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who fought in Vietnam have not fared very well in the popular culture.
This is largely because those who continue to shape popular culture
have tended to loathe the Vietnam War and much of that loathing
has been transferred to those who fought it.
According to
the conventional wisdom passed down from the anti-war Left of the
'60s and '70s, the Vietnam War was uniquely brutal and unjust and
brutalized those who fought it. At first vilified as a war criminal
and a baby-killer, the Vietnam veteran soon evolved into a victim
— victimized first by his country, which made him poor and
then sent him off to fight an unjust war, then victimized by a military
that dehumanized him and turned him into a killer.
With the notable
exception of Hamburger Hill — now over a decade old
— this perspective has dominated Hollywood's treatment of the
war. Until now. The new Mel Gibson movie, We Were Soldiers
at last treats those who fought the war with the respect and even
awe that heretofore has been reserved for "The Greatest Generation."
And therein lies a story.
In Fields
of Dreams, Kevin Costner's baby-boomer character, no doubt reflecting
the perspective of the film's writer, tries to make amends for not
honoring his father and his father's generation. This film was a
microcosm of boomer attitudes, as they grew older and recognized
that their parents' generation was passing from the scene.
Having once
argued that they should not trust anyone over 30, the "best
and the brightest" belatedly realized that their fathers had
done something remarkable — they overcame the Great Depression
and World War II to save the West. Steven Spielberg's Saving
Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation
were bouquets to their fathers' generation. Despite the fact that
the World War II generation had also involved the country in Vietnam,
it now became fashionable to praise that "Greatest Generation."
But as James
Webb, the best-selling novelist who was awarded a Navy Cross for
valor in Vietnam as a Marine infantry officer and who served as
secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, has pointed
out, many of the same baby boomers who avoided service in Vietnam
but who now praise their fathers for World War II still look askance
at those of their own age group who fought in Vietnam. They do so
in spite of the fact that most of the latter looked to the World
War II generation as "their heroes and role models. They honored
their fathers' service by emulating it, and they largely agreed
with their fathers' wisdom in attempting to stop Communism's reach
in Southeast Asia."
As Webb points
out, those who came of age during the Vietnam War differed from
their parents in that they were not members of a unified generation
but merely an age group. Despite the fact that nothing divided this
age group more than the war, the media and the academy anointed
those who opposed the war as spokesmen for the baby boomers as a
whole. But they never spoke for all. "The sizeable portion
of the Vietnam age group who declined to support the counterculture
agenda, and especially the men and women who opted to serve in the
military during the Vietnam War, are quite different from their
peers who for decades have claimed to speak for them." We
Were Soldiers is an eloquent tribute to this latter group.
We Were
Soldiers describes the deadly battle between a battalion of
the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and three regiments of the
Peoples' Army of Vietnam (PAVN) in the Ia Drang Valley of South
Vietnam's Pleiku Province in the Central Highlands. It is based
on the book We
Were Soldiers Once...and Young by the officer that Mel Gibson
portrays in the movie, Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, the commanding
officer of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, and Joe Galloway, then
a young reporter for UPI. The book, based on interviews with participants
on both sides, is an exhaustive recreation of the entire Ia Drang
operation. The movie closely follows the first part of the operation
involving Moore's battalion during its terrible fight for Landing
Zone (LZ) X-Ray from the afternoon of November 14 until the morning
of November 16, 1965.
In an effort
to validate the Army's new air-mobility doctrine based on helicopters,
Moore's superiors ordered his battalion to seize and defend a landing
zone in Pleiku Providence not far from the Cambodian border. The
idea was to bring the PAVN to battle and then bring supporting arms
to bear once the enemy massed, thereby disrupting the attempt by
the North Vietnamese to seize the strategically important Central
Highlands. The plan worked — too well. Moore's under-strength
command soon found itself in the midst of a large PAVN base camp
containing some 2,000 PAVN troops intent on "killing Americans."
The problem
Moore faced was to hold the PAVN force at bay while he built up
sufficient combat power around LZ X-Ray. While the helicopter assault
initially caught the North Vietnamese by surprise, there were only
enough choppers to bring in 80 troops at a time. Since the round-trip
flight time between LZ X-Ray and the battalion's base at Plei Me
was an hour, the danger was that the PAVN force would overrun the
LZ before the entire unit was on the ground. Even then, his 450
soldiers would be heavily outnumbered by a skillful and determined
enemy.
By all accounts,
Moore was a remarkable battalion commander who had prepared his
unit well. Despite losing almost a third of his most experienced
soldiers and noncommissioned officers before deploying to Vietnam
because their enlistment terms were about to expire, the 1st of
the 7th Cavalry was a fine unit, well-trained with high morale and
unit cohesion. These factors and supporting arms were all that separated
the battalion from destruction in the Ia Drang Valley.
We Were
Soldiers concedes nothing to Saving Private Ryan or Black
Hawk Down in terms of a realistic portrayal of infantry combat.
As Moore wrote in his book, "among my sergeants [at LZ X-Ray]
were three-war men — men who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day
and had survived the war in Korea — and those old veterans
were shocked by the savagery and hellish noise of this battle...We
were dry-mouthed and our bowels churned with fear, and still the
enemy came on in waves."
Some have already
criticized the movie for "glorifying the Vietnam War."
But We Were Soldiers does no such thing. No one who sees
the movie can possibly think there is anything glorious about war.
However it does honor the soldiers who fought it.
One of the
most important accomplishments of We Were Soldiers is that
it depicts the soldiers who fought the Vietnam War not as pathetic
losers or pathological killers, but as regular citizens, as men
willing to sacrifice everything to do their duty — to their
country, to their unit, to their fellow soldiers. As made clear
in the movie, these men also had families, whom they loved and who
loved them. Indeed, their last thoughts were usually about their
loved ones. One reviewer called the home scenes cloying, but the
cutbacks between the hell of LZ X-Ray and the families at home reveal
"the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field,
and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over
this broad land.…"
Inevitably,
some will ask where Vietnam ends and Hollywood begins. But in fact,
the movie tracks the book by Moore and Galloway fairly closely.
Friends of mine have questioned two scenes in particular. The first
occurs near the end of the battle when Moore orders his men to fix
bayonets and then leads them in a charge that sends the PAVN reeling.
This scene seems to be a composite of two separate assaults, the
first when one of Moore's companies launched an assault to link
up with the '"lost platoon" (a unit that moved out too
far from the perimeter early in the battle, was cut off and surrounded,
and spent a harrowing 36 hours fighting off countless assaults by
the enemy), the second at the end of the battle when Moore sought
to expand his perimeter. The assault in the book is far less dramatic
than the one in the movies, although Moore himself did participate.
The second
scene takes place after the battle when a helicopter full of journalists
lands at LZ X-Ray to survey the carnage. Although some might question
the prudence of a public-affairs officer transporting a gaggle of
reporters to a battle site when the enemy situation is still uncertain,
it happened pretty much as shown in the movie.
Moore's battalion
suffered 74 dead and 121 wounded during the course of the 40-hour
battle. Over 800 enemy dead were counted on the field, and countless
others were killed by U.S. artillery and air strikes. It should
be noted that We Were Soldiers only tells part of the story
of the Ia Drang operation. As terrible as the fight for LZ X-Ray
was, it was a U.S. victory. What happened a day later was a debacle.
On the afternoon
of November 16, Moore's battalion was heli-lifted out of LZ X-Ray
and replaced by its sister battalions, Robert Tulley's 2nd Battalion,
5th Cavalry and Robert McDade's 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. Because
a B-52 strike was schedule to hit the suspected PAVN base camp near
the Chu Pong Massif on the Cambodian border, the two battalions
were ordered to abandon LZ X-Ray and move overland to LZs farther
east the next day. On the afternoon of November 17, the 2nd of the
7th Cavalry was ambushed as it moved to LZ Albany. Strung out along
a trail, three of the battalion's line companies and its headquarters
companies were annihilated. In six hours 155 Americans died, the
highest death toll for any day of the war.
The battle
in the Ia Drang Valley had important implications for the future
conduct of the war. The Army favored "search and destroy"
missions such as the Ia Drang operation designed to bring the PAVN
to battle and then to destroy it. Although U.S. casualties in Pleiku
Province were high, some 300 between October 23 and November 26,
1965, estimated PAVN casualties were 12 times higher. Thus the Pleiku
campaign convinced Westmoreland that the Army Concept was correct.
In a head to head clash, an outnumbered U.S. force had spoiled an
enemy operation and sent a major NVA force reeling back in defeat,
inflicting far more casualties than it sustained.
Reasonable
people may disagree about the Army's operational concept. For instance,
the overall commander of all Marines in the Pacific during much
of the Vietnam War, Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, Ia Drang represented
an example of fighting the enemy's war — what North Vietnamese
General Vo Nguyen Giap predicted would be "a protracted war
of attrition." And says Krulak, a "war of attrition it
turned out to be . . . [by] 1972, we had managed to reduce the enemy's
manpower pool by perhaps 25 per-cent at a cost of over 220,000 U.S.
and South Vietnamese dead. Of these, 59,000 were Americans. . .
." Krulak's figures are probably low. Hanoi has admitted that
it suffered some 1.4 million combat deaths during the war.
Reasonable
people may also disagree about the war itself. Even many supporters
of U.S. foreign policy in general have argued that Vietnam was the
wrong war in the wrong place. But no one can deny the courage, the
perseverance, the grit, and the indomitable fighting spirit in Vietnam.
No American unit was ever routed in Vietnam and none ever surrendered.
The same cannot be said for U.S. troops in World War II and Korea.
The men I served
with in Vietnam were not unlike those depicted in We Were Soldiers.
For the most part, they were young men barely out of high school.
They became skillful, steady warriors, who with only a few exceptions,
returned home with little bitterness about the war.
These were
the best men I have ever known. I would put them up against any
other generation of warriors. I trusted them with my life and they
trusted me with theirs. Of course, as in all wars, there were the
occasional cowards, laggards, and chronic complainers. But overall,
those who fought in Vietnam were the real "best and brightest"
of the baby-boomer generation. It is safe to say that most of their
countrymen do not know their story. We Were Soldiers is an
important first step in correcting this deficiency.
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