Battle of the Ia Drang Valley

In November 1965 the US Army put helicopter-borne troops into a clearing called LZ X-Ray at the foot of the Chu Pong massif, where North Vietnamese regulars were massed. Three days of close fighting followed, with American artillery and air strikes landing close to their own lines. A day later, a second column marching to another clearing was ambushed and suffered heavily. Both sides claimed lessons from the battle, and both took them to heart.

The Ia Drang is remembered through Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway's book We Were Soldiers Once... and Young and the film based on it, which tell the American side vividly. The casualty ratios usually quoted come from US body counts, a method later seen as unreliable, and the Vietnamese accounts differ on losses. The fighting is also remembered in Vietnam, where the People's Army treated it as proof it could fight the Americans and sustain the war. Historians still ask whether either side drew the right lesson.