In the fall of 1992 I was at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA) as a fellow for the academic year. In October of that year a seminar was held at CFIA that was somewhat unusual. Normally, seminars were conducted by one guest speaker, but in this case, there were four. Also, the subject matter, rather than being some academic topic, dealt with a battle that took place in 1965 in a place called Ia Drang Valley in the former Republic of South Vietnam. The location and the battle was better known to the military as the LZ X-Ray or Landing Zone X-Ray. The seminar was led by Harold Moore, a retired Army Lieutenant General, and Joseph Galloway, a reporter. The two Americans were co-authors of a newly published book called We Were Soldiers Once.....And Young. Accompanying the two Americans were two Vietnamese from the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington. Both Vietnamese were from their military attaché's office. The one who was a colonel was the army attaché while the other was a major, his assistant.
The seminar was arranged by one of my colleagues, a US Army Colonel Casey Brown, who was a fellow at CFIA like me. Casey was a young 2nd Lieutenant, a platoon leader in Vietnam and he was at LZ-Xray with Moore and Galloway. However, he refrained from participating in the seminar, since he was a "host." Casey, who retired as a Major General about 10 years ago, told me that at the time, he was too scared and confused to figure out who won that battle!
What made the foursome of invited guests so unusual is that they had faced each other in battle as adversaries at LZ-Xray so long ago. Harold or Hal Moore was a Lieutenant Colonel commanding the 1st Battalion of the 7th Calvary that was involved in that battle, reinforced by elements of 2nd Battalion. Joseph Galloway was a reporter who was covering the battle. Galloway was the only civilian out of Vietnam War to receive a Bronze Star for Valor in combat! Hal Moore had awarded him that honor after their experience at LZ-Xray. The Vietnamese Colonel was a Captain, a company commander at the time, and the Major was a Lieutenant and an intelligence officer. Both Vietnamese, like the two Americans, fought in that fierce two day battle and survived it. However, their views and interpretations of the battle were completely different. Talk about a different perspective!
The famous 7th Cavalry (Custer's old unit!) was part of the 1st Cavalry Division that had just been reorganized, trained, and deployed to Vietnam as the 1st Air Cavalry Division. The army was experimenting with the air assault or air mobile concept for a number of years. In 1963 the army revived the old 11th Airborne Division which had been inactive since 1957 and renamed it 11th Air Assault. The 11th Air Assault was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia and trained in the new air assault concept. The idea was similar to World War Two glider troops, except that gliders were replaced with helicopters. The unit trained for two years, but just before deployment to Vietnam in 1965, it was re-flagged, as the army puts it, to 1st Cavalry Division and renamed 1st Air Cavalry. The idea was to be able to move troops rapidly and insert them into battle zone (LZs) making for a much safer and faster insertion than a parachute drop. The LZ does not require as much space as a DZ (Drop Zone) for parachute troops. However, there were still a lot of bugs to be worked out! The only helicopter that was available at the time for such use was the good old Huey! Great bird, but not big enough to carry a lot troops, barely enough for a squad in each chopper!
The 1st Air Cavalry arrived in Vietnam and was itching to try out their new tactics. Word reached through intelligence (faulty intelligence!) that a PAVN (People's Army of Vietnam) both NVA and VC were entrenched in the hillside just below an area that was identified as LZ X-Ray. The LZ was small and could only accommodate about three choppers at a time. The intelligence was faulty because there was a reinforced regiment of NVA set up in bunkers and tunnels in the hills just above the LZ. The 1st Air Cavalry decided to test its new assault system and dispatched about 400 men of the 1st Battalion of the 7th under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore. It was actually members of the 1st Battalion later to be reinforced by some from the 2nd Battalion. The assault went off as planned and the first few choppers landed with troops with no major incident. However, before Moore could even have a complete company on the ground, the troops made contact with the enemy and a fire fight broke out. Although eventually all of about 400 or so troops made it to LZ X-Ray, by that time the battle was raging and in full force.
The commander of the North Vietnamese troops was Lt. Col Nguyen Huu An, who later became a Lieutenant General just like Hal Moore. Nguyen learned from his intelligence of the impending arrival of the American troops and he knew that a new battle tactic was going to be tried - air assault. Nguyen determined that one way to lessen the effect of the air assault was to close-in, make it difficult for Americans to land troops. Also, he believed that the biggest advantage that Americans had was air support, bombing. To neutralize that advantage as much as possible he employed a tactic of closing-in so close that if Americans used bombs, they would risk killing their own men. So, both sides were using new tactics for the first time, and both commanders, Moore and Nguyen, knew that it was crucial for their tactics to succeed. Americans were determined to start using the air assault or air mobile system and the NVA had to learn to combat the new technique.
The battle was bloody and furious. Those who have seen the movie got the full force of Hollywood's version of blood and gore of the battle, while the readers of the book could just imagine through the descriptive words just how chaotic and horrifying the whole scene was during the and after the battle. Naturally, each side claimed victory. Americans could claim a higher body count, while the Vietnamese could point to the fact that they ended up with the real estate, even after all that bombing. What was interesting about the seminar was that it was obvious that both Moore and Galloway felt that their side won the battle, and that is how they wrote the book. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, quietly and without backing down, insisted that they had won because after all, the object of the battle was not the body count but who ended up with the real estate!
What struck me the most after listening to the four of them arguing and discussing their views was how stupid it was for both sides to lose all those lives and suffer such carnage for a battle that had no effect on the final out come of the war! In fact, it had no effect on how the war proceeded from that point on! The army brass was determined to use the air assault method, which is now standard not just for army but the Marines as well. Hal Moore's experience and his men's sacrifice really didn't help improve air assault technique. It was obvious from the start that it was a bad idea to land troops in a small LZ when you were heavily outnumbered by the enemy! So, nothing was really gained from that! The Vietnamese proved, at a heavy price, that closing in on the enemy did prevent the enemy from successfully using air support. Many of the 1st Battalion troops were killed and wounded by our own bombing. They also proved that closing in on the LZ, making it too hot for landing could help prevent enemy reinforcements. But, all of those are common sense tactics and did not have to be learned at the cost of heavy loss of life!
At the end of the seminar it was obvious that you would not be able to convince Moore and Galloway that their view was wrong. The same thing could be said about the Vietnamese. They were polite and never raised their voices, but it was obvious that they were in total disagreement with the Americans. One thing was crystal clear. Both sides thought war was a terrible thing and the price paid by those who died was really not worth the final outcome. An interesting and different perspective from two opposing sides on the same battle at the same place.
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