The man who led the desperate relief force into Plei Me on this campaign was a hard charging Special Forces officer named Charlie Beckwith, and he would go on to create the most famous special operations unit in American history. In October 1965, Major Charles Beckwith was handed the job of reinforcing the besieged camp. He loaded about 175 men, mostly South Vietnamese Rangers, onto helicopters and air assaulted into a landing zone near Plei Me, then fought his way into the camp and took command of its defense. He was ordered to sally out and attack the besiegers, and when he did, his force got chewed up and had to fall back into the wire. It was the kind of brutal, up close fighting that Beckwith thrived in and never forgot. Beckwith was already an unusual soldier. He had spent a year embedded with the British SAS, their elite commando force, and he came home obsessed with the idea that America needed its own version, a unit of supremely trained operators for the hardest missions imaginable. In Vietnam he ran a legendary reconnaissance outfit called Project Delta, and his aggressive style earned him the nickname Chargin' Charlie. He spent years pushing the Army to build his dream unit, fighting the bureaucracy every step of the way. Finally, in 1977, he got it. He founded the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta, known to the world simply as Delta Force, and became its first commander. His story has a tragic final chapter. In 1980 Beckwith led Delta Force on Operation Eagle Claw, the daring mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran. It ended in disaster in the desert when a helicopter and a transport plane collided, killing eight servicemen and forcing the mission to abort. Beckwith was devastated. But the hard lessons of that failure led directly to the creation of the modern American special operations command that has dominated ever since. And a thread of it runs all the way back to a young major fighting his way into a surrounded camp called Plei Me.

On October 19, 1965, the North Vietnamese army sprang a carefully laid trap in the Central Highlands, and in doing so kicked off the first great campaign between the US Army and Hanoi's regulars. It started with the Siege of Plei Me. Plei Me was a remote Special Forces camp near the Cambodian border, held by about a dozen American Green Berets and a few hundred Montagnard tribesmen. That night, two full North Vietnamese regiments, over four thousand men, descended on it. But the enemy commander, Chu Huy Man, did not actually want the camp. He wanted what the camp could lure out. His plan was cold and clever. One regiment would besiege Plei Me and pound it hard enough that the South Vietnamese would have to send a rescue column up the single road from Pleiku. The other regiment would lie in ambush along that road and destroy the relief force in the open. The camp was just bait. For days the defenders held on through sheer airpower, hundreds of sorties dropping over a million and a half pounds of bombs around the perimeter, sometimes just yards from their own wire. The North Vietnamese answered with a tactic that would define the war, hugging the American positions so closely that the bombs threatened friend and foe alike. They called it grabbing them by the belt buckle. The relief column did roll out, and it did get ambushed on October 23, taking losses before airpower broke the attack. But the South Vietnamese and their American advisors saw the trap and handled it. By October 25 the North Vietnamese pulled back into the hills, badly bloodied. Plei Me was the opening move of what the Americans called the Pleiku Campaign, five weeks of pursuit and battle that would end in the Ia Drang Valley. The siege nobody remembers lit the fuse on the war's first big set piece showdown.