Retired Command Sergeant Major Basil Plumley, U.S. Army, memorably depicted in the Mel Gibson movie “We Were Soldiers” by Sam Elliott, died at age 92. He first served in World War II and then in Korea and by the time he served in Vietnam as Sergeant Major of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment (Air Mobile), he was already a 23-year Army veteran and hard as nails.
Command Sergeant Major Basil Plumley, signing autograph, is shown to the right of Lieutenant General Hal Moore, his battalion commander, 1/7 Cavalry (Air Mobile), at the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, in 2009.
The interesting outcome to this battle was that McNamara came back to LBJ with 2 options (in a secret memo): find a diplomatic way to get out, or escalate and give Westmoreland what he needs. Well, we know how that turned out.
Military options and recommendations. We have but two options, it seems to me. One is to go now for a compromise solution (something substantially less than the “favorable outcome” I described in my memorandum of November 3) and hold further deployments to a minimum. The other is to stick with our stated objectives and with the war, and provide what it takes in men and materiel….(recommend up to 74 battalions by end-66: total to approx. 400,000 by end-66. And it should be understood that further deployments (perhaps exceeding 200,000) may be needed in 1967.)
Ia Drang was the first large-scale use of the air mobile concept, though it had been tried in the field in Vietnam, on a much smaller scale, beforehand. Ia Drang was notable for many things and, as you point out, it perhaps is most responsible – with air mobile and how the mobile concept could put troops into the field in a far easier way than had been possible in the past – for the escalation in troop levels that ensued for several years afterward.
Basil Plumley’s role in that battle cemented his place in the pantheon of Army, and military, senior enlisted leaders. One hell of a soldier, as they say. And I love the cavalry hats the Air Cav 1/7 officers and senior enlisted personnel wore. Very classy. That nutjob “Colonel Kilgore,” in the film “Apocalypse Now,” also sported one. Today’s military is so rigidly doctrinaire I doubt we’ll ever see that kind of colorful behavior (from folks like Hal Moore and Basil Plumley, not the Kilgore types), and headgear, from military people again.
I’m sure there are still characters in today’s military, but it’s probably few and far in between. Certainly, you’re not going to see a General whipping a soldier like Patton. Here’s a good read.
*Galloway related an incident from an early reunion many years ago in Columbus that illustrates the respect Plumley commands and fear he still strikes in the unit's veterans.*
"It was up in the hospitality room, and everybody's had a few pops. All of a sudden, Sergeant Major Plumley arrives, steps in the door," he said. "And I saw guys who had served a two-year draftee tour in the Army and had been out for 25 or 30 years, turn white, backs against the wall. As the sergeant major made his way into the room, they made their way along the wall and out the door. They were afraid he still had their name and number."
If you watch the embedded CNN film, you’ll see an interview from back then with then-Major Charles Beckwith. He’s famous for having created the Army’s Delta Force organization.
The movie does a pretty fair job of showing the desperate conditions of the battle, especially the constant massed attacks by the superior numbers of NVA. What I object to though is the complete absence of the story of next couple of days when elements of the 7th Cavalry Reg. marched over to an adjacent LZ (Albany) for helo extraction (not as the movie showed) and walked right into another hornet’s nest. The outcome for the troopers was very bad.
One of most horrific first hand accounts of the terror of battle was written by this guy; Jack Smith, who went on to become one of TV news highest regarded reporters.
Here’s an excerpt (full article down the web page) from the beginning of the account when they are still at LZ X-Ray (We Were Soldiers location)-
“Late that morning the Cong made a charge. About 100 of them jumped up and made for our lines, and all hell broke loose. The people in that sector opened up with everything they had. Then a couple of our Skyraiders came in. One of them dropped a lot of stuff that shimmered in the sun like green confetti. It looked like a ticker-tape parade, but when the things hit the ground, the little pieces exploded. They were antipersonnel charges Every one of the gooks was killed. Another group on the other side almost made it to the lines. There weren’t enough GI’s there, and they couldn’t shoot them down fast enough. A plane dropped some napalm bombs just in front of the line. I couldn’t see the gooks, but I could hear them scream as they burned. A hundred men dead, just like that.”
It was after this first battle that things went very badly for the regiment;and not a “Hollywood” ending at all.
Ah yes, Beckwith, another stud. What about Charles Hackworth - who coined the term ‘out G the G’ and created Tiger Force.
I loved Hackworth (‘Hack’). And his “About Face” pretty much sums up the entire experience of (incorrectly) fighting the Vietnam War. Setting up a ‘steam and cream’ for his men. That’s the kind of ‘individual leader behavior’ you’ll never see in the military again, probably for good reason.
I wonder if he really said all of those great lines. “You can’t take no pictures lying on the ground.” “Custer was a pussy, you ain’t.”
Galloway, who was there with them, said he did. You know who else was there, as a young company commander? Rick Rescorla, “The Man Who Predicted 9/11.” He died in the WTC attack on 9/11. Was the security director for one of the large brokerage firms in the Twin Towers. Went back in to make sure all his people got out. And he never came back out after that.
Yes, they were lit up like Christmas trees after the battle at LZ X-Ray. 248 men KIA, in total, more than 400 wounded, for the entire battle. The regiment was hit very hard. It was also where the Army mania, at the time, for “kill ratios” started up.
This is one of the reasons I mentioned in another thread a couple of weeks ago that cutting back on the number of Infantry types is bad news. Your numbers can get decimated pretty quickly.
This is one of the reasons I mentioned in another thread a couple of weeks ago that cutting back on the number of Infantry types is bad news. Your numbers can get decimated pretty quickly.
Many civilians are often surprised by how few true ‘infantry’ soldiers and Marines there really are. The support troop numbers far outweigh the numbers of troops that are actually tasked – and are trained and equipped as such – to go out, close with and then destroy the enemy.
