The enemy began to walk a fierce mortar barrage through the LZ, and Bennett pulled pitch and executed a short hop to another spot, followed by Jayne. ‘It just seemed like the thing to do,’ Bennett said in retrospect. ‘My crew chief and gunner were still on the ground and had to wade through the tall grass and continued loading wounded. The mortars were falling all over the place. Right about then, [the] fuel warning light lit up.’ Amid the fierce mortar barrage, the clatter of rounds punching holes in the aircraft and the confusion of the radio and cries of the wounded, he made a quick calculation. ‘I knew that when the fuel panel started to flicker yellow, that meant we only had 20 minutes of fuel left,’ he recalled. ‘If we beelined it back to Pleiku, that was probably close to 15 minutes.’ Bennett coolly eyed the flickering yellow lights and waited as the battle raged on around him until the wounded were dragged aboard.

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‘We loaded everybody we could,’ Bennett said. ‘We’d be lucky on a hot day to get away with five to six people on with a crew of four, but I think we must have gotten more that night.’

Finally Bennett and Jayne (who would also be awarded the Silver Star for the night’s actions) lifted their groaning Hueys up and out of the tiny LZ. ‘Together, I think we got out 14 to 15,’ Bennett said.

Now Bennett’s attention focused on the fuel warning lights. He raced back to Pleiku and sat down on the main air strip, where an aid station was located. ‘I gave the order to shut down the helicopters right there,’ said Bennett. ‘I knew if we lifted off and tried to hover over to our area, we would never make it.’

It was 0200–only two hours had passed since Bennett had been shaken awake. It would take another 34 years before the Army would award Bennett a much-deserved Silver Star in 1999 for his gallantry that night in the Ia Drang Valley.

The battle at LZ Albany added the names of 151 Americans to a growing list of those killed in Vietnam. Another 121 were wounded. The LZ was abandoned the next day. One American, reported as missing in action, was recovered four days later when he waved down a passing helicopter.

In terms of numbers on a chart, the Ia Drang campaign was an American victory, but for commanders like Bennett, the victory was bitter. More than 300 American dead had soured the taste of success.

Brent Swager interviewed Army Colonel Willard Bennett at his home in St. Petersburg, Fla. Suggestions for further reading: We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway (Random House); ‘Ambush at Albany,’ as told by S. Lawrence Gwin, Jr., Vietnam Magazine (October 1990); and ‘Death in the Ia Drang Valley,’ by Jack Smith, Saturday Evening Post, January 28, 1967.

This article was originally published in the October 1999 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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