As he lay prone and exhausted under a sweltering South Vietnam sun, fear rolling down with every drop of sweat, Bill Beck was ready to give up.Surrounded by People’s Army of Vietnam regulars, with only a shock of spindly grass for cover and AK-47 bullets buzzing all around like angry bees, Beck had every reason to be terrified to the point of paralysis.
But as he lay there on that sunny Sunday morning, boots — and everything else — on the ground with the first wave of the 1st Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 7th Calvary to reach Landing Zone X-Ray, Beck remembered what his high school football coach always said.
As vividly as if were sprawled on the Steelton-Highspire (Pa.) High School practice field instead of a desolate clearing in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands, Beck heard coach Bob Perugini’s voice ring through his head:
“Don’t just lay there, Beck. Get up off your ass and do something.”
What 22-year-old Bill Beck got up and did over the next two hours helped avert American disaster in the first major belt buckle-to-belt buckle engagement between U.S. Army and North Vietnamese regulars of the Vietnam War.
Part of a three-man M-60 machine gun crew with his buddy, Russell Adams, and an ammo bearer, Beck literally hit the ground running when the helicopter skids touched down in LZ X-Ray at 10:48 a.m. on Nov. 14, 1965 — 40 years ago Monday.
Soon, many of his fellow troopers were dead.
“When we first landed, I saw half a dozen guys get killed right in front and beside me before I ever saw the enemy,” Beck said. “All I saw was guys dropping. By the time we got to our position, it was just Russell and me.”
The team settled in on the extreme left flank of the football field-sized landing zone, a mere 50 yards for the base of a mountain called Chu Pong. Their responsibility was to help hold that shaky toehold until their commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Harold G. Moore, could get the rest of his approximately 450 men airlifted in.
They barely had time to breathe before many of the estimated 2,000 enemy soldiers using Chu Pong as a base camp came boiling down the mountainside and engulfed them.
Adams was the gunner that day and Beck his assistant. As such, the tall, lanky Pennsylvanian was supposed to feed the belts of 7.62-mm caliber bullets through the gun, point out targets and pray.
By the time Adams put their gun on the ground, however, their ammo bearer was nowhere to be seen, so that duty fell to Beck, too.
Within the fight’s first 15 minutes, he had to scramble to the rear-area command post for ammo.
On his return run, someone yelled “Grenade!” and a wood-handled projectile called a potato-masher rolled to a stop less than 6 feet in front of him. Beck tensed and prepared to hit the ground, but when the grenade exploded in a bright-white flash, it sent out shockwaves instead of lethal fragments, and he kept moving.
“If it had been a fragmentary grenade instead of a concussion grenade, I probably would have died right there,” Beck said.
As he continued the charge back to his position, Beck looked to his right, approximately 20 yards away and 50 yards behind Adams’ position, and saw a scene that typified the closeness of combat throughout the battle of Ia Drang.
There, just outside a dry creek bed, stood an anthill massive enough to support a clump of trees. On one side of the anthill, American GIs hunkered down. On the other, not five yards away, two NVA soldiers did the same.
Beck yelled as loud as he could to the GIs, but they couldn’t hear over the din. So he dropped the ammo boxes, took out the .45 pistol all M-60 gunners carried as backup, fired the full seven-round clip and saw both NVA go down.
Then he rejoined Adams, who had pushed out to the forwardmost position on the American line.
A few minutes later, Beck crawled no more than a first down’s length to his left to give first aid to a trooper who had been shot in the chest. Then he heard the cry, “Russell’s been hit!”
Beck dashed to his buddy, rolled him over and saw immediately that Adams was gravely injured. A round had pierced Adams’ steel pot and shattered his skull, a horrific wound that left him partially paralyzed to this day.
As his friend lay staring glass-eyed into the sky and trying to speak without words coming out, Beck had no time to render first aid, however.
Enveloped on three sides by the enemy with more coming, Beck had to jump on the M-60 and start blazing away, or neither had a chance.
For the next two hours, he went it alone — doing the work of three — re-supplied with ammo only once by a sergeant who worked his way through the withering fire. Even under those conditions, Beck never faltered.
In his 1992 New York Times best-selling book We Were Soldiers Once … and Young written with former United Press International war correspondent Joe Galloway, a retired Lt. Gen. Moore had high praise for Beck and the handful of soldiers who held that position under such overwhelming odds.
“Bill Beck and his buddies paid a terrible price, but virtually single-handily they kept the enemy from turning (the) left flank and driving a wedge between Alpha and Charlie companies,” Moore wrote.
Of Beck personally, an emotional Moore put it best in an interview on a 1993 ABC Day One special called We Were Young … and Brave which took him, Beck and others back to LZ X-Ray for a return visit.
“When his time came to perform for America and the men around him, Beck did the job,” Moore said.
Bill Beck grew up in Steelton, Pa., a town of 12,000 at the time five miles southeast of Harrisburg where many young men got their first summer jobs in the steel mill that ran nearly “the whole length of town” and often still were working there many summers later.
He played three sports at Steel-High as it was called because, at the behest of the coaches, all athletes played three sports to stay in shape year round.
“Satch” chose football, basketball and track & field and earned nine varsity letters from 1960 to 1962.
He was a good enough as a 6-foot-2, 175-pound tight end and defensive end in football to earn scholarship offers from Furman and several other colleges. He was a tough, hard-nosed rebounder with a good, “true hook shot” in basketball. But it was track & field that he loved most.
He threw the javelin and discus, long jumped and occasionally ran the 400 meters.
He averaged 189 feet throwing the javelin, second-best in school history. He also won the long jump event at several big invitational meets and finished third in the district meet one year with a jump of 20 feet, 1 3/4 inches.
“I liked track a lot because it was more of an individual sport,” Beck said. “It was still a team sport, but I could do something individually to contribute.
“Maybe the one point I earned for the team was enough to help win the meet. It was a team sport, but it was still one-on-one.”
Beck, an accomplished artist from an early age, eventually played college basketball on scholarship for The Art Institute of Pittsburgh and semi-pro football — for one game.
A friend of Beck’s was playing for the Verona (Pa.) Raiders, and, one Saturday, he convinced Beck and another friend to come to the game that night. He even invited them to ride the team bus to the game in Stubbinville, Ohio, and watch from the bench.
“When we get there, they start passing out uniforms, and they say ‘Suit up,’” Beck said. “There was only like 13 or 14 guys that showed up, and it turns out my buddy knew that. That’s why he convinced us to go.
“They promised us $20 a game, so we suited up and played. Afterwards, the coach didn’t want to pay us.”
He did go home with a small bone broken in his foot and a limp. Plus, he got in a fist fight with the other team’s halfback in the middle of the field following the game.
“That was my semi-pro career,” Beck said.
The scrappiness, the rough-and-tumble hardness, the desire to succeed individually to help the team collectively he developed as a high school athlete served Beck well in the jungles of Vietnam a few years later, however.
Looking back, Beck says the parallels between his sporting life and his military life were eerily similar.
“It’s almost too parallel to a game,” Beck said. “We had great officers — great coaches — who were calling the plays, and we did what they asked us to do.
“We trained as a team, just like high school or college. And we did everything we were trained to do.”
In the end, the scoreboard at Ia Drang read America 1, North Vietnam 0. Oh, but if it had only been that simple … and painless.
“Had there not been horror and death and destruction involved, it would have been a great game,” Beck said. “To go back and look and say ‘How did we play? Did we win or lose? What was the final score?’
“But this was a game of life or death. There, if you didn’t perform well, you died.”
When he later heard what his younger brother had to do to survive that day in the Ia Drang, John Beck was not surprised. His “lanky, raw-boned strong guy” of a brother had a street fighter’s reputation at home and the toughness to back it up, though he seldom had to.
He also had the reputation for being the guy you could count on most when the action got hot.
“If you were on his football team playing defense and he was next to you … he’d be the type of guy that you’d be glad to have next to you,” John Beck said. “You knew that he was going to do everything he could 110 percent to keep you from losing the game. That was his greatest attribute.”
From Midget League football on up, John Beck watched his brother try to bury people with his blocking if he was playing offense in football or “tear their head off” if he was playing defense. Saw him control the boards in the basketball with a fierce desire to grab every rebound. Saw him strain and stretch for every last inch when throwing the javelin or long jumping.
Saw him, in many cases, succeed by sheer determination.
John Beck, for 39 years a teacher, coach and athletics director at Steel-High himself, believes that type determination in some way helped his brother survive that first bloody day at LZ X-Ray.
“I can just see him behind that gun with those people coming at him and him just digging those heels in and doing whatever he could do to survive,” John Beck said. “If anybody I knew would have been there and not given up, he would have been the one because I know he was a fighter.
“When it comes to being killed in combat, it’s the luck of the draw for sure. (But) maybe somebody who didn’t have that background or didn’t have that attitude doesn’t make it.”
Upon his return from Vietnam, Bill Beck and his brother went to a basketball game one night in Reading, Pa. At the game, he saw Coach Perugini, who had left Steel-High to be the athletics director at Reading.
Beck went up to Perugini and thanked him for what he’d done that helped his former player survive that day in X-Ray.
“I told him that even with all the grenades and bullets flying, I didn’t think about my mom, my dad, or my brother, I thought about my old football coach,” Beck said. “He was so thrilled. I was just so grateful to him for the leadership that he had. I was so proud I was able to tell him that story.”
These days, Beck is retired from his career as a commercial artist and living in Steelton with his wife, Jennifer. As a retiree, he spends a good deal of time in his home office and every time he sits at his desk, he sees something there that reminds him — often of Coach Perugini.
It’s a quotation — he believes it came from someone at West Point — the former athlete and soldier loves dearly.
It reads, “On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds which, in other years and on other fields, will bear the fruit of victory.”
Bill Beck believes he’s living proof it’s true.
