The Ia Drang campaign provided the U.S. Army a remarkable–if dangerous–opportunity to demonstrate the merits of its newly developed airmobile tactics. The infantry, no longer restricted to the slow pace of marching into battle, could be inserted by helicopter at a moment’s notice wherever they were needed.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Vietnam Magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

An extensive training period ostensibly prepares pilots for combat flying. But flying in and out of Vietnam’s hot LZs, where dust, heat and the enemy worked in concert to bring down the fragile aluminum birds, it took a good pilot with nerves of steel and a special sense of duty. Major Willard Bennett, commander of Charlie, or C, Company, 229th Aviation Battalion (Assault Helicopter), 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), was just such a pilot, with the ability to think and react adeptly in the most intense combat situations. On a November 1965 night, while flying over the hell that the Ia Drang Valley had become, Bennett put on an airmobile show that the grunts on the ground would never forget. No portion of the Army’s airmobile training taught guts–pilots like Bennett provided that.

‘I never worried about getting shot and killed–whether that was because I was young or we were so well-trained I couldn’t say,’ Bennett recalled. ‘Getting shot in combat was just not something I really worried about. Flying in and out of hot LZs just came with the job.’ What Charlie Company’s commander worried about instead were the underpowered and occasionally unreliable engines of the Bell UH-1D Hueys and the equatorial heat that could sap the strength of American flying machines.

‘The Huey I flew on my first tour couldn’t carry a very big payload,’ Bennett said. ‘Generally with a crew of four, we could only lift five or six guys. You had to get a running start most of the time to get airborne, and so they required a larger landing zone. By my second tour all that had changed–the engines were much more powerful and much more reliable.’

Bennett’s Charlie Company was normally attached to the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry, ferrying the infantry to and from combat zones, supplying water and rations and, when it became too hot for the medevacs, ducking in for the wounded. Months before the Ia Drang campaign, Bennett was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for making an emergency night flight to an American forward artillery base on the mountain of Dak To, where a shell had cooked off and exploded in the barrel of a howitzer, critically wounding 17 men. When medevacs were turned back by dense fog that night, Bennett not only led his flight but also refused to turn back as long as U.S. troops remained in the field crying for help. Improvising in the air, Bennett called for troops on the ground to shoot flares from LZs along the way. Using this ingenious method, he navigated his way safely through the mountainous terrain to evacuate the wounded.

Many historians claim that the 230 American lives lost during the fighting at LZs Albany and X-ray versus the loss of more than 1,000 NVA soldiers by body count and 1,000 more estimated killed was a decided victory. Other scholars, however, claim the lessons taught were largely ignored and America was lured deeper into a war it could not win. If the fighting and its results proved to be a historical and military paradox, so did the enigmatic, 34-year-old major commanding Charlie Company.

As a student at Colorado A&M (now Colorado State University), Bennett had enrolled in the the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) to avoid the Vietnam draft. After graduation, having earned an artillery commission, he was sent to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where he ran into a fraternity brother stationed there for Army aviation training. ‘He was really sold on the program,’ Bennett said, ‘and it sounded good to me too.

‘The program required an additional year’s commitment, but I was young and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life just yet. Besides, I had just gotten married, and the extra $100 a month the Army was paying aviators looked awfully good just then.’

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to