We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam by Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway

the sentry and told him we wanted to pass through and walk the old base. An told us this was now the headquarters of a reserve division of the army. The soldier told him he could not permit us to pass. Eventually he summoned an officer, a captain, who said there was no problem with us going around the new headquarters and onto the ground where our old base had stood, but he could not allow foreigners to enter through the post. General An’s three stars seemed to carry less weight the farther we traveled from Hanoi—a phenomenon we would become better acquainted with in the days to come.
    The buses could go no farther on the pitted and potholed dirt track, so we hiked around the army headquarters, crawled through a barbed-wire fence, and walked out onto the plain and hills where once a mighty American division had roosted with its 435 helicopters and 15,000 soldiers. All of that was gone and what remained was farmland—rice paddies carved out of land cleared with American sweat and muscle, and on the edges where the land was poorer were hardscrabble patches of manioc and yam.
    Sergeant Major Plumley and I walked to the spot where our battalion headquarters once stood. Again, no more than memories of nights spent writing letters to the families of soldiers who had died in battle and of days spent saying farewell to small groups of other, more fortunate soldiers who had survived a terrible ordeal and now were going home. This had been our home base during our year in Vietnam. Upon arrival a party had climbed Hong Kong Mountain, which loomed over the base, and there cleared a space, collected rocks, and painted them to form a large yellow 1st Cavalry Division patch with its emblematic black horse head. It was gone now, whether dismantled by some later American division or by the Vietnamese or by the mountain’s relentlessly encroaching jungle I could not say.
    I thought of how we spent the days here. I liked to rise early, in the coolness before dawn, and jog with some of my officers around the entire five-mile perimeter of the base, on a ring road of hard-packed red dirt just inside the tangles of barbed wire and machine-gun bunkers that guarded against an unseen enemy. It was quiet then, before the Army woke up, the silence only occasionally broken by the bark of an artillery tube firing a 105mm round. They called it H and I fire—harassment and interdiction—shooting blindly into the distant jungle in hopes that it might blow up some hapless Viet Cong loping down an unseen trail. I don’t think it worked very well, but we Americans had plenty of ammunition to waste. We learned to sleep through the steady booms of that friendly outgoing artillery addressed “To Whom It May Concern.”
    When I got back from my run I would wash up in a cold shower and then sit down with Plumley and discuss what our battalion had to do on this day. The routine—Did we have responsibility for manning the bunkers on a section of the line? How many men were absent, either sick with malaria or away on R and R for a week? When are our replacements arriving? Plans for the next operation, discipline problems, equipment needs. As we became more settled in this home away from home the amenities got a bit better. From three C-ration meals a day we progressed to two hot meals and one C ration. We all lived in Army tents, at first pitched on bare ground but later spiffed up with wood floors and sandbagged walls. Those floors were important when the tropical monsoon set in and the base turned into a sea of red mud, as opposed to the dry season, when we lived in a cloud of fine red dust stirred up by the endless parade of jeeps, trucks, troops, and helicopters coming and going. That fine red dust got into everything from our food to our laundry to our noses and mouths. The red mud, in its season, was even more maddening, as it stuck like glue to boots, fatigue uniforms, and jeep and truck wheels.
    On our journey back in time, the 2nd Battalion veterans