On "Fox & Friends" this morning, reacting to the live footage of President Trump in Hanoi, I talked about the Vietnam war's domestic impact on the American psyche. It took many decades for that to change, and this Veterans Day movie pick is one of the cultural artifacts of that evolution in perception - a film about soldiering that wears its allegiance in its very title. It was released about six months after 9/11, in the spring of 2002, and in that sense is a movie about an old war seen through the lens of a new one.
The best thing about We Were Soldiers is how bad it is. I don't mean "bad" in the sense that it's written and directed by Randall Wallace, screenwriter of Braveheart (which won Oscars for pretty much everything except its screenplay, which was not overlooked without reason) and Pearl Harbor (whose plonking dialogue has been dwelt on previously in this space). Mr Wallace is as reliably uninspired as you can get. And yet it serves him well here. Pearl Harbor was terrible, but it was professionally terrible, its lame dialogue and cookie-cutter characters and butt-numbingly obvious emotional manipulation skillfully woven together into state-of-the-art Hollywood product. By contrast, in its best moments, We Were Soldiers feels very unHollywoody, as if it's a film not just about soldiers, but made by soldiers - or at any rate by someone who cares more about capturing the spirit of soldiery than about making a cool movie. It's the very opposite of Steven Spielberg's fluid ballet of carnage in Saving Private Ryan, and yet, in its stiffness and squareness, it manages to be moving and dignified in the way that real veterans of hellish battles often are.
This is all the more remarkable considering that it's about the first big engagement of the Vietnam war, in the Ia Drang valley for three days and nights of November 1965. In those days, the word "Vietnam" had barely registered with the American public and the US participation still came under the evasive heading of "advisors". In essence, the 1st Batallion of the 7th Cavalry walked - or helicoptered - into an ambush and, despite being outnumbered five to one by the enemy, managed to extricate themselves. Colonel Hal Moore, the commanding officer of the AirCav hotshots, and Joe Galloway, a UPI reporter who was in the thick of the battle for two days, later wrote a book - a terrific read. That's the source material from which Wallace has made his movie, with Mel Gibson as Moore and Barry Pepper as Galloway.
We Were Soldiers opens with a brisk, unsparing prelude - a massacre of French forces in the very same valley, 11 years earlier. Then we're off to Fort Benning, Georgia a decade later, where Colonel Moore and his grizzled old Sergeant-Major, Basil Plumley (Sam Elliott), are training youngsters for a new kind of cavalry. "We will ride into battle and this will be our horse," announces Moore, as a chopper flies past on cue. Basil Plumley, incidentally, is not in the least bit plummy or Basil-esque. He's the hard-case to Moore's Harvard man, a fairly predictable social tension, at least to those BBC comedy fans who treasure the "Dad's Army" inversion, with lower middle-class Arthur Lowe and his posh sergeant John LeMesurier.
Wallace turns a great book into a clunky film, and at first it seems as if he's doing the usual adapter's shtick of taking a vivid real-life story and shaving all the edges off to fit the usual clichés. The Fort Benning scenes become incredibly irritating in their bland gee-whizzery. There's always some kid around to prompt Mel Gibson to wax philosophical, as when his five-year-old cute-as-a-button daughter asks him, "Daddy, what's a war?"
Meanwhile, Mrs Moore (Madeleine Stowe) serves as den mother to the army wives, clustered around the living room like a convention of 1960s sitcom spouses. One of them is puzzled because she's just been into town and discovered that the local laundromat won't let her wash her coloreds (there's a sign in the window saying "Whites Only"). As in Pearl Harbor, the clothes and hairdos look just right, but the characters and emotional moment feel phony.
But once Mel & Co hit 'Nam, We Were Soldiers lives up to its title, as if happy to have its studio-mandated soppy-girly scenes behind it. At the time of its release, it was fascinating to watch the hasty and not entirely voluntary evolution of the Hollywood war movie post-September 11th. You'll recall the moment in Saving Private Ryan when Tom Hanks says, in all seriousness, that maybe saving Private Ryan will be the one good thing to come out of this lousy war. Hollywood still can't bring itself to be patriotic, to fight for a cause, so in the modern war movie, detached from the morality of the cause, military values - honor, courage, comradeship - exist in a vacuum, the soldier's professionalism its own raison d'ĂȘtre.
That's a problem dramatically, but it's an amazing transformation nevertheless. A Vietnam movie like this would have been unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago, or at any time since John Wayne made The Green Berets. This is a film where soldiers lie burned and bleeding and say "I'm glad I could die for my country" without a trace of Altmanesque irony or Oliver Stoned mockery.
Perhaps the scene that sums up what changed - if only in that brief period of post-9/11 national unity - is the moment when Joe Galloway's fellow members of the press corps are choppered in after the battle. Galloway himself has been transformed by what he's experienced: he understands now, he gets it. Meanwhile, they cluster around Colonel Moore asking the usual idiot how-do-you-feel questions: "How do you feel about the loss of your men, sir? Have you notified their families?" In this film, soldiers are intense, heroic, highly skilled - and the media are a bunch of droning boneheads in safari suits. Who'd have thought it? Considering that for the previous three decades the press congratulated themselves for being the real heroes of Vietnam - getting the truth back to the American people, etc - this scene seems almost heresy.
Mel Gibson? Oh, he's fine, if you make allowances for the wandering southern accent. The real problem is the characterizations of his men, whom Wallace completely fails to distinguish from one another. That's a pity. One of the reasons Colonel Moore wrote his book was to memorialize as individuals, as personalities, the men under his command. It's well worth reading.
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I object to John Link's comment (Nov 15,2017). Last line "It's *another* irony that a country which "defeated" us in war now seeks our friendship and protection."
I am a 29 year Navy Veteran. As a young man, I grew up on Yankee Station. My outfit. HC7, was the Navy's dedicated Combat SAR (heavily armored) Helo's in the Tonkin Gulf. We picked up Pilots (Navy Air Force and Marine) out jungles, rice patties, mountains but mostly feet wet in the Tonkin Gulf. The Paris "Peace" talks had been going on with no effect. The discussions were what shape the peace talk tables would be, & etc. I was sent back from San Diego to West Pac on a 38 Hour notice in 1972. We mined Hiphong (Sp) Harbor at that time. Our Pilot pickups increased dramatically. We dramatically increased the bombings of those things we were "allowed" to bomb. All of a sudden it didn't matter the shape of the Peace Tables. Peace was agreed to and signed in early 1973 by all concerned. Our agreement to South Viet Nam was that would provide air support in the event the North infringed on South Vietnam We maintained patrols but the Navy is always forward deployed someplace in this world. We just stayed close in the Western Pacific. Fast Forward. Nixon is kicked out. Dems win it all in 1974. 1975, the House, Senate and Presidency belonged to the DEMS. Budget Resolution time. They could have just done "it", but no, they had to publically announce that they had removed all funding for South East Asia military operations. The North poked the South and looked up, no airplanes: poked, ditto; poked, ditto. They invaded and slaughtered many. We picked up as many as we could. Some flew overloaded A/C and landed on or near our ships. Flew out on overloaded aircraft, sailed away on inadequate water craft, etc. We did not lose that war. We betrayed those we pledged our support. We betrayed the men who died in La Drang Valley, the pilots who flew into intense ground fire, the Marines and Army in intense engagements over almost a decade. The Military had to endure the miss-stated "loss" of Viet Nam, the loss of adequate funding for the maintenance of our Military, and etc. My personal statement. God Bless Ronald Reagan.
An irony not mentioned here: the prominent Vietnamese actor Don Duong was actually declared a "national traitor" by his government for playing the North Vietnamese Lt. Col. Nguyen Huu An, who led his forces in the Ia Drang valley engagement.
Despite the fact that the film depicted the NVA as brave, resourceful and resolutely determined to drive back the US, the diehard old commie pols could not allow the notion to take hold that the US forces were anything more than murderous mercenaries the Party Line had declared them to be.
IOW they wanted a propaganda film, "We were Soldiers" didn't fit the template.
Duong eventually fled to the US with his family in 2002.
Things have changed in the last 15 years. Fearing their historical enemy China's hostile encroachments in the South China Sea, the Vietnamese are cozying up to the USA , big time.
Their Defense Minister visited here this past summer, and next year our Navy will send a carrier over for an official visit and show of support.
Trump was in Hanoi just the other day---a state visit where the Vietnam Army band played the "Star Spangled Banner." CMIIW, but I don't think Clinton or Barack got the full honors when they visited.
It's *another* irony that a country which defeated us in war now seeks our friendship and protection.
MAGA!
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Movies like this "We Were Soldiers" dungheap are prime examples why I am now Fanatically Disinterested in the current pop movie/culture. It is both idiotically written and moronically produced. Looks like it was targeted for 14-year-old girls.
Wanna see a REAL movie about REAL war? Watch 'The Best Years Of Our Lives" [Amazon has the DVD for < $10.]
I agree almost completely with Mark's assessment of this movie. The battle scenes were frighteningly realistic in their lack of spectacle. The one line that sent chills up my spine was a simple "Fix bayonets". Two words portending a hundred deadly possibilities.
I was stationed at Fort Benning when I was an active duty medical officer for three years and one of my patients was CSM Plumbley. I knew tangentially about his heroics at the time, but had no real understanding until I saw the movie.. He is physically nor personality-wise anything like Sam Elliot, though I loved the performance. He seemed more like he should be working in Santa's shop. But that was one of the things about serving soldiers, you treated all of them with respect because you never really know what someone did during their service.
To me, Benning is hallowed ground. It's hard to explain, but I always felt the place to be filled with the ghosts and memories of all those young men, kids really, who never made it back. I liked how respectful the post itself was portrayed.
On another sidenote that I found out later, the song in the final credits was song by the West Point Glee Club. One of the young men singing was a CPT Adam Snyder who was brought MEDEVACed from injuries from an IED attack outside Tikrit to the Combat Support Hospital where I was working as an ER doctor at Camp Speicher. He died the next day.
I agree with Mark's "so bad it's good" analysis. But art ultimately is in the perception, and I for one was in tears at the end.
I appreciate hearing from military like you who were there. Civilian vs. military is so walled off now that it's hard to know from the civilian side what's really going on. We're lucky to get to hear directly from people like the Navy SEAL Jocko Willink who was on Stuart Varney's show with Mark on Friday. I found an audio interview of Lone Survivor Marcus Luttrell more compelling than the movie, something I listened to it nearly ten years ago, before the movie was made, but you don't forget it. I see the name Camp Speicher and recognize "Speicher" as the name of the Navy pilot shot down in the first Gulf War.
Over the weekend I glanced at a headline that said, Stop saying, 'thanks for your service'. But that's exactly what I do feel like saying, so thank you for serving at Ft Benning and in a hot desert in the theater of battle for the cause of freedom. Thank The Lord for the US military.
This is one of two movies I've ever seen (the other was The Passion of the Christ) where at the end of the movie, no one in the audience moved or spoke. Silence as the credits rolled, and then people slowly, quietly left. Regardless of the criticisms of the movie, it had a profound impact in viewers.
I love this movie.
It'll be interesting how Hollywood morphs to adapt to the Ronan Farrow-triggered avalanche. Now I know why movies have gotten so rotten - the people making them have been sex offenders. At my last count, the total number of arrests is zero. There was a heartbreaking tweet by Corey Feldman this week in all-caps, with "allegations" spelled as "allogations" that opens a window into how hurt these people have been by household names of hero actors who in fact are serial predators. Once I understood what happened to Ashley Judd, I understood what "damaged" her, as Mark said, and her outbursts at the national mall last January made sense.
Whether Mel Gibson plays Harvey Weinstein, that would be a war movie: the real war on women.
As an aside, after a decade in the wilderness, apparently Hollywood has absolved "Mad Mel" of his sins. Perhaps Hollywood now needs to repent too. It would be great if he made a movie about the Battle of Long Tan (... soldiers outnumbered 20-to-1 by Viet Cong). Failing that, he could play the role of Harvey Weinstein should Miramax ever make that docudrama, which would have a certain symmetry to it.
Probably the best thing about this movie, cinematically, was the use of the song Sgt MacKenzie in the battle scene. Not to denigrate the movie, which is good in some parts and great in some others, although it suffers from the parts that aren't so good.
To endorse a comment from another reader, LT Rick Rescorla, who is the soldier in the cover photo of the book, was a true hero of 9/11 - as security director of Morgan Stanley he defied the order of the Transit Authority to remain in place and evacuated the MS staff from above the 40th floor of the second tower. He got all but 6 of more than 2,600 out alive - he and his assistant security director were two of the casualties. He was last seen on the tenth floor stairwell, headed up. And he had produced risk assessments that had predicted the method of the1993 attack and the method of 9/11.
Many thanks for calling my attention to Rick Rescorla's story. I had not heard it before. In a righteous world, everyone in the nation would know it.
Mark, I was in Viet Nam from Aug. 1966 to Sept. 21, 1967. I was a truck driver out of Second Field Force, Long Binh. I have seen every movie about the war, but only one movie hit home with me. It was, "Go Tell the Spartans" with Burt Lancaster. Have a view.
Joe
"... the army wives, clustered around the living room like a convention of 1960s sitcom spouses. One of them is puzzled because she's just been into town and discovered that the local laundromat won't let her wash her coloreds (there's a sign in the window saying 'Whites Only')."
Amusingly enough, I once had the opposite experience, about 30 years ago: at the Carleton U. gym, you had to rent gym clothes, and afterwards, drop them off -- to be returned and laundered -- in a couple of bins, one of which was marked "whites only." So, of course, I made some "racism!!!" jokes.
I'm possibly veering slightly off-topic here but Mark referenced the film Pearl Harbor in less than flattering terms. I'd agree about its vacuous and fatuous historical narrative. I see this as part of a Hollywood trend for the past 35 years, to remake perfectly good films for purely generational reasons. When I was younger in the 1960s and 1970s films were remade because the originals were black and white somewhat stilted versions made in the 1940s and early 1950s without the benefit of colour and modern technology. Now films are remade purely to promote the current generation of actors (celebs) on the back of genuine earlier creativity. One classic example is Pearl Harbor, which can't hold a candle to the 1970 film "Tora,Tora,Tora" a masterpiece of historical docudrama without the faux emotional melodrama which seems to be a prerequisite of any Hollywood film made today.
Furthermore, I'd say that, modern technology notwithstanding, the black and white 1950s film "A Night To Remember" is much better than its pretentious and socially inaccurate successor "Titanic"!
I agree. 'A Night to Remember' was much better despite being in Black & White. What seems most fake about 'Titanic' is it's fetishization of the third and first class passengers and its callous indifference toward the fate of the second class passengers who were proportionally the greatest casualties of the disaster. Not a single male second class passenger survived. That is where the really insightful social commentary is to be found, not among the third class boors or filthy-rich first class survivors.
We live in a world the counter-culture has become the culture and is now a deeply embedded "Establishment." The problem with this (among many) is that the qualities that fueled the counter-culture rise, extreme irony, a bullying meanness, dismissivness, sarcasm, and a total lack of respect for anything are now the hallmarks of our cultural commisars. The phrase "love of country" would no doubt send up howls of derision in show biz except if couch in Spielbergian terms. What do you do in a society when the qualities above are coin-of-the-realm and the older verities of loyalty, kindness, generosity, sincerity and even mercy are not only ignored but mercilessly mocked? Not a pleasant situation.
I remember wishing the film was better. Cliches are dispiriting, sucking the pleasure out of watching a film, demanding that the watcher dumb down his perception and judgement, although I can almost see some truth in your statement:
"...and yet, in its stiffness and squareness, it manages to be moving and dignified in the way that real veterans of hellish battles often are."
I agree that patriotism is an a rare and important sentiment in movies depicting contemporary American life as well as war. Surely it can be done much better. I'd argue that Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket does so, albeit in a nihilistic way that acknowledges the eternal attraction to war and mayhem for the male psyche. That bloodletting doesn't give way to sentimental claims for the all-around awfulness of war, but records its dirty glamor in unexpected and convincing ways.
Great movie, greater book!!!
To fallen soldiers let us sing,
Where no rockets fly nor bullets wing,
Our broken brothers let us bring
To the Mansions of the Lord
....
We shall stand and guard
Though the angels sleep,
Oh, through the ages let us keep
The Mansions of the Lord"
Beautiful music, beautifully rendered in the close credits. It moved me to tears at Ronald Reagan's funeral.
I remember the movie as Mark tells it regarding the shamelessly contrived Ft. Benning scenes. But having entered the theater with low expectations, I left thinking "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young" (sorry, I guess that's the title of the book, which I like better anyway) was one of the best war movies I'd ever seen.
Cornishman Rick Rescorla, previously in the British Army, distinguished himself in this fight. He lost his life while trying to save others' in the World Trade Center.
RIP, and thank you for citing his bravery.