We Were Soldiers

“We Were Soldiers,”  the 2002 action movie set during the Vietnam War, got some mixed reviews from the critics—however, there’s no escaping the film’s depiction of the sheer brutality of battle, even 20 years after it was released.

When it first came out, my husband, Bill, and I went to see it. Bill, a Vietnam veteran, had seen most of the films depicting the war since the premiere of Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” in 1986. He always has maintained Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket” was the most accurate depiction of his experience of Vietnam, and he still agrees with this assessment. But, “We Were Soldiers” is a close runner-up.

It is based on the 1993 bestseller, “We Were Soldiers Once…and Young,” written by two survivors of the battle of Ia Drang, the first of what we now call the Vietnam War. Lt. Col. Harold Moore, who died in 2017, was the commander of the Americans in the fight, while Joseph Galloway was a UPI reporter who was caught up in the fighting. The film follows the story of the three-day battle between American fighters and the PAVN (People’s Army of North Vietnam) that took place Nov. 14-17, 1965.  Mel Gibson plays Hal Moore in the film, with support from Sam Elliott, Madeleine Stowe, Greg Kinnear, Chris Klein, and Barry Pepper. 

I remember seeing the film on a Saturday night and it was an early show. The audience was mostly men in the same age range as my husband. There were a few who left the theater halfway through the movie and never returned–a testimony perhaps to the bloody imagery and desperation of the actors as they played out their roles. No one talked; even as they left the theater when the credits rolled, a heavy silence fell on the group.

The critics who panned the film found it too much of “Mel Gibson Charges Into Battle,” but those who praised the movie–including a Vietnam-era veteran–found it riveting and tragic, its realism depicting the brutality of the battlefield against the honor, respect, loyalty, bravery and survival of the American soldier.

When my husband was “in-country” back in 1969-1970, he wrote constant letters to his mother in Detroit. She was a 2nd Lieutenant in World War II and had been an Army nurse. His father, who died in 1963, had been in the Signal Corps, so you might say Bill came from a military family. Bill’s letters are completely unfiltered–whatever was going on in his mind or right in front of him was recorded in his slanted, almost illegible handwriting.

“My mom understood what I was going through,” he said of the correspondence.

I thought of those letters as I watched the Battle of Ia Drang play out in Technicolor and heard the screams, bullets, and explosions in Dolby Stereo, and thought about the sacrifices so many people made.  There were scenes of death and loss and dread that really hit me hard—-I found myself weeping throughout. I couldn’t get my mind off of the terrible waste of lives that littered both sides after the war was over. Young men—babies, really. Sons and husbands and brothers. Some 58,000 Americans and somewhere in the neighborhood of four times that many PAVN/Viet Cong/NVA were killed in action. Plus a couple of million civilians in Southeast Asia.

Until I married Bill,  Vietnam was a rapidly-fading collage of childhood memories—watching rockets and bombs on the 6 o’clock news, a 19-year-old cousin killed in 1970, a POW/MIA bracelet I bought while in high school and have since misplaced. That was Vietnam to me.

My husband never hid his experiences in Southeast Asia, but until recently, he did not talk much about them.  He said earlier this week that Veterans Day is a bit of a rough day for him–he doesn’t see his contribution in battle as significant as the infantry soldiers who suffered the most horrifying experiences, some of which are graphically detailed in “We Were Soldiers.”

We know now that there are few in any war who escaped the psychological effects of their experiences— the emotional scars, the flashbacks, the haunting memories that will never go away. We know now that those men and women walk among us still, from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, carrying burdens that we are hard pressed to help shoulder.

It is astonishing how soldiers can keep on fighting, faced as they were in the Ia Drang Valley and on every battlefield in every war our young men and women have fought. How do we get so far apart in our differences that we feel compelled to solve them on a battlefield?

We know we owe a great debt and an even greater apology to all of the Vietnam veterans who came home to jeers, criticism, and hatred for their service. Vietnam is no less a sacrifice than Omaha Beach or Bata’an, and that sacrifice should never be forgotten.

As Bill and I walked out of the silent theater that March evening 20 years ago, he said he will never forget the sound a bullet makes when it whizzes past his ear or strikes the ground in front of him. He said a person never forgets the sound of mortars exploding or rockets soaring overhead and smashing into the ground a few feet away. For him, the most powerful part of the film occurred near the end, when two soldiers were shown in an airport—one, head bandaged, in a wheelchair with the other one pushing it—and a woman and her children giving the pair a wide berth. That’s what it was like for the Vietnam veteran—come home, put away the uniform, and move on.

On this Veterans Day, we would do well to remember the veterans from World War II to Afghanistan and Iraq and the many sacrifices made. Whether or not you agree with the politics of the battlefields, they are filled with lives given in the name of freedom, in honor, and with courage. Those who now will fill the cemeteries on Nov. 11 to pay tribute to our veterans are reminded that “If you love your freedom, thank a vet.”