high above the jungle on its way to the Ia Drang Valley. Christopher Calvert, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Dao yelled that they were prepared to fight the enemy, come what may. Where you aware at the time that person was suffering from PTSD or was that something that only came to you in hindsight? We have but two options, it seems to me. During WWII Italian Commandos Were Tasked to Ride Torpedoes. The ARVN II Corps commander knew if he lost the relief force, Pleiku would be left defenseless. ++After some time pass, some helicopters landed and I put him aboard one of them. Only jokes and funny stuff. They had built cohesion as a unit, a team, and that is a powerful force multiplier. At the same time that Hello Dolly opened at Nha Trang airbase, a company of 173rd Airborne had walked into an ambush in Viet Cong base zone, known as the Iron Triangle. (recommend up to 74 battalions by end-66: total to approx. Fort Benning during battles in the Ia Drang (Guest blog). Article written by Joe Lee Galloway, the time Bruce Crandall was caught trying to sling load a. 2023 TIME USA, LLC. Their reaction to what they have seen, what they have done, what has happened to them is normal. My Dad and all my uncles would not tell us kids war stories. In November 1965, Joe Galloway snapped this photo of his childhood friend Vince Cantu during the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, without realizing who was pictured. Vince Cantu and I went through school together right to graduation with the Refugio High School Class of 1959 a total of 55 of us. War Zone C Ambush of the 173rd Airborne, 1965. The title is WE ARE SOLDIERS STILL: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam, and I think its a pretty good story, but he is sure working me hard. This photo shows two soldiers watching an area with enemy presence and keeping a low profile. It was called Hug Them by the Belt Buckleor get in so close to the U.S. troops that the firepower could not be used, for fear of killing and wounding their own. Available for both RF and RM licensing. Here, lightly edited, are their responses. Two of those enemy regiments had already been busy since arriving in the Central Highlands. All they need is some counselling and some understanding. discharging a load of infantrymen on a search and destroy mission. Another 71 Americans had been killed in earlier, smaller skirmishes that led up to the Ia Drang battles. He is the only civilian to receive a combat medal form the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. What was the worst case of PTSD you ever came across? Sadly, they probably died quickly in the war. Then his men took a prisoner, a North Vietnamese private who was quaking so hard he could barely speak. Nevertheless, the enemy can be expected to enlarge his present strength of 110 battalion equivalents to more than 150 battalion equivalents by the end of calendar 1966, when hopefully his losses can be made to equal his input. The big battles began when thenLt. I really cant speak for the general public and what they know or dont know about PTSD. they were young and brave ltg hal moore s return to ia drang valley 1993. For us, the war looked like it was about to be over. . All through that endless night, the PAVN troops combed through the elephant grass searching for their own wounded, and finishing off any wounded Americans they came across. AP photographer Henri Huet, under heavy enemy fire, saw that role through his lens and captured the uncommon dedication that medic Thomas Cole displayed in this memorable photo. Following retirement from active duty in 1977, he worked as the Executive Vice President of the Crested Butte Mountain Resort in Colorado. November 1965 was the deadliest month yet for the Americans, with 545 killed. It would last for three days and two nights before the North Vietnamese would vanish into the tangle of brush and elephant grass, leaving a large circle of their dead scattered around the American position. I distinctly remember family talking about a returned soldier who came home damaged mentally.. As long as even one of us remembers them our friends are not dead. It was, he said, a meeting engagement. Casualties were light to moderate, he added. His face was on fire. All he could see was smoke rising through the jungle canopy. We would often embed ourselves with a platoon or squad, but it was more of a gentlemans agreement than any kind of official policy, based in the main on the idea that we, the photographers, were there to tell their story, and they, the soldiers, realized that unlike them, we didnt have to be there. Central Intelligence Agency. Jimmy Nakayma died in flight,3 degree burns no other injuries. On the morning of November 17, Lt. Col. Bob Tullys 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry, would march out of X-ray, headed northeast directly toward LZ Columbus, where a battery of 105mm howitzers was positioned. He is the only reporter who covered the war recognized for heroism in combat. The platoon of Americans held their breath and their fire until they heard the louder clanking noise of the enemys heavy weapons company moving into the kill zone. In 1970, Caron would be captured by the Khmer Rouge, in neighboring Cambodia, never to be seen again. Released prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. As tens of thousands of anti-war protestors rioted in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, President Johnson and his family watched from the bedroom at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas. War Zone C Ambush of the 173rd Airborne, 1965. The Recon Platoon had captured two North Vietnamese soldiers. it was seasonal depression until in 1986 or 87 when I attended my first reunion of my old 1st Cavalry Division buddies. It was the morning. For his extraordinary heroism and gallantry in action around Landing Zone X-Ray, Moore received the Distinguished Service Cross. Free shipping. One of Westmorelands brighter young aides later would write, a strategy of attrition is proof that you have no strategy at all. In any event, the strategy was an utter failure. All total in the battle of X-Ray and the ambush near LZ Albany, 234 Americans were killed and more than 250 wounded in just four days and nights, November 14-17, 1965. I used to believe that time would let those memories fade and allow me a measure of peace. Joe Galloway of the Ia Drang I feel its symbolic, but Im conflicted about it, knowing what I know. The enemy commander, Lt. Col. Nguyen Hu An, had kept one of the battalions of the 66th Regiment in reserve, and unbeknownst to the Americans that battalion was taking a lunch break just off the trail. The detail not given was that Gunny Purdies commanding officer had just been killed on that hill, the radio operator cut in half. Neither did the article mention that the CO had called in artillery fire on his own position. Excerpts from Memorandum From Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson, Washington, November 30, 1965. In the next six hours, McDades battalion would lose 155 men killed and 120 wounded. When he finally did say something, it sent chills through the Americans listening to the translator: He say there two regiments on that mountain. General Dao, however, was full of vim and eager for the battle. ++"They ran to our foxholes. I saw the medic shouldering wounded and then I saw the kid on his back in the grass. What happened there, in the Ia Drang Valley, 17 miles from the nearest red-dirt road at Plei Me and 37 miles from the provincial capital of Pleiku, sounded alarm bells in the Johnson White House and the Pentagon as they tallied the American lossesa stunning butchers bill of 234 men killed and more than 250 wounded in just four days and nights, November 14-17, in two adjacent clearings dubbed Landing Zones X-ray and Albany. So I just moved on with my life and career. Both enemy regiments withdrew toward the Ia Drang with a brigade of Air Cav troopers dogging their footsteps. In 1998, Galloway became the only American civilian to receive the Bronze Star Medal with "V" for heroism during the Vietnam War. I worked for a little cooperative French agency, Gamma, which we had created a few years earlier. With the war once again making headlines, TIME asked a number of those individuals to select an image from the period that they found particularly significant, and to explain why that photograph moved them the most. In the days before embeds this generations enforced melding of photographer and military unit there was a certain sense of freedom we owned as photographers, being able to go directly to where the story was. we were soldiers once and young ia drang the battle. Joe Lee Galloway The enemy columnmen of the newly arriving 8th Battalion of the 66th Regimentstopped 120 yards short of the ambush and took a break. In other words, every year reaching out far into the future there were more babies born in the north than NVA we were killing in the south, so each year a new crop of draftees arrived as replacements for the dead. I think the first soldier I ran across who was clearly unhinged by combat was in the Landing. When Hal Moore took the first lift of 16 Hueysall that he was given for this maneuverinto the landing zone he had chosen in the Ia Drang, he was painfully aware that he was on the ground with only 90 men, and that they would be there alone for half an hour or longer while the choppers returned to Plei Me Camp, picked up waiting troops and made the return flight. Absolutely. It is not often you see enemies cradling each other. Sometimes, even in war, that moment can tell a whole story with clarity, but it can be ambiguous too. I have got to get all this in one picture, I thought. And preferably as Pyle covered his war., Joe Lee Galloway I was so eager to get to Vietnam before the war ended that my only real fear was that the first troops to land would finish off the Viet Cong and I would miss my war.. His bosses read the papers and discovered they had a real hero pushing one of their buses. (b) Any person found guilty of larceny or wrongful appropriation shall be punished as a court-martial may direct. When the war ended in 1975, that man and five others were all that were left alive of the 400. is shown front and center, resting on the ground in the soft gray light like a discarded soup bowl or a cleaved skull. Select from premium Joseph Galloway of the highest quality. Amazon.com: Joseph L. Galloway: books, biography, latest update Joseph L. Galloway Home About All Books Joseph L. Galloway Follow to get new release updates and improved recommendations Manage your follows Back to top Get to Know Us Careers Amazon Newsletter About Amazon Accessibility Sustainability Press Center Investor Relations Amazon Devices guilty of assault and shall be punished as a court-martial may direct. Dao wisely called an end to his press tour. Later artillery and napalm airstrikes were called in, but they often fell on enemies and friends alike. In mid-April of 1975, a small group of American journalists were invited to fly into the small provincial capital of Xuan Loc, South Vietnam, 35 miles north of Saigon, by commander Le Minh Dao. Paul SchutzerThe Life Picture Collection/Getty Images. Excerpted from a 2013 interview with Art Greenspon by Peter van Agtmael, a Magnum photographer who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: As the first medevac chopper hovered overhead I saw the First Sergeant with his arms in the air. It was an old guerrilla ploy that usually worked, but not here, not now. 2. After Ia Drang: What McNamara Knew, and When He Knew It. Some had feared that the helicopters were too flimsy and fragile to fly into the hottest of landing zones. We have come to a decision point and it seems we have only two choices: Either we arrange whatever diplomatic cover we can find and get out of Vietnam, or we give General William C. Westmoreland the 200,000 additional U.S. troops he is asking for, in which case by early 1967 we will have 500,000 Americans on the ground and they will be dying at the rate of 1,000 a month (the top Pentagon bean counter was wrong about that; American combat deaths would top out at over 3,000 a month in 1968). Stockton sent one of his companies of Blues, or infantry, under command of Captain Charles S. Knowlen, to a clearing near that site. By late summer, the 1st Cavalry was stationed in Vietnam's Central Highlands. Bob McDades 2-7 Battalion plus one company of 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, would follow Tully part of the way, then break off west and northwest toward another clearing closer to the river dubbed LZ Albany. In 2015, Galloway talked about when he arrived in Vietnam in early 1965, "I knew nothing about war except what I had learned from watching John Wayne movies." Photos from the field during the Battle of Ia Drang Valley in 1965. Now the North Vietnamese Army had arrived off the Ho Chi Minh Trail and had made itself felt. As tens of thousands of anti-war protestors rioted in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, President Johnson and his family watched from the bedroom at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas. Russell Burrows, son of photographer Larry Burrows: The fraction of a second captured in most photographs is just that: a snapshot of a moment in time. His legs were paralyzed and VA got him a car with hand controls. They were replaced by new draftees, who flowed in as individual replacements and who knew no one around them, and nothing of their outfits history and esprit. When do you think you first encountered someone with PTSD? He was immensely proud to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad from the Overseas Press Club in 1955. Joseph Lee Galloway (November 13, 1941 - August 18, 2021) was an American newspaper correspondent and columnist. The Communists appear to have decided to increase their forces in South Vietnam both by heavy recruitment in the South (especially in the Delta) and by infiltration of regular North Vietnamese forces from the North. I had given all of my food away so I didnt eat for two days. Still images rarely give straightforward answers but they do offer illuminating clues for those who take the time to delve into them. He was there on the ground for the brutal and historic fall of Dien Bien Phu that marked the end of the French involvement in the region. Suddenly, a mortar shell landed in the dust no more than 10 feet from us. My first memories are of houses full of frightened women looking out the window for the telegraph delivery man. The battle was extremely important because it was the first significant . Date: 10/14/2003 1:27:19 PM Pacific Standard time Howard was a staff photographer for LIFE in the early 1950s, when he was first assigned to cover the fighting in what was then Indochina. From: jgalloway krwashington His weapon was on fire," he said. In November 1965, Galloway embedded with the 1st Calvary Division in the first major battle of the Vietnam War the battle of the Ia Drang. She managed to get accredited by the Associated Press, covered numerous battles, was seriously wounded by shrapnel that would remain in her body, parachuted into combat (small and thin, she was weighed down so as not to be blown away), was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese (which she used as an opportunity to produce a cover story for LIFE Magazine), and remained obsessed by the war until her death in 2006. Their peasant soldiers had withstood the high-tech firestorm thrown at them by a superpower and had at least fought the Americans to a draw, and to them a draw against so powerful an enemy was a victory. First time we ever tried to help the greenhorns heading for combat for the first time was in 2003 as Knight Ridder was preparing to send 37 reporters to war. The last photo in the photo essay shows the medic and a child walking away together, holding hands, and the childs head is burned from napalm. It recognizes his heroism on Nov. 15, 1965, during the Battle of. On the flight across the Pacific, McNamara wrote a top-secret memo to President Johnson dated November 30. Several of my old good friends from those days have gotten together a few times and talk of those times and all the friends who were killed trying to see and report the truth of war. Jimmy D. Nakayama's casualty report no crushed ankles! They took the child into a bunker, cleaned him up and dressed his wounds under candlelight. Joe Galloway was recognized with the Bronze Star with Valor when during November 1965, Battle of Ia Drang, he repeatedly disregarded his own safety to rescue wounded soldiers . From: jgalloway, krwashington In Washington, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent an urgent message to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was in Europe, ordering him to come home via Saigon and find out what had happened at Ia Drang, and what it meant. Colonel, for outstanding service in the Office, Chief of Research and Development, from July 1 1957 to 31 January 1960. FICTION: NEIL SHEEHAN the Huey Plummeted, and the pilots dashed in over the trees to minimize. Gilles Carons atypical vertical image of a face-to-face encounter exposes deep cultural divide and distrust. The soldiers were very sympathetic to the civilians and one medic befriended them. Bruce Crandall recounted tales of one escapade after another: of moonlight requisitions raids, against the U.S. Air Force for needed or merely desired goodies unavailable from the Army, supply chain;[ of the time Bruce Crandall was caught trying to sling load a 10 kilowatt, generator off it pad on an airbase.] After the beginning of the Iraq War my own employer Knight Ridder hired psychologists who interviewed returning war correspondents, and checked up on them periodically to make sure they were OK. What do you think the general public fails to understand about PTSD? A photo of a young widow sprawled atop the grave of her soldier husband at Arlington Cemetery leaves me choked with grief and sobbing aloud. Neither we, nor General Dao, had expected the tide of advancing communist forces to so quickly and completely surround the town. Did anyone, a mentor or a family member, give you any advice about adjusting to a war zone? War Correspondent, Vietnam, Joe Galloway speaks during the 'Vietnam in HD' panel during the History portion of the 2011 Summer TCA Tour at the. Buy Photo Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C., 2005: Joe Galloway, right, Medal of Honor recipient Ed Freeman, center, and retired Lt. Gen. Hal Moore lead a group of Ia Drang. We Were Soldiers Once.And Young: Ia Drang The Battle That Changed the W - GOOD. These hard Marines suddenly became the most gentle, loving persons. Understand what has brought them to that point. Joining us would be the Day One crew, including anchor Forrest Sawyer and producer Terry Wrong. He saw everything; he saw the fatigue of the American soldiers, their fear, the prisoners fear. Young guerrillas wear grenades at their belts, preparing to fight the encroaching Viet Minh forces in the Red River Delta, northern Vietnam, 1954. Hal, over to you. Sidney Lanier High School, Sp4 James Clark was not given any morphine by the medics. 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