“That was the first time,” I said.
“Do you think it’s true?” he pleaded. To him, I was an educated man, having been to college for two years.
“No,” I said.
The siege of Pleime in the Ia Drang valley ended on October 27. For more than a week the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units had launched one fanatical attack after the other. Six thousand uniformed regulars hit the tiny fort, twenty miles from the Cambodian border, with waves of men and mortars and recoilless rifles. They fought from as close as forty yards away, using trenches they had secretly installed under the advisers’ noses weeks before. Inside the triangular compound, hundreds of mercenaries from the Montagnard tribes fought under the leadership of the Special Forces advisers, the Green Berets. From II Corps headquarters, thirty miles north at Pleiku, a relief force of tanks, artillery, and a thousand ARVN infantrymen was sent. Some ships from another assault company in the Cav lifted in 250 South Vietnamese Rangers. Then our air force bombed and strafed. In six hundred sorties, twenty planes were hit and three were shot down. A helicopter was downed, and an American sergeant was killed trying to get to it. When supplies ran low inside, the air force dropped pallets of food and ammunition into the compound. Two men were killed when one pallet landed on them. Another pallet went through the mess-hall roof.
It ended with heavy losses to the enemy and, finally, their retreat. Time gave us some of the credit for scaring them away. “As elements of the U.S. First Cavalry swarmed in by low-flying helicopter, the Viet Minh faded reluctantly away from Pleime. ‘They’re headed west, straight for Cambodia,’ groaned one Aircav platoon leader. ‘I suppose we’ll have to chase the bastards all the way there.’”
He was right.
5. Ia Drang Valley
You should never believe a Vietnamese. He’s not like you. He’s an Asiatic. The Vietnamese of today has seen too much dishonesty, too much maneuvering, and he doesn‘t believe in anything anymore. He automatically thinks he’s got to camouflage himself. He doesn’t dare tell the truth anymore because too often it brings him unhappiness. What’s the point of telling the truth?
November 1965
Action walked in the door with Shaker. The wiry black captain watched intently as we packed for the battalion’s move to Pleiku. I saw him suppress a smile as he looked up the aisle at the confusion he’d caused. His half smile faded quickly as several pairs of eyes met his expectantly. Another announcement? He lowered his eyes quickly.
“What the fuck kind of way is this to live?” he suddenly shouted. “Look at this!” He kicked a clod of dirt from the aisle. “You people like living on a dirt floor?”
I was about to tell him we hadn’t had time to put the floor in yet when Connors said, “Yes, sir.”
“What?” Shaker turned to face Connors.
“That’s right, sir, it’s great like this.” Connors beamed.
“And why do you think it’s great like this, Mr. Connors?” Shaker asked, smiling reluctantly. He liked Connors.
“Well, sir, I don’t know about the other guys, but I’m a heavy smoker, and this place is like living in a giant ashtray. Flick a butt anywhere. It’s great!”
Shaker covered his mouth to hide a smile. He recovered quickly when he turned around and saw us staring at him. We were staring at him because he smiled and also because he never came in here unless he had bad news.
“You can put the floor in when we get back from Pleiku. Anyway, that’s not why I came here,” he announced. “Where’s Riker?”
“Right here.” Len stepped away from a rice-mat partition hung between his cot and mine.
“What’s that for?” Shaker looked at the rice mat.
“Privacy.”
“Oh.” He started to say something, but didn’t. “Riker, you and Mason have got a mission to fly a tactical command ship for the grunts. Around Pleime. You gotta leave now because they’re in a big hurry.” The rest of the tent resumed packing. “Leave your stuff here and we’ll take it with us when we go to Pleiku.” He turned to leave. “So get your shit together and come to the operations tent for the details.”
“How long are we supposed to stay with the grunts?” asked Riker.
Shaker stoppea at the door. “How the fuck should I know?” he said gruffily. Then, quietly, he said, “Just today, I imagine,” and left.
I sat in the left seat and watched the road through the chin bubble. I had counted four blown-out bridges so far. Riker had never been to Pleiku before, so I held up my worn-out map and gave him a guided tour. “Up here at the right side of the Mang Yang pass”—I moved my finger to the spot—“this place is known as the French Graveyard.”
Riker nodded. “Big, grassy mountain?”
“Yeah.”
“I see it. Couple miles ahead?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” I let go of the intercom switch and looked over the black ledge of the instrument panel. My hand rested on my knee when I wasn’t talking. On the left side there was no floor switch for the intercom, so I had to put my hand on the cyclic to pull in the trigger switch one click to talk to Len. I clicked in. “When we get closer, you can see a whole bunch of places that look like graves all over the side of that mountain.”
“I can see them.”
“Well, down there beside it, in the pass, the French lost hundreds of men in a big ambush.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Ten or twelve years ago?”
“Damn.”
“And up ahead there, where the road starts to turn southwest, is where those guys got shot down last month. Fifty-caliber.”
Riker nodded and pulled in some pitch. The Huey climbed 500 feet higher.
“That make you nervous?” I asked.
“Naw. You?”
“No,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “At the pass we’re halfway to Pleiku and about twenty miles from the Golf Course.”
“On the horizon now, at about ten o‘clock?”
“Yeah, that’s Pleiku,” I said. “Actually, what you see is the big airstrip at New Pleiku. That’s where the air force and the II Corps headquarters are. A couple of miles beyond that is the village, and a little bit this side of it is the adviser compound, Camp Holloway.”
We cruised quietly for a few minutes in the cool air above the pass. I looked down between my feet and watched the road change. After its steep climb up the other side, it gently descended through the foothills into the rolling elephant grass of the plains beyond.
Camp Holloway was about ten miles from the western border of a long valley extending from Kontum, thirty miles north, to the Chu Pong massif, forty miles southwest. The muddy Ia Drang River, which meanders by the massif on its way to Cambodia, was the valley’s name-sake.
“It’s pretty on this side of the pass,” said Riker.
It was pretty. The tall grass flowed over the hills. The soil was red where ravines and road cuts exposed it. With the exception of the two American compounds and the village of Pleiku ahead, it looked uninhabited from the air.
We were close to the adviser compound. “Where we’re headed is about five miles due south of that little airstrip at Holloway,” I said.
“Where’s the company going to set up camp?” asked Riker as he looked out his triangular window.