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

Author:Harold G. Moore & Joseph L. Galloway [Moore, Harold G. & Galloway, Joseph L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, American History
ISBN: 9780345472649
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2004-06-29T05:00:00+00:00

Rescorla and his men had been watching the air show appreciatively. "We gathered for the last sweep. Suddenly a fighter-bomber plowed down from above. We buried our noses at the bottom of our holes. An express train screamed down and the explosion shook the earth. The bomb landed thirty yards from our holes. We came up cursing in the dust and debris. The call came to move out. Every available trooper, including Colonel Moore, pushed the perimeter out."

This time it was no contest at all. We killed twenty-seven more enemy and crushed all resistance. I looked over a field littered with enemy dead, sprawled by ones and twos and heaps across a torn and gouged land.

Blood, body fragments, torn uniforms, shattered weapons littered the landscape. It was a sobering sight. Those men, our enemies, had mothers, too. But we had done what we had to do.

Aside from wanting to make certain that Diduryk and his men did a clean, safe job, I had one other reason for joining the final assault personally. Rick Rescorla watched. "Colonel Moore, in our sector, was rushing up to clumps of bodies, pulling them apart. ' the hell is the colonel doing up here?' Sergeant Thompson asked. I shook my head.

Later we saw him coming back at the head of men carrying ponchos. By 10:30 a.m. Colonel Moore had found what he was looking for. Three dead American troops were no longer missing in action; now they were on their way home to their loved ones."

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Mcdade and the rest of his men of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry had begun marching toward LZ X-Ray from LZ Columbus, three miles east, at around 9:30 a.m. Mcdade brought with him his headquarters company, plus Charlie and Delta companies of the 2nd Battalion. He had also been given Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry. They closed in on our position at about noon. In the forefront of the column was Specialist 4 Jack P. Smith, son of radio and television broadcast journalist Howard K. Smith. Jack Smith wrote of what he saw in a 1967 article for the Saturday Evening Post: "The 1st Battalion had been fighting continuously for three or four days, and I had never seen such filthy troops. They all had that look of shock. They said little, just looked around with darting, nervous eyes. Whenever I heard a shell coming close, I'd duck but they kept standing. There must have been about 1,000 rotting bodies out there, starting at about 20 feet, surrounding the giant circle of foxholes."

Others echoed Jack Smith's astonishment. Specialist 4 Pat Selleck, hardened by three days in X-Ray, listened to the newcomers: "I heard one soldier say, ' Christ, what did you guys do out here? It looks like a blood bath. All you see is bodies all over the place walking in here." " Specialist 4 Dick Ackerman, a native of Merced, California, was in Me Dade's recon platoon as it marched into X-Ray. "Upon entering

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