The Ia Drang battlefield was dotted with large dirt ant hills of varying sizes, generally made of very hard, baked earth and home to ants and termites. These features made good defensive positions, and LTC Moore used one as the site of his battlefield command post during the fighting at LZ X-Ray. A dry creek bed that wound through the battlefield also played a pivotal role, serving as a defensive position for the American forces and as an avenue of approach for North Vietnamese troops attempting to penetrate the American positions. Mr. Bill Beck, serving on a machinegun crew, made several trips through the fighting to obtain ammunition. On one trip he noticed an American soldier taking cover behind an anthill while, on the opposite side, North Vietnamese soldiers were doing the same thing, neither party aware of the other. Bill tried to warn the American soldier and then drew his 45 automatic pistol and fired on the Vietnamese soldiers in an attempt to draw them off and warn the American soldier. Years later Mr. Beck painted a watercolor image from his memory of that anthill. In 1993 he returned to the Ia Drang battlefield, found and photographed the same anthill, and after returning home discovered that the photograph fit perfectly over the watercolor as if the painting had been done from the photograph rather than the other way around. His memories of that moment remained as fresh in his mind as the day he lived it.