American Valor Quarterly Issue 2 - Spring 2008 | Page 26

commander, Col. Tim Brown showed up at my location, dropped
in on a helicopter, and said, “Hal, you’re going to go into the Ia
Drang Valley tomorrow morning. We’ve got 16 helicopters, and
your mission is to search for and destroy the enemy.”
So I said, “What is the enemy’s situation, Colonel?” He said, “There
are three battalions of fresh North Vietnamese, fresh off the Ho
Chi Minh Trail that just crossed over the border from Cambodia
into the Ia Drang Valley. Your mission is to find and kill those
three battalions.” An up-to-strength North Vietnamese battalion
in those days was 500 officers and men. So we were going up
against a possible 1,200 to 1,500 of the enemy, with my 450 men.
The major problem I had, having selected my landing zone, was
getting all the troops in before the fight started. That was my big
concern. There was about a 25 minute round trip by helicopter
from the pickup zone near Plei Me Special Forces camp to the
landing zone at X-Ray. So my apprehension was that we would
get into a hell of a fight before I had all of my under strength
battalion in. And that’s exactly what happened.

U.S. Army Center of Military History

I was the first man on the ground, out of then-Maj. Crandall’s
helicopter. Me, the Sergeant Major, my two radio operators, and
my intelligence officer—Captain Metzker—hit the ground, fired
our rifles into the trees and ran across a dry creek bed. But we
made no contact. I was very happy about that. It told me that I
would be able to at least get a few of my men in before we
made contact. But that was a hope which didn’t work out. We
captured a prisoner—Captain Herren’s company—and I rushed
over to that prisoner with my interpreter. It was a scared teenager;
no weapon, empty canteen, and he thought we were going to kill
him. We asked him what the situation was, and he told us there
were three battalions of North Vietnamese on the mountain, and
they wanted very much to kill Americans, but they hadn’t found
any. At that point I ordered Captain Herren to intensify his
reconnaissance in that area, and shortly
after that all hell broke loose. By then I
had Tony Nadal on the ground with his
company, and I had never heard such a
loud cacophony of noise. I pulled the
chain on everything I could put my hands
on—fighter-bombers, field artillery,
mortars. That started the fight, and it went
on non-stop for two days and three
nights. I lost 79 men killed, 121 wounded,
and none missing. The proudest
accomplishment of my life is that I never
left one man missing in action or taken as
a prisoner of war on the battlefield.

we went on a lot of other operations, and Hal would always tip
me off, wherever I was hiding out, and I would scoot up from
Saigon or down from Da Nang, and I generally always marched
with Alpha Company. Tony and his radio operator and I would
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