We Were Soldiers Once...and Young by Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway

supplies were strapped and tied to the bicycle frame and the tall pole. The porter walked alongside and pushed the load, steering the contraption with the pole tied to the handlebar.
    No-tech, primitive, ridiculously simple, yes; but it delivered the goods. Packhorses also worked the trail.
    Besides his food and medicine, each soldier carried his weapon and a basic load of ammunition. The weapons were those the men had trained with all those months on the firing ranges, a jumble of East Bloc surplus from the factories of the Soviet Union, China, Czechoslovakia, and Albania. Among them were the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle, a superb infantry weapon; the SKS Siminov semiautomatic carbine with folding bayonet; the Degtyarev automatic rifle; the Maxim heavy machine gun; 60mm, 82mm, and 120mm mortars; the 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun; the wooden handled potato-masher type hand grenade; and a Chinese made 9mm automatic pistol for the officers.
    People's Army soldiers, young and old, were inveterate diarists. Almost every man carried a small notebook, which he filled with copied love poems, the lyrics of popular songs, and his own writings. The men yearned for home and family. The notebook and two or three small snapshots of a sweetheart or wife and children were carried wrapped inside plastic.
    Now, in late September, as the American cavalrymen were hacking their new base camp out of the jungle near An Khe, one of General Man's regiments, the 320th, was already in South Vietnam; a second, the 33rd, had just reached the Cambodian-South Vietnamese border; and a third, the 66th, still had battalions strung out along the trail. The terrain where they would operate for the next two months, from Plei Me camp west to the Cambodian border, is largely a rolling savanna of four- to five-foot-high elephant grass wooded with scrub trees, not unlike the American scrub oak, and some other varieties that are taller and thicker, especially along the creek and stream beds. There are no roads, and only a few trails, in the interior of this region.
    The land is drained from northeast to southwest by two small rivers, the Ia Meur on the west and the Ia Taste to the east. Although the topographical maps we carried were sprinkled with twenty or so black dots marking Montagnard villages, we saw no villages or Montagnards out there.
    The Vietnamese People's Army historian, Major General Hoang Phuong, who as a lieutenant colonel was sent to the Ia Drang Valley in the fall of 1965 to study the battles and write an after-action report for the high command, says: "When we received the news that the 1st Air Cavalry had come to Vietnam, the commanders of our divisions in the South were very nervous, very worried by what they were hearing about this strong, mobile unit so well equipped with helicopters. The liberation forces moved mainly by foot, were poorly equipped. Our hospital and food services were not so good. How can we fight and win against the cavalry?"
    Major General Phuong adds: "In September of 1965, when you landed at An Khe, our commanders in the Central Highlands studied how to cope. We foresaw that the coming battle would be very fierce. First, we evacuated the population and prepared training camps. We improved our positions, dug shelters, and prepared caches of food and underground hospitals. We knew that sooner or later you would attack our zones, and we tried to prepare positions that would neutralize you. We knew that it would not be enough just to make propaganda saying that we were winning. We had to study how to fight the Americans."
    Phuong continues: "On October nineteenth we started our attack on Plei Me at 11:50 p.m. We attacked from three directions. This was the 33rd Regiment. They had rehearsed the attack. When we encircled Plei Me the ARVN sent one regiment as a relief force. On October twenty-third, at one p. m., the first reinforcements reached our ambush position. Our 320th Regiment had set up the ambush. The battle took