Operation All the Way — 1st Brigade Pursuit, Pleiku Campaign (1965)

Operation All the Way — the 1st Brigade pursuit

Context page — operation level. Drawn from the 1st Cavalry Division's own after-action study of the Pleiku Campaign (DTIC AD0855112) and corroborating histories. It establishes the operation that framed D Company, 2/8 Cav's losses of 4 November 1965 — not what the company did hour by hour, which awaits the battalion staff journal. The phase, its dates, brigade attribution, and place in the campaign are confirmed from primary sources.

Where it sits in the campaign

The fighting around Pleiku in the autumn of 1965 nests in three levels, and getting the levels right is what lets the three D Company names attach to a real operation rather than a vague "campaign":

• The Pleiku Campaign (23 October – 26 November 1965) — the overall U.S./ARVN campaign that began with the PAVN siege of the Plei Me Special Forces camp.
• Operation Long Reach (27 October – 26 November 1965) — the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) part of that campaign: the airmobile pursuit of the retreating North Vietnamese into the Chu Pong–Ia Drang complex near the Cambodian border.
• Operation All the Way (27 October – 9 November 1965) — Phase I of Long Reach, conducted by the division's 1st Brigade. This is the phase that contained 4 November 1965.

Long Reach was run in three phases, with the division rotating its brigades through the area of operations:

• All the Way — 1st Brigade, 27 Oct – 9 Nov.
• Silver Bayonet I — 3rd Brigade, 9 – 18 Nov. This phase contained the Battle of Ia Drang at LZ X-Ray (14–16 Nov) and LZ Albany (17–18 Nov).
• Silver Bayonet II — 2nd Brigade and the ARVN Airborne Brigade, 18 – 26 Nov.

This matters for attribution: the famous Ia Drang battle (X-Ray / Albany) belongs to Silver Bayonet I and the 3rd Brigade — it is not the action in which the D Co, 2/8 Cav men were killed. Their 4 November losses fall a week and a half earlier, in the All the Way pursuit phase. The two are often blurred together as "Ia Drang"; on this site they are kept distinct.

What All the Way was for

After PAVN forces besieged the Plei Me camp and ambushed the ARVN relief column, the 1st Cavalry Division moved up to Camp Holloway / Pleiku and was turned loose to find and destroy the withdrawing 32nd and 33rd PAVN Regiments before they could recover across the border. This was the first large-scale test of airmobile pursuit — small units lifted by helicopter onto a moving enemy. On 1 November 1965, a brigade element overran a 33rd Regiment aid station, killing 99 and taking casualties of its own — an indication of how close and how costly the contact had already become days before the better-known Ia Drang fights.

Where 2/8 Cavalry — and D Company — fit

The casualty event page for 4 November 1965 documents the loss of SGT Richard Coffey, PFC Wright Hamill, and CPL Eddie Hill, Jr. of D Company in the Plei Me / Chu Pong area, on the ground of the 33rd Regiment (Hill 732). A first-person account by D Co medic SP4 David "Doc" Wilson places a Delta Company reconnaissance element in a fight that day that drew in "several more companies from the battalion," against the 33rd Regiment — the kind of pursuit contact that All the Way was built around.

The division ORLL (AD0855112) confirms the brigade attribution directly: the task organization entry for 4 November reads "1ST BRIGADE — No Change," establishing that 2/8 Cav was under 1st Brigade that day without ambiguity.

November 5–6: the battalion keeps moving

The ORLL carries the 2/8 Cav's movements through the days immediately after the 4 November contact. On November 5, A Company moved from Cavalair to Position Paris (ZA025057) and searched the previous day's battle area. C Company moved by air to Position Falcon (ZA021031). D Company and the battalion CP closed on Falcon at 1800 hours — one day after the three D Co KIA.

On November 6, the battalion's next fight came. B Company, operating west of its position at ZA045066, made contact at 1000 hours with what initially appeared to be a squad. By noon the company had run into an entrenched enemy force; by early afternoon the enemy was assessed at at least a battalion. B Company was nearly surrounded. C Company was ordered to countermarch and attack the enemy's rear; it crossed a stream and pressed from the west, then became heavily engaged itself. Artillery and tactical air were called in volume, but neither company could maneuver decisively. As darkness fell both sides disengaged; B and C companies linked up at ZA014068 by 1900 hours and evacuated their dead and wounded. Two platoons of A Company were lifted into Falcon as reinforcement. The ORLL's intelligence summary for that day assessed that the NVA battalion involved — the rearguard of the 33rd Regiment — "had ceased to exist as an effective unit" by nightfall.

This action involves B and C Company, not D Company, and carries no D Co casualty record. It is included here as battalion context: three days after D Company's loss, the 2/8 Cav was still in heavy contact with the same enemy regiment in the same ground.

Why this is among the division's earliest losses

The 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) had only reached Vietnam in mid-September 1965. The 4 November cluster therefore falls roughly seven weeks into the division's deployment, inside its very first major campaign — which is why these three men sit so near the top of the company's casualty record.