Free We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam by Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway Page A

were surprised at just how little remained as evidence of the fact that over those ten years 3 million Americans served in the Indochina theater and billions of dollars were spent building bases and headquarters and housing and recreation facilities for those who came, did their twelve-month tour, and went home. Now they are gone. Far more remained to remind one of the French occupation of Vietnam and their last war with the Viet Minh rebels who rose against them in 1945 and, in 1954, defeated them. At the ends of bridges spanning the multitude of rivers and streams bisecting the highway small octagonal two-or three-man concrete Beau Geste forts with empty firing slits still stand silent guard with neither friend nor foe in sight. I suppose the old forts were built too well to easily tear down, and there’s no market for concrete rubble.
    But only the sharpest eyes could pick out the fragments of an American presence: a piece of perforated steel plate (PSP) among the bamboo and wire making up a farmer’s fence around a cow or pig pen. Here a clattering, smoking truck whose chassis and engine once belonged to a U.S. Army deuce-and-a-half truck. There, in a small rural tea shop, a bulletin board whose notices were pinned up with individual flechettes, the modern-day equivalent of history’s grape shot or canister rounds, small razor-sharp darts that once filled artillery shells fired by American artillery at enemy attacking at close range.
    How could so many of us have fought here for so long and left so little behind in token of our passing except the Vietnamese military cemeteries that dot the countryside, north and south, each of them walled, neatly kept, and marked with an obelisk? Even as our own special teams scour the mountains and jungles of Vietnam for some 1,200-plus still-missing American servicemen, so, too, does the Vietnamese government search for the remains of over 300,000 of their own missing soldiers. Those they have found rest in the new cemeteries.
    Even the huge piles of war junk we left behind—blown-up trucks and tanks, crashed aircraft, twisted steel runway plates—long ago disappeared into the holds of ships that carried it all away to Japanese steel smelters to be melted down and, doubtless, turned into Toyotas and Nissans for the American market. Or perhaps it has come back to Vietnam in the form of those noisy, smoky motorcycles that now clog the roads and streets. It is hard to believe that the American presence in Vietnam, which gave rise to huge bases that sprawled over thousands of acres, has simply been erased. We even built half a dozen creamery operations that produced white and chocolate milk and ice cream for the troops, and they too have vanished. Perhaps all of it was simply built on too large a scale and too flimsily, unlike those French forts, for the Vietnamese to consider worth keeping. All of it may be physically gone, but it is harder to erase from the memories of those who passed through.
    Bruce Crandall says of this part of our journey: “I was amazed as we traveled south to see what an effort had been made to completely eliminate any sign of American wartime presence. It seemed unbelievable that they would not have used the buildings and infrastructure left by the U.S. forces. From Danang onward, I saw nothing American.” Crandall added that we saw no sign of the Vietnamese having put to good use any of the equipment we had left behind—“no dozers, graders, cranes, trucks or other engineering equipment. I was told that all of this equipment was shipped out of the country to help pay some of Vietnam’s war debt.”
    Nearing the end of this day’s long trip, as we were passing through the Bong Son Plain—the scene of several major battles fought by my Cavalry brigade between January and May 1966—we stopped near the site of a temporary headquarters of my old brigade. It had been located near the end of a small dirt airstrip constructed by my Engineer troops. We had