We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (7 page)

Giap was under orders from the Politburo to launch human wave attacks on the French in the late afternoon of January 26, 1954. He walked around the sand table with a pointer in hand, showing us all that had been made ready for the attack. But he said he had grown increasingly worried that such an attack would play into the hands of the French; that his artillery was vulnerable to the big guns of the French, and to launch human-wave attacks would destroy much of the force so carefully built and trained over the last ten years, with no hope of replacements for the terrible losses he would suffer in such an attack.

“I disobeyed my orders. I called off the attack,” Giap told us. “At the time I wasn’t sure if this would cost me my life.” But Giap knew that he could not afford to use China’s human wave tactics against the French because he couldn’t replace either the manpower or the big guns sited in the open.

Instead he ordered his artillery pieces pulled back to the reverse slopes of the mountaintops, and the laborers began burrowing through the earth and rock to construct impregnable gun positions where they could fire on the French below and then swiftly pull the guns back into the mountain itself. His troops were ordered to keep digging the trenches ever nearer the French lines.

When everything was ready, then, and only then—on March 13, 1954—Giap signaled the attack, and this time he would use his tactics, designed for a Vietnamese army, first cutting French supply and reinforcement lines and the vital airstrip with his artillery while the Viet Minh troops closed in on and overran the surrounding French hilltop strongpoints one by one.

All this he told us quietly, matter-of-factly, with no hint of bragging or boasting. He was there; the Politburo was not. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of his army and the positions. He knew that the French commander was betting everything he had on a victory at Dien Bien Phu. So was he. It was a winner-take-all game and Vo Nguyen Giap would win using Vietnamese tactics, not Chinese tactics.

The men chosen to make this trip were all old friends and comrades. Nadal and Herren were both West Point graduates and professional Army officers. After retiring from the Army, Herren continued to work at the Pentagon as a civilian employee, while Nadal worked as a human resource officer in several large corporations. Gwin left the Army as a captain, earned a law degree at Yale, and practiced law in the Boston area. Forrest retired from the Army, coached basketball at his alma mater in Maryland for a time, and then became director of a program designed to keep disadvantaged minority youngsters in high school. Savage, after retiring from the Army, remained at Fort Benning, Georgia, as a civilian employee helping train Army Reserve soldiers. Beck, after completing his two-year tour as a draftee, went back to being a commercial artist. Crandall was badly injured in a helicopter crash on his second combat tour in Vietnam, and after retiring from the Army was public works manager in Mesa, Arizona. Plumley retired after thirty-two years in the Army, then worked as a civilian employee at Martin Army Hospital at Fort Benning for another fifteen years. Smith, after his two years as an Army draftee, went back to college and drifted into television news as an on-air correspondent for ABC, a job that his father, the broadcast pioneer Howard K. Smith, had held.

The following day our group of Ia Drang veterans met with Gen. Nguyen Huu An and seven of his commanders who had fought against us at X-Ray and Albany. The meeting was held outdoors on the shores of one of Hanoi’s seven lakes. For most, on both sides, this was their first time to sit down across from each other. General An welcomed the Ia Drang veterans to Hanoi and did most of the talking on their side. I thanked them for the opportunity for such a historic visit by old enemies. The meeting outdoors in the sweltering heat was mercifully brief. We would have a chance to talk more that evening at dinner.

For all of us the greatest revelations and emotions came that evening at dinner on a floating restaurant built on a barge on Hanoi’s West Lake. When we walked up the ramp we were stunned to be welcomed by a large table of Vietnamese war veterans who regularly gather there to talk of old times over a good meal. These were all crippled war veterans, men missing arms, legs, eyes. Their wheelchairs were crude and decrepit, as were the prosthetics replacing their missing arms and legs.

Any apprehensions we had at such a chance meeting of old enemies were quickly laid to rest as the Vietnamese veterans smiled and held up a hand-lettered sign that read, in English: Welcome American Veterans. Some of us blinked back tears. We shook hands warmly and visited with them for a few minutes before moving inside to a private room, where we were divided up and mixed together, Vietnamese and American veterans, table by table.

Joe and I were seated with the Vietnamese generals, Man, An, and Phuong, whom we now felt we knew well from our previous trips and interviews. After a good Vietnamese meal of spring rolls, fish, chicken, and rice washed down by cold beers, we turned to the obligatory preliminary conversations about families and work and life in general as the hot tea was poured.

The lives of professional military officers are not all that different, no matter what country they soldier for. In our earlier interviews we had learned something about their families—General An had a daughter who was an army doctor and a major; General Man had a son who was an engineer and later would study in the United States; General Phuong lived with a daughter and her family. I had always urged my men never to celebrate the killing of an enemy—“remember that he has a mother too”—and to respect them as worthy opponents. From those same conversations and our book the generals knew something about our families as well.

There were the murmurs of a dozen other conversations at the small tables, the clatter of dishes in the nearby kitchen, which gave off the enticing scents of the next course. The lights of Hanoi sparkled around the dark lake.

Now the Vietnamese generals pulled closer to the table. General Phuong, the historian, spoke for them all. “We have had your book translated into Vietnamese and I have read it twice already and will read it again,” Phuong told the two of us. “We like your book. You are the first serious historians to come here and ask us for our version of what happened and you quoted us accurately. You wrote that our soldiers fought and died bravely in battle, and for that we thank you. Like you, we love our soldiers.”

The small, bespectacled Phuong—a lieutenant colonel when he arrived on the Ia Drang battlefields in 1965 to write the Vietnamese army’s report and lessons learned on the battle and now a major general and chief historian of the Vietnamese army—had something else to say. “You wrote in your book that our men killed your wounded on the battlefield and this is true. But we want you to know that we never gave such orders. We always knew the value of prisoners. The situation on that ground was very difficult. The fighting was hand-to-hand and our wounded and your wounded were mixed together. Our soldiers could not go out in the dark and get our wounded and ignore yours, who were armed and could shoot them if they passed them by. These terrible things happen in the confusion of war, and not just on our side.”

It was clear to us that our book about the battles had opened the hearts of these Vietnamese generals and it was that, and our determination to get and tell their side of the story as honestly as we could, that had opened the door to this journey back to our old battlefields.

Ours was not the only fascinating talk going on that evening. Across the room at another table a stunning conversation was unfolding between a Vietnamese army colonel, machine gunner Bill Beck, and George Forrest. Through an interpreter the colonel asked where Bill had been during the fight at LZ X-Ray. Bill explained that he had been way out front, guarding the American flank next to the dry creek bed. He drew a quick map sketch on a paper napkin. George Forrest helpfully reached over and added the symbol for machine gun to Bill’s X marking his position.

The Vietnamese officer gasped and turned pale: “You and your machine gun killed my battalion! Four hundred men. You killed my best friend. I am godfather of his daughter and only last month I married her off. This is not very easy for me.” Beck, whose memory of those terrible hours alone on that machine gun mowing down waves of attacking North Vietnamese is photographic and whose nightmares linger to this day, responded simply and quietly: “It isn’t very easy for me either.”

At other tables the Americans and Vietnamese told war stories and asked and answered the age-old question: Where were you that day? The dinner ended early since we had a 4:15 a.m. wake-up call to catch our flight from Hanoi south to Danang, where our road journey to the Central Highlands would begin. We headed back to our rooms at the sparkling new five-star Hotel Metropole with its modern amenities—such a contrast to our old quarters at the Defense Ministry with rats and huge spiders on our first two trips. It was quiet on the bus as each of us turned to his own thoughts about the dinner and our trip south to the Ia Drang in the morning.

FOUR

Traveling in Time

F
or our journey to the south and back to the battlefields in the Ia Drang we were joined by Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, my opposite number as a senior lieutenant colonel in the X-Ray battle, and two longtime protégés of his who had also fought at X-Ray—Col. Vu Dinh Thuoc, who as a lieutenant had commanded a company in the battle, and Col. Tran Minh Hao, who had been an assistant regimental operations officer.

We flew to Danang, by the South China Sea, on a Vietnam Air jet, landing at the old American air base from which many of the U.S. air strikes against the north were launched between 1965 and 1972. Only the solid concrete revetments that once protected jet fighters against Viet Cong mortar and rocket attacks remained as evidence the Americans had ever been here. Our party got aboard four small minibuses at the airport and set out on a 200-mile drive south on Highway 1 toward the port city of Qui Nhon, where most of the Cavalry veterans first landed in Vietnam in mid-September 1965 aboard the troop carrier USMS
Maurice Rose
after a month-long sea journey from Charleston, South Carolina.

During our year in Vietnam the roads in South Vietnam had been subject to Viet Cong ambushes and the occasional mine dug in among the frequent potholes. They were dangerous and sparsely traveled by ordinary Vietnamese. Peace had brought much heavier traffic—trucks, buses, cars, motorbikes, bicycles, bullock carts, and foot traffic—to this main and only north-south artery. It had not, however, brought any widening of the two-lane asphalt highway and the potholes were still ever-present and bone-rattling. It was rice harvest time in this section of the country and the local farmers made use of the shoulder of the highway, and often parts of the highway itself, to spread out the harvested grain to dry in the hot sun. In the now-dry rice paddies along the road villagers were bent low, cutting the golden stalks of grain with small curved knives and stacking them. Women threshed the grains of rice from the sheaves with large wooden flails, then carried it to the road to spread it out to dry.

Dodging the rice and the people and the other traffic, especially the slow-moving oxcarts, made for a jolting, horn-honking, at times terrifying journey as our bus drivers negotiated the unending obstacle course through the broad coastal rice fields and on into the sand dune country where a once-sprawling American air base at Chu Lai had been taken apart, plowed under, and returned to the dry baking sand of the days before we arrived here.

We were now in Quang Ngai province, a poor, dry, sandy land more suited for cactus than palm trees. It was also well suited for revolutionaries. Quang Ngai and its people had been occupied by many armies, including ours, but never conquered. Its villages sent fathers and sons to fight the French and the Japanese and then us Americans. To see that the big air base the U.S. Marines had built here at Chu Lai had disappeared was stunning to Joe. He had accompanied the Marines who landed here in the summer of 1965 in an amphibious combat assault to seize and clear the territory for the air base. Now it was gone and it was as if it had never existed. Joe accompanied the Marines on many other combat operations in this area during his first seven months in Vietnam. He had many memories of this barren, sandy land and the sullen, hostile villagers who made it plain where their sympathies lay in this war.

Joe once told me of covering a large multibattalion Marine operation in Quang Ngai province not long after he arrived early in 1965. He and several other correspondents had worked their way forward until they were marching with the lead company at the point of the spear. There came one of those lengthy halts while commanders far to the rear debated what to do next. The Marines and the reporters pulled off the trail and settled in to wait on top of a nearby hill. In front of them was a broad rice paddy perhaps 200 yards wide. Suddenly a Marine sergeant shouted: “Look at that guy! Not one of us; must be one of you reporters.” Down below a newly arrived reporter for the Associated Press, George Esper, trying to catch up, was halfway across the paddy and heading toward the tree line on the other side. Everyone shouted and hollered trying to stop him but George plowed on across the wet field and disappeared into the jungle, not realizing he was now the lead element of this operation. The Marines began saddling up to follow and rescue George or recover his body. Just then the reporter reappeared, leaping from the tree line back into the rice paddy and now running for his life. Behind him in hot pursuit was an old Vietnamese woman swinging a hoe, shouting insults, and doing her best to kill the foreign invader. George survived and covered the Vietnam War for ten long years.

Not far from the highway we could see a tall obelisk that, our interpreters told us, marked the site of My Lai village, where an out-of-control company of American infantrymen slaughtered some 400 women and children in the worst atrocity on our side in the Vietnam War. The worst single atrocity on the other side occurred north of here in the old imperial city of Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968. A North Vietnamese division seized Hue at the outset of the offensive and, working from lists of targeted individuals, rounded up and executed more than 3,000 Vietnamese civilians whose jobs as local or regional government officials or schoolteachers cost them their lives. All of us who served honorably in Vietnam were unfairly tarred with the brush of the My Lai Massacre. That terrible event spoke more about a failure of American leadership than it did about the American soldier. I’ve always said that if that battalion’s commander had been on the ground with his troops, instead of orbiting overhead at 3,000 feet in his command helicopter, the My Lai Massacre would never have happened. It also speaks volumes about failures in the training of both officers and soldiers at a time when the war machine was sucking up 20,000 draftees a month and the demand for sergeants and lieutenants was so great that people were awarded sergeant’s stripes and lieutenant’s gold bars who were hardly qualified and had not earned them. What a tragedy.