On the afternoon of 14 November 1965, the clearing called LZ X-Ray was the most dangerous patch of ground in South Vietnam. North Vietnamese machine guns covered it from the slopes of the Chu Pong massif. The medical evacuation helicopters would not go in. Two unarmed UH-1D Huey transports did, again and again, until there was nobody left to carry out.

Their pilots were Major Bruce Crandall, call sign Ancient Serpent 6, and his wingman, Captain Ed "Too Tall" Freeman. Between them, according to the Army and to President George W. Bush's later account, they evacuated some 70 wounded soldiers and flew in the ammunition and water that kept a surrounded American battalion alive.

Both men eventually received the Medal of Honor, Freeman in 2001 and Crandall in 2007. It took the Army more than 35 years to get there. Crandall, the last of the two, died on 31 May 2026 at the age of 93.

The air cavalry goes to war

The 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) was a new kind of army unit. It grew out of the 11th Air Assault Division, a test formation at Fort Benning, Georgia, where officers like Crandall had spent the early 1960s working out how to move infantry into battle by helicopter. In 1965 the idea went to Vietnam.

Ia Drang was its first real test, and the first major battle between the US Army and the People's Army of Vietnam. It is remembered as the first large-scale helicopter air assault of the war, and also as the first time the B-52 Stratofortress was used in a tactical support role.

On the morning of 14 November, Crandall's flight of 16 helicopters began lifting Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore's 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, from Plei Me into a clearing roughly the size of a misshapen football field. Only about eight Hueys could fit in it at once, so roughly 450 men had to be shuttled in several lifts, each carrying a little less than a company.

The American Veterans Center film on Bruce Crandall and his flights into LZ X-Ray.

Landing into the guns

The early lifts were routine. On the fourth, the helicopters began taking fire. By the time they had refuelled and returned for the fifth, the North Vietnamese had X-Ray targeted. As Crandall and the first eight aircraft landed, the fire was so intense that the ground commander ordered the second group of eight to abort.

According to President Bush's account at the 2007 ceremony, three soldiers on Crandall's own helicopter were killed and three more wounded on one of those flights. Instead of lifting off, he held the Huey on the ground in the line of fire so that four wounded men could be loaded aboard, then flew them back to safety.

At that point his mission was finished. Moving wounded was the job of the dedicated medevac crews, who flew under their own rules. Crandall later explained that medevac pilots were not allowed to land until a landing zone had been "green", meaning not under fire, for five minutes. X-Ray was nowhere near green.

Two unarmed Hueys

Crandall moved his base of operations forward to Artillery Firebase Falcon to shorten the flight to the landing zone, and asked for a volunteer to come with him. Ed Freeman stepped forward. Their helicopters were unarmed transports, not gunships.

Freeman had already survived one famous fight. As a first sergeant in an Army engineer company that fought as infantry in Korea, he went through the Battle of Pork Chop Hill as one of only 14 survivors out of 257 men in the opening stages, and earned a battlefield commission. When he applied for flight training, he was told that at six feet four inches he was too tall to be a pilot. The nickname stuck for the rest of his career.

All day the two Hueys shuttled between Falcon and X-Ray. In went ammunition, water and medical supplies. Out came the wounded. Every landing was into a small emergency landing zone within 100 to 200 metres of a perimeter where the infantry were holding off repeated attacks, and every approach was flown under fire.

Crandall wore out aircraft as well as himself. President Bush said he flew three different helicopters that day, two of them so badly damaged that they could not stay in the air. Crandall's citation credits him with 22 flights, most under intense enemy fire, before he left the battlefield only after all possible service had been rendered to the infantry battalion.

Freeman's citation records 14 separate rescue missions after the medevac helicopters refused to fly into the area, and an estimated 30 seriously wounded soldiers evacuated, some of whom would not have survived without him. His flights, it says, had a direct impact on the outcome of the battle.

Combat footage from LZ X-Ray, November 1965, shared by author Mike Guardia.

How many flights, how many men

The numbers from that day are not perfectly consistent, and it is worth being honest about why. Crandall's Medal of Honor citation gives 22 flights. In his 2007 remarks, President Bush said Crandall flew into X-Ray 14 times and that the two pilots spent more than 14 hours in the air. Freeman's citation gives 14 rescue missions. Some of the difference is simply what counts as a "flight": every trip out and back, or only the landings under fire.

On the wounded, the sources agree more closely. The Army's 2007 announcement said the two pilots flew more than 70 casualties to safety, President Bush said some 70, and later reporting by the Association of the United States Army and Task & Purpose uses the same figure. Freeman's share is put at about 30.

Moore made the same point in his own words to the Army before the ceremony: without Crandall's extraordinarily heroic effort that day, he said, "we on that field would have gone down." The battle at X-Ray lasted until 16 November. Moore's battalion held.

A medal 36 years late

Recognition came slowly. Crandall was first awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Freeman's nomination for the Medal of Honor stalled against a rule requiring nominations within two years of the action, a time limit that was lifted in 1995.

When Crandall learned that both pilots were being considered, President Bush later recounted, he asked for his own name to be withdrawn. If only one of them could have the Medal of Honor, he wanted it to go to his wingman. Freeman received it in the East Room of the White House on 16 July 2001, with Crandall in the audience.

The Medal of Honor Book video series on Ed Freeman and his flights into LZ X-Ray.

Crandall's turn came on 26 February 2007, when his Distinguished Service Cross was upgraded and President Bush presented the Medal of Honor in the same room. Freeman was meant to be there too. He was snowed in, in Iowa, and missed it. He died in Boise, Idaho, on 20 August 2008.

We Were Soldiers

By then the battle had a much larger audience. Hal Moore and reporter Joseph Galloway, who was on the ground at X-Ray, told its story in the 1992 book We Were Soldiers Once... and Young. The 2002 film We Were Soldiers starred Mel Gibson as Moore, with Greg Kinnear as Crandall and Mark McCracken as Freeman.

Hollywood compressed and dramatised the day, as Hollywood does. The essentials survived: a landing zone too hot for the medevac crews, and two transport pilots who decided that did not apply to them.

The Operations Room reconstructs the fight at LZ X-Ray, the battle behind We Were Soldiers.

The sound of rescue

Ia Drang set the pattern for the rest of the war. American units would rely on helicopters, artillery and air power, and North Vietnamese troops would try to fight so close that the firepower could not be used. The Huey became the war's workhorse, and for thousands of wounded soldiers, the sound of its rotor blades was the sound of rescue.

Crandall flew a second tour, was shot down in January 1968 and broke his back, and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1977. In retirement he spent years speaking to students across the country. The line he gave about X-Ray, quoted by the President in 2007, still sums it up better than any statistic: the men on the ground were his people, and they trusted him to come and get them.

Sources: US Army Center of Military History (Medal of Honor citations), White House Office of the Press Secretary (remarks, 26 February 2007), Army News Service, Congressional Medal of Honor Society, Association of the United States Army, Task & Purpose, This Day in Aviation, Wikipedia (Battle of Ia Drang, Bruce P. Crandall, Ed Freeman, We Were Soldiers)