As the rotor blades of the UH-1D Huey helicopter — a slick, as it was called in Vietnam — rotated in the darkness overhead, Captain Gregory Dillon looked down to see hundreds of twinkling lights on the mountainside growing ever closer beneath his feet.People’s Army of Vietnam soldiers carried the lights to brighten their way as they rushed down trails beaten into a mountain called Chu Pong towards a killing zone.
Fourteen hours earlier, from high above in a command & control helicopter, Dillon had directed units of the 1st Battalion of the 7th Calvary as they went into battle for the first time in a place called Ia Drang. Now he was about to join them in Landing Zone X-Ray … if a green or reddish-orange tracer bullet with his name on it didn’t find him first.
As incredible as it may seem, however, he wasn’t concerned about the enemy lead coming at him. The deadly snake of lights slithering down the mountainside left him too mesmerized.
“I wasn’t paying attention to (the tracers) so much,” Dillon said. “I saw the lights coming down the mountain. I knew that they were reinforcing and that we were going to have a big attack in the morning.
“When I got on the ground, the first thing I did was start calling in artillery on the side of that hill. And I told everybody, ‘They haven’t left. They’re coming back in the morning, and you better be ready for it.’”
After Dillon finally set foot in LZ X-Ray that night, he would not leave for almost four days.
Over those next 96 hours, Dillon — the battalion’s operations officer, or S3 — along with Colonel Harold G. Moore and their Air Cav troopers, would learn up close of the skill, tenacity and brutality of the PAVN soldiers.
INTO THE IA DRANG
True to a promise he had made months before during the battalion’s graduation exercise at Fort Benning, Ga., Moore was the first off the chopper skid and on the ground that Sunday morning, Nov. 14, 1965.
What brought Moore and his men to the Ia Drang Valley, just more than a mile from the Cambodian border, was perhaps the first of many head-in-the-sand orders issued by military higher-ups in Vietnam with the power to command, but not the aptitude.
On Nov. 13, 1965, Moore’s superior officer had given him a simple directive. He was to airlift his battalion into an area at the base of the Chu Pong massif, find the enemy and kill him.
No true estimate of the strength of the enemy forces in the area was available. No exact fix on the enemy’s position. No real military intelligence of any kind.
They simply were to fly to a spot marked as an enemy base camp by a big red star on an intelligence map hanging on the headquarters wall and take their chances.
So it was in the early-morning hours of Nov. 14 that Moore issued a verbal order to his command staff to proceed with the assault into LZ X-ray. In turn, Dillon committed Moore’s verbal order to paper without having to be told to do so.
It was the mark of a top-notch S3 and U.S. soldier, Moore said.
“Matt Dillon was my ‘3’for two years in both battalion and brigade command, and he was simply superb,” Moore wrote in We Were Soldiers Once … and Young. “He was blessed with a clear head and quick mind, and he was a people person.”
‘I’LL RUN IT AGAIN’
“Matt” Dillon — yes, his Army buddies called him that after the sheriff on Gunsmoke — traces his military roots to the University of Alabama Army ROTC program and, before that, the Crimson Tide track team and a friend from back home in New Rochelle, N.Y.
Dillon had grown up in New Rochelle a fan of all sports, but he particularly liked hockey. He was pretty good at it, too.
As a forward, he started for his high school team as a freshman and, as a senior winger, played on a squad good enough to beat some college teams.
Running was what he truly loved, however, and it would take him from New Rochelle to Miami to Tuscaloosa to Vietnam.
One day in junior high physical education class, Dillon had been told to run a mile, so he did and finished it in the mid 4:40s. That grabbed the attention of the track coach who happened to be watching — scouting Dillon — because the New York state high school record at that time was 4:42-something.
“He came up to me, and he said, ‘You must have cut inside the white line somewhere,’” Dillon said. “I said, ‘I’ll run it again.’”
Thirty minutes later he did, and the results were much the same.
By the time he finished high school in 1952, Dillon held the state cross country record (2 1/2 miles) and the mile record, had run in the prestigious Penn Relays in Philadelphia and had a track scholarship to the University of Miami.
There he soon learned the football coach scouted the track team. And he demanded that someone with Dillon’s speed play football.
So the 150-pound speedster suited up for the Hurricanes and promptly injured his ankle and sprained his left knee.
“I got beat up something terrible,” Dillon said.
That’s when he started looking for another option and found it at Alabama. A friend from home named Jimmy Christiansen had gone there the year before, and he told his buddy he loved it. So Dillon packed his trunk and transferred to Tuscaloosa, where the pattern for his adult life was put into place.
He sat out the 1954 season and joined the team full-time in 1955, just in time to run for a new coach.
Harold “Red” Drew had stepped down as football coach after the ’54 season, and he took over the track team and coached it in both of Dillon’s two seasons.
He met a lovely girl named Gail Johnston, who would be his wife for 48 years and mother of his two children.
And while competing for the track team, Dillon also fulfilled an obligation of all male Alabama students at that time to join ROTC. He chose Army ROTC, and that choice became his career — one that saw him serve 24 years, achieve the rank of colonel, pull two tours in Vietnam and earn four Silver Stars, seven Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.
After graduating from Alabama in 1956, he took a job teaching and coaching football, track & field and girls basketball at a high school in Cobb County, Ga.
“They paid me $100 extra for each of the sports for the year,” Dillon said.
When he joined the military full-time in 1957, his athletic background and that year of coaching helped make him a better officer, Dillon believes.
“The military is a lot like coaching,” Dillon said. “When you’re a leader of a group of men, whether it’s a football team or a basketball team … combat is the same way. You are leading people, and you’re exulting them to do their job and to do it well. If they do, you achieve like a team would.
“I think it gave me a big advantage being in sports and that one year that I coached before I went into the military. I just think athletes make better combat officers.”
TRUE TEST
The ability of officers and grunts alike was tested like never before at LZ X-Ray, which, it can be argued, was the Vietnam War’s most decisive battle.
The Army had developed the concept of using helicopters to insert infantry far into enemy territory and put it into practice for the first time in the Ia Drang.
Outnumbered five to one by some estimates, Moore’s 1/7 Air Calvary unit put a total of 431 officers and men on the ground during its time in X-Ray, according to the official after-action report.
Afterward, Moore estimated his unit killed, wounded or captured 1,855 NVA soldiers at a loss of 79 Americans killed and 121 wounded.
President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara looked at the bottom line, deemed the losses “acceptable” and embarked on a war of attrition that kept the U.S. embroiled in Vietnam for the next 10 years.
Had Moore’s units been overrun, or had the country’s leaders been on the ground with the troops during those terrifying hours, had they seen the horrors and his fellow troopers saw, they might have chosen differently, Dillon said.
“I was in the unit for almost two years before we went to Vietnam, so I knew all those NCOs and all the young soldiers,” Dillon said. “We’d played softball and touch football and all that together.
“(So) seeing the bodies of all the people that I knew very well being taken out, that was pretty tough.”
CRIMSON AT HEART
These days, Dillon is retired and living in Colorado Spring, Colo., seven miles from the front gate of the United States Air Force Academy and two of his favorite golf courses in the world.
He plays five to six times per week — weather permitting — and consistently cards scores lower than his 72 years. He’s also got eight dogs that keep him occupied.
Oh, yeah, he has one other passion … the Alabama Crimson Tide.
He frequently visits Rolltide.com and subscribes to Bama Magazine and TiderInsider.com, where one sometimes can find him in a chat room on Monday night with other Tide fans.
Even in the midst of marking the 40th anniversary with his 1st Calvary comrades at a reunion in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, he found a television set to watch the Alabama-LSU game.
After all, once a UA athlete, always a UA athlete.
