The Battle of Ia Drang: SP5 Jon Wallenius

Ken Harbaugh:

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I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from SP5 Jon Wallenius. Wallenius served in Vietnam with the Army, and fought in the famous Battle of Ia Drang. As a member of the First Cavalry Division, it was his job to scout for enemies in advanced positions and clear LZs for the infantry.

SP5 Jon Wallenius:

I'm Jon Wallenius. Bravo Company, second of the seventh. Right.

The division was assembled out of men who had been paratroopers, or had been rangers, or were collecting what we call pro pay, professional pay, which meant that you had taken a test and could do your job, whatever it was in a professional category, and you got extra money for that. And as I remember, most every one of my platoon was collecting pro pay. So it was a well-put-together, well-thought-out bunch of people. It wasn't just anybody who came along down the street. The army had gone to great lengths to get the best that was available at the time to make that division up. And we all knew it, and we felt it.

The fourth of the seventh cavalry, as part of the second infantry division, became the second of the seventh cavalry as the first cav division. And we really missed most of that air assault training. We did go over to Kelly Hill, and we repelled down a wall that was seemed much bigger than whatever it was, probably 35 feet, but it seemed taller than that. And we got an orientation ride in a Huey, and they showed us how to board and unboard helicopters. But I'd never ridden on a Chinook until I got to Vietnam. And I think my total air time before Vietnam was maybe 20 minutes in a helicopter.

When we got on the boat to go to Vietnam, it sounds naive today, but I really didn't even know where Vietnam was. And it wasn't until we were on the boat about a week or so when I happened upon a map that was up on the wall, and the boat that we were traveling on was the HMS Rose, which was a World War II Liberty ship. And there was an old sergeant there, and he was pointing to the map, and he said, "This is where you're going, boys." And what he was pointing to was Indochina. And I knew where Indochina was, but I'd never heard of Vietnam before. So that was kind of my first real recollection of exactly where it was we were going. And there was a sense of adventure there. There was a sense of we were going somewhere that was mysterious and far away. And I don't think anyone really had the concept of what combat was going to be like, particularly us younger guys, although many of the World War II and Korean vets that were with us were well aware of what we were getting into.

Well, General Moore's battalion had been given pretty much carte blanche to go sweep and look for the enemy. And on his reconnaissance that he had made, he had noticed commo wire running up the Chu Pong Massif. And that was a pretty good indication that there was something going on there. And besides that, I understand, although I didn't know this at the time, that the maps at division headquarters had a big red star on top of the Chu Pong Massif. And it had been known through military intelligence that that area had been used by the North Vietnamese troops for a long time. And actually, even during the time that the French was there, that was a main base. So it wasn't a real surprise that there were troops in that area. We were looking for an opportunity to find a main force, and air assaulting on their parade field was a good way to stir them up.

I air assaulted in about 4:30 on the afternoon of the first day. And at that time, General Moore had all of his companies on the ground, and we had come in as my company. And we are assaulted in at around 4:30. It was just starting to get dark, and we had been waiting to air assault in for about an hour and a half before we actually got on the birds and went in. The LZ was really hot, and there was a lot of smoke and a lot of tracers. And it was the first time that any of us had really, really air assaulted on a hot LZ. And it was an incredibly noisy and surrealistic sort of an event. We hit the ground and ran to this command post. And I remember seeing my captain salute General Moore, excuse me, Colonel Moore at the time, and asked for the orders of what he was to do. And at that point, my platoon was given the direction to go set their mortars up and tie in with the company mortars, so the battalion mortars, which we did.

Well, an air assault is an adrenaline rush beyond your wildest imagination. From this perspective, I can almost say in a way, it's fun. You have an invulnerability when you're 21 years old, and you don't really have the concept that you're going to get hit. Maybe somebody else, but not you. And so, therefore, you can kind of enjoy the fear. And at the time of this even happening, you're kind of thinking about the bragging rights that you'll get having done this. It doesn't really get terrifying until you start seeing people get hit. And I guess the difference between a professional and non-professional is when those things happen. The professionals keep on with their mission, and they complete it. And we were professionals, and we did. But as far as the air assault, that X-Ray, my chopper got in without anybody being hit on the bird, although the bird took many, many rounds. You can hear them as they go through the fuselage. Sometimes you can see them. I was a little preoccupied with looking to see where they were coming from, but I could hear them hit the bird as we came in, and you could see the tracers coming right at us.

Well, after the initial assault into X-Ray, with all the shooting that was going on there, the night did quiet down. And my platoon, we assumed that we were within an infantry screen because we were mortars, and mortars are always protected by an infantry screen in front. At least, that's what I assumed. However, that wasn't so. When I woke up or got up in the morning, I was waiting for a daylight to appear so that I could make coffee because I wanted to start a fire and I didn't want to attract attention. So as soon as it cut light, I had some composition C-4, which was what we used to light fires with. And I heated up a cup of coffee for myself and the platoon sergeant. And as we were standing, looking out over this chest-high elephant grass, I saw a soldier jump up out the grass in a khaki uniform, in a pith helmet. And he was pointing. And what he was doing is he was setting up a light machine gun to our front. And when I looked at the platoon sergeant, I said, "Who is that out there?" And he said, "I don't know." And I said, "Do you suppose they're Australians?" We were so naive that it never occurred to me that we were fighting an enemy that was dressed in khaki uniforms and was organized. I had thought and anticipated that we were fighting farmers in black pajamas with conical hats and muskets. So this was a surprise. Then we saw this light machine gun cross to our front, and they set up and opened up on us. And that was the first taste of the war really for me.

Every side of the perimeter was different. The North Vietnamese were attempting to encircle us, and they were trying to build forces in groups outside particular sectors of the perimeter. And when they got their forces together, they would attack, or sometimes they would be startled into attacking by our own artillery or our own mortifier, and they would think that perhaps we'd seen them, and they would attack. But they attacked different sectors of the perimeter at different times and with different intensities. In my particular sector, we were attacked that first morning. But after that, pretty much left alone throughout the rest of the next day and a half. On other sides of the perimeter facing the Chu Pong Massif, they were attacked with human wave attacks several times, but all of us certainly were close enough to see another man's eyes when we shot at them. We were fighting within 20 or 30 feet. Many positions were literally overrun and repulsed.

I think that hand-to-hand fighting was unusual in Vietnam. It certainly didn't happen most of the time. But at LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany, there was certainly hand-to-hand fighting.

There was times of quiet. There was times when the birds were chirping. We had lots of artillery falling in around us, our own artillery. When there were lulls, we improved our positions. We were kind of preoccupied with a platoon that had been cut off earlier in the first day that we had made attempts to rescue. There were lots of things to do. There were wounded men to take out. There were dead to remove. There was enemy dead in front of our positions to police up, and then there was the anticipation of further attacks. So there was plenty going on.

Well, the army is always hurry up and wait. And combat is hours and hours of boredom punctuated by a few seconds of sheer terror. And that's what LZ X-Ray was. It was the anticipation of attack for three days, and that anticipation was fulfilled many, many times.

Well, I think every airplane in Southeast Asia was on call to us at that point. They were stacked to 30,000 feet above LZ X-Ray, looking for targets of opportunity and also ones that we had called in. We had a solid ring of artillery fire around us. We had everything the United States government could possibly provide us, but it's true of any war. You don't win it until you have a man on the ground with a rifle. And the North Vietnamese, if they learned anything, learned that the way to combat our firepower was to is now often quoted, grab us by the belt, which is what they did. They attempted to sneak in as close to our positions as possible before they attacked, which prevented us from using artillery and airplanes. And when they were able to do that, they were sometimes successful.

The LZ X-Ray area isn't triple canopy jungle. It's kind of a flat plane with the scattered trees and high elephant grass, but there was an incredible amount of smoke and dust. I mean, the smoke and dust from the explosions, and the helicopters coming in and out, and the small arms fire made visibility from the air nearly impossible on the ground. An infantryman's view is a three-mil perspective. You only see this wide and directly ahead of you. So it was really tough to judge the big picture from the individual point of view. We were just doing our duty and holding our position, and that was our job. And we did it.

Oh, I think that the feeling of ‘over’ came to me when the replacements showed up, when we had another group in, and they took the pressure directly off of us. There were fresh troops there. And at that point, we felt braver. Also, there was a lot of dead enemy bodies around, and the attacks had stopped. So there was a feeling that things were winding down. I don't think there was anyone that was looking forward to more of the same, but the air power and the artillery was just so awesome. It seemed incredible that anybody could survive that and come back again.

There was some joy in victory, but there's also a lot of respect for the enemy soldiers. They were excellent soldiers, and I respect their bravery. They fought us man to man and eyeball to eyeball, so I didn't feel any great rejoicing in that we'd kicked their ass. It was more they were a worthy opponent, and we were lucky that time when we won.

Well, you should know that some very brave men gave their lives on that field. And it would be romantic and patriotic to say that they gave their lives for their country, but they really gave their lives for their friends. And that's what men in combat fight for. They fight for one another. And there was some brave men there that gave their lives to their friends.

From a grunt's point of view, I don't think any of us really cared about the big picture. We may have been there to save the world from communism in an abstract sort of way, but in a real sort of way, we were there to do a job. And we were given missions to perform, and we performed those missions. And what the big picture was or what the politics were involved in it, all that was really immaterial. And we did our best to keep ourselves and our buddies alive and to accomplish the missions that were given to us. And that was the attitude that we had.

Albany is a very mixed-emotion subject. I didn't march into LZ Albany, my friends did. That was my battalion that marched into Albany. And the only reason that I wasn't on that march is because my company had been called to air assault into LZ X-ray on the first day. So we retired from the field with General Moore and his troops. Second of the seventh and an attached company from first of the fifth marched into Albany, about two miles away, to check it out. Why they march? I don't know. I don't know. They could have air assaulted, I suppose.

However, they were ambushed. And my company was asked to go and relieve them or help them. And we air assaulted into LZ Albany around dark on November 17th. I remember that date because that was my birthday. I was 22. And I was grateful to have survived LZ X-ray. And when the company commander came in and told us that we were going to have to saddle up and go in and bail out the battalion, I'll tell you, there was a streak of terror and then fatalism about the whole thing. And when we made that air assault, it was the hottest LZ I ever assaulted, more so to me than X-ray. At that time, the survivors of the battalion were holed up and a little cups of trees that couldn't have been any more than 30 yards long and 15 yards wide. And that's all they owned to the battlefield.

So we assaulted on one side and ran to the cups of trees. The LZ was so hot that the pilot made a couple passes before he got close enough to us to get off. And at that point, he didn't land. I jumped out of the chopper about 12 feet off the ground and immediately rolled into a dead North Vietnamese body. And the bullets were snapping overhead. And I said to myself, "This is a bad, bad place," but we could hear the battalion cheering us when we came in. After the helicopters left, we could hear these cheers out of the cups of trees, and we ran over there and found the survivors.

They had an awful bad afternoon, I'll tell you, yeah. Yeah. They were very relieved that we were there. And we dug in the positions and consolidated their troops. My company commander took over control of the perimeter, and we spent the night there keeping one another alive. And we were probed throughout the night several times but never seriously attacked. And the Air Force kept us illuminated all night long by dropping flares. And come morning, a major who was there got up and said with his pistol in his hand... I'll never forget. And he looked around, and he said, "I need some volunteers to go down to the ambush site." And he looked me in the eye, so I went. And he, and I, and half a dozen other guys walked down, and we're the first people to see the side of the ambush. And it was terrible. So we spent the morning taking out the survivors and then the bodies and loading them on helicopters.

There's no question that the entire Vietnam experience changed my life. And what one thing was it? I don't know. But certainly LZ Albany and the removal of my friends from that bloody elephant grass certainly was a major part. I think that survivor guilt is something that all of us have. "Why them and not me?" It certainly wasn't because of any skill in cunning on my part. It was just luck. And I felt lucky and fortunate to have not been one of the bodies picked up out of that horrible place.

One thing that did happen, I think though, is that after that, I realized that my staying alive in Vietnam had probably very little to do with whatever I was going to do there and that it had to do with just the will of the gods. And it stopped me from being so afraid for a while, for about six months. And then, I think, after that, the realization that I had survived that long and the realization that I only had to survive so much further to make my year tour started to make us all very cautious, overly cautious, to the point where it started getting dangerous. And at that point, it was time to get out of the field and go do something else.

That year tour was an interesting thing that was a double-edged sword. It said that if you could survive a year, you could get out. And unfortunately, what it also did is that it made you very cautious towards the end of the tour. At the beginning, you were invincible, and then you became professional, and then you just got scared. And I was certainly ready to leave the country when I did.

I didn't really lose any close friends at Albany. Those were people in another company, and they were people that I didn't know that well. I trained with those people, but they weren't good friends of mine. It was strange in Vietnam friendships. You got kind of reserved about making friends because it was too easy for them to lose them. And also, people rotated out, and new people came in, and you were cautious about making friends. Most of us had one or two good friends, and you tried to keep those one or two people alive, but it wasn't like being in a civilian situation or even in an army in garrison where you were played pool with these guys, played basketball with these guys. In the combat situation, it was much more self-contained.

Well, I found that my enemy was professional as I was. That was really a surprise. I think that when we went down to Albany and we ran across a North Vietnamese mortar platoon that had been killed by members of the second of the seventh, and their equipment was there, and some of their dead comrades were there. And it was a surprise to me to see that the equipment that they were using was very similar to ours and, in some ways, better. They had French sights rather than the sights the Americans had for their mortars. And they were made out of plastic, and they were much lighter than our sights, and a more powerful magnifier, and a superior piece of equipment. As a matter of fact, we tried to get those adapted. Those captured sites tried to get them adapted to our guns and couldn't do it. But they were well-equipped, well-trained, well-disciplined. They were cleaned. Their uniforms were clean. They were a professional army. And I was surprised.

I don't think that the North Vietnamese were any better troops or any more dedicated troops than ours. It still boils down to you fight for your buddies, and all the other political businesses really irrelevant. And the American troops certainly fought every bit as hard as the North Vietnamese did. They may have had more ideology to get in the Army, and also they certainly didn't have one-year tours. But as far as more dedicated, braver, more superior, I don't think so.

When you're there, you do what you have to do because it's not an alternative that you can go home. So if you're involved in a firefight, the only thing to do is to fight the best you can, and firstest with the mostest. It's superior firepower overcomes wit and cunning. It's just a matter of who dares to do it. And the Americans that I fought with were every much as brave as anybody else. I would much rather fight North Vietnamese soldiers than Americans.

Well, generally, the mission of the infantry is to find the enemy, fix the enemy, finish the enemy. And air assault was an opportunity to use the classic hammer and anvil technique in order to finish off an enemy force. So usually what happened was there would be a scout force that would be set out first, and then the first cavalry division, that was the first of the ninth. And they would go out in small teams and insert into landing zones that were hopefully cold, and in small teams of 6, 10, 12 guys maybe. And they would go wander around in the bush until they stirred something up. And at that point, a regular infantry unit would be called in to make an air assault in order to put one group into a blocking position, and one group into an assault position, and...

We would try to mystify the enemy as best we could onto what landing zones we were going to use. So oftentimes, we'd prep two or three different landing zones. By prepping a landing zone, we would call in aerial rocket artillery, or fixed-tube artillery, or navy guns if we were close to the shore, or perhaps... or air force. And they would hit the LZ with high explosives, and the helicopters would follow in within three or four minutes after the fire had lifted. And if we do that to three or four different landing zones at the same time, it would confuse the enemy to which ones we were actually going to use. And usually, the scenario was…

In the first cav, most of the places that I operated it in the Central Highlands, the landing zones were two or three ship LZs, which meant that you could get two or three helicopters on the ground at the same time. So the first wave, the first three helicopters in would secure the basic LZ. After the prep period, the helicopters would fly in at about a quarter mile out from the landing zone. They would drop down to treetop level, and we would fly in, which made the sound of the helicopter very confusing to somebody that was on the ground. It's very difficult to tell which way it's coming from.

The helicopters would come in very low and very fast into the LZ. They would flare, not actually put the skids on the ground, but hover three or four feet off the ground. The troops would jump out. Everybody had a fixed spot on that landing zone that they were to run to and to secure into the wood lines. And so the typical formation ideally would be three ships in a triangle, and everybody would come in, have a place to go, and we would secure the LZ for the second lift in.

Now, the North Vietnamese would combat us oftentimes by allowing the first ships to come in, and when the second lift came in, then they would open up on the second lift, hopefully being able to knock down those helicopters and trapping the men on the ground. In the heavy air or the light air around Pleiku or anywhere in the Central Highlands, we usually ran with six or seven men on an assault ship. So that meant the initial force would be about 20 men on the ground. And if you could knock down the next three helicopters coming in, you could finish off the 20 men on the ground and very easily. Of course, we tried to prevent that by holding onto the LZ and making sure we could get in two or three waves after that.

Then, if that particular LZ was cold say, and there wasn't any action when you came in, then usually we would either be picked up and moved to another landing zone, or occasionally, we would march through the jungle for three or four clicks, and hoping to scare up some enemy troops. But the basic premise behind air assault was that once you found the enemy, you could call in a large number of troops anywhere in the country or anywhere we were operating very quickly. So oftentimes, we called it kind of being bait. We would air assault into a landing zone, wander around in the woods there for a couple hours, get hit, and then hopefully we'd have an LZ open enough that we could get in some reinforcements. Sometimes that worked, and sometimes it didn't.

We'd go on these hikes for three or four days at a time and just be wandering around like 30 men or so. Wandering around is the wrong word. I would say we'd have like 30 men on the ground, and we would have an objective to try to get to, and we would march with flankers out in a platoon or a company-sized formation, and we were looking to make contact. And the idea was that we would make contact. And then we had plotted other landing zones in the area and also had plotted artillery that we could call in when we got hit. And, of course, that can be kind of a scary thing to do when you're wandering around out there in the woods like that, waiting for somebody to attack you.

Well, the artillery and ARA had several functions. One was to keep everybody's head down or the enemy's head down on the landing zone so that you could get troops in. And also, the artillery or ARA array could prevent the retreat of the enemy. So if the enemy... If we are assaulted onto a landing zone and we had fire supremacy and the enemy was retreating, we could call in airstrikes or artillery into the retreating enemy. And that was a benefit.

Also, when we pulled into a perimeter at night when we were in the field, we would register artillery around us. And that way, if we were hit, we could call for the artillery and we could put it exactly in the places we wanted to. Also, artillery and mortars both were also used for what we called H&I, which was harassment interdiction. And that at nighttime we would plot logical approaches to a position, creek beds or high points like mountain peaks or things like that, and we would fire random rounds on these points throughout the night, which just would prevent somebody from or make somebody think twice about using that position or crossing across that certain creek red bed. Most of the time, it was just explosions in the mist, but occasionally, there was some hits made that way.

Well, in the case of Masher White Wing, we were trying to engage a large enemy forces or trying to herd an enemy for us into a position that we could have an artillery kill zone. So we would make air assaults into likely areas and sweep through to see if there was any enemy there. And so those were usually small air assaults, platoon-size or company-size air assaults where we'd have three or four ships. We would make an assault on the edge of a village, perhaps, and we would sweep through on foot through the village. If there was no contact, we would get picked up on the other side by choppers again, and then we'd be inserted into another similar situation. And yeah, oftentimes, we did that three or four times on a day. So most of those were cold, or, as we like to call them, Hollywood's, where nothing much really happened. But occasionally, you'd hit a hot LZ or you'd hit a sniper or two, could hold up a 200 company for a while until you eradicated that problem.

I can't tell you the experience of a helicopter assault from the perspective of the ground, having never been on it, but I'll tell you from the perspective of an infantryman or a cavalryman in the assault. The idea of the prep on the LZ is to get the enemy to put their head down. And if you put enough firepower out there, even if there is an enemy on the LZ, the helicopters can move in so quickly behind the artillery barrage and have men on the ground with fully automatic weapons firing that hopefully, the enemy doesn't have a chance to even get their head out of their holes before their overrun. And that's how cavalry is to be used. And for that, it's very effective. But because they are cavalry, they're lightly armored. They're lightly armed, and they really can't sustain long, hard hit-em-in-the-head sort of fights. In Vietnam, it was perfect because we were fighting probably what some people call the finest light infantry in the world.

The idea of cavalry is to be the eyes of the division and to cause as much trouble as you possibly can behind the lines of the enemy. Once we get rid of horses and got into armored vehicles, the armored vehicles kind of slowed that thing down. And cavalry, as a lightning force, I guess, kind of disappeared, but the helicopter allowed real cavalry operations to succeed again. And the trick with cavalry is speed and surprise. That's really your weapon as speed and surprise. And so helicopters allowed us the speed, and the surprise is achieved by flying low-level, and by flying very fast, and being able to insert mysteriously in places that you don't expect it.

And yes, helicopters would be easy to shoot down with a tow missile or with the modern anti-aircraft things that are available today. But those things were available in 1965 too. And the thing is that it's... First off, the enemy has to be in the position to do that, and they have to be ready. And they also have to be brave enough to face it. It's like destroying a tank with a Molotov cocktail. You can do it, but it takes a pretty brave man to stare down a tank charging at you with a little bottle of gasoline. And it takes a pretty brave man to stand in front of a helicopter assault that's firing full barrels everything at you and start shooting toes at it too. So I think that the cavalry still has a place in the world. And the 101st, I hope, carries on the tradition of the first cav.

The cav was an excellent weapon in Vietnam, and good weapons are used. And it was a very effective weapon, and you're right. It's thinking that the people that served in the Cav saw a lot of combat. I wish I could tell you honestly how many air assaults I've made. I kept tracked up to 64. I thought that was an awful lot, but people tell me that that was probably a lowball figure. It's a lot of air assaults, and that you can survive them is amazing. But fortunately, if things go right, you end up on most of these without anybody shooting back. And so that's how you can do 64 air assaults. It was a good weapon in Vietnam because it was cavalry, and we were fighting an enemy that was spread out and didn't concentrate their forces into one place. And the cavalry allowed troops to go find those pockets of resistance and to combat them on their own terms and their own backyard. I can't think of any other method of moving men around Vietnam that would've been as effective or worked that well.

Well, I think the Air Cav was the sexiest unit in Vietnam. It was a unit that saw an incredible amount of action at... Our riding into battle on the wings of helicopter was a romantic way to do it. We carried the same elan that horse cavalry did. I think that the cavalry's kill ratio, if you want to count it that way, is probably one of the highest ones in Vietnam. We met the enemy. They were ours. It was a unit that could be used a lot. And I think that we proved the one thing that needed to be proved was that the American ground troops were every bit as formidable as the North Vietnamese were. And that was certainly proved at LZ X-Ray. And for that action, the cavalry got the presidential unit citation, the only unit, by the way, that division that received it in Vietnam.

Well, I'd just like to say that I'm certainly proud to have served in the First Air Cav. It wouldn't have been my first choice if I had realized what I was getting into, perhaps, but I'm certainly proud to have done it. I'm proud of the men I served with. I'm proud of the job that we did in Vietnam, and I'm proud to be part of the heritage of the first cavalry division.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was SP5 Jon Wallenius.

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