We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (10 page)

Assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, Plumley made all four combat jumps of that unit in Europe in World War II: Sicily, Salerno, D-day at Normandy, and Market Garden in Holland. His World War II European theater service ribbon bears eight campaign stars and four invasion arrows. During the Korean War Plumley was a mortar squad leader with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team and made his fifth combat jump at Sukchon, North Korea. His Korean service ribbon carries three campaign stars and one invasion arrow. By the time Plumley and I hooked up at Fort Benning he also wore a Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts awarded for wounds suffered in combat.

Between Korea and Vietnam the sergeant major rose slowly but steadily through the ranks and various assignments: platoon sergeant with the 11th Airborne Division in Germany, 1953–1956; first sergeant, rifle company, 3rd Infantry Division in Germany, 1956–1961; sergeant major, 23rd Infantry Battle Group, and 2nd Battalion 23rd Infantry, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Benning, 1961–1964.

You won’t find much, if anything, if you run the name of Plumley on Google or one of the other Web search engines. His response to questions about his life and service—even after the publication of
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
and his memorable portrayal in the movie
We Were Soldiers
by the actor Sam Elliott made him a legendary figure—has always been: “I don’t do interviews.” Nothing Joe or I have told him about the importance of leaving his story, in his own words, for future generations of soldiers and sergeants has changed his mind about that.

What little we know of him is drawn from dry, official Army records and our personal exchanges during the years of our service together and our long, close friendship in the years that have followed. He is now eighty-eight years old and lives in comfortable retirement in Columbus, Georgia, just outside the gates of Fort Benning, with his wife, Deurice, the daughter of a West Virginia blacksmith. They have one daughter and one surviving granddaughter. A grandson died in a tragic auto accident shortly after completing an enlistment in the U.S. Air Force and just one week before we began filming the movie at Fort Benning.

Plumley was at my side as the first helicopter dropped us into the clearing we had dubbed Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley on that hot morning of Sunday, November 14, 1965. He was beside me as the battle erupted all around us, and it was the sergeant major who grabbed my shoulder as the bullets buzzed and cracked around our heads like a swarm of bees in the first hour of battle at X-Ray and shouted over the noise: “Sir, you need to find some cover or you’ll go down, and if you go down, sir, we will all go down!” When, on the night of November 15, during repeated enemy attacks against Bravo Company 2/7 Cavalry, an illumination flare tossed out of an Air Force C-123 plane circling overhead had a parachute failure and fell burning into a stack of ammunition crates near our command post, I saw Plumley calmly walk over, pull out the white-hot, still-burning magnesium flare with his bare hands, and throw it out into the clearing. For that, and other personal actions during those three days and two nights, I recommended Plumley for his second Silver Star for heroism in action.

It was on the second morning of the battle, with the enemy threatening to overrun and break through the thin lines of Charlie Company 1/7 Cavalry, that the sergeant major decided to begin rounding up some reserve firepower around our little command post. He walked over to Joe, who was lying flat as the bullets cracked past, thumped him in the ribs with the toe of his boot, and shouted down at him: “You can’t take no pictures laying there on the ground, sonny!” Galloway got up, put away his cameras, unlimbered the M16 rifle he carried, and followed the sergeant major as he walked over to our makeshift medical aid station and spoke to the battalion surgeon and medical platoon sergeant. Plumley pulled his Army-issue .45-caliber pistol, jacked a round into the chamber, and declared: “Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!” The battalion surgeon, Dr. Robert Carrera, who had been drafted into the Army out of his residency, looked at Plumley with shock and horror.

Plumley and I were side by side as we boarded the Huey helicopter piloted by Bruce Crandall, the last flight carrying the last few men of my battalion out of LZ X-Ray on the afternoon of November 16. A few weeks later I was selected for promotion to colonel and given command of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division. There were two men I brought with me to my new command: Plumley and my operations officer, Capt. Gregory “Matt” Dillon. For the next eight months I made it a point to be on the ground with whichever of my battalions had the key mission or was in active combat on operation after operation, battle after battle, across the Central Highlands from the South China Sea to the borders of Cambodia and Laos. Plumley was always there every step of the way, working his magic on soldiers and sergeants alike, a calm and steady example of courage under fire.

In the late summer of 1966 we were both ordered back to new assignments in the United States and flew out of Saigon on the same chartered jet bound for San Francisco and on to Columbus, where our families awaited our return. After this tour Plumley was promoted to the new top rank among NCOs, command sergeant major. By now he wore the Combat Infantry Badge with two stars for his service in combat in three of America’s greatest wars of the twentieth century. Fewer than 270 soldiers and officers throughout the Army survived the experience to wear that small silver badge of honor and courage. He served a second full tour in Vietnam, 1968–1969, as command sergeant major of the 2nd Corps advisory detachment in Pleiku, once again stationed in the Central Highlands. In 1972–1973, Plumley was command sergeant major of the 3rd Brigade 2nd Infantry Division and then 1st Corps command sergeant major, both jobs in South Korea.

In December 1974, I attended the retirement at Fort Benning of Command Sergeant Major Plumley and proudly pinned the Legion of Merit medal on my old friend’s chest. Plumley had completed thirty-two years of active duty with the U.S. Army, but his service to our country and our Army was not at an end. He would work another fifteen years as a civilian employee at Martin Army Hospital at Fort Benning before retiring again to enjoy his bird dogs and quail hunting.

After my own retirement from the Army in 1977, my wife, Julie, and I spent most of each year at our home in Auburn, Alabama, a short forty-five-minute drive away from Columbus and Fort Benning. Julie and I were frequent visitors to the Plumley home, where Miss Deurice always had a fresh-baked pecan or sweet potato pie ready to cut.

In the late 1980s as we were researching the Ia Drang battles, Joe came to Auburn to do some work with me on our project. I drove him to Fort Benning to see where my battalion had lived and trained in 1964 and 1965, and then we headed to the Plumley home in Columbus for a scheduled visit with the sergeant major. Joe had not seen Plumley since our last field operation together in Vietnam in 1966. Plumley was standing patiently in his front yard waiting for us. Joe walked up to him and stuck out his hand. The sergeant major ignored that and instead pulled Joe into a bear hug, thumping him enthusiastically on the back. Joe’s jaw dropped in total shock and surprise. “It was like I had been hugged by God Himself,” Joe told me afterward. “I wasn’t prepared for that.”

Nothing speaks more loudly of the deep and lasting impression that Basil Plumley had on generations of young Army draftees than their reactions to his arrival at some of the first reunions of the Ia Drang veterans in the late 1980s. Although these men had served only a two-year obligation to the Army and nation and had returned to civilian life many years ago, as they gathered in the reunion hospitality suite a few would spot the old sergeant major in the door and, turning pale, would ease their way to the wall and try to make a stealthy exit behind him. Anyone who had ever been counseled for mistakes large or small by Plumley never forgot it and never wanted to repeat it. They were afraid he still had his old pocket notebook and that their names might still be written down in it for a long-delayed personal counseling session.

During these years Plumley gathered every Friday morning with a small group of other retired sergeants major at a local restaurant in Columbus for coffee and catching up on Army news and gossip. To the casual onlooker it may have looked like a typical group of old grandfathers at their usual table, laughing and joking and ragging each other over their coffee. But they are the lions in winter, the true backbones of our Army. Joe says that even though they wear PX plaid shirts these days he still sees, in his mind’s eye, the rows of combat ribbons on their chests. For him and for me they
are
the history of America at war for half a century.

None of these old lions ever roared with greater effect than Basil Plumley, who has marched steadfastly through life adhering to the code of the hills of West Virginia, the rules and discipline of the Old Army, and his own sense of duty fulfilled and a job done well.

SIX

Back to the Ia Drang!

W
hen we reached Pleiku in the Central Highlands, we discovered that the chartered helicopter that would take us to the Ia Drang battlefields would be delayed. Between that and the additional discovery that the green light given in Hanoi did not necessarily apply out in the hinterlands, we spent a nervous weekend in yet another shabby hotel. By now Joe had begun rating our lodging by his own variant of the star rating system—the rat rating system. He pronounced the Pleiku establishment a two-rat hotel, meaning each of us was guaranteed at least two rats in our room. He wasn’t far off the mark.

Our old hotel sat on a dusty road in a poor section of Pleiku. The new wave of progress and construction had not made it to this wild west frontier town. A dozen or more Vietnamese schoolchildren had spotted the arriving foreign guests and now hung out in front of the hotel, pouncing on us when we emerged to gleefully practice the English they had learned in class. A snake charmer likewise swung into action when we stepped out the door.

It became obvious that the clearances from Hanoi and the presence of General An had their limitations here, just as they did at the Vietnamese army base in An Khe. Forrest Sawyer, Joe, and I began a round of calls on Pleiku Province People’s Committee officials, who made it clear that no matter what Hanoi said there was only one clearance that mattered and it was theirs to bestow or withhold. Over endless cups of green tea we once again put our case for a historic return to the Ia Drang in company with General An and the two colonels. Having made his point, the chief of the province committee gave us his approval and we were cleared to fly on Monday, October 18.

In the meantime, worried about the delay in getting the chartered helicopter to Pleiku, I got clearance for Tony Nadal and one of our interpreters to drive out west and scout for an alternate way to reach the Ia Drang by jeep, truck, or even by foot if necessary. Tony came back and reported: “It was a trip from Hell.” No doubt it was, but at least now we knew there was a way to get where we had to go if the helicopter failed to arrive.

On Monday we convoyed out to Pleiku Airport—formerly the old American airfield where once chartered jetliners and military transport aircraft jockeyed for ramp space and takeoff and landing slots. Now it handles two Vietnam Air flights per week. None was due this day and we found the terminal locked and shuttered and deserted when we arrived. There had been a time when this place was buzzing like a hornets’ nest, the roads jammed with Army jeeps and trucks, huge supply dumps packed with the arriving machinery of war, uniformed Americans moving purposefully in the tropical heat, big chartered jets unloading newly arrived soldiers to do their year in Hell, who marched past columns of smiling, fortunate soldiers who were going home. Now there was only silence.

Our group sat on the concrete walkway outside and a bull session with Colonel Thuoc developed. He told us he joined the Viet Minh army at age fifteen just in time to fight the French at Dien Bien Phu. He recounted how in September 1965 the company he commanded and others in the 7th Battalion 66th Regiment of the People’s Army set out to march south down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia bound for combat in South Vietnam. Each man carried in his pack a new uniform, packages of salt and rice, a plastic poncho/groundsheet, a packet of quinine tablets for malaria, and a personal notebook. The march took his unit two months and six days to the Ia Drang River, where they turned east into South Vietnam on November 10, 1965. Two days later they were told to change into the new uniforms they had in their packs.

The tall, thin Vietnamese colonel remarked that in 1965 his soldiers were well trained in all their weapons but had “very poor radios.” He praised the U.S. Army’s PRC-25 backpack field radio sets and, with a smile, said he captured two of the better American radio sets at LZ X-Ray. As the war continued Thuoc said his men captured enough PRC-25s and batteries to switch over to using them almost exclusively. Jack Smith, now an ABC national news correspondent, who in 1965 fought in the Ia Drang with C Company 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry, asked Thuoc if his men had executed American prisoners of war during the battles. Thuoc replied simply: “Not intentionally.”

The opening of Pleiku Airport terminal and the noisy arrival of the Soviet-made Hind helicopter that ABC was chartering at an hourly rate of $4,000 cut short the conversation with Thuoc as everyone scrambled to gather their packs, cameras, and water bottles. The white-painted helicopter normally flew for similar hourly pay for foreign companies exploring for oil offshore and for the U.S. Joint Task Force–MIA on its searches for the remains of missing American soldiers. It was not large enough to handle all of us, so we divided into two groups for the trip across the miles and years to Landing Zone X-Ray, some thirty-five miles and a quarter century away from Pleiku.