The 506 Valley

By: Thomas K. Holland

THE 506 VALLEY

17 December 1966

An account by Thomas K. Holland

First Lieutenant, D Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry

1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), Republic of Vietnam, February 1966 – February 1967

Paris, France

This account is drawn from correspondence I exchanged between 2018 and 2021 with Jerry Berggren, formerly a crew chief and door gunner in the Lift Section of C Troop, 1/9 Cavalry, and — through him — with Wayne George, the crew chief of the aircraft that came into our landing zone on the night of 17 December 1966.

It is also drawn from an official U.S. Army document deposited in the National Archives entitled “Battle in the 506 Valley, 17 December 1966.” It runs to 184 pages: a narrative history of the action, followed by verbatim transcripts of recorded interviews.

Its stated purpose was to establish what had happened and to learn from the mistakes so that they would not be repeated. It was classified CONFIDENTIAL and has since been declassified under authority NND 927648. It is the official record of that day and that night.

False and misleading statements were made in that document as well as material omissions. It is my intention in the following account to set the record straight.

I have carried this for sixty years. I am setting it down while I still can.

The record, and how it was read

In the weeks after the battle, under the Army’s Lessons Learned program, Captain Charles Sykes, historian of the 1st Cavalry Division, interviewed the unit commanders who had been directly engaged in this battle on the ground, providing the eye-witness accounts necessary for the drafting of the document.

I first saw it in 2021, through a link Jerry Berggren and I were exchanging. The narrative chapters and most of the interviews had photocopied legibly. The final transcript — the session covering the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry, which is to say my own platoon and my own landing zone — had not. It is a photocopy of a mimeographed carbon and it is by a wide margin the faintest thing in the file. I could make out a word here and a line there. I could for example see my own name in places but could not read what followed.

So I drew conclusions from fragments that I was able to decipher and a number of them were wrong. Those errors are listed at the end of this account.

In September 2026 those pages were read properly for the first time, with the assistance of Claude, an artificial intelligence system made by Anthropic, which enhanced and transcribed the page images and read them back to me line by line. I am eighty-two years old and living in Paris, and there was no other way I was going to get at what was written on those pages.

That reading is the reason this account exists in the form it does. It found missing pages bound out of place inside another officer’s interview. It found the answers recorded under my name. It found a number of things that enabled me to compile this account.

None of it changes what I saw on the ground on 17 December 1966. I have carried that since the night it happened. What the reading changed is that I now know what the Army wrote down about it — and that under my name it wrote down testimony I never gave.

I. D Troop and the Fast Reaction Force

D Troop was the ground reconnaissance troop of the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry. We had three platoons. Each was built around nine vehicles: four scout jeeps mounting machine guns, two jeeps mounting 106mm recoilless rifles, a three-quarter-ton truck carrying a mortar squad, a second three-quarter-ton truck carrying an infantry squad, and the platoon leader’s jeep. Thirty-six men, give or take. Almost all of us were ex-tankers, and all of us were qualified machine gunners. Man for man, a single one of our platoons carried more firepower than an entire infantry company.

I arrived in Vietnam in February 1966 and was given the 2nd Platoon, Delta White. In May, at the close of Operation Davy Crockett, I took over the 1st Platoon, Delta Red, after its platoon leader was killed, and I led Delta Red until September, when I became Troop Executive Officer. In early December, after one of our platoon leaders was wounded, I was given Delta White again. That is the platoon I was leading on 17 December 1966, and its radio call sign was Lancer White.

By September 1966 we were operating permanently out of LZ Hammond, near the Phu Cat airbase just off Highway 1. The rifle platoons of A, B and C Troops — the Blues — were taking heavy casualties, and the Squadron Commander began deploying D Troop’s platoons dismounted, in the same role, to spread the load. Mounted meant in our own vehicles, which is what the troop was built, equipped and trained for. Dismounted meant on foot — without the jeeps, without the trucks, and without the heavy weapons they carried — in the role of a rifle platoon. From September on, on any given day one of our platoons ran convoy escort on Highway 1 mounted, a second worked dismounted like a Blue platoon, and the third sat on strip alert at LZ Hammond as the Division Fast Reaction Force, again dismounted. When any Blue platoon made contact, the platoon on strip alert was lifted in to reinforce.

It is worth saying plainly what that meant. A thirty-five man platoon is not considered a command. Platoons are “led by” lieutenants; companies are “commanded by” captains. A division commander will not let a company be overrun without making every effort to reinforce. The same obligation was not felt for a platoon. By December 1966 several of our Blue platoons had suffered heavy casualties without the Division Commander making an attempt to reinforce — the massacre of the A Troop Blues down to the last man on 30 March 1966 at the Chu Pong massif being the most infamous and well known example. Reconnaissance platoons were expendable, and we understood that.

I should be straight about the limits of that. Nothing in doctrine says in so many words that a division commander must reinforce a company and need not reinforce a platoon. I have looked for it and it is not written down. In practice however a company destroyed was a command lost, with a commander answerable for it all the way up the chain, while a platoon destroyed was simply a casualty figure in the evening report.

II. 17 December 1966 — the 506 Valley

On the morning of 17 December my platoon was the Fast Reaction Force, standing by on the airstrip at LZ Hammond. Around midday we were notified that the A Troop Blues had made contact in the 506 Valley near LZ Pony.

We knew that ground. LZ Pony had originally been LZ Hotel. The only vehicle access was a dirt track running off Highway 1 a few kilometers north of Phu Cat and winding up through the valley, passable by four-wheel drive in the dry season and slow going even then. On a previous move up there in May the NVA had come in behind us laying mines; we lost a scout jeep and its two crewmen, one of whom was my Scout Section Leader, Sergeant Phillip Maddox.

LZ Pony had one battery of six 105s and one battery of six 155’s, LZ Bird about 2 kilometers distant had an identical number of guns, and both could only be resupplied by Chinook. In the autumn the engineers were put to work widening that track into an all-weather road so as to be able to resupply by truck.

The A Troop Blues had walked into an NVA battalion dug in and concealed in the undergrowth alongside that new road, waiting to ambush the engineers. The critical fact is that the Blues did not come from the road. They came from behind, through dense undergrowth. Every NVA fighting position faced outward toward the roadbed. Nothing faced the jungle at their backs. When the Blues stumbled into them, the NVA were as startled as we were.

After a short exchange, in which the Blues threw three volleys of grenades, they pulled back about twenty meters into a small clearing and called for help. Although the NVA vastly outnumbered them they made no attempt to overrun the position — they had no way of knowing how few men were in front of them.

Committing my platoon

About fifteen minutes later my platoon came into that clearing one ship at a time — seven men to a lift ship, four ships, twenty-eight men. I found the Blue platoon leader immediately and asked him for the situation. At that stage he had no real idea what we were up against. He was a second lieutenant and I was a first lieutenant. As the ranking officer with no other senior officer on the ground, I decided on my own initiative to move out and try to flank the NVA position. The Blues stayed where they were.

Before I made that decision I tried repeatedly to raise Major Mendenhall, the A Troop commander, on the A Troop frequency. I got no answer.

My platoon had been reorganized out of necessity — 106 gunners, scout gunners and mortarmen turned into infantry. I had it split into two twelve-man squads with two machine guns each, plus a four-man headquarters element: myself, the medic, and two RTOs.

I moved the first squad out to our left. Sixty or seventy yards from the Blues we ran into heavy fire. Two men down, three more pinned and unable to move. With the rest of the platoon I kept working left. Another forty or fifty meters on we came onto a footpath that ran, though we could not have known it, straight into the main NVA position.

My point men started down it. A short way along were two positions: on the left of the path a bomb crater with no overhead cover holding two NVA prone and facing toward us; on the right a covered, well-concealed bunker with one man and a machine gun facing the other way. That machine gun’s orientation tells you everything about how completely they had discounted an approach from behind.

The two men in the crater let my point close to within a few meters and opened up. There was an exchange and both my lead men went down. I was fourth in the file and saw it happen, and at that moment I understood that we were looking at bunkers and concealed positions spread across a front of at least two hundred meters. I pulled back out of sight and called Apache 6 to report that we were inside an NVA battalion at the very least, and to ask for instructions.

What I got back was not Mendenhall but his pilot, First Lieutenant Pat Haley — by coincidence my room-mate from Armor Officer Basic at Fort Knox the year before, and a good friend. For the rest of that day Pat answered my calls on the A Troop frequency while Mendenhall talked to Squadron and Brigade on the alternate.

The two point men

Pat gave me a wait-out, then came back to say that both my point men were still alive: one of the A Troop scout ships, an OH-13, could see one of them reaching back for the canteen on his web belt. Pat said we had to get them out before artillery or air could be brought in.

I told him we were going, and asked for cover from one of the helicopters. I took two volunteers and we worked up through the brush beside the path to within a few meters of the two positions. We knocked out both and killed the three men in them. While we did it, an A Troop OH-13 observation helicopter hovered at under ten meters directly above us with the observer firing his M-16 steadily into the surrounding bunkers. Without that we would not have gotten in or out; the whole area was crawling with NVA. We put the two wounded over our backs in a fireman’s carry and ran the fifty meters back to the platoon. Tragically, both men died of their wounds an hour or two later.

This was at about 14:00 hours. A few minutes later a birddog arrived overhead to direct airstrikes. Over the next two hours one lone F-4 Phantom would drop a grand total of four or five napalm bombs on the target. In spite of the fact my two men had been safely recovered no artillery was ever called in. I repeat. Throughout the day and the rest of the night artillery was not used in this encounter. I did not witness 1/9 Cavalry Squadron gunships deploying rockets at any time in my area either. There’s a reason for this which I will discuss later.

The composite company

Around 17:30 Pat called to say there was a clearing to our rear that would take one ship, and told me to bring in the A Troop Blues, who had not moved from their original position, consolidate on it and set up a perimeter. I sent my platoon sergeant and he brought everyone in — everyone except my two men who had gone down in the first contact and could not be found.

While we were setting up, four lift ships came in one at a time with an additional infantry platoon, the third platoon from A Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry, commanded by a second lieutenant. That gave us a company-sized force of over eighty men on that landing zone, made up of three platoons from three different units. As the ranking lieutenant I took command of it. I want that noted, because it is the hinge of everything that happened later that night: a composite company should have been commanded by a captain. There was no captain there.

While I was walking the perimeter with my two RTOs assigning positions, a machine gun opened up on us — one of ours. The three of us dove into an NVA slit trench that was deep enough for two. My RTOs got there first, and I ended up on top of them, fully exposed, with a stream of 7.62 tracer passing about an inch above my shoulder blades. I was afraid to draw enough breath to shout. When the gunner finally ran dry all three of us screamed “Friendlies!” It was C Company, 1/8 Cavalry, under a captain named Ogg, which had come up behind us and opened fire on hearing the shooting, not knowing we were between them and the enemy. They ceased fire at once.

What Ogg did next was stop, and dig in for the night where he stood. There is no question they had heard us. Three men had stood up in the fading light and screamed “Friendlies!” at the top of their lungs, and the firing had stopped at once. They knew there was a friendly force a short distance in front of them.

I had no idea who they were. I did not have that company’s frequency and they did not have mine. What I did have was Covington, thirty miles away at LZ Hammond, calling me repeatedly to link up with the infantry company “in my vicinity”.

My perimeter was already set. Ogg’s was not — his people were still moving up on us. Rather than come the last thirty meters and join us, for reasons I have never understood they stopped where they were: behind us, with my three platoons between his company and the NVA positions. I only established this the following morning, when I set out with my two RTOs to find out who was out there and where, howling “Friendlies!” the whole way. Less than thirty meters separated us.

Meanwhile, starting about 14:00, this had become a brigade-sized operation under Colonel James Smith, who had been our Squadron Commander from April to October 1966 and had since been promoted and given command of the 1st Brigade. I thought little of him as a squadron commander and less as a brigade commander. He spent the entire day at two thousand feet and above, without ever setting foot on the ground to assess the situation.

Two thousand feet is safely above small arms fire but there’s a trade off. From that height a vehicle appears as a dot, individual troops are invisible, and terrain features can’t be distinguished. What one sees is a change of color — green jungle giving way to the yellow of rice fields, mountains, rivers, and the trace of a road. You cannot properly manage an engagement from that height. A commander who wants to know what’s really going on has to go down and land, set foot on the ground, and speak to someone present. Seven months earlier I had watched another commander do exactly that, and I set that day out in Part IX.

I do want to say something in fairness to the pilots who stayed above two thousand feet. The volume of fire in the valley that day was extraordinary. An entire 400 man NVA batallion was spraying automatic weapons fire into the air every time one of our helicopters hove into view. Under those circumstances an aircraft would drop down into the so-called “zap zone” for only one of three reasons — emergency resupply, emergency medevac, or troop insertion — and it went in and came out as fast as it could be flown, the crew praying the whole way. What no aircraft would do was loiter at a low level to observe. The altitude was not chosen for comfort. It was the only altitude at which a commander could remain over a battle for hours at a time.

Which is the whole of the argument in a sentence. If the only place from which a commander can actually see where his troops are is a place no aircraft can survive, then that commander has no choice but to physically land and exit the aircraft, if only for a minute or two. There is no other option.

Rather than pulling our two platoons in contact safely back and putting artillery and air onto identified, entrenched positions, Colonel Smith decided to commit the brigade to a frontal assault. This was unknown to me at the time and only became evident as the day wore on. Infantry companies were lifted in piecemeal, platoon by platoon, in some cases directly onto the roadbed the engineers had been building — in front of the main NVA positions and in the middle of their kill zone. Platoons and companies were scattered over a fifteen hundred meter front, fighting individually, with no field grade officers on the ground to coordinate them. One company, Delta 1/12, lost half its men killed. Because Smith could not see what was going on on the ground, he kept feeding companies in.

I learned much of this a few weeks later from Pat Haley, who had a ringside seat. I asked him why on earth Colonel Smith had not landed the infantry back where we were and come in from behind — or simply pulled all of us back a hundred meters and pound the position with artillery. Pat said it had been nothing but chaos and confusion from the very beginning, with Smith screaming at anyone and everyone over the radio in profanity-laced rants all afternoon.

We lost thirty-four killed and over eighty seriously wounded that day, plus several helicopters were shot down.

III. The night of 17 December — the C Troop lift ship

By dark we were dug in as well as we could manage on that one-ship landing zone, expecting a counterattack once the Squadron helicopters could no longer support us. My two wounded had died. I had several more men wounded, but none badly enough to justify an emergency evacuation at night. A Smokey the Bear circled dropping flares every few minutes, and a lift ship orbited to maintain radio contact.

Those relay ships flew in shifts through the night. The crew chief on the one that carried the traffic from midnight until three in the morning was Jerry Berggren, whose name I did not learn for fifty-two years. Its regular aircraft commander was away on leave, so First Lieutenant Al McAuliffe had moved into the pilot’s seat with Warrant Officer Joel McDonnell beside him. Neither man was instrument rated.

When they came back into LZ Hammond a heavy ground fog had settled over the strip, and the aircraft went in. Al McAuliffe and Joel McDonnell were both killed. Jerry Berggren was thrown clear with serious injuries. He spent the next seven months in hospitals, returned to active duty on 1 July 1967 on a limited medical profile, and was put to work in the Aircraft Maintenance Division office at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah. He never went back to the flight line.

It is worth saying why that helicopter had to be up there at all. At company level we carried man-portable FM sets — I remember them as PRC-25s — good for eight to ten miles. A battalion or brigade command post had more powerful sets, the AN/VRC-12 family, with the power and the antenna height to reach thirty to fifty miles. A battalion commander on the ground with us would have been in direct contact with brigade and division all night, and no relay would have been needed. There was not one field grade officer on the ground that night. So there were no long-range radios on the ground. So lift crews spent that night orbiting a battle in the dark to relay other men’s radio traffic, and two of them were killed in the fog over LZ Hammond doing it. That is what commanding from two thousand feet cost, and it was not paid by the man doing it.

Captain Covington kept calling from LZ Hammond every five minutes asking for a situation report, using a radio with a thirty-mile range. I gave him my casualties, including two men missing, and told him we had ammunition and water enough for the night. I specifically did not request a medical evacuation. I specifically did not request a resupply. I was not happy with the situation, but I had four machine guns and a very good bunch of people, and I was confident we could hold.

Around 21:00 or 22:00 the orbiting ship called to say another lift ship was inbound to my LZ, five minutes out, and would need guiding down. I was mystified. We were less than fifty meters from an NVA battalion. At night he could not come in nap of the earth; he would have to come in high and descend slowly, a sitting duck the whole way.

When I heard him coming I stood up with a flashlight to bring him in. As he came down the NVA opened up with everything they had and we returned fire, and all I remember is one endless deafening roar. The moment he touched down I ran to the ship with my scout section leader to find out what they wanted and why they were there.

I remember the crew chief hunched over, trying to say something to me that I could not hear. My scout section leader, standing beside me, was hit in the shoulder. I could see the pilot in the right-hand seat slumped forward and not moving. And I could see a fourth man crouched down behind the crew chief on the far side of the aircraft, too dark to identify. I had a passing thought that he was a second door gunner. I cannot say I much cared at that moment.

On my own initiative my scout section leader and I had begun loading the bodies of the two men we had recovered that afternoon onto the aircraft. Their crew chief helped us. The fourth man stayed crouched at the rear and did nothing. All of it happened inside a minute or two — the rotors, the incoming fire, our own return fire, the pilot slumped forward, my scout section leader going down beside me with a round in his shoulder.

By then I was the only one of us still on his feet. The co-pilot looked back over his shoulder at me and I gave him a thumbs up to go. He did not waste any time. I still had no idea what that flight had been for.

Nothing came off that aircraft. No water, no ammunition, nothing. As it climbed away into the dark all I could think was: what on earth was that all about?!

We patched up my scout section leader, gave him some Darvon, and he was comfortable through the night. The NVA having no wish to engage us slipped away in the darkness.

The next morning we moved into their positions unopposed. They had left a great deal of equipment. We found one body charred by napalm, and they had carried off the three men we killed the previous afternoon, leaving only a severed foot at the bottom of the covered bunker. We found my two missing men. One was dead. The other had been shot through the legs, had crawled into the undergrowth and stayed hidden all night, but was alive and would recover. Later that morning we were lifted back to LZ Hammond. My final count was three killed, four seriously wounded and evacuated to the States, and seven with wounds light enough to eventually return to the squadron.

IV. 18 December — what the First Sergeant told me

Captain Covington met me when we came in. His first words were, “I see you still have all of your hand grenades” — a crack I did not appreciate. I let it go and gave him my debriefing.

As I was leaving his tent the Troop First Sergeant took me by the shoulder and walked me far enough away to talk privately. He was a veteran wounded in Korea. We got on well and I had nothing but respect for him. This is what he said:

“Lieutenant, I have to talk to you. Last night that lift ship from C Troop had the mission of ferrying Captain Covington into your LZ to take command of the three rifle platoons. I was on the strip in front of the aid station when it came back. The pilot was wounded, but the co-pilot was able to fly it out and back to Hammond. And who do I see climbing out? Captain Covington! I ran over and said, what are you doing here, sir? You’re supposed to be out there commanding those three rifle platoons. And you know what he says? He says” — and here the First Sergeant put on a high-pitched terrified voice mimicking Covington — “‘It’s suicide out there! I couldn’t get off the ship. A bullet came up through the bottom of the ship and hit my foot.'”

“We were both standing in front of the aid station, unloading the wounded pilot and the bodies of your men, and I offered to take him in for treatment. He refused. I insisted on helping him and he kept refusing. I asked him where he was hit, because I couldn’t see any blood. Finally he admitted he was all right, because it was just a bruise. A bruise, I said? I asked if I could see it. He refused to show it to me. Then he told me he was putting himself in for the Purple Heart and that he needed me to sign it. A Purple Heart for a bruise? I told him that if he had the guts to put himself in for it, I supposed I had the guts to sign off on it.”

It’s difficult to convey the expression of disgust in his voice.

So the fourth man on that aircraft was not a crew member. It was my troop commander, brought in to take command of the composite company, who refused to exit the aircraft but stayed crouched on the floor behind the crew chief. In the process the pilot and my scout section leader were both seriously wounded.

Covington was a West Point graduate, as were his father and his older brother before him. He retired thirty years later as a full Colonel and was living in Boone, North Carolina, as of a few years ago. I saw a photograph of him in the local paper on a Memorial Day, in uniform, prominently displaying a Purple Heart. I do not know which action that decoration was awarded for, and a man with thirty years’ service may have earned it anywhere. I know only what he told the Troop First Sergeant he was putting himself in for, on the strip at LZ Hammond, on the morning of 18 December 1966.

A bruised foot….

I have set down what the First Sergeant told me he said. Let me add what I saw myself. Less than twelve hours after he declined to exit that aircraft, I stood in front of him in the company area giving him my verbal after action report. He was not limping. He was walking, standing and talking in an entirely normal manner. There was nothing whatever in his bearing to suggest an injury of any kind, let alone one grave enough to prevent him from stepping off that aircraft and assuming the duties of a company commander. I make no claim about what was running through his mind that night. Panic? Fear? Who knows? I am merely telling you what he looked like the following morning.

What this rests on

I set out the basis for that account deliberately, because it is the most serious thing I have to say about a named man and it should be weighed on its evidence. I want nothing taken from him. He is entitled to whatever the Army awarded him. As I understand it bruises do actually qualify an individual for a purple heart.

What I saw myself: four men on the aircraft, one of whom was crouched behind the crew chief and never got off, and whom I could not identify in the dark.

What I was told the following morning by the Troop First Sergeant, who had watched the aircraft come back in and had spoken to Covington on the strip.

What I saw for myself that same morning, standing in front of Captain Covington to give him my after action report: a man walking and standing normally, with no limp and no sign of injury of any kind, less than twelve hours after a wound he had given as his reason for not leaving that aircraft and taking command.

What Wayne George, the crew chief, wrote in August 2018: “There was a soldier that went with us and I never knew his name… The soldier thought he was shot in the foot… The soldier didn’t get shot, the round was stopped in the floor when it hit his boot.”

What Jerry Berggren saw with his own eyes at LZ Hammond that night. He went over the aircraft with Wayne George after it came back, and they found the round that had come up through the floor without breaking skin — and a second that had struck a support bar in the main rotor dead center, which would probably have failed had it been an inch to either side. Three men, none of whom compared notes, describing the same round in the same floor.

What the record does not contain is any mention of that aircraft. Not the aircraft, not its mission, and not Captain Covington. No lift ship is described as coming into my landing zone that night, by anyone, anywhere in those 184 pages.

So there is nothing in the official account to weigh against what follows, and nothing in it to support it either. What I have is the Troop First Sergeant’s word to me on the strip the next morning, corroborated fifty-two years later by the crew chief who was in that aircraft’s door and who recorded that a soldier who was not one of his crew went out with them and came back.

V. January 1967 — the interview I was not asked to attend

Two or three weeks after the 506 Valley, under the Lessons Learned program, a team came to the squadron area at LZ Hammond to interview the company commanders who had been committed on the ground that day. Each was to be questioned in turn and the interview recorded. The purpose was to establish what had happened that day and record it so as not make the same mistakes twice. There was a great deal to learn. Seven units had been put into that fight — six infantry companies and my composite company. The six infantry companies spent the entire afternoon in close quarter combat mere meters from entrenched NVA positions, engaged just as soon as they jumped off their lift ships. Since Smith, from his vantage point, was unable to determine the enemy disposition, he ended up feeding these companies piecemeal straight into the NVA kill zone. One of the companies, D Company 1/12 Battalion, was involved in hand to hand fighting and took horrific casualties in the process. None of these units were ever able to link up for a co-ordinated assault and finally ended up spending the night isolated from one another in the dark.

I remember the day they came. They set up a tent in the squadron area with the flaps down so that nothing could be seen from outside. It must have been a hundred and four degrees in there. I heard about it from scuttlebutt. Captain Covington did not mention it to me and did not ask me to attend.

I walked over towards the tent anyway. Halfway there I was intercepted by Pat Haley.

It was the first time I had actually laid eyes on him since Fort Knox, almost two years before. We had been at Armor Officer Basic together in the autumn of 1964 — two rooms sharing one head in the BOQ, and they had assigned the rooms alphabetically. Haley, Holland. We had spent nearly every day together for the length of the course.

It was standing on that path that I learned he was Major Mendenhall’s pilot, and that he had been the voice answering me on the radio all day on 17 December. Neither of us had known. We had a great deal to talk about. He told me he had been flying right seat for the A Troop commander for almost ten months, that he had lost hydraulics once and had to autorotate, that Mendenhall was his third commanding officer.

I asked whether he was going in for the interview. He said, in so many words, that it was too crowded in there and that it was only for senior officers. I took that to mean captains and above. So I stayed outside on the path with Pat, and after a while I went back to my platoon.

What I will set down at this point is the fact that I was the ranking officer, on the ground, of a composite company consisting of three rifle platoons drawn from three different units on an unnamed one-ship landing zone in the 506 Valley on 17 December 1966. I was never asked to participate in the interview conducted by Captain Sykes that afternoon and I did not participate. There were two other officers, both Second Lieutenants, who were also present with me on that same landing zone. They did not participate in this interview either.

The record of that interview which I was finally able to read in 2026, in the file at the National Archives, attributes answers to me by name. Answers to questions I never gave in a tent that I never entered.

Four commissions

A few days after that interview, Captain Covington took me aside for the purpose of offering me a regular Army commission.

It was the fourth such offer I had received. The first came on graduation from UC Berkeley, where I had been a Distinguished Military Graduate of the ROTC program. The second came at Fort Knox, serving with the 4th Battalion, 37th Armor, and the third came in Korea. A regular army commission meant the same career path as a West Point graduate: twenty years guaranteed, retirement at half pay, and no exposure to a reduction in force. I was flattered but declined on each occasion.

I remember standing there thinking that if I had had a company commander and a squadron commander I admired and respected, I might probably have said yes, and my life would have gone another way entirely. However the thought of taking orders from this man, or from Colonel Smith settled it, and I declined for the fourth time.

I set this out because it bears directly on why anyone should believe a word of what I’m saying. By February 1967 I was a reserve officer a few weeks from discharge and a return to civilian life. I had no career in the Army to protect, no promotion to lose, and no officer efficiency report to worry about.

Nobody offered me anything to keep quiet, and nobody asked me to. A man who wanted something from the Army might have shaped an account to suit. I wanted nothing from it then, and I have wanted nothing from it in the sixty years since. I have no reason whatsoever to invent any of this.

VI. February 1967 — leaving

I rotated home in February 1967, some weeks after the 506 Valley. I was leaving four or five days ahead of my scheduled departure. I had trained my replacement for the second platoon and had nothing further to do with myself, and I would far rather have spent what was left of it at An Khe — which was safer than Los Angeles — than at LZ Hammond, where we were mortared on a regular basis.

As I was boarding the log ship that would take me to An Khe and the flight home, a number of my men, several fellow platoon leaders and some of the pilots came up to say goodbye. Captain Covington was nowhere to be seen.

Then the Squadron Executive Officer, a major I hardly knew, asked to speak with me. It was highly unusual for an officer of that rank to speak to me directly without my company commander present, and I was apprehensive. After everything that had recently transpired, I half expected him to tell me that they wanted me to stay on a few days more and run some night ambushes to fill up my time. He said:

“Lieutenant, I’d like a word. You are certainly unaware of this, but the men in your platoon recommended you for the Distinguished Service Cross for your actions on 17 December. Most of them having had little or no formal education, they had a great deal of difficulty writing up the citation, so they went to the Troop First Sergeant, who was only too happy to oblige. However, Captain Covington overrode them all and downgraded the recommendation from the Distinguished Service Cross to the Army Commendation Medal with V. We at Squadron were very unhappy about it, but we could not simply ignore Captain Covington’s recommendation. We finally compromised and awarded you the Silver Star.”

He shook my hand warmly, smiled, thanked me for everything I had done, and turned away. I was at a loss for words.

I want to set down what I actually felt standing there. It was relief. He had not come to stop me from leaving. He was letting me get on that helicopter. And on top of that there was to be a medal, which I had never expected, had never asked after, and had never once thought about.

What moved me then, and moves me still, is where the recommendation came from. Decorations are almost always handed down from above, commanding officer to junior officer. That one came up from below — from soldiers who had to go to the Troop First Sergeant to get the citation written, because most of them had little or no formal education. My platoon was made up largely of black and Hispanic men, in an Army where there was no love lost between enlisted men and officers. That they did that for me meant a great deal more than the decoration itself.

I returned to civilian life in Oakland, California a few days later. I took a graduate degree, and in 1969 I moved to Paris, where I have lived ever since. The antiwar sentiment and the treatment of returning veterans in that period had a great deal to do with that decision. It has been fifty-seven years and it seems like yesterday. I have no regrets. The French have been good to me.

VII. The official record

With regard to the “Battle in the 506 Valley, 17 December 1966,” prepared by Captain Charles Sykes and on file at the National Archives, a number of things about that official account trouble me.

The account of “U SPKR”

The official record has pages of testimony given by someone who was not on the ground. It appears in the transcript as an interjection by a speaker recorded only as “U SPKR” — an unidentified speaker — breaking into another officer’s interview. That voice describes coming around my landing zone in a slow turn from the northwest; dumping his nose to put rockets onto anti-aircraft positions; diverting the gunship that was flying chase on him; watching a medevac ship go down in an open rice field with four wounded and three crew aboard; and following a scout ship that lost its radios and ruptured an oil line. He refers to “the Lancer element” — my platoon — in the third person. He speaks of “our three platoons, composite company down there” as something he was trying to link up with somebody else. He is undoubtedly a 1/9 Cavalry officer flying a B model gunship. That points to two men: Apache 6 — Major Mendenhall — or the pilot flying him.

The pilot flying him that day was First Lieutenant Pat Haley. When those interviews were being conducted at LZ Hammond Pat was standing beside me outside the tent, so it can’t be him.

That leaves Major Mendenhall as the probable identity of “U SPKR” but we will never know for certain since Captain Sykes failed to ask this individual to identify himself at the beginning of his interview.

What he says is that at about 1800 a B model from C Troop came in to resupply us, came down to hover, took an intense volume of automatic weapons fire, pulled out with all four men aboard wounded, and never completed the resupply. He then goes on to say his own ship attempted to extract my two dead at dusk and got no closer than two hundred feet on final.

There are serious problems with those two assertions that I did not notice until Jerry Berggren pointed it out to me in September 2026.

The first problem is that B model aircraft are in fact gunships flown by the weapons platoons and Troop Commanders, not to be confused with D model lift ships. They carry a crew of four – pilot, co-pilot, and two door gunners. These ships were armed with rockets, a nose mounted grenade launcher, and two 7.62 machine guns, one on each side of the ship manned by the two door-gunners. They were loaded to the gills and could not carry additional cargo or passengers due to weight constraints; to load a passenger or dead body aboard one would first have to disembark a door gunner.

It was C Troop’s lift section that flew D models — four of them carrying a crew of three and configured specifically to carry seven fully loaded infantrymen, or alternatively cargo. Resupply was always carried out by empty D model lift ships not in the process of ferrying troops, not by B model gunships as “U SPKR” would have us believe. That is not a matter of preference or of what was available. These aircraft simply did not do it.

The second problem is that C Troop was not committed to this operation that day in the first place. C Troop lift ships did fly that night, after dark, and I come to that below; but no C Troop element took part in the daylight engagement. This is made clear from Sykes’ account in addition to the “Unit Historical Report N° 15” entitled “506 Valley 17 December 1966.” A Troop 1/9 under the command of Major Mendenhall and one platoon from Delta Troop 1/9 were the only units committed from the 1/9 Cavalry Squadron. No C Troop B model gunships participated in this engagement.

In other words the resupply aircraft he describes cannot have been from C Troop, and it cannot have been a B model gunship either. He either misidentified the model of the aircraft, or the Troop from which it came, or both at once. I don’t have any more of an explanation for this discrepancy than I do for Captain Sykes permitting an unidentified speaker to go on the record in an official US Army document in the first place.

U SPKR goes on to say that he attempted to lift my two dead out but got no closer than two hundred feet. I doubt this account as well, and for reasons I can state plainly. We know it was a 1/9 Cavalry commander making these statements and we know he was flying a B model gun ship. There was no way he could load an additional two dead bodies aboard that aircraft without first disembarking his two door gunners. Frankly I don’t see him risking his life, the lives of his crew, and the loss of his aircraft to extract two dead bodies, all the while leaving his two door gunners behind on an LZ under fire. In addition to that he would most certainly have informed me by radio beforehand in order to allow me the time to prepare the bodies. He did not. At 200 feet I would have seen him. I did not.

U SPKR is mute as to what happened on that battlefield after 1800, unlike the six captains commanding the six infantry companies. The reason is simple enough: he was no longer there. South Vietnam kept its clocks on UTC+8 in those years. At Qui Nhon on 17 December 1966 the sun set at 1819 and civil twilight ended at 1842, after which there was no longer light enough to fly by. With the exception of a single C Troop D model flying radio relay, everything else in the air had packed up and gone home. The aircraft that came into my landing zone did so at 2200 — more than three hours after the last of them had left.

The account of the individual who impersonated me

The official record has pages of testimony given by 1/Lt Thomas K. Holland. It is not a summary compiled at a desk. It is the transcript of a recorded interview: questions are put, answers are given, and other officers in the room interrupt and are noted as having done so. Somebody sat in that tent and answered those questions. And he answered them in the first person, as the platoon leader — “my platoon sergeant”, “the two other squads I took with me”, “I pulled this lead squad back”. That rules out a clerk mislabelling a page. It also rules out my platoon sergeant, who is spoken of in the third person by the man speaking.

Whoever he was, he was not me and the Army took his word for mine.

The first question that arises is who identified that speaker as Lieutenant Holland, and on what basis? I do not have an answer for that.

When I first went through this file I reported to Jerry that pages 25 through 29 of that transcript had been removed: it ran consecutively to page 24 and then resumed at page 30. That was wrong, and I withdraw it. Those five pages are in fact in the file. They were bound in the wrong place — lifted out of the 1/9 Cavalry transcript and inserted into the middle of Captain Ogg’s interview, some fifty pages earlier.

What is on them matters a great deal more than where they were. Pages 25, 26 and 27 continue the answers attributed to me, and they are not vague. They describe moving through undergrowth over head height with visibility to the front of ten or fifteen feet; a point man and two flank men making the initial contact; the lead squad pinned; maneuvering to the left and striking a trail running north and south; two machine gun bunkers back to back on that trail, one covering north and one covering south; a line of some twenty bunkers about ten meters apart in the hedgerow, well camouflaged and with overhead cover; two men down ten feet in front of the bunker opening, one of whom killed one of its two occupants before he fell; and three men sent up through the hedgerow to knock out both bunkers while A Troop H-13s circled overhead firing down into the rest of them and throwing grenades.

That is my action. It is accurate. It corresponds in every material particular to what I have set out in Part II of this account, and to what the Army said of me in General Orders Number 1246.

And I did not say it.

On the other hand whoever gave those answers knew exactly what had happened on that trail in the afternoon. It is important to note that this man gave no further information about what happened on that landing zone after night fell at 18:00. That is where his testimony abruptly ends. One has the impression that there is nothing further to add, and since what he said previously is factual it lends credence to that thesis. Nothing could be further from the truth.

He omitted to mention:

That Captain Ogg’s company took the better part of three hours to cover the 500 meters between his landing zone and my position.

That upon arrival Captain Ogg’s lead elements had fired a long volley of 7.62 machine gun tracer rounds straight into my landing zone from a distance of thirty meters (missing me by inches).

That in spite of the short distance separating our two units Ogg made no effort to link up with us. He ended up digging in behind us so that my company was between his company and the NVA, negating any contribution his company could have made in the event of a firefight.

That due to security protocols we did not have each others’ call signs and radio frequencies.

That there was no field grade officer physically present on the ground co-ordinating troop movements. (Interestingly the record clearly shows this without remarking on it. Seven companies were committed that day. By any normal reckoning that means two battalion commanders and a brigade commander, with their staffs, should have been on that ground. They were not there. My own composite company should have been commanded by a captain; he was not there either. The one exception the interviews do disclose is the S-3 of the 1/8 Cavalry, a major, who landed and tried to take charge of the situation in his commander’s absence, and was wounded and evacuated. No other field grade officer made the attempt. The lift ships that orbited the battle all night existed to relay radio traffic — a function that would have been unnecessary had a battalion commander with his long-range sets been on the ground with us.)

That the two batteries of 105’s and two batteries of 155’s sitting on LZ Pony and LZ Bird, a short distance away, were not called in at any time during the engagement.

And most importantly that a C Troop D model lift ship had come in to my landing zone at 22:00 hours. That it landed, that it took on my two dead, that the aircraft commander was shot through both legs, that one of my men was seriously wounded, and that it carried my troop commander in and back out again. Captain Covington’s name is not mentioned anywhere.

None of this appears anywhere in those 184 pages. Not in the narrative. Not in any interview. Not once, by anyone, at any point.

If I had been physically present at that interview and called upon to testify I can assure you I would not have forgotten to mention these “details.”

The account of the transcriber

Somebody turned a recording into typescript and assigned names to voices. At the head of page 24 that name reads “LT Allen”, struck through, with “Holland” written in above it by hand. Whoever prepared or checked that transcript did not reliably know who had been speaking. He guessed, or he was told, and what he wrote became the record.

Established: the aircraft landed

This does not rest on my word alone. Wayne George was the crew chief of that aircraft and stood in its door. On 2 August 2018, asked directly by Jerry Berggren what had happened on that mission, he set down what he remembered. He confirms it.

He writes that Captain Crawford was flying and was hit by an armor-piercing round that passed through the collective stick, through his left leg, and stopped in his right knee. That there were three of them aboard and, listed separately from the crew, “a soldier that went with us and I never knew his name.” That they took about fifteen rounds, one of them within twelve inches of his head. That “we did take 3 cases of ammo but never got to drop them off.” That the solider (sic) thought he had been shot in the foot and had not, the round having stopped in the floor when it struck his boot. And that the next morning he found one of the control rods to the blades hanging on by a quarter of an inch.

And he describes the approach in his own words: “We started taking rounds on the way down.” Down onto that landing zone. Nowhere in his letter is there an aircraft that turned away, or aborted, or was driven off. He was asked point blank what happened on that resupply mission and he answered point blank, and a crew chief who had been driven off a landing zone would have said so in his first sentence. What he describes is a ship that went in, took heavy fire on the ground and in the air, and came back out.

The aircraft landed. I was standing beside it and the crew chief, Wayne George, was crouching on the floor directly in front of me.

Established: three crew and one passenger

A lift ship of that troop flew with three crew — pilot, co-pilot and crew chief — leaving room for seven infantrymen, four on one side and three plus the crew chief on the other, for weight distribution. But I do not ask anyone to take my word for the crewing, because there is better evidence than mine. Wayne George, who was aboard, wrote this in August 2018:

“Captain Crawford commander of our platoon was the pilot and Ray ______ don’t remember last name right now, was copilot and I was the crew chief. There was a solider (sic) that went with us and I never knew his name.”

Three crew, each of them named, by the man in the aircraft. Then a soldier, listed separately and explicitly not one of them. That is not my inference. It is the crew chief’s own account.

Established: a soldier aboard, not crew, struck in the foot and not wounded

Wayne George again, in the same letter: “The soldier thought he was shot in the foot… The soldier didn’t get shot, the round was stopped in the floor when it hit his boot.”

Inference: that soldier was Captain Covington

This is inference and I will not present it as anything else. I could not identify the man myself; it was pitch dark and I never saw his face. Wayne George never knew his name. Covington never mentioned the matter to me afterwards, and as far as I am aware never mentioned it to anyone.

It rests on the account the Troop First Sergeant gave me on the morning of 18 December 1966 — he had watched the aircraft come back in, had been unloading it in front of the aid station, and had spoken to Covington on the strip — corroborated fifty-two years later, independently and without prompting, by the presence aboard of a soldier who was not crew and who thought he had been shot in the foot.

Two men who never met, describing the same man.

One aircraft came into my position that night. It came in at about 22:00, in complete darkness. It landed. My scout section leader and I put our two dead aboard it, and its crew chief helped us. Its pilot was hit and my scout section leader was hit standing beside me. It flew out. I was there for all of it and I am not mistaken about it. And I am not the only man saying so: the crew chief who stood in that aircraft’s door confirms it — the same descent under fire, the same pilot shot through the legs, the same ammunition that never came off, and a passenger aboard who was not one of his crew.

Three defects in one document

I have set these out as separate complaints. They are not separate. They are three defects in a single document, and they are worth putting side by side, because together they amount to more than any one of them alone.

U SPKR. An officer who was circling at an altitude of two thousand feet, where a five ton truck appears the size of a dot, gave an account of what happened on the ground, describing a landing zone he never set foot on. The transcript does not name him. It calls him “U SPKR.”

The Impostor. Somebody sat in that tent and answered questions in the first person as the platoon leader of Delta White. He was claiming a command that was not his, in a tent I had been kept out of, and the Army wrote his answers down under my name, where they have stood for sixty years.

The Transcriber. A clerk entered testimony in my name on an official document without knowing who had been speaking.

Take the three together and ask what the document is worth as evidence of what happened on my landing zone on the night of 17 December 1966.

As a record of what happened on that landing zone on the night of 17 December 1966, that document is worthless. I do not say that in anger. I say it as the plain consequence of how it was made.

VIII. What good practice looked like: Operation Davy Crockett, May 1966

I do not offer the absence of field grade officers on the ground as a point of hindsight, or as a standard nobody was keeping at the time. I had watched the standard kept, on the same ground, by the same squadron commander, seven months earlier.

Operation Davy Crockett was fought in the Bong Son area in May 1966, not far from the 506 Valley. It was a brigade operation — the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 7th Cavalry together with our own 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry — commanded by Colonel Hal Moore, newly promoted and newly given command of the 3rd Brigade. Our squadron was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Smith: the same James Smith who, as a full Colonel, would fight the 506 Valley from two thousand feet in December.

I watched Colonel Moore fight that battle. In the middle of the heavy fighting he put his helicopter down in the thick of it to evacuate my RTO, Spec 4 Michael Kim, who had taken a round through the thigh and was losing blood — and to ask me personally what the situation was. Having dropped Kim at the aid station he flew to the far side of the battlefield, landing again to put the same questions to First Lieutenant Larry Gwin, executive officer of A Company, 2/7 Cavalry, who were in a blocking position. He wanted it first hand, from men on the ground.

He could have ordered a frontal assault on those positions. He had the force to do it and it would have been an easy decision. Instead he pulled everybody back and put artillery onto them for the rest of that day and all through the night, even going so far as to call in naval gunfire from a destroyer lying off the coast within range. He called in delayed fuse rounds to blow the tops of the bunkers off and then alternated with high explosive rounds to kill the exposed enemy. The following morning more than two hundred VC walked out of those positions with their hands above their heads, without a shot being fired. It was one of the most successful operations of the war.

On the fourth night of that fighting, with a VC battalion surrounded, Colonel Moore ordered Lieutenant Colonel Smith to spend the night on the ground with his staff. Smith set his command post a few meters behind my platoon — Delta White — in a dry rice paddy about a hundred yards from the enemy’s dug-in and fortified positions, and there he put up his long-range radio. To do it he had to erect an antenna twenty or thirty feet high with guy wires staked into the ground. I remember watching him help his sergeant major with it, cursing and swearing throughout, plainly furious at having to spend a night on the ground with the troops.

After dark those wires were invisible. Checking my positions around the perimeter, I tripped over one of them. The stream of invective that followed was epic. You would have thought I had lost the war single-handed. It was entirely characteristic of the man, and he was known for it.

I set all of this down because of what it establishes, and I want to be plain about it. Colonel Smith knew exactly what a long-range radio on the ground was for — he had raised one with his own hands. He knew that a commander’s place in a fight was on the ground, because the most respected brigade commander in that division had ordered him there and had demonstrated why on the same battlefield, twice in one afternoon, by landing in the middle of it to ask the men what was happening. And he knew precisely what artillery could do to an entrenched enemy in place of a frontal assault, because he had watched two hundred men walk out of their bunkers and surrender to it without a shot being fired.

Seven months later, in the 506 Valley, he did none of it.

IX. Corrections to my earlier correspondence

Between 2018 and 2021 I wrote all of this to Jerry Berggren in a series of long emails. Setting it down properly, and reading the official study closely, has shown me that I got a few things wrong. They are listed here.

1. My call sign. I signed those letters “1/Lt (Delta Red).” On 17 December 1966 I was leading Delta White, the 2nd Platoon, radio call sign Lancer White. I had led Delta Red from April to September 1966 and signed out of habit. The official narrative uses Lancer White, and that is correct.

2. The cargo on the lift ship. I wrote that there was “not a crate of anything on that aircraft.” There were three cases of ammunition aboard, as Wayne George told Jerry in 2018. Nothing was offloaded, and from where I stood outside the aircraft in the dark I could not see that. The error was mine.

3. The pilot of the lift ship. In my first letter to Jerry I said that the pilot of that aircraft had been killed. He was not. He was seriously wounded and he survived. Wayne George established this in 2018, describing an armor-piercing round that passed through the collective stick and his captain’s left leg and stopped in his right knee. I was happy to hear it.

4. Captain Ogg. I wrote that Ogg “slow crawled to the battlefield.” The record shows that C Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry had been ordered by Lieutenant Colonel Eggers to seal off and block to the west and southwest, a task the study describes as formidable and as taking about two hours, and it records that Ogg himself wanted to move east into the fight. My complaint concerns what he did after we made contact with each other at dusk — that he dug in behind my three platoons rather than linking up, some thirty meters away — and I stand by that. But the earlier characterization was unfair and I withdraw it.

5. The A Troop Blues’ initial casualties. I described their first contact as producing “one or two guys with minor wounds but nothing serious.” The official narrative records that one of Lieutenant Featherston’s squad leaders, Sergeant Bryant, was killed in that first action and that his body was still forward of their position. I did not know that at the time, or had forgotten it, and the record is better than my memory here.

6. What I took the record’s “all 4 crew members” to mean. I treated the record’s mention of an aircraft pulling out with all four men aboard wounded as independent corroboration that a fourth man had been aboard my aircraft. I withdraw that. In September 2026 Jerry Berggren pointed out that the speaker describes a B model, which is a gunship, which carries four crew as standard and cannot fly a resupply at all. Whatever aircraft he was describing, it was not the one that came into my position, and it corroborates nothing about who was aboard mine. What remains is the Troop First Sergeant’s account and Wayne George’s, which is where it always chiefly rested.

7. The pages I reported as missing. I said that pages 25 through 29 of the 1/9 Cavalry transcript had been taken out of the file. They had not. They are bound out of order, inside another officer’s interview fifty pages earlier, and they are complete. I withdraw the suggestion that anything had been removed, and I have set out in Part VII what is on them.

The men in this account

I set this down in September 2026, and a reader coming to it later will want to know who was still alive to answer for himself.

First Lieutenant Al McAuliffe and Warrant Officer Joel McDonnell were killed in the fog over LZ Hammond in the small hours of 18 December 1966, flying a radio relay that would have been unnecessary had there been one field grade officer on the ground that night. Neither man was instrument rated. Their crew chief, Jerry Berggren, was thrown clear but severely injured.

Major Thomas Deal Mendenhall, commanding A Troop, and Captain Patrick Lawrence Haley, his pilot, were killed together on 18 April 1967 when their aircraft — a UH-1C, tail number 66-15048 — was brought down by hostile fire in Binh Dinh Province. Four months after the 506 Valley. Two months after I flew home. Pat was in his last month in country. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, posthumously, for an action on 2 October 1966. There is an airfield named for him.

I saw Pat once after Fort Knox: on a path at LZ Hammond in January 1967, outside a tent I did not go into. We had a great deal to talk about and we talked for perhaps half an hour. It is the last time I saw him. Whatever was or was not said inside that tent, he is the man I would most like to be able to ask, and he has been beyond asking since three months after I last shook his hand.

Colonel James C. Smith retired as a Major General and died in December 2016, aged ninety-three.

Colonel Hal Moore, who commanded the 3rd Brigade during Operation Davy Crockett, retired as a Lieutenant General and died in 2017, aged ninety-four.

Captain Benjamin W. Covington III retired as a Colonel and died in 2023, aged eighty-four. I had intended, before depositing this account anywhere, to send it to him and to offer him the opportunity to answer it in his own words, unedited and in full. I began looking for him too late. Had I started three years sooner he could have replied, and I would have printed whatever he sent me. That opportunity is gone, and its loss is mine as much as his.

Captain Charles Sykes, who prepared the study and conducted the interviews, I have not been able to trace.

What became of Captain George Crawford, WO Jackie Yoder, and the eighty men on that landing zone that night I do not know. I’m sure many must still be alive.

Jerry Berggren and Wayne George are living. Jerry has read this account and corrected what is written here about him.

What this account is for

It is about two failures of command, and what they cost.

Captain George Crawford was a pilot in command of the C Troop lift section. Captain Benjamin Covington was the commander of D Troop. Both men held the same rank and both were career officers.

Captain Crawford volunteered to pilot an aircraft into a dangerous one ship landing zone after dark and under heavy fire, with the mission of ferrying Captain Covington in to take command of an eighty man composite company on the ground. In the process he took an armor-piercing round through the collective stick, through his left leg, and into his right knee, which ended his military career on the spot.

Captain Covington, who refused to step off that same helicopter under those same conditions, returned to LZ Hammond one hour later unscathed. He would go on to award himself a purple heart for a bruised foot, complete a thirty year career in the military, and retire as a full colonel with generous retirement and benefits. That is failure number one, and it is heartbreaking.

The other failure is that of a brigade commander who fought a battle from two thousand feet, who put no headquarters on the ground, and who therefore obliged a lift crew to orbit that valley all night relaying other men’s radio traffic — which killed First Lieutenant Al McAuliffe and Warrant Officer Joel McDonnell in the fog over LZ Hammond and put Jerry Berggren in a hospital for seven months.

That second failure cost a great deal more than the men I have just named, and I want to set out why, because it turns on something that will not be obvious to anyone who has not carried a radio in combat.

The radios

I carried a small booklet in my breast pocket containing the call signs and radio frequencies I was authorized to have: my sister platoons, my troop commander, and medevac. I was instructed to destroy it if I were ever taken prisoner. Frequencies were issued on a need-to-know basis, and need-to-know stopped at the next higher command. In my case that meant my troop commander. I did not hold squadron frequencies. I did not hold brigade frequencies. As I recall we held the other three troop commanders’ frequencies within our own squadron, exceptionally, because reconnaissance platoons were so often in contact with them. I’m fairly sure an ordinary infantry platoon held nothing outside its own company.

Captain Covington told me repeatedly, from LZ Hammond thirty miles away, to link up with the infantry company in my vicinity. He never gave me that company commander’s call sign or frequency. Whether it was his to give or not, I was not authorized to have it.

Now multiply that across the valley. On 17 December there were six infantry companies drawn from three infantry battalions on that ground, together with my own composite company — itself three platoons belonging to three different units. They could not speak to one another. Units a few hundred meters apart, fighting the same enemy in the same hedgerows, had no means of calling one another up. And because no one knew with any certainty where anyone else was, no one could call in artillery with any confidence. To make matters worse Colonel Smith had inserted 6 infantry companies within meters of entrenched enemy positions, far too close to safely call in artillery. Add to that dozens of helicopters circling overhead all afternoon. The combination of all this completely precluded the use of artillery during the entire engagement. A recipe for disaster.

The field grade commanders who had the call signs and frequencies were circling at two thousand feet. The brigade commander was up there, and by the record two of his battalion commanders were as well. They could communicate with individual company commanders but none of them could see what was happening on the ground.

The men in the air had the communications and not the eyes. The men on the ground had the eyes and not the communications.

One field grade officer physically on the ground would have joined the two halves together — not for his rank and not for his courage, but for two practical things he would have brought with him. A radio with the power to reach brigade and division. And the call signs and frequencies of every company committed. He could have told the company on the left that another was on its right. He could have cleared ground for artillery. He could have made seven separate fights into one battle. There was no such officer on that ground at any time that day, save the S-3 of the 1/8 Cavalry, who landed, tried to take charge in his commander’s absence, and was wounded and evacuated.

When darkness fell the helicopters had to go home. That left seven companies isolated not only from higher headquarters but, in many places, from each other. That is why Jerry Berggren’s ship was orbiting the valley at midnight: so that there would be some means of relaying traffic if the nightmare came — a counterattack in the dark against units that could not talk to one another. And, plainly, so that it could not afterwards be said that no provision had been made for it.

I would like to say at this point that although C Troop was never officially designated as participating in this engagement, several of their lift ships were in fact used after darkness fell. Specifically for the radio relay mission and the mission to ferry in Captain Covington to take command of the composite company.

I have set out the cost in Part II. Thirty-four killed and more than eighty seriously wounded in a single day against very light casualties for the North Vietnamese. Our troops were cut to pieces just as soon as they dismounted the lift ships and never came close to overrunning those entrenched positions.

That is the consequence of commanders circling at 2000 feet or worse yet commanding by radio from thirty kilometers away. This was a recurring problem in every command throughout the war and unfortunately not limited to the First Cavalry Division.

The lesson: see no evil, speak no evil

So consider what the lesson of 17 December 1966 really and truly was.

On the one hand it was an absence of commanders. They were either circling around at two thousand feet, too high to see their troops on the ground, or they were thirty kilometers away at LZ Hammond talking to their platoons over long range radios. When night fell every last one of them flew back to LZ Hammond and the mess tent for a cold beer, leaving the troops in the field to fend for themselves.

On the other hand artillery was not called in. Two separate fire support bases with four batteries between them, twenty-four individual artillery pieces, sat within easy range of that engagement and were left idle.

I have been through all 184 pages. Nowhere in them did I find that said plainly. What I find instead is an aircraft that supposedly never landed, an absence of commanders on the ground that is recorded without once being remarked upon, and my own name set against testimony I never gave.

Now I ask you. Is this a lesson that needed to be learned in 1966? Are we to believe that Colonel Smith, after extensive formal training throughout his military career, had never heard of Alexander at Gaugamela, or Bonaparte at Toulon?

A lesson was learned that day. It was passed on, every officer in that squadron understood it, but it was not the one intended. It was see nothing and say nothing.

That is what the failure of a Lessons Learned program looks like. Not a lie told once, but a lesson left unwritten — and therefore still waiting, sixty years later, to be paid for by somebody else.

This is how wars are lost.

Two careers

Colonel James C. Smith, who fought the 506 Valley from two thousand feet, did not employ the artillery available to him, and flew back to LZ Hammond at nightfall while his troops fended for themselves in the field, was promoted to major general and given command of the 1st Cavalry Division, which he held from May 1971 to January 1973. He retired a major general in 1981 and died in December 2016, aged ninety-three. He was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in 1976 and ” is best remembered for his foundational contributions to the development of modern aviation and airmobility. “

Colonel Hal Moore, who first made a name for himself by his courageous and competent leadership at the Ia Drang in November 1965, and proved those same qualities again during Operation Davy Crockett, left Vietnam in 1966 and was posted to the Pentagon and then to Korea. He never returned to Vietnam. He retired a lieutenant general in 1977, and never held another command in the war he had so brilliantly fought.

In the Second World War the Army relieved commanders who failed, and did it briskly and without ceremony, on the principle that the cost of leaving a bad commander in place was paid by the men underneath him. That practice did not carry over into Vietnam.

The consequences of a lack of accountability

The fallacy is to believe that every officer wearing a colonel’s eagles is the next Stonewall Jackson, and every officer wearing a general’s stars the next Robert E. Lee. Men of the quality of Hal Moore are one in ten thousand. There are numerous references to Moore in published writing. He was a standout by any measure, and his peers spoke of him in reverential tones.

He had that exceptional ability to keep a cool head under fire and make the right call. Compare him to high-stakes poker players or professional athletes. Anybody can play Texas Hold ‘Em, but there is only one Phil Ivey. Anybody can put on shoulder pads and a helmet, but there is only one Tom Brady. Anybody can run around with stars on his collar and play general, but there was only one Hal Moore.

How is it possible that this man was sidelined to Korea at the moment he was most needed!?

The answer is accountability. Bad poker players lose their stakes. Bad quarterbacks are fired come Monday morning. Incompetent and cowardly colonels keep getting promoted.

I wanted to go on the record with this account so that whoever comes to this battle after me, whether a historian, or one of the children or grandchildren of the men who were on one of those landing zones that night, has the whole of it in front of him and can weigh it for himself.

Four career officers from the 1/9 Cavalry Squadron were awarded the Purple Heart the night of December 17, 1966. Two were posthumous, one was for a crippling and career-ending wound, and the fourth was for a bruised foot.

Add this account to the long list of courageous actions and selfless sacrifice by the pilots and men of Charlie Troop, and by the men of the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry.

May God bless and keep you all.

Thomas K. Holland

First Lieutenant, Armor, U.S. Army (separated 1967)

D Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)

Republic of Vietnam, February 1966 – February 1967

Paris, France

Date: September 2026

Note on sources

This account consolidates correspondence between the author and Jerry Berggren (formerly crew chief and door gunner, Lift Section, C Troop, 1/9 Cavalry) dated 31 July 2018 to 2021; an email from Wayne George, crew chief of the C Troop aircraft on the night of 17 December 1966, written 2 August 2018 and forwarded to the author by Jerry Berggren; and the 1st Cavalry Division historical study “Battle in the 506 Valley, 17 December 1966,” by Captain Charles Sykes, Division Historian (classified CONFIDENTIAL; declassified under authority NND 927648).