Requiem for The Cold War

My own work was finished, a book six years in the making finally done, and I slipped back from the present into incomplete images and unresolved memories of the past. It was in a way a special voyage of my own, made without leaving my apartment, a trip with its own melancholia. A new president had just been inaugurated, and members of the media, caught up in their apparent need to give instant report cards, were filled with endless details cataloging his successes and failures, even when nothing he had yet done was worthy of being called a success or a failure. On television there were daily reports of the anarchy and destruction being wrought in what was once Yugoslavia. But I was elsewhere, spun backward in time and caught once again in the tangles of Vietnam that I thought I had left behind long ago. My trip had begun with, of all things, a book, We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young, a powerful description of the battle of the Ia Drang Valley, which took place in November 1965 in Vietnam's central highlands. The Ia Drang was arguably the most important battle of Vietnam, significantly more important than even Tet, I think. It was a moment when the two sides not only fought with great determination and courage but in the process also (continued on page 168) Requiem (continued from page 161) defined themselves and much of the strategy for the rest of the war.

We Were Soldiers--written by Harold Moore, who commanded an American battalion that engaged a vastly superior (numerically, anyway) North Vietnamese Army force at the Ia Drang, and Joseph Galloway, who was at the time a young reporter with UPI--is more than a mere book, far more than pages and words. It is a kind of monument to these men and to all the other young men who fought in Vietnam. It is one of the great reports of men in combat that I have ever read--to my mind, a modern Red Badge of Courage. On a subject as political as the Vietnam war, where so much of what is written is by the very nature of the war political, We Were Soldiers is a book that is simply about the fate and honor of the young men who fought in that isolated place during those days. Modest, understated (the reader has to imagine how brilliant and supple a commander Moore was over the three days of bitter fighting), it deftly reports the minute-by-minute valor of two great infantry units, both extraordinarily well-led, coming upon each other in the highlands of Vietnam. What was at stake was magnificent soldiering: At that moment the elite American units, the NVA elite units and the Israeli infantry were perhaps the three best fighting forces in the world, and here were two of those forces suddenly facing each other in the closest of killing fields. The American unit, which landed by helicopter right on a battalion headquarters of its enemy, was badly outnumbered, but it had access to far greater mechanized and technological support in terms of air, helicopter and artillery forces. For its part, the NVA had exceptional leadership at every level and a far better knowledge of the terrain. Furthermore, its leadership, which was fighting for its home soil, was quite willing to take heavy casualties if in the process it would help wear out American enthusiasm for a war so far away.

It is a record of men at war that has its own powerful pull: the courage of the individual American soldiers caught in such terrible circumstances with no one to rely on save themselves. As the day began these soldiers were members of an elite combat unit, albeit mostly young kids (only a few of the NCOs were old enough to have been in World War Two and the Korean War, and a small number of the officers had served either in Korea or in Vietnam, in an earlier tour), eager for and terrified of the battle ahead. By the end of the first day they were grizzled combat veterans of some of the most intense fighting in American military history. What We Were Soldiers does is capture at so terrible a moment the nobility of men under fire, their loyalty to (and love for) one another, their common acts of uncommon valor, both large and small.

There were, in effect, two quite separate and distinct battles of the Ia Drang. The first battle took place when Lieutenant Colonel (and later Lieutenant General) Hal Moore and his First Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry of the First Cavalry Division (known in this war as the Air Cav, which meant that it rode into war carried not by horses or tanks but by helicopters) opposed some 1600 elite soldiers of the North Vietnamese infantry, whose commanders had been spoiling for a chance to fight American soldiers, and who had in fact hoped that they could lure the Americans into terrain such as this, as far from the American base camps and as near to the NVA camps as possible. The second battle of the Ia Drang took place just after the first one was over, when the remaining soldiers from the first American force--most of whom had come in during the first battle to relieve Moore's original troops and whose battalion commander was much less experienced than Colonel Moore--were, despite the availability of helicopter transportation, ordered to walk out of the battle site and landing zone to a new landing zone some four miles away. The orders, which demanded that the troops leave as secure an area as the first battlefield had by then become and walk four miles through terrain that favored the other side and was almost perfect for a collision, remain somewhat puzzling.

Moore trusted his instincts, which turned out to be very shrewd, and in the battle of Ia Drang 1 he kept the NVA from flanking his forces and rolling up his flanks on him. The battle had begun with only one under-strength American company on the ground, and it had continued with a rare intensity in those early hours as Moore managed to get the rest of his battalion on the ground. The American lines held despite murderous assaults by the NVA over the three days of battle. The NVA soldiers were good, brave and well armed. An ordinary American battalion commander, one without Moore's exceptional skills, pressed into so difficult a battle so early in his tour of duty in Vietnam, might have made mistakes, mistakes that surely would have cost him an entire battalion. When Ia Drang 1 ended, it was by traditional American standards a considerable success. Certainly more than 1000 NVA regulars were killed, and Colonel Moore kept his own losses surprisingly small for so terrible and long a battle: 79 dead, 121 wounded, none missing. By contrast, with the battle seemingly over, the decision to walk to a fresh landing zone was disastrous, and at Ia Drang 2, 151 U.S. soldiers were killed, 121 were wounded and four were listed as missing.

For a variety of reasons, all of this had a powerful hold over me as I read the book 28 years later. When I finished We Were Soldiers, I was deeply moved, much as I had been by Ken Burns' public television series on the Civil War and by Shelby Foote's poignant narration of much of that. We Were Soldiers' scenes of young men virtually surrounded and badly outnumbered by this ferocious and well-armed and talented enemy were palpable. Even though I was far from Vietnam when this battle took place, it had always fascinated me, for my friend John Paul Vann (the legendary American who was the centerpiece of Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie) had studied the battle of the Ia Drang and had spoken to me at length about it at the time. A few months after the battle, Vann had been back in America; he called me up and we went out to dinner. His tone that night was almost remorseful; his was the voice of a man who had always known something like this was going to happen, talking about the fate of other men less fortunate.

That night he described it to me in detail, these two great infantry forces finding each other with terrible inevitability, each a force of excellence, and he described the savagery of the fighting that had followed.

It was, he said, a battle that the North Vietnamese had wanted badly. I still remember Vann's exact phrase: "They practically lit flares for us to come in there." Vann told me that the North Vietnamese regulars, victors over the French (and, in effect, over the ARVN--the Saigon army--even when it was heavily assisted by the Americans earlier in the Sixties), had sought the battle. They had wanted to test the American military machine and (continued on page 218) Requiem (continued from page 168) to work out their own strategy for combating so technologically advanced a fighting force, the likes of which neither they nor anyone else had ever fought against. Our young men had done very well at the Ia Drang, Vann said, and the Air Cav was one hell of a division with good officers and great NCOs. It was quite likely, he said, that they had killed the NVA at a ratio often to one. Or perhaps even higher, he added, perhaps 15 to one. Of course, the NVA had fought well, too, and Vann believed they had achieved the goal they wanted at the Ia Drang: They had learned that in order to combat the vastly superior firepower of the Americans, with their air and artillery and helicopter gunships, they had to close to within 30 meters. (Vann was absolutely right. Moore and Galloway tell how the NVA wanted to learn how to fight the Americans, and they quote NVA colonel Nguyen Huu An as telling his men when they fought the Americans to "grab them by the belt" in order to neutralize the American technological advantage of airpower and artillery.)

The terrible thing, Vann added, was that, given the kill ratio, General Westmoreland was convinced he had won the battle. Vann, whose estimates of what was happening in Vietnam were for a long time better than those of anyone else I knew, was convinced that the NVA would be delighted with a ten-to-one ratio in such rare main-force battles. We had a short calendar for victory, Vann had added, and the other side had what was essentially an open one.

That night when I left Vann I pondered those young American soldiers propelled by events outside their control. To me they were faceless and nameless, yet I saw them so far from their homes, thrown into thick, heavy foliage, canopy after canopy of it on such rugged terrain, against so formidable and so determined an adversary, who was fighting on his native soil. These were the young men who were called on to act out, with the risk and sacrifice of their lives, what the mistaken policies of some 20 years had brought us to. They were men who were almost innocent of war and killing one day, and then shortly afterward, in the instantaneous quality of the next day's fighting, were as skilled and experienced as soldiers can ever be. Now, 28 years after first hearing about it, Moore and Galloway had given me names and faces to go with my earlier images, and as I read We Were Soldiers I did not sleep well for several days. I could see again the young Americans in the utter fury of this battle, their ammunition sometimes running low after charges from the other side, all too aware that they were perilously close to being overrun and wondering how many additional assaults they might have to stop. I felt myself pulled back to Vietnam once again, and I started rereading some of the books on the war, notably my friend Sheehan's magisterial book on John Paul Vann. All the old images came back.

It was an odd sensation, most particularly now in the age of Yeltsin and Clinton, an age when Gorbachev lectures in America and gets honorary degrees here and the Berlin Wall has been torn down and sold as souvenirs. We live in an odd time. The Cold War is over, and for the moment we have replaced the tensions created by modern intercontinental paranoia with more traditional, centuries-old ethnic hatred of a medieval quality. We live in a world that is different from what we knew: It is ever more, because of modern communications and transportation, a world without boundaries. The Third World seeps over and blends into the First World. Nothing is what it once was. Warren Beatty in the movie Bugsy, jowls and all, has come to look like Richard Nixon, and Richard Nixon, writing in The New York Times on the need to do more to help the former Soviet Union, has come to sound like Adlai Stevenson. We are threatened today more by the weakness of Russia (memories of Germany between the two great wars) than by its strength. Yet We Were Soldiers is a reminder that the Cold War existed, that for all the wise decisions made over four decades, there were some that were unwise as well. Perhaps the price for making the wise decisions was that we had to pay for them with the unwise ones. More, the book reminded me that there were young men such as those at the Ia Drang and at other battles in Vietnam and in Korea--those young men of the Second Infantry Division sent to the edge of the Yalu by Douglas MacArthur in his final demonic moment of vainglory--who paid heavily for the miscalculation of others, more often than not for the mistakes made by men thousands of miles away. We have a new history today, but the old history lingers on.

The Cold War persists in memory as a series of freeze-frames. The dates are a little less clear than those of hot wars, in which it is so much easier to tell who fired the first shot. The Cold War (its title implied that it was a war in which, if at all possible, the struggle would take place without battles) ended with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But did it begin in 1946 with Churchill's speech about the Iron Curtain or in 1948 with the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Airlift? Its end came so quickly that most of us were surprised. In some ways we remain surprised today. I was 12 when Churchill gave his speech and 14 at the time of the Berlin Airlift, and the Cold War seemed to be then if not a permanent condition, at least a lifetime endeavor.

Those of my generation, born a little too late for World War Two, who were in our early teens when the Cold War started, gradually came to believe it a given of our lives. It would never end, or at least not in our lifetime. The precondition of all candidates for presidential office would in some ways be a litmus test of how tough they were in terms of the Soviets. My generation came to manhood in the defining Cold War campaign of 1960, when, lest we forget, John F. Kennedy spoke more harshly of the need to stand up to Castro in Cuba than Richard Nixon did, thereby easily out-hawking Nixon in at least one area. That was a campaign in which endless time was devoted to the question of which candidate cared more about Quemoy and Matsu. For his sins, Kennedy, the most modern and rational of men, found upon his election that there was a plan well in the works to send a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba, a force that was too large to be a covert force of guerrillas but in no way large enough to be an actual invading force. Kennedy found himself so caught up in Cold War rhetoric that he could not deal with China as if it were different from the Soviet Union, nor could he slow the American commitment to Vietnam. He may have intended one day to slay that commitment, but in the brief time allotted to his presidency he did little else but feed it.

That the Cold War could end so quickly changed the essential assumptions of American politics in a dramatic way: George Bush was a lineal heir of the hard-liners. Who could imagine that in 1992, so shortly after the end of the Cold War, the most essential rationale of recent American politics would be so quickly subtracted from the equation, thereby leaving his party with diminished purpose, and that Bush would not be able to capitalize on his new friendships with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the good guys of the new era? Bush was, it seemed, almost paralyzed by his own good works. How strange it must have seemed to someone of Bush's background and politics that a young man who had never served in Vietnam and who had in fact been more than a little disingenuous about how he had personally dealt with the Vietnam war could challenge him for the presidency.

What we know about the Cold War is still, of course, elementary. But after 40 years of heightened rhetoric the curtain has been pulled back on the Soviet Union to reveal what is in all things non-military, an underdeveloped society, albeit a Caucasian one, closer to the Third World than to the First or Second, unable to provide basic services to its population. It is, and there was always considerable evidence of this, essentially an economic, political and social failure. Its strength was its military might, yet here in the modern era, when technology is still so critical to military power, it was almost surely falling behind the West because it was so far behind in the world of technology. I tend to agree with Zbigniew Brzezinski when he says the high-water mark of Soviet power probably came in the early Sixties, when it was an early-stage nuclear power and when it had a vast traditional land army with seemingly endless tank divisions based in Europe. I do not want to diminish the reality of the Cold War but rather try to separate myth from reality, paranoia from genuine danger. The memory of the Soviet tanks crushing Hungarian freedom fighters remains real; the knowledge that the governments of eastern Europe for those 45 years effectively reflected an invisible occupation is equally real. Joseph Stalin was a truly evil man, a monstrous figure who existed in a rare time of darkness and who cast his shadow into the beginning of the nuclear age. Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were new to their roles as superpowers, and each was at the start essentially isolationist. The rivalries between them were exacerbated by the coming of intercontinental ballistic missiles. In addition to the natural rivalry of nations inherent in their postwar relationship, their political and economic systems differed, which permitted greater demonology on the part of each superpower. But having said that, there were junctions that we did not see, or saw but did not choose to take.

The impulse of Soviet policies, diplomat George Kennan suggested, would reflect the anxieties, paranoia and ambitions that were historic in the Russian nation. There was, in effect, a Kennanist card to play--to see the tensions of the world in traditional terms of nationalism, and not to see communism as a monolith. By 1961 there were already significant tensions in the communist world, principally between the Soviet Union and China. Postwar capitalism was a huge, dynamic success in Europe, and it would be a great mistake to give credit to Soviet communism or monolithic communism for any successes then taking place in the underdeveloped world. The West might be temporarily in bad odor in the underdeveloped world, but that was inevitable, given the reaction of countries so recently ruled by Western colonial powers. In terms of policy there were many strong arguments for the Kennanist card. In terms of American politics, especially in terms of the bashing the Democrats had taken for allegedly losing China, it was not a playable card. The politics of the nation dominated its policies. In a nation uneasy about its new wealth and international role--and which had for domestic political reasons created a dynamic of excessive anticommunism--the reality of enlightened policy was bent to the harsher reality of domestic politics.

If there was a dynamic that caused those young men to end up in the Ia Drang, it began with the fall of China and with the yahoos who blamed the Democrats for losing it. We as a nation fed that dynamic; we who were supposed to be above all else anticolonialist wrote the checks from 1946 to 1954 in aid to the French in what was a colonial war in Indochina. We even corrupted our language in order to see the French forces as the forces of democracy and the Vietminh as communists. In fact, to the ordinary Vietnamese, the Vietminh represented an anticolonial force and the French a colonial presence. We savaged our own Asian experts and blamed them for losing China, thus making sure there would be no successive generation of experts to warn that if we went into Vietnam--no matter how great the valor and the considerable skills of men like Hal Moore and his soldiers--we could not win, for we would be fighting the birthrate of the opposing nation.

Nations have always behaved like nations. Rationality surfaces, is blurred, is refocused, is blurred again, is refocused again and blurs again. Barbara Tuch-man called the Vietnam experience the folly of nations when, a decade ago, she interviewed me about Vietnam for a book of hers. Nations have always had rivals, whether they are rivals on the border to be invaded or rivals in a larger, almost abstract sense, as in the Cold War. One's own grandiosity is forever disguised as in a living dream; we comfort ourselves geopolitically with a self-portrait created with equal parts of our own innocence and the purported evil of whomever we choose as our foe. Nations have always attributed to their rivals the most egregious of morals and motivations and to themselves the purest of virtues. It is the most elemental instinct of human nature to see a rival's motives in the darkest of shades and one's own motives in the lightest.

Truth and freedom have always had their boundaries, rarely more so than during the Cold War. There was, for example, a democratic nation that thought of itself as devotedly anticolonial, always wanting to be on the side of the little man against the oppressor. That nation, for the sake of the Cold War, added something of a rider to its anticolonialism: Those anticolonialists it supported had to be good anticommunists first. Only then could their anti-colonial credentials be checked. This meant finding indigenous leaders who were both anticolonial and anticommunist, which turned out to be extremely hard to do, for the most basic reasons pressed on us by recent history.

In this same democratic nation, during the height of the Cold War, the highest officials of the land turned on its most distinguished native-born scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, a man who, under brutal deadline pressures, had headed the team that had brought this nation the first atomic weapon. When at the height of the Cold War this same scientist showed himself unwilling to be a part of the search for an even more frightening weapon, high officials of the democratic nation decided that he was a security risk.

No matter that the nation had thoroughly scrutinized Oppenheimer's loyalty and personal affiliations and that the brilliance of his service had proven that he was a loyal man. No matter that he had helped to create an awesome weapon, and that few men had served their nation so well and at such terrible personal cost during those years. It was not enough to tell him that the tides had changed, that his services were no longer needed, that his own weapon, once the ultimate weapon, would now be merely the penultimate weapon. He had, in the new order, to be found essentially disloyal, and his security clearance, for political reasons, had to be revoked. Most important, his political credibility, if at all possible, had to be tarnished. To another scientist working in this same democracy, Wernher von Braun, who had headed the rocket program of Germany during this self-same war (and who therefore most assuredly could not have passed the very same security check), the revocation of so distinguished a man's security clearance was pure madness. In England, thought Von Braun, they would have knighted a man like Oppenheimer for his achievements.

We readily see the foolhardiness of other nations. It was easy for intelligent American analysts to see the hopelessness of the French cause in Indochina and Algeria, just as it was easy for the French to see the hopelessness of the American cause in Vietnam in 1965. (In 1965 someone asked a French friend of mine what the French thought of the American decision to fight in Vietnam. "It is like the first husband hearing that his ex-wife is about to get a divorce from her second husband," he answered, quite pleased with himself.) The Americans, my friend Bernard Fall said, are fighting in the same footsteps as the French, though they're dreaming different dreams. Challenging a nation's myths and dreams is a difficult task. We understood the hopelessness of the French cause when they fought first. The French understood the hopelessness of our own cause when we fought the second time. Hanoi understood the hopelessness of both causes from the start.

This is not a uniquely American condition, though because of our missionary past, we may have a greater need than others to cloak the instincts of realpolitik in the guise of purity, democracy and liberation. But others are guilty of it, too, and have been guilty of it for centuries, long before we were formed. So as I reread the Vietnam books, in the midst of that melancholia, I remembered a trip I had made in France in 1966. I was between tours in Vietnam at the time and was posted in France, and The New York Times assigned me to cover the 50th-anniversary ceremonies at Verdun. I was never much for covering ceremonial acts; in general they bored me, for I viewed them with some contempt as the easiest and cheapest way of making the front page of the paper. But almost nothing I have done as a journalist has stayed with me so clearly as the events of that day.

Verdun was the symbolic battle of a truly grisly war, one of dubious purpose and certainly of dubious value for both victors and vanquished. It was a war in which the technology of arms greatly outstripped the intelligence of the commanders--a modern war in a modern era fought by men commanded by those who by and large understood nothing of the modernization wrought by technology and who sent their men into battle neither comprehending nor, it seemed sometimes, caring what was going to happen to them. It was nothing but carnage, mutual carnage.

The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. The Germans had conceived of it as the perfect site for a set-piece battle into which the French would throw far too many of their precious human resources. The Germans reasoned that, because of Verdun's historic (and to a considerably lesser extent strategic) value, the French would try to hold on to Verdun when challenged by the Germans. They would choose to reinforce their existing force and then if necessary throw virtually all their men into the battle. What Erich von Falkenhayn, the German architect of the battle, wanted was nothing less than what others would call a battle of attrition. His strategy was, as he said, one in which he would bleed the French white and thereby force them out of the war. In some of his estimates he proved very shrewd. The French did rise to the bait and they did place too high a value on Verdun. They threw as many as 60 divisions into the battle over a relatively short period of time. More than three-quarters of the French army passed through Verdun at some stage of the battle.

Von Falkenhayn was partially successful: He did indeed bleed the French white. He was quite correct in his assumption that in the end the French would act irrationally and invest far too much in Verdun. Where he was wrong was in his estimate that the Germans would by contrast act rationally. The Germans, too, became impaled on the idea of Verdun's importance. Eventually both armies were waging a demented war of mutual attrition. At Verdun alone an estimated 700,000 French and German soldiers were killed in a terrible battle in which the lives of countless men were exchanged for a few yards of territory. Some observers, including Winston Churchill, believed this estimate was somewhat conservative. It was in almost all ways, wrote the historian Alistair Horne, the worst battle in history.

At the end the land around Verdun bore no resemblance to the French countryside. Rather, it looked like a crater on the moon. When the war was over in 1918, local people working there began carrying off ten cartloads of skeletons a day until 1932.

Fifty years after the battle I arrived along with many of the surviving combatants. I looked at all those old men, some without limbs, almost all of them still wearing their medals, and I wondered what they now thought about those days. What did they think about the German soldiers, who had become in this modern Cold War era their newest allies? By the time we got to the battlefield itself, the French officials had, while stringing new communications wires for all the journalists there, turned up additional skeletons and more unspent shells, the last relics of the battle.

What I remember most about the day was not General de Gaulle leading the veterans in singing the Marseillaise but the Ossuarium. Even then, before I fully understood what it meant, the word stopped me. Ossuarium. A solarium is a place to collect the sun, an ossuarium is a place to collect bones. A house of bones. The bones of an estimated 130,000 young men, French and German alike, are contained in the Ossuarium. They fought against one another, killed one another and were destined to have their bones kept in the same grim housing for eternity. Who knows which bones were French and which German? Sworn enemies in those days, the two nations had become close allies by the time I visited Verdun. On that same tour of duty in France I had gone to a book party in Paris for Adenauer's memoirs, which to my memory De Gaulle himself attended--a jolly party for so old a man.

I walked around Verdun that day and thought about the moment 50 years earlier when two armies had faced each other, each representing a nation wanting to be a greater power, each soldier sworn to hate the soldiers of the dreaded other side. Was there greater sin in the minds of the French than being German? Or in the eyes of the Germans than being French? I thought of their bones mixed together for eternity and pondered how that battle and that war had been a tragedy for both nations, and how it had led not to a path of greater power and prestige but to an inevitable decline for both and to an apocalyptic near future for Germany. It was a vision that stayed with me many years later as I pondered what happened in Vietnam.

There is no ossuarium at the Ia Drang Valley. Hal Moore refused to leave the battle site when the battle was finally over until he was absolutely sure that everyone he had come in with was accounted for, that there were no men missing from his battalion. The battle site itself is far from the urban centers of Vietnam, a nation not celebrated for the ease of in-country tourism. Those who make a pilgrimage to it will be few. Perhaps some who fought there and some who would write further about it will return. For others the pilgrimage is mostly in their minds, and the battle for Americans, at least, will live largely because of the ability of Moore and Galloway to record the simple bravery of that day.

When Moore and Galloway revisited Vietnam they met with Moore's opposite number, Nguyen Huu An, who had commanded the North Vietnamese forces. If they were not friends there was certainly respect, and perhaps admiration, the kinship of men who had shared the battlefield and respected each other's soldiers and tactics. No one who had fought at the Ia Drang would ever again make the mistake of so many American commanders and speak with contempt of the enemy. The enemy was worthy, if nothing else. Lieutenant General An told Lieutenant General Moore how bravely the Americans fought and how much his soldiers had admired them.

Colonel Moore had known within 15 seconds of the start that it would be a ferocious battle, and he and his men were soon to learn that the other side was exceptionally large, well commanded and well led at the NCO level, and that the Americans had stumbled into the very heart of the war and into, for that matter, history. Early on, at several critical junctures when he might have committed his reserve force, Moore had held on and shepherded his manpower shrewdly. He had dared one thing as he maneuvered with his limited force: He had left his rear completely exposed. Had Colonel An come at him from behind, the battle might have ended quickly in defeat for the American forces. When Moore met An years later they talked about this. Moore told of how exposed his rear was and An asked why, and Moore said that given his limited number of men, he had to trust his instincts. An nodded and said, Yes, of course, a commander (meaning himself) can never know everything about a battle while it is going on.

It is important to understand how bravely both sides fought, what honor there was to both these infantries in those days. A civilian friend of mine received a letter from a man who was the commander of an airborne battalion that had arrived in Vietnam about the same time as Moore's. The officer described an early battle and told how well his men had fought and how proud he was of them. He was deeply moved by their courage and their strength in so terrifying a war. Their valor had greatly exceeded his expectations. But truth be known, he had written at the time, no matter how well his men had done, the other side had outfought them. The only difference, the officer wrote, had to be the passion and the sense of purpose that they felt about their cause. Men could not simply be ordered to fight that bravely. After all, he suspected, they were fighting for their own soil and their own independence; if this were true, as he suspected, and if that was what we were up against, then it was going to be a hopeless task regardless of our bravery and our technology. For the bravery of both sides was singular. One cannot admire the exceptional valor of either side without comprehending the comparable valor of the opponent. To deny one is to deny the other.

The American grunts were drawn to the Ia Drang by fate. There was that moment when someone sat at headquarters in the central highlands and pointed at a spot on a map, a landing zone was chosen and the Hueys were geared up. That was fate. That battle became, for the Americans at least, about survival and about loyalty to one another and honoring one another. To this day when the Ia Drang veterans meet, it is a celebration not so much of a cause but of one another and their bravery and the fact that they were there. They can comprehend this when so much else in a war that was orphaned seems incomprehensible. Many different military units from many different wars have their reunions, but the reunions of Colonel Moore's men are different: There is a loyalty that is special. The families of those who died there still come; the children of men who were once young now come as adults and parents themselves. Sometimes others come as invited guests, but as a friend of mine who has been to a reunion noted, it is an odd feeling being there, being warmly welcomed and handsomely treated but feeling, nonetheless, that you are always an outsider and that you do not really belong. What they have substituted for the pride and vainglory of nations is loyalty to and pride in one another, which in those days was all that they were left with and which is probably all they will ever have or need.

"I still remember Vann's exact phrase: 'They practically lit flares for us to come in there.'"

"The terrible thing was that, given the kill ratio, Westmoreland was convinced he had won the battle."