We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam by Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway Page A
Authors: Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway
Tags: United States, General, History; Military, Asia, History, Travel, Military, War, vietnam, Asian history, Military Personal Narratives, Military History, Military History - Vietnam Conflict, Vietnam War, Military - Vietnam War, Southeast Asia, Essays & Travelogues, Southeast, Military - United States, Postwar 20th century history, Military veterans, c 1970 to c 1980, c 1960 to c 1970, from c 1945 to c 2000
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this small, amiable gray-haired former schoolteacher with the fact that this was the man who, along with the former waiter Nguyen Ai Quoc, a.k.a. Ho Chi Minh, had built an army out of an unarmed gaggle of peasant boys and girls and led them with great skill against the Japanese, the French colonialists, the United States, and, more recently, against their former ally and neighbor, Communist China.
Giap greeted Joe and me as old friends in token of our two previous meetings and shook hands with the rest of our traveling squad during a brief stop in a museum reception room. He welcomed them as fellow soldiers to a Vietnam now at peace. Joe and I had talked through our feelings about these meetings with our old enemies on the earlier trips. For us this was research, capturing the words and thoughts of these men for history. Some of the others in our group of veterans were less comfortable with the idea; they were still angry at those who tried to kill them so long ago, and had in fact killed many of their friends. Some, like former-soldier-turned-journalist Jack Smith, expressed their feelings in the early discussions with the enemy commanders. Others listened quietly but tensely to the explanations of the North Vietnamese officers that their troops had no choice but to kill wounded Americans they found as they searched the battlefield at night for their own wounded and dead. How could we pass them by when they were still armed and might shoot us? asked one of the enemy generals. Most of the Americans would find peace on this journey.
We had asked for this briefing because of the importance of Dien Bien Phu and the defeat of the French in setting the stage for America’s beginning involvement in the affairs of the two Vietnams. Giap had told us earlier that if we Americans had studied the lessons clear for all to see in the wake of Dien Bien Phu we would never have come here. He was right about that. Even more puzzling was the fact that we Americans had paid the tuition—by the end of the French war in Indochina the United States was financing about 70 percent of the cost of that war—but had not learned the right lessons. Any serious study of our war in Vietnam has to begin with the French war—and those were the books I read on the troopship that brought my battalion to South Vietnam in the summer of 1965.
Giap led the way to a large room in back where a huge twenty-by-thirty-foot sand-table exhibit depicted in full detail the battlefield of Dien Bien Phu, the scene of his greatest victory over the French in 1954.
The general, speaking through an interpreter, told us he made one daring decision that changed the course of the siege and history, a decision that he said could have cost him his life. After the French bet everything they owned in Indochina on drawing Giap and his Viet Minh army into a decisive battle in the remote mountain valley, Giap drew a tight cordon around their positions. Another army of peasant laborers pulled and pushed old American 105mm artillery pieces captured by the Chinese in Korea along a sixty-mile dirt road through the mountains.
His soldiers tunneled and trenched and burrowed in the red earth, drawing the noose ever tighter around the French strongpoints and positions, while the big howitzers were set into positions on the forward slopes of the mountains surrounding the doomed French garrison.
Giap was under orders from the Politburo to launch human wave attacks on the French in the late afternoon of January 26, 1954. He walked around the sand table with a pointer in hand, showing us all that had been made ready for the attack. But he said he had grown increasingly worried that such an attack would play into the hands of the French; that his artillery was vulnerable to the big guns of the French, and to launch human-wave attacks would destroy much of the force so carefully built and trained over the last ten years, with no hope of replacements for the terrible losses he would suffer in
Giap greeted Joe and me as old friends in token of our two previous meetings and shook hands with the rest of our traveling squad during a brief stop in a museum reception room. He welcomed them as fellow soldiers to a Vietnam now at peace. Joe and I had talked through our feelings about these meetings with our old enemies on the earlier trips. For us this was research, capturing the words and thoughts of these men for history. Some of the others in our group of veterans were less comfortable with the idea; they were still angry at those who tried to kill them so long ago, and had in fact killed many of their friends. Some, like former-soldier-turned-journalist Jack Smith, expressed their feelings in the early discussions with the enemy commanders. Others listened quietly but tensely to the explanations of the North Vietnamese officers that their troops had no choice but to kill wounded Americans they found as they searched the battlefield at night for their own wounded and dead. How could we pass them by when they were still armed and might shoot us? asked one of the enemy generals. Most of the Americans would find peace on this journey.
We had asked for this briefing because of the importance of Dien Bien Phu and the defeat of the French in setting the stage for America’s beginning involvement in the affairs of the two Vietnams. Giap had told us earlier that if we Americans had studied the lessons clear for all to see in the wake of Dien Bien Phu we would never have come here. He was right about that. Even more puzzling was the fact that we Americans had paid the tuition—by the end of the French war in Indochina the United States was financing about 70 percent of the cost of that war—but had not learned the right lessons. Any serious study of our war in Vietnam has to begin with the French war—and those were the books I read on the troopship that brought my battalion to South Vietnam in the summer of 1965.
Giap led the way to a large room in back where a huge twenty-by-thirty-foot sand-table exhibit depicted in full detail the battlefield of Dien Bien Phu, the scene of his greatest victory over the French in 1954.
The general, speaking through an interpreter, told us he made one daring decision that changed the course of the siege and history, a decision that he said could have cost him his life. After the French bet everything they owned in Indochina on drawing Giap and his Viet Minh army into a decisive battle in the remote mountain valley, Giap drew a tight cordon around their positions. Another army of peasant laborers pulled and pushed old American 105mm artillery pieces captured by the Chinese in Korea along a sixty-mile dirt road through the mountains.
His soldiers tunneled and trenched and burrowed in the red earth, drawing the noose ever tighter around the French strongpoints and positions, while the big howitzers were set into positions on the forward slopes of the mountains surrounding the doomed French garrison.
Giap was under orders from the Politburo to launch human wave attacks on the French in the late afternoon of January 26, 1954. He walked around the sand table with a pointer in hand, showing us all that had been made ready for the attack. But he said he had grown increasingly worried that such an attack would play into the hands of the French; that his artillery was vulnerable to the big guns of the French, and to launch human-wave attacks would destroy much of the force so carefully built and trained over the last ten years, with no hope of replacements for the terrible losses he would suffer in
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