CUT OFF: The Epic Stand of the 'Lost Platoon' | Battle of Ia Drang | Clyde "Earnie" Savage

We had two machine guns who had set up off to my right flank. They started firing, and we fired, and my squadron maneuvered back to where the platoon was at and just got married up with the platoon when the main part of the force hit us and started firing. And we ended up losing the platoon leader, platoon sergeant, weapon squad leader, artillery F.O., mortar F.O., all within about the first five minutes of the battle. And it was a very intense fire back and forth there for about 20, 30 minutes initially. And the mortar F.O. guy had come around to my flank, and he got hit and killed out here in the head. And he had a radio. He had dropped the handset to the radio, and he was trying to get artillery in. And I tried to reach over the log to get it, but when I did that, all kinds of fire started hitting the log. The E.M.V.A. was firing at me, and I had to reach under the log. I reached under the log and pulled the handset and started to adjust the artillery. And I adjusted the artillery around us, and all fires going on at this time back and forth, very intense. It was so loud you could hardly think clearly. When you get in an intense battle like that, your training takes over. Your adrenaline gets high. Your fear is basically gone. My experience in Vietnam was you're afraid right before it happens. But once it starts, your adrenaline takes over, and you're more like you're not really there. You're outside looking at what you're doing, and your training takes over, and you do what you're trained to do. You are about to embark upon the great crusade to meet this mounting aggression. And make no mistake about it, good will prevail. I was born in Alabama, raised there as well. And had there been a history of military service in your family? Yes, I had three brothers who served in the Marine Corps, Air Force, and Army. You guys covered the branches pretty well. Got them all, yeah. When did you join the service, and why did you choose the Army? I joined in 1962. I was originally going to go into the Air Force, but the guys that I was going with couldn't pass the test. So we all went in the Army together. Nice. Where did you do your training? I did my basic training in Fort Raleigh, Kansas. And at what point did you have the opportunity to serve in this emerging Air Cavalry Division? I served in Korea in 62, 63. And when I came out of Korea, I came to Fort Benning and joined the Level II Air Assault Test. That's where they were testing the air assault concept for the Army. Explain the concept. The concept was instead of riding around on wheels or track vehicles or jumping out of the air and walking, we went from point A to point B on helicopters. So it transports you very quickly, and you get up and move out quickly, and you weren't more out for walking. However, we did walk quite a bit. People thought we flew airborne, but we did do quite a bit of walking. How did you train for that before you were in combat? When you're here in the States testing this concept, what does that look like? Well, your basic infantry training on the ground is the same. You're trained as your squad and platoon, company-level type of operation, battalion-level type of operation. The concept with the air cal was that you move everybody by helicopter. And in our tests, we tested against the 82nd Airborne and the Fort Bragg. And, of course, once they jumped out of the plane, they had to walk. And we could move from point A to point B with the snap of your finger. So we were always short where we weren't supposed to be. So we gave them a pretty hard time in the tests. So were you trying to perfect how quickly you could unload and load and take off and land and that sort of thing? Yeah, you could go into places where wheeled vehicles couldn't go. And later on in Vietnam, this paid off because you could fly over the jungle and drop down where the enemy was hiding. And it would be very difficult to determine where you were coming from or when you were coming. And that's the way it worked as well in the tests. What kind of helicopters were you using and how many guys could fit on there? We were using a UH-1 helicopter. You could pretty well fit a squad on there with equipment. And that depended also on the weather. If it was really hot, that helicopter couldn't pick up as much weight as it could if it was cooler. But you could normally put a nine-man squad on there with equipment. When did you first deploy to Vietnam? We deployed to Vietnam in August of 1965. We went over by ship. We landed at Quang Nam Bay in Vietnam. That's where most of the ship stuff were coming in at the time. And then we went from there to An Khe, which was our base camp. This video is sponsored by 4Patriots.com. 4Patriots has made it their mission to ensure that we are all prepared for any situation or environment. No matter what situation you find yourself in, you can trust that 4Patriots will have your back. ABC has this crazy team member that likes to go out in the mountains and run for days and days and days. So in his base camp, he wants some quick and easy electricity. He regularly uses the Patriot Power Generator 2000X when he's out in the mountains and in other obscure locations. That power pack uses the endless free power of the sun to power your lights, your TV, medical equipment, or even your fridge. Plus, it's expandable and comes with a free solar panel. We had the folks at 4Patriots set up a special page for you at 4Patriots.com forward slash ABC so you can see any deals or any specials that they're running at this time. Go to 4Patriots.com forward slash ABC to support this video. So the fighting that we're going to be talking about at X-Ray is November of 1965, but give us a little bit of the background that led up to this mission. What was happening that your commanders felt that you needed to respond there? Well, Plamey Special Forces Camp was under siege by the North Vietnamese Army. It was basically a siege. They didn't really want to take the outpost, but they wanted to ambush the reinforcements coming in and basically what happened on there, there was a MEC Army unit. It had American advisors with it who knew basically what the ploy was that they were pulling, and so they were ready for artillery and air support, and when they sprung the ambush, they pretty well wiped out the NVA ambushing units, and we knew about that. Before we went into X-Ray itself, we were in security of the brigade headquarters for a couple of days, and then we moved from there to Plamey Camp where we stayed to go into LZ X-Ray. So we'd been out about a week of patrol training before we went into X-Ray. So explain the plan. The plan basically, from what I understood from the operation orders, was we knew that the NVA was somewhere out there. They didn't know exactly where they were. We knew they were withdrawing from their attack on Plamey. We found out later, though, there were a lot of new units that came in we weren't aware of, so we were more or less like a search-destroy type operation. We were going into the area they thought they were located at. The NVA was located there, but we wasn't sure exactly what was going on for us. That was a concern. Tell us a little bit about your leader, Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore. He was a great leader, tactically and technically proficient, and a very good personality. He would get right down in the trenches with you and talk on your level, and his leadership was superb. He invented a lot of things that improved the training for us and the leadership training specifically. He had one program to call for drop out, you're dead, basically. He could walk up to a leader and kill him, say you're dead, and then there had to be somebody prepared to jump in that position because once you're dead, of course, you can't say anything. We were always trained from the lowest level up, at least one or two levels up, that we could take over if we had to. Okay, so let's get to that day now. This is mid-November of 1965. Explain what happened as you landed and began there. Well, first of all, when we came from Security for Brigade, we flew into Playme Camp, which had been under siege. We flew in there on Chinook helicopters, and when we got off the helicopters, there was a big pile of trash, which we thought was trash, and when we walked past it, we realized it was more Vietnamese Army soldiers who had been pushed up out of the wire and around the camp and been piled up in position to have a mass burial. So that itself alerted you, hey, things are a little different than what you're used to because the only thing we had come in contact with before was the guerrillas in the black pajama suits. These guys were different. They were professionals. When we flew out of there on our Huey helicopters, I can remember as we approached the LZ, I could see the smoke coming off of it because the Hueys, when we first fly out like that, we fly at a higher level. They were 5,000 feet in the air, and you could see a long ways. But when you start approaching the LZ, you drop down to what was called treetop level, and basically they're at the treetops. You're doing 160 knots at the treetops. In training, you know, every once in a while, the branches would hit the bottom of the skids of the helicopter, and it would scare the hell out of you. But going into the LZ, you know, we weren't too concerned about the limbs because we could see what was going on before the smoke off the LZ on the prep fire. Then when we landed, nothing happened. When we were in the machine guns, the door gunners were firing off the sides of the LZ, which that was SOP to do that. And we jumped out of the helicopter and ran out to the edges of the LZ like you should to secure it. The helicopters took off, and then it was dead silence, not anything. Nobody fired around, nothing, really quiet. So nothing was going on at that time for about 10 to 15 minutes. I know we were sitting there just waiting, and two of our platoons had been sent off towards the mountain. We were only one company on the ground at the time, Bravo Company, John Heron's company, and my platoon was still sort of held back. And the two platoons that went out made contact with NVA soldiers coming off of Chupong Mountain. Captain Heron sent my platoon up to hook up to the right side of the first platoon. So Lieutenant Herod got us up, and we took off to cover the right flank of the first platoon. And by the time we approached the first platoon, Lieutenant Herod turned the platoon and chased off what I found out later was NVA soldiers. I was a trail squad, so I didn't really know what was going on up front. I knew that we were going where we shouldn't be going. We were going away from the company itself. And so we went up 500, 600 yards up there, and as we come up on the little knoll, we run head-on into a unit coming down the valley. It was probably an NVA battalion. We weren't sure. We didn't know what it was. The first two squads went down and took them under fire, and I was the trail squad, and me and the machine guns flanked. I went out front and flanked the enemy. We actually flanked the enemy and fired on them before they fired on us. And then I looked, and I seen like two platoons of NVA flanking, trying to flank us to the right. They wasn't firing. They were just moving quickly to the right, trying to get into our flank. And about that time, the machine guns, we had two machine guns who had set up off to my right flank. They started firing, and we fired, and my squad maneuvered back to where the platoon was at and just got married up with the platoon when the main part of the force hit us and started firing. And we ended up losing the platoon leader, platoon sergeant, weapon squad leader, artillery F.O., mortar F.O., all within about the first five minutes of the battle. And it was a very intense fire back and forth there for about 20 or 30 minutes initially. And the mortar F.O. guy had come around to my flank, and he got hit and killed, got hit in the head. He had a radio. He had dropped the handset for the radio, and he was trying to get artillery in. And I tried to reach over the log to get it, but when I did that, all kinds of fire started hitting the log. The NVA was firing at me, and I had to reach under the log. I reached under the log and pulled the handset and started to adjust the artillery. And I adjusted the artillery around us, and all fires going on at this time, back and forth, very intense. It was so loud, you could hardly think clearly. There's so much ammunition being fired now. And I finally tried to get the artillery adjusted in, and when I was given to do a gun target line, not a gun target line, an observer target line, they couldn't adjust that. But I could hear the artillery firing in the distance, so I went to a gun target line, which means I know where you're firing from, and I know where you're firing to, and my adjustments will be from that. And so I made the adjustments based on the gun target line and quickly got the artillery around us, and I called in very close around where we were at. It was so close one time that when they fired for effect, a couple rounds fell on the opposite side of where they were firing at. But the main thing was the artillery saved us there, and we kept the artillery going all afternoon. And I set up target reference points all around the perimeter, and they logged those at the artillery site. So later on when I had to call for artillery, I would just call for that target reference point, and I could get a fire for effect, that's all the guns firing at one time on that point. So we fought most of that afternoon, and then started backing off a little bit around 5 o'clock in the afternoon. We were still getting people firing back and forth, but the most intense part took place for probably 35 to 40 minutes. Then we had killed a whole lot of them, and they had also killed a whole lot of us. But they took my artillery that afternoon because the LZ was under attack. But the whole time I never remember hearing the artillery firing on the LZ or the small arms fire from the LZ, I guess because the artillery was so close that it hurt my ears. I know I can hardly hear now anyway. But I think just before they drowned it out, everything I was hearing was right around me. But during the night, they'd run into us a couple times during the night, either deliberately or by accident, there was a short firefight, and they would back off because I would have called the artillery on them. And then I know that a major unit was cruising down the bottom about 3 o'clock in the morning, and they stopped right at one of my reference points, one of the target reference points, and I called a fire for effect on that, and I think they fired 12 guns on that. They fired a lot of artillery. So they killed a lot of the folks that was coming down that bottom. And they had tried to reach us a couple times the afternoon, the day before, but they weren't able to get anywhere near us. I never seen them, never heard them. But they lost a few people trying to get to us. I do remember that. And then the next morning they called and said they were coming in. I think a battalion of the 1st and 5th Cav had came in and some of the 2nd and 7th Cav had came in, and then they left the LZ and came up and got us. They got us about 11 o'clock the next morning, about 11 o'clock. We had lost eight KIAs out of the platoon. There was a platoon of 27 people there. Of the 27 people, one was a company medic, one was an artillery forward reserver, one was a mortar forward reserver. So three of them didn't even belong to the platoon. So we had a fighting force of only 24 people, basically what we were doing. Well, everybody was fighting, but only 24 people actually belonged to the platoon. But they got us about 11 o'clock, and it took just about the whole company to move all of the wounded and dead back to the LZ. How did you go over what had happened? How did you dissect it and learn from it and figure out what to do the next time you're in that situation? I don't think there's a whole lot of dissecting to do to it, you know, and figure out what you're going to do next time you realize, you know, that the training we had had paid off greatly and that we were still alive. Most of us were still alive. But then we had all those people who were not killed who DROs. That means they were getting discharged from the Army. A lot of those people killed there were supposed to be discharged from the Army in about two weeks because they were draftees, two-year guys, and we'd been training with them 18 months or so. So most of them were ready to rotate out, would have rotated out if we came back from that mission without hitting LZX, right? Most of those guys that were killed would have went home. But then the ones that weren't killed or wounded, the majority of those did rotate out. Once we get back to base camp, we had nobody left in the platoon and very few people left in the company. So we had to have not they all were killed or anything like that or wounded, but they were discharged from the Army. So we had to take a group of new people in, integrate it in, and train them. But we used our experience in training and our experience of what we had went through and how we trained those people. And so we did have a few of the good NCOs left. We had a lot of them that were killed. In my platoon, two of the major ones were the platoon sergeant and the weapon squad leader, and the rest of them were wounded. So I was one of the NCOs left that went over originally. We didn't have that many. So we had to help integrate the new NCOs in and new ones we were getting as well as train the new people. How soon were you back in action? We trained those guys probably a month or so off and on, but we were still out there playing with the VC. We called them trainers, training OP-4, because they couldn't shoot as well as the regular guys. But in January, we went to Bong Sun, which was along the coast, mostly rice paddies. We run into NPA down there also. We were in Bong Sun for 45 days straight. And just about every day, we were in contact, making contact with the enemy. Sometimes we'd fight them four or five hours, and it would get dark and they would take off, and we would jump on the helicopters and catch them, 10 to 15 minutes. I remember saying, damn, let them go for a while. But yeah, we were 45 days there, and we lost quite a few people there as well. And I found out one thing from that. The old vets we had left, we probably didn't lose any more of those guys. So experience makes a difference in combat. If you experience combat, your chances of survival are much greater. And if you're with a well-trained unit, your chances of survival are much greater when everybody knows what they're doing. But if you've got new guys and something happens, they don't know exactly what to do, they hesitate or they do the wrong thing, and that causes them to get killed or get hit. And that proves itself very well in Bong Sun. So the story of Landing Zone X-ray and Aya Drang is an incredibly powerful story, but it really became well-known thanks to the book that Colonel Moore, and eventually General Moore, wrote with Joe Galloway. So what's it like to have what you lived become a very well-read story and then turn into a movie, and so your story becomes a story that a lot of people know? Well, when the book first came out, I read the whole book. The book itself includes Atlanta's own Albany as well. LZX was just one part of that battle. And the book is probably 90%, 95% true. Of course, they interviewed everybody that was in the fights, so the information they wrote the book on is based on actual memories of the guys that fought it. Now, the movie itself is probably 70% accurate as far as historical is concerned, and the rest of it is 30% Hollywood. There's a lot of things they showed in Hollywood. And the other thing on the movie is they take a three-day fight, and they try to put it into two hours. When you do that, everybody's fighting all the time. Yeah, to have a historical account of what happened, and you're very proud of the people who were there with you, and that includes Joe Galloway and General Moore for actually doing the book itself because I think it's one of the most accurate books done at the time. And the movie itself was as well because a lot of the movies were strictly based on what Hollywood thought was going on in Vietnam, and this movie was based on an actual book telling what went on. And, of course, they took a Hollywood license to change it the way they thought they should, so they'd sell more tickets, I imagine. So as you look back at your career, what are you most proud of both in that operation and throughout your 20 years in the service? Well, I'm proud of that outfit, you know, and anybody who served with it will tell you that. And the first several that stayed together, General Moore's battalion, as far as reunions, better than, I think, any other battalion. We had close to 200 people show up at our last reunion we had in Georgia. I was very proud to serve in that unit. I was very proud to have done a career in the Army. I wouldn't have changed anything that I've done.