We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam by Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway Read Free Book Online

uniform with the four stars of his rank. He was about five feet three inches tall and of medium build. He brought to our meeting a printed map of the Central Highlands with details of the Pleiku Campaign and the Ia Drang battles clearly marked. Four other army officers accompanied Man, including the deputy commander of army archives and a lieutenant colonel from the army political department.
    During the war we knew little, if any, details about the background of the enemy commanders we were fighting. The North Vietnamese commanders had grown up in a secretive system where nothing was revealed that might be of use to an enemy. Joe seized the opportunity to ask if Man would tell us about himself, share his biography with us. He readily agreed and told us some salient details of his life story. He was born in 1913 in the Central Highlands and joined the Indochina Communist Party in 1930, shortly after it was formed. He said he had been put in prison in Kontum by the French for revolutionary activities in the highlands not long after. The experience made him a committed lifelong revolutionary. Man said he had joined the Viet Minh army in 1945, and commanded a number of different regiments in the struggle against the French.
    By the time of the pivotal battle at Dien Bien Phu, Man had risen to become commander of the 316th Division. One of the regimental commanders in his division was a young major named Nguyen Huu An—and their careers would be intertwined from that point forward, from there to the Ia Drang and on through the entire war with the Americans. In 1975 in the final campaign against South Vietnam, Man told us, he commanded the attack on the port city of Danang from the south while his old friend and protégé, General An, attacked from the north. He said there were some 100,000 South Vietnamese soldiers in Danang at the time.
    Man said that he was sent south in 1964, first to the coastal area of Central Vietnam; then to the Central Highlands; then, as commanding general of the Central Front, he organized attacks against the newly arrived U.S. Marines, including a fierce fight the Marines called Operation Starlight in the summer of 1965. From there he returned to the highlands to command the newly organized B-2 Front, a division-size command of some 30,000 troops, in what we call the Pleiku Campaign and the Vietnamese call the Tay Nguyen Campaign.
    The general was very solicitous of our welfare, asking if we were being treated well and if our quarters were adequate. I told him both the accommodations and the atmosphere were a good deal better than they were in the Ia Drang Valley. Man laughed and replied: “We are sitting here on these chairs but we consider this a valley, too—a new valley.”
    Man told us that the original plan for the Central Highlands was to besiege Plei Me Special Forces Camp and lure a South Vietnamese army rescue column down Route 14, where it would be ambushed and wiped out. Then his forces would capture Pleiku and move down Highway 19 to the coast, effectively cutting South Vietnam in half. But with the arrival of U.S. Marines in Danang in the spring and later reports that a new experimental Air Cavalry Division, the 1st Cavalry Division, was being sent to Vietnam, Man said, that plan was put on hold in the late summer of 1965.
    He told us, with a smile, that this plan was dusted off ten years later and parts of it put into effect in launching the final offensive that led to the fall of South Vietnam—launching the campaign with a surprise attack that took a key city in the Central Highlands, Ban Me Thuot, and began rolling up the South Vietnamese army and moving toward the eventual capture of Saigon. But in the fall of 1965 the revised plan was to besiege Plei Me Special Forces Camp as bait, destroy the inevitable South Vietnamese relief column, and wait for the newly arrived 1st Cavalry helicopter soldiers to get involved. “We used the plan to lure the tiger out of the mountain…I had