A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (103 page)

The air and artillery seemed to be having no effect. In desperation, Moore radioed all units to toss colored smoke grenades and ordered the supporting fire brought right up to the edge of the perimeter. Several artillery shells landed inside it, and an Air Force F-105 Thunderchief jet dropped two canisters of napalm near the anthill where Moore’s command post was located, burning some of the men there, “cooking off” a stack of M-16 ammunition, and nearly exploding a pile of hand grenades.

Moore finally had to commit his reconnaissance platoon reserve to prevent the company next to C from cracking. In the meantime a probing attack began against a third section of the perimeter. Moore formed an emergency reserve by withdrawing a platoon from a sector not yet threatened and asked Brown to lift another rifle company to him when the punishment the NVA battalion had been receiving began to tell at last and the volume of fire started to diminish.

C Company had ceased to exist as a unit by the time the assault lost momentum after two hours and then gradually ebbed through the next hour. Of the approximately 100 men who had seen the first light of Monday, fewer than forty were unwounded. There were great gaps in the line where the dead and injured lay. Not enough North Vietnamese ever got through to seriously threaten the battalion position, because the untested men of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, held and the many who died took as many of their opponents with them as they could. A second lieutenant who had led one of the platoons was dead in his foxhole. Around him were the bodies of five Vietnamese. Out in the elephant grass a Vietnamese and an American who had shot
each other lay side by side. The American died with his hands gripped around the throat of the Vietnamese.

When Arnett and I arrived at X-Ray at midmorning on Monday, Moore still had the artillery and air strikes going full-tilt, because he was afraid the third North Vietnamese battalion the deserter had reported might be about to assault and he was trying to break it up before it could attack. The artillery had fired nearly 4,000 rounds in twenty-four hours, and the fighter-bomber sorties were approaching 300.

The survivors of the platoon that had been cut off on the ridge were finally rescued early Monday afternoon when the 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry, reached Moore’s perimeter by marching from another landing zone two miles away. A three-company sortie worked its way to the platoon slowly, because of the sniper fire. A captain from the reinforcing battalion was shot in the chest. Seven men from the platoon walked back unscathed to the clearing where twenty-seven had landed the day before. Most of the twelve wounded survivors had to be carried in litters improvised out of ponchos. The overly eager lieutenant was among the eight dead brought back that way. Those who returned owed their lives to the soldierly skills and battle sense of Staff Sgt. Clyde Savage, twenty-two, from Birmingham, Alabama, a squad leader and the only senior noncom to walk out in one piece. He had seized the artillery radio after the observer was shot in the throat and erected a barricade of shrapnel and high explosive around the tiny perimeter the survivors formed on the ridge, calling the shells to within twenty-five yards without dropping one among his frayed band. The survivors managed to beat back three attacks during the night with this powerful assistance. The NVA seem to have then forgotten the lonesome platoon in the confusion of their battle.

The third assault Moore anticipated came before dawn on Tuesday. It was weaker than the others, staged by perhaps two companies and once more against the south and southwest sides. C Company had been replaced there by a full-strength rifle company, and this time the attackers were detected and decimated before most of them could get near the foxholes. The riflemen finished off those who did get close with grenades and well-placed bursts from their M-16s.

Moore would not leave on Tuesday afternoon without three of his sergeants. They were from C Company, and he thought they were still out in the elephant grass where they had disappeared the day before. His troops were being relieved by elements of a second fresh battalion.
The artillery and air strikes had been suspended to facilitate the flight pattern of the helicopters. One of the relieving battalion commanders was nervous that the NVA might take advantage of the lull to bring mortars into action from the ridges of the Chu Prong. He wanted Moore to hurry up. Moore refused.

He had not slept in forty-eight hours. He was the victor. The bodies of hundreds of Vietnamese soldiers lay on the ridge and before the foxholes on the valley floor. The Vietnamese had died in such lavish numbers because they had made themselves the attackers and had assaulted without the assistance of any heavy weapons. They had also died because of the worth of Moore’s American soldiers, and now that the fight was over the cost of his victory came home to Moore. Seventy-nine Americans were dead and 121 were wounded. Most of them were men whom Moore had schooled and led for a year and a half. The bodies of the three sergeants from C Company had actually been found earlier on Tuesday and evacuated. Through an error, Moore had not been informed. The thought of abandoning their bodies in this strange place, or the even darker possibility, however remote, that one or all of them might still be out there wounded, was more than he could bear. “I won’t leave without my NCOs,” he shouted, weeping and shaking his rifle with a clenched fist. “I won’t leave without them,” he cried. He ordered the search continued. A rifleman turned out to be missing. Moore held up the movement until the man’s body was discovered and Hal Moore was convinced that he was not leaving any of his soldiers behind.

When I stopped off at Tim Brown’s forward command post at a tea plantation south of Pleiku on Tuesday evening, he told me that he wanted to pull out of the valley of the Drang. His mission was to find the North Vietnamese and to kill as many of them as possible. Moore’s battalion and the reinforcements Brown had sent him had fulfilled that task manyfold. To hang around in the same area and try for more right away was to play too dangerous a game, Brown said. The NVA seemed to be infiltrating across the border rapidly. Where Moore had encountered one new regiment, more might be hiding. Brown, who had flown into X-Ray several times to stay in touch with the battle and get a grasp of the terrain and the enemy, wanted to lift out all of his troops and probe carefully before seeking battle again.

“Then why don’t you pull out?” I asked.

“General Westmoreland won’t let me,” Brown said. “He says that if we withdraw, the newspapers will make it look like we retreated.”

The next day one of the battalions that relieved Moore’s, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was ambushed and destroyed as a fighting unit while moving up the valley about two and a half miles north of X-Ray. Its commander was not as canny as Moore and made the mistake of having his troops advance in a column. He also neglected to put out flank security. One element of an NVA battalion quickly formed a classic U-shaped ambush which his two lead companies walked into, while another element struck his third company as it was strung out in the elephant grass and trees. The men of the 2nd of the 7th resisted gallantly, and many Vietnamese also perished in the hand-to-hand fighting that lasted the better part of an afternoon. The two lead companies were grievously hurt, and the third company was massacred; 151 Americans were killed, 121 were wounded, and 4 were missing in action. The 7th Cavalry had been Custer’s regiment at the Little Big Horn. On November 17, 1965, “history repeated itself,” one of the survivors of the third company said.

McNamara was shaken by the casualties. The Battle of the la Drang—as Moore’s fight and the ambush came to be known;
ia
, meaning “river” in the language of a local Montagnard tribe, was not translated in the reports of the time—had taken 230 American lives in four days. (The four missing men were also later determined to be dead.) McNamara was shaken by something else the following week—a request from Westmoreland for an additional 41,500 U.S. troops. The general cited as his reason unexpectedly high NVA infiltration. Westmoreland’s troop requirements had already been creeping upward since July, and this latest one would mean putting 375,000 Americans into South Vietnam. McNamara had anticipated Westmoreland asking for more men, but not this soon. He flew to Saigon from a NATO meeting in Paris for a thirty-hour visit to reassess the war.

His November 30,1965, memorandum to the president was a contrast to the easy confidence of his July report. Westmoreland was going to request even more American troops than he had so far done officially—approximately 400,000 to be sent by the end of 1966. The general might then ask for further deployments, “perhaps exceeding 200,000,” in 1967. Sending Westmoreland the 400,000 men he would definitely ask for “will not guarantee success,” McNamara said. “U.S. killed-in-action can be expected to reach 1,000 a month and the odds are even that we will be faced in early 1967 with a ‘no-decision’ at an even higher level.” The administration could try to negotiate some sort of “compromise solution” and hold the dispatch of any more Americans “to a minimum”
in the meantime, McNamara said, but he advised against it. He wanted “to stick with our stated objectives and with the war and provide what it takes in men and materiel.”

As his “overall evaluation … the best chance of achieving our stated objectives,” he recommended a threefold course of action. Hanoi should be given another opportunity to yield. If Ho and his associates again proved stubborn, the air war against the North should then be escalated and Westmoreland should be sent the 400,000 men. The new opportunity to yield would be proffered in “a three- or four-week pause” in the bombing of the North. Johnson had suspended Operation Rolling Thunder for five days in May 1965 and nothing had happened. McNamara’s feeling was that five days had been too short a time for Hanoi to reflect. The longer pause he was now recommending was also designed to further the campaign of public relations and diplomacy he had mentioned in his July memorandum. Before taking any more escalatory steps, he told the president, “we must lay a foundation in the minds of the American public and in world opinion for such an enlarged phase of the war and … we should give NVN a face-saving chance to stop the aggression.”

On Christmas Eve 1965, Johnson suspended the bombing as Mc-Namara wanted. Hanoi was as unyielding after thirty-seven days as it had been after five. The president resumed the bombing on January 31, 1966. By this time Westmoreland’s troop requirements for his war of attrition had risen to 459,000 men. At Johnson’s instruction, McNamara was engaged in a complicated game of bureaucratic haggling to hold down Westmoreland’s demands while giving him most of the American soldiers he wanted.

The men of the Air Cav who had fought in the wilderness of the mountain valley were sent next to the rice-growing hamlets of the Bong Son Plain on the coast above Qui Nhon, one of the most densely populated sections of Central Vietnam and another of the Viet Minh strongholds during the French war. The operation began near the end of January 1966 and was code-named Masher. (Lyndon Johnson bridled at the taste of his generals and soon had the name changed to White Wing after the white-winged dove.) Tim Brown’s term as 3rd Brigade commander had ended in December. Hal Moore, who had been promoted to full colonel, was rewarded with command of the brigade for his victory at the Chu Prong. The brigade’s hard-luck battalion, the 2nd of the 7th Cavalry, caught the worst of the battle again, especially its third company, which had been rebuilt since the massacre with replacements from the United States.

The countervailing monsoon season was far advanced on this eastern side of the Annamites, and the paddies were flooded. The stretch of sand the battalion commander chose as a landing zone for the third company was zeroed in by NVA machine gunners reinforced by Viet Cong and hidden in fortified positions within groves of coconut palms on two flanks. The company was pinned down as soon as the men jumped from the helicopters and was progressively savaged through a long day of dying. The troops of another company from the battalion managed to fight their way across the paddies and close to their stranded comrades during the night, but it took a larger relief force led by Moore to complete the rescue the next morning. The dead, wrapped in their ponchos, looked forlorn on the rain-beaten sand.

A North Vietnamese regiment from the NVA’s 3rd or “Yellow Star” Division had marched down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Bong Son Plain earlier in 1965 and had also infiltrated by sea. The Northerners had joined up with a regiment of Viet Cong regulars who had previously cleansed the area of almost all vestiges of the Saigon regime. With the help of the peasants the Communist soldiery turned every hamlet into a bastion. The approaches across the paddies and other open spaces were meticulously covered by interlocking fields of fire from automatic weapons housed in bunkers that had layers of packed earth for protection overhead. The bunkers were constructed by tearing up the abandoned railroad along the coast and using the steel rails and stout wooden ties as supports for the layers of earth. The camouflaged foxholes in the canal dikes had a thoughtful improvement—a little chamber hollowed out off to one side in which a soldier could huddle during an air or artillery bombardment and get the same kind of protection as the fighters in the bunkers. There were also zigzag communication trenches so that the Communist commanders could reinforce, resupply ammunition, and evacuate wounded in the midst of battle. They had plenty of time to arrange their dispositions before the men of the Air Cav arrived. Had their spies in the ARVN not kept them informed, the preparatory movements of their opponents would have done so. Masher had been in planning for forty-five days. It was the southern wing of an offensive involving more than 20,000 American, Saigon, and South Korean troops, the largest action on the Central Coast since the ambitious offensive by the French high command, Operation Atlante, in the winter and spring of 1954.

Moore and his subordinates and the leaders of the ARVN airborne battalions that were the other strike element of the southern wing could hardly be blamed for conserving the lives of their men by calling on every bit of firepower at their disposal. The valley of the Drang had
shown that in spite of the unprecedented technology behind him, the American soldier was still subject to the rain forest and the ridges, the elephant grass and the other equalizers of Vietnam’s mountains, the moment he got out of his helicopter. This battle on the Bong Son Plain illustrated that he was also not exempt from the equalizers of the lowlands that the ARVN had encountered once the Viet Cong had been allowed to grow strong in the Mekong Delta. Brig. Gen. Howard Eggleston, an odd-man-out engineer who had been one of Charlie Timmes’s deputies in 1963, had an engineer’s appreciation for water and mud. He observed that no matter how many helicopters an army possessed, “you don’t have much mobility in a full rice paddy.” To have taken these hamlets chiefly by infantry assault across the flooded paddies would have meant massive casualties. The punishment of the first couple of days (the ARVN paratroops were also initially hurt trying to show the Americans they were not cowards) had a sobering effect. The commanders began to settle for pummeling a hamlet with shellfire and air strikes until the enemy abandoned it.