Joseph L. Galloway's interview for the Veterans History Project at Atlanta History Center

today's November 10th 2016 we're at the Atlanta History Center in Atlanta Georgia my name is Joe Bruckner I'm a volunteer at the History Center and with me is Toni Hilliard who's also a volunteer and Suvorov who was the director of oral history and genealogy at the History Center we're here today to conduct an interview in connection with the Library of Congress veterans history project and we're very honored to have with us mr. Jill Galilee mr. Galloway is a journalist who is the only individual that's been awarded a combat medal by the army and also he's written a book bestseller we were soldiers and once then young and this has been named one of the ten greatest books ever written on the war so it's a real privilege to be with you today and have you come in and tell us your story pleasure to be here could you give us your full name and where and when you were born Joseph Lee Galloway jr. born November 13 1941 in Bryan Texas ok and what city and state do you currently live in I live in Concord North Carolina tell us a little bit about your upbringing oh my I was born three weeks before Pearl Harbor and I did not meet my father until the end of 1945 when he came home from service he and five of his brothers wore the uniform in World War two and four of my mother's brothers so we were heavily invested in that war and my earliest memories are of living in houses full of frightened women looking out the window for the Telegraph boy you know they were all of these uncles and ants were young couples they had maybe one or two kids the war broke out and then the father is gone and he's gone mostly for the duration of the war so we my mother and I lived between her mother's house in the little town of mark a Texas and his mother's house in the little town of Franklin Texas which was 28 miles away and we would ride the bus between those two we my mother was pretty good at figuring out when we had worn out our welcome in one place and we moved to the other had a little like and remember a little alligator embossed cardboard suitcase we would pack all our belongings and and head down the road those were the years of world war ii and i have a memory of scrap metal collections and saving bacon grease which i have no idea what they did something to do with ammunition there were I you know I remember my mother they only gave you the ration book only had one coupon for a pair of shoes per person per year and I'm a growing boy you go through shoes pretty quick so my mother gave up her shoe rationed so that I could have two pair a year and that my father was earning $21 a month in the army and he gave us a an allotment so that we got $18 of his 21 he lived off of four dollars a month that bought his cigarettes I guess and it was it was interesting times do you remember specifically when your dad came back from the war oh I remember it like it was yesterday he came back and he came up on the porch and he had the little overseas cap he was wearing and I wanted that cap and I was begging for it and he took that cap off his head and he threw it out in the yard and I ran to get it and when I got back mom and dad were in the house and the door was locked so they got busy making my little brother [Laughter] but it was interesting times interesting time if my dad worked at a couple of jobs took a course at A&M and took a job with the humble oil company in South Texas in a little town called refugio and my mom and I loaded what furniture we had by then and on the back of a pickup truck and drove down in the winter to join my dad he had found a place he could rent it was in the oil boomtown and places to live were very hard to come by so he was down there living in a rooming house for a good while until he could find an apartment to rent and we joined him and I went through 11 years of public school in that little town and graduated from a high school there in night class of 1959 before we move ahead I want to ask you a question about your father and your uncles did your father they endure your uncle's talk about their experiences in World War two not much not much now my dad did not go overseas he was scheduled to go with the division to the army division to the Pacific Theater and they were almost literally lining up to get on the boat when they they came through asking if anyone could type and he could type and they pulled him out of the out of the line and he spent the war in fat Fort Ord California and he finished up as a tech sergeant the other uncle's they were all over the place one was Army Air Force and he flew in the Pacific New Guinea in all those places my mother had one brother who was in the 101st airborne and was wounded pretty badly in Europe in the Normandy campaign and the rest of them I think were just one was in the Navy the youngest brother of my dad managed to get in the war like in 44 and was on a navy ship that was hit by kamikaze pilots off of Okinawa he survived that most of them made at home one shape or another but but they got home from it okay and boy were they in a hurry to get on with life and living but they didn't talk about it much didn't talk about it hardly at all until I came home on leave from Vietnam and I remember my uncle jigs who had been a pilot in the Pacific and he never would talk about it in fact he was kind of really nervous around crowds and he considered a family reunion a crowd I mean he would disappear out the back door into the woods and and stand around smoking and walking and I came back from Vietnam I didn't like crowds much myself and I walked out there in those woods and for the first time ever uncle jig started telling me about his service and what he saw in the New Guinea campaign and things like that but they didn't think it was worth talking to you if you didn't understand what they had gone through and I understand stood that a whole lot more when I had gone through it myself I'm sure you did so what did you do after you got out of high school I went to college for six weeks and those six weeks stood me in good stead I was the campus stringer for the local daily newspaper in Victoria Texas the Victoria daily advocate and to me it was a junior college and to me it just seemed like an extension of high school and I had had that right up to here so I I was I just turned 17 and I was begging my mother to sign the papers so I could enlist in the army I wanted out of South Texas I wanted out of Texas and I wanted out of school and I finally browbeat the poor woman to the point where she said okay I'll sign and she and I were in the car on the way to the recruiting office and we two blocks away you passed the newspaper office and my mother one last-gasp attempts at Joe what about your journalism I said good call mom stopped the car and I got out and I went in and I saw I knew the managing editor of fine young man named Jim Rec and I said mr. Rick you wouldn't happen to have a vacancy for a reporter and he said well as a matter of fact I do and he hired me on the spot 35 bucks a week and Friedan subscription to the newspaper and that saved me from the Army I had have probably been in Vietnam carrying a rifle and stripes on my shoulder I guess now you've got an experience I believe when you were much younger where you got into journalists oh absolutely I you know it's not like I just woke up one morning 17 and wanted to be a reporter when I was 9 years old I traded my old bicycle to an uncle for a 1912 Remington typewriter this is one of those square things about yay high and yay wide and weighed about 50 pounds and I got my dad to bring me a box of carbon paper and if I hit those keys as hard as I could I could make six copies of my home reported home grown newspaper from my neighborhood by then we lived in an oil camp with about 30 houses all the men work for Humble Oil and refining company which was a family owned company in those days it's now called Exxon it was bought by Standard Oil of New Jersey and my dad and several of his brothers all worked for that company and we lived ten miles outside of refugio Texas on the middle of a big ranch in the middle of one of the biggest oil fields in Texas and I was the local reporter and publisher of about a weekly newspaper if I could manage it and I made a successful business of it back then it was a real popular Christmas gift for kids was a little printing press that that you you set rubber-type on this thing and you could run these boy you could run them off a lot quicker than I could type them and some kid would always get one of those for Christmas and he'd make a newspaper and then he'd get tired of it I would sell him my newspaper subscription list I'd already collected the money and he would have to fulfill the subscription and not have any money no operating cash and he would get bored and he would quit after a week or two and then I would start it up again so you weren't just a journalist you were a businessman too dang right but I I you know it was a lifelong interest I worked on the school newspaper first running the mimeograph machine you remember those I still smell it yeah and then as a reporter and writer and I had a I had very good almost great English teachers and journalism teachers really encouraged me to that and at the end of a long life I have to say I wouldn't change a thing sure you wouldn't a lot of us are glad you did what you did so after your mom saved me from the arm talk about what happened after that I went to work on the daily newspaper I worked they they generously called it five and a half days a week what it was was six days a week I think I had Tuesday and half a day Sunday off and I worked on the copy desk editing stories writing headlines and once in a while they would let me go out and report a story I can remember the first one they sent me on I really screwed up it was a historic meeting between two warring women's garden clubs and they were going to come together and peacefully agreed to work on planting oleander plants down the middle of a highway and I went out and covered this and mixed up the names of the presidents and I I wrote that story and handed it in and I had shot a picture for they taught me how to use the old speed graphic camera like that and like I walked in the next day and I could always tell when Jim wreck was mad because his neck got red and he was sitting there and he had about five cigarettes burning at once in his ashtray and he didn't even look at me he just muttered and he muttered you really screwed that one up Galloway I've had every member of both women's garden clubs on the phone to me explaining to me who their president is and is not yeah I thought my career was over before it began but I survived and moved on it was a very good place to learn I had either side I was flanked by older guys who had been in the business a long time one was was a fellow who had made it all the way to the New York Times and then drank his way all the way back down to a small daily in South Texas and then dried out and but was still a very flamboyant writer and reporter and on the other side was a very solid excellent reporter thoughtful man who had been the managing editor of an even smaller paper the the Pulitzer Prize with the great box 13 scandal in South Texas when Lyndon Johnson stole stole his way to Congress into the US Senate there was a mysterious box thirteen and Alice Texas that somehow caught fire in the basement of the courthouse as the Texas Rangers were on their way to check it out and see if it really did vote 133 to 2 in favor of Lyndon Johnson and it was going to put him in the Senate and did because the ballots all burned up before the Rangers got there so that guy's sitting there on one side and a more solid citizen you couldn't imagine and then this flim-flam man on the other side I got an education out of the deal so you learned how to deal with both ends both ends of the spectrum and both of them were good journalists in their own way so I you know I'm I have no one to blame on blame it on I am self educated I was always a reader read five six books a week and have ever since I was ten years old and still do well that had to really help you as a journalist absolutely you cannot understand what good writing is until you understand by reading I used to hire people for UPI and Los Angeles and I would say they'd come in with all their clippings and I would tell them look somebody else could have written that and put your name on it far as I'm concerned I I don't want to see your clippings I want to see your library card if you don't have one get out of my office that tells me more than anything what was your first experience of covering a situation outside the country whether it was a war or another another issue or well my first assignment outside the United States was in 1964 after browbeating my bosses for a couple of years trying to get to Vietnam they finally agreed to transfer me to Tokyo Japan and put me to work on the Asia desk Tokyo was Asia headquarters then for United Press International and I went to work on the copy desk there as Asia editor and but as when I was leaving the States I went to see my old mentor Harry Truman former president of the United States and told him I was going and he said well you going to Tokyo you going to Japan when you get there I want you to go take a look at that Hiroshima place you know he says I take a lot of crap for bombing them I want you to go look at it and be my eyes and ears and and let me know how they're doing so in the early spring of 65 I went down took a photographer and went down to Hiroshima and called on the mayor and the governor and did did the whole town and and wrote a report to Harry Truman I found of course it was a very prosperous town now and all of the damage had been repaired long since excuse me y'all go ahead what was his response or did he comment on what you were paid he didn't comment he I didn't hear back from him I sent him the the report just so that he would know and wrote a story about it but he he just he wanted to know what what the people thought about him and the mayor of Hiroshima is a socialist and he said Mr Calloway he said we people of aricema we hold no grudge against mr. Truman but we do wish that he would quit saying if he had it all to do over again he'd bomb us again and I happened to know that the mayor as a young man had worked as a clerk in the post office in Hiroshima and the night before it was nuked his boss he had been working long hours and this boss said you know Yoshi you're you look tired why don't you sleep in tomorrow morning and he lived about ten miles outside the city and when the police got nuked he was not there he was home asleep and it saved his life of course and I said mr. mayor if Harry Truman had it all to do over again in the situation was this exactly the same you better sleep in again he was not amused I was going to ask you thing laughed did not the interview was over at that point Harry Truman's just a remarkable man I came to know him when my first job outside Texas was Kansas City and the first day at work the boss says look yeah I'm gonna break you in here on the day side a little bit but then you're going on the night shift because you're the last guy hired you get the crappy schedule and he said inevitably New York desk is going to ask you to get a comment from Harry Truman on this that or the other and he showed me the rolodex and said there's mr. Truman's home phone you call him and it wasn't two weeks until exactly that happened and I don't know what it was it was some question and hide with trembling fingers dialed the former president's home number at nine o'clock at night and he answered his own phone you know I was and I was apologizing like crazy and he said no son he says I like the reporters it's editors I hate he said go ahead and ask your question and I asked it and he said yep he said the answer to that is on page 197 volume two of my memoirs but I don't expect your editors can read so I'll give you the answer again and and I'm apologizing again he said nah no he said I do like reporters he said come see me here at the library someday well next time I had a day off I hauled ass over to Independence Missouri and visited with mr. Truman and and it became a habit I would go by and see him a couple of times a month and I would go in and I would stick my head in the door of Miss Rose his secretary and I'd say Miss Rose is the boss in she'd say how many school buses did you see in the parking lot when you arrived I said Ron it must have been 20 or so she said then you know where he is and I would go on down the hall to the auditorium and the former president would be sitting on the lip of the stage with his little feet dangling talking to five hundred eighth graders from Joplin Missouri about the Constitution of the United States of America and the responsibilities of the office of president never the power but always he talked of the responsibilities and I I think back on that and I think on every president we have had since then and I can't see even one of them in that same position doing that same thing Harry Truman was truly one of a kind he was a man of the people and he never never thought of himself as anything but and he spent many many a morning in that auditorium talking to a bunch of Gaulke kids so his image as a regular guy is accurate absolutely absolutely what an amazing experience for you oh you have no idea I was covering mr. Truman was doing a speech in I believe Dodge City Kansas on the 24th day of October 1962 and because I was a friend of his there'd be six or seven reporters in the hall of the hotel suite he would send somebody out to bring me in and I was sitting there in the hotel room with Harry and Bess Truman John D Montgomery the Kansas Democratic Chairman and myself when the phone rang and mrs. Truman answered and I can hear her voice and she says Harry it's the White House calling for you and mr. Montgomery and I offered to get up and leave the room and Harry said doll sit down and it was Jack Kennedy calling to declare the Cuban Missile Crisis he was giving Truman a heads up that he would be on TV within the hour making this speech and we waited there with him and watched him critique Kennedy's speech a little bit about what is you know that's pretty heady stuff for a kid who's 20 years old that really is yeah it was a positive about Kennedy's speech negative a little bit of both no absolutely positive and Hammer and the arm of his chair when when Kennedy said that that he was invoking not the Monroe Doctrine but the Rio de Janeiro treaty and Harry's saying George Marshall and I wrote that treaty for exactly this reason and point-by-point Truman was making his points along with Kennedy boy you just you have no idea I left there I mean we were trembling on the brain brink of nuclear war and I had one of my uncle's was he flew as engineer on a aerial refueling Strategic Air Command ship at anchor and he flew out of Linna Kansas and I had to drive through there on my way back to Topeka from listening to Kennedy's speech and he was gone and so was every airplane there and so was every airplane at Schilling Air Base in Topeka and all of them both of those were sacked bases and later my uncle told me that every b-52 we had was either in the air or on the ground at tule greenland's which is where he and the tankers were sitting and they were cocked locked and ready to rock Wow and we came so close we came so close to nuclear war right then and there I'm not sure that many people know how close we got they don't know I don't think they do I don't think they do to this day that's a fascinating area okay it's 1964 and let's start there with your first trip overseas you were starting to talk about that but I like the Harry Truman experience is just fascinating ya know we I spent as soon as I got to Tokyo I I asked the boss there I said I want to go to Saigon I want to go cover the Vietnam War oh he said you know I just sent a second American to Saigon will never need more than that and I knew better but I just thought I'll hide and watch and I worked on the Tokyo desk you know right and all of the China stories and all of the copy from Asia came through to be edited rewritten shortened lengthened sent to New York and that's what I did for a few months but then things got hot March of 65 the first Marines landed in Danang in South Vietnam and the pressure was on my boss was having to send people in temporary duty so he could cover this and finally he just said okay you're going get on the plane and early April of 65 I was on the plane to Vietnam got there took a couple of days to get the accreditation cards and everything and got on a got on a c-123 milk run flight that went all the way stopping at every town in every base in Vietnam and got to Da Nang and I was in the war I was in the war so quick I had not even gotten to the black market to buy fatigues and and boots I was wearing chinos and loafers and I even have a picture of myself on my first combat operation I got to Da Nang and I had my clothing in a Samsonite suitcase my mother had given me for high school graduation and this this very excited dark-skinned gentleman came running up and he said you are mr. Galloway and I said yeah and he said oh I am already yet the UPI photographer you come with me and I and what about my suitcase and he said a rude thing about my suitcases put it put it in the aerial squadron terminal and drugged me onto a c-130 and and I didn't know where we're going or what's happening and we flew to Kuan nice city and we got off and if you've ever seen and somebody stuck a stick in an ant it was like that people were just going every which way and there was a sense of panic in the air on this air little airstrip and I already ran over to a helicopter and talked to this guy and then he waved at me and I went over and got on this helicopter with them and here we are I don't know where we are leaving for I don't know where to and we flew out of there about 10 minutes on this marine CH 34 helicopter which is Korean War vintage shaking I mean give you a real massage and we flew out of there about ten minutes and we circled and I'm looking out the open door and there's a hill not very high hill in the middle of a rice paddy a big rice paddy like so and we landed on top of that hill and the guy shut the chopper off and and there was dead silence and we got out and I looked around and there were probably 200 little they weren't foxholes they didn't have time they were just little indentations and there was a man lying in each one like he was holding a rifle except there was no rifle and that man was dead and they were all dead they had been overrun and all of them were killed by the Vietcong and what we were doing there was the crew chief of that helicopter needed help we had to go man to man until we found the two American advisors and recovered their bodies and brought them back to the helicopter and brought them home and that was our our that the only reason that guy led us on that helicopter was he needed help in the bodies and and I I it was a shock it was a total shock and I you know and to that moment my knowledge of war was limited to John Wayne movies for God's sakes but now I saw the reality of it I saw 200 dead Vietnamese and I saw two dead Americans and I looked at their faces and I carried their bodies and I looked at them all the way back to that base on that helicopter and they didn't look like John Wayne to me and you know in the movies you did you get up after they turn the camera off and you're okay but not in a war you still did and we got back to that that town that base and it was getting near dark and I'll read told me he said look they're so scared up here that all the Americans leave at night and fly back to Danang but if we stay the night we'll get a start early in the morning and we'll be ahead of the AP I said sounds good to me alright and we went over to spend the night at the Mac V was the adviser compound we went over to that compound and there was a tall skinny totally exhausted army captain standing at the gate and he said boy am I glad you guys decided to stay here tonight we have been on 24/7 alert for the last five days and I need some sleep and you guys are gonna guard the base tonight okay and I got a I get they had a switch little one long army switchboard in there and the guy managed to connect me through the the bureau in Saigon and I'm dictating a story when they started more during the place and I'm underneath the switchboard still dictating and the guys at the other end he says what's that noise and I said they're shooting at us you idiot [Laughter] it was my introduction to the Vietnam War and that night re took the first shift for three hours and then it was my turn and the guy gave us an M tube grease gun 45 caliber submachine gun and my turn I'm out there I'm scared to death I'm in this bunker with a slit that looks out right at the road well during my shift the enemy attacked the South Vietnamese compound commanders compound across the the little road they say hit it with satchel charges blowing it up and I'm figuring we're next and finally after the longest night of my life there's a little light in the east you know the Sun is going to come up in a minute and I've made it and I look and down that road comes a Vietnamese guy on a bicycle with a big package on the front on his handlebars and I have checked around in that machine gun and I have got it right on him and I'm about to blow his gizzard out when the captain hits me on the shoulder and says son if you shoot that man you're gonna have to cook our breakfast [Laughter] he was the cut and our breakfast was on his hannel fire I tell you you you know you can't make stuff like that up well you learned a lot about 24 hours then take long you know it didn't take long my my next introduction was one of the Americans who had been in Saigon for a good while by then ray Herndon he was also a Texan came up to Da Nang to introduce me around and and he took me out to see the Vietnamese arvin corps commander who was a four-star general wench on tea by name thi and later he would side with the Buddhists in an uprising and be exiled from the country but at that time he was truly the warlord of the northern part of South Vietnam and Herndon took me in to introduce me to him and and he was a very blunt spoken guy and he looked at me and he said are you Americans here to stay you know you've come in here and you're pushing us aside and you're saying we're taking this war over he said you know we've been fighting this war for 20 odd years a long time and now you say you're gonna take it over are you gonna stick are you going to stay the course because if you decide next year are ten years from now that you're going to cut and run when you leave there going to be people shooting holes in your helicopters and it's going to be me and my troops and I just I looked at my said general that's what that's the way above my pay grade that I don't know who you think you're talking to I'm just a kid reporter you need to be talking to somebody else I've done a lot when he said that it meant a lot it he said a lot and I thought about him he was exiled the CIA saved him when Kalki wanted to shoot him but a mutual friend of ours guy named general Sam V Wilson talked key and not shooting tea and letting him and his family come to the States and he lived in Northern Virginia until fairly recently when he died but you know I began then to understand something of just how complex the history and society of that place and those people was and we had no business being there we were getting ourselves in the middle of a civil war with the people we didn't understand that we were if anything contemptuous of your average American GI just looked at them as gooks and didn't understand who they were what they were what their history was and I don't think you should go to war against anybody without really knowing those things you you know you why are you willing to take it upon yourselves to change the people in a country by violence if you don't know what they are who they are you don't know their language this is foolishness so I pretty early on decided that there was just no way we could win this thing no matter how much force we brought against them just look at that Ho Chi Minh Trail I went into the museums in Hanoi and they would tie sticks of bamboo to a plain old heavy iron bicycle and then load 400 pounds of stuff on it and you got two guys one arms pushing and guiding from the front and the other ones pushing from the back and they would come through eight hundred miles of jungle and deliver four hundred pounds and turn around with the bicycle and go get another load and we're sending five million dollar war planes piloted by five hundred thousand dollar pilots to attack two guys barefooted in pajamas with a bicycle I don't I don't I don't see how that computes and I certainly don't see how it computes to victory in war that wasn't gonna happen never even got close never even one year of that war did we kill more of the enemy than they were their natural birth rate increase in Hanoi in North Vietnam and so every year they were making a new crop of draftees for 18 years down the road and we could sit there and do everything we could and only kill less than that number of increase so you came to that realization pretty early early and yet first of all I worked for United Press they didn't pay us to have an opinion they didn't pay us to write what our opinion was in fact they were actively discouraged you having an opinion did you have experiences where you wrote something and they censored it and wouldn't publish it because I disagreed or never never did because I you know I knew what you wrote what you should and the other thing was that I spent my time in the field I spent my time with soldiers and I was not going to be the one to tell them that the deaths of their comrades were useless I couldn't do that I could never bear it not because I'd be afraid but because I would be ashamed to hurt them that badly so I knew but I didn't say well that's good when it's over we can talk about it but not when you're grieving the loss of so many of your friends and I was losing friends too there were 70 journalists who were killed in action just trying to get the story or the picture just trying to tell the truth you know when I turned 30 years old I did an accounting and I had more friends who were dead than we're alive that's what happens when you go to war when you're 23 24 there was a question that the students asked you earlier we had that wonderful meeting with the students and they asked you about your relationship with the troops yeah oh absolutely you know you would turn up to go March with an infantry company Marines or army didn't matter and you might stay three hours or three days or even a week but it always went kind of the same you know you would March we wore fatigues like there's and jungle boots and and sometimes carried a weapon sometimes not but you'd be marching along for a while and then they stop first Moke breaker check the map or heat some sea rations and you sit down in the dirt and the guy next to you says who are you oh I'm a reporter and you'd think about that need say you 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 the cheapest outfit in the world oh you'd say then you're crazy as hell but nobody understands crazy like the infantry and the just grin and the guy next to him and say who the hell is that they'd say oh it's some crazy reporter that but if you stayed the night the next day his answer would be it's our crazy reporter you stayed with them then I and I and it never changed from war to war there's a kid who lives over on the coast to North Carolina now that I ran into with the seventh Cavalry in the Persian Gulf War in the middle of nowhere Saudi Arabia and and he stuck in my mind because he had a clown about that big tattooed on his butt cheek and the first time I met him he showed it to be and and he now is a high school history teacher in the North Carolina and I know where he is and we keep track of each other it just the the the relationship between a correspondent and the soldier is just the same as between one soldier and another or it seems to me because I felt as much a soldier as I did a reporter and I'm sure that's because you stayed with them you didn't fly in in the morning and fly out at night you you live their life I lived their life ice ice I rolled up many a night in a poncho and it's awful uncomfortable and they're bugs and snakes and I can remember nights when the mosquitoes were so bad that I took the plastic bag that I kept my camera and lenses in and put it over my head because they were driving me crazy it's kind of hard to breathe in a plastic bag but it's better than being eaten alive by mosquitoes and you know the first time that I took those orange anti-malarial pills I went blind for 12 hours I couldn't see past the end of my nose and so I couldn't take those pills and I thought if it's a choice between going blind and getting malaria I'll take malaria so I you know one thing about I spent 12 years in Southeast Asia and I had everything you can have died had dengue fever I had malaria I had every parasite known to man including a world record 23 foot long tapeworm you know I loved Southeast Asia and I thought to myself I would love to live here all my life but I don't think my life will be very long if I do stay here so I better get out well as I mentioned in the introduction you're the only person that's been awarded a combat medal by the army and would you talk about that battle of what surrounded it how you got into it and what happened well it's a long story and it really starts in mid October of 1965 with the laying of North Vietnamese Army siege against a little Special Forces camp called play me up in the mountain yard country in the Central Highlands and in that camp were a dozen Americans on an 18 Special Forces a-team and maybe a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five CID G they called them irregular Defence Force molten yards people that were hired on as mercenaries by the Special Forces and that that place fell under siege and they shot down two or three helicopters and a couple of our Air Force fighter planes shot down a b57 Canberra for God's sakes and they closed the airspace well the Special Forces sent a reinforcing team in led by a guy named major Charlie Beckwith a fellow out of Georgia out of the University of Georgia a football player a special forces guy later would go on to found the Delta and Beckwith and his little team from b57 detachment they called it they were specialists in going across the border into Laos and Cambodia and they were sent in to stiffen their resistance in this camp and I missed them going in just by a matter of hours and so I was mad as a wet hen I was stomping up and down the flight line into Pleiku and I ran into an old Texas Aggie buddy of mine captain burns and he said what's matter Jo and I said well I want to get into play me Special Forces camp and I can't find a ride and he said well let me go check he went down to the flight office and he came back and he says well dummy airspace is closed over there I said I know that but I still want to go he said well he said I wouldn't mind taking a look myself yeah come on we'll go that's how you work things back then and he flew me in and I shot a picture out of the open door or that Huey it's kind of laying on its side and we're at about a hundred and fifty feet and kind of spiraling in and it's perfect you got the triangular camp right in the frame of this picture in the frame of that dope and doorway and you can see the mortar shells exploding all over it and that's where we're going and we he pulled in there and I jumped out and they threw a few wounded people on board and my buddy is gone shooting me the bird through the plexiglass as he heads up the mountain and with my ride and a Special Forces Master Sergeant comes up and he said sir he said I don't know who you are but major Beckwith wants to see you right now and I said well which one is he he said it's that big fellow over there jumping up and down on his hat and and that's what he was doing jumping up and down on his hat I went over there somewhat timidly and and he said who the hell are you and I said I'm a reporter and he he scratched his head and he said you know he said I need everything in the world I need ammo I need medevac I need food I would love to have a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey and a box of cigars and what has the army and its wisdom sent me but a goddamn reporter he said son I have news for you I do not have a vacancy for a reporter but I desperately need a corner machine gunner and you're it and he proceeded to drag me over to a bunker not even the bunker really a slit trench with some sandbags piled up and an a air-cooled 30 caliber machine gun and he showed me how to load it and how to clear a jam and he gave me my instructions he said you can shoot the little brown men outside the wire the ones on the inside belong to me he said and one more thing I want you always to have your left eye on that bunker down there that's our supposed allies I don't trust them as far as I can throw them if they turn that machine gun around take them out and I ran that machine gun for two days and nights and finally we got relief a column broke through they had planned the ambush to lure the relief armor column of Vietnamese out of Pleiku that was the last Vietnamese left in pleiku and if they could ambush him and kill them all then crush the camp finish us off in a hurry but we were the bait then they could take pleiku and go on and cut the country in half right down route 19 and the the the fact that the cavalry was there and was able to jump artillery along with that arvin column and and broke through the ambush they had a whole regiment of north vietnamese sitting there to take them out and they between air support and that immediate artillery they couldn't do it and that set the stage for the iran campaign when the cavalry battalion landed on those hills right outside play me camp i was going out to hook up with them and I went to say my goodbyes to major Beckwith and he said you done good on that machine gun boy he said you want to come with me on some of my other missions yes I said how long do they last and he said Oh sometimes 10 days two weeks three weeks I said major they're probably gonna fire me for being three days in this camp with no contact with the Home Office I said I better say no he said you're not carrying a piece I said well technically speaking in spite of the you've made of me these last two days and nights I'm a civilian non-combatants and he said ain't no such thing in these mountains boy he said sergeant get this boil and sixteen and a bag of magazines he's gonna need them if he's gonna stay up here and they brought me an m16 and a bag of 20 loaded magazines and I threw him over my shoulder and marched off with the cab to clear those mountains around the camp we found the wreckage and remains of ten fifty caliber air anti-aircraft Chinese machine guns that had their Gunners legs chained to the tripod so that they wouldn't run when they came under the intense air attack there was there was a regiment's worth of machine guns up there and we got them we got them all but that was there was some hairy times and that was the prelude to the I drank campaign I went back to pleiku filed that story and shipped my film and then I came out to a place called the katenka tea plantation which was where the cavalry Brigade had just set up to run their operation Hal Moore's battalion and one other battalion first and second of the seventh Cavalry and then later they added a fifth cavalry battalion to it and they had a big Vietcong attack on the brigade headquarters one night I was in town that night and came back out the next day and boy they had and the clothes run thing they had they had art we had artillery and they were charging across an open-air fire field dirt runway and here came the North Vietnamese and the mostly Vietcong out of the rubber plantation they crank those those howitzers down and they had plenty of beehive rounds and they ate him alive because they had practiced attacking a certain way and they hadn't counted on those artillery pieces and and once they've rehearsed it they just keep doing it until it works or until they're all dead and in that case they were all dead they just charged into those howitzer barrels and you can't do that it's a deadly operation anyway that that set my feet on the way to landing zone x-ray on the 14th day of November one day after my 24th birthday I spent that night under a bush in a foxhole I dug myself with a company of infantry that were guarding the regiment the brigade headquarters and the next morning Hal Moore's battalion air air assaulted into this clearing at the foot of the Chu pong Massif which ran 1214 miles back into Cambodia so it was a natural highway for infiltration it was full of lime it was limestone and it was full of caves that were easily dug and the enemy was in there they had supplies in there this was a regimental headquarters area and how more Lanza's battalion right smack in the middle of them yeah only 10:00 10:00 a.m. on the 14th a Sunday I never forget it no 1965 or 1965 and I was on one of the lift helicopters taking the company out of katika to go to x-ray and I had slipped on to the helicopter and along came an officer and he had a medic with him and he kept looking in helicopter after helicopter and he came to the one I was on and he looked in at me and said who the hell are you and I said I'm a reporter and he said I need that seat for a medic get the hell off that helicopter so I got thrown off and didn't regret it a bit they needed a medic more than a than a reporter and the brigade commander said don't worry about it it's probably gonna be a hot walk in the Sun and if anything happens I'm going out there so you just hang right here well they know Morden landed then all hell broke loose and the radios went wild and the colonel comes storming out of his tent and I just fell right into a slipstream and went right to his command helicopter and got aboard and we flew out there and it wasn't hard to find there was smoke was rising in the air five thousand feet and it was straight to it we were circling overhead the colonel wanted to land and how Moore very much did not want him landing there he was telling him on the radio well you land that command ship with all those antenna down here and you're gonna be a bullet magnet and I guarantee you you're gonna have to walk home because your bird won't fly it when they finished shooting it up I got two birds already on the ground here and the colonel was arguing a bit but losing the argument we were circling when they shot down a a 1e Skyraider right went and went in right below us streaming a hundred feet of fire from his belly and they were I had the cans on my ears and and they were yelling anybody see a shoot anybody CSU then I watched him my side of the helicopter I watched that bird go right in the jungle and I clicked the mic and I said no shoot no shoot he rode it in and he's still there he's still there Air Force captain had a wife and five kids some years ago they went to his wife and said we've we've located the wreckage and we can do a recovery of remains and the wife said look the Air Force has taken care of putting all five of my kids through college he was very proud of what of his service and what he was doing and he rests in a place of a historic battle leave him in peace that was her choice and he rests there today well and I can see that plane going in just just as clear as day and the colonel Wadden middle and so he dropped me at the fire base about five klicks away where the howitzers were providing fire support but I still wasn't there it took several hours more and I recognized how Moore's three his operations officer Matt Dillon at I went to hurry and buy and I grabbed him I said Matt I need to ride in there he said well I'm going in as soon as it's dark with a load I ammo and water but I can't take you without the old man said so I said get him on the radio and I followed him into the tent and he got on the 25 and and there's how more on the other end he's telling him what he's bringing and when he's coming and he said by the way said that reporter Galloway he wants he's here and he wants to come in with me and I'm listening close and Hal Moore says if he's crazy enough to want to come in here and you got room bringing I had my ticket to ride all I had to do then they were by now there's Peter Arnett of the AP and four or five other reporters are in that firebase and they've been wanting to ride too and all I had to do then was hide from them until it got near dark and they caught a ride back to pleiku where they could get a cold bunk and a hot meal and I got a ride into the pages of history as soon as it was dark I got on a helicopter piloted by Colonel Bruce Crandall then major Crandall and we flew into landing zone x-ray just at dark just before moonrise and there I was truly the worst bloodiest battle of the entire ten years of the Vietnam War 242 Americans killed in four days 300 wounded badly in four days all told three hundred and five Americans killed in the operation there's been a lot written about this but this is an opportunity for people to hear about it firsthand from somebody that was there please talk about that to whatever extent you want to and what you think people ought to know about that battle well most of what you need to know about the battle you could find in the book and in the movie the movie is maybe 75% reality based on the book 25% Hollywood BS which is the reverse of normal for those guys anyway but the the very BD details of that battle are in page after page 440 pages of our book it's very detailed too we put our hearts and souls and everything we could find about that battle about the men on both sides the commanders on both sides two trips to Hanoi to interview the enemy commanders what was that like that was first of all we hadn't done that we fought two wars since World War two the last time we were able to do that was with World War two and only because the German generals were in our prison camps and they had to answer our questions this was I was we the first trip we virtually forced the door open I forced the door open they were not willing participants and they had said that they would give us a visa and the general and I got to bang with the picked up our photographer and then the embassy kept saying we have no authority from Hanoi to give you a visa and I was getting furious because US news was picking up the bill for three of us in a hotel in Bangkok and it was getting very expensive and there was going to be no product at the end I didn't like that so the guy the guy at the Embassy the Vietnamese embassy said why don't you go see this Australian businessman here in Bangkok he has very good ties to Hanoi to very high up people in Hanoi and maybe he can explain it and so the general and I on the morning went out to this guy's house he lived like a Pasha and he said look here's the deal you're a reporter they understand you you can get a visa anytime it's this general here they don't understand and they don't want to give him a visa because they don't understand the purpose that he wants to come to Hanoi and I said okay the purpose both of us come to Hanoi is to ask your commanders to tell us their side of this battle it's what military historians do or would love to do if they could and he said well they don't understand that in Hanoi I said okay I know what they do understand in Hanoi so you send them a message right now and you tell them I'm the deputy foreign editor of US News and World Report magazine twelve million people in the United States read that every week and I'm gonna write every story person early on Vietnam and Southeast Asia for the next 25 years and I'm gonna stick it in this deep and break it off and he said my god mr. Galloway surely you don't want me to tell them that I said I want you to tell them precisely that if I don't get that visa of a our toast you know I got a call at 7:00 a.m. the next morning from the guy at the Embassy saying mr. Galloway would you in general more come down and get your visas and we were on our way to Hanoi but they wouldn't give us who we wanted they gave us jock who was wonderful to have they gave us the chief of military history who had been on the battle Hill which was wonderful but they wouldn't give us the the actual North Vietnamese army commanders but with the two that I got I could make a cover story on the 25th anniversary of the battle and it's interesting because that story convinced annoy that we were exactly what we said we were and our purpose in being there was precisely to accurately quote what they said and to tell the story of this battle and they decided that was as much in their interest as it was in the other sides and so that article got us the contract to write the book and we were in the middle of writing that book when cable arrived from hanaway and said if you in general more will come back to Hanoi we will give you the North Vietnamese commanders who fought against you and so we debated a little bit and said we got to do it there's no not doing it we got on a plane and went to Hanoi and they put us in that same little ratty guest room hotel in the center of the defense ministry compound in Hanoi like big put in a residence in the center of the Pentagon we were in the very belly of the beast and we would go in and sit down with General on I think I taped seven hours of interview with him six hours with General Mancha who Eamon the division commander these are guys who went on to general maan became the commissar of the People's Army of Vietnam and a member of the Politburo general on rows two three stars that was the commander of their equivalent of the War Army War College when the Chinese attacked and seized that mountain inside South inside North Vietnam in 1970 I want to say three four something like wow they're right around then maybe at 76 I don't know but they came in they invaded Vietnam they seized this mountain and the Vietnamese had done a couple of a counter attacks that got beaten back they grabbed general on out of his college duties his War College duties and his staff and sent him up to the border and said you better take that mountain back and he told us about doing that they they did so we were given exactly what we had asked for and that we we came back was by now it was October and we were supposed to hand the manuscript in by Christmas so here I am I've got half a book to write and I've got all this new material to feed in so we were burning the midnight oil seven days a week finally we had it done we got on the train to New York from Washington the general was staying at his son's house at night but I was keeping him up till midnight he said he described it later he said now I know what it feels like to be work on a plantation in the old days and you're the slave driver he said I changed this I chained his leg to my dining room table but it paid off that it did that it did we took that box with the manuscript in it up to New York and walked into their senior vice president and chief editor it plopped that on his desk and how Morra looked at him and said we have brought you the heart of the Buffalo and this book editor was horrified he thought blood was going to be leaking out of that box well you can see why that's been named one of the ten greatest books about war with that kind of research and being able to do what you did that hasn't been done really when we loosen the goalposts one of my general friends we we printed up probably 300 copies of the manuscript and I very carefully placed it with people that knew what they were going to be reading and and would be able to start the buzz and and the reaction was overwhelming I knew we had it I told you no more you you know this is gonna change your life he said why how do you mean I said you're about to become very famous well you said I don't know if I'm ready for that [Laughter] we'll talk about what you did subsequent to that throughout the rest of your career and just any experiences you would like well I stayed in Vietnam from that November of 65 until September of 66 and while I was leaving Vietnam I wasn't leaving Asia I liked that place so I went back to Tokyo and did two years there and then I transferred to be the bureau chief in Jakarta Indonesia and I stayed there six years then I went from Jakarta to New Delhi to be the South Asia manager of UPI I had think I had eight countries everything from Afghanistan through Burma a wonderful place and then I came back to Singapore for two years as the Southeast Asia manager but in all of this time I kept going to different Wars I went to in 71 I covered this Marxist guerrilla uprising in Sri Lanka then I went from there to Dhaka in East Pakistan for the india-pakistan war I started off the war on the side of the Pakistan Army and ended up being liberated by the Indian Army and watching the creation of a new nation bangladesh i get i get interview requests from bangladesh i think they think I'm a george washington figure they keep wanting me to come over for their festivities and I you know Bangladesh is not high on my list tourist attractions but I did that I covered the the Indonesian takeover of Portuguese Timor stuff like that New Guinea the uprisings in Papua New Guinea stuff like that was almost a constant in my life I I kept things packed so that I could grab and run head for the airport you had to keep research material handy on a country in any of these countries and I had that I would grab it I could read it on the plane going in and hit the ground and start filing stories that's that's what you got to do when you're a wire service fireman yeah you're always putting out fires well that had to be exciting it was it was and I get to where it's time to think about leaving Southeast Asia and they call up and say well we want to make you the bureau chief in Moscow in the Soviet Union now at that point I hadn't seen a winner in 12 years and they're gonna send me in the middle of winter to the Soviet Union and that's what they did and that's where you go you know you get the army mentality they they're going to move you every three years somewhere and you have no choice so I went and it was fascinating I'm glad it was at the end of a long foreign career because I understood what I was seeing and I could go in there and tell them look I've seen much better run dictatorships than you got going here and they would probably listen to you a little well it was like react they had no choice but to listen to me what I understood going in was that anything they did to me as the UPI bureau chief in Moscow we were going to do to the task bureau chief in Washington DC and while I was not a professional spy he was a colonel in the KGB and the Russians never make stupid trades and I knew that and they knew I knew that and I hammered them every day and they could stand there like a jackass in a hailstorm and take it I had fun you got to have some light amusement in a place like Moscow there's not much to be had that was a culture shock I guess after the places you had been well it was you know it's 52 shades of gray and I'm gathered that it's much improved in some ways and much worse in others but it looks to me like it's still run by the KGB whatever they call that form of government they've got it's it's a mess and it was a mess then it's easy to believe that all of the intelligent people ran away in 1917 and that all you got left are a nation of potato farmers what did you do subsequent to that that you'd like to share with us as far as your experiences or well they they offered me the Paris Bureau but I was tired of overseas and so they sent me to Los Angeles which worked perfectly it was just like another foreign country had a hard time finding the visa office but there than that I had a couple of years for UPI in Los Angeles and then I switched over to be the West Coast editor of Us news and that was different very different first of all they paid me real money UPI never did and I never cared because I was living overseas and living off my expense account and whatever pitiful salary they paid me I could put in the bank in and I worked in Los Angeles for two years for him and when my savings were gone I had to find a real job after only 22 years with United Press International and I left and went to US News did two years and then was called back to their headquarters in Washington DC and did a senior editor job for a while and then a senior writer job which was much more fun and I got to do all kinds of things very great pleasure and I left that and did a one-year tour as a special consultant to General Colin Powell at State Department I was sworn into government service on the tenth day of September 2001 and I was standing in line at the badge office at state when they flew the planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and the world turned upside down I spent that next year writing speeches and articles for secretary Powell is one of the finest men I've ever worked for then I went to work for knight-ridder newspapers in DC as their senior military correspondent and they gave me a weekly syndicated column so I could finally begin taking a revenge or at least trying to balance the scales and when did you get out well you're still in journalism technically a sort of but with uh I tell you what I decided to hang it up in 2006 in February to be precise I was on my last combat patrol in a place called Mosul Iraq with the 256 Stryker Brigade of the US Army and I was in a platoon of three Stryker vehicles and we had been on patrol for about three hours and I'm in the back hatch with a sergeant we're talking on the intercom when the radio just went crazy we had a pair of Kiowa Warrior helicopters flying over cap flying protection over us as we patrol the city and one of them had just been shot down and his wingman gave the the strikers the exact coordinates of where the plane went where the bird the helicopter went down and we were there in two minutes and it had crashed in a somebody had dug a half-block Foundation excavation for a built building that never got built and any hole in the ground in Iraq becomes a garbage dump they've been throwing garbage in it for years and it was rainy season it was cold it was raining and we skidded down the muddy sides of that pit and started looking for the wreckage of the helicopter well it was it was all wreckage the whole junk heap and finally we spotted a tendril of smoke and we found the wreckage of the chopper and there were two men in it we pulled it apart with our bare hands and got the pilot out he was dead just and we tore into the other side of the helicopter and got the copilot out and he was alive we had a pulse and we got him up the side of that muddy pit and into the back of a Stryker to get him to a helicopter landing pad and he died before he got there and I tell you I was standing there in that rain and thankful it was raining because you couldn't tell I was crying because I knew what was going to happen with those two families a wife in each one two babies in each one all under the age of four and then army sedan is going to pull up and their lives are going to be destroyed and to me it was exactly the same as looking in the faces of those two men I pulled off that mountain top in Vietnam so many years before and I couldn't take any more I'm 65 years old and I'm still running up and down sand dunes after nineteen year old Marines and looking in the faces of dead Americans that are you right so I quit I quit I hung it up the first of June 9 2000 I can't even remember now 2006 and on the first year and I loaded the last of my stuff in a u-haul truck it's bigger one as I could rent and I headed south to Texas at a high lope well you sure earned your right to retire yeah well they wouldn't let me what's the rest of the story Wow they keep me busy I kept writing the column for another four or five years and then I married dot Gracie and she wouldn't move to Texas so I had to move to North Carolina and then they hired me to work for the Vietnam War 50th the commemoration project and so I've been doing that for three years they keep me on the road going around the country doing interviews with Vietnam veterans and doing speeches and I guess it keeps me limber and out of the bars well it also serves a great mission of being with those veterans letting them tell their stories yeah I learned something new from every interview yeah I really do there's stories that chill your blood they're stories that make your heart glad it's all different but you learn something from every one of them and they probably learn something from you every oh Lord I I don't know I supposed to do that sue do you totally have any questions just one last one I know we've kept you wait too long but you saw soldiers in Vietnam and you've seen soldiers in the post 9/11 conflicts do you see differences the differences are external the differences are in training and equipment and weaponry you know there's not a lot of doubt that the modern equipment is better than the old stuff but that's not what makes a soldier soldiers hearts or what you look for and feel and those are unchanged they're unchanged through six thousand years of recorded history soldiers do what they do out of a selflessness and a willingness to give without hope of reward they do it for their family they do it for their country but most of all what I found is they do it for each other the man on the left the man on the right and that's unchanged and unchanging they're gonna always be willing to step up and do it that's I can't imagine that being said better is there anything else you would like to say no I think I'm covered just about the whole waterfront well I want to thank you number one for sitting down with us and telling your story and I want to thank you for what you've done for the country and for veterans and by your writing all the way back to when you first had that little little typewriter up through now I mean you have served a purpose of telling the veterans that is invaluable and a lot of people know about what went on because of you and the way you tell the story and the way you spoke to these high school students today I mean you nobody wants to be called a hero but I think what you're doing is heroic and that you're educating society about our country and about history and about veterans and I just personally want to thank you for being here and thank you for your service well thank you I'm no hero I had the great honor of standing alongside some real heroes and I know what they are and who they are and they're my friends and my brothers and sisters and I'm the luckiest guy you ever seen because about a million bullets were fired in my direction and not one of them took effect yeah and I think it was Winston Churchill who said there's nothing so exhilarating as to be fired upon without effect I can't I can't think of a better way to end in the discussion all right thank you very much thank you

Channel: Atlanta History Center

Views: 37,747

Keywords: Journalist (Profession), Atlanta History Center (Museum), Library of Congress Veterans History Project

Id: CxLvhLytYnk

Length: 104min 16sec (6256 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2019