Medal of Honor Pilot Bruce Crandall, 1st Cavalry Veteran of Ia Drang (Full Interview)

he was obviously a helicopter

pilot

and there were heavy casualties. I was the aviation support commander for that battle and we were planning to raise that unit, it was the first or the seventh and then I would raise two other battalions and put them in. about blocking positions on the Cambodian border to keep people who had been attacking our special forces camps in the country. We were trying to keep them out of the country. We wanted to eliminate them before they could leave the country and return. and do it again anyway the fight was planned to the east and they ended the main fight was to the west, the mountain was coming up and we lost, I think 301 dead in total in those few days that this happened, it wasn't just a x-ray, that was it and that was the most casual loss any unit had lost since the first Korean War.

I think about Pork Chop Hill, I think we lost more, but we set the high standard for battlefield casualties in Vietnam for that date and we learned a lot of lessons in that battle, some of them were still relearning, you know, we have to trust. the resources and the people that are on the field trust them to do the job, let them loose if they attack you from the right, you can shoot to the right, it doesn't matter where it's from and we still have a There is no problem allowing that kind of freedom, but we have to allow it because what happened in X-Ray was that those people who supposedly left Cambodia pounced on them and beat up those two units in the second of the week. the 7th lost more people than when Custer hit it and the first of the 7th was the first in the battle were those who went into x-ray but the second of the 7th went cross-country on the 16th of x-ray to Albany to return to secure the landing zone after the B-52 attack and by the time the 2nd and 7th reached Albany, a B-52 attack hit the X-rays and then we were leaving.

For the second of the seventh and the first of the fifth to come back and clear the battlefield because their second seventh was wiped out, I think they lost 155 dead, 125 wounded and that caused everyone to leave that area. We can't afford to keep doing that, we have to find another way to do this because you can't lose that many people and the division commander brought us back to reorganize and prepare to do it a different way, so uh, we ended up with the lessons learned that you have to let them go because if they had let us go to attack those people coming down that hill, we could hit it with the artillery, the artillery that was shooting with x-rays could hit those people and we could hit it with bombers, we could hit him with everything if the discussion about whether he was in the country or not was resolved and the discussion regarding our division was resolved.

They weren't in Vietnam They were in Cambodia I'm a map where I've been doing it for 10 years before I went to Vietnam You can't tell me where that border is That's jungle There's nothing up there that gives you a reference point of any kind, the top of the mountain, you could, you could, you could say, okay, the top of that mountain, this side is in Vietnam, that side is Cambodia, but to say that in that jungle you can know where it is just no, you can't and that's why there are many discussions between brazil and uh venezuela between venezuela and french guiana between venezuela and colombia venezuela shares a lot of border and jungle and they have many disagreements with their border countries because it is difficult to know where that border is and if let's say it is a river wherever it changes from the shore so the arguments are valid um I'm not saying that Venezuela is wrong that Brazil is right nobody knows you you just don't know where that damn border is It was when they established it for the first time, sir, when those casualties fell, I think there were efforts initial attempts to evacuate the wounded, but eventually orders came that the fire was too hot in the rear, they did not do any medical evacuation that their commander gave.

They were given a directive that they would not do medical evacuation on a lc that was hot and a lz that is red, a green landing zone was one where for five minutes there was no fire, they did not understand that I took two of their birds and that offended. That commander took a good look at me that night and strangled me on a cot and threatened me and I thought he was an enemy and it occurred to me to point a gun at him. I put it on film but he showed it when I got out of the helicopter, but he came after me for taking his people to a hot landing zone and he should never be in charge if you just told his guys to do what you think. which is correct, they have done what we were doing and we.

It would have been twice as much medevac or half the time and I would have been busy doing medevac and if I had finally removed all the seats from my helicopter that were in the cargo compartment because I couldn't do medevac and I hadn't been able to. he put them there with the seats there and the general says why did he do that and I told him he doesn't think the infantry are sitting in those seats when we attack anyway, don't they have seat belts? Sitting there like they're in the states, they're at the doors and they've got their feet on the skates and when we level off they're gone, I don't have to tell them to get off and I'm not going. sit on the floor, wait for them to take off their seat belts and just check their seats to see if they left anything behind.

If they shoot me, I want them out so we can reach an agreement. You can sit in the doors of my helicopter all day and I will take the wounded on deck and not long ago you needed a general officer's signature to sit outside the helicopter, talk about that a little more, you went back to a hot area time and time again, you and my partner Ed Freeman got the

medal

, that's right, talk about how you communicated with each other, how you decided this had to be done, there was no other option when the fifth one left, you had six people. shot from my plane three dead and three wounded my crew chief shot in the throat the radio operator of the infantry company died anyway I on the way back and I knew that that lz had really gone to hell because there were people shooting at me from right outside my plane it seemed like they were as close as the trees and I was very close to the trees because it was only an eight ship LC at the time we later expanded it to 20 but I had to land quite close to the trees and these guys are shooting people from my plane with hits to the head, so they shoot pretty accurately on the way back anyway.

I called ahead and said I wanted all my commanders, every plane commander on my plane when I hit the ground and I canceled the second aid plane and sent them back and when we came back I didn't mean I sent two helicopters to play with me because no game stroke could play with me I had no more ammunition, I had already taken everything. So we had to play hit again to get ammo to carry and I figured all I was going to need was two helicopters. Well, of course, that was too short and when I came back, the commanders came over and I asked them. volunteers to go with me I said I want someone to blow my cover so there will be two birds up there instead of one because if something happens you need to know where it happened and if a guy goes down into the jungle you want to be able to get him out of there as quickly as possible and another helicopter can provide suppressive fire and do all the things you need anyway Ed Freeman volunteered now that Ed had been my boss in Panama and wanted to do the mission he did.

I don't want me to go, he said no, stay, I'll take it, I said no, I'm the commander, I'm going to go, I'll find out what the hell is going on there and he says, well you should stay. here and I told him, look, you are no longer my boss, he said that I am in command here because he had been my boss in Panama, he was not promoted and I was, and he did not have to serve for me, we had a great relationship, no one on my team knew that he He had been my boss at some point or had been passed over for a promotion, but he volunteered to serve, so he finally understood that I would lead him and said, "I'm going in and I shouldn't have taken him because he was an older guy with the rest of him, so he took my third in command.

He'll take George Hill, he was senior. I have no problem with that, so Ed was just a captain, he was my first platoon commander and Ed Wong Jim. Wall was my second platoon commander, anyway, we take off and I call Moore when I'm there a couple miles away and I'm listening to all this on their radios once I know what the hell is going on I hear his people yelling I'm out of power. ammo I need ammo and I need more infantry I need support and I can't do anything I'm not going to get troops there when they're shooting from the eight planes I started with.

He had four that were still flyable and he was flying them. If they were shot at, they were just shot hard enough that they were losing fuel on the binding controls or something that kept me going. blow them up again if they didn't have that leaky field or binding controls tape so we knew where the new holes were and would blow them up. I flew the same plane three times, I think that day was the first plane I flew. I flew twice and ended up with 22 flights and I had logged into that bird in the morning, so my name was in the book and I think that's how they find out how many flights I did, but we did a lot more than that was just five miles, that's two and a half minutes and here we go 120.

So you're talking about seven minutes round trip, eight minutes depending on how long it takes you at the landing zone, so you're not there. We didn't spend much time and ended up getting 70 people living off of the people who took Medivac and I think we would have had a lot more than that if we had the Medevac unit doing it. Also and on my second tour we took care of that medical evacuation policy. They no longer had a green landing zone requirement. We have a commander there who allowed his people to do what they needed to do.

It's a shame you found out in combat. What can go wrong in combat? It's pretty late to figure it out and you can't train for it and figure it out. I don't care what you do at the training base, it's not the same and we should. Doing this is as hard on the troops as we can get in training because you don't get any of it, you wear them down, you take away their interest in the military, but what do you gain by just breaking their asses? uh, working with them all night and all day and training in the jungle or in the desert, whatever you don't earn that much, you should train in the desert, you should train in the jungle, but train for that facility, that guy configuration, but don't make it as hard as possible on the troops and that's what we do: we teach the troops that hardship is meaningless.

Teach them to look for generators for electrical equipment. Teach them to know where the air force supply depots are. get equipment that they can use when they get there they should have told us where we were going because the chainsaws would have been mine. I would have bought chainsaws and electric generators and Home Depot. I just spent ten thousand dollars of my own money. knowing that because I would have sold those things to get my money back and still have a lot left because that's what we needed and we didn't have it, we weren't allowed to bring chainsaws to the base.

Camp out and cut down all those trees. We had to do it with axes and machetes. The machete was the biggest tool we had at my level. That's the wrong way to do business. Teach troops how to live well. You showed them how to live. live well and your heroism was rewarded many years later, but rewarded anyway, yes that's a better way to do it, it's the same thing we made some commanders think that killing enemy soldiers is the key, that's nonsense , the body count shouldn't even be. It shouldn't even be considered anymore because you're doing a body count for someone in the Pentagon who wants a body count for someone at the top level, that proves that we're doing something that shows that we're effective when we went to Afghanistan to Iraq.

We had all these Iraqi soldiers, tanks and equipment lined up along the way and we just wiped them out. What do we gain from that? Probably a million Arabs hated us more because it was shown on their television as well as ours. Why all we had to do was crawl past them and then they would still have been there? The soldiers in the army are not people you need to kill, they are the Saddams, you need to kill their people like that, but you don't have to kill everyone you face, you need those people to take charge when you take command, when you take command in the country, you need those soldiers to be your security forces and stuff, we did it in Germany, George C.

Marshall. General Marshall said that they are no longer our enemy, the Italians are no longer our enemy, we are going to build the economies, we are going to rebuild Europe and he took eHe did that and that's what you have to do. you have to plan to convert them don't kill them killing them only makes you kill my children I'm going to be mad at you