 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Jim Knott, President and CEO of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in the fall of 1964, 1965 saw a dramatic increase in the number of American ground troops in Vietnam. The Battle of the Idring Valley was the first major battle between the US Army and the People's Army of North Vietnam. The two-part battle in the Central Highlands took place from November 14th to 18th, 1965. It was Thanksgiving Day back at home that most Americans first read the headlines about the battle, which was a turning point of sorts with single-week casualty numbers exceeding those of the worst weeks of the Korean War. Americans had to face the fact that we really were engaged in a war. Today, we have veterans of the Battle of the Idring Valley recalling what it was like on the front lines. Mr. Vince Cantu was drafted into the Vietnam War in 1963 and became a US Army private in the first battalion of the 7th Cavalry. His battalion was charged with pioneering a new kind of air warfare that the Army termed Air Mobile. Colonel Bruce Crandall is a veteran master army aviator in both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters and has led more than 900 combat missions during two tours in Vietnam. He was drafted into the Army in 1953. And in early 1965, he joined the Dominican Republic Expeditionary Force as a liaison to the Eighth Inc. Airborne Corps, and later that year commanded the first Cavalry's Division's Company A 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion in Vietnam. He has received many awards, including the Bronze Star Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross with one Oak Leap Cluster, and the Medal of Honor. Dr. Tone Johnson Jr. went to Vietnam in 1963 as part of the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the First Cavalry Division. In November 1965, his unit was ambushed by the Viet Cong in the Idring Valley and was all but destroyed. He received the Bronze Star for his meritorious achievement and the recognition of his bravery during the campaign. Later, recovering in the hospital, he was inspired by the care he received to pursue a career in medicine. He later became a family practitioner and started a combat and medical training program for infantry soldiers to learn first aid. Colonel Joe Marm enlisted in the Army in 1964 and graduated from Officer Candidate School as a second lieutenant. He was then reassigned to the First Cavalry Division and by September 1965 was in Vietnam. In November 1965, his battalion came under fire in the Idring Valley. Colonel Marm received the Medal of Honor in recognition of his bravery in the campaign. He later successfully petitioned to go back to Vietnam for a second tour, only after signing a waiver stipulating that going back into harm's way was his own choice. And finally, your moderator for this panel, Mr. Joe Galloway. Joe is one of America's premier war and foreign correspondents. He is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, but he is also the recipient of the Bronze Star for Valor, the only civilian to receive the honor in the Vietnam War, and is the recipient of the Doherty Award, the highest honor the US Army infantry can present to an individual. Mr. Galloway has co-authored several critically acclaimed books, including We Were Soldiers Once and Young. And in sequel, We Are Soldiers Still, a journey back to the battlefields of Vietnam. The first book was made into the major motion picture We Were Soldiers in 2002. Ladies and gentlemen, your panel for the afternoon. It's awful quiet out here. Yeah, it is. I don't know about this being a much of a panel discussion, but it sure is a great gathering of my brother soldiers. It's been 50 years and five months since we met on a battlefield in the Central Highlands of Vietnam on the 14th of November, 1965. It was the first major battle for American infantry to run head on into North Vietnamese regulars, two very fine, light infantry. And they went at it tooth and nail. The North Vietnamese were there to kill us all. And we were damn well determined they wouldn't. And I met, it's interesting, on the battlefield, on the second day, I was shooting some pictures. And I was behind a little bush on one knee. And a fellow jumped out of a mortar pit and zigzagged across the edge of the clearing and dove under that bush. And all I could see were two eyeballs about the size of saucers under the rim of the helmet. And he said, Joe Galloway, this is Vince Cantu from Refurio. Don't you know me, man? Vince Cantu and I graduated in the class of 1959 from Refurio High School, 55 of us. And the next time I saw him was in the middle of the worst battle, the first battle, the worst battle, the bloodiest battle of the entire Vietnam War. He sure looked good. And he said, hey, Joe, if I live through this, I'm going home to Refurio by Christmas. I said, Vince, go by and see my mom and dad. But don't tell them where we met. I came to be on that battlefield at the engraved invitation of Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, who was the battalion commander. I'd marched with his battalion three days before the battle began, a long, hot walk in the sun to the east of Play Me Special Forces Camp. And I spent the night with him, coldest night I ever spent anywhere in Vietnam in the Central Highlands at 4,000 feet, and we were all soaking wet from fording of river. And I was trying desperately to get into this battle. And there were five other reporters and photographers, including my nemesis, Peter Arnett of the AP, also trying to get in. But I had the edge on them because I recognized Colonel Moore's S2, Captain Matt Dillon. I grabbed him. I said, Matt, I need to get in there. He said, well, I'm going in as soon as it's dark with two helicopters full of ammo. But I can't take you unless the colonel says so. I said, get him on the horn. And he got on the radio, made a report to the colonel, could hear the battle raging in the background over the radio. And he said, oh, and by the way, I've got that reporter Galloway. He wants to come in with me. And I'm listening real close. And the colonel said, if he's crazy enough to want to come in here and you've got room, bring him. Hal Moore believed that the American people had a right to know what their sons were doing and what the army was doing with their sons. And that was how he conducted his operations. The press was always welcome. So I got my, all I had to do then was hide from the other guys until it got near dark and they all flew back to play coup to get a hot meal and a cold bunk. And I got a ride into the pages of history. So here we are. Bruce Crandall, tell your story. Well, I made the mistake of taking him back out of there. He took me in. Yeah, I took him in and I also took him back out. That was the first experience we'd had with the helicopters being that influential on the battlefield. The infantry had had a lot of experience but the helicopters were just learning our role. And it, I don't know why we waited until after dark to take them in. I prefer to go in when it's daylight and I can see who's shooting at me. But evidently the infantry had some kind of disagreement with that when we went in after dark. My one man and I flew 14 and a half hours that day. And we were, we brought out 71 people that survived and we got enamel and water and medical supplies into the people on the ground so they survived. It was a very exciting time to say the least. When we'd get shot up, we'd shift aircraft and start flying another one. And I'd call in to the base where the helicopters were and tell them crank one, I'm coming and I'm shot up. And we would do that and we'd change the aircraft. I think we got five different aircraft during the day. But we flew the same aircraft a number of times. Duck tape works. But we were, and we know what we were doing because I don't want it to sound like we didn't have a real good idea of what we were doing. But we knew, but we also knew that we had to do what we were doing otherwise the infantry would not survive on the battlefield. And they were ours. They were ours to make sure they survived. And my wingman, Ed Freeman, was too tall in the movie. He was played by Sam Elliott. And no, no, Sam played Sergeant Major. Well, anyhow, Ed was one hell of a good helicopter pilot and we'd been together for 10 years before we went to Vietnam. We had five company commanders that were engineer officers that would work in topo units and we'd been together. So we knew each other, we trusted each other. We trusted the infantry. We had eight battalions of infantry. And so we had a marriage, a normal relationship with the infantry. And how more in the first to seventh was my heaviest load. They were able to find the most trouble. I think they knew Custer personally. But big Ed Freeman, received the Medal of Honor first. And that was right because he's the only one that volunteered to go when I asked for volunteers. And he stayed with me all day and until the night until we brought Joe and them in. And that was the last flight. Go ahead. You wanna take over? This is one of my particular personal heroes. A private of the infantry was shot to doll ribbons on the battlefield, lost an eye. And spending a year in an army hospital decided that the doctors were his heroes. And the army helped him become a doctor. And he became a reservist, a reserve officer. Then he became a National Guard officer. His last tour of duty was as the Surgeon General of the Texas 36 National Guard Division. And he still practices medicine today in Corpus Christi. It's amazing the stories that come off a battlefield. Tom? Some of it's true. That's right. Some of it's true. Some of it's true. Some of it's true. If you can believe the craziest person that I know is here and one is sitting over here on the other side. It's, you would say, I guess part of it is true. But I made the mistake myself. I said, when I was 17, coming to the end of my 17th birthday, I went down to sign up for at the board and signed up to go in for the army. And I went there and the lady said to me, she said, what's your name? And I looked at her and I said, I said, Tom Johnson. And she looked at me and that's not in a relationship to the Tom that was here before. But she said, no, that's your name. And I said, yes, that's my name. And she said, no, that's not your name. And then she said, well, again, I'll give you one more chance. What's your name? And then I said, Junior Johnson. And then she said, no, that's not your name. And I said, and then I said, well, I said, she said, your name is Tone. And for that, I'm gonna send you in today. So she told me to go outside and sit down. And I went outside and I sit down in the waiting room for a little bit. And I got up and I walked out and I said, well, I can beat her at this. I'm gonna go over and sign up myself. So I went and signed up as a volunteer to go into the Army. And so we went in and on that day that we were asked to support the support in the field. I looked at it as gosh, we just gonna go out. We're gonna take our mortars I was in 11 C-10, 11 C-10 is heavy weapon infantry. And I said, gosh, I'm gonna go out and we're just gonna support them. We're gonna lay, put up, set up our own waters and lay down fire for them. And that's what we're gonna do. So we got out there and some, I always call those helicopter pilots gonna crazy because he was going out and he's ducking around the tree tops and then we get to the place where we was gonna go in. And he just came in real low and he says, now boys, get your tails off the plane, off the chopper. And he's flying higher than this 40m here. He's flying higher than that. And he said, what are we gonna do? He said, go ahead and jump out. Just get out now because I'm taking fire and I need you to just get out so I can take off. And so we jumped out and nevertheless, we was in a rice paddy. And of course, in a rice paddy in Vietnam, it's a lot of water plus some other things that we don't wanna probably talk about. So we jumped out. You went to Japan, just what happened. Yeah. Well, we did and we were taking heavy fire. And then so I told the guys at the time, I said, guys, I said, I think we were sent here to take the fire off of the others. And he said, everybody was saying, well, what are we gonna do? So we actually hit it for the wood line and then we started to lay down fire. And that was a tough day. When I stood there and I was looking through the elephant grass and I pulled the elephant grass back and right before me, there was a guy who looked about my age or younger and he was looking right at me and I was looking right at him. And neither one of us was fired at either. We was just staring at each other. And then all of a sudden a large noise out of nowhere and when I woke up, what, four hours, five hours later, I thought I was dead, I say, because I couldn't see anything and I was just laying there. So I, and then all I could think of before I, you know, heaven's searching, certainly it's dark because I can't see a thing because I, and so I laid there for a while and then something told me to reach up and check, check yourself. And so I started checking my fill in myself. I said, all right, but I felt my face and my face like felt like somebody cake mud all over my face. But fortunately for me, it was my own blood and it was covering up my eyes and I couldn't see. So when I finally opened up and I got the blood off, I could, I could see and then I noticed that, gosh, you know, I'm here and I'm here alone and I could hear firing from the distance. And so we decided, well, I decided that I would go and try to find some others and we will get together and we will try to develop a circle of fire. And we, we did that and we fought throughout the, throughout the evening and through the night and through the next day. We was laying down as much fire as we could and then at night time, I said, gosh, you know, we was there and the Vietnamese was coming and we saw them coming and one of the guys says, well, what are you, what are we gonna do? And I said, you know, sorry to say, but I said, hell, if I know, I'm just a private. You know, and, you know, and we were looking and everybody looked around and they said, oh, are you the rank in this private? So, so I said, well, well, okay, well, well, let's try to, you know, find something to eat because it's in the middle of the night and we haven't had anything to eat and we've been at this since about 9 a.m. in the morning and I say, well, and so we did that and we were sitting down and waiting for things to kind of clear down, settle down a little bit and we noticed that the Vietnamese started coming again and I say, nobody fights at night. And now this is silly and all I can see was the tracer ammo and we had tracer ammo, but I didn't think the Vietnamese had tracer ammo or the Vietcong had tracer ammo. So we were just looking at that and I was laying on my back and I was watching this tracer ammo come across my face and so finally I said, you know what? I think it's somebody on our side is shooting our way. And so we start holler a little bit and then finally they say, who's there? And we say, it's dog company. Actually, let's dealt the company for all of you people who are down to a bad and they say, we're here, but we have no ammo and they say, well, you better stay down because the Vietcong is right up on you. So we stayed down for a little bit and then we decided, well, we got to get back in the fight and so we decided to move out and start doing what we could. It was a tough night and we went through that and through the part of the day of the next day. And when I first knew Joe, I said, well, he came to Corpus and said, and I didn't know he lived in the referral or actually he lived out on the bay, you know? And he told me one day, he said, well, we're gonna have a meeting and up in the referral, we're gonna come up and we're gonna discuss some things. And so we went up there and then he told me he had written a book and I had already seen the movie so he asked me to come in and look at it and everything and then he showed me and said, gosh, you know, your name is in the book. And I said, he said, because I could get to you to get anything else, you put your name is in the book and I looked at it and I say, wow, my name is in the book. That's something for the ranking as private. But actually I did, I lived through everything and lived through the war and I came out and I, as Joe said, I went back to school and the Army was nice enough to let me join the Army health professional program and go to school and I went to school and I decided I will pay them back by going back into the Army. I went back into the Army and served and then I got out and I say, well, and I went into public health service and I served as a commander in the public health service for several years and then I got out and I said, well, what am I gonna do? Well, so I decided, well, I go into the guard and I went into the guard and I served in Texas Guard for about 30, 30 years in the Texas Guard and when I got out, I asked Governor Rick Perry was in the governor and he said, well, Tony, you're such a good fellow. We won't make you a brigadier but I guess we'll make you an admiral in the Texas one in the Texas State Navy and I said, what is this? I'm an Army officer, right? No, thank you. Let's move along over there to my own classmate, Vince Cantu, Vince, tell us your story. Well, Joe, I shouldn't have been there in the first place. Me too. No, President Kennedy passed a proclamation, no married men. At that time I was married and I had a little girl, Mary Lou, and so I felt safe but then Uncle Sam came knocking and he said, hey, Army needs you. So I gathered all my papers, took them to Victoria because that's where the recruiting station was and I said, hey, you can't take me in. So I put all the information in front of them. I said, I'm sorry but we need to find out if we're here, we're here yet? I said, okay. So I was sure I wasn't gonna pass but three guys went, one didn't make it because intelligence, the other one, he was too fat so I lucked out. Who was, who was the one who had no intelligence? I should have played like I had no intelligence. I should have done that but anyway they took me in. Now the way I met Joe, Sergeant Montgomery was my platoon sergeant and Sergeant Mueller who was German descent was my platoon sergeant. I mean squad leader. And he was sitting there in the firing all around us and big old tree behind him. I said, sergeant, what do you do sitting here? I said, I came to him and I said, I just had a daughter coming back which went over there and they used this, Maurice Rose. I said, and I haven't seen her. And he kept on crying. So I said, get behind the tree and I put him behind the tree and I rushed over to Sergeant Montgomery. I said, Sergeant Mueller came, function. He said, well, can't you send him back to the back area? So I went back to the back area and I took him and I went to Sergeant Montgomery. He said, can't do you, the squad is yours. Now that next ship coming, send some of your men to pick up the dead and put them in the chopper. So I went there and I'm waiting. I said, these guys that I've been over two years together, because when they took us in there, I needed 10 days left in the army. So how can I get their confidence? You don't send them out and I could get them back in where it feels safe. So I made up my mind to, hey, I'll just turn on the follow me. So when the chopper came in, they all followed me and we put the dead body in it in the chopper. And then I see Joe, of course I didn't know it was him, come from behind the bush and kneel down and take a picture, but I thought he was gonna shoot me. So I go down into the elephant grass and the elephant grass is real tall. At that time, it was real tall because nobody had stepped on it. So I kept looking and I was wondering why he didn't have a rifle. I kept looking and in my mind, I said, I know that guy. And then it was real hard. Joe at the time had a lot of freckles. So I looked at him, yeah, that's Joe Galloway. So I crawled over toward him and I said, Joe, get away. They looked up. I said, Ben, scan two, you remember me? And the big old grin. So we crawled towards each other. I said, what are you doing? He said, I work for UPI. I said, well, you better get your rifle because they shootin' life bullets. And then how I met Joe in the field. And he took a picture of me that bent all over the place and that has opened up my world. I took, I played with a group called the Saints and Sinners, 10 members and their wives. I took them to the referral we played there. Had been 40 years since I played. And we had a big crowd. So after the dance and the music winter, Moya's Cafe is a real popular cafe. It's mentioned in a lot of books and everybody goes there. So here we are, about 35 of us. We all eat after the deal. Of course, I don't have the kind of money to pay for all those guys. So I said, well, for everybody, we'll just divide it into 10 and go pay. So I went to Dale Moya, the owner of the restaurant. I said, Dale, I need to bill. She said, Vince, it's already been taken care of. I said, who? He said, Dale wants to stay anonymous. That's the way my life went. Thank you, Joe. Yeah, anonymous. Playing with my hearing aids, I like that. Vince, you earn more than a free meal at Moya's. Yeah, I think he did. You heard that? Because I couldn't. That's what I was... Yes. Yeah, Paul. There's too many chopper days. Joe Marm, Colonel Marm, tell us your story. It's an honor for me to be here. There's many Vietnam veterans out there, so I can't tell any lies. Never stopped us. I would have been drafted. They had a draft back in the 60s, so I enlisted under the college option program and went through basic training, advanced individual training, and then OCS. And we did KP and we did guard duty, which they don't do now. But it made me appreciate being a soldier. And I graduated from OCS and went into the Ranger School, and that was my best preparation for Vietnam. Nine straight weeks of intensive training up in the mountains of North Georgia and down in the Everglades of Florida. And we had a big formation right before we graduated, and they called out about 50 names of our classmates and said, your order's now being changed. You can make one phone call home. You're going to Fort Benning. I was supposed to go to Fort Jackson in South Carolina and push basic trainees. But I went in and signed in, and we were there just a month, and we headed to Vietnam. My first sea voyage went over on the USS Maurice Rose. We took a bus from Fort Benning to Charleston and boarded the Rose and headed west. Went through the Panama Canal up to California and across to Pacific. Went through a typhoon, and the whole division had to get over there. 15,000 soldiers and 400-plus helicopters all had to get over there. And the helicopters were on aircraft carriers. We took a mule. Colonel Stockton, they gave him a mule during the testing phase of the 11th aerosol when they were testing the helicopters to see if they would work. And it proved to be a very, very successful division. A very good division, but it was very expensive. They were able to outmaneuver the 82nd and the 101st during the war games that they were participating in. But Colonel, he wasn't supposed to do it, but he took his mule. They gave it to him as a gag gift. And he called his mule after his wife's name, Maggie. He got to Vietnam and Maggie, the generals told Stockton, I don't want Maggie on my Chinook helicopter. And so he had to sling load Maggie underneath his command helicopter to our base camp up in the central highlands of on K. Maggie came to a bad end. She was killed one night by a sentry from the 7th Cavalry. And Sergeant Major Plumlee reported this fact to Colonel Moore, who held his hands over his head and said, what did you do? And he said, well, sir, I loaded Maggie aboard the chow truck and they delivered her back to the 9th. He said, why did we kill her? He said, she were challenged, sir, and didn't know the counter sign. You and I, we was on the same, we were on the same time on the USS Maurice Rose. Yes, sir. We wrote that same. Same you. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry to interrupt. But we were in the 7th Cavalry and whose lineage goes back to General George Armstrong Custer. And there at LZX Ray, we thought we're in another little big horn surrounded and outnumbered. But we had a lot of assets Custer didn't have. We had the entire division ready to give us support. So that was very, very, very fortunate that we had that. But I was, that was my first job right out of my army training. And as a rifle platoon leader in a company, we were the second company in. Bravo company came in first and started looking for the enemy. And our company, a company came in about 1030 on a Sunday morning, the 14th of December. And one of the platoons of Bravo company got separated and surrounded by the enemy and the rest of the company had to pull back. My company commander, Tony Nadal, said, Marm, take your platoon and link up with Bravo company. They're gonna make an attempt to get back up to that platoon that was trapped. So we started doing it, but we were taking casualties from the enemy into our front. And we weren't able to do it on that first attempt. So we pulled back and we're gonna make a second attempt with two companies minus the platoon that was trapped. B company and A company. And so we started out and we put artillery and mortar fire in front of us, trying to soften up the front as we move forward. But everybody has their own little firefight. In front of me was a, and it was elephant grass and shrubs and trees. It wasn't heavy jungle like you think of in Vietnam. But this one solidified rock an hill was about seven feet tall and just looked like a big an hill with shrubs and trees around it. Was right in the front of my platoon's sector. In the heat of battle, I told one of my men to throw a grenade, run up there and throw a grenade over the top. But trying to use sign language because he couldn't hear me that well, but he thought I meant throw it from where we're at. He did and it landed in front of the bunker and it went off and it didn't do much damage. So we kept moving forward and I told another one of my men to shoot a bazooka. It's called a light anti-tank weapon. It's a one shot disposable tank killing weapon that we had. There's a new weapon for Vietnam and my soldier tried to shoot it, but it was a misfire. So what you do with misfire? I took the weapon from him and closed it up and opened it up again and shot it. And it went right into that, that big rock solidified rock, and it made a big boom and a big cloud of dust. It really picked up arm around. We started moving forward again, but we were taking too much fire from in him. We had to stop, it was about 30 meters away, that I said rather than wasting any more time because it was starting to get dark, we wanted to get to that platoon before it got too dark. So I told my men to hold their fire and not to shoot me up. That kind of worried me a little bit. So I ran forward about 30 meters, got to the solidified rock an hill and threw a grenade over the top and went around to the left side of it and silenced some more North Vietnamese that were still trying to shoot me. When the bunker was silenced is when I turned to my men to tell them, let's go, we got to get to the platoon when I got shot somewhere from one of the North Vietnamese further in the background there. And it kind of ruined my day. The bullet shattered my left jaw, went in, went in the left jaw and deflected down and came out underneath my right jaw. And I didn't have, you're supposed to have a medic with you that's assigned, attached to you. One of my sergeants, a squad leader was a medic in the Korean War and had switched MOSs and was an infantry guy now. So he was doing double duty, carrying the aid bag and taking care of his squad. And so he came up to me and patched me up and a couple of my soldiers carried me back to the rear. And so I was a walking wound that it didn't have to, it just kind of had to help me back a little bit. And this guy took me out later that night before last night. He still owes me a pig. I have a hog farm in North Carolina. He bled over my helicopter. But we had tremendous soldiers and they'd been training together and some of them had 10 days left and many of them had a week left or two or three months left and were in that battle fighting right alongside of us. And we were a cross section of America in terms of all races and religions. And I had E-fives with buck sergeants with 10 years of service that were working with me. And so I just had a tremendous platoon of about 35 guys. In our company, we lost 11 in those three days of battle. 11 killed in action. And we went in with 450, the whole battalion went in with 450 and we had 79 soldiers killed in action after three days of intense fighting and 121 wounded in action. But we were blessed with just good soldiers and NCOs. It should be noted here that the overall picture was that until this point, until this battle, the war had pretty much been confined to American advisors with Vietnamese troops and the casualties had been accordingly fairly small. A couple of weeks, something like that. Although all casualties are painful. At this point, with this battle and the succeeding battle at Landing Zone Albany by our sister battalion, the second of the seventh cavalry, 205 Americans were killed in four days and approximately 300 wounded out of two battalions. The entire campaign from mid October to mid November, 305 American dead. When these figures hit Washington, there was a considerable concern in the White House. Considerable concern by President Johnson. Secretary of Defense McNamara was Robert Strange McNamara aptly named, was at NATO in Brussels and President Johnson told him, get your butt to Vietnam and find out what the hell is going on over there. More or less in those words, I think. And McNamara came over, he took briefings at the embassy, he picked up Westmoreland and they flew up to Ancestral and took briefings from Colonel Moore, from Major General Harry Kinard, who was the division commander. And on the plane home, dated 30 November, 1965, McNamara wrote a top secret eyes only memorandum to the president. And he wrote a letter to the president and wrote a top secret eyes only memorandum to the president. And on 15 December, 1965, President Johnson called a meeting of his wise men at the White House. They had a two day session. When Johnson walked into the cabinet room for the beginning of this meeting, he had a copy of McNamara's memo in his hand. And he shook it at him and said, Bob, you mean to tell me that no matter what I do in Vietnam, I can't win that war? And McNamara looked at him and shook his head, yes. The memo said, roughly speaking, that the North Vietnamese have not only met our escalation of the war, but they have exceeded it. And we are at a decision point. We can decide to find whatever diplomatic cover is available and get out of this war, out of this place. Or we give General Westmoreland the 200,000 more troops he's asking for, in which case by early 1967, we will reach a military stalemate at a much higher level of violence and approximately a thousand a month American did. He was wrong for a bean counter. It actually would turn out to be 3,000 a month at its height. But knowing this and having the memo and they sat there and they talked about it for two days, they then voted unanimously for option two, give Westmoreland the 200,000 more troops and go for a military stalemate at a much higher level of violence. It's one of the more curious moments in American history. At that time, we had 1,100 Americans who had lost their lives in Vietnam and the war would drag on for the better part of 10 more years and 58,290 names would be engraved on the black granite wall in Washington, D.C. So I wanted you to see that larger picture and there's one more part of it. It seems to me and others who've studied it that this battle in the aftermath, General Kennard wanted permission to pursue the fleeing North Vietnamese enemy across this line on a map into Cambodia where they had their sanctuaries and where we knew they were and where we could see their arms dumps and their men and this was kicked all the way back to Washington, to the Pentagon and then to the White House and the answer came back, you dare not pursue those people into Cambodia, period. It will not be allowed. At that moment, I believe we telegraphed a message to General Jop and the bosses in Hanoi that they now had and would have for the rest of the war strategic initiative. They would decide when and where we would fight and how long the battle would last and all they had to do at the end of it was cross a line and they were time out. We're gonna have time to rest, refit, reinforce and we'll come back when we're ready to fight you again. So it's in many ways very depressing to look at the blood that was lost, the sacrifices that were made and see that it was all going nowhere. We were not going to win. I don't even think we could define what victory would look like in Vietnam. So it's my opinion, it's my story and I'm sticking with it. You guys are welcome to check in. As we expanded from 100,000 to 500,000, I went back in 69. I didn't have the seasoned NCOs like I had in 65 just because the army had expanded so rapidly and so fast and which was a shame. We had great soldiers and many of them were promoted right from out of basic training. They had an NCO course and they were called, many of the Vietnam vets will know, they were called Shake a Bake. They had 90 day wonders. They were great soldiers. It just didn't have a lot of experience. Joe got drafted and so did I. And they sent me 12 miles from home after they drafted me and expected me to behave which was expectations they didn't have back home. Anyhow, my first sergeant called me and my buddy in and he said, you two guys are too effed up to even be in the army. And you might make corporal someday and I don't want that on my conscience but you make good second lieutenants. Now sign this document. Sign this document, get the hell out of my unit. And that gave me a career in the army. I screw up and move up. He made journal. Oh, Colonel. I generally made Colonel. Well, I remember Joe was talking about in relationship to Cambodia because one day we were sent out to do a firing mission and it says, well, you got a firing mission and your mission, the Vietnamese are coming across the border and your firing mission is to go out and fire at them and make sure. And so we go out and we're sitting there waiting and we see the Vietnamese sitting up on the other side in Cambodia. We could see them. We actually, they were sitting there and we were setting up our mortars and getting ready and putting down base plates and we noticed that the Vietnamese all they were doing was putting the mortar base on the mortar tube on a rock and they were firing with the mortar tube on a rock and we were sitting there firing with ours, going to fire ours with, and someone said, you can't fire across the border. And we were waiting and I went into fire but in the Vietnamese was just firing at us and then we looked back in the rear and we noticed that, well, there was a B-52 bombers were unloading and you could hear, if you ever been in a place where you could hear when they're unloading, you just hear a rumbling coming across and it's coming right at you and you could hear that rumbling coming and so we didn't know what to do was to go across the border and be with the Vietnamese or to be a cop. It was kind of a cop but it was something else to watch I remember having, telling the guys one night when we were laying on our backside, they're wondering what we were going to do next and so, and I always carrot a lot of grenades with me and I said, well, guys only one thing we can do. I said, here is one grenade, pull the pin and we was just laid down on the ground because we didn't have any more ammo or anything else. I said, we'll just lay down on the ground and then when they come up and they reach and get you, you just hand them the grenade and so we did that right away and the next day, I said, afternoon of the next day, well, we heard the choppers and we said, gosh, you know, the choppers are coming and they were coming on the fire, I said, but they still were coming in and so we said, well, gosh, we just lying there and everybody said, well, take off your grenades and then throw it out in the woods and we started to do that and I had mine in my hand and my hand was so tight and I tell my wife, you know, that's why I can't move my hand very much now because I said, I had that grenade so tight I was holding it and I couldn't open my hand and so I was wondering what I was going to do when the first sergeant was the first one to come up, Sergeant Major Bowles, we had 35 guys and only five of us survived that day and so we were there waiting and when I heard his name and when he called and I said, Johnson and he said, he came and started coming across and when he started coming across, I looked and I saw some little helmets and I know the only people who were tall and those are standing in the elephant grass with helmets on their head when it happened to be Vietnamese, or if he had cognized it, oh my God, we were being overran and so I handed him my grenade to throw and Sergeant Major said, oh no, no, no and because I was getting ready to throw the grenade and I went like that and it wouldn't come out of my hand, it was stuck in my hand so he had to come over and take it out and then at that time he said, well, we're gonna take you back, you've been wounded and to my surprise, I said, well, I know I've been wounded once and he says, yeah, you know, you got a fragmentation wound on your eye and went right through your face and I said, really? And he said, yeah. We did get that platoon the next day. A young E-5, Ernie Savage, took over and put a ring of steel all around that platoon that night his whole chain of command was killed or wounded and he survived with the help of the medic, Doc Lose. They survived and we were able to get up to him the next day and get him out of there. One thing that I wanted to get across to this audience is we never should have a draft again. The draft did nothing except change the place where some of our guys went to jail, the local chair for the judge could tell a young man that you either go in the army or go to jail and we had the largest stockage we've ever had and you don't gain anything by having a draft. You don't get equity and when you talk about it, we've got some of the finest young men in our military today and they're doing a great job when they're allowed to do it but the draft is a terrible way to try to solve a problem that can't be solved in any manner, shape or form like that. I was drafted, I didn't have to go, but if I had it to go again, I'd do it and most of your regular army types were good men. Yeah, very good. We're very good. Yeah. And those I served with in the guard when we went to the First Gulf War where they were very good, but they did very well. I think we have run to the end of our string here gentlemen. Yeah. I got my point in. You got your point across. You don't see. So thank you all for your attention. Yes. Thank you.