We Were Soldiers Once...and Young by Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway Read Free Book Online

techniques of helicopter warfare--were by this order taken away from us. It made no sense then; it makes no sense now.
    Our last night at Fort Benning was Friday, August 13, 1965. I came home early, around seven p. m., in time for dinner with my wife, Julie, and our five children, who ranged in age from thirteen down to three. I told all of them I would be leaving early the next morning, long before they awoke, and I would be going to the war in Vietnam. Later, I sat on the sofa reading aloud to my daughter, Cecile, six. She looked up at one point and asked: "Daddy, what's a war?" I tried my best to explain, but her look of bewilderment only grew.
    My alarm clock was set for 1:30 a. m., and by 3:30 a.m. the battalion had loaded aboard chartered buses bound for the port of Charleston, South Carolina, where the transport ship USNS Maurice Rose waited at dockside.
    We sailed from Charleston on Monday, August 16, and it took the better part of a month for the "Ramblin' Rose" to transit the Panama Canal and cross the Pacific to South Vietnam. On that same date, August 16, the last elements of the 66th Regiment of the People's Army left their base in Thanh Hoa, North Vietnam. It would take them nearly two months to cover five hundred miles on foot along the Ho Chi Minn Trail to our meeting place in the Ia Drang Valley.
    The Rose dropped anchor in the port of Qui Nhon, in central South Vietnam, in mid-September, and we were welcomed ashore by our advance party. With the help of the 101st Airborne a huge area of scrub jungle just north of the town of An Khe had been secured. An Khe, forty-two miles west of Qui Nhon on Route 19, would be the base camp of the 1st Cavalry Division--just as soon as we cleared the jungle and built that camp. It was precisely what General Harry Kinnard had vigorously opposed for his airmobile troops: a fort in the middle of Indian country.
    Kinnard lobbied hard in Washington, Saigon, and Bangkok for his new division to be based inside Thailand, in its own sanctuary. From there it could launch combat operations inside South Vietnam and onto the North Vietnamese lines of communication inside Cambodia and Laos. The negative responses General Kinnard's request elicited weren't even polite. His division would now have to build, garrison, and guard a base camp, and that would reduce the number of troops available to actively pursue and destroy the enemy.
    As our Chinook transport helicopters ferried the battalion into An Khe we passed over a small airstrip with a beat-up old three-story yellow building at the northwest end. On the boat coming over I had reread Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy and I recognized that airstrip as the departure point for the French army's Group Mobile 100 on June 24, 1954, as it headed west on Route 19 and straight into the historic Viet Minh ambush that helped seal the fate of French colonial rule in Indochina.
    We stepped off the choppers into a tangle of trees, weeds, and brush, in the middle of what would become our airfield, the Golf Course. Brigadier General John M. Wright, assistant division commander, had decreed that the airfield for the 1st Cav's 450-plus helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft would have to be "smooth as a golf course." He wanted no bulldozers scraping the land bare to become a mud hole in the monsoons and a red dust storm in dry season. The men of the division and some two thousand Vietnamese laborers cleared the site by hand, with machetes and axes, and General Wright had his instant Golf Course. They also built a heavily fortified twelve-mile-long and hundred yard-wide defense perimeter, called the Barrier Line, around the base. We lived rough: puptents, C-rations, and showers only when it rained. The battalions took turns manning the picket line of outposts well out from the barrier and running patrols to keep the Viet Cong off guard. My battalion lost two men by drowning on patrol crossings of the Song Ba river during that first month.
    In the first days