Two weeks after arriving “in country” I flew on my first air mission, a low level air drop over a special forces camp.  Afterwards, C-123 landed at Pleiku in the Central Highlands about 225 miles inland from our base on the coast. Pleiku’s only Air Force Flight Surgeon was John Flood who had graduated from the University of Washington two years ahead of me. What I remember most about him from school were his stories about his father who was an engineer for the Great Northern Railroad. John rode with him frequently and knew every stop between Minneapolis and Seattle. It was good to see a familiar face.

We were ready to depart for our home base when word came that our plane was being diverted into Plei Me, a small Special Forces camp about 40 kilometers to the southwest. It had come under attack by the Communist North Vietnamese Army. The camp was manned by four hundred Montagnard irregulars along with two dozen American and Vietnamese Special Forces advisors. They were in desperate need of munitions, medical supplies and rations but resupply would be dangerous. We were told that North Vietnamese gunners high in the surrounding hills were positioned to actually shoot down at our planes as they approached the drop zone. The pilots joked they could not decide whether to wear their flack jackets or sit on them as they usually did. 

When the resupply flight was delayed until daylight, I spent a restless night trying to sleep on a stretcher in the terminal. In the morning the Captain said the mission was too risky. He did not want to take responsibility for the loss of the squadron’s Flight Surgeon, so he arranged for me to take another plane back to Nha Trang. Torn between a sense of duty and common sense, I did not object. During that first day of the week long resupply missions at Plei Me, four of the participating C-123’s,  including the one I had been on, took multiple hits from ground fire.

In mid-November, barely a month after my arrival, the battle for the Ia Drang Valley took place in the central highlands. As depicted in the movie, “We Were Soldiers” starring Mel Gibson, it was the first conventional engagement of the war between American troops and North Vietnamese units. While we won the day, it came at great cost. Nearly 250 of our soldiers were killed and many more wounded. Thinking I might help, I was standing by at the Army 8th field hospital in Nah Trang when the first wave of casualties arrived by Air Evac. The Army medical team was well organized and while my services weren’t needed I observed dozens of shell-shocked soldiers on stretchers still wearing their blood-stained field uniforms. Some lay silent from narcotic sedation. Most stared blankly into space contemplating the Hell they had just escaped. No doubt a few went on to die. For others their wounds were a ticket home where they faced lingering disability, Post Traumatic Stress and insults from anti-war activists. The North Vietnamese lost many more men than we did in the battle but now we knew they were prepared to stand and fight. The enemy had learned that if they fought close enough to grab the Americans by the belt our air power was ineffective.