We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

Overview

Each year, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps selects one book that he believes is both relevant and timeless for reading by all Marines. The Commandant's choice for 1993 was We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young.
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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345475817
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/23/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	23,334
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.15(h) x 1.05(d)

About the Author

Harold G. Moore was born in Kentucky and is a West Point graduate, a master parachutist, and an Army aviator. He commanded two infantry companies in the Korean War and was a battalion and brigade commander in Vietnam. He retired from the Army in 1977 with thirty-two years' service and then was executive vice president of a Colorado ski resort for four years before founding a computer software company. An avid outdoorsman, Moore and his wife, Julie, divide their time between homes in Auburn, Alabama, and Crested Butte, Colorado.
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.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

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.

Table of Contents

	Prologue	1
	Going to War
1.	Heat of Battle	9
2.	The Roots of Conflict	16
3.	Boots and Saddles	44
4.	The Land and the Enemy	58
	X-Ray
5.	Into the Valley	73
6.	The Battle Begins	86
7.	Closing with the Enemy	101
8.	The Storm of Battle	121
9.	Brave Aviators	139
10.	Fix Bayonets!	156
11.	Night Falls	174
12.	A Dawn Attack	188
13.	Friendly Fire	205
14.	Rescuing the Lost Platoon	221
15.	Night Fighters	235
16.	Policing the Battlefield	249
17.	It Ain't Over Till It's Over	262
	Albany
18.	A Walk in the Sun	277
19.	Hell in a Very Small Place	296
20.	Death in the Tall Grass	321
21.	Escape and Evade	344
22.	Night without End	356
23.	The Sergeant and the Ghost	375
	Aftermath
24.	Mentioned in Dispatches	391
25.	"The Secretary of the Army Regrets..."	413
26.	Reflections and Perceptions	434
	Epilogue	444
Appendix	Where Have All the Young Men Gone?	447
	Acknowledgments	471
	Interviews and Statements	476
	Chapter Notes	480
	Selected Bibliography	513
	Index	519

What People are Saying About This

David Halberstam

"A stunning achievement."

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

"A great book of military history."

Editorial Reviews

A GUT-WRENCHING ACCOUNT OF WHAT WAR IS REALLY ALL ABOUT, which should be ‘must’ reading for all Americans, especially those who have been led to believe that war is some kind of Nintendo game.”
–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 Publisher

In November 1965, America's involvement in the Vietnam War was just beginning. When 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, commanded by Lt. General Harold "Hal" Moore, were dropped into a clearing in the Ia Drang Valley, they were immediately surrounded by more than 2,000 North Vietnamese troops. Another battalion was to take part in an intense battle less than two and a half miles away. The fighting would become some of the fiercest of the entire war. General Moore and journalist Joseph Galloway (the only journalist at the scene) recount the bravery displayed at Ia Drang.

bn.com

We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young is a great book of militaryhistory, written the way military history should be written. It is agut-wrenching account of what war is really about, which shouldbe 'must' reading for all Americans, especially those who havebeen led to believe that war is some kind of Nintendo game.

H. Norman Schwarzkopf

Between experiencing combat and reading about it lies a vast chasm. But this book makes you almost smell it.

Wall Street Journal

There are stories here that freeze the blood....The men who fought at Ia Drang could have no finer memorial than this one.

New York Times Book Review

A powerful and epic story . . . raw, gutty, and eye-stinging. This is the best account of infantry combat I have ever read, and the most significant book to come out of the Vietnam War.

David Hackworth

A stunning achievement, a book that is not merely a book,but rather a monument to all the young men who were in thela Drang in those fateful November days—paper and words withthe permanence of marble. I read it and thought of The Red Badge of Courage, the highest compliment I can think of.

David Halberstam

On Nov. 14, 1965, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry, commanded by Lt. Col. Moore and accompanied by UPI reporter Galloway, helicoptered into Vietnam's remote Ia Drang Valley and found itself surrounded by a numerically superior force of North Vietnamese regulars. Moore and Galloway here offer a detailed account, based on interviews with participants and on their own recollections, of what happened during the four-day battle. Much more than a conventional battle study, the book is a frank record of the emotional reactions of the GIs to the terror and horror of this violent and bloody encounter. Both sides claimed victory, the U.S. calling it a validation of the newly developed doctrine of airmobile warfare. Supplemented with maps, the memoir is a vivid re-creation of the first major ground battle of the Vietnam War.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Ia Drang, in November 1965, was the first major battle fought by U.S. troops in Vietnam. It was also one of the fiercest. As a lieutenant colonel, Moore commanded the battalion that initiated the fighting. War correspondent Galloway accompanied Moore's troopers from start to finish. We Were Soldiers Once movingly depicts Ia Drang through the eyes of junior officers and enlisted men of the 1st Cavalry Division and their North Vietnamese opponents. The authors convincingly present Ia Drang as an archetype of a self-defeating U.S. strategy that emphasized wearing down a determined and skillful enemy on the battlefield. The result was an unacceptably high level of American losses for the results achieved. One of this book's most telling episodes is its depiction of an army so unprepared to deal with casualties that some telegrams notifying families of a son or husband killed at Ia Drang were delivered by Yellow Cab! Recommended for all collections.-- D.E. Showalter, U.S. Air Force Acad., Colorado Springs

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