Every Captured NVA Officer Said The Same Thing About US Helicopter Crews

November 14th, 1965. The Ia Drang Valley, Central Highlands of South Vietnam. The 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry began landing at Landing Zone X-Ray at 10:48 in the morning. Sixteen Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopters in the first wave, more behind them through the afternoon. About four hundred and fifty men on the ground by evening. No road, no march, no warning. To the People's Army battalions waiting on the slopes of the Chu Pong massif, this had never been seen. By the time the campaign ended in late November, the 1st Air Cavalry Division had lost three hundred and five killed. American estimates of People's Army of Vietnam dead came in over three thousand five hundred, with less than half confirmed. Both sides claimed victory. The Americans named the new way of fighting "airmobile." The People's Army did what the People's Army always did after a fight. They wrote it down. Eight months later, in July of 1966, the U.S. Army stood up an office in Saigon called the Combined Document Exploitation Center. By the end of the war it held over two hundred thousand numbered document sets recovered from the bodies, packs, and base camps of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong dead. Its sister facility, the Combined Military Interrogation Center, had been running since October of 1965, processing prisoners and defectors. And from late 1964, in a separate Saigon field office, the RAND Corporation was running its own program, the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, which would produce two thousand three hundred and seventy-one interviews and sixty thousand pages of testimony before it closed at the end of 1968. Three archives. Three different cataloging systems. One subject that surfaced again and again, in the diary of a battalion commander, in the field notes of a province cadre, in the answers given by a captured private with no rank to lose.