A class of prime youth shredded in seconds. They decided that these results justified a strategy of attrition: They would bleed the enemy to death over the long haul. He was there on the ground for the brutal and historic fall of Dien Bien Phu that marked the end of the French involvement in the region. (Joe Galloway/UPI) American Riflemen of B Company, 2nd Battalion., 7th Cavalry. All rights reserved. Nine regular North Vietnamese regiments (27 infantry battalions) have been infiltrated in the past year, joining the estimated 83 VC battalions in the South. Joe Lee Galloway I thought I was bulletproof, invincible, as young men often do before they see the elephant.. The last photo in the photo essay shows the medic and a child walking away together, holding hands, and the childs head is burned from napalm. What happened there, in the Ia Drang Valley, 17 miles from the nearest red-dirt road at Plei Me and 37 miles from the provincial capital of Pleiku, sounded alarm bells in the Johnson White House and the Pentagon as they tallied the American lossesa stunning butchers bill of 234 men killed and more than 250 wounded in just four days and nights, November 14-17, in two adjacent clearings dubbed Landing Zones X-ray and Albany. Joe GallowayUPI/Getty Images I snapped this photo at [the Battle of la Drang], LZ X-Ray, on Nov. 15, 1965. A Mars bar was a very special thing indeed. We Were Soldiers is a 2002 American war film written and directed by Randall Wallace and starring Mel Gibson. Then, said An, the fight would be man-to-man and much better odds. Knowles was furious at Stockton for disobeying his orders. It is not often you see enemies cradling each other. During the Vietnam War, he often worked alongside the American troops he covered and was awarded a Bronze Star Medal in 1998 for having carried a badly wounded man to safety while he was under very heavy enemy fire in 1965. Hal Buell, former photography director at the Associated Press, who led their photo operations during the Vietnam War: In all wars, the battlefield medic is often the stopgap between life and death. Understand what has brought them to that point. "On the second day, they dropped a couple of napalms in the (landing zone), and a couple of guys bringing in. Lt. colonel Moores service in the office, Chief of Research and Development reflect great credit upon him, FICTION from NEIL SHEEHANs A BRIGHT AND SHINNING LIE., PAGE 573 We have come to a decision point and it seems we have only two choices: Either we arrange whatever diplomatic cover we can find and get out of Vietnam, or we give General William C. Westmoreland the 200,000 additional U.S. troops he is asking for, in which case by early 1967 we will have 500,000 Americans on the ground and they will be dying at the rate of 1,000 a month (the top Pentagon bean counter was wrong about that; American combat deaths would top out at over 3,000 a month in 1968). Col. Hal Moore, a 43-year-old West Point graduate out of Bardstown, Ky., was given orders to airlift his 450-man 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, into the valley on a search-and-destroy mission. Released prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. Sal VederAP. When do you think you first encountered someone with PTSD? My older brother Huynh Thanh My, who was killed covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, always told me that an image could stop the war and that was his goal. Some experienced a flash of guilt when in a starkly honest millisecond they thought, Glad it was him, not me. That big ugly candid moment was immediately pushed down, but it would creep back every now and then, especially back in the world when they gave a hug to their new child, the one their dead buddy would never have. Stockton, an Army brat who had grown up in horse cavalry posts all across the West, had resurrected black cavalry Stetson hats for his men and smuggled the 9th Cavs mascot Maggie the mule aboard ship and 8,000 miles to Vietnam in defiance of another of Dick Knowles orders. At the head of the column, McDade had no idea where most of his men were and was near-incoherent on the radio. It was, he said, a meeting engagement. Casualties were light to moderate, he added. Within an hour of landing and the second airlift of troops just arriving, the battle at X-ray was joined. General Westmoreland estimates that through 1966 North Vietnam will have the capability to expand its armed forces in order to infiltrate three regiments (nine battalion equivalents, or 4,500 men) a month, and that the VC in South Vietnam can train seven new battalion equivalents a monthtogether adding 16 battalion equivalents a month to the enemy forces. it was seasonal depression until in 1986 or 87 when I attended my first reunion of my old 1st Cavalry Division buddies. Why were these uniformed men just giving them away? Other locals and American military are nearby; the anxious glance of the child indicates as much. Date: 10/14/2003 1:27:19 PM Pacific Standard time Burdy will be released by Mercer University Press in September 2015. By Joe Lee Galloway. The battle consisted of two engagements in the valley . Second Lieutenant Walter Marm (later Colonel) received the Medal of Honor on February 15, 1967 for his actions during the 3-day battle at LZ X-Ray. Find the perfect battle of ia drang stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. The only civilian decorated for valor by the U.S. Army for actions in combat during the Vietnam War, Galloway received the Bronze Star medal with V Device for rescuing wounded soldiers while under fire in the Ia Drang Valley, in November 1965. Each of us was terribly afraid that the other was going to be killed in the next minutes. And a UH-1 "Huey" helicopter is flying in toward the area. Subj: RE: Galloway never wore a uniform either In other words, every year reaching out far into the future there were more babies born in the north than NVA we were killing in the south, so each year a new crop of draftees arrived as replacements for the dead. hasta la vista foe another decade or so Pentagon was going to act on my idea. Yoichi OkamotoLBJ Library. All through that endless night, the PAVN troops combed through the elephant grass searching for their own wounded, and finishing off any wounded Americans they came across. Free shipping. War Correspondent, Vietnam, Joe Galloway speaks during the 'Vietnam in HD' panel during the History portion of the 2011 Summer TCA Tour at the. Free shipping. Kinnard, and by Colonel Moore. Are there not always two sides to a coin? He collaborated on the bestselling book about that battle called "We Were Soldiers Once. Soldiers and journalists alike are reluctant to seek treatment, and for the same reason: A fear that it is a confession of fear, and may damage your career. I was photographing a different family and out of the corner of my eye saw the action and turned. Do you have an observations about why that might be so? Nov. 14-18, 1965< this would be LZ X-Ray's battle, Robert Saucedo should have been leaving the war. Collections; . No one knew quite what to do to help him. 3. War correspondents like Joseph Galloway suffer as well. Sadly, they probably died quickly in the war. Jimmy Nakayma died in flight,3 degree burns no other injuries. I saw the medic shouldering wounded and then I saw the kid on his back in the grass. They were about to make history, conducting the first nighttime heli-borne infantry assault into a very hot landing zone. Later I realized that I had shot a photo, in the heat of battle, of my childhood friend from the little town of Refugio, Texas. The enemy columnmen of the newly arriving 8th Battalion of the 66th Regimentstopped 120 yards short of the ambush and took a break. Dao called in a helicopter to evacuate us, but suddenly, the ARVN troops who had been seated alongside the road broke and ran for the incoming helos. But we journalists were so sure that we were immune to all we witnessed in combat. Cole, himself wounded, peered beneath his bandaged eye to treat the wounds of a fallen Marine. It was a great moment for Americans! The soldiers eyes reveal, and you dont need a caption to explain it, that he most likely experienced hell along the way. But there and then, I decided to follow in his footsteps and complete his mission. Veterans from the Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam tell stories about author and war correspondent Joe Galloway. The sketchy American intelligence Moore was provided said the area was home base for possibly a regiment of the enemy. Stockton radioed his higher-up, Brig. It created a sense of mutual respect that in many ways is challenged by the new embed ethos. ThenLt. Learn more about the Battle of Ia Drang at www.lzxray.com. U.S. killed-in-action can be expected to reach 1,000 a month, and the odds are even that we will be faced in early 1967 with a no-decision at an even higher level. At first, we thought it was deserted. Communist casualties and desertions can be expected to go up if my recommendations for increased U.S., South Vietnamese and third country forces are accepted. Sidney Lanier High School, Sp4 James Clark was not given any morphine by the medics. Larry Burrows The Life Picture Collection. ie Crushed ankle. Joe Lee Galloway got a Draft Deferment,during the Vietnam War. In 2001 as the Vice President of Security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, he lost his life supervising the evacuation of the World Trade Center Tower 2. My first tour in Vietnam lasted 16 months. Please update your browser at http://update.microsoft.com, Howard SochurekThe LIFE Picture Collection. They were not. While the Vietnam War raged roughly two decades worth of bloody and world-changing years compelling images made their way out of the combat zones. The title is WE ARE SOLDIERS STILL: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam, and I think its a pretty good story, but he is sure working me hard. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. The North Vietnamese regulars, young men who had been drafted into the military much as the young American men had been, had paid a much higher price to test the newcomers to an old fight: an estimated 3,561 of them had been killed, and thousands more wounded, in the 34-day Ia Drang campaign. Prior to Nov. 14, 1965, the U.S. Army had never met its North Vietnamese counterpart in a major battle. When you were a young journalist heading off to Vietnam, did you have any fears? His face was on fire. I had given all of my food away so I didnt eat for two days. Or is it the young woman and her two children being confronted by an American GI? contribution that his branch made to the accomplishment of the Air Mobility Division mission. Military options and recommendations. to: lzalbany65 Slapping a swagger stick along his leg, he quickly loaded the two journalists who had accepted his invitation, myself and UPI reporter Leon Daniel, into a Jeep and barreled into the town. . But for his actions this night of November 3, John B. Stockton would be relieved of duty and sent to work a desk job in Saigon. Joe Lee Galloways true fillings on PTSD! The turning point of the five-year-old war, the offensive by elusive Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces failed in military terms but constituted a political victory in the arena of international public opinion. In this interview, Zacharias spoke with Galloway about his war reporting days and his own PTSD. Hal Moore and reporter Joseph L. Galloway, it dramatizes the Battle of Ia Drang on November 14, 1965. Unfortunately the young soldier was later killed but this image conveyed the senselessness and horror of how the human condition was playing out. Although they could have easily crushed the defendersa 12-man American A-Team and 100 Montagnard mercenary tribesmenthe enemy dangled them as bait, hoping to lure a relief force of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) out of Pleiku and into an ambush laid by their brothers of the 33rd Regiment. It Didnt End Well. JG The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that post-traumatic stress disorder afflicts almost 31 percent of Vietnam veterans, 10 percent of Desert Storm veterans, 11 percent of Afghanistan veterans and 20 percent of Iraq war veterans. Gold Star Family members can also fall victim to PTSD as a result of second-hand trauma. Paul SchutzerThe Life Picture Collection/Getty Images. How much preparation are they given for dealing with what they encounter? The luck was with Moore. (Photo Credit: Zayne / Paramount Pictures / MovieStillsDB) We Were Soldiers is based on the novel, We Were Soldiers Once and Young: Ia Drang - The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam, by renowned war correspondent Joe Galloway and Lt. Gen. Hal Moore.Both were present at the Battle of Ia Drang, the first large-scale engagement of . On November 14, 1965, the 1st Battalion (Bn), 7th Cavalry Regiment (Regt), 1st Air Cavalry (Cav) Division (Div) was sent on a search and destroy . I assured them that theirs was a normal reaction to the horrors of war and urged them to get some help. "He was the kindest, most gentle and loving man," Grace Galloway said. This photograph has come to be known as Reaching Out.. What is We Were Soldiers about? My Dad and all my uncles would not tell us kids war stories. 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