February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
This November, for example, marks the 30th anniversary of the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in South Vietnam.
The battle was the first major engagement between U.S. forces and a combination of North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong.
The battle was depicted in a best selling book, “We Were Soldiers Once… And Young” and the movie derived from it, “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson.
Gibson played Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, co-author of the book along with journalist Joseph Galloway
Moore commanded the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry, the front line American force in a battle that was to herald a new tactical era based on the use of helicopters.
Reference is made early in the movie to the fact that Moore’s command was George Armstrong Custer’s unit which, of course, had been destroyed by the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn, almost exactly a century prior to the Ia Drang fight.
Moore and Custer shared the same rank (Custer was a brevet brigadier general during the Civil War), though not the same fate.
Moore’s men called him “Yellow Hair,” a nickname they had borrowed, with more than a twist of dark humor, from Custer.
In both battles a far smaller U.S. force, with only limited advance intelligence, came upon a far larger enemy force encamped in a river valley.
Indeed the combined number of NVA and VC troops at Ia Drang was roughly equivalent to the total of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors arrayed against Custer.
And their tactics were not dissimilar, both employing full frontal charges that relied heavily on numerical superiority.
The total number of 7th Cavalry troopers to die at Little Bighorn was 263. About 30 of them were Irish-born, the best known of them being Myles Keogh, the Carlow man who had fought for the Papal Armies and the Union during the American civil War and whose papal medal, a gift from Pius IX, ended up around the neck of Sitting Bull.
Moore, Lt. Col. Robert McDade, commander of the 7th’s second battalion, and a reinforcing unit from the 5th Cavalry, lost 234 men with an almost identical number of wounded at Ia Drang.
At Little Bighorn a central act of the drama took place at Last Stand Hill. At Ia Drang it was at Landing Zone X-Ray.
The North Vietnamese and VC combined casualties far exceeded those of the combined tribes at Little Bighorn. Custer, of course, did not have air support and long-range artillery at his disposal.
Unlike Custer, Moore got to keep his blond hair, and his life.
Nevertheless, the parallels between both battles are, to say the least, noteworthy.
In both cases there was no shortage of Irish and Irish American involvement. And there was also the participation at Ia Drang of an honorary Irishman.
Much has been written about Rick Rescorla, whose combat-weary face is to be seen on the cover of the Moore/Galloway tome.
Rescorla, a lieutenant in the 7th’s second battalion, survived Ia Drang and the first World Trade Center bombing only to die working to save literally thousands of co-workers on Sept. 11.
A corporate security chief for Morgan Stanley, Rescorla was literally the last man out of the towers in the 1993 attack.
He was at his post again on Sept. 11. He sang songs through a bullhorn to keep people calm, a tactic he had used during combat in Vietnam to encourage and embolden soldiers under his command.
Rescorla made it out with the estimated 3,000 people he had shepherded to safety but went back into the doomed South Tower to rescue even more. His remains were never found.
Though born in England, Rescorla described himself as a Celt from Cornwall. As a result, he was given an honorary place on www.irishonthewall.com, a website dedicated to the Irish-born who died in Vietnam and which is part of the lasting legacy of the late, and sadly missed, Brian McGinn of Alexandria, Virginia.
Right beside Rescorla on the Irish website is an entry for his best friend in Vietnam, a Dublin native by the name of John Cecil Driver, who also fought in the 7th’s second battalion.
Rescorla and Driver are mentioned together at one point in the Moore/Galloway book.
An army doctor by the name of Captain William Shucart states: “The guys who taught me most about the Army were Lieutenant Rick Rescorla, an Englishman, and Sergeant John Driver, an Irishman.
Driver, according to Shucart, had his own rules and ways for fighting a war. And he for sure did not forget to bring his Irish sense of humor to the battlefield.
The first rule when cleaning a rifle was to make sure that the chamber is empty, thus eliminating the possibility of an accidental discharge.
Driver’s rule, according to Shucart, was to make sure it was your own rifle so you wouldn’t waste time cleaning someone else’s.
The Dubliner must have been small and lean because he spent much of his time working as a “tunnel rat,” an extremely dangerous duty in which the ‘rat’ would enter a tunnel, or tunnel system — dug by the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese — in search of an enemy who was well versed in the tactics of laying underground ambushes and booby traps.
“He would drop down in there and yell: ‘Anybody home?’ He didn’t throw smoke in first, like everyone else,” said Shucart.
Driver didn’t confine his Vietnam service to just a first tour which, in his case, covered 1965-66.
Driver went back to the U.S. for a while only to return to combat as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne. He was killed in April of 1969 and his name is today to be found on Washington State’s Vietnam memorial wall in the state capital of Olympia.
Time heals all wounds, most of them anyway. The Little Bighorn isn’t all about Custer anymore and Hal Moore has sat down to talk about the Ia Drang with the men who fought him there.
9/11 is another kind of wound altogether, an event in history that all hope will never be repeated, or even echoed.