We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam Read Online Free PDF Page A

questions about the other side that lingered in our minds and, from the beginning of our decade-long research into the Ia Drang battles, Joe and I knew that somehow we had to persuade the North Vietnamese commanders to sit down with us and talk about how the battle looked from their side if we wanted the answers to our questions of why, and why there, in that remote valley. Although the prospects when we began serious work on our project that cold January day in 1982 seemed dim indeed, still we decided that when the time came we would make a strong push for this unprecedented opportunity to talk to our old enemies.
    Not since the end of World War II in Europe had Americans been able to sit down with their former enemies and discuss in detail the battles they had fought—and it was possible then only because the German commanders were in our prisoner-of-war camps and had no real choice in the matter. No one likes to talk of their defeats, only their victories.
    With that in mind, on the eve of our first return to Vietnam we bombarded the Vietnamese diplomatic mission at the United Nations in New York with requests to interview the North Vietnamese Army commanders who had fought against us in the Ia Drang Valley. We only knew the name of Senior Gen. Chu Huy Man, the overall commander, and Maj. Gen. Hoang Phuong, the historian who had written the North Vietnamese after-action report on the battles. The others who fought us—the battlefield commander, his battalion commanders and company commanders—were mysteries to us.
    We met neither encouragement nor rejection from the Vietnamese diplomats, but that first trip would prove both challenging and frustrating in the extreme.
    At the time some of our friends and some of the veterans of the battles were astounded that we wanted to go back to Vietnam and sit down and talk to those men who had tried hard to kill us all—and we them—in the valley of death. For us, doing our best to record the truth of those battles for history, it was vital that we talk to everyone we could find who had firsthand knowledge, and that clearly included our old enemies.
    The first of our many trips back to Vietnam came in August and September 1990, when we interviewed military and civilian officials in Hanoi for the U.S. News & World Report cover story on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Ia Drang battles. Except for interviews with two remarkable Vietnamese officers, Senior Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap and General Phuong, our hope of talking to our actual opponents who fought us in the Ia Drang—and our stated goal of returning to the battlegrounds—failed to come to pass on that trip.
    We returned again the following year, in October and November 1991, in the wake of the publication of Joe’s prizewinning article, and things went a lot better. This time we were granted the crucial detailed interviews with the enemy commanders we had sought.
    We tape-recorded hours of conversations with Senior Gen. Chu Huy Man, who as a brigadier general was the de facto division commander in the Central Highlands in 1965; with Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, who as a senior lieutenant colonel and my opposite number directed the attempts to kill us all from a bunker on the slopes of the Chu Pong Massif; and with Major General Phuong, the official historian of the Vietnamese army, who as a lieutenant colonel was sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to write a lessons-learned report on the Pleiku Campaign. Their comments and answers to our questions were a vital part of our research.
    As important as those 1991 interviews were, for us the real prize was our return in October 1993, when, finally, we were allowed to return to the old battlefields with Lieutenant General An and two other North Vietnamese veterans of the battles. Traveling with us was the ABC correspondent Forrest Sawyer and members of his documentary film crew, who captured it all for a one-hour documentary first broadcast in January 1994 on the now-defunct Day One