WASHINGTON -- A quarter century after American GIs fought their first major battle in Vietnam is an appropriate time to consider the wages of war.
Hawks who demand that the United States strike Iraq should review the lessons of the blood bath in the Ia Drang Valley, which turned the fighting in Indochina irrevocably into America's war.
To some, the costly battlefield victory confirmed the effectiveness of American search-and-destroy tactics. It convinced policymakers that U.S. forces could win the Vietnam War.
Others came to see the fighting in a remote valley of the Central Highlands as a classic demonstration of the limits of U.S. military power.
Senior Editor Joseph Galloway has written a splendid 14-page cover story in the current issue of U.S. News & World Report on the battle he covered November 14-20, 1965, as a young correspondent for United Press international.
More than 2,000 Vietnamese and 234 soldiers of the 1st Air Cavalry Division were killed before the 325-B Division of the People's Army of Vietnam retreated to Cambodia.
To some, those body counts added up to an American victory, but it was one that Galloway noted 'degenerated into a decade of bloody frustration that sent 58,000 Americans home in shiny aluminum Army-issue caskets, ruined one president, deeply scarred another and turned the nation against itself.'
A month after the battle, few Americans were thinking about the escalating fighting half way around the world, but poetAllen Ginsberg did muster 10,000 anti-war marchers at Berkeley.
The late Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., said the sight was 'enough to make any person loyal to this country weep.'
Galloway and retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Harold G. 'Hal' Moore, a hero of the Ia Drang battle, recently met in Hanoi with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, 80, the brilliant strategist who led North Vietnam's peasant army against a superpower's helicopter assault forces.
'Even advanced weapons have weaknesses,' Giap told his visitors. 'We had our choice of weaknesses. You staged bombing raids in advance of your landings. During that time our soldiers were in their tunnels and bunkers and took very few casualties.
'When your armed helicopters came in we were still in our shelters,' Giap explained. 'Only when the helicopters brought your troops did we emerge, and only then did we start shooting. You Americans were very strong in modern weapons, but we were strong in something else. Our war was people's war, waged by the entire people. Our battlefield was everywhere, or nowhere, and the choice was ours.'
Giap acknowledged his forces suffered shortages of food and water in the Ia Drang fighting.
'We had no helicopters,' he said. 'Our people had to forage in the jungle for food and drink water from the streams.'
During a 90-minute interview, Giap said, 'In Vietnam, your commanders never realized that there are limitations on power, limitations on strength.'
As President Bush weighs his options in the Persian Gulf, the commander-in-chief might well ponder an old jungle fighter's words of wisdom.
