In 1965, 2,000 NVA Soldiers Attacked 450 Americans At Ia Drang. The Next 72 Hours Were Hell

In 1965, 2,000 NVA Soldiers Attacked 450 Americans At Ia Drang. The Next 72 Hours Were Hell

The clearing was about the size of a football field. Barely eight helicopters could touch down in it at once. And on the morning of the 14th of November 1965, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore was about to land 450 men inside it. Rising over that clearing was a mountain called the Chu Pong. Somewhere on its slopes waited more than 2,000 soldiers of the North Vietnamese army.

 And they had been hoping the Americans would come. You have probably seen a version of what happened next. A famous film turned this battle into a bayonet charge and a hard-one victory. The men of the first cavalry did hold that ground. So, how did the first 72 hours in the Ayad Drang Valley come so close to ending in disaster? And why does the army’s own record tell a harder story than the movie? This is that record hour by hour drawn from the Army’s own files rather than the film.

 It starts at 10:48 in the morning in a place the maps called Landing Zone X-ray. Four months earlier, most of these men had been training in the Pinewoods of Georgia. Now, they were the test case for a brand new idea about how America would fight. The First Cavalry Division was an experiment. Instead of marching to battle, the infantry would fly, carried into the fight on helicopters.

 The Ayad Drang was where that theory would meet a real enemy for the first time. According to the Army Center of Military History, Moore was ordered to air assault into the valley on the 14th and told plainly not to climb the mountain itself. Moore chose the clearing called X-ray because it was one of the few spots big enough to land his helicopters.

 It sat almost at the foot of the mountain. His battalion was under strength that morning. Most of the men were young, many of them drafties barely out of their teens. Roughly 450 of them would go in, fed a dozen or so at a time because the clearing simply could not hold more. Landing a single light battalion at the foot of a mountain full of enemy regiments was looking back either very bold or close to reckless.

That afternoon it would look like both. The first lift touched down at precisely 10:48. Moore’s afteraction report fixes the moment to the minute. For about half an hour, fewer than 200 Americans stood in that clearing. Then a patrol caught a break that turned almost at once into a warning.

 They captured a lone North Vietnamese soldier who had slipped away from his unit. Through an interpreter, and this is from historian John Carlin’s account for the army, the prisoner said there were three battalions on the mountain who wanted very much to kill Americans. That was on the order of 1600 men. Fewer than 200 Americans had reached the ground.

 If the enemy had swept down onto the clearing in that first half hour, this would be a very different story. Just after noon, the shooting started. Bravo Company pushing out from the clearing ran headlong into North Vietnamese soldiers coming down off the slope. Within minutes, it stopped being a landing and became a battle.

 There was a reason the mountain was so crowded. The North Vietnamese had been pulling American units toward this valley on purpose, hoping to learn how to fight the new helicopter army and bleed it. Moore had set his men down almost exactly where the enemy wanted a fight. One piece of that battle would haunt the men who lived through it.

 A platoon from Bravo Company chasing fleeing enemy soldiers pushed too far ahead and lost contact with everyone behind them. Their leader, Lieutenant Henry Herrick, was killed. So were the two sergeants who took over after him. Command fell to Sergeant Ernie Savage, mostly because he happened to be near the radio.

 Cut off on a low rise, surrounded on every side, Savage did the only thing that could keep them alive. He called artillery down almost on top of his own position, and kept calling it through the afternoon and into the night. By the time it ended, the platoon had lost eight men killed and 13 wounded out of about 27.

 The survivors held a patch of ground barely bigger than a tennis court and would not be reached for another full day. The men started calling them the lost platoon. This is where the story takes a turn. Nobody in that clearing expected. The fight for the lost platoon was only the opening. As the light went, Moore pulled his companies into a tight circle around the clearing and a giant termite hill that became his command post.

 Everyone dug in and waited. Keeping them alive were the helicopter crews. Major Brucele and Captain Ed Freeman flew their unarmed Hueies into that clearing again and again, hauling in ammunition and water and lifting out the wounded. The medical evacuation helicopters had refused to land in fire that heavy. Crannle and Freeman went in anyway.

 Between them, they carried out around 70 wounded men, and both would receive the Medal of Honor for it, though the recognition took decades to arrive. Freeman said later that he flew in and out of that landing zone for 14 1/2 hours and made his final landing near 10 at night. The North Vietnamese probed the perimeter under a bright moon, testing for a soft spot close enough that men could hear them moving in the grass.

 Out on the low rise, the lost platoon beat back three separate assaults in the dark and somehow lost no one else before dawn. By first light, the Americans were still holding. Everything was in place for the worst hours of the entire battle. The men just did not know yet what was coming. reaction to where you guys would occasionally wear these or there was another uh another boot that had actually a foot pattern on the bottom.

 So that came from SISO, our supply people. Yes. In Okinawa. Indeed. Ed Baker. If you wanted Ed Baker. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So if you actually wanted to get a uh leave like a footprint or leave um an indigenous print, then you would sometimes u Yeah. We never got this far to us wearing them because uh one thing about our jungle boots, we had that metal plate.

 So if we ever or think about stepping on something more explosive. True. You know that would protect your foot a little bit at least and we had we given the option well we would have thought about it but who knows. The second morning began before the sun was fully up. More sent patrols out from the perimeter and one of them walked straight into hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers massing for an attack.

 What followed fell hardest on Charlie Company. Wave after wave came at the southern edge of the perimeter. Two lieutenants were killed within minutes of each other. One of them cut down trying to drag a wounded man to safety. With the line close to breaking, the Air Force controller on the ground, Lieutenant Charlie Hastings, radioed a single code phrase, broken arrow.

 It meant an American unit was in danger of being overrun, and it summoned every available aircraft in South Vietnam. In their book, We were soldiers. Once in Young, Moore and the reporter Joe Galloway described fighter bombers stacked up over the clearing at every level of the sky, each waiting its turn to attack. That much firepower, that close, came with a price.

 Two jets dropped Napal directly onto Moore’s own command post as men waved frantically to turn them away. Americans burned. A young soldier named Jimmy Nakayyama was among them, and he died of his wounds 2 days later. One of the very few civilians in that clearing was a young wire reporter named Joe Galloway. 50 years on, he described what those first minutes on the ground actually felt like. Galloway did not stay a bystander.

Before the day was out, he was carrying water, carrying the wounded, and by his own account, carrying a rifle of his own. But the guns and the airplanes were not done yet. And how a single under strength battalion survived being outnumbered on that mountain is the part the film quietly skips.

 If this kind of history is why you are here, subscribing helps this channel keep digging through the archives instead of the myths. So, here is what actually held that clearing together. And it was almost never a single rifle. It was firepower on a scale that is genuinely hard to picture. From two firebases a few miles away, American guns fired with almost no pause for 3 days.

 Encyclopedia Bratannica puts the total at around 33,000 artillery rounds poured into the ground around that one small clearing. 33,000. That is not a typo, by the way. It works out to a shell landing near that perimeter every few seconds for days on end. Then came something that had never been done before. B-52 bombers flying all the way from the island of Guam struck the Chupong Mountain in support of the troops below.

It was the first time those giant strategic bombers were turned on a ground battle. The famous film ends on a dramatic bayonet charge that turns the tide. According to military historians who have gone back to the record, that charge did not happen. Moore did order bayonets fixed on the final morning as a careful precaution while his men swept the ground in front of them.

 But there was no grand charge into a waiting enemy. The North Vietnamese had already begun pulling back, driven off mostly by artillery and air, not by hand-to-hand fighting. On the final morning, even the enemy commander understood what was killing his men. General Enuan Huan, who led the North Vietnamese here, later explained his answer to American firepower.

 “Grab the Americans by the belt,” he said. “Get so close that the bombs and shells could not fall without hitting their own.” By the third morning, the Americans had a few hours of uneasy quiet and a growing row of their own dead and wounded waiting to go home. Moore ordered one last sweep of the ground beyond the perimeter, partly to be certain no wounded man of his had been left out in the grass.

 What his soldiers found out there was the full scale of what the guns and the air strikes had done. Around midm morning on the 16th of November, the order came to pull Moore’s battalion out and back to base to rest. By the army’s own timeline, their fight at X-ray had lasted a little under 48 hours. For Moore’s men, the worst was over.

 For the First Cavalry Division, the 72 hours were not finished. And the part that comes next is the part the movie leaves out entirely. On the 17th of November, a different battalion moving on foot toward another clearing called Albany strung out in a long column through the trees. Almost exactly 72 hours after Moore first landed at X-ray, the North Vietnamese caught that column in the open.

 What happened at landing zone Albany became one of the worst single day losses of the entire war for an American unit. In a matter of hours, more than 150 Americans were killed. Many of the wounded lay among the enemy through the night. If X-ray had been a hard one stand, Albany was closer to a massacre. One officer who fought at both places.

 Lieutenant Rick Rcora later called Albany a long bloody traffic accident in the jungle. Taken together, those two fights are what that opening stretch of IA drang actually looked like. The film that made this battle famous ends at X-ray on the victory. It never shows Albany at all. Leave it out and you get a triumph. Put it back in and you get something much closer to the truth of that week.

 So, what did those 72 hours actually cost? At X-Ray itself, the Army’s center of military history records 79 Americans killed and 121 wounded. Add the ambush at Albany and the toll across those days climbs to 234 Americans killed. Galloway, who counted friends among them, put it at more than 200 dead in barely 4 days and nights.

You will see enormous enemy body counts attached to this battle, well over a thousand. Those are American estimates. And Moore himself cut the field numbers back because he did not trust them. The honest answer is that no one has a reliable count of the North Vietnamese dead.

 Both sides walked away, certain they had learned how to beat the other. The Americans decided helicopters and firepower had worked. The North Vietnamese decided they could stand and trade blows with the most powerful army on earth and keep coming. The war would run for another 10 years on those two conclusions and both sides would keep paying for them.

Galloway said that not a single man left that valley the same person who arrived. The 79 names from X-ray and hundreds more from the days around it are cut into a wall of black granite in Washington today. That is the first 72 hours of Iad Drang. Not a clean victory and not a movie. Just a clearing at the foot of a mountain and the men who were told to hold it.