Joe Galloway

in our society what has been said about Vietnam and Vietnam veterans has not always been true as I said in the prologue to my book Hollywood got it wrong every damn time and interestingly that line jumped off the page right into the face of a guy named Randall Wallace about ten years ago he had grabbed the book out of a bookstore on the way to an airport and was reading it reading the prologue and he was a screenwriter and he said that was so in my face that I was determined to try to make one true movie about Vietnam and he did call we were soldiers that came out last year and and a brilliant job he did I have no note no written speech I'm just going to talk to you but before I really get into this thing would all of you who served in Vietnam please stand and be recognized for me it was taking one step onto a Huey helicopter the afternoon early evening of 14 November 1965 but getting there getting to that point people to ask me if you had this all to do over again would you do it again and I say you know I wasn't forced at gunpoint to do any of this I was a multiple volunteer I fought schemed and bade to get to Vietnam as a kid I read the the collected works of burning pine not just his war writings but but the things he wrote the collected columns that he wrote before the war when he was traveling traveled across America just writing about people and I always knew I wanted to be a reporter and I thought if during my time my generation there is a war and America is in it I want to go there and I want to cover American soldiers and I want to do it the same way Ernie Pyle did as best I can but I started reading these stories out of a place called Saigon and they were written by men whose by lines were Neil Sheehan for UPI David Halberstam for the New York Times Malcolm Brown for the hated AP and I said you know it's coming we're gonna have a war there this is 1963 mind you we're gonna have a war there it's going to be my generations war and I have got to cover it and so I began a campaign a week doing letter to my bosses in New York explaining it to them in detail why they should send me to Asia and I think it came to the point where either they had to send me or fire me because I was not going away I was more persistent than a kick and I covered the 64 election campaign and and the election itself and once I saw Lyndon Johnson was going to win I knew we were going to war there because he said we weren't and we both come from Texas and I knew about his lives so I was home in Texas taking a week off the phone rang and it was my boss in Dallas and he said the you own a trenchcoat and it was a puzzling reference to me I had no idea what the man was talking about and I said huh and he said you've just been transferred to UPI is a headquarters in Tokyo as quickly as you can get there unprecedented to be transferred from one man Bureau in the middle of the country to Asia but I pulled it off and I found myself I got there in November of 1964 and immediately asked for transfer to Saigon and and the boss said this is never gonna happen we've got two guys there covering this situation and I can't see that we'll ever need any more than that and so I bit my tongue and in March the 1st battalion of the 9th Marines came ashore at the name and two weeks later I was on my way to Vietnam just as quickly as possible through Saigon got my press pass interestingly Vietnam was the until now the most openly covered war in the history of our country you've got your press pass you were from that was your ticket to ride you know in any military aircraft boat whatever truck whatever is moving and go to a unit and stay as long as as your bosses would allow as long as your own courage would allow but you know when I went there all I knew about covering Wars I had gained from a careful study of John Wayne movies and I thought I've really got to hurry and get there because the Marines have landed and this thing may be over with in a hurry and so I did I got there and I would tell you my first day in actual operations in Vietnam I had got my past been a night in in Saigon I was told that my job was in Danang I was told to go to consulate air base and get on an Air Force c-123 which was the milk run it went all the way up to way and then back to Danai I think I traveled for about seven hours and I staggered off of this thing my ears ringing a Samsonite suitcase that my mother had given me for graduation from high school in my hand I think she was sending me a message and a very excited dark-skinned gentleman ran up and he said you are Galloway and I said yes he says I am all riu it from UPI I am a photographer and there is big trouble in Quang Ngai which I had no idea where that was you must come with me and I said what about my suitcase and and he told me to do a physical impossibility and he threw it in the ethereal transport squadron hooch and drove me to a c-130 which was sitting on the ramp spinning up and we jumped in and we were off and it was a short hop and we landed in a place called Quon Nuys city and and it looked like an anthill that had been stirred with a stick and we got off that plane and mr. Hewitt immediately ran over to a marine CH 34 helicopter and he talked to this guy who was from wearing a flight suit and he waved at me and we were suddenly on this helicopter going I do not know where and then we flew about ten minutes out from quantised city in and there was a bald hill sitting in the middle of these huge rice paddies and we circled this this thing probably at a thousand feet and then slowly coming down and I could see glimpses out the door and I could see a lot of people lying on this hill in little not foxholes they didn't have time they had dug little shallow depressions just enough to get a few inches lower than the ground and we landed and they shut the helicopter down and we stepped out and there was total silence there was a battalion of South Vietnamese soldiers and every one of them was dead they were lying in those holes as though they were holding rifles but the rifles were gone and how we got this ride was the Marines were coming out to recover the bodies of the two American advisers to this battalion and they needed help getting them back to the and so we went hole to hole until we found those two Americans and carried their bodies back to the helicopter and as we flew back I thought there's nobody in here looks like John Wayne this is gonna be a long hard war that night Quanah air stripped it seems closed down at dark re-read who's a very brave man who died in a helicopter crash in 1971 he says you know all the Americans leave here and go back to demand at night but if we stay we'll be ready to go early in the morning long before the first planes come back in so let's go over to the military assistance group compound and spend the night with them and we went over and a very tall very tired captain of infantry his eyes brightened he said welcome we've all been on 100% alert for the last five nights so you get to do guard duty tonight and he said 200 you'll be midnight to 3:00 a.m. you'll be 3:00 a.m. to dawn and he handed us the ovum to grease gun submachine gun 45 caliber and he showed me how to operate it have a little bit how to clear it how to safe it and I lay in that bunk with just my eyes biggest pie place until 3:00 a.m. which came very soon and I was shaken handed my weapon and sent to the bumper and I stood there like a truthful owls just looking at everything and seeing nothing and during the longest night of my life those three hours till sunrise the enemy did a satchel charge attack on the Arvin compound across the road a little too close for my taste and finally I could see a little brightness in the sky and I thought I've made it but then out of that darkness came a Vietnamese guy an old man on a bicycle with a huge parcel on the handlebars and I unn safe that grease gun and I drew a bead on him and I said to myself if he moved so much as a finger I'm blowing him away and about then that tall captain hit me on the shoulder and he said don't shoot him son or you'll have to cook breakfast that's the best the cat my introduction to the iodine Valley like I said covered a lot of operations including an amphibious combat assault with brother Gill here but in the fall of that year I moved up I heard I you know the Marines walked a war I had worn out two pairs of boondock cos I had fatty food and crotch rot and everything else you could imagine I was absolutely sick of those rice paddies that we were walking through and I heard about this army division coming in which had 435 helicopters and I said by god I'm gonna ride the war and I moved to the central islands and hooked up with the the 1st Cavalry Division airmobile and a few days before the iodine operations I made the acquaintance of the 1st battalion 7th US Cavalry and it's commander Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore and it's command sergeant major basil well Plumlee out of West Virginia and I did a long walk with them in the in the hot Sun East the Playmate Special Forces campaign right before dark we forwarded a mountain stream neck-deep coldest water I've ever been in and then huddled in our wet and our ponchos and then we're on mountain plateau at about 3:00 thousand feet I spent the coldest night of my life no fire no cigarettes no nothing just laying there with my teeth chattering Sun finally starts to make its appearance and I fish around in my pack and I find this fist sized lump of c-4 plastic explosive that all good Boy Scout scary and I pinch off a piece about that big and I light it with a match because it is wonderful twenty seconds you've got a canteen cup full of boiling water it burns with great fire and my water was just about boiling when I looked up and there stood Plumlee and Colonel Moore and the colonel looked at my hot water and he looked at me and he said in this outfit everybody shaves every morning and I looked at my coffee water and I looked at him and I fished out my razor and there went my coffee water but on the night when it counted there were half a dozen reporters trying to get into the fight that had begun in landings on x-ray and the drank valley one of them was my nemesis from The Associated Press mr. Peter Arnett and I foxed all of them out of their drawers I got in they did not we were trying desperately every helicopter that came near the firebase where where the artillery was supporting this battle but none of them were going the right direction for us but I had a an ace in the hole I ran into Colonel Moore's s3 his operations officer Matt Dillon I said man I got to get in there and he said well I'm going in as soon as it's dark with two helicopters full of ammo but I can't put you on those choppers that's up to the old man we'll get him on the radio and I stood there and listened as he gave a quick sitrep to her abhorrence that I'm coming in and bringing this I'm bringing these people and oh by the way does that reporter Galloway that marched with us the other day he wants to come too and the answer from Carl Moore was this if he's crazy enough to want to come in here and you've got room bringing smart man smart man he believed that the American people had a right to know that what's happening with their sons and daughters in Vietnam an absolute right and and so he was not afraid of the press he welcomed us he welcomed so here I was I spent that night after a little briefing from the colonel with my back against a small tree my cameras beside me and my m16 rifle across my knees and it was noisy and flares and probing attacks but nothing big and I sat there thinking I've got the world in a jug in the stopper in my hand I've got an exclusive seat at the biggest battle of the war and that lasted until 10 minutes before 7:00 in the morning when two battalions attacked the lines of Charlie Company on the southeast side of the perimeter about a thousand of them against a hundred of us and everything that we are command posts was right behind Charlie Company so everything that was fired at Charlie Company that didn't hit something passed right through the command posed about that high and I was flat on my belly feathering out at the edges cursing my zippers for keeping me low keeping me from getting lower when I had a thump in my ribs and I I reached like this and I look thinking I might have been hit by something and I had it was a combat boot size 12 I estimated and it was on the foot of sergeant major basil Plumlee now Plumlee was a bear of a man what the paratroopers call a five jump bastard all four jumps combat in World War two of the 82nd Airborne Division Sicily Salerno Normandy and Market Garden the bridge too far one combat jump in Korean with the 187th RCT this man was working on his third award of the combat infantry badge and how rare that is I will tell you that the United States Army only ever handed out 270 of those period Plumley been at the waist and this was a firestorm and the den of combat for those who have not experienced it is deafening it is a noise like no other it seeps into your bones and Plumlee hollered he had a parade ground voice and he hollered been it the way so he'd get the closer and he hollered down at me what he said was this can't take no pictures laying on the ground sunny well in thought he's right later I would learn that sergeants major are always right but I also thought this looks dire indeed and we may all die here today and if I'm going to die but just as soon take mind standing up alongside a man like the sergeant major so like a fool I got up and the sergeant major went about his business and I followed and his next stop was our aid station such as it was it was the battalion surgeon dr. career I'm an honorary captain drafted out of his residency and started heating the medical platoon sergeant all the others who normally would be in that battalion aid station had been farmed out to the companies because between Lyndon Johnson refusing to declare a national emergency and freeze tours of duty and malaria we'd lost a couple hundred men should have been 750 men in the colonel Moore's battalion actually closer to 400 410 that's how badly below strength he was and what that meant was all the medics were with the companies Plumlee leans over into the face of dr. Pereira and says gentlemen prepare to defend yourselves and he looked at his 45 the jacked around into it and Carreras eyes were biggest dinner plates he hadn't volunteered for this he hadn't signed up for this he sure didn't think it was you know his job to be pulling triggers but the sergeant-major knew something he knew that we were in danger of being overrun he knew that he needed to gather up whatever he could sweep up including the dock that cook and one civilian medium puke and get him ready because the guy bad guys may be coming to Claire across that clearing any minute so I learned something I learned a valuable lesson that instant you can be afraid but when you start doing your job the fear goes away and I sometimes tell people I everything you know there's somebody made a lot of money writing a book called everything I know I learned in kindergarten well everything I know I learned in combat I learned all about leadership and courage and what gets you through and most important the quality of the soldier the NCO the officers that were present doing their job 65 percent of Colonel Moore's battalion were draftees they were most of them drafted at the end of 1963 they were out of a different America who was being drafted in 1963 if you didn't have the money to get in your mama couldn't get you in college if you weren't married didn't have kids if you were just hanging out pumping gas being a farm boy or whatever the draft board got your ass it's interesting no fewer than 20 men from a hundred mile radius of my little hometown in South Texas were in this battle on that battlefield I ran into a classmate of mine from refugio high school class of 59 there were only 55 of us in that class and here's one of them standing in front of me his cousin is right over there and they were all carrying names like Garcia Hernandez Figueroa Jimenez and I could not be more proud of it at home they could and were treated as second-class citizens but on that day in that place who was there who was standing up for America who fought there and died there man who had less than two weeks left on their tour of duty who should have been on freedom bird gone home we put on the helicopters wrapped in the honchos to fly home in an aluminum casting and so I have a totally different view of Vietnam veterans and I think mine is the true and correct view and I say to them often as I can you may not have been the greatest generation but by God you were the greatest of your generation I tell you what I was on a panel once about 10 and 11 years ago down in southern Virginia at hampden-sydney College with none other than Oliver Stone and you know he had nothing to say that I was interested in hearing his remarks were unexceptional but somebody tipped me that his old company commander was in the audience and so as soon as this panel was over we were paired to a cocktail hour and I immediately looked this guy up a retired colonel named Bob ahem pillow and I said okay what's true about platoon he said well it's it it's a pretty good depiction of what it's like to move a battalion through triple-canopy jungle but beyond that nothing he said I ran a tight infantry company Oliver Stone was a good soldier earned a righteous Purple Heart and a righteous Bronze Star but I don't know where that he pulled this story out of he said we would be in the bush for two weeks on patrol constantly moving setting up ambushes we would come back to a firebase at the end of two weeks we had two days the first day you got a shower you saw the docs you got your leech bites and your scratches and your burns fixed you drew a clean uniform and at the end of the day you got two cans a hot Pabst Blue Ribbon beer living large and the next morning you cleaned your weapons you drew ammo you drew supplies and we did the math talk and by nightfall we were out of there on another two-week Patrol he said my NCOs did not shoot each other my men didn't have time or the inclination to smoke dope I said you know you ought to write that story and if you'll write the book I'll write the foreword and he did and I did so it's out there look it up Bob and Bill I think it's called platoon and there's the true story the truth however has a hard time catching up with lies moves too slow the picture that has been portrayed of the Vietnam veteran is totally wrong the Vietnam veterans I know our teachers bankers lawyers they do a thousand different jobs they came home to no welcome they fought in a war they didn't ask for they came home to disrespect suspicion accusations and he went aground in the crossfire just like we did in those jungles long ago and just laid low and did our thing but my thing and her mores thing is to tell the truth we spend ten years researching our book this was before the worldwide thumb directory was on to CDs we had to first find and then interview 250 plus individuals some of them in Vietnam most of them scattered all over American we found them by ones and twos and we got their stories you know military history in particular has usually been written by someone who was hundreds of miles away and is operating from after-action reports and yellowing papers and if you ask them why you don't talk to the grunts they say oh well they only see ten meters either side of their foxhole and that's true but we resolved to find one grunt for every 10 meters 360 degrees and guess what the real truth is in their stories the real history and you know they're very modest often they wouldn't tell you much about what they did but they would tell you hours worth about what Johnny did and the foxhole over here and Sam did over here and all we had to do was cross-reference and we could put together the story so we got it done we worked awful hard on it we've done everything we can to give back to the army the Marines the Navy America in the years since it was published we worked by the way 8 years with mr. Wallace on the movie before it ever saw the light of day we're proud of it it's 85% reality based on the and 15% Hollywood which they couldn't resist though we beat the heart around the head and shoulders it's good it's good it tells an honest story for once is on the cover of our book lieutenant Ciro our Rick Rescorla an Englishman born in Cornwall served in the British Army served London Bobbie served as a I guess the words mercenary in the Rhodesian territorials fighting the Marxist guerrillas came to America in 1962 or three because he thought we were going to war - and he wanted to be a part of it he came here and immediately enlisted in our army was sent to boot camp best guy they're sent to OCS number one in his class assignment to the second battalion 7th cavalry sent to Vietnam sent to the iodine Valley his company was chosen to reinforce calm Wars battalion and he was immediately plugged into a section of line where we were virtually overrun Bravo Company first of the seven had lost something like 75 percent of its men in half a day the enemy thought those remnants were still holding that section of the line in point of fact they were pulled out and Bravo Company second of the seventh full string 110 men was put into those positions we called it the Foreign Legion the company commander was Myron diederich a Ukrainian immigrant grew up in New Jersey tough tough guy best company commander how more ever saw in three Wars and one of the platoon leaders was wicked Rescorla regrets Borla the englishman these two guys got busy they had a little break breather so they pulled the lines and a little tighter dug deep foxholes do these little shallow body holes were too many of our men died they dug three men foxholes this beam with firing steps they got the men out and they cut this elephant grass or stomped it down they went out 200 meters and set out trip flares and alarms that would pass let us know they were coming then they registered the artillery front back in sideways they had this battlefield covered then they set back to wait for the attack they knew would come and it was night and at 3 a.m. when it is darkest in anyone's soul especially on the battlefield repressed for love move from foxhole to foxhole talking to his manager and then he's saying - he's saying the old Welch mining songs he sang the songs of the British Army in the Zulu Wars and he built the strength and confidence in them and sure enough here came the enemy to battalion strong just before daybreak and they were thrown back blood early and they came again and they were thrown back again and they came a third and final time and they were smashed this company had killed 400 of the enemy at a cost of six Americans lightning wounded brilliant job Rescorla got a Silver Star finished his tour came home to America home to Amer first thing he did was raise his right hand and be sworn in as a citizen went to law school got a law degree Oklahoma tops top college for a while I think in South Carolina but gravitated towards security work became the vice president of security for Morgan Stanley brokerage New York City he was a hero in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center last man out of the building after he made sure everybody was out came out covered in choking and coughing next week he went to his employers and he said you know most of your people live in New Jersey this building was a target last week it will be a target again so why don't you move headquarters to New Jersey build a low-rise high security facility and we'll all love you better for it and they said sorry we have a long-term lease on these 22 floors in trade tower to 3,000 employees on those floors Rick Rescorla said okay if that's how it is you won't listen to reason you can give me the time and money that it takes to run five or six full evacuation drills every year so that everybody knows how to get out of this deathtrap and they laughed they called him Rick's fire drills but he insisted and on September 11th 2001 trading Tower one is hit the Squawk Box in all of the offices in town to the Port Authority swap boxes are saying stay at your desk don't panic you're safe here no sweat and Rick wrestler looked out that window at that burning building and he said he grabbed his bullhorn and he went four by four 22 floors or during the evacuation by the buddy system two by two down those 66 flights of stairs off they went and when their building was hit and the smoke poured into the stairwells and people's threatened to panic Rick press portal sang to them he's saying god bless america pulled out his cell phone called his wife told her he loved her he got him all out but five and he was on his way back up to get the stragglers last seen on the 10th floor when the building came down they never recovered his body one more thing three years before September 11th Rescorla had been diagnosed with terminal cancer the doctors gave him six months to live but he beat it God had one more thing for him to do I called it the power of one man the power of one he saved 3,000 lives but each of those lives each of those humans had a spouse children mother father brothers sisters the circle widens so far how far I think people from Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund can tell you that of the 58,000 200 thirty four five 2035 mains on that wall there are 20 some million people in America who have a direct connection to them familial friend classmate concentric circles so yes that's the story of the man on the cover of the book my friend Rick risk for you know we don't have enough time for me to say all that I would want to say about the talks what remarkable people we took 19 of them into the idream Valley not one of them came out on his own feet you know greater love hath no man then he lay down his life for the sake of another and that is the credo of HoMedics the toss and I would tell you you know dr. arable battalion surgeon he thought he shouldn't have been there he thought he was being misused to be on the battlefield that he should have been back to Charlie med with an you know an operating table where he could really do work and so was a something of a bitter man but I persuaded to come to one of our dinners his wife force thing I think his kids force demon and he came and when he was introduced he got a standing ovation I think there were something like thirty men in that room who owed their lives to him I watched him do a battlefield tracheotomy with a pocketknife and save a man's life the enlisted docs the medics I'd be when everybody else goes to ground is when they have to stand up and move war is hell on medics and it's hell on photographers too you can't do that job laying on the crap and I you know I I have a special place in my heart for all of the docs thank you nice allegic we did find and recover the diary exactly as depicted in the in the movie and and it was you know basically a series of letters from this North Vietnamese soldier to his wife and and it's almost pure poetry and we had it translated and in fact we quote some of it in the book and and we have taken steps to return that diary to Vietnam and to the family of that soldier when those telegrams those terrible telegrams started coming in they had no casualty notification system so they handed them Western Union handed them over to yellow cab drivers to take them out and shove them into the hands of new widows a horrible job and badly one widow of one of our first sergeants Jack shallow opened the door at one o'clock in the morning to find a totally drunk out of his mind taxi driver standing there shoving her the telegram telling her that what's bid and bad and then fell backward and passed out in her flower bed and she's trying to deal with her own grief and this this cab driver passed out in her flowerbed horrible things happen a young Hispanic widowed opened her door to get the telegram she I think was 8 months pregnant I passed out just fainted right there the cab driver doesn't know what to do mrs. Moore Julie Moore and mrs. Kennard wife of the division commander burned up the phone lines to Washington DC they raised hell 6 feet and put a concrete block under and two weeks later this was changed and the casualty notification system that we know where a Jacklyn an officer and one or two others come to the house prepared to help was Institute reinstituted

Channel: Bill Holiday

Views: 37,814

Rating: 4.8992805 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Galloway, We Were Soldiers, Vietnam, War, VVMF

Id: JtT9-eFqErE

Length: 45min 57sec (2757 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2016