The Bitter Triumph Of Ia Drang (February/March 1984 | Volume: 35, Issue: 2)

The Bitter Triumph Of Ia Drang

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Authors: Harry G. Summers Jr

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

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February/March 1984 | Volume 35, Issue 2

Editor's Note: The author fought in Korea and Vietnam, wrote several books of military history, and was the editor of Vietnam Magazine.

ALTHOUGH IT HAS been almost thirty years since the beginning of our military involvement in Vietnam and almost twenty years since American ground combat forces were committed to battle there, many still find the Vietnam War difficult to understand. This is not surprising. That master theorist on the nature and conduct of war, Karl von Clausewitz, could have been talking about Vietnam when he complained a century and a half ago about “the confused and confusing welter of ideas that one so often hears and reads on the subject of the conduct of war. These have no fixed point of view,” he wrote, “they lead to no satisfactory conclusion; they appear sometimes banal, sometimes absurd, sometimes simply adrift in a sea of vague generalization.” If “vague generalization” is the problem, then getting down to specifics may help provide the answer, and a good place to start is with the first major engagement of the U.S. Army in Vietnam—the Battle of the Ia Drang valley. Fought in November 1965, it was a more accurate portent than we could know of the final battles that took place almost ten years later.

THE GEOGRAPHIC SETTING

Where was this battlefield? To say that it was in Indochina or more precisely in the central highlands of South Vietnam doesn’t help much. But visualize for a moment the United States as it existed in the 175Os during the French and Indian Wars. Recall that the American settlers lived mostly on a narrow strip between the Atlantic and the foothills of the Appalachians. To the west were a series of outposts—Fort Pitt, at the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, for instance—to protect the settlements from attack by the French and their Indian allies, whose forces stretched in a great arc from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, then south to the Mississippi delta.

Now superimpose South Vietnam on that map: its coastline extends about the distance from Pittsburgh (Fort Pitt) to Savannah. Like our early settlers, most of the Vietnamese also live in a narrow strip along the coast. In place of the Appalachians are the mountains of the Chaîne Annamitique, with peaks reaching over eight thousand feet. Beginning in the early 1960s, the South Vietnamese, with the help of American Special Forces teams, established a series of outposts in these highlands along the hundreds of miles of border they shared with Laos and Cambodia. These were built to protect South Vietnam from the North Vietnamese, who, like the French and Indians, also stretched in a great arc to the north and west, from the Demilitarized Zone south along the socalled Ho Chi Minh Trail in supposedly neutral Laos and Cambodia. One of these outposts was at Plei Me, about two hundred and fifty miles