OCTOBER 19, 1985
Barely three weeks after the 1st Cav hacked out a base for itself at An Khe, there occurred in the plateau country southwest of Pleiku City a series of skirmishes and larger actions that became known as the Battle of the la Drang Valley. Airmobile tactics developed piecemeal at Fort Benning were now to be tested in war.
Three regiments of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had filtered out of Cambodia along the Ho Chi Minh network of trails into South Vietnam. Together, they constituted an entire division under the command of Brigadier General Chu Huy Man. It was the largest massing of North Vietnamese strength since the fall of Dien Bien Phu to the Viet Minh in 1954, which ended French rule of its Indochina colony.
Chu positioned his force along the eastern slopes of the Chu Pong Massif, a formation of mountains rising above the la Drang Valley, about halfway between the South China Sea and Cambodia. The highlands were wild and desolate, a ravine-slashed region of scrub and huge termite hills, virtually empty except for tigers, elephants, and scattered Montagnard tribesmen. His goal was to capture Pleiku, a provincial capital, and then drive eastward to the port city of Qui Nhon, cutting South Vietnam in half.
He started his campaign an hour before midnight on October 19, 1965, by attacking the Plei Me U.S. Army Special Forces camp. Commanding General Harry Kinnard of the 1st Cav sent a battalion-size task force to reinforce defenses at Pleiku, then conducted the first real airmobile operation of the campaign by choppering in Sky Soldiers ahead of a column of ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) on their way to relieve the besieged Special Forces camp. General Chu, taken aback by the helicopters’ injection of heavy firepower into the fray, withdrew to the la Drang Valley, a VC stronghold so remote and so infested with enemy troops that the South Vietnamese army had never dared enter it. Chu had suffered his first defeat.
General Westmoreland gave Kinnard his head.
“I think the Cav is ready,” he said, defining the mission in starkly simple terms: “Find, fix and destroy the enemy forces threatening Plei Me, Pleiku, and the Central Highlands.”
One by one over the next month, Kinnard put all three brigades of his division into the fight and let them use their newly forged skills. This was a war that demanded mobility of the most supple and quick-reflexed kind—a war without clearly delineated front lines and rear support areas, a war of attrition rather than territorial gains, a hide-and-seek war fought on terrain almost designed to frustrate ground vehicles.
Kinnard’s assault units used a three-team organization for search-and-destroy. Each company-size outfit encompassed a “White Team,” a “Red Team,” and a “Blue Team.” The White Team flew bubble-nosed OH-13 Sioux helicopters and were charged with finding the enemy through reconnaissance. Red Teams flew Huey “hog” gunships armed with rockets and machine guns. They cleared landing zones and provided supporting fire; later, Huey gunships were replaced with the more deadly AH-1 Cobras specifically designed and equipped as attack choppers. Blue Teams consisted of Huey troop carriers, called slicks because, unlike gunships, they had no externally mounted guns or rockets to increase their aerodynamic drag. Blues inserted troops after Whites located the enemy and Reds cleared a landing zone.
During the last week of October, reconnaissance helicopters probed every corner of the tumbled and tangled region, nosing right down to treetop level for a look at trails or other signs of activity, constantly harassing Chu’s withdrawing forces. The choppers repeatedly drew enemy fire, but the North Vietnamese found both the OH-13s and the bigger Hueys difficult to bring down. Few were lost, partly because of NVA inexperience in dealing with them and partly because of the 1st Cav’s fast-moving, low-flying tactics.
On October 29, a Blue Team force landed in the middle of an enemy cache of weapons and food, killing sixteen NVA soldiers, capturing eight and wounding twelve. Three days later, a rifle platoon commanded by Captain John Oliver surprised a regimental aid station along the Tae River and killed fifteen NVA.
When the enemy counterattacked with a battalion, Oliver formed a tight defensive perimeter around a small clearing uphill from the aid station. Over the next two and a half hours, two companies of reinforcements—about two hundred men—were fed into the fight to assist Oliver. They arrived one bird at a time in his tiny clearing above the streambed while gun-ships hammered at surrounding NVA soldiers to keep them pinned down. Eight helicopters were hit, but all of them continued flying.
That was the first major action of the Pleiku campaign. The Sky Soldiers stopped the NVA counterattack cold and quickly regained the offensive. When the NVA 33d Regiment withdrew in defeat the next morning, they left ninety-nine dead soldiers on the field. The 1st Cav casualties were eleven dead and fifty-one wounded.
General Chu sent his fresh 66th Regiment into the fight against Kinnard’s Sky Soldiers, giving the North Vietnamese a substantial edge in numbers. But the helicopter proved to be what military planners called a force multiplier—a technological advantage that changed the odds.
On the afternoon of November 3, four platoons of the 1st Cav established a patrol base on a hilltop clearing north of the Chu Pong Massif and sent three platoon-size ambush forces into the enemy stronghold of the la Drang Valley. One of the forces ambushed a heavy-weapons company of NVA and then beat a hasty retreat back to the patrol base.
Barely had the platoon reached the base than the NVA attacked in battalion strength. Night-flying skills practiced back in the United States now came into play. A company of reinforcements landed in the clearing in six-helicopter lots. The first lift, escorted by a Red Team of armed helicopters, swept in under the light of flares. Subsequent runs used only the light of the full moon. A platoon leader dubbed the landing zone “LZ Spiderweb” because the sky was crisscrossed by a brilliant pyrotechnical webbing of red tracers fired by the Americans and bluish-green tracers from NVA weapons.
General Chu once again lost what should have been an easy victory against outnumbered U.S. forces. He suffered seventy-two dead to two Americans killed.
By November 7, when Kinnard began to withdraw the 1st Brigade and replace it with Colonel Thomas Brown’s 3d Brigade, the 33d NVA Regiment alone had lost, by U.S. intelligence estimates, about 900 of its 2,200 men. American losses so far were 59 dead, 196 wounded.
The decisive battle of the campaign, the ultimate test of air-mobility against ground infantry, occurred around an opening in the trees, no more than one hundred meters long, that nestled near the foot of one of the mountains of the Chu Pong Massif. When White Team helicopters, dipping below treetop level, spotted well-used trails and communications wire nearby, no one suspected the size of the force in the vicinity. As it happened, the clearing that would gain fame as LZ X-Ray was located almost on top of the headquarters and staging area for Chu’s regiments.
On November 14, the First Battalion of the 1st Cav’s 7th Regiment commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore was inserted onto the LZ as the starting point for search-and-destroy missions. At 12:30 P.M., platoons of B Company spread out to explore the ground toward the Chu Pong heights. One of the platoons led by Lieutenant Henry Herrick ran head-on into about 150 NVA soldiers. Herrick was killed immediately and his platoon pinned down.
While survivors of the surrounded platoon fought for their lives, A Company of LZ X-Ray battled waves of khaki-clad NVA regulars in pith helmets. Through the rest of the day and night, enemy troops attempted to break the Americans’ perimeter.
Meanwhile at the Brigade Operations Center, Kinnard orchestrated his airmobile resources. Chinooks lifted two batteries of 105mm howitzers—twelve guns in all—to LZ Falcon, a clearing about five miles east of the battle. During the two nights during which the battle raged, artillery at LZ Falcon pumped more than 4,400 rounds of high explosives into the fight. Many fell within fifty meters of the X-Ray perimeter in an effort to prevent NVA troops from getting “into a bear hug with us,” as Moore put it. Between artillery barrages came flights of navy, marine, and air force fighter-bombers to bomb, strafe, and napalm enemy positions.
Huey transports, escorted by gunships pouring 7.62mm machine gun fire and 2.75-inch rockets into the trees, continued to bring in reinforcements and supplies and to carry out the wounded.
X-Ray was a scene of mayhem. Choppers rose and descended through dust and smoke; exploding artillery shells and rockets hammered at the air; and staccato bursts of machine and rifle fire mixed with the screams and shouts of the combatants.
By the second nightfall, the Americans were well dug in all around the clearing. Mortars and artillery were calibrated to drop shells within twenty-five yards of their lines. Helicopters stopped shuttling in and out of the LZ at ten o’clock. Some of the pilots had been flying for sixteen hours straight. “When I tried to get out of the aircraft,” said slick pilot Major Bruce Crandall, “it caught up with me. My legs gave out, and I fell to the ground vomiting and shaking.” The inside of his helicopter was awash with the blood of the wounded.
Having slackened their efforts during the night, the NVA struck hard at first light on November 15, sending a force estimated at one thousand against the X-Ray perimeter. Fighting was so furious—including violent hand-to-hand combat in some places—that midmorning arrived before the battle waned sufficiently for helicopters to begin landing a company of reinforcements from An Khe. A larger, battalion-size unit landed at a clearing two miles away and started a forced march to flank the enemy and relieve X-Ray. By noon, they reached the battlefield. One soldier said, “My God, there’s enemy bodies all over this valley. For the last thirty minutes, we’ve been walking around and over and through bodies.”
The North Vietnamese continued to attack until ten in the morning, when they withdrew under fire. Scores of corpses and weapons were left to litter the battleground. Shortly after three that afternoon, a rescue force from X-Ray fought its way to the position of the trapped Second Platoon. By half past four, the survivors and the dead were back on X-Ray.
The NVA returned to the fight that night and continued it into the next day. By that time, Moore had been reinforced in battalion strength and amply resupplied with ammunition. In the end, American firepower, climaxed by the bombing of the Chu Pong heights by B-52s based on Guam, proved too much for the North Vietnamese. General Chu’s command was all but destroyed. The body count of NVA dead was 634; additional dead and wounded were estimated at more than 1,200. American casualties were listed as 79 killed, 121 wounded.
General Kinnard’s 1st Cav had more than lived up to the expectations of airmobility advocates such as Gavin and Howze. From October 19 to November 28, 1965, the 1st Cavalry Division had played a pivotal role in rescuing the Plei Me Special Forces camp; Sky Soldiers had applied new airmobile tactics to chase the enemy back to its stronghold in the la Drang Valley, and then, outnumbered seven to one, had won a huge victory. In doing so, the 1st Cav moved complete infantry companies 193 times, conducted 6,000 sorties, logged 27,000 hours of flying time, airlifted 13,000 tons of supplies, moved entire artillery batteries 67 times, provided close air support, conducted reconnaissance missions—and virtually obliterated two of North Vietnam’s best infantry regiments. Only four cavalry helicopters were shot down during that period, and three of them were recovered to fly again.
Vietnam became the Helicopter War. By the late 1960s, more than 2,000 Hueys would be in the air over Vietnam on any given day. Inevitably, the VC and NVA adjusted to the new challenge. They learned how to fire at choppers flying overhead, how to mine likely landing zones, how to lure Sky Soldiers into ambushes. During the course of the war, a total of 4,112 helicopters would be downed. Five of the eight generals who were killed in Vietnam died in helicopters.