Plei Me: The Siege, the Ambush, and the Road to Ia Drang*

Most people who know the early American ground war in Vietnam know the name Ia Drang. They know Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, Landing Zone X-Ray, the helicopters descending into elephant grass and the terrible ambush that followed days later at Albany. What is much easier to miss is why the 1st Cavalry Division was searching that remote corner of the Central Highlands in the first place. The road to Ia Drang did not begin at X-Ray on November 14, 1965. It began almost a month earlier at a small fortified camp called Plei Me.

Plei Me sat roughly forty kilometers southwest of Pleiku City and not far from the Cambodian border, surrounded by the rugged terrain of Vietnam's Central Highlands. Established in 1963, it was one of the camps associated with the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program, or CIDG, through which U.S. Army Special Forces worked with South Vietnamese Special Forces and locally recruited indigenous troops. In the Plei Me area those troops were predominantly Jarai, one of the peoples Americans and French commonly grouped together under the broad term Montagnard. The camp's location allowed patrols to watch the border country, gather intelligence and challenge Communist movement through a region where South Vietnamese government control was often weak.

Calling Plei Me simply an American Special Forces camp therefore hides most of the people who actually defended it. Its garrison included twelve American Special Forces advisers, fourteen South Vietnamese Special Forces soldiers and more than four hundred CIDG troops, largely Jarai Montagnards. Many of those men were outside the perimeter on patrols, ambushes or at listening posts when the attack began. The Green Berets provided training, communications, advice and access to American airpower, but the bulk of the fighting strength belonged to indigenous soldiers defending a remote position in their own country.

That distinction matters because Plei Me is sometimes remembered as the opening encounter between Americans and North Vietnamese regulars. In reality, Americans were still serving primarily as advisers at the camp. The large-scale clash between conventional U.S. Army units and the People's Army of Vietnam would come during the campaign that followed. Plei Me was the event that put those forces on a collision course.

The North Vietnamese plan was considerably more sophisticated than simply surrounding the camp and trying to overwhelm it. General Chu Huy Man's Western Highlands forces were preparing a broader offensive intended to break South Vietnamese positions across the Central Highlands. Plei Me was one of the Special Forces camps protecting the approaches to Pleiku, and Man correctly understood that South Vietnamese commanders would be reluctant to let it fall.

That made the camp useful as bait.

The 33d PAVN Regiment would surround and attack Plei Me, applying enough pressure to force the South Vietnamese II Corps command at Pleiku to send a relief column. The 32d Regiment would wait along Route 6C, the road the relief force would have to use, and destroy it in an ambush. Once the South Vietnamese reserve had been eliminated, the two regiments could combine against the weakened camp. Beyond Plei Me stood Pleiku itself and the possibility of a much larger blow against South Vietnamese control of the Highlands.

The trap depended upon the defenders at Plei Me becoming desperate enough that someone would come to save them.

On the evening of October 19, 1965, the first pieces began to move. At approximately 7:00 p.m., troops of the 33d Regiment opened fire on a Montagnard patrol near the camp. Around 10:00, a PAVN company overran a listening post southwest of the perimeter while mortars and recoilless rifles began striking Plei Me itself. After midnight, North Vietnamese infantry attacked from several directions. Men reached the wire, and some penetrated portions of the outer defenses before the defenders forced them back.

The American Special Forces commander was Captain Harold M. Moore, a name worth pausing over because Vietnam history has supplied us with an almost malicious coincidence. This was not Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. “Hal” Moore of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, who would become famous at Ia Drang several weeks later. Captain Harold M. Moore was the Green Beret commanding the American detachment at Plei Me when the siege began. Two different Harold Moores would therefore occupy important places in the same unfolding campaign.

Captain Moore called for air support as the defenders fought to hold the perimeter. By roughly 4:00 in the morning, American aircraft were attacking North Vietnamese positions around the camp. Those first strikes began an air operation that would grow far beyond anything previously attempted in support of an isolated position in Vietnam.

Inside Plei Me, survival depended upon more than simply keeping enemy infantry outside the wire. Men had been wounded, ammunition was being consumed rapidly and the camp would require food, medical supplies and replacement ammunition if the siege continued. Aircraft became its connection to the outside world. Army CV-2 Caribous, experimental CV-7 Buffalo transports and Air Force C-123s flew supplies toward a position surrounded by enemy troops. Weather and darkness sometimes made the job even more difficult. On the night of October 24, when clouds hid the camp from the aircraft overhead, the defenders fired a star-burst flare upward through the overcast so transport crews could use it as a reference and release their parachute loads. Most of the ammunition and food fell inside the compound.

Airpower was also being used with extraordinary violence outside the perimeter. By the end of the Plei Me fighting, American aircraft had flown 696 strike sorties in and around the camp, 585 of them by the U.S. Air Force. Fighters delivered roughly 866,000 pounds of general-purpose bombs, more than 250,000 pounds of fragmentation bombs and nearly 486,000 pounds of napalm, in addition to rockets, cluster munitions and cannon fire. For its time, Plei Me became the largest air-supported combat operation yet conducted during the war.

The scale sounds almost impossible when compared with the size of the camp. Several hundred men were holding a patch of ground while aircraft poured more than a million and a half pounds of ordnance into the jungle surrounding them. At times strikes were brought extremely close to the defensive wire because that was where the North Vietnamese were. The difference between airpower as an impressive statistic and airpower as something that kept men alive could be measured in yards.

The wounded created another problem. Captain Russell L. Hunter, an Army Medical Corps officer, learned that Plei Me faced a mass-casualty situation and volunteered to fly into the camp. Once there, he treated and sorted wounded men while the position remained under fire, exposing himself repeatedly to retrieve casualties and provide medical care. Hunter would later receive the Distinguished Service Cross for what he did during the siege. His presence is a reminder that Plei Me was being held not only by men firing outward from the perimeter but by men trying desperately to keep the wounded alive inside it.

Everyone understood, however, that airstrikes alone could not resolve the situation. The garrison needed reinforcement, and that was precisely what the North Vietnamese plan had been designed to provoke.

Rather than immediately drive a large relief column down Route 6C and into the expected ambush, American and South Vietnamese commanders first chose to put a smaller force near the camp by helicopter. One hundred seventy-five men, most of them South Vietnamese Rangers, were selected for the mission. Leading them was Major Charles A. Beckwith, then a Special Forces officer known for his experience in long-range reconnaissance. Years later Beckwith would become famous as the founder and first commander of the Army's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, better known simply as Delta Force. In October 1965, however, his immediate problem was considerably simpler to describe and much harder to accomplish: get 175 men through enemy-held country and into Plei Me.

The force landed approximately five kilometers northeast of the camp on the morning of October 21 and began moving overland. By nightfall they were close, but Beckwith resisted the temptation to make the final approach in darkness because the defenders might mistake the approaching Rangers for North Vietnamese troops. Shortly after sunrise on October 22, Beckwith ordered his men to make the final dash to the perimeter. They surprised the enemy and reached the camp. As the senior American officer now present, Beckwith assumed command.

Getting into Plei Me proved easier than getting back out. Beckwith was soon ordered to send troops outside the perimeter to push the enemy away from the camp. Two South Vietnamese companies and their American advisers moved out and ran into well-prepared North Vietnamese positions. Fourteen members of the force were killed, including an American adviser, and Beckwith pulled the survivors back inside the defensive line. He later remembered realizing that simply surviving the camp might become an achievement in itself.

Meanwhile, an even larger drama was developing on the road from Pleiku. South Vietnamese commander Lieutenant General Vinh Loc faced exactly the dilemma the North Vietnamese had designed for him. If he kept his reserve at Pleiku, Plei Me might fall. If he sent that reserve south, Pleiku would become more vulnerable and the relief force might be marching directly into a trap. American commanders had reached the same conclusion: the assault on Plei Me might be intended specifically to draw forces away from the provincial capital.

The compromise brought the newly arrived 1st Cavalry Division into the fight. Major General Stanley Larsen promised American support for the defense of Pleiku if Vinh Loc committed his reserve to the relief of Plei Me. Major General Harry Kinnard's 1st Cavalry Division then began moving troops and artillery from its recently established base at An Khe toward Pleiku. Task Force Ingram, built around the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry and artillery, arrived first. Soon much of the division's 1st Brigade followed.

The American cavalry was not yet being sent to storm Plei Me. Its immediate jobs were to protect Pleiku, provide artillery support and stand ready if additional forces were needed. The ground relief remained fundamentally a South Vietnamese operation.

Vinh Loc eventually committed an armored task force of roughly 1,400 men under Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Trong Luat. Tanks and armored personnel carriers moved south along Route 6C with infantry and supply vehicles. Everyone knew the road might contain an ambush. They simply did not know exactly where it would begin.

At about 5:30 on the afternoon of October 23, the 32d PAVN Regiment sprang the trap.

North Vietnamese small arms, mortars and recoilless rifles struck the column at multiple points. Tanks and armored personnel carriers moved off the road and opened fire while the more vulnerable rear elements, including trucks carrying ammunition and fuel, suffered badly. Vehicles burned as South Vietnamese troops attempted to establish defensive positions. American artillery from the 1st Cavalry Division began hammering the ambush force, followed by F-100 fighter-bombers, helicopter gunships and additional air support.

This was the moment the North Vietnamese plan was supposed to work. The relief column was inside the killing zone. If the 32d Regiment could destroy it, Plei Me would remain isolated and the 33d could renew its attack with reinforcement.

Instead, American firepower and South Vietnamese resistance broke the ambush.

The fighting continued for roughly two hours before the main North Vietnamese attack pulled back. Other elements of the column suffered additional attacks, but the survivors established defensive positions and held through the night. By morning it was clear that the 32d Regiment had failed to destroy the relief force and had suffered heavy casualties of its own. Rather than remain exposed to continuing artillery and air strikes, the regiment began withdrawing west toward its base areas nearer the Cambodian border.

The relief column did not immediately race onward to Plei Me. Lieutenant Colonel Luat was concerned about another ambush and wanted his troops resupplied before continuing. Only after receiving assurances of continued American artillery support did the column resume its advance on October 25. By dusk, the South Vietnamese force reached Plei Me and reinforced the perimeter.

The siege was effectively over.

For the defenders who had spent nearly a week inside Plei Me, that was enough. The camp still stood. The Jarai CIDG soldiers, South Vietnamese Special Forces, Green Berets and Rangers had survived. The North Vietnamese had failed to destroy the relief column and had been forced to abandon their immediate attempt against the camp.

But Plei Me was not the end of anything.

It was the beginning.

American commanders now faced a possibility that had been remarkably rare during the war to that point. A substantial regular North Vietnamese force had been identified, had fought a major battle and was retreating toward the Cambodian border. Instead of allowing those regiments to disappear back into remote base areas, the newly arrived 1st Cavalry Division was ordered to go after them.

That decision transformed the siege of Plei Me into something much larger.

Helicopters gave the 1st Cavalry Division an ability that conventional infantry formations had never possessed. Roads were no longer the only practical way to move large bodies of troops through the Highlands. Infantry could leap across jungle, rivers and mountains, landing in clearings behind or beside retreating enemy formations. Scout helicopters could search terrain from above while gunships, artillery and tactical aircraft attacked targets they discovered. The division had come to Vietnam specifically to test whether airmobility could change the way American ground forces fought.

The retreat from Plei Me gave it the opportunity.

Beginning in late October, cavalry units pushed westward, searching for the 32d and 33d Regiments as they withdrew toward the border. The fighting became a running series of clashes scattered across the Central Highlands rather than one continuous battle. On November 1, cavalry troops struck a North Vietnamese field hospital and base area. Other encounters followed as helicopters deposited American troops in places enemy commanders had not expected them to appear.

The North Vietnamese were reorganizing too. The 66th Regiment had reached the region, giving the Western Highlands command additional strength. The battered units from Plei Me were moving toward the Chu Pong Massif and the Ia Drang Valley near Cambodia, where they could regroup and prepare for further operations.

By November 12, American intelligence and cavalry reconnaissance were increasingly focusing on that area. Brigadier General Richard Knowles directed the 3d Brigade to search west of Plei Me toward the Ia Drang Valley. Colonel Thomas Brown then assigned Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. Moore and the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry to search near Chu Pong.

This was the other Harold Moore.

On the morning of November 14, Moore stood at Plei Me preparing his battalion for an air assault. Major Bruce Crandall's Hueys waited to carry the soldiers west. Their destination was a small clearing near the base of the Chu Pong Massif.

It was designated Landing Zone X-Ray.

Ghosts of the Battlefield tells what happened next in X-Ray to Albany: The Five Days That Rewrote the Vietnam War. The battle that followed would become one of the defining stories of America's entry into full-scale ground combat in Vietnam, but X-Ray cannot really be understood if the story begins when the first Huey touched down.

The men at X-Ray were there because Plei Me had held.

That is what makes the siege important beyond its seven days.

Plei Me showed the emerging character of the war in the Central Highlands before most Americans knew what that war was going to become. A small Special Forces team worked beside hundreds of indigenous soldiers at an isolated camp. South Vietnamese Rangers and armored troops fought the ground battle to relieve them. American aircraft delivered supplies and brought enormous firepower against enemy positions. Helicopters moved reinforcements across country that made ordinary movement painfully slow. The North Vietnamese demonstrated that they were no longer merely infiltrating small guerrilla formations into South Vietnam; regular regiments were capable of planning and executing complex operations involving siege, deception and ambush.

And then the Americans did something the North Vietnamese had not fully anticipated.

They followed them.

That pursuit carried the 1st Cavalry Division from Plei Me toward the Cambodian border and into the Ia Drang Valley. There, both armies would learn lessons they believed proved they could win the war. American commanders saw the extraordinary possibilities of helicopters, artillery and airpower. North Vietnamese commanders saw that getting close enough to American troops could reduce some of those technological advantages.

Those lessons would shape the next decade.

But before X-Ray and Albany, before Hal Moore and Bruce Crandall became famous names, before Ia Drang entered the history books, several hundred men were trying to survive inside a triangular camp in the Central Highlands.

Most of them were not Americans.

They were Jarai Montagnards serving in the CIDG program, South Vietnamese Special Forces and Rangers, and the families and communities whose lives had become entangled with a war moving steadily into their homeland. Beside them stood a small number of American Green Berets who could call aircraft, coordinate support and advise the defenders but could not hold the camp by themselves.

When Plei Me survived, the North Vietnamese trap failed.

When the relief column survived, the campaign changed direction.

And when the 1st Cavalry went after the retreating enemy, the road led directly to a clearing beneath the Chu Pong Massif.

Ia Drang did not begin at X-Ray.

It began at Plei M