We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (5 page)

With the name of the late deceased,

And an epitaph drear,

A fool lies here

Who tried to hustle the East.

Our first significant interview on that 1990 visit was with Major General Phuong, the chief of the army’s Military History Institute for the past ten years. He met us at the Foreign Press Service office. The general left a hospital bed to keep his appointment with us, holding his right arm close to his side, occasionally grimacing with pain from what he said was a large swelling under his arm. Phuong was neatly but simply dressed in a well-worn tunic and faded fatigue trousers patched along one seam. He wore thick round spectacles and had thinning, close-cropped hair. Phuong was cordial, knowledgeable, and willing to share that knowledge.

Phuong told us that the People’s Army had been studying American tactics and weaponry since the first U.S. Marines landed in Danang in March 1965; that they knew the time would come when they would have to fight us. He said the arrival of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) with its inventory of over 435 helicopters in the summer worried Communist commanders in the south. “We had to study how to fight the Americans,” he said. The general told us he had been sent south, walking for two long months down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, specifically to watch the Ia Drang campaign unfold and to interview the North Vietnamese commanders and write an after-action and lessons-learned report for distribution to their soldiers.

Phuong told us that the NVA commanders planned to lay siege to the Plei Me Special Forces Camp to draw into an ambush a predictable South Vietnamese relief force. They anticipated that newly arriving troops of the 1st Cavalry Division would be sent in after that and then the Americans could be attacked and brought to battle. The historian said that with our helicopters we were very difficult for the NVA troops and commanders to deal with: “You jumped all over, like a frog, even into the rear area of our troops…you created disorder among our troops.” He told us that the pressure from the Americans forced the Vietnamese retreating from the siege at Plei Me Camp to break down into ever smaller groups, until finally they were moving only by twos and threes like coveys of quail running ahead of the hunters.

Phuong told us, and showed us on my old Ia Drang battle map, that when the fighting began at Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang he was about three miles away from the battlefield. He said he could see the smoke and hear the artillery and air strikes. I asked if he then moved toward the fighting. He grinned and replied: “Oh no! I went in the opposite direction.” Phuong told us that the North Vietnamese drew valuable lessons from the Ia Drang, lessons that they applied, with flexibility, throughout the rest of the war. Phuong’s report, written in the immediacy of the moment after he had interviewed the surviving North Vietnamese commanders, was printed as a small pamphlet and quickly disseminated to the NVA and Viet Cong troops. It was titled simply: “How to Fight the Americans.”

During our interview, he frequently referred to a small notebook that was filled with his handwritten account of his interviews with the North Vietnamese Army commanders in the fall of 1965. The notebook also contained meticulously hand-drawn maps of the battle areas. He seemed delighted by our intense interest in something he knew a great deal about, and was more than willing to share with fellow historians. We would have given a lot for a copy of his journal but had to settle for him reading to us from those pages covered with his notes.

The high point of our trip was our talk with General Giap, an architect along with Ho Chi Minh of the modern Vietnamese revolutionary movement in the 1930s. In the ensuing decades Giap built a formidable guerrilla army out of a mob of peasant farmers who answered the call to arms, and wielded that army with a brilliance and ruthlessness that helped pin down the Japanese occupiers in World War II, defeated the French, then the Americans, and even later the Chinese Communists when they briefly invaded Vietnam.

On September 2 we awaited his arrival at the front door of a formal government reception hall. Giap arrived in a small Russian-made Lada sedan accompanied by his aide, a burly army colonel. Giap, then seventy-nine years of age, was a small, slender man no more than five feet two inches tall. He wore a simple, well-worn brown army uniform with red shoulder tabs bearing four tiny gold stars. He had a kind face, sparkling eyes, and an open, friendly manner. There was nothing in his demeanor that spoke of a man who sent millions of his countrymen to their deaths in the wars of his lifetime. He appeared in good physical condition and moved swiftly and surely.

He shook my hand firmly and said: “I have heard about you during the war and I am glad to welcome you here, not as a commander of the 1st Air Cavalry but as a friend of the Vietnamese people.” To Joe he remarked: “Your name I know as well. You are the war correspondent who carried a rifle like a soldier.”

We moved into a large, twenty-by-thirty-foot air-conditioned reception hall. Giap and I sat side by side in two ornately carved chairs at the head of a large, low table, with Joe on our right and our interpreter, Le Tien, on our left. Giap’s aide placed a tape recorder on the table and snapped it on. Joe did the same with our recorder. Giap did most of the talking, emphasizing his points with a strong, sure voice, using his hands and arms for emphasis. Several times he put his right hand on my left arm while making a point.

Giap made it clear that the Vietnamese people had been prepared to fight the Americans for however long it took to expel us from Vietnam, if it took ten years, or twenty years, or even longer. Over and over he emphasized that the Vietnamese were fighting for their freedom and independence; that we Americans were just the latest invaders and not the last, either. Giap told us that Vietnam’s history contained the lessons that should have kept us out of there: “If the Pentagon had learned from the Dien Bien Phu battle perhaps they would have avoided going to war with us later.”

The general, who was a schoolteacher before he joined Ho Chi Minh in the jungles to fight the Japanese, returned several times to lessons he thought the American commanders and political leaders should have learned, from Dien Bien Phu to the Ap Bac battle in the Mekong Delta in 1962, when American helicopters were first employed, to the Tet Offensive. He said he loved to read, mainly history, and talked knowledgeably about George Ball’s writings on Vietnam, and Neil Sheehan’s
A Bright Shining Lie
. He groused about the difficulty of getting good books in Hanoi.

The general turned steely eyed when he spoke, with passion, of the relative strengths of the two warring nations: “You Americans were very strong in modern weapons, but we were strong in something else.” He said we were the invader, the aggressor, while the North Vietnamese fought a “people’s war, waged by the entire people,” and they could fight everywhere or nowhere, and the choice was up to them. He expressed amazement that the Americans had no overriding strategy or goal in the war, only the tactics and weapons of a modern army and President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration that we were not there to defeat North Vietnam, only to protect and preserve the South Vietnamese government. “Our goal was to win,” Giap told us, leaving unsaid the fact that they did.

As our conversation with Giap came to an end, he inscribed and signed several books about him written in English that we had brought with us. He grumbled that some of them were less than accurate and one he dismissed as not only wrong but insulting. On impulse, I took off my wristwatch, an inexpensive Timex, and handed it to the general, telling him through the interpreter that it was a token of my appreciation—a gift from one old soldier to another. Giap held the watch in both his hands, looking at it with amazement, as tears gathered in his eyes and mine. Then he turned and clutched me to himself in a full embrace. It was my turn to be stunned as this former enemy—arguably one of the greatest military commanders of the twentieth century—held me like a son in his arms for a long moment.

We walked slowly together to the front steps and said our good-byes. His aide opened the door of the little khaki-colored Russian sedan and saw Giap comfortably seated before they drove off into the Hanoi traffic.

It would take another year and another trip to Hanoi before we finally got what we had wanted all along: the opportunity to sit down with the two senior commanders who had fought against us so long ago in the Ia Drang, Senior Gen. Chu Huy Man and Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, both still on active duty, to my amazement. Both of these men had fought at Dien Bien Phu in 1954—Man as a division commander, An as a regimental commander—and were long past retirement age had they been American generals. In their army, officers down to the rank of colonel often remain on active service as long as they are physically capable. General Giap, now in his mid-nineties, is still considered on active duty even today.

In 1991, at the time of our meeting, Man was chief political commissar of the entire People’s Army; his protégé, General An, was commandant of the Senior Military Academy, their version of our Army War College. At the time of the battles Man was a brigadier general commanding what was essentially a full division of North Vietnamese Army regulars from his headquarters near the Cambodian border, and An was a senior lieutenant colonel who commanded the troops fighting me from a command bunker on the slopes of the Chu Pong Massif.

Now, on November 4, 1991, at a reception room in the Defense Ministry compound in Hanoi, a short walk from our now-familiar quarters in the shabby old guesthouse in that same compound, we came face-to-face with General Man, then seventy-eight years old, a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, chief political commissar of the People’s Army, and one of only two generals Hanoi ever granted the rank of “senior general.” Man was wearing a neatly tailored 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 confidence the Americans will use their helicopters to land in our rear, land in the Ia Drang area,” Man told us. He said his command post was to the south of the Chu Pong Massif and LZ X-Ray and was subject to bombing by American B-52s that struck within a thousand yards of his position. He said the explosions left him temporarily unable to hear anything, but he recovered. Man said, however, that his troops were widely dispersed and very adept at digging in, and thus casualties from the big bombers were few.