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.TheCommunists driven off from Plei Me redeployed in the Ia Drang Valleybelow a mountainous region known as the Chu Pong near the Cambo-dian border.There they were reinforced by fresh troops from the north.Meanwhile soldiers from the First Air Cav continued to hunt for theCommunists.On November 14, about 450 soldiers from the First Battalion of theSeventh Cavalry made a helicopter landing in the Ia Drang Valley.(TheSeventh, part of the First Air Cavalry, was descended from the horse cav-alry unit that met its fate under the command of Gen.George Custer atthe Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Indian wars.) They did not meetany opposition when they landed at about 11 A.M.All went well for thefirst hour on the ground, until soldiers from one platoon ran into theNorth Vietnamese.The Americans then came under heavy assault fromautomatic weapons, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades.Theysoon found themselves surrounded and taking heavy casualties.Inhand-to-hand combat, the hard-pressed troopers beat back their attack-ers.The two sides were so close together that a U.S.Air Force jet mis-takenly dropped napalm on an American position.After the battle wasover, an American and a North Vietnamese soldier were found lyingdead, side by side; the American still had his hands gripped tightlyaround the throat of his enemy.Second Lieutenant Walter Marm, Jr.,won the Medal of Honor that day for single-handedly attacking andkilling all of an eight-man North Vietnamese machine-gun crew.Enemy ground fire was too intense for relief to come from the airuntil after dark.Reinforcements from the Second Battalion of the FifthCavalry had to be landed several miles away; they fought their waythrough on land to relieve the Seventh the following day.But the reliefforce was as hard hit as the soldiers they were coming to aid.Jack Smith,part of the relief force, provided a vivid account of the intensity of thebattle in a magazine article published some months afterward:Our artillery and air strikes started coming in.Just before they started,I could hear North Vietnamese voices.The Skyraiders were droppingnapalm bombs a hundred feet in front of me on a [North Vietnamese]machine gun complex.I felt the hot blast and saw the elephant grasscurling ahead of me.The victims were screaming.No matter whatyou did, you got hit.The snipers in the trees just waited for someone to 85GROUND WARmove, then shot him.I don t know why, but when a man is hit in thebelly, he screams an unearthly scream.Something you cannot imagine;you actually have to hear it.When a man is hit in the chest or the belly,he keeps on screaming, sometimes until he dies.I just lay there, numb,listening to the bullets whining over me and the 15 or 20 men close tome screaming and screaming and screaming.Smith s unit suffered heavy casualties.At one point in the battle,North Vietnamese troops walked through the American position,killing the wounded Americans where they lay.Smith, covered withblood from his own wounds, played dead and survived.The North Vietnamese finally broke off their attack on November15.For the next few days they were pounded by B-52 bombings, andseveral smaller ground battles were fought between the two sides untilthe battle finally ended on November 18.The North Vietnamese pulledout of the Ia Drang Valley, some of them moving across the border intoCambodia.Lt.Gen.Harry W.O.Kinnard, commander of the First Cav-alry Division (Air Mobile), requested permission to follow the enemyinto Cambodia (which was, officially, a neutral country), but permissionwas denied by Washington.Kinnard complained bitterly after the warthat his soldiers had not been able to pursue the enemy across the bor-der into Cambodia, Laos, or North Vietnam  even in hot pursuit :A 1966 battle the marine to the far right is firing an M-16, the standardAmerican rifle after 1966.(U.S.Marine Corps) 86VIETNAM WARShort of that, I didn t see how it was going to be possible to keep theguerrillas from being reinforced at will.It was pretty clear that if youcan t quarantine the area where the guerrillas are, it s very unlikelyyou re really going to pressure them.So you kept butting your headagainst the reality of a war where you have a fifty-yard line and you retold to play your game on one side of it.The other guy s able to playwhere you are, but you can t go where he is.At best that s a long-termstalemate, and our people aren t good at that.Although the United States was already openly bombing NorthVietnam, and secretly bombing Laos, and the CIA was conducting asecret war in Laos with U.S.-armed Meo tribesmen, President Johnsonrefrained from attacks on Cambodia.Under President Nixon the U.S.government began a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1969,and openly sent in ground troops in the May 1970  incursion.Four days of battle in the Ia Drang Valley resulted in the deaths of230 Americans and perhaps 1,300 North Vietnamese.As a direct resultof this battle, the Communists abandoned plans to launch an offensivethrough the Central Highlands that would have split South Vietnam intwo.Smarting from their losses in the Ia Drang Valley, the Communistsavoided further major conflicts with the Americans for the remainderof 1965.The escalated war was getting off to a good start in the eyes ofAmerican leaders.General Westmoreland proudly declared in his mem-oirs that  in the Highlands as on the Bantangan Peninsula, the Ameri-can fighting man and his commanders had performed without thesetbacks that have sometimes marked first performances in other wars.Westmoreland made an even larger claim in his memoirs:From this beginning until American withdrawal some seven and a halfyears later no American unit in South Vietnam other than a few com-panies on the offensive or an occasional small outpost ever incurredwhat could fairly be called a setback.This is a remarkable record.To control the battlefield after an engagement and to kill more of theenemy than he killed of your forces was, by Westmoreland s definition,an American victory.For the enemy to abandon the battlefield and suf-fer heavier casualties than the Americans was by the same logic a Com-munist  setback [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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