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Moore after the engagement, reports that “throughout the initial assault phase, Col. Moore refused three times to leave the battle and meet with generals in Saigon.Ī citation for the Distinguished Service Cross, awarded to Gen. Galloway, a reporter for the United Press International wire service who was present for most of the battle, later said that Gen. Moore led the initial assaults on the North Vietnamese positions himself, and remained at the battle’s front lines until his battalion was relieved after three days of fierce, close-combat fighting. Moore set about avoiding the fate of his predecessor.Īpplying a “first in, last out” approach to combat leadership, Gen. Sizing up the situation at Landing Zone X-Ray, as the Ia Drang clearing was called, Gen. Moore’s troops sometimes referred to their blond-haired commander as “Yellow Hair” - Custer’s nickname. The American forces’ position, reporters and military historians later wrote, was not unlike that of George Custer, whose troops were surprised, surrounded and slaughtered at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. They soon found themselves opposed by more than 3,000 North Vietnamese troops who had been hidden in mountainous terrain alongside the clearing. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his leadership during the Battle of Ia Drang, one of the earliest and bloodiest engagements of the Vietnam War. He and the 457 men under his command were there to track North Vietnamese Army units and search for a possible enemy base. Moore, then a lieutenant colonel, stepped off a Huey helicopter and onto a football-field-sized clearing in South Vietnam’s Ia Drang Valley. Sporting a bulldog face and a Southern accent acquired from a childhood in small-town Kentucky, he developed a reputation as an exceptional combat leader during the Korean War and in the early stages of the Vietnam War - no more so than in the Battle of Ia Drang, the first major engagement between American and North Vietnamese forces. At least one jump resulted in his being dragged along the ground by an airplane. Moore’s military career spanned three wars and multiple continents, beginning with a posting in Japan during the American occupation after World War II and a stint at Fort Benning, Ga., where he tested parachutes and parachuting equipment on more than 130 test jumps. Moore suffered a stroke last week but did not provide additional details. In a Facebook post, his family said that Gen. and Young” and in a film adaptation starring Mel Gibson, died Feb. Hal Moore, an Army lieutenant general whose leadership in one of the earliest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War saved scores of lives and was memorialized in the book “ We Were Soldiers Once.