ordered the signal codes destroyed and asked for artillery. Palmer and Sergeant Robert Stokes were also killed. Command fell to Sergeant Ernie Savage, a squad leader who happened to be close to the radio. He called in artillery around the platoon again and again. Medic Charlie Lose gave the wounded extraordinary care, and the platoon held the knoll through the rest of the battle at X-Ray.

  Specialist Galen Bungum later described the stand on the knoll. "We gathered up all the full magazines we could find and stacked them up in front of us. There was no way we could dig a foxhole. The handle was blown off my entrenching tool and one of my canteens had a hole blown through it. The fire was so heavy that if you tried to raise up to dig you were dead. There was death and destruction all around."

  Savage remembered the repeated PAVN assaults this way. "It seemed like they didn't care how many of them were killed. Some of them were stumbling, walking right into us. Some had their guns slung and were charging bare-handed. I didn't run out of ammo, had about thirty magazines in my pack. And no problems with the M16. An hour before dark three men walked up on the perimeter. I killed all three of them 15 feet away."

  At 15:45, Moore ordered Alpha and Bravo Companies to evacuate their casualties and pull back from the fighting, then try again to reach the lost platoon. Their advance stalled at a large termite hill where a PAVN machine gun was dug in. Lieutenant Walter "Joe" Marm of A Company fired a light anti-tank weapon at the position, charged it with grenades under fire and killed the remaining gunners with his rifle. A dozen dead PAVN troops, including one officer, were found there the next day. Marm was wounded in the neck and jaw, and he was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his lone assault.

  The second push covered just over 75 yards before the PAVN stopped it. Alpha Company's lead platoon came under fire from an American M60 machine gun that the PAVN had taken from a dead 2nd Platoon gunner. After an impasse of 20 to 30 minutes, Captain Tony Nadal and Captain Herren asked to withdraw, and Moore agreed.

  Three times that night, just before midnight, at 03:15 and at 04:30, the PAVN assaulted the knoll, using bugles to signal their troops. Artillery, grenades and rifle fire drove them back each time. Savage's lost platoon came through the night without taking any more casualties. On the 15th, Lieutenant Colonel Tully's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry arrived, and Tully led B Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry and two companies of his own in a third push. Behind a screen of fire support, they reached the knoll without meeting the PAVN. Of the platoon's 29 men, nine had been killed and 13 wounded.

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• 5. Fire From Above

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  At about 13:45 on the first afternoon, Moore called in air strikes, artillery and aerial rocket artillery on the mountain. He relayed the requests through his operations officer, Captain Matt Dillon, who was flying above the battlefield. Soon afterward, Captain Bob Edwards of C Company reported an estimated 175 to 200 PAVN soldiers charging his lines. With a clear view of their sector, his men called in heavy ordnance and adjusted it with precision. Many PAVN soldiers were burned to death as they scrambled out of their bunkers, and others were caught in a second barrage. By 15:00 the attack had been stopped and the PAVN withdrew.

  The wounded had no such easy route out. Medical evacuation helicopters took out only two men before their pilots called off the mission under intense fire. Casualties were loaded onto the assault Hueys instead, and those pilots flew load after load of wounded from the battlefield.

  On the morning of the 15th, Lieutenant Charlie W. Hastings, an Air Force forward air controller, transmitted the code phrase "Broken Arrow" on Moore's instruction. The phrase told every available support aircraft in South Vietnam that an American combat unit was in danger of being overrun. At 07:55 Moore had his men throw colored smoke grenades to mark the perimeter, and aircraft began hitting the PAVN at close range, including those among Charlie Company's broken lines.

  Then came a tragedy from the sky. Two F-100 Super Sabres approached Moore's command post to drop napalm dangerously close to American positions. Hastings frantically radioed them to abort. The second pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Comstock, complied, but the first aircraft had already released its napalm. Several American soldiers were wounded or killed.

  Galloway helped carry one of the badly wounded men and wanted to put a name to the death around him. The man was Pfc. Jimmy Nakayama of Rigby, Idaho, who had been a second lieutenant in the National Guard. He died two days later. Galloway recalled that Nakayama had become a father that same week.

  The B-52s were already in the plan. At 18:50 on the 14th, General Kinnard had discussed with General Larsen the possibility of a B-52 strike near X-Ray. At 16:00 on the 15th, the first wave of carpet bombing fell about 7 kilometers west of the landing zone. It was aimed mainly at units of the 32nd Regiment about 5 kilometers farther west, and it would carry on for five consecutive days. Lieutenant Colonel Nguyễn Hữu An was on his way from his forward command post to meet Lã Ngọc Châu, the 66th Regiment's political commissar, when he saw the bombs raining down in waves. General DePuy, who executed the strike, said, "this is the fastest a strike of this nature had ever been laid-on." Afterward, Westmoreland told his intelligence and operations chiefs to bring a B-52 strike down within seven hours of acquiring suitable intelligence.

  Shortly before 04:00 on the 16th, trip flares and grenade booby traps set by Captain Myron Diduryk's Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry began to go off. At 04:22 an estimated 300 PAVN soldiers attacked. Diduryk's forward observer, Lieutenant Bill Lund, used four artillery batteries to drop fire into separate concentrations across the battlefield. Flares from C-123 Provider aircraft lit the field to Bravo's advantage.

  The PAVN came again 20 minutes later, a third time shortly after 05:00, and a fourth time near 06:30 around the company command post. Each time Lund's precise artillery cut down scores of attackers. By daybreak, Diduryk's company counted only six lightly wounded men and none killed. They would be needed again the next afternoon, at a clearing to the north.

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• 6. Ambush at Albany

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  On the morning of the 17th of November, Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade's 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry marched out of X-Ray toward LZ Albany, about 4 kilometers to the north-northeast near the Ia Drang. Lieutenant Colonel Bob Tully's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry headed for LZ Columbus, about 4 kilometers to the northeast. Tully's men moved out at 09:00 and McDade's followed 10 minutes later. Both went on foot because B-52s flying from Guam were coming for the slopes of the Chu Pong and for X-Ray itself. The ground troops had to clear a two-mile safety zone by midmorning.

  Staff Sergeant Donald J. Slovak, leading the reconnaissance platoon's point squad, saw "Ho Chi Minh sandal foot markings, bamboo arrows on the ground pointing north, matted grass and grains of rice." After about 2,000 meters, Alpha Company led McDade's battalion northwest while Tully's column carried on to Columbus, which it reached at 11:38. Alpha's captain, Joel Sugdinis, noticed the sudden absence of air cover and wondered where the rocket helicopters had gone. Then he heard distant explosions behind him as the B-52s hit the Chu Pong.

  Lieutenant Pat Payne, the recon platoon leader, was walking around termite hills when he came upon a PAVN soldier resting on the ground. He jumped on the man and took him prisoner. About 10 yards away, his platoon sergeant captured a second. McDade halted the column and went forward from the rear to question the prisoners himself. He called his company commanders ahead, most of them with their radio operators.

  The halted column sat in open ground, strung out over 550 yards. The men were worn out after almost 60 hours without sleep and four hours of marching. Elephant grass stood chest-high, which limited their view. The radios needed to call air and artillery support were up front with the company commanders.

  Close by were 550 men of the PAVN 8th Battalion, 66th Regiment, the fresh, rested reserve of General Mân. Elements of the 33rd Regiment's 1st Battalion were there too, though that regiment was under strength after the fighting at Plei Me. The 8th Battalion was led by Lê Xuân Phôi. At 13:15 the shooting started. The close-quarters fight lasted 16 hours.

  The PAVN struck the head of the column and spread down its east side in an L-shaped ambush. Units peeled off along the length of the line to attack the outnumbered Americans, and the fighting turned hand to hand. By 13:26, McDade's command group, the recon platoon and Alpha Company's 1st Platoon had been cut off in a clump of trees. Captain George Forrest ran a gauntlet back to his Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, which held a smaller perimeter at the rear of the column, 500 to 700 yards to the south.

  Charlie Company suffered 45 dead and more than 50 wounded, the heaviest losses of any unit at Albany. A-1E Skyraiders dropped napalm, but with American and PAVN troops intermixed, the strikes likely killed soldiers on both sides. About an hour into the fight, Phôi was mortally wounded while personally leading an attack, and he died after nightfall. He was the only high-ranking officer on either side killed in action at Albany.

  At 14:55, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry under Captain Buse Tully began marching from Columbus toward the rear of the column and reached Forrest's perimeter by 16:30. Around 16:00, Diduryk's Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, the veterans of X-Ray, learned they would go in as relief. At 18:45 the helicopters swept over the clearing. Lieutenant Rick Rescorla, the only platoon leader left in Bravo Company, led the reinforcements into the perimeter, which was then enlarged. The wounded were flown out around 22:30 as helicopters took intense ground fire.

  On Friday the 18th, soldiers began gathering their dead, and the task took the better part of two days because American and PAVN bodies lay scattered across the field. Rescorla described the scene as "a long, bloody traffic accident in the jungle." He also took a large, battered, old French army bugle from a dying PAVN soldier. The Americans left for LZ Crooks, 6 miles away, on the 19th.

  The fight at Albany cost the United States Army 155 men killed or missing and 124 wounded. About half of the roughly 300 American deaths in the 35 days of Operation Silver Bayonet came in these 16 hours. On the 24th of November, Pfc. Toby Braveboy was recovered when he waved down a passing Bell H-13 Sioux scout helicopter.

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• 7. Counting the Dead

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  Lieutenant Rick Rescorla walked Charlie Company's sector at X-Ray after the assaults of the 15th. "There were American and NVA bodies everywhere. My area was where Lt. Geoghegan's platoon (2nd Platoon, C Company) had been. There were several dead NVA around his platoon command post. One dead trooper was locked in contact with a dead NVA, hands around the enemy's throat. There were two troopers, one black, one Hispanic, linked tight together. It looked like they had died trying to help each other." Charlie Company alone had 42 men killed and 20 wounded in that assault.

  Galloway wrote that 80 Americans died and 124 were wounded at X-Ray, many terribly. He put the toll for the whole battle at 234 Americans killed and perhaps as many as 2,000 North Vietnamese. The official American count at the end of the X-Ray fight stood at 79 killed and 121 wounded.

  The American estimates of PAVN dead were far less settled. The United States reported finding 634 PAVN bodies near X-Ray and estimated that artillery and airstrikes killed 1,215 more some distance away. Only six PAVN soldiers were captured. Moore himself acknowledged that the figures were inaccurate, and he had lowered the body count his men first submitted, 834, to 634, judging the higher number too high. At Albany, the Americans claimed 403 PAVN dead. McDade later said he had reported no estimate and had not seen even 200 PAVN bodies.

  The Americans claimed a kill ratio close to 10 to 1. Ia Drang helped popularize the "body count" as a measure of success. According to Lewy, Defense Department officials later judged that American claims of PAVN and Viet Cong casualties across the whole war were inflated by at least 30 percent.

  The PAVN side told a different story. A 1966 report by the PAVN Central Highlands Front said that in five major engagements with American forces, PAVN soldiers suffered 559 killed and 669 wounded. PAVN histories claimed 1,500 to 1,700 American casualties. The official PAVN history said the Plei Me Campaign, which included Ia Drang, eliminated 1,700 American and 1,270 ARVN troops, shot down 59 helicopters and destroyed 89 vehicles. The United States military confirmed 305 killed and 524 wounded in the campaign, including 234 killed and 242 wounded between the 14th and the 18th of November. It claimed 3,561 PAVN killed and more than 1,000 wounded.

  ARVN II Corps tallied PAVN losses from the 18th of October to the 26th of November at 4,254 killed by body count, 2,270 more killed by estimate, 1,293 wounded and 179 captured. Those figures leaned on loss reports from PAVN regimental command posts, intercepted by ARVN radio listening stations. They also took in casualties from the five-day Arc Light bombing that neither the Americans nor the PAVN counted. Both sides probably inflated their estimates of the other's losses.

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• 8. Blueprint and Memory

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  Colonel Nguyễn Hữu An carried the lessons of X-Ray into his orders for Albany. "Move inside the column, grab them by the belt, and thus avoid casualties from the artillery and air." The American way of fighting leaned on air mobility, artillery and close air support. The PAVN had learned that it could blunt that firepower by engaging American forces at very close range.

  Moore noted that most of the casualties inflicted on his men came from small-arms and light-mortar fire. He credited the PAVN with accurate shooting, well-placed ambushes and coordinated targeting of officers, all of which overwhelmed American positions in small-unit fighting. The Americans, for their part, inflicted their own losses with B-52 strikes, aerial rockets, artillery and overwhelming firepower.

  On the 18th of November, General Westmoreland visited Moore's 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry and told its men they were being recommended for a Presidential Unit Citation. Westmoreland and An both judged the battle a success. It was also one of the few set-piece battles of the war.

  The story soon reached the public. Morley Safer documented the fight at LZ X-Ray in the CBS special report Battle of Ia Drang Valley. Moore and Galloway later wrote the critically acclaimed book We Were Soldiers Once... And Young.

  In 1994, Moore, Galloway and men who had fought on both the American and North Vietnamese sides traveled back to the remote jungle clearings where the battle took place. The United States had no diplomatic relations with Vietnam at the time, and the risky trip took a year to arrange. It became part of an award-winning ABC News documentary, They Were Young and Brave, produced by Terence Wrong. In 2002, Randall Wallace brought the battle at LZ X-Ray to the screen in We Were Soldiers, with Mel Gibson playing Moore and Barry Pepper playing Galloway.

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