“The Real Heroes Are Dead”

On this, the 18th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11, I’m re-posting a blog entry from two years ago regarding Rick Rescorla, whom I was privileged to know. It was originally published in The King’s Necktie on September 7, 2017 under the title The Voice of the Prophet.

At a time when US policy regarding Afghanistan and global terrorism is in chaos, years of painstaking negations with the Taliban were blown to bits by the president’s ego, the US Air Force is being used to line his pockets, and his administration is trying to finance a “border wall” by taking appropriated funds from overcrowded schools serving the children of US soldiers, I can’t think of anything new I can say that would commemorate today’s anniversary better than this.

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In November 1965, after what had thus far largely been a counterinsurgency against the guerrillas of the Viet Cong, US troops met North Vietnamese regulars in combat for the first time, amid the scrubby pines near a river in the Central Highlands of Pleiku Province. That place was the Ia Drang valley. In search of the enemy, an infantry battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) helicoptered into what turned out to be the basecamp of several regiments of the People’s Army of Vietnam, setting off a three day battle in which more than two hundred Americans and well over a thousand Vietnamese lost…