What happened at Ia Drang?
The Battle of Ia Drang, fought from 14 to 18 November 1965 in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, was the first major battle between US troops and the regular North Vietnamese Army. Helicopters of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) dropped Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore's battalion into a clearing called Landing Zone X-Ray beneath the Chu Pong massif, where two North Vietnamese regiments surrounded it. The battalion held for three days with massive artillery and air support. Then, on 17 November, another battalion marching to Landing Zone Albany was ambushed and lost some 155 men killed in a single afternoon. Both sides claimed victory, and both drew the lessons that shaped the next seven years.5
In November 1965 American soldiers rode helicopters into a valley in the Central Highlands to find the enemy, and found far more of them than anyone expected. At a clearing called LZ X-Ray the first great battle of America's Vietnam War began, and four days later, at a second clearing called Albany, it ended in the bloodiest single day the US Army had yet suffered in Vietnam.6
Part of The greatest battles in American history · Before: The Battle of Chosin Reservoir · Next: The Battle of Khe Sanh
A new kind of war
As the United States committed ground combat troops to Vietnam in 1965, it brought a new idea with it: airmobile warfare, moving infantry, guns and supplies by helicopter to strike deep and fast across country no road could cross. The 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) was the first division built around the concept, and Ia Drang was its first major engagement.7
Until then American troops had met mostly local Viet Cong guerrillas. But regular North Vietnamese regiments had been coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into the Central Highlands, where the Ia Drang valley, close to the Cambodian border, served them as a base. Their plan was to attack the Special Forces outposts in the region and take Pleiku, a provincial capital some 37 miles from the valley.8
Plei Me
The campaign opened in October 1965 at the Special Forces camp of Plei Me, held by a 12-man American team and its Montagnard irregulars. The North Vietnamese 33rd Regiment laid siege to it, hoping to lure a South Vietnamese relief column into an ambush laid by the 32nd Regiment. American artillery, flown in by Chinook helicopters, broke up the plan, and both regiments withdrew west toward the Ia Drang.9
Into the valley
The 1st Cavalry went after them. The battle that followed was the second of three phases of the Pleime campaign, fought as part of Operation Silver Bayonet. Intelligence expected one enemy regiment near the Chu Pong massif, a 2,401-foot ridge that ran to the Cambodian border. In fact the equivalent of a division was there.10
Landing at X-Ray
On the morning of 14 November 1965 Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. Moore's 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, about 450 men by Galloway's count, began landing by helicopter in a clearing at the foot of the Chu Pong massif, designated Landing Zone X-Ray. Joseph Galloway, the war correspondent who was with them, writes that the first lift brought only about 90 men in 16 Hueys, and that Moore was on the ground with them for some half an hour before the rest arrived.11
A North Vietnamese soldier captured near the landing zone told the Americans that his comrades wanted very much to kill Americans but had not been able to find any. Within an hour they had. Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An, commanding the North Vietnamese at X-Ray, sent his battalions against the landing zone.12
The first afternoon
Around noon the 7th and 9th Battalions of the 66th Regiment, with a composite battalion of the 33rd, attacked, and by mid-afternoon the fighting was intense and often hand to hand. The North Vietnamese moved three battalions to surround the clearing, intending to wipe out the American battalion. In one firefight an American company lost all its officers and was almost overrun. The helicopters kept coming in through the fire with men and ammunition and went out with the wounded; one of their pilots, Major Bruce Crandall, later received the Medal of Honor.13
Moore's answer was firepower. Artillery from nearby firebases poured in some 33,000 rounds over the course of the battle, by Britannica's count, and tactical jets of the Air Force and Navy struck around the perimeter. The North Vietnamese answered with what Nguyen Huu An called "hug them by the belt buckle": closing so tight against the Americans that the artillery and bombs could not be used without hitting them too.14
The lost platoon
Early in the fight a platoon of Company B was cut off on the slope. Its leader and most of its men were killed, and command fell to a squad leader, Sergeant Clyde "Ernie" Savage, who held the survivors together until help came. It took three costly attempts before the battalion broke through to them.15
Holding the landing zone
Night brought probing attacks, and daylight brought new assaults. On the morning of 15 November the North Vietnamese attacked from three sides at once. Around noon the 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry arrived on foot from a nearby landing zone, and on 16 November the rest of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry marched in. Lieutenant Joe Marm of Company A, who attacked an enemy position single-handed and was badly wounded, also received the Medal of Honor.16
Over the slopes of the Chu Pong massif, B-52 bombers flying from Guam struck the enemy base areas, the first time the giant strategic bombers had been used in direct support of American ground troops. By the third day the Americans had the upper hand, and the North Vietnamese began to withdraw. On 16 November the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry relieved Moore's battalion.17
Ambush at Albany
On 17 November Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade's 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, set off on foot from X-Ray toward another clearing, Landing Zone Albany, a few miles away. Many of the men had gone nearly 48 hours without sleep. After a march of some three miles the column was strung out over about 550 yards of trail in tall grass and trees when it ran into the fresh 8th Battalion of the 66th Regiment, with a company of the 33rd, resting in the woods near the Ia Drang.18
The fight that followed lasted about six hours. When it was over the battalion had lost 155 men killed and well over 100 wounded; one company lost more than 80 percent of its men, about half of them killed. A Defense Department account calls it the single bloodiest day of the Vietnam War.19
Brigadier General Richard Knowles called it a meeting engagement and denied there had been an ambush; Galloway disputed that to his face. Over the four days from 14 to 17 November the Americans lost 234 killed and roughly 250 wounded; North Vietnamese losses were estimated at 1,800 to 2,000 killed. The Vietnamese army's own figure, published in its newspaper Quân đội nhân dân, is far lower: 554 killed and 1,223 killed and wounded for the whole Plei Me campaign of autumn 1965, which took in the Ia Drang fighting.20
The lessons of Ia Drang
Each side drew the conclusion it wanted. To General William Westmoreland and his staff, a kill ratio of about 12 to 1 proved that a war of attrition could be won. On 30 November Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, back from Vietnam, warned President Lyndon Johnson that the enemy had matched American escalation; he laid out a choice between negotiating and sending some 200,000 more troops, and predicted about 1,000 American dead a month. In December Johnson's advisers voted to escalate.21 › Tet Offensive, 1968
In Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh concluded that North Vietnam could fight the Americans to a stalemate, and that patience would wear them down as it had worn down the French. General Vo Nguyen Giap saw the helicopter as the great American innovation. "If we could defeat your tactics, your helicopters," he later said, "then we could defeat your strategy." The battle thus encouraged both sides to fight on, and the war would go on for more than seven years.22 › Battle of Khe Sanh, 1968
Memory
Ia Drang is remembered above all through the book Moore wrote with Galloway after retiring from the Army as a lieutenant general, We Were Soldiers Once... and Young, published in 1992 and filmed in 2002 as We Were Soldiers, with Mel Gibson as Moore. Galloway, the only civilian awarded the Bronze Star for valor by the US Army for the Vietnam War, earned it for rescuing wounded men at Ia Drang.23
The veterans of X-Ray and Albany still meet. At Fort Benning in 2015, on the battle's 50th anniversary, survivors told new generations of officers what went right and what went wrong. Moore closed his speeches with words that his men still quote: "Hate the war, love the American warrior."24
