We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young by Harold G. Moore

Author:Harold G. Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road

ALBANY

18

A Walk in the Sun

I will tell you one thing that sticks in my mind: This was the least airmobile operation that occurred probably in the entire Vietnam War. It was right back to 1950 Korea or 1944 Europe. All we got were verbal orders: Go here. Finger on map. And we just marched off like we were in Korea.

—COLONEL ROBERT A. MCDADE

Call it fate. Call it Custer’s luck. Whatever it was, it sure as hell had nothing to do with airmobility. The two battalions that had inherited Landing Zone X-Ray were about to abandon it, and they were leaving the same way they had arrived: on foot. Whatever the 1st Cavalry Division’s 435 helicopters were doing this sunny Wednesday morning, November 17, 1965, they were not available to move Lieutenant Colonel Bob Tully’s 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry to LZ Columbus or Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade’s 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry to the spot on the map that was designated LZ Albany. Grumbling and groaning, the men of both battalions loaded their packs. The word had come down: The big Air Force B-52 bombers were already airborne out of Guam, and their target was the near slopes of Chu Pong mountain. Friendly forces had to be well outside a two-mile safety zone by midmorning when upward of two hundred tons of five-hundred-pound bombs would begin raining down from thirty-six thousand feet. At nine A.M. Bob Tully’s men moved out, heading northeast.

Says Tully: “We spent the night there with McDade’s battalion. I was told to go to Columbus. We were the lead out of LZ X-Ray and moved out the same way we came in—two companies up, one back. We used artillery to plunk a round out four hundred yards or so every half-hour so we could have a concentration plotted. That way, if we ran into problems we could immediately call for fire.”

Ten minutes later Bob McDade’s soldiers moved out. The 3rd Brigade’s commanding officer, Tim Brown, was on the ground in X-Ray at the time, watching the movement. Brown’s instructions to McDade were to follow Tully’s battalion. A little more than halfway to LZ Columbus, McDade’s battalion would head northwest for LZ Albany. This clearing, at map coordinates YA 945043, was 625 yards south of the Ia Drang.

Chief Warrant Officer Hank Ainsworth, a twenty-eight-year-old native of Weatherford, Oklahoma, had ten years in the Army, the last year and a half as a Huey pilot in the 11th Air Assault Division and the 1st Cavalry Division. Hank was pilot of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry command helicopter this day: “I was assigned the mission to take the 2/7 command chopper on a recon flight. We flew an area north of X-Ray the morning of 17 November. People on board were looking at two or three different LZs for potential use. They picked Albany, the smallest of those we overflew, really a one-ship LZ. We flew low-level, three or four hundred feet above the trees, checking the route they would take going in there.

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