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

it was my battalion, 1st Battalion 7th Cavalry, which he fought first in Landing Zone X-Ray and then “wiped out” in the ambush at Landing Zone Albany. He expressed total surprise when I told him that on November 16, 1965, the surviving 250 troops of my battalion were withdrawn by helicopter to Pleiku to rest and refit, and it was the 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry that left X-Ray on the morning of November 17 on the fateful march to the Albany clearing two miles away. I was pleased that my withdrawal escaped his notice at the time because such maneuvers are fraught with danger in combat.
    “Only today I learn that it was the Second Battalion; before I believed it was your battalion, General Moore,” An told us. “I thought we finished your battalion off in Albany. I learn more details about this battle that I never knew. I think this battle on seventeen November [LZ Albany] was the most important battle of the whole campaign. Your soldiers were surprised when we attacked them but they fought valiantly. I tell you frankly your soldiers fought heroically; they had no choice. After the fighting when we policed the battlefield, when we picked up our wounded, I saw the bodies, yours and ours, neck to neck lying alongside each other. It was most fierce fighting.”
    Late on November 17, after X-Ray had been evacuated and abandoned, An said he was in his command post on the edge of Chu Pong Mountain. “It was a very rocky area. There were no trenches, no shelters. We could not dig through rocks. When I looked up at the sky I saw thirty-six B-52s. I counted them myself.” He said the bombs from those B-52s struck half a mile to a mile away from his headquarters.
    That same day, November 5, 1991, we had another long interview with Major General Phuong, the chief army historian. He provided the greatest detail on the battles at X-Ray and Albany of the three enemy generals we interviewed.
    General Phuong had a detailed sketch map and again brought his little green notebook filled with notes he had taken when he reached the Ia Drang battlefield on November 16, 1965. He told us that the surviving North Vietnamese commanders gathered after the fight and together they went over each action in the battles and the lessons that should be learned from them.
    All three of the old enemy generals, who, like us, had spent much of their lives and careers in combat, emphasized that the greatest lesson to be learned from war is to cherish peace. They expressed their hopes that our research and writing would bring that lesson to the American people.
    That night, after Joe had transcribed a long day of taped interviews, we lingered over warm scotches in dirty glasses and talked of all that we had heard that day in answer to the lingering questions we had about our battles. In this same old guesthouse, on our first visit a year earlier, we had talked about our fears that we would not be well received by either the enemy commanders we had come to interview or by the people of Hanoi, whose memories of America’s Christmas bombing raids by B-52s in 1972 could not be pleasant ones. We were surprised by how warmly we had been welcomed then by ordinary people in the streets of Hanoi, and now by the men who had fought us in a historic battle. As we mused about this Joe said that in a strange way we were blood brothers to these men—that each of us had cared passionately enough about duty, honor, country, and our cause to kill and die. He voiced a final thought: In a world where most people couldn’t care less how or whether you live or die perhaps we have much more in common with such men as these, our old enemies, men like ourselves.

You Killed My Battalion!
    A fter being refused permission to journey to our old battlefields in the Ia Drang on two previous visits to Vietnam, suddenly the official government objections on grounds of safety and security vanished.
    Shortly after publication of We Were Soldiers Once…and Young in the fall of 1992, we were