Customer Reviews

Pleiku: The Dawn of Helicopter Warfare in Vietnam

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If you want to know where America's Air Assault tactics came from, how they developed in Vietnam and by implication how Army Aviation is in trouble today--begin with this book! Have your highlight pen ready when you examine the decisions and actions of the brave pioneers who created 3-D Air Assault capabilities in our Army at the behest of Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara (he could do good things once in a while!). If you read carefully you will see that to get the drastic Army structural changes needed, the capabilities of helicopters were oversold--to get large numbers of helicopters, the ground vehicle was dismissed as a tool with the helicopter doing EVERYTHING. General Kinnard and his wizards of the 11th Airborne Division [later reflagged the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)] went about having helicopters do everything---place troops around the battlefield, act as CAS gunships, fly-in artillery for fire bases--except stay in the "death ground" of enemy fire (re: Colonel Bolger's book: "Death Ground: America's Infantry in battle") as an armored shield and protected transportation means carrying superior levels of firepower. So while Air Assault operations could "run circles" around the enemy on the map board, once Sky Troopers left their mounts, they were vulnerable to enemy fire fighting the enemy "even" at best---as the more numerous enemy could absorb untold casualties without ill effect at home. Its interesting that the helicopter-replacing-everything hubris negated the understanding of the need to field a helicopter-transportable light Armored Fighting Vehicle (AFV) that could "Air-Mech" with Sky Troopers into battle and give them dominance from that point on in the operation. The M551 Sheridan light tank was available though 7 tons too heavy for the CH-47 Chinook; (I have seen photos of it lifted by the CH-54 Sky Crane heavy lift helicopter) why it wasn't airdropped from fixed-wing C-130 Hercules aircraft and used for 3-D maneuver fire support by the one parachute-qualified Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division is a mystery--the French Airborne parachuted all over the countryside in the first Indo-China war. Perhaps it was the urgency of getting a force that could maneuver deep into the Central Highlands of Vietnam before the enemy cut the South into two over-rode deeper analysis and force-on-force war games to reveal structural flaws and correct them. America was at war.

As you read this superb book which should be a companion to LTG Hal Moore/Joe Galloway's "We were Soldiers once and young" account of the Ia Drang battle fought by the 1st Cav, you get a sense that we miscalculated and were thinking "big blue arrows"--operationally impressed by helicopter distance/speed 3-D maneuver capability and overly reliant on distant artillery howitzer/aircraft supporting arms and overlooked the up close "belt buckle" fight that the enemy chose to fight whenever possible because it would curtail our long-range fires since he had the advantage in RPG explosives weapons effects (ready-to-fire, doesn't need to be unfolded like a M72 LAW) while we fought him "even"; our M16s versus his AKMs, our grenades versus his grenades, our bayonets versus his bayonets, our casualties versus his numbers.

Today, the "pendulum" has swung the other way with the helicopter Air Assault delivering foot-mobile troops implies casualty risks and some Commanders are willing to surrender 3-Dimensional maneuver to the enemy and fight "heavy" only along the 2-D axis, once again over-relying on distant supporting arms fires to defeat the enemy (but its digitized and "precision" this time!) though this means you will be channelized and ambushed in ground vehicle restricted terrain. That aircraft (Aviation branch) could work TOGETHER with tracked AFVs (Armor branch) to position the latter into "go" terrain to overcome the enemy was possible then and certainly do-able today with lighter AFVs like the 3-4 ton German Airborne Wiesel which can be lifted even by the Huey's replacement, the UH-60L Blackhawk.

The solution is to read this book and put yourself in the shoes of the decision makers like a good war simulation, draw on your history and combine Airborne and Air Assault capabilities using that magnificent air-droppable M113 that was rumbling all over the countryside (Coleman mentions go/no-go for tracked vehicle terrain considerations in his book), the new M551 Sheridan light tank, and combine the best attrributes of 3-D and 2-D maneuver into one. The lesson today is to field the M8 Armored Gun System successor to the M551 and modernize the latest M113A3, buy some Wiesels for recon and create an Air-Mech 3-D capability in the U.S. Army today before we fight in another place like Vietnam again. We cannot hope to chose where/when we can fight ("We don't do mountains and we don't do jungles"), living for a replay of the open desert to stampede our heavy armored caccoons ala' Desert Storm---we must be ready to go where America sends us. When South Vietnam was in danger of being severed by the NVA in 1965-66 we sent the best we had: the 1st Air Cavalry Division and they saved the day, though at a cost so high we could not sustain the support at home for the noble endeavor. At least Kinnard's men had some time to run tests and conduct experiments, we may not be so lucky. NOW is the time to get ready, this book would be a good place to start.

Coleman chronicles the history of the Ia Drang campaign from the viewpoints of many levels of the combatants - from brigade, battalion and company commanders to platoon and squad NCO's and skytroopers. Also insights from captured NVA documents and maps on their battle plans. I found his chapters covering the LZ XRay and LZ Albany actions gripping text.

The author makes history interesting. He covers probably the most significant transition in tactics undertaken by the U.S. Army in the 20th century--"freeing infrantry from the terrain". The First Cav tactics would later be emulated by most of the U.S. infantry units in Vietnam, and later by the ARVN, but no other units ever had anywhere near the rotary wing assets available as did the Cav. What the Cav initiated tactically in the Ia Drang Valley battles led to the evolution to their "pile on" tactics employed later in the war. Their massive airlift capability was the great equalizer in later battles with numerically- superior and well-armed NVA units--battles often (perhaps generally) initiated by Cav "Blue" Platoons of its 9th Cavalry Squadron. Readers interested in this book will find even greater detail, and a much more focused account of the battles at LZ Xray and LZ Albany in Harold Moore's and Joe Galloway's book: "We Were Soldiers Once--And Young". Other good reading is Mathew Brennan's "Brennan's War" (his personal account serving as a member of a Cav Blue Platoon in 1967-69), and his:"Headhunters" (also about Blue Platoons in the Cav), and "Hunter/Killer Teams" (about scout/cobra "Pink" teams). J.D. Coleman also wrote an excellent book about 1st Cav operations in 1969-70, including the invasion of the Cambodian "sanctuaries" in May of 1970, entitled "Incursion".

I came across this book back in 1989 when a friend asked me if my father was Sgt. Eugene Pennington who served in Vietnam. It turned out that he was reading this book and came across my father's name mentioned in it. I had been hearing my father talk of his experiences in Vietnam over the years and was amazed to find a book that so accurately informed the reader of the Vietnam experience. By reading this book, I became quite familiar with the tactics that my father had been trying to relate to me. I bought a copy of the book and gave it to him for Father's Day. To this day I still believe that it was the best gift I ever gave him. I would greatly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about helicopter warfare in the Vietnam era.

This is a good story, though a little bit too, too much like an after action report. Still, the fact that it was written by one who was there during the battles at LZ XRay and LZ Albany make it an especially good book to read. Also included are the accounts of how the helicopter air arm of the army came into being and why and why it proved so effective.
Simply said: get the book. It is a good read again and again and again. The movie, "We were soldiers" came from the actions described in his book.

Coleman's Pleiku: The Dawn of Helicopter War in Vietnam is an excellent prelude to Moore and Galloway's We Were Soldiers Once. Coleman deals with the more technical details of creating a fighting division from a concept to a reality in a matter of months, which was one of the great logisitical and management feats of the US Army in the 1960's as a new Army doctrine was invented in the midst of interservice rivalrys of competing needs to be able to fight a nuclear war in Europe to that of containing surrogate guerilla war instigated by the USSR. We Were Soldiers is the meat and potatoes of hard infantry fighting that tested the use of an airmobile infantry being able to move huge miles and shift an entire front of a battle; the essence of mobility to compete with terrorism of indiginous warfare that was composed of both "under cover combatants" and melded well led and trained fully equipped comabatants. Both books give credit to a skilled enemy fighting on their own land and show the logistical issues of both sides that led to new techniques and tactics being developed that are still in use fifty years later. Both books show the indomitable ingenuity of the US military to develop cohesive fighting capabilities across traditional interservie differences to overcome almost insurmountable logistics and potential rivalries in order to accomplish difficult combat missions. They also point of the difficulties of fighting an indiginous force who are fighting for their land as opposed to a political ideology. Both books reveal the courage of the soldier, Coleman's more to the top echelons, while We Were Soldiers bares the gut courage of small unit leaders and their outstanding soldier in the field. The books are complimentary to the understanding of early US warfare tactics and development of new doctrines in the Cold War.

Not a bad book - I guess I was just expecting something different. I bought this after reading "We Were Soldiers" and hoped it would read the same. If you're looking for a Vietnam book, or a book about the beginning of the air cav, I recomend getting "We Were Soldiers" instead.