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

on the ground and within minutes they captured the 33rd People's Army Regiment's field hospital. Fifteen enemy were killed and forty-four others, including patients and hospital staff, were captured, along with tons of medical supplies, rice, documents, and weapons. The North Vietnamese counterattacked that afternoon; the fight had been going on for hours before the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry arrived to reinforce Stockton. There were eleven Americans killed and fifty-one wounded, with enemy casualties estimated at 250.
    On that same day, November 1, the lead elements of the 66th People's Army Regiment began crossing into South Vietnam from Cambodia, moving along the Ia (River) Drang. Among the documents captured in the hospital fight was an enemy map of the Ia Drang Valley showing trails used by the North Vietnamese. On November 3, General Dick Knowles directed Colonel Stockton to begin a reconnaissance in force on a specific trail running along the Ia Drang two miles inside the border.
    Stockton moved his operations base to the Due Co Special Forces Camp and, concerned that the 1st Brigade had moved so slowly in getting infantry reinforcements to come to his assistance during the hospital fight, prevailed on Knowles to shift Captain Theodore S. Danielsen's Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry to Due Co as well.
    That night Stockton set three platoon-size ambushes, one along the Ia Drang trail, the others a mile or so north. The southernmost platoon watched as a reinforced North Vietnamese company approached their ambush on the trail 2.2 miles inside the Vietnam border. The North Vietnamese stopped for a rest break just 120 yards short of the ambush site and then, shortly after nine p. m., resumed the march eastward.
    The Americans let the lead elements pass through, but when the heavy-weapons company clattered into the kill zone, the Americans touched off their eight claymore mines, each spewing hundreds of steel ball bearings in a semicircle of death, and poured a storm of rifle and machine-gun fire into those who survived the mine blasts. Captain Charles S. Knowlen then ordered all his ambush parties back to the patrol-base clearing and within half an hour came under heavy attack by a large force of very angry North Vietnamese. When his men radioed that they were in danger of being overrun, Colonel Stockton ordered Captain Danielsen's company helicoptered in as reinforcements.
    The move saved the day, but it also cooked Stockton's goose: General Knowles said he had ordered Stockton to obtain his explicit permission before committing Ted Danielsen's Alpha Company troops to action. The incident ended with Stockton being transferred to a staff job in Saigon, and the division losing one of its most controversial and successful battalion commanders.
    Whatever else ensued, division headquarters did not at that time move to exploit the success of Stockton's ambush and pursue the considerable number of enemy reinforcements who had just arrived off the Ho Chi Minn Trail. Instead, on November 6 orders were issued for the 1st Brigade to return to An Khe and for the 3rd Brigade to take the field in Pleiku province, effective November 10.
    The 3rd Brigade battalions, under Colonel Tim Brown, were my 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry; Lieutenant Colonel Robert Mcdade's 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry; and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Tully's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry. Mcdade, a Korean War veteran, had been the division personnel officer (G-1) for nearly two years and had been given command of our sister battalion in late October.
    On November 9, Colonel Brown and I went to the division's forward command post in Pleiku for a briefing on the battlefield situation. The intelligence map hanging on the wall had a large red star on the Chu Pong massif above the Ia Drang Valley, west of Plei Me. I asked one of the briefers what significance that star had, and he replied: "Enemy base camp." The next day my battalion was flown from An Khe to brigade