Men next to me fell over with a bullet in the head. And the machine gun fire and the rifle fire and the rocket grenades of the enemy that pass through that company are landing on us. And all of a sudden, this thunderous attack erupts, and we're right behind the company that's being hit. The second morning, the enemy launched a major attack on the southeast side of this little football-sized clearing. TERRY GROSS: Joe Galloway, I'm going to ask you to describe what it was like to be on the ground in the middle of a battle in which there was rocket fire, bombs, cannons, ground artillery. A note, please be aware - in about six minutes, there is a graphic depiction of a soldier injured in battle. The battle ended with 230 Americans dead, 240 wounded and 3,000 North Vietnamese dead. They never expected to be surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. General Moore led 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry into the Ia Drang Valley. We're going to listen to part of our interview with Joe Galloway from 1992 about their book. He was critical of the runup to the Iraq War, which brought him to the notice of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. News and World Report and for Knight Ridder newspapers. And Young: Ia Drang - The Battle That Changed The War In Vietnam.' He wrote it with the man who led that campaign, Lieutenant General Harold Moore. He collaborated on the bestselling book about that battle called 'We Were Soldiers Once. We're going to listen back to excerpts of two interviews with him.Īs a 24-year-old UPI correspondent, Galloway was at the first major battle of the Vietnam War. Former war correspondent Joe Galloway, the only civilian awarded a Medal of Valor by the Army for combat action in the Vietnam War, died last week at the age of 79.

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