A plane dropped some napalm bombs just in front of the line. There weren’t enough GIs there, and they couldn’t shoot them down fast enough. Another group on the other side almost made it to the lines. It looked like a ticker-tape parade, but when the things hit the ground, the little pieces exploded. One of them dropped a lot of stuff that shimmered in the sun like green confetti. The people in that sector opened up with everything they had. About 100 of them jumped up and made for our lines, and all hell broke loose. Late that morning, the Cong made a charge. There were some wounded lying around, bandaged up with filthy shirts and bandages, smoking cigarettes or lying in a coma with plasma bottles hanging above their stretchers. After three days of constant bombardment, you get so you can tell from the sound how close a shell is going to land within 50 to 75 feet. Whenever I heard a shell coming close, I’d duck, but they’d keep standing.
They said little, just looked around with darting, nervous eyes. Some had long rips in their clothing where shrapnel and bullets had missed them. Some of them had blood on their faces from scratches and from other guys’ wounds. The 1st Battalion had been fighting continuously for three or four days, and I had never seen such filthy troops. The names of the soldiers have been changed, but in all other respects, this is what happened. This was the beginning of the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, the first pitched battle fought by American soldiers in the war for Vietnam, and the bloodiest engagement of the long and divisive struggle.Īfter a day of marching into the jungle, Smith and the 500 other men of the 2nd Battalion came upon a clearing, known on the maps as X‑ray, where the 1st Battalion was fighting. On November 15, Smith’s battalion was ordered in to help the 1st Battalion, which was meeting strong resistance. In November 1965, units of the 7th Cavalry began to make the first American penetration in force of a communist stronghold near the Cambodian border. “We dug and walked and looked for an enemy who was never there.” “We thought we were a sham,” Smith recalls today. Smith’s company - Charlie Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry (Regiment) - had never been in action, and Smith, who was 20 years old, had come to believe that it never would. Smith was a supply clerk in the 1st Air Cavalry Division in South Vietnam.
This article and other features about America in Vietnam can be found in the Post’s Special Collector’s Edition, The Heroes of Vietnam.
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