We Were Soldiers

We Were Soldiers Information

We Were Soldiers is a 2002 war film that dramatizes the Battle of Ia Drang on November 14, 1965. The film was directed by Randall Wallace and stars Mel Gibson. It is based on the book We Were Soldiers Once? And Young by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Hal Moore and reporter Joseph L. Galloway, both of whom were at the battle.

Plot

A French unit is on patrol in Vietnam in 1954, during the final year of the First Indochina War. The unit is suddenly ambushed by North Vietnamese Army forces, who kill the officers and the unit is overrun. Nguyen Huu An orders the execution of all surviving French soldiers, to discourage further French involvement in Vietnam.

Eleven years later, the United States had entered the Vietnam War. U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore is depicted as dedicated and deeply committed to training troops under his command. He is disquieted when his unit is re-flagged as the 7th Cavalry prior to deployment to Vietnam to being a battalion. Moore is also dismayed because President Lyndon B. Johnson has decreed that the war will be fought "on the cheap", without declaring it a national emergency. As a result, Moore believes he will be deprived of his oldest, best-trained soldiers (a formal declaration of war would have meant mobilization and extension of the terms of enlistment for volunteer soldiers) just prior to shipping out for Vietnam.

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 Vietnamese attackers, despite the fact that intelligence has no idea of the number of enemy troops. He leads a newly-created air cavalry unit into the Ia Drang Valley. After landing in the "Valley of Death", the soldiers learn that the location they were sent to is actually the base camp for a veteran North Vietnamese Army division of more than 4,000 men.

Upon arrival in the area with a platoon of soldiers, 2nd Lt. Henry Herrick spots a scout, runs after him, and orders reluctant soldiers to follow. The Vietnamese scout lures them into an ambush, resulting in several men of the platoon being killed, including Lt. Herrick and his subordinates. The surviving platoon members are surrounded with no chance of retreat. Sgt. Savage assumes command and calls in artillery and uses the cover of night to keep the Vietnamese from over-running their small defensive position. Meanwhile, with helicopters constantly dropping off the Cavalry units, Lt. Col. Moore manages to secure weak points before the Vietnamese can take advantage of such.

On the second day, despite being trapped and desperately outnumbered, the main U.S. force manages to hold off the Vietnamese with artillery, mortars, and helicopter lifts of supplies and reinforcements. Eventually, enemy Vietnamese commander Nguyen Huu An orders a large scale attack to completely overrun the American position.

At the point of breaking and being completely overrun by the enemy and with no option left, Moore orders his radioman to call in "Broken Arrow" (indicating that Moore's position is being overrun and can no longer be defended, and requesting all available combat aircraft to attack the enemy, even those close to the U.S. troops' position). The aircraft attack with bombs, napalm and machine guns, massacring many NVA's and Viet Cong but an accident occurs dangerously close to Moore's men, killing some of Moore's soldiers but successfully repelling the second Vietnamese attack. After the Vietnamese forces are repelled, the surviving men of the stranded platoon, led by Sgt. Savage, are eventually rescued.

Moore's troops regroup, secure the area, and stop at the base of a hill, where Moore surmises the Vietnamese division headquarters is holed up in tunnels. At the same time the Vietnamese commander plans a final assault on the Americans and sends out most of his troops to carry out the attack. The Vietnamese have set up strong defense emplacements near the hidden entrance of the underground passage to the command post spoken of by the scout. Hal and his men charge right at them, into a seemingly impending massacre, but before the Vietnamese can fire, Major Bruce "Snakeshit" Crandall and other helicopter gunships attack the Vietnamese, destroying the bulk of the enemy force.

Nguyen Huu An, the Vietnamese Commander, is alerted that the Americans have broken through their lines and there are no soldiers between the Americans and their command post. Since the Commander had deployed his reserve forces to a final offensive and the base camp has no troops to call upon for defense, the Vietnamese commander quickly orders the headquarters evacuated.

Moore, having achieved his objective, returns to the L.Z. (helicopter landing zone) to be picked up. True to his speech to his soldiers before deploying, only after all of his men (including the dead and wounded) are removed from the battlefield does he step on to a helicopter and fly out of the valley.

While the Vietnamese are collecting their dead, Nguyen Huu An, holding a small damaged American flag, tells one of his officers: "Such a tragedy. They will think this was their victory. So this will become an American war. And the end will be the same (as the French) except for the numbers who will die before we get there."

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. His superiors congratulated him for killing over 1,800 North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong soldiers. The film ends with an older Moore visiting the Vietnam war memorial and a showing of the names of soldiers who fell at Ia Drang.

Cast

Mel Gibson as Lieutenant Colonel/Colonel Hal Moore
Madeleine Stowe as Julia Moore
Greg Kinnear as Major Bruce "Snakeshit" Crandall
Sam Elliott as Sergeant Major Basil L. Plumley
Chris Klein as 2nd Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan
Luke Benward as David Moore
Taylor Momsen as Julie Moore
Devon Werkheiser as Steve Moore
Keri Russell as Barbara Geoghegan
Barry Pepper as Joe Galloway
Mark McCracken as Ed "Too Tall" Freeman
Don Duong as Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An
Ryan Hurst as Sergeant Ernie Savage
Robert Bagnell as 1st Lieutenant Charlie Hastings
Marc Blucas as 2nd Lieutenant Henry Herrick
Josh Daugherty as Sp4. Robert Ouellette
Jsu Garcia as Captain Tony Nadal
Jon Hamm as Captain Matt Dillon
Desmond Harrington as Sp4. Bill Beck

Adaptation from source material

In the source book We Were Soldiers Once? And Young, Moore complains that "Every damn Hollywood movie got it wrong"; Wallace has said he was inspired by this comment and became "determined to get it right this time."

The film's final version, though getting many of the facts of the book presented onto film, does not present an entirely historically accurate portrayal of the battle, nor is it entirely faithful to the book. For instance, the film depicts a heroic charge under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore at the end of the battle that destroys the Vietnamese reserve, ending the battle in an American victory (a fact that director Randall Wallace noted in the DVD commentary); in fact, there was no heroic final charge in the book, nor were the forces of the North Vietnamese destroyed, though the American commander Moore reported 834 enemy bodies, 1215 estimated KIA, 1/3rd of the enemy force were killed to 72, out of 395, American fatal casualties (18%). Lt. Col. Nguyen Huu An, the Vietnamese commander, did not see the conclusion at LZ X-Ray as the end of combat, and the Battle of Ia Drang continued the next day with combat action at LZ Albany where the 2/7th, with A Company 1/5th, found themselves in a fight for their lives against Lt Col Nguyen Huu An's reserve.

Finally, as the movie notes in a voice over by Joe Galloway (Barry Pepper), the battle continued for over 300 more days.

There are as well many other historical differences in the book versus the movie; presumably to shorten the length of the movie. Some differences not shown would have demonstrated how desperate the American situation at Ia Drang was. For example, the seriousness of the overrun of C Company under the command of Capt Robert Edwards and the repulse of the final major North Vietnamese push at LZ X-Ray on the former C Company line which was then held by B Company 2/7th under the command of Capt Myron Diduryk, the Ukrainian Captain that Mel Gibson, as Col Moore, seems to claim is attached to the 1/7th. Also incorrect is the act of Capt. Ramon Nadal pushing forward and rescuing the stranded platoon of Lt. Henry Herrick, which according to the book was actually done not by one company of the 1/7th, but rather was a major push made by two companies of the 2/5th as well as B Company 1/7th.

Despite the aforementioned differences from the book and departures from historical accuracy, in a documentary included in the video versions, Gen. Moore states that this film is the first one "to get it right."

Reception

The film received mixed to fairly positive reviews. Roger Ebert, from the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the movie 3.5 stars out of 4 and praised the movie's battle scenes and how the movie follows the characters.

"Black Hawk Down" was criticized because the characters seemed hard to tell apart. "We Were Soldiers" doesn't have that problem; in the Hollywood tradition it identifies a few key players, casts them with stars, and follows their stories.

Lisa Schwarzbaum, from Entertainment Weekly, gave the movie a B and noted the film's fair treatment of both sides.

"The writer-director bestows honor " generously, apolitically " not only on the dead and still living American veterans who fought in Ia Drang, but also on their families, on their Vietnamese adversaries, and on the families of their adversaries too. Rarely has a foe been portrayed with such measured respect for a separate reality, which should come as a relief to critics (I'm one) of the enemy's facelessness in Black Hawk Down; vignettes of gallantry among Vietnamese soldiers and such humanizing visual details as a Vietnamese sweetheart's photograph left behind in no way interfere with the primary, rousing saga of a fine American leader who kept his promise to his men to "leave no one behind dead or alive."

David Sterritt, from the Christian Science Monitor, criticized the movie for giving a more positive image of the Vietnam War that, in his opinion, did not concur with reality.

"The films about Vietnam that most Americans remember are positively soaked in physical and emotional torment " from "Platoon," with its grunt's-eye view of combat, to "Apocalypse Now," with its exploration of war's dehumanizing insanity. Today, the pendulum has swung back again. If filmmakers with politically twisted knives once sliced away guts-and-glory clichés, their current equivalents hack away all meaningful concern with moral and political questions. "We Were Soldiers" is shameless in this regard, filling the screen with square-jawed officers who weep at carnage and fresh-faced GIs who use their last breaths to intone things like, "I'm glad I died for my country."

Todd McCarthy, from Variety, said the film "presents the fighting realistically, violently and relatively coherently given the chaotic circumstances..." McCarthy further said, "Mel Gibson has the closest thing to a John Wayne part that anyone's played since the Duke himself rode into the sunset, and he plays it damn well." He summarized with, "Gibson's performance anchors the film with commanding star power to burn. This officer truly loves his men, and the credibility with which the actor is able to express Moore's leadership qualities as well as his sensitive side is genuinely impressive."

Hal Moore, who had long been critical of many Vietnam War films for their negative portrayals of American servicemen, publicly expressed approval of the film and is featured in segments of the DVD. Some soldiers were less pleased: Retired Col Rick Rescorla, who plays an important role in the book, and whose photo is on the cover, was disappointed, after reading the script, to learn that he and his unit had been written out of the movie. In one key incident, the finding of a vintage French bugle on a dying Vietnamese soldier, the Cornish-born Rescorla is replaced by a nameless Welsh platoon leader.