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Ia Drang: The First Battle

While it has been almost fifty years since the United States became involved in Vietnam, and almost twenty years since the Fall of Saigon, it is those first major engagements that took place over forty years ago that provide the most portraits of what American soldiers would endure during their tours in Vietnam. Master military theorist Karl Von Clausewitz in the 1830s could have been talking about Vietnam when he discussed the nature and conduct of war by saying, "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 as they lead to no satisfactory conclusion: they appear sometimes banal, sometimes absurd, sometimes simply adrift in a sea of vague generalization." Clausewitz's "vague generalization" on the "fog of war" is a problem as it fails to provide specifics, however if specifics help provide answers, a good answer would be the first major engagement of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, The Battle of the Ia Drang Valley (IDV).
Many members of the U.S. 7th Cavalry (7th Cav) battalion landing via helicopter in Vietnam's IDV on November 14th 1965, were expecting "a walk in the sun." The enemy force they were hunting, the men figured, probably would not be there, but the rationale was that if the enemy were there, the U.S. 7th Cav would search out the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and destroy every last one of them. The 7th Cav also thought this battle would be like others previously fought against the enemy; a quick strike (usually by Viet-Cong forces) and then, once realizing they were outnumbered and outgunned, the enemy would retreat back into the woods. On both counts they figured wrong. The choppers deposited 457 Americans amid more than 3,000 NVA regulars, and their fight--the first major American battle of the Vietnam War--would rage for three days and two nights. This engagement provided a glimpse into the agony and anguish soldiers on each side of the battlefield...