We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (9 page)

When I got back from my run I would wash up in a cold shower and then sit down with Plumley and discuss what our battalion had to do on this day. The routine—Did we have responsibility for manning the bunkers on a section of the line? How many men were absent, either sick with malaria or away on R and R for a week? When are our replacements arriving? Plans for the next operation, discipline problems, equipment needs. As we became more settled in this home away from home the amenities got a bit better. From three C-ration meals a day we progressed to two hot meals and one C ration. We all lived in Army tents, at first pitched on bare ground but later spiffed up with wood floors and sandbagged walls. Those floors were important when the tropical monsoon set in and the base turned into a sea of red mud, as opposed to the dry season, when we lived in a cloud of fine red dust stirred up by the endless parade of jeeps, trucks, troops, and helicopters coming and going. That fine red dust got into everything from our food to our laundry to our noses and mouths. The red mud, in its season, was even more maddening, as it stuck like glue to boots, fatigue uniforms, and jeep and truck wheels.

On our journey back in time, the 2nd Battalion veterans scouted around and found the site on a rock ledge looking out over the base camp where they had built a rudimentary shack and christened it the Garry Owen Officers Club. Men who fought hard and suffered much gathered here at night to drink hard and play hard. In the absence of any other entertainment they sang the old songs of soldiers at war as well as new songs they wrote to mark the battles they had fought. They rewrote songs written about George Armstrong Custer and the death of the 7th Cavalry in the Little Big Horn Valley to include a new and bloody valley of death called the Ia Drang. Someone even taped them one evening and I have a copy of that tape. You can hear the voices of men now dead and other men now old, as they were on a night in early 1966, when they were young men in their prime, engaged in a war their country’s leaders thought was worth the sacrifice. Their beery voices on the tape are punctuated by the outgoing artillery rounds in the distance. Listening to the singing of Gwin, Rick Rescorla, Bud Alley, Jim Lawrence, and a dozen other young lieutenants and captains is like pulling back a curtain and peering back across forty-two years to a simpler, deadlier time.

After this march back through another place that now exists only in our memories we boarded the buses and continued up Route 19, again stopping briefly at the top of the Mang Yang Pass, where there is an old French cemetery with the headstones of hundreds of soldiers of Group Mobile 100, the French regiment that had fought alongside us in Korea, who were killed on June 15, 1954, when a Viet Minh ambush trapped their column in the narrow pass and slaughtered them in one of the final battles after Dien Bien Phu had fallen. This was the first place I came after we arrived in An Khe in the summer of 1965, to walk among those graves and take counsel of the sad lessons of the French war I had read about on the long boat ride to Vietnam. We were told the French dead were buried upright, their faces turned in the direction of home.

As we continued our ride toward Pleiku we could see small, neat concrete and stucco houses, each with its own garden, spaced out along either side of the highway. Those, we were told, were the homesteads granted to former soldiers resettled there when a People’s Army division was demobilized in the Central Highlands. I suspect those new farmers were also the troops of that reserve division now headquartered in An Khe who, by their very presence, secured the strategic route into the highlands and provided a counterweight to the indigenous Montagnard tribal people, who, even today, have not come to terms with their new rulers.

I shared a seat on the bus with my old enemy, General An, and with a good interpreter at hand, we talked for hours of our lives and experiences in the service of our countries. An joined the Viet Minh guerrilla army in 1945 at age nineteen—the same year I was graduated from West Point and took up a second lieutenant’s commission in the U.S. Army at twenty-three years of age. He commanded a regiment against the French in the siege of Dien Bien Phu and proudly told me that his troops captured the last strongpoint to fall, Eliane 2, before the French commander surrendered; he commanded two-plus regiments against the Cavalry in the Ia Drang; he was commander of the North Vietnamese division that bloodied the 173rd Airborne and 4th Infantry Division at the Battle of Hill 875 (Dak To) two years after Ia Drang, and he led the division that was the first to enter Saigon in April 1975. After the end of our war, An fought in Cambodia against Hanoi’s former allies the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. In 1979, An planned and led a daring, successful nighttime attack against Communist Chinese forces who had crossed into Vietnam and dug in atop a mountain. The Chinese had beaten back three previous attacks when An was urgently summoned from duties as commandant of the Vietnamese army war college and sent to the border with the mission of wiping out the Chinese and ending their punitive invasion of Vietnam. An told us he pulled back the Vietnamese troops to repeatedly rehearse the plan of attack, and when they attacked up the mountain the next time they overran the Chinese occupiers, killing or capturing all of them.

Virtually his entire life and military career had been spent at war, and Nguyen Huu An was every inch a soldier and a leader. This was our second meeting in two years and we were beginning to understand and like each other, and that bond would only grow stronger in the days ahead. I wondered then and still do at the vagaries of fate that pitted two such evenly matched military commanders against each other in battle. My respect for An was born on the battlefield before I even knew his name, and now it only grew as we became better acquainted sharing a seat on that bus.

While An was learning his trade fighting the French in those early years I was learning mine, first in the Army of Occupation in Japan and then on the battlefields of the Korean War. Between that war and the one where we met in battle I went through the usual variety of Army schools, tested experimental parachutes by the simple expedient of jumping out of airplanes while wearing them, and did staff duty in the Pentagon. Our experiences in very different armies were not all that different. We had more in common than a soldier of any army has with a civilian.

FIVE

The Backbone of the Army

T
raveling in our group on the return to the battlefields was an old soldier who had been by my side every day of the twelve-plus months I served in Vietnam as battalion and brigade commander. Sgt. Maj. Basil L. Plumley was my strong right arm and had more time in combat, under fire, in three of America’s wars than most soldiers have in the chow line. It was an honor and pleasure to find the good sergeant major standing beside me on this journey through old memories.

Through the years I have reflected often on the soldiers and sergeants with whom I have been privileged to serve in peacetime and in wartime. From the beginning at West Point I was taught that the soldiers were my responsibility; that their lives were literally in my hands. That is a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of a twenty-one-or twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant or a twenty-four-or twenty-five-year-old captain, and it simply could not be borne without the help and guidance of older, more experienced sergeants who are the mainstay of every outfit from platoon to division. They truly are the backbone of our Army and I thank God there were good ones, working with me, every day of my thirty-three years of service.

There was a sergeant, and a damned fine one, standing there when I stepped off the train on the first day when I arrived at West Point. There was a sergeant standing there when I took command of my first platoon in Occupied Japan. And another was waiting to help when I took over my first company as a brand-new captain in the middle of the Korean War. The best of them all, Plumley, was there beside me in bloody combat in the Vietnam War. Without them my learning curve would have been terribly steep and the price of my education paid for in the blood of many more American soldiers.

For a young officer in the American Army, selection to command soldiers in a line unit—platoon, company, battalion, brigade—is the very definition of success. There are many more hopeful candidates than there are command slots. The path up that pyramid is steep indeed, with each officer spending almost a year in advanced courses for his chosen branch—Infantry, Artillery, Engineering, Ordnance, Armor. The lucky ones get a shot at troop duty afterward but most are ordered to staff duty or teaching slots in ROTC courses or service schools. Then, as majors, some will make the cut and spend a year at the Army’s Command and General Staff College. Again, the most fortunate will be promoted and assigned to command at battalion level, while the rest go back to staff duty at home or abroad.

As the officers shuffle along this route of advancement with its many transfers, who then assures continuity in the day-to-day running of the Army in the field? It is the noncommissioned officers, the sergeants, from squad leader to platoon sergeant to first sergeant, and, ultimately, the most experienced, best qualified, and carefully selected, the sergeants major. Officers come and go on their routes through schools and staff duty and command but the sergeants are always there with the soldiers—training, leading, and instilling and ensuring discipline.

I will never forget my arrival at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, on July 15, 1942. When my group of new soon-to-be cadets pulled into the train station we were met by a stone-faced, spit-shined sergeant with a pencil-thin mustache resplendent in Cavalry hat, Cavalry riding boots, and bloused riding breeches. His look implied that he had measured us, just as he had measured thousands like us before, and we did not for an instant impress him. His name fit him as well as those gleaming Cavalry riding boots: Master Sergeant Bonebrake. We fell into something like a formation and Bonebrake marched us up the hill and into the complex of imposing gray granite buildings brooding on the slopes and plain high above the Hudson River. There was a sense of ageless permanence, a majesty if you will, about that place, and a cold, powerful, unbending, relentless, no-nonsense authority. Master Sergeant Bonebrake fit in perfectly with the place and the weight of its history and those thick gray granite walls.

He was the first noncommissioned officer I met on Army duty, and during the three long World War II years that followed that first meeting, Bonebrake would teach us the real art of soldiering—how to fire, clean, and care for the 105mm artillery piece and how to ride, jump, and care for U.S. Cavalry horses. By example he showed us how to look like and behave like a soldier, a dedicated leader, a man of authority and purpose. Through my own progression through the ranks and command of line units at every level from platoon (30 soldiers) to division (15,000 soldiers) there were always the sergeants there to help keep me out of trouble. I learned early to do a lot of listening when the sergeants talked, though I never lost sight of the fact that ultimately I alone was responsible for my unit’s successes or failures.

When I took command of my Air Assault Battalion of 750 officers and men at Fort Benning, Georgia, in June 1964, it marked my first troop command since I had commanded a company in combat in Korea in 1952. On that day I met the most remarkable and memorable sergeant of a lifetime—Sergeant Major Plumley. He was the very essence of an Airborne soldier—six feet two inches tall, ramrod straight, lean, crew-cut hair, penetrating blue eyes, and a man of few words. Plumley judged men by their actions, not their words, and expected to be so judged by his own actions.

What struck me most on that first meeting were two small silver emblems worn above the serried ranks of colored ribbons on his chest: the Combat Infantry Badge with one star, signifying this man had served on the line in both World War II and Korea, and the Master Parachutist Badge with five combat jump stars in token of his participation in all four combat jumps of the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II and another one in Korea. I liked the man immediately and it turned out that we thought a lot alike when it came to soldiering and leading soldiers in training, in garrison, on maneuvers, and in battle. We could not know that early summer day in 1964, before the Vietnam War exploded, that we would be side by side for more than two years and, together with our battalion, would fight the first major battle of that war.

The sergeant major and I sat down with the battalion officers and I informed them that he worked for me alone and would take orders from me alone. Then he and I closed the door to my office and talked about our relationship and the battalion—its training status, discipline, the other NCOs, the officers, the morale of the troops, and the state of security of company arms and supply rooms. I told him he would have unlimited access to me anytime he felt it necessary, and that we would meet personally to talk at the beginning and end of each day of duty. He would oversee and improve the professionalism and promotion of NCOs in the battalion. When it came to punishment for disciplinary infractions by the troops or the junior NCOs I would always ask his recommendation.

As we launched an intensive schedule of training our battalion in the new and experimental art of air assault warfare—the movement of Infantry into battle by helicopter—Plumley was always there. He was quiet, laconic even, but on occasion he could be quite crusty and brusque. He was always candid and always all business. Where do we get such men? In the case of Basil Plumley, out of the hardscrabble hills of West Virginia, where he was born in the village of Bluejay on New Year’s Day 1920, and where he came of age during the Great Depression. He joined the U.S. Army in March 1942. Joe once asked him why he signed up. Plumley replied that it was “better than starving to death.” He volunteered for paratroop training in August 1942—because, he told me, “I liked them jump boots.” He probably also liked the $50 a month additional pay for airborne enlisted soldiers, too.