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

cleared this area of a tenacious enemy in some very costly battles during Operation Masher–White Wing. The enemy had been embedded here, as in Quang Ngai, for a long time among a people who believed in their cause. Afterward, when we handed over control to the South Vietnamese army troops, they flooded into the region with long-absent landlords and tax collectors trailing behind them trying to swiftly squeeze as much rent money and rice as possible out of the tenant farmers. Within a week of our departure the South Vietnamese troops and their locustlike camp followers were gone, too, and the enemy had returned and was back in control. It was here that I first realized the futility of this war. I climbed to the high ground and looked down on that overgrown and abandoned landing strip, which had been paved by some succeeding American commander. Again, nothing was left but the painful memories of brave men fighting and dying in a struggle for what?
    After dark we pulled into Qui Nhon, the old port city where we first disembarked from the troopship in 1965, and checked in to a run-down hotel whose dark, dingy rooms offered plenty of mosquitoes and electricity that came and went according to some unknown and erratic schedule.
    In the morning our little convoy took Route 19 toward the Central Highlands, and it was quickly apparent that the Vietnamese government had grasped both the strategic and economic value of that road. It had been turned into a four-lane superhighway minus the potholes and the chaotic traffic of Highway 1. We stopped at the top of the An Khe Pass, once garrisoned by 1st Cavalry Division units guarding against enemy attempts to cut off that chokepoint between the port below and the division base farther inland.
    As we gazed across the rugged mountain slopes below, Bruce Crandall idly asked: “Didn’t we lose a C-123 down there?” Larry Gwin, standing next to him, broke down sobbing. In an instant he was carried back to one of the worst days of his life, a day populated by the ghosts of war. That transport plane was carrying the mortar platoon of Gwin’s outfit, A Company 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry, from the base camp at An Khe to the Bong Son Plain for a new combat operation, Masher–White Wing, early in 1966, when it crashed near this pass with all aboard lost. That platoon was the only one from Gwin’s company that had survived the fierce battle at LZ Albany in the Ia Drang with few casualties. It was then Lieutenant Gwin, executive officer of A Company, who was dispatched to this lovely, rugged mountain pass to attempt to identify the charred bodies of his friends, men he had trained with and fought beside. Now Bruce and Joe shielded their friend from the ABC crew’s cameras and did their best to comfort him. It was neither the first nor the last time those of us on this journey would be ambushed by our memories.
    After this trip Gwin would complete a book about his own memories of Vietnam, Baptism , which tells how his A Company 2/7 Cavalry dwindled to only 15 of 110 original members of the outfit in just twelve months of combat. As this book was going to press in early 2008 Gwin had just completed writing a new post-Vietnam memoir: The Imploding Man: Back Home from Vietnam .
    Our next stop was at An Khe, where we hoped to walk the ground of the division base camp we had hacked out of the jungle and scrub brush by hand with machetes immediately upon our arrival in Vietnam. That base was our home for a year, a huge sprawling collection of wood-floored tents sandbagged against enemy mortars for living quarters, rudimentary buildings that served as headquarters, even cruder buildings thrown up by each battalion as enlisted and officers clubs.
    Standing at the entrance to the base area was a small Vietnamese army post with a scattering of stucco buildings and a gate with a surprised and nervous Vietnamese soldier carrying an AK-47 rifle. General An, wearing his uniform and badges of high rank, approached