They Were Soldiers
As the president of the United States mulls another escalation of U.S. forces in a foreign war zone, some American combat veterans are marking an anniversary from a different war and a different time, and a very different escalation.
Forty-four years ago today, Nov. 14, 1965, 1/7 Cav of the 1st Cavalry Division choppered into LZ X-ray in the Ia Drang Valley in a reconnaissance in force that encountered three regiments of the People’s Army of Vietnam dug in on and around the Chu Pong massif.
What ensued was the first major engagement between U.S. and North Vietnamese regulars, and some of the bloodiest days in American military history; with up to 70 percent battalion-level casualties and some platoons almost entirely wiped out on the single bloodiest day of the Vietnam War, Nov. 17, 1965, when the troopers of 2/7 Cav thought it was over and the enemy was defeated. It wasn’t.
Two good friends, Larry Gwin and John Eade, were there with 2/7 Cav, choppered in to reinforce 1/7 Cav at LZ X-ray and then marched five miles to LZ Albany. Another friend, Joe Galloway of We were Soldiers fame, was a war correspodent who had attached himself to a unit he correctly anticipated would see action. Gwin (Silver Star, Purple Heart) wrote about it in Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir. He is now writing a sequel about the long, difficult process of recovering his life in the aftermath of horrific combat. What follows is the preamble, a short history of his year in Vietnam:
Alpha Company, Second Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), arrived off the coast of Vietnam in mid-September, 1965, after a 2-month voyage from Savannah, Georgia, where they’d embarked. On September 15th, they were airlifted to their division’s new base camp, then being hacked out of the jungle just west of An Khe, a village on Route 19, which ran from Qui Nhon, on the coast, to the Cambodian border, where, unbeknownst to most of us, the 325th Division of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) had been building up its forces for a push through the Central Highlands to the South China Sea. I had been in Vietnam for 2 months serving as an advisor to a South Vietnamese Army battalion in the Delta, and had been assigned to the 1st Cav just before it arrived.
When the 146 officers and men of Alpha 2/7 arrived at their base camp, they began their tours by digging bunkers and foxholes in case they were mortared, setting up tents along their company street, and working on the division’s sprawling defensive perimeter called “the Green Line.” At night, they would sit in their foxholes on the line and stare out into the darkness, where the enemy lurked. After weeks of hacking, clearing, and burning brush, digging more defensive positions, and manning their section of the perimeter, they conducted patrols outside the Green Line and other “small unit” operations, generally acclimating themselves to the temperature — usually in the low 100s — and the humidity — usually in the high 80s. On their first battalion-sized operation, Alpha 2/7 air assaulted into the lowlands east of An Khe Pass, seized positions along Route 19, and started looking in earnest for bad guys.
In early October, Alpha Company’s commander was suddenly relieved and replaced by a captain named Sugdinis, a Ranger-trained West Pointer on his second tour in Vietnam, who’d just come from Delta Company of the First of the Seventh Cav, our sister battalion. On the very next day, I received orders to join Alpha 2/7 as its executive officer, or second in command. Grabbing my gear, I hustled over to my new unit, bivouacked 500 meters down the highway. Captain Sugdinis greeted me warmly, briefed me as to what he expected of “his new XO,” and then we both went about getting to know the other officers and men of A 2/7.
Five days later, we suffered our first casualties. While searching for bad guys in the hills overlooking the highway, Sergeant First Class Ben Johnson, Jr. was killed in action, and two other men wounded, when one of them triggered a booby trap. The captain was with them, and he came back from that patrol a changed man. It’s hard to lose men, especially your own.
By the time we’d spent a month together, we’d been on several company-sized operations, had become familiar with airmobile tactics (for infantrymen, simply getting on and off a helicopter as quickly as possible and knowing where to go), and had acclimated ourselves to the heat, humidity, and strain of being constantly “on the alert.” We’d even captured a bad guy, a black-pajama’d VC, in an ambush.
In early November, the Division’s Airborne Brigade ran into hard-corps units of North Vietnamese regulars near the Cambodian border, and our Brigade, the 7th Cavalry, was committed to the fight. We were trucked from An Khe to Pleiku on November 12th, and air assaulted shortly thereafter into the tall grass and scrub jungle of the Ia Drang Valley, just north of the Chu Pong Massif and east of the Cambodian border. That’s where our sister battalion, the 1/7, ran into a large PAVN force at a place called LZ X-Ray and found themselves heavily engaged. Though viciously and repeatedly attacked, they stood firm in the face of overwhelming odds.
The following morning, Alpha 2/7 air assaulted into LZ X-Ray to help them out, experiencing our first hot LZ, suffering casualties as soon as we hit the ground, and arriving just in time to plug a gap that had opened up in the 1/7’s perimeter. An hour after we landed, another battalion of Americans, the 2/5, came overland into our perimeter, and the enemy briefly backed off. But during the next 2 days and nights, we fought off several more battalion-sized attacks. On the morning of the 16th, they finally broke off the fight and melted into the jungle. The rest of our battalion flew into LZ X-Ray that afternoon, and everyone started to breathe a little easier. Though Alpha 2/7 had suffered several more KIA’s and WIA’s, we’d stood fast and done well. We had “seen the elephant.”
(Forty years later, the battle at LZ X-Ray was portrayed in the movie, “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson and Sam Eliot. It was the first time that regimental-sized units of the American and North Vietnamese armies had clashed.)
On November 17, 1965, our battalion, barely 400 men by then, marched five miles west and north to secure a previously un-reconnoitered LZ named Albany . There, we blundered into a reinforced battalion of PAVN — more than 800 of them — well rested, heavily armed, and eager to kill Americans. We, on the other hand, had been on “full alert” for 2 days and nights at X-Ray, and were exhausted after a 5-mile trek in 100-degree heat. Alpha Company lead the battalion into Albany, and just minutes after we arrived, our entire column was suddenly and viciously attacked, and for the next 12 hours, we fought tooth and nail, toe to toe, and hand to hand against a tough and well-trained enemy, ultimately fending them off by calling napalm strikes onto our own positions and killing hundreds of them in the process. Eventually, they backed off and melted into the jungle, but they had inflicted terrible damage. Of the 400 Americans who made the march to Albany , 155 were killed and 124 were wounded, leaving us with a casualty rate of roughly 70%, one of the worst that any American unit suffered during the entire Vietnam war. Alpha Company lost half its people — 35 KIA and 19 WIA) — with two of our platoons, the 1st and 2nd, being almost wiped out … only 6 men survived. We weren’t the only ones to get clobbered. Charlie Company walked to Albany with 120 men, but after the fight there, only 9 of them were fit for duty.
We came home to our base camp thinking we’d stood our ground and beaten the best the enemy had to throw at us, but it took us from Thanksgiving to Christmas to refit, or replace our casualties, and it wasn’t until just before Christmas that we went back out into the field to look for PAVN. The few search-and-destroy operations we went on prior to the new year were really just training runs, but we eventually got back up to snuff.
Then, in mid-January, we learned that we were headed out on another big operation into the Bong Son plain, and our base camp was suddenly abuzz with world-renowned journalists who couldn’t wait to join us on our next mission. The 1st Air Cav was famous.
The first Bong Son campaign started inauspiciously on January 25, 1966. With roughly 120 men ready for the field, Alpha Company was to be ferried by Air Force C-123’s from An Khe to Bong Son, where we would regroup and proceed by chopper into the action. But waiting on the airstrip for the last of our four planes to leave, I heard that one of our aircraft had gone down. I then received a radio call from Captain Sugdinis, who’d flown out on the first lift. He informed me that the C-123 carrying our entire Third Platoon had lost power and crashed into the mountains east of An Khe Pass. Everyone aboard had been killed. Forty-two more of our men, mostly veterans of the Ia Drang, were suddenly gone.
Captain Sugdinis directed me to attend to the wreckage and recover, account for, or identify as many of our men as I could. The Mortar Platoon, which was still waiting to board its aircraft, was to leave its mortar tube behind and proceed to Bong Son as a makeshift rifle platoon. He would reform the company into three platoons and go from there. He then ordered me, in no uncertain terms, to take my R& R after wrapping up my assignment. I acknowledged his instructions and went about the business of attending to the plane crash and trying to recover and identify our dead. Of the 46 men who had been on the flight … 42 from Alpha Company and four Air Force crewmen. We were able to positively identify only eight. A more depressing duty I’ve never had.
Returning from R&R, I immediately rejoined the company, still in the field. While I had been stumbling around Hong Kong , they had been in a hard-fought 2-day battle at LZ 4, losing 8 more men KIA at a place they called “the Graveyard.” But their morale was high, and the replacements had done well. The very next day, we flew into an area west of the Crow’s Foot and trekked up and down mountain ridgelines to set up an ambush before the rest of the battalion assaulted into the valley below us. That night, we lost a man when he stood up to take a pee, and the man on alert next to him fired a round into what he thought was a PAVN infiltrator. War is a very dangerous business. Unfortunately, we were “behind enemy lines” and under strict instructions to maintain radio silence, so we couldn’t call in a Huey to evacuate the poor guy, and we had to carry his body with us for the next 12 hours while we trekked to our ambush site.
Shortly after Bong Son, Captain Sugdinis was replaced by a new captain, just in from Korea , and Alpha Company had a new Company Commander. The new CO, for lack of a better word, was a disaster.
During the next two months, we were involved in several pretty hairy operations, one a return to the Ia Drang Valley in early March to look for PAVN, and another near the Cambodian border south of Dak To. It didn’t take us long to realize that our new CO had no idea how to lead a rifle company. Not only was he incompetent; he was indifferent. In fact, he was shit-canned two months later when he sent an ambush patrol into another company’s area of responsibility. Our ambush patrol was ambushed by one of their ambush patrols, one man was killed and four others wounded, and our CO was relieved on the spot. Bye-bye, Captain Shit-Bird.Our next CO was a young captain named Davison, who was inexperienced but turned out to be a good man. In early May, we flew back into Bong Son and almost immediately ran into another batch of hard-corps PAVN regulars, finally bagging them in a village called Thanh Son 2, which we attacked. During the ensuing melee, we lost another 12 men KIA, including a platoon leader, 2nd Lt. Dick Hogarth, and 15 men WIA, including myself and another platoon leader named Marty Hammer, who was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions that day. The wounded were medevac’d after dusk on May 6th, and I ended up back at An Khe in the 2nd Surgical Mobile Army Hospital, 47th Group, where I spent the next three weeks blissfully recovering from a gunshot wound to my left thigh. I learned that Captain Davison had done a good job and that our battalion had captured the colors and the political officer of the 79th Quyet Tam Regiment, which gave us all a lift, especially those of us who’d been there.
By that time, I was beginning to think I might make it home — with just over a month to go until my DEROS (Date of Expected Return from Overseas) and my being unable to walk — but while recuperating at the MASH, I received a note from our adjutant to the effect that Captain Davison had come down with typhus, and asking if I could make it back to take command of the company. If I couldn’t, another lieutenant would take charge. Of my company? No way! So I showed up for duty the next morning, even though my wound was still healing and I could barely walk.
Captain Davison briefed me on Alpha Company’s mission before he was evacuated to Manila to recover from his typhus. Fortunately for me, we were manning the Division’s defensive perimeter, so I was able to use a jeep to get around in, and I assumed command without any fuss. During the next three weeks, we were rocketed on line and probed several times, but we suffered no casualties, and of that I was thankful. I also learned how challenging it was to command a company.
When the good captain came back and resumed command, he told me that I had “done well” and that I would not have to go out into the field any more. For me, the war was over. Or so I thought.
The next day, the 101st Airborne Division ran into trouble near Tuy Hoa, and our battalion was ordered to help them out. The good Captain called me into his tent and proceeded to renege on his promise. Alpha Company was to spearhead the assault, he said, and there were only two experienced lieutenants left in the company, Jim Kelly and me. That’s why he was asking us to go.
So we went.
The next four days near Tuy Hoa are a blur, but I remember an air assault into another hot LZ, flying over PAVN gun pits we could see. After a night on that LZ, we were ordered to follow a large enemy force. We did so for two days, and when we caught up with them, they shot us up pretty good, killing 2 more of our men and wounding another 4. That’s when I lost it. That’s when I hit the wall.
The next morning, we called in an artillery barrage to destroy the objective to our front, then charged across an open field, firing as we went, expecting at any moment that the enemy would open fire, but they had faded into the jungle once again. Shortly after that, I think Captain Davison realized that his XO had reached the end of his rope, so he let me and Jim Kelly return to base camp to get ready to fly home. We both had less than a week before our DEROS. We were, as they say, so “short” that we could hardly climb into our jungle boots.
Four days later, with my bags packed and my duffle bag shipped home, I said goodbye to the men of Alpha Company. They had returned from Tuy Hoa without further contact. I told them that if I could make it home, they could make it home, and that I’d never been prouder than when I’d been working with them. Then I wished them well, saluted, turned, and walked away. Of the original 140 men that I had joined in early October, only 16 were still with the company.
The day before I flew home from Da Nang , three captains from the battalion came striding into the tent I was in and started berating me for being out of uniform. What the hell? Then they broke into smiles as one of my “fellow company commanders” pinned brand new shiny captain’s bars on the collar of my jungle fatigues. It was the 4th of July, and I didn’t even know it.
Early the next morning, dressed in my short-sleeved khaki uniform, with my new captain’s bars on my right collar, the crossed rifles of an infantry officer on my left collar, my jump wings and Combat Infantryman’s Badge pinned proudly over my left breast pocket, and my paratrooper boots spit-shined as well as I could shine them, I boarded a C-141 Starlifter along with eighty or so other veterans and flew home.
So I came home a captain, and it felt good.
Galloway wrote about the definitive account of the Ia Drang with 1/7 CO Harold Moore in We were Soldiers Once…And Young: Ia Drang–The Battle That Changed The War In Vietnam. The first part of the battle, at LZ X-ray, was depicted in the Mel Gibson film, We Were Soldiers (which notes the bitter irony of the 7th Cavalry’s bloody history, a prior bad day having been experienced at the Little Bighorn).
Galloway and Moore’s sequel, We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam ties up a lot of loose ends, including Eade’s story and the perspective of the erstwhile enemy, encountered decades later, plus a lot of aftermath.
Gwin’s Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir makes an excellent companion read that lets you see through the eyes of a soldier on the field the events made familiar by Galloway and Moore’s book. Gwin also writes a lot about his friend Rick Rescorla — life of the party in the barracks, backbone of the unit in battle. You remember Rescorla. He’s the British-born American hero who died saving lives in the Twin Towers on 9/11 … keeping spirits up by keeping them singing, just like he did at the Ia Drang. Here he is about to advance in the bayonet charge at LZ X-ray:
Here’s a detailed history of LZ’s X-ray and Albany with maps and some images at history.army.mil.
And here, from the Mudville Gazette archives, is John Eade’s incredible experience as the lone man surviving in his position, which he related to me for an anniversary newspaper article in 2005, and I expanded for Mudville. It was the first time he had spoken publicly about it.
“I Am Going To Die Well.”
In 1965, Sgt. Eade, 21, was a fire-team leader in 2nd Platoon, A Co., 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regt., 1st Cav Div. 1st Lt. Larry Gwin was Alpha Co.’s XO. The battalion was sent in to reinforce 1/7 Cav at LZ X-ray on Nov. 16, 1965, and with NVA forces at X-ray destroyed, 1/7 was choppered out, and 2/7 was marched 10 km to LZ Albany. They encountered and captured a couple of NVA soldiers, and had established a defensive perimeter at Albany when the two NVA regiments encamped nearby attacked. Gwin was at the A Co. command post among some trees and anthills in the center of the LZ. Eade and 2nd platoon had been sent into the trees to the left while 1st Platoon went right. Before it was over, more than two-thirds of the Americans were dead or wounded.
Eade recalls that his platoon was immediately pinned down in ferocious fighting as the NVA swarmed on them through the trees. “For the first hour and a half, it was intense hand-to-hand,” Eade said. “It was like a gang fight. It was small groups of us versus small groups of them. It got down to knives. It got down to choking people.”
Eade said he and three others, Wilbert Johnson, Barry Burnite and Oscar Barker Jr., had some freedom of movement along a line of brush and tried to flank the NVA.
“We wanted to hunt them down and give the platoon a chance,” Eade said. “We bit off more than we could chew.” Eade said. Burnite, a white trooper, was a machine gunner and Johnson, a black trooper, was his crewman. When the machine gun was disabled by shrapnel and Burnite was hit in the chest, Johnson dragged Burnite 30 meters in an effort to save him.
“It was the greatest feat of human strength I have ever witnessed,” Eade said. “I don’t know if Burnite was still alive.” Eade, a native of Toledo, Ohio, is white and said that growing up, he had played sports with a lot of black kids and was not subject to racism. But he said that what he witnessed that day cured him of any possible vestiges and has left him with no tolerance for it.
Johnson, Barker and Eade holed up among some trees and continued to fight. Johnson was killed, and Eade was shot in the gut and the right shoulder, forcing him to fire his M-16 left-handed. His legs and boots had been sprayed with shrapnel, with a large piece stuck into his foot, so Eade couldn’t walk. By about 3 p.m., much of the fighting had subsided around Barker and Eade. Barker tended to Eade’s wounds when they weren’t fighting, stuffing one of Eade’s dirty socks into his shoulder wound to stop the bleeding because they were out of bandages.
“I knew and he knew that everyone else was dead,” Eade said. He urged Barker, a black trooper, to try to save himself and run for the command post, where Gwin and others held a perimeter.
“He refused to go,” Eade said. Shortly after that, Barker was shot in the chest, and Eade had to watch him die. Barker had a sucking chest wound, and it took him a long time to die, Eade said.
Eade has recently done research and is preparing paperwork in an effort to have Barker posthumously awarded a Silver Star for gallantry under fire.
Eade himself was awarded a Purple Heart. There are no living American witnesses to Eade’s actions, which Gwin says would otherwise merit a Distinguished Service Cross. Eade says he is not interested in decorations. He wears the Combat Infantryman’s Badge on his lapel and is satisfied with that.
After Barker was killed, Eade was alone. I asked Eade what his thoughts and emotions were at this time, as the last surviving man in his position with every expectation that he would be killed as the NVA moved around finishing off the wounded. I was under the impression that Eade had played dead to survive, but he said that wasn’t the case.
“Playing dead was a way to die. It made no sense to me. Our job was to hold that position and kill the enemy,” Eade said. “I had this thing in my mind, part of the U.S. Army’s General Orders and the soldier’s code you learn in boot camp: ‘I will never forget I am an American fighting man. I will never surrender of my own free will. I will continue to resist to the utmost of my ability. I will not leave my post until properly relieved.” Eade said he kept repeating it himself.
“I don’t think it was unique to me,” Eade said, citing the actions of men like Barker and Johnson. Eade said his seemingly hopeless position was made easier by his belief, established weeks earlier after several men in the unit were killed in other actions, that he would not be leaving Vietnam alive. What Eade says about that may sound familiar to other veterans of combat.
“It wasn’t a matter of living or dying. It was taking care of each other and doing your duty. The anticipation of a future is what you give up. The question was not, ‘Am I going to die?’ We all know the answer to that. The question was, ‘How am I going to die? I am going to die well.’”
In the command post, which Eade estimates was located about 50 meters of open ground beyond his own woodline, Gwin and the others holding out saw large groups of NVA moving through Eade’s area. A couple of survivors who had made it out said they didn’t think anyone was alive there, and despite some misgivings on the part of some officers, the decision was made to call in a napalm strike on the area.
“I think they made the right decision,” Eade said. He was on the edge of the napalm strike and was set on fire by it, but said that among his problems, it was inconsequential.
“It set me on fire, but I managed to roll in the dirt and put it out,” Eade said. In fact, he said, the napalm served a purpose. “It flushed them out and gave me an opportunity to reduce the numbers.”
Later in the afternoon, he was surprised by the sudden appearance of three enemy soldiers behind him.
“There were three North Vietnamese looking at me, one with a pistol.” Eade said he shot and killed two, but was shot in the face by the surviving Vietnamese, the one with the pistol. The small-caliber bullet hit him in the face, destroying his right eye socket and shattering parts of his sinuses, making it difficult to breathe. He was knocked unconscious, and when he came to, the surviving Vietnamese was gone.
“I was angry at myself for being shot in the head. I was angry at myself for being careless. I was really pissed off at the North Vietnamese. It was probably the most maniacal moment of my life.” Eade said.
After the napalm, the numbers of North Vietnamese moving through the area had been great reduced, but they continued to come through until about midnight, Eade said. He said he stopped using his rifle after dark so he wouldn’t give away his position.
As he heard small groups of NVA, probably collecting their dead, Eade said he crawled around and threw grenades.
“There was no shortage of grenades lying around,” Eade said, referring to his dead comrades’ munitions. He recalls that it was a struggle to stay awake. He was on his third night without sleep, and believed that if he fell asleep, he would be found and killed.
After midnight, the NVA activity ended. Around 9 or 10 the following morning, Eade said he heard someone moving toward him. He prepared to shoot, but held his fire. Then he saw the shape of an American helmet. “I yelled at them, ‘Give me some water!’” Eade said. “I was really thirsty. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re shot in the stomach. I can’t give you water.’ I told him I had been drinking water all night, but he said no. So I asked him for some morphine. I told him I had used mine up on the other wounded. ‘It really hurts,’ I said. He said, “You’re shot in the head. I can’t give you morphine.’ So I said, ‘Well, then give me a cigarette.’ They gave me that.”
Gwin reports that the discovery of Eade alive was a tremendous morale boster for the rest of the battalion. When the battle was over, Gwin said, the battalion that had marched to LZ Albany could fit into four deuce and a half trucks — nearly three-quarters of them had been killed or wounded in a matter of hours. But he said that despite the trauma, morale was high and remained so in following weeks as replacement rotated into nearly empty platoon tents and the battalion prepared to return to the field.
“The survivors rallied and cheered the fact that we had held the ground. We knew that we had killed a lot of them. We had given as good as we had gotten,” Gwin said. “The morale was very high in a perverse sort of way, because we had survived it.”
Gwin went on to complete his year in Vietnam and 45 combat assaults as executive officer of Alpha Company. He was wounded later in his tour when he was shot in the leg, but returned to combat duty after a short in-country convalescence. He was awarded the Purple Heart and the Silver Star for gallantry under fire at the Ia Drang. Gwin’s experience is detailed both in his own book and in “We Were Soldiers Once … And Young.”
Eade spent the next year in the U.S. Army hospital at Valley Forge, which is where Barry Burnite’s mother came to see him.
“I don’t know how she found me,” Eade said. “She asked me, how did her son die. I kind of told her the truth and I kind of didn’t. I cleaned it up a bit. The uncontrollable grief of that woman has stayed with me my whole life. Her pain and her grief was more than I could bear to look at. I can never think about it without wanting to cry.”
Forty-four years later, Eade and Gwin consider themselves soldiers still, American combat infantrymen before anything else. They’ve said their Vietnam experience colors their thoughts about committing troops to combat. Eade in particular said Mrs. Burnite’s grief is his measure. If that has to happen again, then it has to count. They had misgivings about going into Iraq, not about Afghanistan, but in any case, once troops are committed, they have said they want to see conflicts fought to a successful conclusion.
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Topics: history, military, vietnam
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:10 am Comments (3) on Saturday, November 14, 2009
3 Responses to “They Were Soldiers”
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November 14th, 2009 at 8:43 am
Compelling stories. Unfortunately, many of our politicians today are not made of this stuff. The soldier’s creed … ‘I will never forget I am an American fighting man. I will never surrender of my own free will. I will continue to resist to the utmost of my ability. I will not leave my post until properly relieved.” … runs contrary to either their moral compasses or the stiffness of their spines.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Senator Graham said that the President had screwed up with respect to Afghanistan and has been asked to meet with the President. It sounds as though he’s going to get an earful.
November 14th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
[...] Jules Criitenden: They were soldiers… 42 years ago today. Let us not dither away lives [...]