TV REVIEW : Vietnam’s Defining Event

One of the many qualities that seems to separate the Vietnam War story from previous U.S. battle histories is the lack of the indelible event that defined the soldier’s experience. Vietnam, apparently, had no Antietam, no Battle of the Bulge, that encapsulated the best and worst in those who were in the war.

With tonight’s edition of “Day One,” titled “They Were Young and Brave” (8 p.m. on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), that perception should be dramatically changed. Combining the immediacy of the best of TV’s Vietnam coverage with a sobering narrative to match a Civil War account by Bruce Catton, this Forrest Sawyer-hosted account of the pivotal Battle of Ia Drang tells two powerful stories at once.

First is the montage of memories of those--American and Vietnamese--who were at Ia Drang, an area in western Vietnam near the key North Vietnamese supply line of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Second is the genesis of the disastrous U.S. military escalation, for although the eventual outcome of Ia Drang was a U.S. fiasco and massacre, U.S. leadership used it to justify a jungle war of attrition against a guerrilla force. From victory to defeat to governmental distortion, Ia Drang may be the symbolic event of the Vietnam War.

The air cavalry squad led by Lt. Col. Hal Moore in late 1965 became the first and most spectacular experiment in the U.S. attempt to defeat the North Vietnamese by moving ground troops by air. Moore’s men unknowingly landed in the Ia Drang Valley next to a key North Vietnamese supply base, and were outnumbered 10-to-1. Despite this, the battle on Nov. 14 ultimately swayed in the U.S. favor, thanks to air support.

Nov. 15 was another matter. A foolish maneuver with a fresh squadron that included then-private and now ABC reporter Jack Smith led the group into a grisly ambush. Smith and his surviving buddies, including Capt. George Forrest (whose heroics possibly prevented a complete wipeout) return to the valley clearing, vividly recalling the tragedy. Smith’s shattering memories include him playing dead and watching as napalm from U.S. planes dropped like liquid death on a field with dying troops on both sides.

These former enemies, including North Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Huu An, embrace at the battlefield site, aware as perhaps no one else of the significance of these two days. An says that his army knew from this point on that it could outlast the Americans; Moore and his men shudder that their own army, in a cynical case of disinformation, turned the bloody defeat into a “victory.” Their faces, along with the revealing archive film and photos, tell the real story.