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Making It Real: "We Were Soldiers" Strives To Tell It Like It Was
Monday, February 25, 2002
By Laura Freschi
Military Advantage

On of the film’s authors, Joe Galloway, admitted he couldn't sleep the night after seeing the movie for the first time. He said, "Did they dramatize some of it? Sure they did -- this is Hollywood. This is entertainment. This is truth and entertainment. But I would say to you that there's less Hollywood in this movie than any movie I've ever seen."

"We Were Soldiers" carries an unusually heavy burden for a Hollywood movie. It hopes to show the Vietnam War in a way no film has done before: as it really happened.

Luckily, the film's cast and crew had good raw material to work with: the book "We Were Soldiers Once…and Young," a painstaking account of the first bloody battle of the Vietnam War in the Ia Drang valley, later dubbed the valley of death. The authors, Joe Galloway and Lt. Gen. Hal Moore (USA-Ret), had the first-hand knowledge and the passion to back up such a detailed account. Hal Moore was the dedicated CO of 1st Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, and Galloway was a reporter for UPI who charged into the battle for his story, eventually fighting alongside the soldiers in their most harrowing moments.

When Moore and Galloway began work on the book in 1982, they were men on a mission; they had something to say. "We knew what Vietnam had been like, and how we looked and acted and talked and smelled," they wrote in the prologue. "No one in America did. Hollywood got it wrong every damned time."

For decades after the war ended, movies showed Vietnam veterans as drug-fiends or dysfunctional misfits. Every movie, Galloway believed, had a political axe to grind.

To write an account free of political motivation is a daunting, if not impossible, task. Moore and Galloway wanted to narrow the focus of their account to the men in battle. They wanted to show that the boys had nothing to do with the complex political machinations that put them in that valley so far from home. Most didn't choose to be there at all. But once they were there, they fought with valor and courage, for each other. "In battle," the authors wrote, "our world shrank to the man on our left and the man on our right and the enemy all around."

Galloway and Moore thought that if they could show people what really happened in that one battle, then the American people would understand that the boys who fought were decent, ordinary people, and they hoped that the veterans would finally get the respect they deserved.

When Moore and Galloway's book came out in 1992, it spent 17 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The Marine Corps Commandant chose it as the book of the year, and commanding officers still use examples from the book to illustrate training techniques and leadership on the battlefield.

"If we can settle the books on Vietnam, at least in that corner of the story, as regards the boys who fought, and who they were, and what they did and why they died, and who they died for-each other-then it's okay," said Galloway.

* Making the Movie
* The Truth is in the Details
(More: Military Advantage News Source)
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Dan