We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (11 page)

The two civilian Vietnamese pilots in the cockpit passed the word back to those of us on the first lift that they hadn’t the foggiest idea where LZ X-Ray was located. The former Huey pilot Bruce Crandall and I moved forward and knelt between them in the cockpit. I showed them my old Army topographical map of the area and put my finger on the clearing. Not good enough. “Anyone have a compass?” we shouted to the rear. Joe fished around in his pack and pulled out a battered old compass he had carried as a Boy Scout. With it we oriented our pilots and, finally, were on our way.

For Bruce Crandall, squatting between the two Vietnamese helicopter pilots, the reasons for this journey were twofold. “My purposes for going were to travel with my brothers back to the time and place where we first became a family, and to use the opportunity to find out everything I could about my missing helicopter and crew who are still missing in action,” Crandall said.

Huey helicopter No. 63-8808 with crew members WO Jesse Phillips, WO Ken Stancil, Crew Chief Don Grella, and Gunner Jim Rice—all of whom flew missions during the Ia Drang battles—disappeared on a routine supply mission between An Khe and Qui Nhon on December 28, 1965. They were in Bruce’s company in the 229th Assault Helicopters and the missing men have been on his mind for all these years.

Everywhere we went on this trip Bruce asked for information and help finding the crash site and the missing men. He said he was particularly grateful to Colonel Thuoc “for his assistance and continued efforts to find our MIA crew.” The North Vietnamese colonel brought Bruce photos of downed Hueys from military files in Hanoi and at every stop on our journey questioned military and civilian authorities on the subject. “He was and is a true professional,” Crandall said.

We watched out the windows and windshield as the city gave way to patchwork plots of small coffee and tea plantings, two or three small villages, and then we were over familiar territory—thick scrub jungle, meandering creeks, open areas with tall elephant grass and no evidence of human habitation. Much as it was twenty-eight years ago.

The first time I flew over this countryside was at dawn on Sunday, November 14, 1965, when we did an aerial reconnaissance mission searching for a clearing in the Ia Drang Valley suitable for our helicopter assault scheduled in just a few hours. To disguise our intentions the two Hueys and two escorting gunships flew a course from Plei Me Camp to Duc Co Camp on the other side of the Ia Drang River. Just passing by, but from the open doors of the helicopters we scanned the terrain carefully with binoculars. We needed a clearing big enough to take eight Hueys landing together. Only two clearings seemed large enough, one designated Yankee, the other dubbed X-Ray. Yankee turned out to have tree stumps dotting the clearing, so it would be X-Ray, at the base of the Chu Pong.

Now, from two miles out, Bruce and I spotted the X-Ray clearing dead ahead of us at the foot of the Chu Pong Massif. As we approached the clearing I saw clear signs that nature had done much to repair the devastation of war. Shattered trees had grown new branches. Shell holes and the line of old foxholes were at least partially filled. The elephant grass had reclaimed large swaths of land that had been burned over by fires set by napalm and bombs and artillery shells. I was stunned to see wildflowers blooming here and there in the clearing.

The helicopter settled to the ground almost precisely on the spot where Crandall landed that morning twenty-eight years ago carrying me, Sergeant Major Plumley, Capt. Tom Metsker, and my two radio operators.

The steps were lowered and at 11:15 a.m. I stepped down into the tall grass, closely followed by Joe and the sergeant major. For those of us who have known him for over four decades, Plumley’s first name
is
Sergeant Major. He’s that kind of man. Mrs. Plumley once cornered Joe at a reunion and asked him: “Joe, why don’t you call the sergeant major Basil? I do.” Joe just shook his head and tried to explain to Mrs. Plumley why that would be unthinkable to him or any of us. “Ma’am, as far as I am concerned, his first name is Sergeant Major and always will be,” Joe replied.

For years I had felt the need to return to this place and now, finally, I was here in the company of men who had fought both with me and against me. We were standing on the ground where so much had occurred that resonated throughout a war and throughout our lives. Each of us separated as we came off that Russian helicopter, each moving with little hesitation toward the places that were important to him. Our two nervous Vietnamese military intelligence minders warned us repeatedly of the dangers of unexploded shells and bombs and urged that we watch closely where we stepped. I felt certain that whatever higher power had brought us through this battle and other battles without a scratch had not brought us back here now just to see some of us die a delayed death from an old bomb or mortar shell. Our escorts weren’t so sure.

We were met by a wall of oppressive heat and humidity as well as a fresh and unfamiliar green on trees and grass that none of us remembered from that November 1965. This time we arrived in the Ia Drang at the tail end of the monsoon season. The ground was moist and soft where in our memory it was baked hard as rock by the sun. Water flowed in what we knew as the dry creek bed—a tactically critical fold in the earth that both sides coveted and fought and died for during the battle. The trees now covered with fresh green leaves had been coated with red dust back then, and the bullets and shrapnel from bombs and artillery rounds denuded the trees of foliage in short order. We were instantly drenched in sweat and every movement was an effort. There was, with the departure of the helicopter, an eerie silence disturbed only occasionally by noises from the tall grass and the jungle forest: an unfamiliar bird’s cry; the whir of insect wings; the distant chatter of a monkey. We heard none of that on our first visit here, when the thundering noise of bombs, rockets, machine guns, rifles, grenades, men shouting orders, other men screaming in pain and calling for the medic or their mothers shut out all other sounds and half deafened us. Then the only smells were smoke from the grass and trees set afire by our shells and bombs, the reek of cordite and gunpowder, the sickly copper smell of freshly spilled blood in large quantities, the awful choking odor of burning human flesh that once smelled is never forgotten. Then, as the days and nights wore on, there was the sickening sweet smell given off by hundreds of dead men bloating and putrefying where they had fallen in a large circle in the jungle all around us. There was none of that now. Only an occasional whiff of stagnant water the rains had left in the bottoms of old bomb craters and foxholes; a musty damp odor given off by the red earth itself; an exhalation of life and growth and greenery from jungle and forest. All around us the tall elephant grass was a brilliant green.

My former company commanders, Tony Nadal and John Herren, headed for the creek bed and beyond, where their companies had fought for three days and two nights. With them went Ernie Savage, now a retired master sergeant, who as a twenty-one-year-old buck sergeant in Herren’s B Company had inherited command of the Lost Platoon after his lieutenant and two more senior sergeants had been killed in the first ten minutes of battle—and kept his men alive for twenty-seven hours while cut off and surrounded by a large force of North Vietnamese under orders from General An to wipe them out. They had to hike a hundred yards or more through the tall grass and scrub trees, with Major Hao the minder clucking over them like a mother hen as he warned them to watch every step they took. It wasn’t the poisonous snakes that worried him. It was fields where unexploded bombs and mortar shells and 40mm M79 grenades had rested half buried and untouched for a quarter century but were still just as deadly as the day they rolled out of some American munitions plant. Hao wanted them to turn back, to abandon this risky trek, but they could not and would not. Eventually they came to that slight knoll where Savage had gathered the shattered platoon of twenty-nine men—nine dead, thirteen wounded, and seven able-bodied men—and fought off an enemy determined to wipe them out.

They found little that spoke of the twenty-seven hours that small, suffering little band spent cut off from the battalion, a tiny island of resistance in a sea of enemy soldiers who came at them over and over during the longest night any of them would ever know. Their medic, Doc Randy Lose of Biloxi, Mississippi, crawled from man to man plugging their wounds and his own with rolls of C-ration toilet paper after his bandages ran out, keeping them from screaming in pain when the morphine ran out and only silence and the black night was hiding them from the enemy all around them. When we pushed out during a lull in the fighting the next afternoon at first we couldn’t find them. They had no time to dig foxholes, but during that night each of them had somehow burrowed down, scraping at the hard, dry soil with their fingers, and as the artillery they called down on themselves and the encircling ring of enemies covered them with dirt and branches and leaves, they became part of the earth itself. When we called out for the twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Savage he slowly raised his hand into the air and suddenly there they were in front of us. From the time Savage assumed command of the shattered platoon not another man was killed and Doc Lose somehow kept all the wounded alive. They still had ammunition and were ready to fight on if necessary. Their story and this place where it unfolded are legend in today’s Army. When we asked General An about this trapped platoon he shook his head slowly and told us that he had ordered his troops to wipe them out. “Their will to live was stronger than our desire to kill them.”

Bill Beck, a gifted artist who had sketched from memory the places where he had fought not long after the battle, spun around a time or two getting his bearings and then walked straight to his old position, where, on his machine gun, he had wiped out an entire battalion of North Vietnamese. Beck had inherited the machine gun that first day of battle when his gunner and best friend from back home in Pennsylvania, Russell Adams, was shot in the head. Beck had vivid and disturbing memories of running to Adams after he was hit, turning over his helmet and finding part of his friend’s brain still in it.

Standing there alone, Beck looked down and saw something unusual barely poking through the red dirt at his feet. He scuffed at it with the toe of his boot and unearthed the rusted remains of an American steel helmet. Just the top two or three inches were intact. It was, Beck was certain, Russell Adams’s helmet. Beck scraped it out of the red earth with the toe of his boot, scooped it up, and slipped it into his pack. All this was done furtively and in a matter of seconds. Beck wanted no argument from the Vietnamese about him taking this relic that meant so much to him home.

Beck thought back to those days when he was Russell’s assistant gunner. The two of them were from eastern Pennsylvania—Russell a small intense man of few words who came off his father’s dairy farm outside Shoemakersville, and Bill a big, strong, six-foot-tall athlete who hailed from the gritty mill town of Steelton, just upriver from Harrisburg. They were so unlikely a pair that the guys called them Mutt and Jeff. When Russell took that enemy round in the head Bill was horrified. He ran over and scooped Russell into his arms, like a baby, and trotted across the dangerous open ground through a hailstorm of bullets to deliver his buddy to the medics, praying as he went—for Russell, for himself, for all of us.

It was nothing short of a miracle that he made it to the aid station and back, taking over the abandoned M60 machine gun just in time to halt an attacking enemy battalion in its tracks and hold them off for hours, out there alone on that crucial piece of ground. Bill and his machine gun saved my battalion from being overrun that day. In another, greater miracle Russell Adams survived his terrible head wound, emerging from an Army hospital many months later, disabled both mentally and physically—the wound left him partially paralyzed on his left side—and went home to the family dairy farm and back to the familiar hard work he had known all his life. Long after the war was over Joe and I went to the Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and presided over an awards ceremony where Beck and Adams were each presented the Bronze Star with V for their heroism and sacrifice on this battleground. When Russell limped onto the stage—watched proudly by his wife and young daughter—he received a standing ovation and a hero’s welcome from a military audience that wept openly. Our own tears were of joy at seeing our brothers honored by those who command a new and different U.S. Army and see men like Beck and Adams as an important part of their heritage and history.

Beck finding Adams’s helmet was just the first of a series of magical moments that would transpire as we walked this ground.

Beck carefully snapped photos of the landmarks he had sketched a quarter century before—a termite hill where he saw an American GI on one side and a North Vietnamese soldier on the other, each hiding from the other. There was the gnarled tree where he had jumped to seek cover beside a sergeant during a burst of enemy fire and looked over to discover that the sergeant had a bullet hole in his forehead and was dead. All these landmarks where old, horrifying memories were lodged were still there. There was the creek bed where he saw a young lieutenant shot and killed while his radio operator, tethered to him by the long black cord of the radio handset, struggled to free himself but was shot in the back, his radio absorbing most of the damage. When he got home to Pennsylvania from this trip he cut the photos in half diagonally and did the same with copies of his old sketches, then married them up. They matched perfectly. Bill Beck had no false memories. The real ones, the totally scary ones, were engraved on his heart and lived in his nightmares and time had neither dimmed nor blurred them. They were razor sharp and still cut deep.

The only signs we saw of any human activity in this remote and wild area near the Cambodian border was a rough dirt logging road running east-west along the northern base of the Chu Pong Mountain with a rock-paved ford that took it across the creek bed. Two or three huge teak logs lay in the tall grass at one end of the X-Ray clearing. They looked like they had been there since the last dry season, waiting for the loggers to return and truck them out to the coast, where they would be shipped to Japan.