The Vietnam War came up on my radar in early 1963 through the dispatches of David Halberstam of the New York Times, Neil Sheehan of United Press International, and Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press. Somehow I knew then that this would become an American war and my generation’s war, and I had to go there and cover it.
At the time I was covering the statehouse in Topeka, Kansas, for UPI but began a campaign of begging and pleading to be sent to Asia and to that developing war. Against all odds, I succeeded, and in late 1964 I was transferred to UPI Asia Headquarters in Tokyo. In March 1965, the first battalion of US Marines landed in Da Nang in Vietnam, and three weeks later I was on a plane bound for Saigon and the war. This would be the first of four tours in Vietnam for me: 1965–66, 1971, 1973, and 1975 for the end. Since then I have been back to Vietnam five times.
As a kid I had read the collected works of World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle and dreamed that someday I might follow in his footsteps and chronicle the lives and deaths of American troops in combat, however lofty an ideal that might be.
Now I had arrived and a long, painful journey began. The marines and I began to learn the hard lessons of both war and Vietnam that spring of 1965. They were fighting Viet Cong1 guerrillas and finding it hard, hot work in the rice paddies, jungles, and mountains. They pursued a wily, wispy foe on his home turf and seldom caught him.
I wore jungle fatigues and little else. The Nikon cameras dangling from my neck and the lack of a rifle over my shoulder distinguished me from the marines and, later, army soldiers. I was twenty-three, only a bit older than the grunts, and I would hook up for a few hours or a few days with a company on patrol. When we came to a halt, the guy next to me would look me over and ask who I was.
“A reporter.”
“You a civilian?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re out here with me?” “Yes.”
“They must pay you a helluva lot of money!”
“No. I work for UPI, and they are the cheapest outfit in the world.”
“Then you are crazy, man!”
The guy next to him would ask who I was. “Some crazy reporter,” he would reply. Then all was clear and good. Nobody understands crazy like infantrymen.
The learning curve in combat is very steep, and failures are punished with wounds or death. I learned from the officers, sergeants, grunts, and such veteran war correspondents as Dickey Chapelle of National Geographic, Jack Foisie of the Los Angeles Times, Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News, and others who had also covered World War II and Korea. I also learned by observing, by watching the troops in the field in the crushing heat as they carried packs and weapons and ammo weighing up to sixty or seventy pounds on their backs. I saw men felled by heatstroke in the 118 degrees of the tropics, white foam around their mouths as their bodies convulsed. When a man began to stagger and seemed about to collapse, his buddies would take some of his equipment to ease the burden and help him keep up. All the time they would scan the jungle or the tree line in a never-ending 360-degree sweep like owls. In Vietnam, the enemy was everywhere and nowhere, and nothing could be overlooked or ignored on pain of death and destruction.
This was a time long before laptop computers and satellite phones and Wi-Fi connections. Getting your story to the bureau in Saigon and shipping your precious film weren’t the easiest chores. I would dictate a story through the military phone system—a shaky, overburdened linkage of old-fashioned switchboards that snaked from north to south and east to west. Each switch had a code name: Tiger Switch, Puma, Lion. All who used that system were ranked by priority, one being the highest, four being the lowest. Civilian reporters were a four, at the very bottom, and could be disconnected by anyone with a higher priority—that is, until we learned to be “Colonel Smith Priority Two.” But even then, it could take hours to dictate five hundred words to the home office. For photos, we wrote caption2 data on the manila envelopes that contained our 35mm film canisters and then headed to the air base at Da Nang to find a “pigeon,” someone traveling to Saigon who would be willing to carry an envelope in exchange for a ride to their hotel or quarters from the UPI messenger who met their flight. The film would be developed, edited, printed, and then taken to the Saigon Post and Telegraph for transmission by radiophoto machine to UPI in Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Manila for relay to New York and the world.
By covering troops in combat, I learned to be a very careful, methodical reporter, double-checking the spelling of a soldier’s name and hometown and quoting him honestly. I never knew when my reporting would show up in Vietnam. I could spend an hour or a day or two with an outfit; then I’d leave to get my story and film out. Because we were a worldwide news agency, the odds were high a hometown newspaper of one or more troops would print my story, and a soldier’s mom would cut it out and put it in her next letter to her son. Or it might be printed in Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that circulated widely in Vietnam. Either way, the troops would read my stories, and chances were good I would hook up with that unit again weeks or months later. You do not make mistakes in stories about men who are armed and dangerous.
During my tours in Vietnam, I marched with and befriended young lieutenants, captains, and majors, soldiers I would meet again and again in that war and other wars that followed. In August 1965, I met and marched for a day with a newly promoted major named Norman Schwarzkopf in the Central Highlands out of Duc Co Special Forces Camp. Norm was an adviser to a battalion of South Vietnamese airborne troops. A quarter century later, in the first Persian Gulf War, he was the commanding general of US Central Command (CENTCOM). He reminded me that my coauthor Lt. Gen. Hal Moore had been his tactical officer when Norm was a West Point cadet. Norm called me to his headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, two weeks before the invasion of Kuwait and Iraq and pulled the cover off his battle map and briefed me on what he was planning to do. Then he assigned me to “the division which has the most challenging and dangerous mission in my battle plan—and the commander who is most like Gen. Hal Moore.” Ten days before the invasion, I reported to the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division, Mechanized and its commander, Maj. Gen. Barry McCaffrey. I was given total access to a division preparing for war.
In all my dealings with American troops, I was never turned away or turned down. I was generally welcomed as the only civilian those young soldiers and marines would ever see sharing their hardships and horrors. I was always willing to lend a hand in combat—to carry water and ammunition or a wounded man. I never presented myself as a neutral observer, aloof from what was happening all around me. These young men America had sent to war, in return, were willing to share what little they had—a drink from their last canteen of water or half a cup of the last coffee.
In November 1965, I stumbled into the bloodiest battle of the Vietnam War, where an understrength battalion of the First Cavalry Division (Airmobile) was surrounded by two regiments of North Vietnamese Army regulars. For three days and two nights, it was a bloody struggle to survive against an enemy determined to kill all of us. And on the following day and night, two miles away, another battalion was ambushed and slaughtered in the tall elephant grass. These were the battles of Landing Zone X-Ray and Landing Zone Albany. Some 234 Americans were killed and another 250 were badly wounded. More than 2,000 enemy dead lay all around those two small clearings in the jungled forest.
Those battles changed my life, changed my heart. I left Ia Drang valley with an abiding love for our soldiers and a lifelong debt owed those young Americans who gave their precious lives so I might survive to tell their stories to the world. Men died all around me; others were horribly wounded. Not one of us left that place unchanged from the men who arrived there just days before. I did what I could to help, even unlimbering an M-16 and helping to fend off the enemy. For a brief time I stopped being a reporter and became a soldier. In the process, I found and made the best, most loyal friends of a lifetime and earned the lasting respect and trust of the military family.
Joseph L. Galloway
Concord, North Carolina
April 2019