[J.D. Henderson, Wednesday September 28, 2005 at 7:00pm EST]

This editorial from Knight-Ridder newspapers is worth reading. Before assuming that it is lefty-liberal anti-military speak, you should know it is written by Joseph Galloway, the author of We Were Soldiers Once, and Young.

If the lowest private fails, then others have failed in training, leading and directing that private. The chain runs from sergeant to lieutenant to captain to lieutenant colonel to colonel to one, two, three and four stars, on to the longest serving, most arrogant secretary of defense in our history, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and beyond him to the commander in chief, President Bush.

It’s long past time for responsibility to begin flowing uphill in this administration. It’s time for our leaders to take responsibility for what’s being done in all our names and under our proud flag. It’s time for Congress to do its job if the administration won’t do its job.

Lt. Col Hal Moore: “I will leave no one behind” [DIGITALLY ENHANCED AUDIO!]

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechweweresoldiers7thcavalryaddress.html
Moore didnt know what he was doing in Nam, Killed his men.

MOORE LEFT SOME OF HIS DEAD TROOPS ON X-RAY!

Moore said he wouldnt leave any troop behind on the Battlefield dead or alive.

ArmChair General

“Didn’t you go back to the Ia Drang in March for Operation LINCOLN?”

Steven R. Hansen “Yes, we did return to the Ia Drang.

++In fact, we air assaulted back into XRay.

++It was quiet.”

++The mission was to search for and retrieve the remains of some MIAs.( Missing in Action )

++We found them.

The battlefield had been cleaned up pretty good by both sides.

We found a scattering of stuff and I noticed the remains of one NVA soldier near the
“Ant Hill” that sheltered the command post during the battle.

Isnt it strange! Col. Moore said he brought every one back even the dead.
( page 198, We were Soldiers Once and Young.)Hardback

Moore said he wasnt leaving anyone on LZXRAY !

He did!, then he sneaks back to retrive the ones he left behind on X-Ray.

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p=2785&page=1

Memories of Vietnam

Submitted by Stephane Moutin-Luyat

Steve Hansen

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p&page=1&p=2785&page=7

Memories of Vietnam

Tuesday, July 18, 2006 by Stephane Moutin-Luyat

Steve Hansen, two-tour veteran of the Vietnam war, shares his thoughts and experiences in

this fascinating interview.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/03-25-2002/vo18no06_hal_moore.htm

The Real Hal Moore
Interview of Lt. General Harold G. Moore by William F. Jasper
TNA: Both in the book and the movie, your commitment and your promise to

your men, to bring them all home, dead or alive, comes through very

strongly.

Was that Army doctrine or was that purely Hal Moore?

Moore: No, that was not Army doctrine.

I was very close to my men.

When we were ordered to Vietnam in August 1965, I had been training

my battalion for 14 months.

I knew all my NCOs, my sergeants.

We trained together intensely.

We trusted each other, knew our lives depended on each other.

We were a family of fighting men.

Before we left for Vietnam, I gathered all my men on the parade ground

at Ft. Benning, Georgia, just like in the movie, and I told them that were

going into battle far from home against a tough enemy on his own turf.

I told them: “Some of us are going to die ? maybe me, certainly some

of you.

But I promise you this: If you go down, I?m going to bring you back.

And if I go down, I hope you bring me back.”

In later years, I?ve had many of my troopers tell me that that promise

meant a great deal to them and helped them in battle, because they

knew if they went down that they would not be left lying on the ground

for the vultures, insects, and weather, but would be brought back to

their families for burial.

And I never lost a man in two wars, Korea or Vietnam.

After the Ia Drang battle, I was promoted, made commander of a

brigade of 3,000 men.

We lost a man on the Bong Son Plain.

He got separated from his unit.

I turned out the whole brigade and we hunted for him for two days.

We finally found him; he was dead, but we brought him home.

MOORE LEFT SOME OF HIS DEAD TROOPS ON X-RAY!

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p&page=1&p=2785&page=7

» Home > Personal Stories, Front Page Features > Memories of Vietnam

——————————————————————————–

Memories of Vietnam
Submitted by Stephane Moutin-Luyat

The NCOs that came in as replacements were drawn from Army units in the States and Europe and they were trained, capable men. So to were some of the lower graded soldiers. And of course we received some privates direct from Basic and Advanced training. Later in the war almost every replacement would be raw meat.

In December I went on R&R to Hong Kong. Most of the men wanted Bangkok. It had a reputation for being cheap and wide open. I wanted Hong Kong because I wanted an escape from Viet Nam and anything like it. And while Hong Kong was Asian it was also British and a very nice place to be. I enjoyed my self immensely.

Shortly after my return I was sitting in the NCO club we built with some friends and looked around. Almost all the faces were new. Those of us who had been together at Benning stayed connected. But we were more reserved about the replacements. Why make a friend just to see him die.

Read LTC Moore’s after action report in full here

All those new recruits would soon experience combat. In January, the 1st Cav launched Operation MASHER in the populated coastal province of Binh Dinh, the biggest search & destroy operation in Vietnam to date, and once again the 1/7 and 3d Brigade would find themselves in heavy fighting, especially around the hamlet of Phung Du north of Bong Son. It’s always been one of the most interesting operation for me, what can you tell us about it? it must have been a complete change of scenery from the Central Highlands.

When I returned from R&R I got a new job. Warren Adams, the company First Sergeant, pulled me up to Company Headquarters to be the field logistics sergeant. It was not a real job, in the sense of being authorized in the official Table of Organization and Equipment (TO&E) but it was necessary function during operations.

D Company was not a maneuver element. The three platoons, Recon, Heavy Mortar, and Anti-Tank were combat support elements and their location and employment were usually established by the Battalion Operations Officer or S3. The D company CP was usually, but not always, collocated with the heavy mortars. One of our missions was to monitor the battalion command radio frequency and track the location of the other companies. By staying abreast of the situation we were ready to reconstitute the battalion Tactical Operations Center (TOC) if the principal TOC was overrun or lost during an air lift.

Bong Son was my first operation as a member of the company field headquarters.

We had operated in populated areas around Qui Nhon during our initial toughing up phase and while we were reconstituting after the Ia Drang. But we had not made any significant contact. And the populace, at least on the surface, seemed loyal to the South Vietnamese Government. At Bong Son we would engage NVA regulars again and much of the populace was openly hostile to us.

Having said this, I also must say that I did not participate directly in any combat at Bong Son. But I did monitor the radios and I was very aware of the intense fighting that was going on just a kilometre or two from our support locations. And, for a time, we were located at the airstrip and I saw the casualties come in. For me, it was kind of sureal. I was there but I was somewhat detached. I think it was a coping mechanism. A bit of guilt for being relatively safe and a bit of relief for not being at risk.

We operated on the Bong Son plain twice. In January 66 and again in March (my recal may be faulty). No matter what the higher ups called the operations there we called them Bong Son One and Bong Son Two. At reunions we still talk about them. Most agree that the actual combat was worse than anything at XRay even though the tactical situations never was,

At this time of my life the events of Bong Son One and Two run together.

Here are some things I recall.

Riding by truck all night from An Khe, down Highway 19 to Qui Nhon and then up Highway 1 to Bong Son, immediately boarding Hueys and making a combat assault. My understanding is we did this because Bong Son was to far from An Khe to stage the assault from there. But the Hueys could fly empty from An Khe and arrive with enough fuel to stage the assault. In so doing, we achieved tactical surprise. It was a well conceived and brilliantly executed maneuver.

Walking in sand, sleeping in sand, eating sand, trying to dig in in sand, hating sand.

Watching a Charlie model Huey gun ship coming in with fuel streaming out of it. The left side opened up like a shark bite and the gunner dead and hanging by a strap. Aparently one or more of the rockets in the missing pod had detonated on launch or been hit by ground fire.

Going to the S1 tent to pick up replacements. Most were 82nd Airborne veterans of the Dominican Republic. On the way back we passed by Charlie Med. There were more dead GIs wrapped in ponchos there than the 82nd had lost during their entire mission in the DR.

Learning Sergeant First Class Kennedy, a C Company hero in the Ia Drang, had been killed by friendly fire. Fire from a 106 in our own Anti Tank platoon.

Hearing an explosion nearby and finding out one of our 82nd Airborne replacements had snagged a grenade when he was setting his 81 mm mortar bipod down. It blew his arm off and he died almost immediately in front of me.

Seeing a senior NCO (not a D Company man) throw his boots down a well and reporting them stolen while he slept.

Seeing Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky and his wife in matching black flight suits walking among the ordinary soldiers and thanking them for their service.

Showing no interest in seeing Nancy Sinatra put on a USO show.

Seeing those damn pictures in Life magazine and feeling guilty and relieved all over again.

====================================================================

Didn’t you go back to the Ia Drang in March for Operation LINCOLN? not sure 1/7 was involved in this one, but after Bong Son the Cav was known as the “swing” division, alternating between the coastal plain and the Central Highlands. How was your perception of the war at that time after several months in country? I guess morale was pretty high in the 1st Cav, did you have the feeling that you were turning the tide in Vietnam, were you told anything about the big picture?

Yes, we did return to the Ia Drang. In fact, we air assaulted back into XRay. It was quiet. The mission was to search for and retrieve the remains of some MIAs. We found them.

The battlefield had been cleaned up pretty good by both sides. We found a scattering of stuff and I noticed the remains of one NVA soldier near the “Ant Hill” that sheltered the command post during the battle.

====================================================================

[continued on next page]

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

We Were Soldiers Once and Young written from WW2 Ernie Pyles books

Joe Galloway has all of Ernie Pyle’s books.

A blueprint Galloway follows to the T.

Joe Galloway has been living the life of Ernie Pyle, He took over Pyles Idenity in

1963, Talk about idenity theft, He writes like him, He talks like him, everything

Pyle likes and dislikes Galloway dose also.

Pyle loved the Infantry,so dose Galloway.

Pyle hates War, so dose Galloway

everything that Pyle did in WW2, Galloway did in Vietnam.

+Plagiarism mainly consists of borrowing whole passages from another writer

without giving that writer credit.

From the works Ernie Plye

+There no one will lie to you; no one will try to put a spin on the truth.

+Those for whom death waits around the next bend or across the next rice paddy have no

+time and little taste for the games that are played with such relish in the rear.

+No one ever lied to me within the sound of the guns.

Galloway replaces WW2, with Vietnam.

+It may also entail in a more sophisticated scam borrowing someone else’s ideas

or structure without attribution.

When you read We Were Soldiers Once and Young, It’s like reading Ernie Pyles

“Here Is Your War”!

Joe Galloway Military reporter VITENAM co author of We Were Soldiers Once and Young,

has been PLAGERIZING the works of Ernie Pyle and merroring Pyles life,

We Were Soldiers Once and Young has Ernie Pyle’s style of writing in it.

Joe Galloway has the complete works of Ernie Pyle.

Joe Galloway took this from Ernie Pyles works as true, But even Ridgway got it

wrong.

Joe Galloway took Ernies stament as fact as it is in Ernie Pyles works and makes an entire

speech about a untrue statement.

From Ernie Pyles War. by James Tobin 1997

Hardback page 107

Softback page107

As Ernie and his friends listened, Ridgway recited a favorite passage from

memory. It was Kiplings tribute to war reporters:

I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
In deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.

Joe Galloway from

The Military and the Media:One Man’s Experience below

“I would leave you with these lines from Rudyard Kipling in which he tried to

explain his relationship with the British Army. They explain something of what I feel:
I’ve eaten your bread and salt,
I’ve drunk your water and wine;
The deaths ye’ve died I’ve watched beside,
And the lives that ye’ve led were mine.

But the verse is to Departmental Ditties, Not reporters

Prelude

http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/kipling_ind.html

Prelude
(to Departmental Ditties)
I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
In deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.

Was there aught that I did not share
In vigil or toil or ease, –
One joy or woe that I did not know,
Dear hearts across the seas?

I have written the tale of our life
For a sheltered people’s mirth,
In jesting guise — but ye are wise,
And ye know what the jest is worth.
Rudyard Kipling

There are more Plagerised Ernie Pyle in this speech
Click HERE for Media Relations page.

The Military and the Media:
One Man’s Experience
Joe Galloway, Senior Writer, U.S. News & World Report

Prepared for delivery 22 October, 1996 at the Commandant’s Lecture Series,

The Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.

Thanks to Mr Galloway for permission to use it here.

——————————————————————————–

I can think of no place more appropriate than the Air War College to share the following bit of personal data which was left out of the very kind introductory remarks by the General: I want you to know that I have personally been bombed, rocketed, strafed and napalmed by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marines, U.S. Army Aviation and the air forces of sovereign states of South Vietnam, India and Pakistan, and maybe a couple more I don’t even remember now.

You will note that I am not an inconsiderable target and yet I am here today, unscathed, unscratched and ready to talk. I hold no grudges; I’m just eternally grateful that in those few instances some guys couldn’t shoot worth a s–t. I hasten to add that in literally hundreds of other instances, when the chips were really down, close air support kept me and a lot of other more deserving guys alive.

My one enduring image of what air power really means is one that I have carried in my mind and in my heart for more than 30 years. In the Ia Drang Valley in November of 1965 1 found myself with a battalion of the lst Cavalry Division, surrounded by two regiments of North Vietnamese regulars, 400 Americans versus 2,000 enemy. We were clinging desperately to a small clearing called Landing Zone X-Ray. On the morning of the second day we were under attack from three sides. Wave upon wave of enemy soldiers seemed to be literally growing out of the elephant grass. On the southeast perimeter, no more than 50 meters from where I lay, two platoons had been overrun and the line was wavering and cracking. The sergeant major came over, kicked me in the ribs and invited me to get up, make use of my M-16 and defend myself. Our forward air controller, Air Force Lieutenant Charlie Hastings, set aside his rifle and spoke into his radio the code word Broken Arrow. It signaled: “American unit in danger of being overrun.”

With that, every available air resource in South Vietnam was diverted to our control. They came by the dozens and scores: Air Force, Navy, Marines. Old Spads, F-100’s, F-4s, A-6,s. Charlie Hastings stacked them up over our heads in layers a thousand feet apart from 7,000 to 35,000 feet and they literally built a wall of steel and napalm around us. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

In the middle of all this dust, smoke and confusion a tragic friendly fire incident occurred: A Supersabre unloaded two cans of napalm right into the command post area. They burst no more than 15 meters to the right of the command group and one scared reporter. Several American GI’s were engulfed in the flames. I helped carry one of them out of the burning grass and I can still hear his screams and feel the bare bones of his ankles where the flesh had cooked off rubbing in the palms of my hands to this day. Then I witnessed something very important; something that placed it all in perspective: Lieutenant Charlie Hastings stood, heartstricken and trembling, before the battalion commander and tried to apologize for the terrible error. The commander looked him in the eyes and said: “Don’t worry about that one, Charlie. Just keep ‘em coming.”

Charlie Hastings kept them coming and that air support was the difference between life and death for the rest of us. That day, just one day past my 24th birthday, I learned that war is a hard and terrible business. Mistakes are made, but you must put them behind you and deal with the job at hand. By the way, Charlie Hastings served 30 years with the Air Force and retired a colonel three years ago. He’s living the good life down in Arizona, trying hard to catch up on a list of Honey Do’s that somehow accumulated over about 30 years. Charlie never forgot what it’s like down there in the mud with the foot soldiers; and none of us ever forgot what it’s like to holler HELP and have it rain down from the skies. Nobody ever won a battle or a war all by himself. It demands teamwork. If they teach you nothing else here and at the Army and Navy War Colleges, I pray to God they teach you that.

I was asked to give you my reflections on the Military-Media Relationship. That’s awfully high-toned for someone who got his start covering Marine platoons in Vietnam in early 1965, worked his way up to Infantry companies and the occasional battalion-size operation and has always felt slightly uncomfortable with anything larger than that. I will confess, right up front, that I am partial to the Infantry; always have been. Some might find that puzzling if not perverse; that a civilian reporter, given a choice, would choose the hardest and least glamorous part of any war as the part he wishes to cover.

But there is method in that madness, and I would recommend it to my younger colleagues who may one day be called on to cover war. There, in the mud, is where war is most visible and easiest understood.

————From Ernie Plye works also+

+There no one will lie to you; no one will try to put a spin on the truth. Those for whom death waits around the next bend or across the next rice paddy have no time and little taste for the games that are played with such relish in the rear.

+No one ever lied to me within the sound of the guns.

—————

=There, at the cutting edge of war, you find yourself welcomed and needed — welcomed by the soldier as a token that someone in the outside world cares about him and how he lives and dies; Needed for the simple reason that an Infantry company or platoon in combat always needs another set of hands to carry ammo or haul water to the wounded or to pick up a rifle when the chips are really down. There you earn the sort of friendship that cannot be acquired in any other field of human endeavor — there you forge bonds that will endure for a lifetime.

A few years ago I shook hands with one such battlefield friend and brother, agreeing on the terms by which we would jointly author a book. The lawyer who was negotiating the deal with the publisher asked to see the contract between us. We explained that there was no written contract; just that handshake. He looked horrified; we looked at him with pity. “You see,” my buddy explained, “We have trusted each other with our lives; this is just a little matter of some money.”

There is no secret in all of this. In every war there are always correspondents who walk this road; men and women whose fear of death is overcome by a fear of never having known the truth of war. The numbers are always disproportionate and they grow more so as rules and pools and fools proliferate.

When I look back at the military/media experience in the Gulf war it is with sadness for lost opportunities on both sides of the equation. Because of poor planning, paranoia and over-control, the details of a great victory of American arms were virtually lost to history. The crucial Army tank battles took place far from the lens of any camera; the Navy was over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind; and although the Air Force contributed all that nifty smart bomb film the vital human element of the Air Force story was largely missing, and we were left with the false image of a Nintendo War. The only thing the Pentagon had to hide in the Gulf was the finest military force this country has ever put into the field, and it did that very efficiently.

I am here to argue for more openness, more contact, more freedom between your profession and mine. In this one instance I believe familiarity would breed not contempt but trust and respect. My knowledge of and respect for you was born on the battlefields of Vietnam, learned alongside men like Lt. Charlie Hastings. That respect was reinforced by my experience in the Gulf, where I was the exception that proved the rule. There were around 1,000 correspondents accredited in the Gulf; 140 were permitted into the combat pools. There was precisely one reporter who went to war with a personal recommendation from General H. Norman Schwarzkopf in his hip pocket, and you’re looking at him.

How this came to pass is just another war story. In 1965 in Vietnam I marched along some bad roads in the Central Highlands with a Vietnamese Airborne battalion and made the acquaintance of a young Army adviser, Major Norm Schwarzkopf. The battalion commander who taught Charlie Hastings and me some important lessons in the Ia Drang Valley in November, 1965, was a splendid combat commander named Hal Moore. Long before that, Hal Moore taught infantry tactics to hundreds of young cadets at West Point, including one named Norm Schwarzkopf. He even persuaded young Schwarzkopf to choose the Infantry as his branch, against the best advice of his father who warned him that he would be forever giving up any hope of making the rank of general as a mud-foot Infantry officer.

I dealt fairly and honestly with both those men, as I have always tried to do with all men, and what goes around comes around. Life may be short but memories are long.

Thanks to that trust, I was sent down to the 24th Mech two weeks before G-Day. On my first night there the Division CG called me to his TOC and pulled the cover off the battle map. What he said, as my eyes followed the arrows and the hair stood up on the back of my neck was this: I trust you because Schwarzkopf trusts you; but more than that, I trust you because you’re coming with me. I never heard a more compelling argument for operational security in my life.

During the days before G-Day I visited every brigade and battalion in the division; saw the preparations; checked on the OR rates of the equipment; ate a lot of really bad chow; got lost traveling at night in the desert about fourteen times. Did a lot of listening and looking. And then we rode to battle together. I emerged from that experience with a damned good story of an American armored division at war …. and with something far more important: A whole new crop of comrades-in-arms and friends-for-life. We had trusted each other with our lives.

My regret, and one that I believe is now shared by the more thoughtful military leaders today, is that there was not an experienced team of reporters, photographers and cameramen traveling with every Brigade which crossed the berm into Kuwait and Iraq; stationed with every Air Force squadron which saw action; and on the bridge of every Navy ship offshore. Too much of the war either went uncovered, or the pooled dispatches and film took so long to reach the rear that the war was over and the stories never saw the light of day. More importantly, I think we will all have cause to regret the fact that a new generation of correspondents was not free to accompany a new generation of captains and majors of all the services to war — to learn the ropes, earn the trust and build the bonds that last a lifetime.

Some of you seated here today — the best and brightest of our nation’s defenders — are convinced that the press is your enemy. In any similar gathering of reporters there would, no doubt, be some who believe the same thing of you. This is a national tragedy…. and one that each of us has an obligation and a duty to do everything we can to repair and heal. There is more than enough blame and fault to go around, but that is not the point. Somehow my mind keeps going back to what my old friend Hal Moore tried to explain to that lawyer: once we have trusted each other with our lives …. everything else is small change.

Since Vietnam, I’ve thought long and hard about the relationship between your profession and mine — professions that the founding fathers of this nation thought so important that they included specific definitions of our duties and responsibilities and rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

A generation of officers emerged from that searing, bitter, orphaned war looking for someone to blame for the failures manifest in our nation’s defeat in Vietnam. Many chose to blame the media: Walter Cronkite lost the war; Dan Rather lost the war; Peter Arnett lost the war. By choosing the easy way out they obviated the painful need to carefully examine the root causes of our failure to win. By placing full blame and responsibility on the press they could avoid delving deeper, peeling to the underlying layers of the onion and exposing the more important failures of political leadership at home and military leadership right down the chain of command from the Joint Chiefs to the commander, U.S. Forces Vietnam and on down to Corps and Division.

How much easier it was to simply shoot the messengers. This red herring was dragged through the 0 Club bars of a thousand posts for a decade and more after the end of the Vietnam war. It became an article of faith for a generation of officers, and that led directly to the over-control and the spin control that allowed the Gulf War to be fought in a near-vacuum. Note that I say NEAR VACUUM, because nature abhors a vacuum.

For all the faultless planning and flawless execution of the plan, for all the success at locking the media out of the loop, locking them up in hotel briefing rooms far to the rear, in the end it was two very public television events that had much more to do with shaping the end of that war than all of the actions on or above the battlefield.

Those two events both occurred three days into the war. One was Gen. Schwartzkopf’s Mother of All Briefings, a masterful exposition of what had occurred and why. Near the end of that briefing, flush with the feeling that he had knocked the ball over the fence, the general was asked a simple question: Have you achieved your objectives? He sang beautifully about how he had not wanted this war, had hoped to avoid fighting it, didn’t like seeing people dying in combat, and, yes, he supposed that his prime objective, the liberation of Kuwait, had been achieved. In short, my old friend allowed his bullfrog mouth to overload his tadpole ass. An hour later his phone began ringing with calls from the White House: Wasn’t it time to begin working out the cease fire? No, said the general, he was still 48 or more hours away from completion of the plan; his tanks were still engaged heavily with units of the Republican Guard; the 24th Mech was only now pulling into place to close the sack behind the enemy in the Euphrates Valley. The voice on the phone responded, “General, that’s not what you just told a worldwide TV audience of more than two billion people.”

In the field, the commander of the 7th Corps armored phalanx had not heard Schwarzkopf’s briefing. Gen. Fred Franks now knows that he should have had his TOC wired to receive CNN and he should have had a smart iron major sitting there monitoring it minute by minute. If he had done that, he would have known that the war plan he was following had just accelerated from late middle game to end game. When he supervised the rewriting of Field Manual 100-5, the successor to Air-Land Battle, Gen. Franks was careful to include that recommendation for the benefit of the next generation of commanders.

The second very public event was the broadcast of film of the so-called Highway of Death and its scenes of miles and miles of shattered and burning wreckage strewn along Highway 8. With the help of J-STARS imagery and the on-the-ground firsthand knowledge of a young Army major who months before had driven that highway and made careful note of the natural choke points, the Air Force had hit those choke points at the head and tail of the long retreating column of Iraqis fleeing Kuwait City. The film of the Highway of Death, unanalyzed, gave the impression that thousands and thousands of Iraqis, innocent and guilty alike, had been slaughtered. Even General Colin Powell believed that what had happened was a turkey shoot, and, in his words, Americans don’t indulge in turkey shoots. He increased the pressure on General Schwarzkopf to conclude arrangements for an immediate cease fire.

Had there been even one or two reporters and cameramen on the ground, to take a firsthand look at that highway, we would have known then and there that the Highway of Death was, in fact, a Highway of Dead Toyotas. That when the choke points were closed and the column ceased movement all the drivers and passengers instantly knew what was coming, and instantly got out of their vehicles and beat feet out into the desert. That the casualties in the great turkey shoot were perhaps no more than 150 or 200 killed.

By locking out the media, by cutting them off from timely communication of their reports to the rear, the commanders in Riyadh and Washington had perhaps taken a certain amount of revenge for perceived sins of the media in covering Vietnam, but they had without doubt outsmarted themselves. A perfect example of what our British cousins call: Too clever by half.

I’ve since made a couple of other deployments, including Korea and Haiti, and closely watched the deployments to Somalia and Bosnia. Some of the lessons learned in the Gulf seem to be being applied with a good deal more foresight and planning by the new generation of commanders. There have been bobbles and missteps on both sides but nothing that I consider fatal.

But there is still that underlying suspicion: Your peers tell you that I, and people like me, are YOUR enemy. My peers tell me that you, and people like you, are MY enemy. The correct answer to both groups is: Bullshit! I much prefer to MAKE my own friends and enemies the old-fashioned way. I EARN them, and I am proud of them. I stubbornly refuse to inherit them. And I recommend that course to you as well.

What I am telling you is that familiarity far more often a breeds respect and friendship. Because of my experience in battle in Vietnam, when I was younger and skinnier and much dumber, I have been given the honor and privilege of open access to your tightly guarded world. When I boarded a Huey and flew away from Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley on 16 November 1965, 1 left knowing that I was alive to tell this story only because 79 young Americans had given their lives to save mine, and in that same effort 130 others had been shattered by terrible wounds. I knew that I owed them, and those like them, a lifelong obligation to try to understand their world and to tell the their story to a country that too easily forgets the true cost of war.

Someday, some of you in this room will wear stars and carry the heavy responsibility of high command. Inevitably the day will come when you must lead your young lieutenants and captains into the horror that is war. When that day comes, or in the days before it comes, the phone will likely ring and some public affairs puke will be on the line asking you how many media pukes you want to take with you. When that day comes, the right answer is: yes sir, yes sir, I’ll take three bags full, but send me the brightest and best ones you have. Then farm them out with your lieutenants and captains and let them go to war together. The experience of war will create bonds between them that cannot be broken; the young reporters will learn to love the soldiers and airmen just as you and your lieutenants have learned; and in the end 99 percent of the coverage that flows from this experience will be entirely positive.

I want you to do this because it is right, and I ask you to do this so that there will be others like me thirty years down the road who know and love your profession and can translate it for the American public. I ask this because my time as a combat correspondent has, sadly, come to an end. All these years I have been free to go to wars, to do the .really dumb stuff that I always tried to conceal from my mother and my insurance agent, because I had a strong, loving wife at home to take care of our young sons if anything ever happened to me. She had all the ticket punches of a military wife, 11 moves in 22 years, sudden disappearances of her husband for long periods of time, living with the knowledge that a phone call or a knock on the door could bring news that she was a widow. She handled it all perfectly. Last January, after a brief, brutal battle with cancer, my wife, Theresa died. I am now trying to be father and mother to two boys, 16 and 18, and I find I am no longer free to grab my rucksack and my helmet and instinctively head for the sound of the guns. My obligation and promise to her and to our sons must take precedence.

I thank you and all those like you for sharing your world with me. You have shared the last two sips of water in your canteen on a hot jungle trail; you’ve shared the only cup of hot coffee in a hundred miles on a cold desert morning in the Euphrates Valley; and always you have shared what is in your hearts. Your world, your profession, has given me the best friends of my life and both the greatest happiness and greatest sorrow I have ever known.

+I would leave you with these lines from Rudyard Kipling in which he tried to explain his relationship with the British Army. They explain something of what I feel:

I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
In deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.

God bless you and God bless our country.

Moore said he wouldnt leave any troop behind on the Battlefield dead or alive.

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p=2785&page=1

Memories of Vietnam

Submitted by Stephane Moutin-Luyat

Steve Hansen

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p&page=1&p=2785&page=6

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p=2785&page=1

Memories of Vietnam

Tuesday, July 18, 2006 by Stephane Moutin-Luyat

Steve Hansen, two-tour veteran of the Vietnam war, shares his thoughts and experiences in

this fascinating interview.

ArmChair General

“Didn’t you go back to the Ia Drang in March for Operation LINCOLN?”

Steven R. Hansen “Yes, we did return to the Ia Drang.

++In fact, we air assaulted back into XRay.

++It was quiet.”

++The mission was to search for and retrieve the remains of some MIAs.( Missing in Action )

++We found them.

The battlefield had been cleaned up pretty good by both sides.

We found a scattering of stuff and I noticed the remains of one NVA soldier near the “Ant

Hill” that sheltered the command post during the battle.

Isnt it strange! Col. Moore said he brought every one back even the dead.
( page 198, We were Soldiers Once and Young.)Hardback

Moore said he wasnt leaving anyone on LZXRAY !

He did!, then he sneaks back to retrive the ones he left behind on X-Ray.

I’m not a soldier, but I think maybe we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Rumsfeld has gutshot the tankers, and the artillery, and the traditional infantry. He’s only crippled the logistics guys.

On the other hand, he’s giving fine resources to the new units that are supposed to replace the tanks and artillery and infantry. And the new units won’t need as much logistics support either.

If he’s right we’ll have a shiny new army to replace the stuff he’s broken.

It’s a great big gamble, but we might win it.

Nat Helms DefenseWatch
DefenseWatch’s Nat Helms

Forwarded Message:
Subj: Galloway
Date: 9/25/2005 11:55:47 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: natshouse1@charter.net
To: Lzalbany65@aol.com
CC: Sfttpres@aol.com
Sent from the Internet (Details)

Hi Russell,

Okay, you got my attention… So what is your beef? I am neutral here although I have read Galloway’s book, talked to Hal Moore and traded correspondence with Galloway several times… and I am from Galveston. Try to help me understand what you are trying to accomplish. We are off the record and you have my assurances nothing will be repeated except to my boss… whose bar you will have to get over if you want our official attention. Is the entire account offered by Moore and Galloway fiction or just material facts within the situation… nothing has ever been raised either officially or unofficially by anyone until you came along with these issues… my boss’s first question was – why not? I was in some serious combat as was my boss and my recollections are at best what happened within my eye view. I was usually so scared or so involved I had tunnel vision and didn’t know what was happening around me. How could you know all this? My daughter is a lawyer and she went to great lengths the other night explaining legal “knowing” and hearsay… over your surprising allegation by the way… what do you KNOW and what do you THINK you know? And finally, how do I know you were even there? We get letters from all kinds of kooks and flakes… no offense… I have been a writer for many years… forgive me for being skeptical… and iI am far more receptive to this notion that my boss. please don’t be offended, it is the nature of the beast. If you can make a case we will make a jacket.. .
Forwarded Message:
Subj: RE: Galloway
Date: 9/27/2005 6:50:38 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: natshouse1@charter.net
To: Lzalbany65@aol.com
CC: Rogcharles@aol.com
Sent from the Internet (Details)

LZ,

You haven’t proved anything and you already sent me this crap once. Nothing has materially changed. I can fault my own recollection about the events in ‘Nam so how can anyone expect Galloway not to, or Hal Moore, or me, or my boss, or Col Hackworth.. I think you have some weird obsession you need to resolve. Maybe the VA can help you… All your allegations materially change nothing in history Please let us rest with our beliefs and you go on entertaining yours. I will admit you make some points history someday needs to fix… just for the sake of total clarity… not because Joe Galloway had memory lapses or lied or manufactured information. There is shit about Vietnam I try to forget every day … maybe Galloway is luckier than us. Nat Helms

yes I was there
Russell L. Ross
1741 Maysong ct San Jose Ca
95131-2727
PH 408 926-9336
http://hometown.aol.com/lzalbany65/myhomepage/
other screen names
undagrnd88
lzalbny65
lzalbany65
loneranger6566
article99ucmj
bco151111aad
lzxray111765

Joe Galloways last contact with me
Subj: RE: My web Page is now on the 1st page of Joseph L. GallowayWe Were Soldiers=FICTION
Date: 1/15/2004 3:23:36 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: jgalloway@krwashington.com
To: LZXRAY111765@aol.com

like i say russell, if you had anything worth taking i would sue you for libel and slander and take it all. but you don’t. only a couple bottles of blue pills which you need to use more regularly.

Forwarded Message:
Subj: RE: Galloway
Date: 9/26/2005 5:03:09 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: natshouse1@charter.net
To: Lzalbany65@aol.com
CC: Rogcharles@aol.com
Sent from the Internet (Details)

I’m not… I was 15 in ‘65… I got to Vietnam in Jan 68 and I am not interested in protecting

Galloway… I am interested in protecting DefenseWatch.

Galloway is a powerful guy and Hal Moore even more so. I I asked was that you pony up the

proof. Anyone can talk the talk … pony up some proof and we will write somethnig.

Nat Helms
—–Original Message—–
From: Lzalbany65@aol.com [mailto:Lzalbany65@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 6:30 PM
To: natshouse1@charter.net
Subject: Re: Galloway

if you were in combat then you should be able to pick out the fiction then.

ask you daughter what happen when there is Inconsantance in your story,

yes I was there,

sorry I forgot where your web page was, other journalist dont want to expose Galloway either

I know one who was with Galloway in the Gulf war, after the information I sent his web page

he even said Galloway wasnt at the places, times Galloway said he was, I ask him if I could

post his reply on my web page, he said no

but he not going to expose Galloway.

so thank you for your time

I see your just like the others, you can let anyone know what I sent you even Galloway, Moore, Im still trying to get him into court.

I would like to get you on the wittness stand, as you are as you claim to be a Combat vet,

what battles were you in, are you and expert in 1965 -65 tatics weapons, equipement?

I am

Forwarded Message:
Subj: Re: Joe Galloway in 2 diffrent places at the same time 1700hrs Nov.14,1965 40…
Date: 9/25/2005 9:18:50 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: Lzalbany65
To: natshouse1@charter.net

yes I was there
Russell L. Ross
1741 Maysong ct San Jose Ca
95131-2727
PH 408 926-9336
http://hometown.aol.com/lzalbany65/myhomepage/
other screen names
undagrnd88
lzalbny65
lzalbany65
loneranger6566
article99ucmj
bco151111aad
lzxray111765

Joe Galloways last contact with me
Subj: RE: My web Page is now on the 1st page of Joseph L. GallowayWe Were Soldiers=FICTION
Date: 1/15/2004 3:23:36 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: jgalloway@krwashington.com
To: LZXRAY111765@aol.com

like i say russell, if you had anything worth taking i would sue you for libel and slander and take it all. but you don’t. only a couple bottles of blue pills which you need to use more regularly.

Joe Galloway KNIGHTRIDDERS military consultants FICTION EXPOSED

From Soldiers the Offical U.S. Army Magazine

An Author’s Quest Story By Helke Hasenauer about Joe Galloway. page 33

ph 1-703-806-4486 Sun, Mar. 03, 2002March 2002>> Joe Galloway”‘Clark died and, two days later”.

Harold G. Moore, then the 1st Battalion commander,

didn’t learn about Galloway’s actions until the two collaborated

on “We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young,”

a best-selling book about the history of the battle published in 1992.

Moore, who retired as a three-star general, put Galloway in for the award.

Moore’s big LIE

“There was grazing machine-gun fire going over our heads and he got up in that grazing fire

and ran to that soldier to save him,” Moore said.

Galloway, crouching down to avoid enemy fire, saw PFC Jimmy Nakayama and Spc.5

James Clark get caught by the flames.

With the help of Sgt. George Nye, Galloway grabbed Nakayama’s feet and carried him to

safety.

>Clark died

Thursday, Jun. 4, 1998

Refugio native awarded Bronze Star

Former UPI reporter tried to save a wounded soldier during the Vietnam War

By STEPHANIE L. JORDAN
Staff Writer

BAYSIDE — For Refugio native Joe Galloway, reporting the Vietnam War meant getting away from press briefings, safe base camps and clean sheets. He saw the war as the grunts saw it, down in the dirt with the heat, death, blood, fear and valor.
And on Nov. 15, 1965, during the first large-scale battle between American troops and the North Vietnamese Army, Galloway stopped being a United Press International reporter and became a hero.

On May 1, 1998, Galloway — now a senior writer for U.S. News and World Report — was awarded a Bronze Star with a “V” device for valor for his actions during the battle. Galloway, who divides his time between homes in Bayside and Boston, is the first civilian to be given the award from the Army, said Maj. Gen. Joseph K. Kellogg, who presented him with the medal at Fort Bragg, N.C.

“At that time and that place he was a soldier,” Kellogg said. “He was a soldier in spirit, he was a soldier in actions and he was a soldier in deeds.”

Galloway was honored for trying to save a wounded soldier during one of the pivotal battles of the Vietnam War, a battle that left 234 Americans dead.

“I know that wasn’t my job, but in those days everyone did what they could to survive and help everyone else make it out of there alive,” Galloway said.

While with troops of the 7th Cavalry’s 1st Battalion — part of the First Cavalry Division — fighting in the Central Highlands, Galloway was in the battalion command post when an

American fighter mistakenly dropped napalm near the position.

Galloway, crouching down to avoid enemy fire, saw PFC Jimmy Nakayama and Spc.5 James

Clark get caught by the flames.

With the help of Sgt. George Nye, Galloway grabbed Nakayama’s feet and carried him to

safety.

———-Joe Galloway

>>> “Clark died > Thursday, Sep 01, 2005They Were Soldiers
The requested article was not found.

http://www.scottmanning.com/archives/000431.php

Joe Galloway in 2 diffrent places at the same time 1700hrs

Nov.14,1965 40k apart places, 1st Catecha, 2nd LZ Falcon

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0204/galloway3.htm

A Reporter’s Journal From Hell
by Joe Galloway

Part Three: The Things We Carried…

CATECHA
In the morning the word passed that B Company was moving out; the whole battalion was moving out on an operation to the west of Plei Me Camp. I caught up with the Brigade Commander, Col. Tim Brown, who confirmed that for me.

I told him I wanted to ride in with the 1st Battalion.

Brown said it was probably going to be another long, hot walk in the sun—but I could hang around and if anything happened he would fly out in his command helicopter and I could go with him.

I nodded but had a bad feeling about this; felt I ought to go in with the troops.

The 1st Battalion troops lifted on out,

replaced by Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion 7th Cav.

1700hrs Nov 14th 1965 Catecha
Later, when the radios burst into frenzied reports of action, Bravo 2/7 Cav began lining up

and loading up on choppers.

Galloway
I slipped down the line, found one chopper with room and got

aboard.

Just before we lifted off a big lieutenant came down the line

looking in every chopper.

He spotted me, waved me off, and put a medic aboard in my seat.

I couldn’t complain about that, but there was action out there in a place designated Landing

Zone XRay, and I couldn’t get there.

Back to Brigade HQ. Col. Brown came bustling out of the tent with a couple of his staff

officers behind him.

He waved me along, moving quickly toward his command chopper, bristling all over with radio

antennas.

He told me that Lt. Col. Moore and his men had gotten into a helluva fight out there in the Ia

Drang Valley and he was headed there.

1200hrs Nov 14th,1965 LZ XRay 1200hrs
> As we neared the end of the 20 mile flight we could easily locate the battlefield: cloud of

smoke rose high above it.

We dropped down to about 1500 feet circling the clearing below.

I had earphones on and could hear Col. Brown talking to Lt. Col. Moore. Brown wanted to

land; Moore was telling him the landing zone was under intense enemy fire and if he landed

that command chopper with all those antennas it would be a magnet for bullets.

Moore succeeded in waving off his boss.

aprox 1230hrs LZ Falcon Nov 14,1965

Brown told me on the radio that he was dropping me at

>Landing Zone Falcon five miles

from LZ XRay and I would have to catch a ride in from there.

More disappointment.

I jumped off the chopper at another small clearing in the scrub brush,

this one filled with a battery of 12 105mm howitzer artillery pieces.

They were firing nonstop, providing support for Lt. Col. Moore’s besieged battalion in XRay.

As the day wore on more reporters drifted in.

A new AP guy I had >not previously met

Someone from Reuters, >probably

>A couple of others.

>We met every chopper begging for a ride in to the fight.

probably my friend? Not previously met? other Reporters? this dailog is from a reporter?

some one from?,

No luck.

The day was growing older and except for the incessant din of outgoing artillery fire we were

no closer to the action.

It was then that I ran into Capt. Gregg (Matt) Dillon, the 1st Battalion S-3 or operations

officer.

I asked how I could get to XRay.

He replied: I am going in with two choppers full of ammo and water just as soon as it is good

dark.

I said I wanted to go.

He said he couldn’t make that decision without Hal Moore’s approval, but he would get on

the radio and ask him.

I stuck with him till he picked up the radio handset and informed Moore of his plans.

“Oh yes, that reporter Galloway wants to come along.”

Hal Moore responded: “If he is crazy enough to want to come in here, and you have the

room, bring him along.”

All right!

I had a ride.

Now all I had to do was hide out from the rest of the gang till they got tired and headed back

to Pleiku for the night.

I disappeared behind a tent and waited them out.

Finally they were all gone and Dillon’s two choppers roared in. aprox 2030hrs-2100hrs

We got aboard in the darkness and lifted off.

I was bound for the biggest battle of the war—

and I was all alone.

An exclusive!

Galloway met Jimmys wife BUT in 2 diffrent stories Joe Galloway writes

Posted on Fri, Apr. 29, 2005,

Joe Galloway His Wife Cathy?

Joe Galloway his wife Trudy?

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/galloway/11525840.htm

Saturday, Aug 27, 2005
Joe Galloway

Posted on Fri, Apr. 29, 2005

There were men such as Jim Nakayama of Rigby, Idaho,

who had so much to live for.

>>His wife,

>>Cathy,

>>gave birth to their baby girl, Nikki,

a couple of days >before

Today, Vietnam is different from when the war started and ended

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY

Knight Ridder Newspapers

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam – Never mind that dateline. It will always be Saigon to me, the place where I landed 40 years ago to cover a war that would eventually consume much of my youth and much of my country’s innocence before it ended in bitter, bloody chaos three decades ago.

The old familiar streets are still here, but now they’re lined with chic shops and boutiques instead of the seedy bars where delicate Vietnamese women once wheedled overpriced “Saigon Teas” out of big American GIs.

The traffic is, at once, both denser and calmer as motorcycles have replaced bicycles and the man-powered cyclo taxis have been banned from the center of town. Pedestrians seem to risk death just crossing a street full of speeding motorbikes, but it’s a carefully choreographed dance. There are rules for the walker: Don’t run. Don’t try to dodge. Just walk slowly straight ahead and let the motorbikes adjust for you.

The Vietnamese are still the hardest-working people I have ever known, hustling and bustling and chasing a buck and a living with determination. The majority of them, 60-plus percent, are under the age of 30, and for them the war is something in the history books.

The country and the people are far different than they were when we came and when we left. In the cities, the old shabby yellow colonial buildings that survived have been spruced up and modernized. Office towers and high-rise hotels tower over their older neighbors. Cranes are everywhere in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City as new construction sprouts on every available scrap of land.

Communists may still rule here, but business is still business, and business is good in Vietnam. The country’s economy grew at a rate of 7.7 percent in 2004.

Two-way trade between Vietnam and the United States has reached $6 billion annually. Trade with neighboring China is also at $6 billion a year. A local Honda plant cranks out millions of the ubiquitous motorbikes that sell for the equivalent of $1,000 to $2,000.

On the outskirts of Hanoi, a huge gate modeled after the Brandenburg in Berlin, complete with sculpted horses, marks the entrance of a new subdivision for the very affluent. A planned but still unbuilt house there sold six months ago for $250,000. The same non-existent home has already changed hands twice. The last buyer paid $450,000 for it.

Yet in poorer rural areas such as Quang Tri province, the per capita income is still around $200.

What we call the Vietnam War the Vietnamese call the American War. “You see, we have fought so many wars over a thousand years that we could never call yours `the Vietnam War’ – it would be meaningless to us,” explained an earnest young guide in Hanoi.

The American War takes up only one paragraph in the history book taught in grade schools in Vietnam today. But a big, busy bookstore on what once was Tu Do Street in old Saigon carries shelves full of books about the war and biographies of some of the great North Vietnamese Army commanders, such as Gen. Nguyen Huu An, who did his best to kill all of us in the Ia Drang Valley during some terrible November days in 1965.

A friend and fellow scribbler, Phil Caputo, inscribed a copy of his book “A Rumor of War” to me: “As an old French general once told another, `The war, old boy, is our youth – secret and uninterred.’” By then, in the late 1970s, both of us knew exactly what that old French general meant.

It seemed so simple and straightforward when we began that march 40 years ago with the landing of the first American Marine battalion at the port city of Danang. We were a modern superpower blocking the spread of communism to a Third World country.

War has a way of looking simple going in – and generally turns out to be far more complex and costly than the architects ever thought possible. This one sure was.

The Vietnam War consumed the presidency of the brash Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, who sent the first combat troops there. It brought young American protesters into the streets and helped topple Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon. A third president, Gerald Ford, inherited an orphaned war that ended in chaos and defeat on his watch.

To those who fought it, mostly young draftees on both sides, the war was unavoidable, a duty their country demanded of them. To those caught in the middle, the peasant farm families, it was an unending and deadly disruption to their lives. One and a half million Vietnamese perished in those 10 years. On the black granite wall in Washington, D.C., the names of 58,249 Americans who died in Vietnam are engraved.

The war gave me the best friends of my life and took some of them away almost immediately. I can still see their faces as they were then.

There was Dickie Chapelle, with her horn-rimmed glasses and a boonie hat decorated with the jump wings she’d earned in some other war long before. She told me that the first rule of war corresponding was that you must survive in order to write the story and ship your film. A Marine walking in front of her set off a booby-trapped mortar shell and a tiny fragment nicked her carotid artery. She bled to death, her head in the lap of another reporter, Bob Poos, while a Catholic chaplain gave her the last rites.

And Henri Huet, half French, half Vietnamese, all heart, all smiles. He took me on my first combat operation, teaching me every step of the way how to do this insane work and stay alive. He went down in a South Vietnamese Huey helicopter inside Laos in 1971 with the finest photographer of the war, Larry Burrows of Life magazine, and another who might have inherited Burrows’ mantle had he lived, Kent Potter of UPI.

I think of them all, all 66 who died in our war giving everything they had, telling the truth and showing the real face of war to America and the world.

I think, too, of the young American soldiers who died all around me in the Ia Drang Valley and elsewhere in a war that seemed like it would never end – and never really has in my memory and in my heart.

>>There were men such as Jim Nakayama of Rigby, Idaho,

>>who had so much to live for.

>>His wife,

>>Cathy,

>>gave birth to their baby girl, Nikki,

>>a couple of days before he died on Nov. 15, 1965.

Then there were those on the other side, such as Gen. An who did his best to wipe us out in the Ia Drang and came damned close to it. Years later, in 1993, he and some of his officers went back to our old battlefield with us, walked that blood-stained ground and shed tears with us for all who died there, American and Vietnamese.

Gen. An died of a heart attack a year later.

In 1995 my good friend Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and I visited Gen. An’s home in Hanoi to pay our respects to his widow and children. There, in a glass case of his most precious possessions, along with his uniform and medals and photographs of the young warrior, was a copy of our book, “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” which told the story of the battle.

I think, too, of Col. Vu Dinh Thuoc, who started his career as a private storming the French positions at Dienbienphu and progressed to lieutenant commanding a company at the Ia Drang and on to colonel commanding a division in the final attack on Saigon.

As we later walked the battlefield together, Thuoc tapped me on the chest and said:

“You have the heart of a soldier. It is the same as mine. I am glad I did not kill you.”

So am I, colonel. So am I.

And I am glad that peace and a measure of prosperity have at last come to Vietnam and its people after a thousand years of war. There’s no room left for anger or bitterness, only memories, and they, too, will vanish soon enough.

———————-

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. He spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine. His overseas postings included four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam.

On May 1, 1998, Galloway was decorated with the Bronze Star with V for valor for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965. His is the only medal of valor the U.S. Army awarded to a civilian for actions during the Vietnam War. He is the co-author, with retired Lt. Gen. Hal G. Moore, of the national bestseller “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” which was made into the movie “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson.

A Reporter’s Journal From Hell
by Joe Galloway

Part Four: A Season in Hell

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0204/galloway4.htm

The two cans went right over our heads and impacted no more than 20 yards from us,

the jellied gasoline spreading out and flaming up going away from us.

That 20 yards saved our lives, but through the blazing fire I could see two men, two

Americans, dancing in that fire.

I jumped to my feet.

I charged on in and someone was yelling, “Get this man’s feet!”

I reached down and grabbed the ankles of a horribly burned soldier.

They crumbled and the skin and flesh, now cooked, rubbed off.

I could feel his bare ankle bones in the palms of my hands.

>>We carried him to the aid station.

>>Later I would learn that his name was Jimmy D. Nakayama of Rigby, Idaho.

>>His wife >>Trudie

>>November 7. ??

>>Jimmy died in an Army hospital two days later, on November 17.

>>For a lot of years I looked for Jimmy’s wife and daughter.

>>Last month, after the movie We Were Soldiers was released I received a letter from

>>Jimmy’s widow.

>>Last week a letter came from his daughter Nikki, now 36 years old and the mother of

>>two young sons.

>>No single day has passed since that long-ago November day that I have not thought

>>about Jimmy Nakayama,

>>the young woman who loved him,

>>and the daughter who would never know a father’s love.

When Did Galloway meet Lt. Col. Moore, Sgt. Maj. Plumley?

did Galloway load wounded when they landed on LZ Xray?

Joe Galloway has boarded Moore’s, Plumley’s Huey’s on the morning of Nov 10,1965

and they dont even know it.

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0204/galloway3.htm

by Joe Galloway A Reporters Report from hell.

Part Three: The Things We Carried…

ref from the Digital Journalist, We Were Soldiers Once and Young hardback

story 1
Galloway meets Lt. Col. Moore, Sgt. Maj. Plumley the morning of the 11,1965 on a

6,000ft mountain top 5 miles east of Plei Me.

We Were Soldiers Once and Young hardback page32, paperback Mel Gibson on cover
page 45-46
Galloway meets Lt. Col. Moore, Sgt. Maj. Plumley the morning of the 11,1965 on a

6,000ft mountain top 5 miles east of Plei Me.

from Soldier of Fortune Sept.,1983,page 27 3rd paragraph far right column

11 Nov 1965 morning.
>Galloway meets >only Moore

Galloway “Moore walked over and suggested that if I were attached to them I could dam

well shave too.

from Soldier of Fortune Sept.,1983,page 27 3rd paragraph far right column
story 2
Galloway meets Plumley aprox 2130hrs on Nov 14,1965 on LZ X-Ray.

from the Digital Journalist

Question How did Galloway get past LT.Col. Moore as they loaded the Hueys as each

person must be accounted for, before lift off.

Galloway “On November 10th the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division moved into the

field to continue operations around Plei Me Camp”.

I hooked up with the 1st Battalion 7th U.S. Cavalry which was lifting by helicopter into a

remote area of the Special Forces Camp, searching for the North Vietnamese who

had fled.

I had my new M-16 rifle on my shoulder, 20 full magazines in my pack.

I also carried these things:

two full canteens on a pistol belt.

A sheathed bayonet.

Two Nikon F cameras on my shoulder and around my neck.

I had a 35mm lens on one, a 43-86mm zoom lens on the other.

My pack contained the magazines for the rifle.

Clean socks and drawers.

Shaving gear.

A dozen rolls of Ektachrome color; a couple of bricks of Kodak Tri X black and white.

C-rations for a couple of days.

A bottle of Louisiana hot sauce to make them semi-palatable.

Half a dozen small reporter notebooks.

Couple of spare pens.

Two books—Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, and T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War.

A fist-sized lump of C-4 plastic explosive, about which more later.

Strapped beneath my pack was a nylon poncho liner rolled inside an Army rubber

coated poncho; on its side an entrenching tool.

We heli-lifted into an old cassava field, hacked and burned out of the jungle.

Question How did Galloway get past Col. moore when they loaded the Hueys as each

person must be accounted for, befor lift off.

11 Nov 1965 morning.
>Galloway meets Moore and Plumley for the first time?

I was fishing around for a couple of packets of instant coffee when the battalion

commander,

Lt. Col. Hal Moore, and his sergeant-major, Basil L. Plumley, loomed up.

The colonel welcomed me to his battalion, inspecting me closely all the while.

Finally he said these words: In my battalion, everyone shaves in the morning.

You, too.

He was looking at my cup of coffee water.

The sergeant major was grinning broadly.

I groaned and dug out my razor and bar of soap.

2. Soldier of Fortune 1983 Sept If You Want a Good Fight by Joe Galloway

page 27 3rd paragraph far right column

Galloway dosent meet Plumley till 2130hrs! Nov 14th1965 on X-Ray

Galloway ” A gruff voice came out of the dark as Dillion and I stood up.

“Watch out where you walk.

There are a lot of dead bodies around and they are all American”

That was my> INTRODUCTION >His wife,

>>Cathy,

>>gave birth to their baby girl, Nikki,

a couple of days >before

Today, Vietnam is different from when the war started and ended

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY

Knight Ridder Newspapers

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam – Never mind that dateline. It will always be Saigon to me, the place where I landed 40 years ago to cover a war that would eventually consume much of my youth and much of my country’s innocence before it ended in bitter, bloody chaos three decades ago.

The old familiar streets are still here, but now they’re lined with chic shops and boutiques instead of the seedy bars where delicate Vietnamese women once wheedled overpriced “Saigon Teas” out of big American GIs.

The traffic is, at once, both denser and calmer as motorcycles have replaced bicycles and the man-powered cyclo taxis have been banned from the center of town. Pedestrians seem to risk death just crossing a street full of speeding motorbikes, but it’s a carefully choreographed dance. There are rules for the walker: Don’t run. Don’t try to dodge. Just walk slowly straight ahead and let the motorbikes adjust for you.

The Vietnamese are still the hardest-working people I have ever known, hustling and bustling and chasing a buck and a living with determination. The majority of them, 60-plus percent, are under the age of 30, and for them the war is something in the history books.

The country and the people are far different than they were when we came and when we left. In the cities, the old shabby yellow colonial buildings that survived have been spruced up and modernized. Office towers and high-rise hotels tower over their older neighbors. Cranes are everywhere in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City as new construction sprouts on every available scrap of land.

Communists may still rule here, but business is still business, and business is good in Vietnam. The country’s economy grew at a rate of 7.7 percent in 2004.

Two-way trade between Vietnam and the United States has reached $6 billion annually. Trade with neighboring China is also at $6 billion a year. A local Honda plant cranks out millions of the ubiquitous motorbikes that sell for the equivalent of $1,000 to $2,000.

On the outskirts of Hanoi, a huge gate modeled after the Brandenburg in Berlin, complete with sculpted horses, marks the entrance of a new subdivision for the very affluent. A planned but still unbuilt house there sold six months ago for $250,000. The same non-existent home has already changed hands twice. The last buyer paid $450,000 for it.

Yet in poorer rural areas such as Quang Tri province, the per capita income is still around $200.

What we call the Vietnam War the Vietnamese call the American War. “You see, we have fought so many wars over a thousand years that we could never call yours `the Vietnam War’ – it would be meaningless to us,” explained an earnest young guide in Hanoi.

The American War takes up only one paragraph in the history book taught in grade schools in Vietnam today. But a big, busy bookstore on what once was Tu Do Street in old Saigon carries shelves full of books about the war and biographies of some of the great North Vietnamese Army commanders, such as Gen. Nguyen Huu An, who did his best to kill all of us in the Ia Drang Valley during some terrible November days in 1965.

A friend and fellow scribbler, Phil Caputo, inscribed a copy of his book “A Rumor of War” to me: “As an old French general once told another, `The war, old boy, is our youth – secret and uninterred.’” By then, in the late 1970s, both of us knew exactly what that old French general meant.

It seemed so simple and straightforward when we began that march 40 years ago with the landing of the first American Marine battalion at the port city of Danang. We were a modern superpower blocking the spread of communism to a Third World country.

War has a way of looking simple going in – and generally turns out to be far more complex and costly than the architects ever thought possible. This one sure was.

The Vietnam War consumed the presidency of the brash Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, who sent the first combat troops there. It brought young American protesters into the streets and helped topple Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon. A third president, Gerald Ford, inherited an orphaned war that ended in chaos and defeat on his watch.

To those who fought it, mostly young draftees on both sides, the war was unavoidable, a duty their country demanded of them. To those caught in the middle, the peasant farm families, it was an unending and deadly disruption to their lives. One and a half million Vietnamese perished in those 10 years. On the black granite wall in Washington, D.C., the names of 58,249 Americans who died in Vietnam are engraved.

The war gave me the best friends of my life and took some of them away almost immediately. I can still see their faces as they were then.

There was Dickie Chapelle, with her horn-rimmed glasses and a boonie hat decorated with the jump wings she’d earned in some other war long before. She told me that the first rule of war corresponding was that you must survive in order to write the story and ship your film. A Marine walking in front of her set off a booby-trapped mortar shell and a tiny fragment nicked her carotid artery. She bled to death, her head in the lap of another reporter, Bob Poos, while a Catholic chaplain gave her the last rites.

And Henri Huet, half French, half Vietnamese, all heart, all smiles. He took me on my first combat operation, teaching me every step of the way how to do this insane work and stay alive. He went down in a South Vietnamese Huey helicopter inside Laos in 1971 with the finest photographer of the war, Larry Burrows of Life magazine, and another who might have inherited Burrows’ mantle had he lived, Kent Potter of UPI.

I think of them all, all 66 who died in our war giving everything they had, telling the truth and showing the real face of war to America and the world.

I think, too, of the young American soldiers who died all around me in the Ia Drang Valley and elsewhere in a war that seemed like it would never end – and never really has in my memory and in my heart.

>>There were men such as Jim Nakayama of Rigby, Idaho,

>>who had so much to live for.

>>His wife,

>>Cathy,

>>gave birth to their baby girl, Nikki,

>>a couple of days before he died on Nov. 15, 1965.

Then there were those on the other side, such as Gen. An who did his best to wipe us out in the Ia Drang and came damned close to it. Years later, in 1993, he and some of his officers went back to our old battlefield with us, walked that blood-stained ground and shed tears with us for all who died there, American and Vietnamese.

Gen. An died of a heart attack a year later.

In 1995 my good friend Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and I visited Gen. An’s home in Hanoi to pay our respects to his widow and children. There, in a glass case of his most precious possessions, along with his uniform and medals and photographs of the young warrior, was a copy of our book, “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” which told the story of the battle.

I think, too, of Col. Vu Dinh Thuoc, who started his career as a private storming the French positions at Dienbienphu and progressed to lieutenant commanding a company at the Ia Drang and on to colonel commanding a division in the final attack on Saigon.

As we later walked the battlefield together, Thuoc tapped me on the chest and said:

“You have the heart of a soldier. It is the same as mine. I am glad I did not kill you.”

So am I, colonel. So am I.

And I am glad that peace and a measure of prosperity have at last come to Vietnam and its people after a thousand years of war. There’s no room left for anger or bitterness, only memories, and they, too, will vanish soon enough.

———————-

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. He spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine. His overseas postings included four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam.

On May 1, 1998, Galloway was decorated with the Bronze Star with V for valor for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965. His is the only medal of valor the U.S. Army awarded to a civilian for actions during the Vietnam War. He is the co-author, with retired Lt. Gen. Hal G. Moore, of the national bestseller “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” which was made into the movie “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson.

A Reporter’s Journal From Hell
by Joe Galloway

Part Four: A Season in Hell

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0204/galloway4.htm

The two cans went right over our heads and impacted no more than 20 yards from us,

the jellied gasoline spreading out and flaming up going away from us.

That 20 yards saved our lives, but through the blazing fire I could see two men, two

Americans, dancing in that fire.

I jumped to my feet.

I charged on in and someone was yelling, “Get this man’s feet!”

I reached down and grabbed the ankles of a horribly burned soldier.

They crumbled and the skin and flesh, now cooked, rubbed off.

I could feel his bare ankle bones in the palms of my hands.

>>We carried him to the aid station.

>>Later I would learn that his name was Jimmy D. Nakayama of Rigby, Idaho.

>>His wife >>Trudie

>>November 7. ??

>>Jimmy died in an Army hospital two days later, on November 17.

>>For a lot of years I looked for Jimmy’s wife and daughter.

>>Last month, after the movie We Were Soldiers was released I received a letter from

>>Jimmy’s widow.

>>Last week a letter came from his daughter Nikki, now 36 years old and the mother of

>>two young sons.

>>No single day has passed since that long-ago November day that I have not thought

>>about Jimmy Nakayama,

>>the young woman who loved him,

>>and the daughter who would never know a father’s love.

Yes I’m sure a lot of soldiers who meet him like him, he’s a good reporter and probably quite personable. But I bet you not a single one would ever put him in charge of anything military. Because he just doesn’t -understand- it, for all that he’s been reporting on it for 40 years.

It’s blatently obvious in his writing. “

I understand that it’s so blatently obvious in his writing, but couldn’t you have given some examples, for the more uncomprehending of us?

Joe sent the exchange to General Barry McCaffrey in the following email:

—– Original Message —–
From: Jlgalloway2@xxxx.com
To: b.r.mccaffrey@xxxxxxnet ; xxxxx
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 5:20 PM
Subject: a little exchange of email
barry & jill: yesterday i had a lengthy exchange of messages with rummy’s mouthpiece, larry darita, over my column last week about paul van riper and the rigged war game in 2002. thought you might find it of interest:

General Barry McCaffrey read the exchange and encouraged Joe to allow it to be disseminated far and wide:

Subj: Re: a little exchange of email
Date: 5/4/2006 10:50:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time
From: b.r.mccaffrey@xxxxxxx.net
To: Jlgalloway2@xxxxx.com

Joe,

This is the most powerful stuff hands down I have ever read about this war. You need to put the grammar right with capitals, etc and the PUBLISH IT ON LINE IMMEDIATELY JUST AS IS…BOTH SIDES.

This exchange ought to be your going away gift to the capital. Thanks for your ferocious protection of our soldiers and marines, thanks for your dedication to the truth, thanks for your enormous moral courage.
Barry

One of the many confounders is that Americans do not appreciate the purpose of our military overseas – Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Bosnia, Germany, Hawaii, etc. I have been to all these places ‘cept Iraq and I have seen first-hand the importance of our purpose “over there”. American lives lost over there are “not worth it” for most; in many American minds we do not understand why we are there or what we are doing. However, should our shores be invaded, then we do understand and lost American soldier lives are suddenly worth the defense of our nation; when in my opinion, our defense begins abroad.

Going back to my first paragraph – military blunders and the resulting deaths are the life-blood for those against military operations. Military blunders are always going to happen, and I believe we are getting better at minimizing them, but need to do better. Look at what happened in the Aleutian Islands when we tried to get the Japanese outa there – our boys were in summer boots and summer uniforms! They were told they would be back on ship in a matter of days. Iwo Jima – same thing. Awful just awful stuff – so many lost. And we are still unfortunately losing them today – at orders of magnitude less then in previous wars (one lost is too many. . .OK).

Galloway’s quote here is totally wrong:

“the army you describe as “so much more capable” than it was 5 or 10 years ago is, in fact, very nearly broken. another three years of the careful attention of your boss ought to just about finish it off.”

Nearly broken? Not close to reality.

On a positive note, I love the dialogue in the galloway dirita exchange. This is so wonderful and so American! What other countries can this happen – would a senior DoD official actually respond to a reporter?

Yes I’m sure a lot of soldiers who meet him like him, he’s a good reporter and probably quite personable. But I bet you not a single one would ever put him in charge of anything military. Because he just doesn’t -understand- it, for all that he’s been reporting on it for 40 years.

It’s blatently obvious in his writing.