Joe Galloway - Ia Drang Valley

i was never made to feel unwelcome in the field with soldiers marines uh look at this i mean i'm the only civilian they're ever going to see out there and that that's kind of special uh because they can spend two years in the big green machine and and uh never see a sign that a civilian cares whether they live or die and i did care and so i was always fairly well received and you know i tell the story of you be out with a company of infantry you might be three hours or three days you're marching along that first hour and they come to a stop and they say smoke them if you got them and everybody sits down and the guy next to you says who the hell are you i'm a reporter you mean you're a civilian yeah and you're out here with me yeah damn they must pay you a lot of money no i work for united press international they're the cheapest outfit in any business oh he says then you're crazy and nobody understands crazy like the infantry so once they got you in that pigeon hole you know the guy next to him would say who the hell is that he says ah it's some crazy reporter so that was it and the next morning you would be their crazy reporter kind of coming of age on a battlefield covering soldiers and marines is the best possible training for a young reporter i would go out and march with them write a story take pictures send my stuff off in the sure and certain knowledge that probably my piece would run in stars and stripes and it would make its way back to that company or if it didn't it'd run in their hometown paper and their mama would cut it out and put it in her next letter and things being as they were i would come back to march with that company again and you don't misspell the names or get the hometowns wrong on guys who carry rifles and are armed and dangerous it makes you a very cautious careful reporter and that's a good thing [Music] it was sunday november 14 1965 day passed my 24th birthday and big big things were happening in the central highlands i'd been up there for several weeks covering things and there were attacks and the special forces camp at play me came under siege by a regiment of north vietnamese and i got in there and spent a few days with the special forces and now here it is the first cavalry division is sending a battalion out into no man's land you know an area where really no one's gone before and uh we're able to do this because of the helicopter this this is going to be the event that tests whether the helicopter really is going to be the weapon of choice in vietnam or the mode of transport no longer would the infantry have to walk they would fly to work or that was the theory anyway and we're going to find out and i spent that night of my birthday in a foxhole that i dug under a t-bush on a plantation where the brigade headquarters for the third brigade of the first cab were located and they they were loading up a company to fly in on this operation and they had all the huey's lined up and i scooted along and found a vacant seat and got in it and here come a guy down the line and he's got a medic with him and he's looking for a place and he looks at me and says who are you i said i'm a reporter get out of there and he puts the medic in my seat can't argue with that but i was upset that i couldn't go in on the first lift and i went to see the brigade commander colonel tim brown i said look i need to get in there and he said look it's probably going to be a long hot walk in the sun and no action but just in case if anything happens i'm going to go out there i got my command helicopter and i'll give you a ride well it wasn't an hour later that something did happen and all hell broke loose and the colonel comes zooming out of his headquarters heading for his chopper and i'm right behind him so colonel brown flies out to the site of this battle not hard to find because the smoke rising off that battlefield is 5 000 feet in the air and we circle around and he's talking to colonel moore on the ground and he wants to land and colonel moore is waving him off he says look this lz is just hotter than a pistol you land that command helicopter with all those antenna on it in here and you're gonna have to walk home they'll shoot it to pieces and so we're obviously not going to get to land and just about then an a1e air force skyraider bomber fighter bomber zooms below us and he's trailing a hundred feet of uh fire and smoke and uh they're yelling anybody see a shoot anybody see a shoot and it was my side of the helicopter so i was leaning out and i watched him all the way and i clicked the mic and said no shoot no shoot he rode it into the ground and he's still there today uh the air the joint task force m.i.a people contacted his widow 12 15 years ago and said we know where he is where the wreckage of his plane is and we'll go out there and do a dig and recover remains if you want that and she said no i don't think so he he died doing something that he loved he died supporting a historic battle and the air force took care of me and my five kids put all the kids through college so we're okay and leaving rest in peace there in the jungle and that's where he is uh but we were waived off and the colonel dumped me in a uh artillery firebase about three four miles away and uh i spent the afternoon there looking for a helicopter ride to get into the battle and they were hard to come by and as i spent the afternoon four or five other reporters turned up including my nemesis peter arnett of the associated press and but i had the edge on them i'd marched with colonel moore's battalion three days before and spent the night with them up in the hills very cold up on those mountain plateaus and i knew him so i spotted a captain rushing by and i knew that it was colonel moore's operations officer captain matt dillon and i grabbed him and i said matt i need to ride in he said i'm going in as soon as it's dark with two hueys full of ammo i said i want a ride and he said i can't i can't say yes it's got to be the colonel i said get him on the radio so i followed him into the tent and he got colonel moore i could hear the battle going on in the handset of the radio and he reported to the colonel what he was bringing and when and then he said that reporter galloway wants to come along and the response of colonel moore was i was listening very close he said if he's crazy enough to want to come in here and you've got room bring him so then all i had to do was hide from the other reporters until it got near dark and they flew back to placo for a hot meal and a cold bunk and a warm shower and i got a ride into the pages of history i was sitting with my back against a little scrub oak tree and all of a sudden the the world came apart two battalions of the enemy were attacking a company size section of our perimeter and we were located right behind them uh probably no more than 30 yards or so and everything the enemy fired at at that company that didn't hit something passed right through where we were sitting or laying because i fell over flat on my face and i was you know flattening out as flat as i could get because everything in the world was sailing through just about knee-high all kinds of lead and uh about then i i felt a thump in my ribs and i looked down and and it was a combat boot and i looked up and it was sergeant major basil plumley a bear of a man out of west virginia and he bent over and over the den of battle which is truly deafening you you have no idea how loud war is until you're in the middle of it and he leans over waist bends at the waist and yells down in his loudest voice can't take no pictures laying there on the ground sonny and i i thought about it and realized he was right and i got up and i followed him which is a smart thing to do if you're a war correspondent follow someone who's got stripes on his arm you can't go too wrong that way and especially in the case of sergeant major plumley this was his third war he had done world war ii he made all four combat jumps of the 82nd airborne sicily salerno normandy and holland and one combat jump in korea and here he was on his third war and he uh he knew that we were in some dire danger of being overrun and he was gathering up what kind of a battalion reserve he could including one reporter and he went over to the battalion surgeon and the medical platoon sergeant sergeant keaton and he pulled out his 45 and he jacked around into the thing and he hollered at them gentlemen prepare to defend yourselves and the doc looked like he had been shot i mean he'd been drafted out of his residency and he was an honorary captain is what it really is and he certainly didn't expect he was going to have to use that 45 he was carrying but plumley was doing what he felt he should do and as this battle progressed i you know hollywood has the sergeant major giving me an m16 it didn't happen that way i brought my own uh i carried an m16 and a lot of loaded magazines in my pack and uh [Music] you you know there are some events that are so horrific and so immediate that you cannot be a neutral observer you can't be the civilian non-combatant who stands apart from this thing these are people who are laying down their lives so that you might live and you owe them something too and i carried water i carried the wounded and i eventually picked up the m16 and did what i had to do because you can have the greatest story in the world if you don't live to tell it it dies with you and so i did what i what i had to do and i make no bones about it [Music] they wear the nation's highest medal of valor the medal of honor uh and i could probably name you a dozen other guys from this battle who deserve that same medal what i know is that bruce and ed in his day and joe marm they wear that medal in honor of all of us all who fought there all who died there all who came home damaged from that battle [Music] this is i'm you know and i'm not saying this in any way to disrespect them because they are wonderful representatives of all of us and they wear that medal [Music] they wear that with great humility and they know better than anyone else that it's for all of us oh you know i i that was my first tour in vietnam i went on to do three more and i went on to cover americans at war for 43 years i never saw again any battle so immediate so violent so bloody uh you know in a matter of four days and nights 234 young americans were killed and another 250 or 300 were wounded badly and the truth is not a single one of us left that place the same man who arrived there it changed us all it changed our lives for me i i knew that 80 young americans had laid down their lives so that i might live [Music] lived to tell their story and i knew that i owed them and really all soldiers and marines had a sacred obligation to tell their stories to present their stories to the american people uh and you know that's a that's that's a heavy burden but one that i bear proudly and and i have spent my life since those days 50 years now half a century trying to fulfill that obligation i am struck speechless by it and i always have been it was very hard for me to go down and stand there and look at those names and for a couple of years anyway i would sit up in the up on the benches up in the woods up the slope from the wall and take it in but not see the details the the details are what are so important uh i think it's you know the most incredibly moving piece of art i have ever seen it tugs at my heart [Music] the names on there i know many of them it's very hard uh when we got the first galley proofs of our book we were soldiers once and young i put that in a plastic bag and took it down and put it at panel three east where the names of 305 first cavalry division soldiers who died in the i drank where their names are engraved and left that there for them finally their story got told [Music] you

Channel: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund

Views: 49,975

Rating: 4.9466667 out of 5

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Id: N6XXcDATAgE

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020