Eleven years later, the United States is fighting the Vietnam War. US Army Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore is chosen to train and lead a battalion. After arriving in Vietnam, he learns that an American base has been attacked and is ordered to take his 400 men after the enemy and eliminate the North Vietnamese attackers; intelligence has no idea of the number of enemy troops. Moore leads a newly-created air cavalry unit into the Ia Drang Valley. After landing, the soldiers capture a North Vietnamese soldier and learn from him that the location they were sent to is actually the base camp for a veteran North Vietnamese army division of 4,000 men.
Upon arrival in the area with a platoon of soldiers, 2nd Lt. Henry Herrick spots an enemy scout and runs after him, ordering his reluctant soldiers to follow. The scout lures them into an ambush, which results in several men being killed, including Herrick and his subordinates. The surviving platoon members are surrounded and cut off from the rest of the battalion. Sgt. Savage assumes command, calls in the artillery, and uses the cover of night to keep the Vietnamese from overrunning their defensive position.
Back in the United States, Julia Moore has become the leader of the American wives who live on the base. When the Army begins to use taxi drivers to deliver telegrams that notify the next of kin of the soldiers' deaths, Julia personally takes over that responsibility.
At the point of being overrun by the enemy, Moore orders 1st Lt. Charlie Hastings, his forward air controller, to call in "Broken Arrow", a call for all available combat aircraft to attack enemy positions, even those close to the US troops' position, because they are being overrun. The aircraft attack with bombs, napalm, and machine guns, killing many PAVN and Viet Cong troops, but a friendly fire incident also results in American deaths. The North Vietnamese attack is repelled, and the surviving soldiers of Herrick's cut-off platoon, including Savage, are rescued.
At the end of the film, it is revealed that the landing zone immediately reverted to North Vietnamese hands after the American troops were airlifted out. Hal Moore continued the battle in a different landing zone, and after nearly a year, he returned home safely to Julia and his family. His superiors congratulate him for killing over 1,800 North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong soldiers. An older Moore visits the Vietnam War memorial and looks at the names of the soldiers who fell at Ia Drang.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 64% of 146 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The website's consensus reads, "The war cliches are laid on a bit thick, but the movie succeeds at putting a human face on soldiers of both sides in the Vietnam War."[6] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 65 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[7]
Hal was a courageous leader, loving husband, and father whose life exemplified the Academy credo of Duty, Honor, Country. His memory lives on in his writings as well the hearts of the soldiers he inspired and mentored during his long, challenging life.
The book was moving account of the November 1965 Battle of Ia Drang Valley in the Vietnam War and the heroic fight that 450 soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, put up against a superior force of 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers at LZ X-Ray.
The Doughboy Award is presented annually to recognize an individual for outstanding contributions to the United States Army Infantry. The award is a chrome replica of a helmet worn by American Expeditionary soldiers during World War I and the early days of World War II.
Sterner said he doesn't see the point in bringing up the discrepancies about Plumley, a man he calls a "genuine hero" because he earned a Silver Star in battle. He said he knows of hundreds of cases in which soldiers have been awarded Silver Stars or other valor awards and the records cannot be found.
To Hal Moore, his troopers were his family, an attitude dating back at least to his time fighting in Korea. His view of his soldiers is captured in this single line from a letter sent on October 28, 1952, when he celebrated the reorganization of his unit after the Triangle Hill battle:
Lt. Col. Bruce Crandall, who was later awarded the Medal of Honor for delivering crucial supplies of ammunition and water to Moore's men, and for flying through smoke and gunfire to ferry wounded soldiers out of the valley, told The Washington Post in 2007 that the battle "was hell on Earth - for a short period of time."
Widely praised by critics for its research, which included testimonies from U.S. soldiers whom Moore led and from Vietnamese commanders whom he opposed, the book was subsequently adapted to "We Were Soldiers," directed by Randall Wallace and with Gibson starring as Gen. Moore.
Beginning in the early 1990s, Moore returned several times to the battlefield at Ia Drang. Traveling with soldiers who served under him, he made what was perhaps an unprecedented gesture in Vietnam: meeting in person with North Vietnamese commanders who opposed him, and on at least one occasion camping with them at the battlefield under the stars. He chronicled the trips, and lessons learned, in "We Are Soldiers Still" (2008), which was also co-written with Galloway.
In Vietnam, he said, "we were trying to create a democratic country in one that had no concept of democracy. We tried to build a South Vietnamese army in the image of the American Army." In Iraq, he continued, "we are repeating history."
They never expected to be surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Reinforcements came from both sides. The battle ended with 230 Americans dead, 240 wounded and as many as 3,000 North Vietnamese dead. The story of that battle and Moore's role in it was told in the book "We Were Soldiers Once...And Young," written by Moore and Joseph Galloway, who was a 23-year-old reporter at the time of the battle and covered it for UPI.
Now, in the smoke and the dust, which limits visibility and the terrible heat - that compounds the situation. The men screaming and yelling, giving orders in three languages - English, Spanish, Vietnamese; wounded men screaming for medics and for their mother, about to die - I've never found it difficult to keep my head in situations like that. I'm a paratrooper. I've had a couple malfunctions. Once, I was eight seconds from hitting the ground, but I knew I'd make it in on my reserve if I could get it open. So I've never really been concerned when I've been tough situations. Just do the job.
Each year, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps selects one book that he believes is both relevant and timeless for reading by all Marines. The Commandant's choice for 1993 was We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young.
In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War.
How these men persevered—sacrificed themselves for their comrades and never gave up—makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating. General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This devastating account rises above the specific ordeal it chronicles to present a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge, dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.if(typeof performance.mark !== 'undefined')performance.mark("Product_Tabs_loading_start");Related collections and offersEssential History
Harold G. Moore was born in Kentucky and is a West Point graduate, a master parachutist, and an Army aviator. He commanded two infantry companies in the Korean War and was a battalion and brigade commander in Vietnam. He retired from the Army in 1977 with thirty-two years' service and then was executive vice president of a Colorado ski resort for four years before founding a computer software company. An avid outdoorsman, Moore and his wife, Julie, divide their time between homes in Auburn, Alabama, and Crested Butte, Colorado.
Joseph L. Galloway is a native Texan. At seventeen he was a reporter on a daily newspaper, at nineteen a bureau chief for United Press International. He spent fifteen years as a foreign and war correspondent based in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore, and the Soviet Union. Now a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report, he covered the Gulf War and coauthored Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War. Galloway lives with his wife, Theresa, and sons, Lee and Joshua, on a farm in northern Virginia. Show MoreRead an ExcerptPrologueIn thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars...
-Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, Act II, Scene 3This story is about time and memories. The time was 1965, a different kind of year, a watershed year when one era was ending in America and another was beginning. We felt it then, in the many ways our lives changed so suddenly, so dramatically, and looking back on it from a quarter-century gone we are left in no doubt. It was the year America decided to directly intervene in the Byzantine affairs of obscure and distant Vietnam. It was the year we went to war. In the broad, traditional sense, that "we" who went to war was all of us, all Americans, though in truth at that time the larger majority had little knowledge of, less interest in, and no great concern with what was beginning so far away.So this story is about the smaller, more tightly focused "we" of that sentence: the first American combat troops, who boarded World War II-era troopships, sailed to that little-known place, and fought the first major battle of a conflict that would drag on for ten long years and come as near to destroying America as it did to destroying Vietnam.The Ia Drang campaign was to the Vietnam War what the terrible Spanish Civil War of the 1930s was to World War II: a dress rehearsal; the place where new tactics, techniques, and weapons were tested, perfected, and validated. In the Ia Drang, both sides claimed victory and both sides drew lessons, some of them dangerously deceptive, which echoed and resonated throughout the decade of bloody fighting and bitter sacrifice that was to come. This is about what we did, what we saw, what we suffered in a thirty-four-day campaign in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in November 1965, when we were young and confident and patriotic and our countrymen knew little and cared less about our sacrifices. Another war story, you say? Not exactly, for on the more important levels this is a love story, told in our own words and by our own actions. We were the children of the 1950s and we went where we were sent because we loved our country. We were draftees, most of us, but we were proud of the opportunity to serve that country just as our fathers had served in World War II and our older brothers in Korea. We were members of an elite, experimental combat division trained in the new art of airmobile warfare at the behest of President John F. Kennedy. Just before we shipped out to Vietnam the Army handed us the colors of the historic 1st Cavalry Division and we all proudly sewed on the big yellow-and-black shoulder patches with the horsehead silhouette. We went to war because our country asked us to go, because our new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, ordered us to go, but more importantly because we saw it as our duty to go. That is one kind of love.
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