Rick Rescorla: Ia Drang Hero

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I heard his voice long before I ever met him: ‘Gaaaa-rry Owen, Garry Owen, Garry Owen, / In the Valley of Montana all alone / There’ll be better days to be for the 7th Cavalry / When we charge again for dear old Garry Owen….’

It was the summer of 1995. I was a company commander in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry — George Armstrong Custer’s old outfit — and an audiotape made at An Khe in the spring of 1966 had found its way into my hands. ‘Garry Owen’ is the motto of the 7th Cavalry. The voice pounding through on the scratchy tape was a voice out of the pages of history for me — the voice of Rick Rescorla.

As a 7th Cavalry man I had heard of Rescorla. He was made famous by the account of his actions during the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965, the Americans’ first major battle of the Vietnam War. He became a legend in the unit for his behavior in combat, and his face became an American icon when a young reporter named Peter Arnett snapped his photo. That photo became the cover of the book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway, two who were there. The book, and now the movie, We Were Soldiers, tell the story of the fight. Rescorla was a second lieutenant then, but was already experienced in combat.

Born in Cornwall, on the English coast, Rescorla had seen man’s darker side already, first from service with the British army on Cyprus, and later in a’security force’ in Rhodesia. The epitome of the young warrior, he was the sort that England seems to have bred in abundance for centuries: the type of young man who in times past went forth from Britain and created an empire upon which the sun never set. England happened to be fresh out of wars in the 1960s, so Rescorla became an American and fought in ours.

In 1965 Rescorla knew war. His men did not, yet. To steady them, to break their concentration away from the fear that may grip a man when he realizes there are hundreds of men very close by who want to kill him, Rescorla sang. Mostly he sang dirty songs that would make a sailor blush. Interspersed with the lyrics was the voice of command: ‘Fix bayonets…on liiiiine…reaaaa-dy…forward.’ It was a voice straight from Waterloo, from the Somme, implacable, impeccable, impossible to disobey. His men forgot their fear, concentrated on his orders and marched forward as he led them straight into the pages of history: 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry…’Hard Corps.’

When I started interviewing these veterans of my regiment decades later, I was struck by the emotions Rescorla’s men still felt for him. His old radio telephone operator (RTO), Sam Fantino, 30 years later still seemed to maintain that constant ‘where-the-hell-is-the-lieutenant-now’ look out of the corner of his eye. When a lieutenant and his RTO click, the radioman takes on a host of new roles — part radioman, part scrounge, part mother hen looking over ‘his’ lieutenant. With Fantino and Rescorla it was something special to watch. Many other survivors of the platoon acted the same way. Over time, I came to believe that they would have followed Rescorla in an assault upon the gates of Hell, for he did not order, he led.

After his time as a rifle platoon leader, Rescorla technically became a liaison officer. But in reality he was running a sort of miniature, brigade-level LRRP (long range reconnaissance patrol) team for Hal Moore, who had by then been promoted from comman-der of 1-7 Cavalry to commander of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division. They called it a Ground Reconnaissance Infiltration Team, though Rescorla told me they preferred to call his group a GRIT patrol. One hundred fifty men tried out, from whom Rescorla chose 15 for a trial patrol. From those 15, three men were selected to accompany Rick on the ground, one of them a former British SAS member. Walking deep into areas such as the ‘Crow’s Foot,’ well ahead of the rest of the brigade, Rescorla and his team bridged the gap between division recon and bat-talion scouts. That was his idea of a ‘cushy staff job.’

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, People, Vietnam War

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