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We Were Soldiers Once...And Young: Ia Drang The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam Hardcover – October 20, 1992
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In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War.
How these men persevered--sacrificed themselves for their comrades and never gave up--makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating. General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This devastating account rises above the specific ordeal it chronicles to present a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge, dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateOctober 20, 1992
- Dimensions6.4 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100679411585
- ISBN-13978-0679411581
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
- D.E. Showalter, U.S. Air Force Acad., Colorado Springs
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
–GENERAL H. NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF
“Hal Moore and Joe Galloway have captured the terror and exhilaration, the comradeship and self-sacrifice, the brutality and compassion that are the dark heart of war.”
–NEIL SHEEHAN, author of A Bright Shining Lie
“A powerful and epic story . . . This is the best account of infantry combat I have ever read, and the most significant book to come out of the Vietnam War.”
–COLONEL DAVID HACKWORTH, author of the bestseller About Face
From the Inside Flap
In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War.
How these men persevered--sacrificed themselves for their comrades and never gave up--makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating. General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This devastating account rises above the specific ordeal it chronicles to present a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge, dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Joseph L. Galloway is a native Texan. At seventeen he was a reporter on a daily newspaper, at nineteen a bureau chief for United Press International. He spent fifteen years as a foreign and war correspondent based in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore, and the Soviet Union. Now a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report, he covered the Gulf War and coauthored Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War. Galloway lives with his wife, Theresa, and sons, Lee and Joshua, on a farm in northern Virginia.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars...
-Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, Act II, Scene 3
This story is about time and memories. The time was 1965, a different kind of year, a watershed year when one era was ending in America and another was beginning. We felt it then, in the many ways our lives changed so suddenly, so dramatically, and looking back on it from a quarter-century gone we are left in no doubt. It was the year America decided to directly intervene in the Byzantine affairs of obscure and distant Vietnam. It was the year we went to war. In the broad, traditional sense, that "we" who went to war was all of us, all Americans, though in truth at that time the larger majority had little knowledge of, less interest in, and no great concern with what was beginning so far away.
So this story is about the smaller, more tightly focused "we" of that sentence: the first American combat troops, who boarded World War II-era troopships, sailed to that little-known place, and fought the first major battle of a conflict that would drag on for ten long years and come as near to destroying America as it did to destroying Vietnam.
The Ia Drang campaign was to the Vietnam War what the terrible Spanish Civil War of the 1930s was to World War II: a dress rehearsal; the place where new tactics, techniques, and weapons were tested, perfected, and validated. In the Ia Drang, both sides claimed victory and both sides drew lessons, some of them dangerously deceptive, which echoed and resonated throughout the decade of bloody fighting and bitter sacrifice that was to come.
This is about what we did, what we saw, what we suffered in a thirty-four-day campaign in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in November 1965, when we were young and confident and patriotic and our countrymen knew little and cared less about our sacrifices.
Another war story, you say? Not exactly, for on the more important levels this is a love story, told in our own words and by our own actions. We were the children of the 1950s and we went where we were sent because we loved our country. We were draftees, most of us, but we were proud of the opportunity to serve that country just as our fathers had served in World War II and our older brothers in Korea. We were members of an elite, experimental combat division trained in the new art of airmobile warfare at the behest of President John F. Kennedy.
Just before we shipped out to Vietnam the Army handed us the colors of the historic 1st Cavalry Division and we all proudly sewed on the big yellow-and-black shoulder patches with the horsehead silhouette. We went to war because our country asked us to go, because our new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, ordered us to go, but more importantly because we saw it as our duty to go. That is one kind of love.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; First Edition (October 20, 1992)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679411585
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679411581
- Item Weight : 1.6 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #149,467 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #87 in Southeast Asia History
- #99 in Vietnam War Biographies (Books)
- #246 in Vietnam War History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Legendary combat leader and New York Times Bestselling author, Lieutenant General Harold (Hal) Gregory Moore Jr, passed away peacefully at age 94 on February 10, 2017.
Hal was born on February 13, 1922, in Bardstown KY to Harold and Mary (Crume) Moore. Hal started a 32-year military career upon entry into the United States Military Academy in 1942, convincing a Congressman from Georgia to swap Hal’s Kentucky appointment to the Naval Academy for one to West Point. Upon graduation in 1945, he served on occupation duty in Japan; he returned to Fort Bragg where he met and married the great love of his life, Julie Compton. He tested parachutes, surviving multiple malfunctions to include being hung up and towed behind a plane. Deployed to the Korean War in 1952, he commanded an Infantry rifle and heavy mortar company in the 7th Infantry Division and was awarded two Bronze Star Medals for Valor.
Subsequent assignments included teaching tactics at West Point, developing airborne and air assault equipment in the Pentagon, and a tour of duty in Norway where he planned the ground defense of northern Germany, Denmark, and Scandinavia. Upon completion of the course of study at the Naval War College, Hal took command of the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry at Fort Benning, GA. Fourteen months later, the unit was designated the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry (Custer’s old outfit) and deployed to Vietnam with the 1st Cavalry Division in 1965.
Hal is best known for his leadership in the first major battle between the US and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) that occurred in the remote Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands in November 1965. Within 20 minutes of the first shot, the 7th Cavalry, vastly outnumbered, was assaulted by hundreds of enemy furiously determined to over-run it. After a three-day bloodbath, the enemy quit the field leaving over six hundred of their dead littering the battleground. Hal was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest award for valor, for his actions during the fight. Hal then assumed command of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division and led it through several major campaigns in 1966 earning another Bronze Star Medal for Valor for carrying wounded to safety under “withering small and automatic weapons fire.”
In 1968, Hal pinned on his first star and led the planning for the Army’s withdrawal from Vietnam. He returned to Korea in 1969 and was promoted to Major General and given command of the 7th Infantry Division to “straighten out that Division” after it was fractured with insubordination and riots. Over the next year, Hal rebuilt the Division back into an effective fighting force. In 1971, he took command of the Training Center and Fort Ord, CA in the era of the Vietnam antiwar demonstrations, associated drug problems, continuing racial tensions and the transition to the “modern volunteer Army.” He applied lessons learned from the 7th Infantry to create another successful outcome. In 1974, Hal was promoted to Lieutenant General and assigned to the Pentagon as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel for the Army where he was most proud of actions he took to rebuild an NCO Corps almost destroyed by the Vietnam War.
Following retirement from active duty in 1977, he worked as the Executive Vice President of the Crested Butte Mountain Resort in Colorado. In 1981, working with his co-author, Joe Galloway, he turned his attention to the research that underpinned their 1992 New York Times Bestselling book on the Ia Drang battles, We Were Soldiers Once… and Young. In 2002, the book was the basis of the acclaimed movie, We Were Soldiers, where Mel Gibson portrayed Hal. After being devastated by the loss of his wife, Julie, in 2004, Hal withdrew from public life but worked with Joe Galloway to produce the 2008 sequel to the first book; We are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam.
Hal was a dedicated outdoorsman who loved to ski, hike, camp, and fish and was most proud of the fact that he “infected” all his children with the same passion. Hal was fishing in a local bass fishing tournament in 1952 on the morning his son, Steve was born. He always claimed he had permission to go - something Julie disputed. The fact that Hal won a nice Shakespeare reel did nothing to mitigate the trouble he was in upon his return.
Hal was known for his finely tuned sense of humor; earning the nickname of “Captain Fun” from his grandchildren. He would routinely send funny postcards of “jackalopes” and hide small toys around the house in anticipation of visits.

Joseph L. Galloway, one of America’s premier war and foreign correspondents for half a century, recently retired as the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. Before that he held an assignment as a special consultant to General Colin Powell at the State Department.
He is the co-author of the 2020 book They Were Soldiers: The Sacrifices and Contributions of Our Vietnam Veterans with Marvin J. Wolf, published by Nelson Books. They Were Soldiers features 49 interviews with Vietnam Veterans from all walks of life and focuses on the contributions they made to America after they returned home. It makes a strong case that the men and women who participated in the Vietnam War were every bit the equal to their “Greatest Generation” parents—and that they were certainly the greatest of their generation.
Early in 2013, Galloway was sworn into service as a special consultant to the Vietnam War 50th Anniversary Commemoration project run by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He was also a permanent consultant to Ken Burns’ Florentine Films project to make a documentary history of the Vietnam War which was initially broadcast in 2017 on PBS.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and 20 years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine. He joined Knight Ridder in the fall of 2002.
During the course of 15 years of foreign postings—including assignments in Japan, Indonesia, India, Singapore and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow in the former Soviet Union—Galloway served four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in the assault into Iraq. Galloway also covered the Haiti incursion and made trips to Iraq to cover the war there in 2003 and 2005-2006.
The late Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who first met Galloway in South Vietnam when he was a brand new Army major, called the Texan “the finest combat correspondent of our generation—a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.”
He is co-author, with the late Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of the New York Times and national bestseller We Were Soldiers Once…And Young (published by Random House), which was made into the critically acclaimed movie, “We Were Soldiers” starring Mel Gibson. We Were Soldiers Once…And Young is presently in print in six different languages with more than 1.2 million copies sold.
Galloway also co-authored Triumph Without Victory: The History of the Persian Gulf War for Times Books—and in 2008 he and Gen. Moore published their sequel to We Were Soldiers for HarperCollins, the New York Times bestseller We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam.
When Military History magazine polled 50 leading historians to choose the Ten Greatest Books Ever Written on War, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young was among those ten books.
On May 1, 1998, Galloway was decorated with a Bronze Star Medal with V for Valor for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965. His is the only medal of valor the U.S. Army awarded to a civilian for actions in combat during the entire Vietnam War.
Galloway received the National Magazine Award in 1991 for a U.S. News cover article on the 25th anniversary of the Ia Drang Battles, and the National News Media Award of the U.S. Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1992 for coverage of the Gulf War. In 2000, he received the President’s Award for the Arts of the Vietnam Veterans Association of America. In 2001, he received the BG Robert L. Denig Award for Distinguished Service presented by the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association. In 2005, he received the Abraham Lincoln Award of the Union League Club of Philadelphia, and the John Reagan (Tex) McCrary Award of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
Galloway was awarded the 2011 Doughboy Award, the highest honor the Army’s Infantry can bestow on an individual. Few civilians have ever received a Doughboy. On Veterans Day, 2011, he received the Legacy of Service Award of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.
Galloway is a member of the boards or advisory boards of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the 1st Cavalry Division Association, the National Infantry Museum, the School of Social Studies of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., the Museum of America’s Wars, and the Military Reporters and Editors Association.
Galloway is the recipient of honorary doctorate degrees from Norwich University and Mount St. Mary’s College of Newburgh, N.Y.
He now resides in Concord, N.C., with his wife, Dr. Grace Liem Galloway.
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This is a really good story and I would recommend that you read it. Follow up the book with the movie. Although the book is always better than the movie, and the movie left out a few great details, it also helped me understand the book a little better as well.
The significance of the above paragraph is that Colonel Dillon was the S-3 officer for LTC Moore's 1st of the 7th Cav. At the time of the Battle of the Ia Drang it was November, 1965. Fast forward four and a half years later; Lieutenant Colonel Gregory P. (Matt) Dillon had command of the 1st of the 7th Infantry which was part of the 3rd Infantry Division located in the Zone of West Germany. Since writing our war memoirs I've since been reading a lot of material on the Vietnam War, after forgetting most of it for over forty years. I never knew that my commanding battalion officer was a very instrumental and heroic officer at LZ Xray.
First of all, the very concept prior to the battle of the Ia Drang Valley of air mobile assault was an untested theory. After the battle it became doctrine written in stone as how to conduct operations in Vietnam. The troopers of the 7th Cav were trained in the techniques of airmobile assault at Fort Benning Georgia. Their uniforms which signified the typical fatigues that were worn in CONUS (Continental US) Europe and Korea shows to all that this unit was one of the first units to go to Southeast Asia. The basecamps erected by the 1st Cav Division looked to be temporary tent cities very reminiscent of WWII temporary camps. Later on in the war the base camps would be made heavily sandbagged structures complete with outhouse latrines and rainwater showers. The uniforms would also change drastically and the troopers would be wearing the lighter weighted jungle fatigues and the newly designed canvas upper jungle boots.
The troopers of the 1st of the 7th Cav would be led by the highly competent LTC Harold G. Moore. These troopers were well trained and Moore's officers were of a very high level. Their mission was what was to be a familiar phrase to all infantry officers who served in South Vietnam and it was to "search and destroy the enemy." The enemy was found soon after landing at LZ Xray. This LZ had the capabilities of holding 8 slicks when landing and extracting troops and equipment. Moore and Galloway tell the brutal story of how they held the LZ for three days and were able to direct in field artillery and air support on the surrounding NVA. The 7th Cav with a force of about 450 men were able to hold off an NVA force of 2500 men. Using the choppers for support and medevac operations the 7th Cav proved to all that they could indeed contain and beat the forces of the well trained NVA.
The stories told herein, show the professionalism and heroics of not only the lst Cav but also gets into the mindset of the North Vietnamese. It shows the true dedication of the revolution techniques of the North Vietnamese. As well as the Americans fought in Vietnam the North Vietnamese knew that we would tire of it. In fact General Moore faced these facts way back in the early days of 1965. He knew that the North Vietnamese were a tough and savvy opponent and that the US severely constrained themselves by not going and pursuing the enemy when they escaped to Cambodia. The war as fought with these so-called rules could never be won. Moore understood this early on.
This book represents many things. It shows to us that the US brought air mobility to the battlefield. It showed to all that it could maneuver from above the tough jungle terrain of Vietnam. Something the French lacked was the ability to maneuver, so they lost on the battlefield. The US did not lose on the battlefield, however as Ho Chi Minh knew we would tire of the war no matter how many of the North Vietnamese and VC we Americans killed. So therefore we left the battlefield in 1973 and the weak ARVN were left to their own devices, which I may add we supplied them. They quickly lost these devices and they indeed lost the war in 1975.
Moore's book is a classic which shows the brutality and yes some of the senseless management of men at war. Moore and Galloway show respect to the troopers who fought in that war and they convey what the effects of that major battle were and how the Vietnam War was to be fought in the future. It also shows our hubris and tragic decisions which led to the ultimate tragedy that was the Vietnam War. This book should be read by all who want to know about the battle, the Vietnam War and perhaps how to prevent such tragedies in the future.
Ia Drang – the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
by Lt. Gen. Harold G Moore
and Joseph L. Galloway
First of all, Mel Gibson owes a lot of people, including General Moore, a huge apology for his movie version of the book. However, if you have seen the movie, the photo journalist played by Barry Pepper is Joseph Galloway who, like Moore, was there for the first half of the battle. As Gibson saw it, the only people whose lives much mattered were officers. When an officer gets pooped, the scene switches back to Ft. Benning and the sorrow of the officer wives. To be sure, they suffered as much as anyone and deserve our empathy, but in Gibson’s world, enlisted men died anonymously, and their memories aren’t worth spit. I was afraid the book would be the same, but Moore and Galloway sound a lot like Ernie Pyle in that every man mentioned, enlisted and officer, gets a brief sketch that involves at least his age and hometown. There is a chapter that traces the subsequent histories of a few families of the dead, enlisted and officer as well. The first part of the book is several pages listing all the dead from both halves of the battle, a nice tribute, I thought. The book has ample maps, and, unusual for a Kindle edition, they were expandable for more detail.
Early in the Viet Nam war, some military thinkers and President Kennedy endorsed the idea of helicopter borne soldiers who could land right in the middle of the enemy and begin the fight from the get go. Later, the concept was called vertical envelopment, and it was adopted by more than just the First Air Cavalry Division. The 1st Air Cav was the first, however. All the rest of the grunts, including the Marines in the north, were mostly on foot. Choppers were used to ferry them about, but they did not yet attack from the air or land in the face of the enemy. Probably, they should have called them the 1st Air Dragoons. As part of the program, the army resurrected a few old cavalry regiments, including Custer’s 7th. Their song was “The Garry Owen,” and “Garry Owen!” was used as an affirmative, an acknowledgement or a greeting. Other revived regiments adopted black Stetsons and handlebar mustaches. Maybe that part of “Apocalypse Now!” wasn’t far off the mark. They were a newly created, elite unit, and their swagger announced it. They trained intensively for their mission, were then blindsided by newly inaugurated President Johnson’s reluctance to go completely to war. Before the division deployed to Viet Nam, Johnson declined to extend enlistments for the duration, and the division arrived in country badly under strength as many of these highly trained soldiers were discharged at the end of their enlistments. Later, in the second half of the battle of the Ia Drang, things got worse when these airborne troops were so shorted on their training that they got only one helicopter ride, but never trained in assault from them.
The battle of the Ia Drang is divided neatly into two parts, each named after its primary landing zone, LZ, the first part being X-ray and the second being Albany. Moore was a lieutenant colonel and commander of a battalion. Using aerial reconnaissance, and maps, Moore selected LZ X-ray as the place to assault and to meet the North Vietnamese army who were deeply dug in to the Cho Pong massif, just east of the Cambodian border. Cambodia, of course, was off limits to U. S. and, by extension to ARVN troops as well, and there was no doctrine of hot pursuit. Johnson wanted to keep the fiction of Cambodian neutrality and would not allow pursuit across the border, no matter how hot. NVA and VC could cross the border and thumb their noses. Many in the U. S. high command objected strongly to such restrictions, but, as one administration official, William Bundy I think, rightly pointed out, if we pursued twenty miles into Cambodia, the NVA would withdraw twenty-five, and so on until we needed to conquer the whole country, in which case the NVA might invade Thailand. Nixon missed the point and both invaded and bombed Cambodia, setting up the appallingly brutal regime of Pol Pot. The 1st Air Cav was eager to attack a much larger NVA force and show what they could do. The NVA, augmented by main force Viet Cong units, were similarly eager to fight the Americans and to discover ways to neutralize their overwhelming advantages in air power and artillery. The 1st Cav, besides inserting troops directly into battle, via Huey’s, would use Chinooks to land 105 howitzers in fire bases a safe distance away to provide pin point artillery. Huey gunships with four, fixed mount M-60’s, pods of 2.75” rockets, two M-60 door gunners and a 40mm cannon brought devastating close air support to troops on the ground. The Air Force provided a fixed wing fighter, the A-1E Skyraider, that was heavily armored and could carry an enormous load of bombs and napalm cannisters, as well as .50 cal. machine guns for strafing. It was for this reason that Moore’s battalion was confident of victory, despite being criminally short handed. After they landed, the NVA threw everything they had at the Americans. There was no lack of heroism among the NVA, and they kept coming into hellish fire until, after about fifty hours, they were forced to withdraw. Mel Gibson’s heroic, bayonet charge failed to materialize.
The second part of the battle, Albany, took place a day or two later. The ill equipped, ill trained battalion was sent in to replace Moore’s battle worn battalion, and, after policing the battlefield for American bodies and weapons, both NVA and American, they were, for unclear reasons, ordered to march from X-ray to Albany for extraction. They were exhausted from lack of sleep and from working at X-ray, and, not expecting much from a defeated enemy, were strung out in column of march without much in the way of flanking forces or recon. The NVA had two fresh battalions, and they attacked the column, attempting and succeeding in splitting it into isolated islands of defense. They were so close in, that they neutralized the American superiority in air and artillery fire power, both of which, from an inexcusable, command malfeasance, were late in coming. Eventually, they withdrew, and the Americans, after heavy loss, were able to exfiltrate on helicopters. Americans called it a victory, but I think the greater claim to victory was with the NVA. Their motive in fighting was to learn how to neutralize this new American power, and they did. They also pretty much forced President Johnson to accept a much wider war, one they knew they could probably win the way the beat the French: make battle losses unacceptable to the American electorate. In both halves of the battle, the cowardice of the Medevac choppers whose pilots would not approach a hot LZ was notable. Medevacs were performed mostly by 1st Cav choppers who, under terrific, enemy fire, would first unload supplies and then load bodies and wounded.
In Moore’s analysis, I think he agreed that the war was unwinnable, that it was going to be long and bloody, and that in the end, America would have to declare victory and go home. He ends with a quotation from Clausewitz to the effect that it’s stupid to begin a war if you don’t first define the conditions of victory. I’m not going to analyze the war here, that’s beyond the scope of this essay, but I think our loss is abundantly clear, and it becomes increasingly clear with every new analysis. The valor of the troops didn’t lose the war, but the indecision of the politicians did. Kennedy bears the bulk of the blame for our involvement, and to him much be assigned the burden of the loss. If he had ever read his Clausewitz, he either forgot it or failed to pay attention. What’s even worse is that our current crop of leaders is just as woefully ignorant of the folly of indecisive war as was the last.
I am impressed by General Moore. During the battle, General Westmoreland, commander of U. S. forces in Viet Nam, wanted Moore to leave his troops and fly to Saigon to give a briefing. Moore refused. Later in the war, as a brigade commander, Westmoreland replaced him as commander, because they had a policy of rotating officers on a fixed schedule. Moore, being in the middle of the battle and seeing the insanity of turning over command at that time, didn’t relinquish command until the battle was over, ten days later. He began each chapter with an apt quotation, often from past military leaders, such as W. T. Sherman, or from classical sources, often Shakespeare’s kings. One of them, though, was unattributed, and I hope it was Moore’s own: dulce bellum inexpertis. For that one, he gave the translation: “War is delightful only to those who haven’t experienced it.” I just checked it (should have done that first) and it’s by Pindar, but it was made common by Erasmus. I don’t know how much of the book was written by Moore and how much by Galloway. Galloway was a journalist, so I suppose most of the prose is his, but it’s hard to tell. Excellent book, and much better than I expected. Still waiting, though, for Gibson’s mea culpa. Maybe after the truly godawful “Hacksaw Ridge,” he thinks he’s done damage enough.
Top reviews from other countries
This book is co-written by the commanding officer (USA), H. Moore, and an embedded journalist, J. Galloway, who was forced to fight for his life alongside the soldiers. The tone is one of neither glorification nor coverup, and the military input also tries to take a sympathetic note towards the Vietnamese army commander and units (as reflected in the movie). Lots of detail, especially trying to focus on the individual experience of a wide range of soldiers involved in a complex sequence of battles.
If you are familiar with the movie, the most important of many aspects that the movie could not cover, is that the Battle of Ia Drang Valley actually consisted of two major engagements, the second of which is not covered by the film. That said, I think the movie made a fairly good version of this.
This is major military history written with a sense of humility, compassion and comprehension of the realities of planning and engagement. Absolutely recommended.
This book is not an easy read. War action is described in great details in the 400 pages. The author does service to every individual from the battalion who faught the La Drang battle by mentioning their part in the action, which makes it a complex reading experience. It takes some patience and even perseverance to stay with the story till the end, but it is worth it.













