Rare Combat Footage That Shows How The 4th Infantry Fought In Vietnam 

December 2nd, 1966, west of Pleu, Republic of Vietnam. The base camp was not finished. On the slopes of the mountain called Dragon Mountain, engineers were still carving roads out of red clay, and the monsoon was turning the whole world to mud. The division had been in the country for barely two months.

 It had not yet fought its first major battle and a 24year-old platoon leader from the first battalion 12th infantry was dying of wounds received the day before. His name was Marinari. The day before his platoon had run into a North Vietnamese force in the jungle west of Pleu, the kind of sudden violent meeting that the central highlands kept producing.

 Inari was hit, struck by sniper fire and machine gun fire both. The accounts of the day say he kept moving anyway, kept his platoon organized, kept the fire coming back, kept his men covered before the wounds took him. He died the next day, the 2nd of December. He was the first officer of the fourth infantry division to be killed in Vietnam, and he was awarded the Silver Star postuously for what he did in those final hours.

 He did not know that his name would outlive the war. A few months later, the base camp at the foot of Dragon Mountain was renamed Camp Inari. The first permanent monument to a war that had barely begun. But his death raised a question that nobody in that camp could yet answer. The enemy who had killed him had disappeared back into the jungle within minutes.

 He had chosen the time, chosen the place, chosen to fight, and chosen to leave. That was the pattern of everything the division had encountered since its ships came alongside the pier at Qui Non. The North Vietnamese army seemed to fight exactly when and where it wanted and not a moment longer. The question the Ivy Division would spend the next 2 years answering was simple to state and almost impossible to solve.

How do you force a decision on an enemy who refuses to be there when you arrive? No one in the division knew in December of 1966 that the answer would be found only after thousands of patrols, hundreds of firefights, and dozens of hills whose names were just numbers on a map.

 And that when the answer finally came in the mountains north of a village called Dakto, it would arrive wrapped in a mystery the Americans did not understand until it was too late to matter. This is the story of how the fourth infantry division learned to make the North Vietnamese army stand and fight and of what that lesson truly cost.

 To understand what the Ivy Division was up against, you have to understand the ground first. Everything else follows from it. The central highlands of South Vietnam, the region the military called second core, is a high broken tableland of mountains running from the border with Laos and Cambodia in the west down to the narrow coastal plains in the east.

 In 1966, most of it was still what it had been for centuries. triple canopy jungle, razorback ridges, streams that flooded in the monsoon and vanished in the dry season, and valleys so thick with vegetation that a man could walk 5 ft from a battalion of North Vietnamese regulars and never see them. The fourth infantry division drew this ground.

 The core commander map of two core was a vast space from the Cambodian border to the South China Sea and most of it in the summer of 1966 belonged to the enemy. Seasoned North Vietnamese army units in regimental strength controlled the great bulk of the interior. They came down out of the mountains of Laos and Cambodia through corridors that had been in use for a decade, moved through the highlands, and struck wherever the war needed them next.

 The American command had assigned the fourth infantry division to a narrow corridor within this region and told it in effect to own the rest. In the late summer and autumn of 1966, the first contingent of the division, more than 3,000 men, came ashore at Quanon on the coast. They marched off the ships into heat, noise, and the peculiar chaos of a country at war, and flew inland to Pleu, the provincial capital in the heart of the highlands.

 There was no victory parade. There was a reception by the commander of American forces in Vietnam, General William West Morland, and then the buses and then the mud. The division set up camp at the foot of Dragon Mountain near Pleu. The location was chosen for a reason. Dragon Mountain dominated the approaches to the town and Pleu was the hinge of the highlands.

lose pleu, lose the high ground, and the enemy could cut South Vietnam in two along route 19 all the way to the sea. The first problem arrived with the first rains. The monsoon turned the camp into a bog. Operations were severely hampered. The first problem of the enemy arrived almost at the same time.

 He was there everywhere, but he was not there when you arrived. The Ivy Division’s soldiers went out on their first patrols in September and October of 1966 into country that swallowed sound and light and came back with nothing to show but exhaustion, leeches, and the first cases of what would be the highest malaria rate of any region in Vietnam.

And then there were the people. The highlands were home to the mountains, the mountain peoples, the Raid, and the Jerai. tribal farmers who had lived in these hills long before the Vietnamese state ever reached them. They were by any measure victims of a war they did not make. The Vietkong entered their villages, took their rice, burned what they did not take, and killed those who resisted.

 The Americans brought something else. A decision that the safest thing for these villages was to move them. In a series of relocations, entire villages were lifted. huts, belongings, livestock, families, and carried to safer ground. It was done with good intentions. Good intentions did not make it less of an upheaval for people who had lived on the same ridge line for generations.

 The men of the fourth division built the bonds with the Montana yards that the war allowed. Some would fight alongside them as irregulars, but the relocation of the Highland peoples remains one of the quiet, unresolved human costs of the American war. That was the situation the division inherited. Worse terrain, highest disease rate, a resettled population and an enemy who owned the interior and could not be found.

 But the division had one thing going for it and it was not machines. It was a tradition. The fourth infantry division, the Ivy Division, so-called because the patch bears four ivy leaves, one for each of its original regiments, and because IV reads as Ivy, had answered two calls to arms before this one.

 In the first world war, it fought at the Orc, at Sammy Hill, and in the Muse are gone. In the second, it was the first American division to land on Utah Beach, fought its way through the hedge, broke the sief freed line, was gutted in the Herkin Forest, and held the line in the Battle of the Bulge. Its men had made a profession of fighting in places nobody wanted to fight.

 The Highlands were simply the next such place. What they had not yet learned, what no American unit had yet fully learned in 1966 was how to fight this enemy on this ground. The doctrine the Ivy Division brought with it was built for a different war. It was built for the massed armies of Europe, set peace battles, lines of contact, objectives seized and held.

 In the Central Highlands, none of that existed. The enemy was not a front. He was a presence. The North Vietnamese Army and the Vietkong moved through the jungle the way water moves through a stream bed. Always following the path of least resistance, always gone before you could damn the channel. The autumn and winter of 19667 was a slow education in failure.

 The division sent out search and destroy operations. columns of infantry hacking through elephant grass and bamboo, following trails that were already cold. The enemy knew the terrain the way a farmer knows his fields. He had trails under the canopy, caches hidden in the earth, village networks that fed him information American intelligence could never match.

 When contact came, it came on his terms. A sudden vicious ambush, mortars, automatic weapons, the enemy bouncing in with swift ferocity, as the afteraction reports put it. And then the moment American artillery was called in and the heavy fire began to fall, he melted away. There was terrible arithmetic in this. An American patrol could march for six days and make one contact lasting 20 minutes.

 The enemy chose every one of those 20 minutes. He chose the ground, usually ground where American heavy weapons could not be brought to bear quickly. He chose the hour, often at night, when American units could not pursue, and he chose the exit, which was usually a pre-planned withdrawal route through terrain an armored vehicle could not reach and a helicopter could not see.

 The division soldiers learned the frustration of it in their bones. From the air, the enemy could be hit, but he was a master of camouflage, invisible beneath triple canopy, and air power alone could not make him stand. On the ground, the Americans could find him sometimes, but could not hold him. One patrol would be hit by a force three times its size, survive by the skin of its teeth, and watch the enemy vanish into the green wall before reinforcements could arrive.

The weapons that had won the last war were not the answer. The artillery was devastating when there was something to shoot at. The gunships were deadly when they could see the target. The infantry was willing, but an infantryman cannot close with an enemy who refuses to be closed with.

 And there was a deeper problem, one that the soldiers on the ground felt more than the commanders in Saigon did. Every operation that came back empty-handed was not a failed operation. It was evidence that the enemy had won without firing a shot. He was fighting a war of time. Every month the Americans spent searching the empty jungle was a month he spent preparing for something bigger.

 The Ivy Division could not see it yet. But the enemy was not merely hiding. He was building. By the beginning of 1967, a hard truth had settled over the division. They were fighting a war of patrols and ambushes in which the enemy wrote the script. What the division needed was a way to force him to fight the American way with artillery, with air power, with every advantage the Americans possessed.

 The answer when it came was not one weapon. It was a partnership. The Americans had one advantage that no amount of jungle craft could cancel. They were overhead. By early 1967, the division had begun to build a combined arms system of extraordinary refinement. A system built around the helicopter and built to solve the problem of an enemy who could not be seen. It worked like this.

 Out ahead of the infantry columns above the canopy flew the light observation helicopters, the small, nimble scouts the soldiers called loaches. They flew low and slow, hanging over the jungle like insects, drawing fire so that the fire could be located. They were bait and they were eyes.

 When a loach found the enemy, it called for its big brothers, the armed Huey gunships loaded with rockets and machine guns that could be overhead in minutes, not hours, the way artillery had been in earlier wars, but minutes. The gunships struck fast with uncanny accuracy for an entirely new weapon. And they had formidable power. For the infantry below, the arrival of the gunships was a revolution.

 A forward air controller in the sky who could see the enemy, fix him in place, and hammer him until the infantry arrived. And when the infantry did arrive, that was the second half of the system. Artillery was registered on every likely position. Forward observers moved with the patrols, speaking directly to the firing batteries, and the batteries themselves had been brought close.

 By 1967, the division was building fire bases on hilltops throughout the highlands. Bulldozed, sandbagged, armored positions from which big 105s and 155s could reach any valley within walking distance of an American soldier. The system had a name in the reports. firepower and mobility mutually supporting.

 In practice, it was simpler than that. The loach found the enemy. The gunships fixed him. The artillery stunned him. And the infantry, the man on the ground, the one who had to walk into the ambush, finished him. But there was a cost built into the system. And the division discovered it in the spring of 1967. To make the enemy fight, somebody had to be in the jungle where the fighting was.

The system could not work from a fire base. It required patrols, small, exposed, vulnerable patrols walking into the places the enemy had chosen to defend. The first real test came in operation Sam Houston. The enemy had been interfering with a vital road, a road being pushed westward from Pleu toward a special forces camp near the Cambodian border.

 The road crews had been morted, the convoys ambushed, the engineers shot at from the treeine. Intelligence reported a large concentration of North Vietnamese units in the border mountains. This was more than harassment. This was an enemy choosing his own battlefield. Operation Sam Houston ran from January to April of 1967. The concept was simple.

 take the fight to the enemy on his own side of the border in the valleys he used to infiltrate and keep him there and keep him from disengaging. It was in effect the first large-scale test of the division’s new way of war. It worked and it bled. The terrain was the worst the division had yet seen. The ply trap valley, a long murderous slash of jungle and elephant grass along the Cambodian frontier.

 a place where the soldiers would later say the map was a lie and the compass was a rumor. Landing zones were almost non-existent. Clearings had to be blown out of the jungle before resupply ships could come in. And those clearings were exactly where the enemy liked to wait. On the 22nd of March 1967, one company of Ivy Division infantry, 108 men, was caught in the valley.

 What hit them was the full fury of a North Vietnamese force that had been waiting in prepared positions for exactly this chance. The company took fire from three sides. The fighting went on all day. When it was over, company A had lost 22 men killed and 42 wounded. A casualty rate of 60% in a single engagement.

 22 names on a morning report. 42 men who would never walk normally out of the Highlands again. The battle was a victory in the ledger of the time. The enemy had been fixed, struck, and driven from the field with losses he could not replace as readily as the Americans could replace theirs. The American accounting that day put North Vietnamese losses far higher than the American.

 But the men of Company A did not experience it as a victory. They experienced it as the day their company almost ceased to exist. Operation Sam Houston ended in April with 155 Americans dead and a claimed count of more than 700 enemy killed. The division had learned something. The enemy could be forced to fight if you put men into the places he had to defend.

 But the method consumed the men who made it work. Every lesson was being paid for in the worst currency. And even as the first and second brigades learned this lesson in the border mountains, the third brigade was learning a different one in a completely different war 400 m to the south. While the rest of the division hunted NVA regiments along the Cambodian border of Pleu, the Third Brigade had been sent south to war zone C, the Vietkong’s old stronghold north of Saigon to fight alongside the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in the biggest

operations the American side had yet mounted. This was the world of the Iron Triangle, the January 1967 Operation Cedar Falls, in which a mechanized battalion of Ivy Division soldiers, men riding in armored personnel carriers, a novelty for a division built on foot, was assigned to clear the southern sector of the Saigon River, and block the escape routes of the Vietkong fleeing the giant cordon.

 Cedar Falls was the first time American troops bulldozed an entire enemy stronghold, the village of Ben Souk, out of existence, and the mechanized ivy men learned that armor could work in a war everyone had assumed belonged to the infantrymen and the machete. Then came Operation Junction City. at the time the largest American operation of the war.

82 days a paratrooper air assault behind enemy lines and the first time American troops crossed into a war zone the communists had considered their own capital. The third brigade formed part of the eastern blocking force, sweeping the jungle in battalion-sized columns, overrunning base camps, uncovering caches.

 In one sweep with elements of the 25th division, the Ivy men walked into a division-sized Vietkong complex. Bunkers, hospitals, storehouses, rice laid out like a proper headquarters. The first day brought heavy resistance. By the second day, the enemy had abandoned it during the night, leaving everything behind.

 The lessons of war zone C were different from the lessons of the Highlands. In the south, the enemy ran. In the west, the enemy chose to fight. The third brigade learned mobility, that men riding in steel could cross country that would kill a foot patrol and arrive able to fight. They learned that tanks, once dismissed as useless in the jungle, could turn an ambush into a route, and that a convoy stopped on a road could be saved only by something mobile enough to reach it.

 It was a great irony of the Ivy Division’s war that its most famous tactical innovation, armor, and mechanized infantry in the jungle began not in the mountains where the division fought, but in the flat lands where it had been sent to learn. Back in the highlands, the enemy had not been idle. Through the spring and summer of 1967, the first and second brigades ran Operation Francis Marion, an enormous border screening effort based out of fire bases with the evocative names of Jackson Hole and the Oasis.

 Designed to do one thing, seal the border and intercept North Vietnamese forces wherever they chose to cross. Through that long grinding operation, more months of patrols, more ambushes, more costs, the artillery did its share on a scale that is difficult to grasp. By the operation’s end, more than 400,000 rounds had been fired into the border country.

 The enemy understood what was happening. The Ivy Division was building a wall of fire along the border, and if the wall could not stop infiltration entirely, it could make infiltration enormously expensive. So in the autumn of 1967, the North Vietnamese did what the Americans had been trying for a year to make him do. He stopped running.

 He made a decision. Out in the mountains where the borders of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam meet above a small town called Dakto, elements of the North Vietnamese First Division. By most accounts, four regiments, roughly 7,000 men, were concentrating in the rugged country around the provincial boundary. It was the largest enemy buildup the Highlands had yet seen, and the most deliberate.

 The Ivy Division had spent a year learning to force the enemy to fight. In November of 1967, he was about to demonstrate that a forced fight is not the same as a chosen one, and that the enemy, too, could choose. If you have found this account worth your time, consider subscribing. More of these stories from the Vietnam War are on the way.

 The buildup at DAC 2 was not a secret. The special forces camps in the region, Ben Het, Dak Peek, Dakiang were watched and the watchers reported movement, battalion columns, artillery, supplies moving along the trails from Laos. In October of 1967, intelligence confirmed what the division had feared. The North Vietnamese First Division was assembling for a major operation aimed at the American logistical lifeline and the chain of camps along the border.

 The American response was operation MacArthur and the Battle of Dakto, which began on November 3rd, 1967 and would run for the next 3 weeks. It would be for the American side the bloodiest engagement of the year and the purest concentration of North Vietnamese regulars the war had yet produced. The Ivy Division’s first brigade made the first contact on November 3rd and 4th on the slopes of Hill 1338, a monstrous jungle covered peak that dominated the approaches to DAC 2.

 The fighting there was immediate, heavy, and unlike anything the division had seen. The North Vietnamese were not bouncing in and out. They were dug in on the high ground with prepared positions, bunkers, interlocking fields of fire, mortar pits registered to the meter. This was the moment the division’s year of adaptation was put to the test.

 The enemy had made the choice to stand. Now the Americans had to take him. For the next 3 weeks, the battle ran like a fire along the ridge lines. Hill after hill was attacked, taken, and held against counterattack. Hill 882, 4 days of assault against an NVA battalion in bunkers. Hill 724 seized after a grinding uphill fight by infantrymen of the Ivy Division, so costly that the hill was later renamed in memory of the dead. The big guns of the division.

 By the battle’s peak, 17 artillery batteries supported the operation, hammered the enemy ridges around the clock. Air Force strikes, B-52s from Guam, fighter bombers from Thailand, burned the jungle off the hills in sheets of orange fire. Three American brigades were in the fight. Two from the fourth infantry division and the 173rd airborne brigade, the paratroopers, moved north from their base at Bianoa to join the hunt.

 Under the overall command of the fourth division’s commander, Major General William R. Piers, the force advanced on the enemy positions like a closing hand. Piers was the right commander for this war. A veteran of Merill’s Marauders in Burma in the Second World War, jungle warfare against the Japanese. He had spent a professional lifetime thinking about exactly the problem now before him.

 How to bring overwhelming American power to bear on an elusive enemy in impossible terrain. He was a driver. The soldiers knew he flew over the battlefield constantly, appearing anywhere, demanding more speed, more aggression, more results. Under his hand, the division’s year of learning became a weapon.

 The enemy fought with equal ferocity. The North Vietnamese First Division was the finest formation the other side had. Hardened regulars, veterans of years of war, many of them fighting on their own border, on ground they had fortified for months. They did not give ground cheaply. There were days when the Americans advanced by meters.

 By the third week of November, the battle had narrowed to a single objective. The highest, most formidable position the enemy held. On the map, it was just a number. Hill 875. Hill 875 was the anchor of the enemy’s line, an almost perfectly conical mountain, its summit shorn by years of ordinance into a wasteland of stumps, craters, and shattered logs.

 It was the place from which the North Vietnamese could see everything that moved in the valley below and the key to the passes behind it. Take 875 and the enemy’s supply and withdrawal route into Laos was cut. Hold it and the whole Dak 2 position became untenable. On November 19th, the assault went in. The burden fell on the paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne with an infantry battalion of the Ivy Division attacking the hill from another direction.

 on the northern slope. What followed was one of the worst infantry fights of the war. The North Vietnamese had fortified the hill over weeks. Bunkers of logs and earth connected by trenches sighted so that every piece of the slope was covered by fire. The Americans came up the hill through a storm of small arms and mortar fire in a jungle that had been turned to blades and splinters by the bombing.

They took the first positions and were hit by counterattacks. They took more and were hit again. The fighting went on for 4 days. The second battalion of the 53rd Infantry, the lead assault battalion, was cut to pieces. By the end, 87 of its men were dead and 130 wounded, most of them in the first two days.

 On the 21st of November, the second day of the assault, the unthinkable happened. A tactical air strike called in to support the pinned down paratroopers was misdirected. The napom fell on American lines instead of the enemies. The firestorm swept over a company of the second battalion. The precise number of men lost in that green and orange instant remains a matter of dispute in the records, but every account agrees on what it did to the battalion’s morale and to the assault’s momentum.

 The paratroopers who survived the napalm had watched their own air force kill their own men and the hill still had to be taken. They attacked again on the 22nd. They were bloodily repulsed. And now the division’s problem was no longer military. It was existential. 4 days on the hill, 200 casualties. The enemy still held the crest.

 A retreat would abandon the dead and hand the NVA a propaganda victory. Another assault risked another disaster. The decision was made to go up the hill one final time with everything the Americans possessed. The morning of the 23rd of November, 1967, Thanksgiving Day, broke over DAC 2 in the cold rain of the Highlands. For the last time, artillery and mortars poured fire onto the summit of Hill 875.

 Air Force strikes rolled over the crest, destroying whatever cover the enemy had left. Then the infantry went up. The accounts of the final assault are a study in how close-run things war really are. The North Vietnamese, battered, short of ammunition. Their escape route behind the hill compromised, fought until the Americans were among their bunkers, and then they did what their commanders had decided days before.

 They abandoned the crest, filtering down the reverse slope under the cover of the mist. By late afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, the summit of Hill 875 was in American hands. The men who reached the top found a lunar landscape and enemy dead in the hundreds. The battle of Dakto was over. In the region as a whole, the fourth infantry division and its attached units had fought elements of the enemy’s first division through 20 days of continuous combat.

 More than 1,600 North Vietnamese dead were counted by the American side. Even the most conservative estimates put the enemy’s losses above a thousand. The American cost was staggering. More than 360 Americans dead and more than 1,400 wounded. The first brigade of the fourth infantry division alone lost 82 men. South Vietnamese troops fighting alongside them lost more than 70.

 By the standards of the time, the kill ratio was a triumph. By the standards of the men who went up the hill, it was a butcher’s bill. Major General Piers standing on the battlefield called it a victory. And by any tactical definition, it was. The enemy’s first division had been shattered. The border was secure. The enemy had stood, and the Ivy Division had beaten him toe to toe on ground of his own choosing.

 What no one on that hilltop yet understood was that the enemy had chosen that ground precisely so that he could lose it before the war moves on. It is worth stopping at the bottom of Hill 875 because the war did not stop there for the men who fought it. The victory had been won by a machine, an interlocking system of artillery, air power, helicopters, and infantry that the Ivy Division had spent a year perfecting.

But machines do not die. Men do. The stretcherbearers and the medics were the true protagonists of the aftermath. The correspondence between the American infantrymen and his medical support had been built during the same year as the fighting system itself. The medics who walked with the patrols, the dust off helicopters that came in under fire, the field hospitals that could take a man from a jungle slope to a surgeon in under an hour.

 a chain of survival more sophisticated than any in the history of war. Of the wounded at DAC 2, the great majority survived. That is a fact worth marking because it was paid for in the same currency as everything else. But the survivors carried the hill with them. The men of the 173rd Airborne came off hill 875 holloweyed and short of numbers.

 Some companies had lost a third of their strength. The paratroopers who had watched the napalm come down on their own lines carried a wound that no surgeon could reach. In the weeks that followed, the division’s medical officers would note a rising number of men being evacuated for reasons that had no name yet. Combat exhaustion, the records called it, a phrase that did not begin to describe the weight of what those men had carried up that slope.

 And the ground itself was testimony. The hills of DAC 2, 875, 882, 724, 1138 were renamed unofficially by the men who fought on them. Bloody Ridge was one. Purple Heart Hill was another. The names never made the maps. The dead never came off the hills in the way the living did. Some of them are still there.

 The ground around DAC 2 was never fully cleared of its dead, enemy or American. And the jungle has long since reclaimed the fire bases. Then there was the name that began this story. Camp Anari had grown into a city in the jungle. More than 900 buildings by the end of the division’s first year, a monument to a lieutenant who had died before the war got properly underway.

 The men who went uphill 875 did not think about monuments. They thought about each other. That was the division’s other inheritance, the one that the year of learning had built without anyone planning it. A bond between men who had bled together in a war that gave them nothing else lasting. The soldiers of the fourth infantry division went back into the jungle after Dak 2.

 There was no time for anything else. The war did not pause for the dead. The winter of 1967-68 should have been by every logic of the time the beginning of the end for the enemy in the highlands. The NVA First Division had been wrecked. The border had been held. The Ivy Division’s zone of influence had grown by the division’s own accounting sevenfold, covering some 10,000 square miles of rugged terrain.

And yet, almost immediately, the enemy came back. In January of 1968, intelligence reported a new buildup near DAC 2. The Ivy Division went back to work. An air assault wave after wave of helicopters against a new objective in the mountains, Hill 1049. The enemy was dug in along the crest. The assault forces hacked through his bunkers and took the hill in a series of determined attacks.

 It was a smaller battle and it was barely noticed outside the highlands because at the end of January 1968, the Ted offensive exploded across the entire country. The North Vietnamese army and the Vietkong attacked every city, every province capital, every American base in South Vietnam simultaneously. The cities which the American command had assumed were secure were the enemy struck hardest.

 And it was only then in the light of Tet that the DAC 2 campaign of November was seen for what it had been. The border battles of autumn 1967, DAC 2 and its siblings at Loch Nin and Songb had not been desperate defenses. They had been bait. The North Vietnamese High Command had ordered its regular divisions to stand and fight along the borders to absorb American firepower to draw American units and American attention to the frontiers.

 The first division had been sacrificed at DAC 2 in service of a larger plan. While West Morland’s forces were congratulating themselves on the kill ratios in the mountains, the enemy was massing the forces for Tet in the cities and the lowlands where the Americans were thinnest. Historians still argue about how deliberate the plan was.

 Whether the border battles were a faint ordered from Hanoi or a series of local commands making the best of a bad situation. But the effect is not in dispute. The victories of Dakto had bought the Americans nothing but a change in the enemy’s timetable. The enemy’s decision to stand and fight. The decision the Ivy Division had spent a year trying to force had been in the end a decision the enemy wanted to make anyway.

 Major General Piers had left the division by then, succeeded by Major General Charles P. Stone, who would lead the Ivy Division through the desperate winter of Tet and the battles that followed. Piers would go on to a different kind of service. He was later named to investigate the massacre at Mi and his report which told the truth about what had happened there was suppressed by the army for years.

 The man who had commanded the greatest victory of the division’s war would spend his last years in uniform fighting a different kind of cover up. It is one of the wars quieter ironies and the Ivy Division itself simply continued. There was no choice. The enemy was back in the highlands in strength within weeks. The division fought through 1968 and 1969, held the border, protected Pleu, and ground down the ranks of the NVA divisions that kept coming up the trails from Laos.

 The battle of Dak 2 would not be repeated. The enemy never again concentrated as openly on that ground. But the war it had been a prelude to went on for years. The men of the division had answered the question they had been given. They could force the enemy to fight and they could win. What they had not been asked and what no one on the American side had yet thought to ask was whether it would be enough.

 So what in the end made the difference at DAC 2. The answer is not a single weapon, not a single leader, not a single stroke of luck. It is a system. And the story of how the Ivy Division built it is the story of the war itself compressed into one command. The division’s edge was its ability to bring overwhelming firepower to bear on an enemy it had spent a year learning to locate.

 The light observation helicopters found the enemy, and the enemy, unable to move without being seen from above, lost the freedom of movement that had made him unbeatable. The gunships fixed him in place. The artillery, 17 batteries at DAC 2, connected to every infantry patrol by radio, stunned him. and the infantry closed in on him, but firepower does not locate an enemy by itself.

 The ground element was the irreplaceable half of the equation. Every hill at Dak 2 was taken by men on foot, carrying rifles, walking uphill into fire. The guns could prepare the way. They could not take the crest. The North Vietnamese understood this and they fought the Americans exactly where the Americans were least comfortable.

 in the bunkers, at close range, in the mist. And there was the third element, the one the afteraction reports rarely captured, the enemy’s own decision. It is the uncomfortable fact of this story that the Ivy Division succeeded in forcing the NVA to stand and fight at DAC 2 and that the NVA had already decided to stand and fight there.

 The American learning curve, the patrols, the fire bases, the year of adaptation, all of it mattered. But the battle that made the division’s reputation was in the deepest sense a battle the enemy gave them. That is the larger answer to the documentaries question, and it is a hard one. The Ivy Division proved that an American division could defeat a North Vietnamese division in open battle.

 But the enemy strategy did not depend on winning open battles. It depended on choosing them and on choosing to lose them at the right time. Dak 2 was a victory that cost the enemy a division and bought him the conditions for Tet. In the strategic arithmetic of Hanoi, that was a bargain. For the men on the ground, none of this was visible in November of 1967.

They saw what infantrymen always see. the hill, the fire, the men beside them. They fought because they were there and because the man next to them was there. That is the human answer to the question and it should not be lost in the strategic one. The system made victory possible. The men made it actual.

 The enemy’s plan made it temporary. The fourth infantry division answered its third call to arms in the central highlands, and it did its duty there with the same stubborn competence it had shown on Utah Beach and in the Hortkin Forest. By the time the division’s colors left Vietnam in 1970, it had fought in the worst country the war had to offer against the best infantry its enemy possessed, and it had never lost a battle of any consequence.

 The ivy patch was worn proudly by the men who wore it, and it was known in the Highlands in a way that the division’s propaganda film was not entirely wrong to claim. The enemy respected that patch because it stood for a unit that would come and find him, even in the places he had chosen. But the mountains kept their secrets.

 The jungle grew back over the fire bases, over the landing zones, over the hills where the dead were never recovered. The Montanards who had been relocated and who had watched their old ridgeel lines disappear into the war were relocated again by history itself. Their highlands became part of an undivided communist state in 1975 and the American promises that had accompanied them through the war dissolved with the American departure.

There was no one left to mark the graves of Daktu or to tell the children of the mountain people why their grandfathers had trusted outsiders with their villages. The men who fought at Dak 2 are old men now, the same age the lieutenant who named Camp Anari never reached. Some of them still talk about the hill on Thanksgiving when the family asks. Most of them do not.

 The war they fought was the last one in which American infantry could be decisively committed to a war of attrition in the Asian jungle. And the lesson of their war was the lesson of attrition itself. That a war of numbers is only won by the side that can sustain the numbers. The Ivy Division could force the enemy to fight and it could win the fight.

 It could not force the enemy to stop fighting and it could not convert the hilltops it took into a peace. in that the division story is not a story of failure nor entirely a story of victory. It is a story of what soldiers do when they are given a war that cannot in the end be won by soldiers. They do the job they are given. They bury their friends.

They hold the ground and they answer the next call. The old soldiers of the fourth infantry division will tell you if you ask that the ground they held mattered. They are right. It did matter to the people it protected, to the strategy it served, and to the men who died on it. What the war could not give them, the reason for the ground, the meaning of the sacrifice, history has still not fully settled, and maybe never will.

 The machine that won DAC 2, the helicopters, the guns, the radios, the system, is long gone from those mountains. Most of the men who worked it are gone now, too. What remains is the part of the story that outlives every system and every strategy. The oldest lesson of the infantry learned again on the worst ground in Vietnam. That in the end wars are decided by men who are willing to go up the hill.

 And at DAC 2 Thanksgiving morning 1967, the men of the Ivy Division went up the hill. Like and subscribe. See you in the next