A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (102 page)

Intangible things had also been invested in the creation of the Air Cav. The troops and their sergeants and officers knew and trusted one another. Most had organized and trained together for more than a year at Fort Benning as the experimental nth Air Assault Division. The pilots of the different helicopter formations had learned to play their individual roles and to synchronize their movements in a complicated ballet. When Johnson had said yes to Westmoreland in July 1965, the experimental division had been given the colors of the regular 1st Cavalry Division and additional battalions to bring it up to strength and sent to Vietnam in September, establishing an immense base camp for its three brigades and 435 helicopters in the An Khe Valley on the eastern side of the mountains not far from the Central Vietnamese port of Qui Nhon.

I heard about the first big battle between the Air Cav and Hanoi’s regulars of the NVA in mid-November 1965 while I was in Central Vietnam to research a story on refugees. I had found five hamlets behind a stretch of beach in Quang Ngai Province that had comprised a prosperous fishing village of about 15,000 people until the previous summer. The houses had not been the common thatch and wattle. They had been homes of thick-walled brick, the achievement of generations of saving from the labor of the sea. All had been reduced to rubble or grotesque skeletons by two months of bombardment from aircraft and point-blank
shelling by the 5-inch guns of Seventh Fleet destroyers. The village had been declared a Viet Cong base and razed simply because it had been in a guerrilla-controlled area. Officials from the district center said their inquiries showed that more than 180 civilians had been killed before most of the inhabitants had fled. Other estimates that seemed reasonable ran to 600. The young officers at the province military advisory detachment said they knew of at least ten more hamlets that had been leveled just as thoroughly on the same vague reasoning and twenty-five others that had been severely damaged. The pattern of destruction was widening, they said.

That evening I called the
Times
office in Saigon to describe the story I would be writing. Charlie Mohr, the bureau chief, told me that it would have to wait. A major fight had just started with the NVA near Pleiku, the principal town in the center of the Highlands, and I had better get there as fast as I could.

An obliging captain drove me out to the province airstrip, and late into the night I hitchhiked rides on planes down the coast to Qui Nhon and then over the mountains to Pleiku. I was accustomed to the desultory quality of an ARVN command post after sunset. At Pleiku the night was alive and roaring. The radios were raucous with requests and orders and reports. The big, boxy Chinooks clattered down, loaded up with artillery shells, and lifted away again to feed the howitzers that reverberated through the flare-broken darkness off to the southwest where the battle was taking place.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, Col. Thomas “Tim” Brown, a scion of a military family (his brother, George, an Air Force general, became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the mid-1970s), was at ARVN II Corps headquarters on a hill beside Pleiku being briefed by the corps intelligence officer. Brown commanded the 3rd Brigade of the Air Cav. His executive officer was Lt. Col. Edward “Shy” Meyer, the first of the Vietnam generation of officers to become chief of staff of the Army at the end of the 1970s. The 3rd Brigade had been dispatched to the Highlands earlier in November to find two NVA regiments that had attempted to seize a Special Forces camp at the Montagnard village of Plei Me about twenty-five miles south of the town. Brown’s three battalions had searched south and southeast of the camp itself for several days without success, and he had exhausted his intelligence. Westmoreland had sent word through Maj. Gen. Harry Kinnard, the division commander, that he wanted Brown to search
west toward the Cambodian border, but Brown didn’t know where in the west to begin. He had come to II Corps headquarters hoping for a lead.

Brown was thinking that the ARVN intelligence officer had little to offer when he noticed a red star drawn on the briefing map near the Cambodian border southwest of Pleiku. The star called attention to a massif, a cluster of peaks and ridges covered with double-canopy rain forest, that rose suddenly out of the Drang River Valley west of the Plei Me camp and extended back over the border six to seven miles farther to the west. Brown had seen the massif from the air. It looked forbidding. It was called the Chu Prong (Prong Mountain), after the highest peak within it.

“What does that red star signify?” Brown asked.

‘That’s a VC secret base, sir,” the intelligence officer answered.

“What’s in there?” Brown asked.

“We don’t know, sir, we’ve never been in there,” the intelligence officer replied.

The Chu Prong, Brown decided, was as good a place as any to begin. He instructed his best battalion commander, Lt. Col. Harold “Hal” Moore, Jr., forty-three, a West Point graduate from a small town near Fort Knox in western Kentucky, to select a landing zone near the massif and explore its edge. Moore was not to penetrate the Chu Prong in any depth, as the terrain would engulf a battalion. Brown also cautioned him to keep his companies within supporting distance of each other. For all their training, the men of Moore’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, and the other two battalions of the 3rd Brigade had yet to be tested in combat. The troops had seen only a few skirmishes during their two months in Vietnam. Brown was concerned about the shock of a battalion suddenly encountering a large North Vietnamese force.

Thirty-five minutes after landing without opposition on a Sunday morning, November 14, 1965, a platoon from Moore’s lead company caught a North Vietnamese soldier who was trying to hide in a clump of brush. The man was dressed in a dirty khaki shirt and trousers and was unarmed, carrying only an empty canteen. Moore questioned him through an interpreter. He turned out to be a deserter. He said he had been living on bananas for the past five days. Moore asked him if there were any North Vietnamese troops in the vicinity. Yes, he said. He pointed toward the Chu Prong. The first ridge, a finger that jutted out into the valley, loomed about 200 yards from the clearing Moore was using as a landing zone. There were three battalions in the Chu Prong, the deserter said, and they were eager to kill Americans.

***

“X-Ray,” as Moore had code-named the landing zone, was not hard to distinguish from the air on Monday morning. It was an island in a sea of red-orange napalm and exploding bombs and shells. Peter Arnett and I watched in awe from 2,500 feet, filled with fear at the imminent prospect of going down there. We had caught a ride on a “slick ship” Huey making an ammunition supply run from the artillery position six miles to the east; we were waiting for a pair of jets to finish a strike so that we could land.

The Huey plummeted, and the pilots dashed in over the trees to minimize exposure, then “flared” the helicopter as soon as we reached the clearing, braking in the air like a parachute popping open. The ammunition was tossed out and stretchers with a couple of wounded hoisted aboard as a bullet thwacked into the fuselage and others buzzed through the open doors. Arnett and I leaped down and ran at a crouch for the partial shelter of a huge anthill nearby where Moore had established his command post.

Moore was a tall man with blue eyes and craggy features, his emotions soaring in the relief and exhilaration of having just broken a three-and-a-quarter-hour assault on the southern and western sides of the perimeter by another North Vietnamese battalion. “By God, they sent us over here to kill Communists and that’s what we’re doing,” he shouted.

Many of the North Vietnamese survivors of this latest attack had turned themselves into snipers. They were all around and would not quit. They had climbed into the tops of the trees on the valley floor, dug “spider holes” amid the scrub brush and stands of five-foot-high elephant grass, and burrowed into the tops and sides of the strange, gargantuan anthills, some considerably taller than a man, that were interspersed everywhere. The dry season had begun in the Highlands. The loose-fitting khaki fatigues of the NVA blended well with the brownish yellow of the elephant grass and other parched vegetation, and they camouflaged themselves with branches. Whenever a helicopter landed or someone moved, one of them would cut loose with a Soviet-designed AK-47 automatic assault rifle and often another of Moore’s men would be killed or wounded before the sniper could be silenced.

The battalion’s entire perimeter was only 300 yards across, and the clearing itself where helicopters could land was much smaller. It would have been quiet and strewn with American corpses had Hal Moore not been such a superlative fighter, a daring but canny man who had served his apprenticeship in Korea. His intuition and a line of field telephone
wire a Cav scout helicopter had spotted strung along a trail north of the clearing (the NVA were not well equipped with tactical radios and used field telephones extensively) had convinced Moore on Sunday that the deserter was not lying. He had immediately understood that if the North Vietnamese rushed a force down off the ridge and got right next to the clearing, they could stop him from landing any more helicopters and slaughter those men he did have on the ground. He had to stiff-arm his enemy away from the clearing until he could bring in all or most of his battalion.

Without waiting for the rest of his second company to arrive, Moore had directed his first company to move up the ridge. He acted not a moment too soon. The three North Vietnamese battalions in the Chu Prong numbered about 1,700 men to Moore’s 450. Two of the battalions were from a regiment that had arrived only at the beginning of November; the third was a composite of survivors from one of the regiments that had unsuccessfully besieged the Plei Me camp. The NVA commander was readying one of the battalions as fast as he could, and its lead troops were about to launch a pell-mell assault down the ridge to try to reach the clearing. The men of the two armies met among the trees where the rain forest began.

A pitiless struggle started, Vietnamese and Americans killing each other within yards. The close quarters deprived Moore’s men of the advantage of air and artillery, and the Vietnamese did all they could to keep the killing on an infantry-against-infantry basis by staying as close to the Americans as possible, a tactic they called “clinging to the belt.” Had Moore’s men not been superbly armed themselves with the new M-16 automatic rifle and a quick-loading grenade launcher called the M-79 that looked and worked like a single-barrel shotgun, many more of them would have died.

Tim Brown had been proved right in his concern about a large NVA unit, but he need not have worried about a shock effect on his unseasoned troops. These Americans were as eager as their opponents—too eager in the case of one platoon. The second lieutenant in command fell for a Vietnamese trick: the lure. He carried his men out ahead of the rest of the company in pursuit of an NVA squad that seemed to be fleeing. The lieutenant and his platoon were soon enveloped and cut off on the crest of the ridge.

Moore had already guessed that the NVA would attempt an envelopment of his whole first company, because that is what he would have tried if he had been the enemy commander. He stopped it by rushing his second company to the flank of the first—and into another remorseless
action at a dry creek bed near the base of the ridge—as soon as the next helicopter lift arrived with the remainder of this second company’s troops. He then blocked one more end run against the second company by positioning the men of his third company on the flank of the second as fast as they landed. To do so he had to leave the rear side of the clearing unprotected, because the rest of his battalion—his weapons company with the 8imm mortars and his reconnaissance platoon—were still being shuttled by the helicopters from the assembly point at the Plei Me camp. He assumed correctly that the NVA commander would not think to hook around that far. Moore’s third company spotted the NVA flankers of this last envelopment approaching through the more open terrain close to the valley floor. They hit the Vietnamese with volleys of rifle fire and shattered them with artillery and fighter-bombers and salvos from the aerial-rocket Hueys.

Hal Moore now ordered the first and second companies to assault up the ridge and rescue the surrounded platoon. They were stymied almost immediately and took heavy losses. Second Lt. Walter Marm, Jr., won the Congressional Medal of Honor by single-handedly destroying a Vietnamese machine gun and killing the eight NVA soldiers manning and protecting the weapon before he was felled with a bullet wound in the face. Brown then reinforced Moore with a rifle company from another battalion late Sunday afternoon when the firing slackened enough to risk landing helicopters again and Moore pulled his troops into a perimeter for the night.

Shortly after daybreak on Monday the ordeal passed to Moore’s third company, C (“Charlie”) Company, which had managed to keep the Vietnamese at arm’s length through Sunday and had escaped with minor casualties. It had been assigned the south and southwest sides of the perimeter. The company commander had not requested volunteers to man forward listening posts during the night. He decided that they would be blinded by the thick elephant grass in front and that he could get by with artillery concentrations brought to within 100 yards of his line. At dawn, Moore ordered a local reconnaissance by all companies, a standard precaution. C Company’s commander told each of his platoon leaders to send out a squad. The Americans walked right into the soldiers of a fresh NVA battalion creeping toward them on hands and knees. Men died in the long grass as they sought to fall back firing. Others died running out to try to help comrades. The Vietnamese surged into a general assault on C Company, hoping to overrun it quickly and crack open the perimeter.

The company commander asked Moore for the battalion reserve, the
reconnaissance platoon. Moore refused. He had to hold the reserve as a last resort. In the confusion of battle he could not know whether C Company was receiving the main blow or a diversion, and shortly afterward an adjacent company also came under attack. C Company’s commander was shot in the back and gravely wounded as he stood up to throw a grenade at two NVA soldiers who had penetrated his line. Moore then did try to reinforce with a platoon from another company. They could not reach C Company and lost two killed and two wounded in the attempt. The Vietnamese were laying sheets of bullets across the perimeter—low enough to catch a crawling man—from machine guns and the Soviet equivalent of BARs they had set up around the anthills on the south and southwest sides. Soon all of C Company’s officers and most of its noncoms were dead or as seriously injured as the company commander. The attack on the adjacent company worsened.