REVIEW BY PAUL D'AMATO
We Were Soldiers
Directed by Randall Wallace
With Mel Gibson, Greg Kinnear and Sam Elliot
Showing at major cinemas from April 25
Hollywood has released a string of movies lately that claim to give us a realistic portrayal of war. Apparently, a war movie counts as "realistic" if the blood and dismemberment look "real", even if it fails to say anything honest about the war it's supposed to be depicting. This is certainly true of the new Vietnam War movie We Were Soldiers.
Its purpose is clear: to encourage Americans to feel good about going to war, even though it may be a terrible thing. But We Were Soldiers is more than another post-September 11 movie that's gung-ho about the US military. It attempts to revive the Vietnam War as a noble US victory instead of the miserable defeat of an invading imperialist army by a poorly armed but highly motivated people.
The film stars Mel Gibson as Colonel Hal Moore, who leads his 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry into the first major US military engagement in Vietnam — the battle of the Ia Drang Valley — in November 1965. The screenplay is based on the book, We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young, written by Moore and reporter Joseph Galloway.
The story is about how 400 US soldiers triumphed against "overwhelming odds" during three days of fighting in a place that the Pentagon called LZ (landing zone) X-Ray. However, this is contradicted by how the fight unfolds in the film. As both the movie and the book show, the Vietnamese were outgunned because of their lack of air power.
"As we dropped behind the termite hill, I fleetingly thought about an illustrious predecessor of mine in the 7th Cavalry: Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his final stand in the valley of the Little Bighorn in Montana 89 years earlier", Moore and Galloway wrote. "We were a tight, well-trained and disciplined fighting force, and we had one thing George Custer did not have: fire support."
The authors make the same point again later in the book: "No matter how bad things got for the Americans fighting for their lives on the X-Ray perimeter, we could look out into the scrub brush in every direction, into the seething inferno of exploding artillery shells, 2.75-inch rockets, napalm canisters, 250- and 500-pound bombs and 20mm cannon fire, and thank God and our lucky stars that we didn't have to walk through that to get to work."
The movie shows this barrage so effectively that the audience must be left wondering not how the US soldiers made it, but how the Vietnamese could have possibly survived.
Conveniently for his purposes, director Randall Wallace — who also wrote the script for Pearl Harbor — decided to end the film two-thirds of the way through Moore's story, after 79 US soldiers were killed and the Vietnamese offensive against LZ X-Ray was turned back.
But the battle didn't end there. The next day, remnants of the US fighters at X-Ray, along with the newly arrived 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, were caught in an ambush after a forced march to another landing zone.
In what the Moore and Galloway book calls "the most savage one-day battle of the Vietnam War", Vietnamese fighters attacked and wiped out 155 US troops and wounded another 124. Most of the casualties took place in the first half-hour of the battle.
The book quotes a North Vietnamese Colonel Nguyen Huu An as saying: "I gave the order to my battalions: 'When you meet the Americans, divide yourself into many groups and attack the column from all directions and divide the column into many pieces. Move inside the column, grab them by the belt, and thus avoid casualties from the artillery and air."
The movie has Colonel An say something similar, but on the last day of the LZ X-Ray battle. Thus in the film, it seems that An's plan didn't work. It did work on the following day.
The movie would have been entirely different if it had shown this phase of the Ia Drang campaign, in which US troops were almost annihilated before, once again, being saved by massive air strikes that not only killed hundreds of Vietnamese soldiers, but also finished off many wounded US soldiers.
In We Were Soldiers, there are no cowards and no racists. Everyone pulls together, everyone fights hard, nobody runs in fear and everybody holds their ground. US soldiers die saying things like, "Tell my wife I love her" and "I'm glad I had a chance to die for my country".
Some reviewers have made a lot of the fact that the Vietnamese are portrayed as serious, hard-fighting, noble and worthy adversaries. But this was done for a reason. The idea that the enemy was "inferior" wouldn't have provided the proper backdrop to showcase the "heroism" as they invaded another people's land.
This also explains why the film depicts the first major battle in Vietnam. At this point, US soldiers were gung-ho, ready to die for what they believed to be a good cause.
It would have been impossible to make this kind of movie about a later battle, because by 1968, the US army was already beginning to disintegrate. US forces increasingly came to see all Vietnamese as the enemy and were wiping out villages and committing countless atrocities against civilians.
One of the key elements leading to the US defeat in Vietnam was the breakdown of discipline and the quasi-mutiny of troops in the field.
David Cortright's book Soldiers in Revolt tells a very different story about Company C, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry — the very unit that was nearly wiped out at the end of the Ia Drang campaign. In April 1970, the men of this reconstituted company refused a direct order to go down a dangerous jungle path — right in front of a CBS camera crew.
Such incidents became common in Vietnam. But showing them wouldn't fit the aims of We Were Soldiers.
If Ia Drang was put in its proper historical context, it would have been portrayed as a battle in which poorly armed but more motivated Vietnamese soldiers, fighting for their homeland, confronted Washington's far greater military capabilities and showed for the first time that the US had a real fight on its hands.
In order to avoid this kind of realism, We Were Soldiers has to show the battle close up — with a tight focus on the gritty, look-after-the-guy-next-to-you pseudo-realism that was perfected by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan.
Pull the camera back would have revealed a deeper truth: that these young US soldiers were simply cannon fodder for a US military engaged in an imperialist attack.
Both Colonel Moore and the makers of We Were Soldiers portray the Ia Drang campaign as a US victory. This is completely shortsighted. As "Cincinnatus", a US officer who wrote an anonymous history of the disintegration of American forces in Vietnam, put it: "The United States Army faced a guerrilla war in Vietnam, a small Southeast Asian country of some 65,000 square miles with a population of about 16 million people.
"That nation fought to a standstill the United States of America, with over 200 million citizens — one of the largest nations on Earth and, surely, one of the most powerful. America's fighting men won every major battle ... yet they lost the war."
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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