We Were Soldiers Film Notes

We Were Soldiers

Theatrical release poster

Directed by Randall Wallace

Produced by

Arne L. SchmidtJim LemleyRandall Wallace

Written by Hal Moore

Joseph L. Galloway (book)Randall Wallace (screenplay)

Starring

Mel GibsonMadeleine StoweSam ElliottGreg KinnearChris KleinKeri RussellBarry Pepper

Music byNick Glennie-Smith

Studio Icon Productions

Distributed by

Paramount Pictures (US)Buena Vista Pictures Distribution (International)

Release date(s)

March 1, 2002

Running time 138 minutes

Country United States

Language English

Budget $75 million

Box office $114,660,784[1]

We Were Soldiers is a 2002 American war film that dramatizes the Battle of Ia Drang on November 14, 1965. The film was directed by Randall Wallace and stars Mel Gibson. It is based on the book We Were Soldiers Once… And Young by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Hal Moore and reporter Joseph L. Galloway, both of whom were at the battle.

Plot

A French unit is on patrol in Vietnam in 1954, during the First Indochina War. The unit is suddenly ambushed by Viet Minh forces, who kill the officers. Although the French soldiers kill many Viet Minh, the unit is soon overrun. Nguyen Huu An (Don Duong) orders the execution of all surviving French soldiers, to discourage further French involvement in Vietnam.

Eleven years later, the United States had entered the Vietnam War. U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) is depicted as dedicated

and deeply committed to training troops under his command (the 7th Cavalry Regiment), who are preparing for deployment to Vietnam. He is disquieted because the 7th Cavalry regiment was the unit commanded by General George Custer in the 19th Century when he and his men were slaughtered at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Moore is also dismayed because President Lyndon B. Johnson has decreed that the war will be fought "on the cheap", without declaring it a national emergency. As a result, Moore believes he will be deprived of his oldest, best-trained soldiers (a formal declaration of war would have meant mobilization and extension of the terms of enlistment for volunteer soldiers) - about 25% of his battalion - just prior to shipping out for Vietnam.

After arriving in Vietnam, he learns that an American base has been attacked, and is ordered to take his 400 men after the enemy and eliminate the Vietnamese attackers, despite the

fact that intelligence has no idea of the number of enemy troops. He leads a newly-created air cavalry unit into the Ia Drang Valley. After landing in the "Valley of Death", the soldiers capture a North Vietnamese Army lookout who informs them that the location they were sent to is actually the base camp for a veteran North Vietnamese Army division of more than 4,000 men.

Upon arrival in the area with a platoon of soldiers, 2nd Lt. Henry Herrick spots a scout, runs after him, and orders reluctant soldiers to follow. The Vietnamese scout lures them into an ambush, resulting in several men of the platoon being killed, including Lt. Herrick and his subordinates. The surviving platoon members are surrounded with no chance of retreat. Sgt. Savage assumes command. He calls in artillery and uses the cover of darkness to hold off the Vietnamese from overrunning their small defensive position. Meanwhile, with helicopters constantly dropping off the Cavalry units, Lt.

Col. Moore manages to secure weak points before the Vietnamese can take advantage of such.

The casualties in Vietnam are shown taking an emotional toll at Fort Benning, Georgia, the unit's base of operation. Lt. Col. Moore's wife Julie (Madeleine Stowe) and Lt. John Geoghegan's wife, Barbara Geoghegan (Keri Russell), assume the task of delivering telegrams to inform families (mostly soldiers' wives like themselves) about the soldiers being killed in action.

On the second day, despite still being trapped near the landing zone, and desperately outnumbered, the main U.S. force manages to hold off the Vietnamese with artillery, mortars, and helicopter lifts of supplies and reinforcements. Eventually, enemy Vietnamese commander Nguyen Huu An orders a large scale attack to completely overrun the American position.

At the point of breaking and being completely overrun by the enemy and with no option left, Moore orders his radioman to call in "Broken Arrow" (indicating that Moore's position is being overrun and can no longer be defended, and requesting all available combat aircraft to attack the enemy, even those close to the U.S. troops' position). The aircraft attack with bombs, napalm and machine guns, massacring many NVA's and Viet Cong but an accident occurs dangerously close to Moore's men, killing some of Moore's soldiers but successfully repelling the second Vietnamese attack. After the Vietnamese forces are repelled, the surviving men of the stranded platoon, led by Sgt. Savage, are eventually rescued.

Moore's troops regroup, secure the area, and stop at the base of a hill, where Moore surmises the Vietnamese division headquarters is holed up in tunnels. At the same time the Vietnamese commander plans a final assault on the Americans and sends out most of his troops to

carry out the attack. The Vietnamese have set up strong defense emplacements near the hidden entrance of the underground passage to the command post spoken of by the scout. Hal and his men charge right at them, into a seemingly impending massacre, but before the Vietnamese can fire, Major Bruce "Snakeshit" Crandall (Greg Kinnear) and other helicopter gunships attack the Vietnamese, destroying the bulk of the enemy force.

Nguyen Huu An, the Vietnamese Commander, is alerted that the Americans have broken through their lines and there are no soldiers between the Americans and them. Since the Commander had deployed his reserve forces to a final offensive and the base camp has no troops to call upon for defense, the Vietnamese commander quickly orders the headquarters evacuated.

Moore, having achieved his objective, returns to the L.Z. (helicopter landing zone) to be picked up. True to his speech to his soldiers before

deploying, only after all of his men (including the dead and wounded) are removed from the battlefield does he step on to a helicopter and fly out of the valley.

While the Vietnamese are collecting their dead, Nguyen Huu An, holding a small damaged American flag, tells one of his officers: "Such a tragedy. They will think this was their victory. So this will become an American war. And the end will be the same (as the French) except for the numbers who will die before we get there."

At the end of the movie it is revealed that the landing zone immediately reverted to North Vietnamese hands after the American troops were airlifted out. Hal Moore continued the battle in a different landing zone, and after nearly a year he returned home safely. His superiors congratulated him for killing over 1,800 NVA& Viet Cong soldiers. The film ends with an older Moore visiting the Vietnam war memorial and a showing of the names of soldiers who fell at Ia Drang.

Cast

Mel Gibson - Lieutenant Colonel/Colonel Hal Moore

Madeleine Stowe - Julia Moore Taylor Momsen - Julie Moore Luke Benward - David Moore Greg Kinnear - Major Bruce "Snakeshit"

Crandall Sam Elliott - Sergeant Major Basil L. Plumley Chris Klein - 2nd Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan Keri Russell - Barbara Geoghegan Barry Pepper - Joe Galloway Don Duong - Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu

An Ryan Hurst - Sergeant Ernie Savage Robert Bagnell - 1st Lieutenant Charlie

Hastings Marc Blucas - 2nd Lieutenant Henry Herrick Josh Daugherty - Sp4. Robert Ouellette Jsu Garcia - Captain Tony Nadal Jon Hamm - Captain Matt Dillon Desmond Harrington - Sp4. Bill Beck

Blake Heron - Sp4. Galen Bungum Clark Gregg - Captain Tom Metsker Erik MacArthur - Sp4. Russell Adams Dylan Walsh - Captain Robert Edwards Mark McCracken - Captain Ed "Too Tall"

Freeman Edwin Morrow - Private First Class Willie

Godboldt Brian Tee - Private First Class Jimmy

Nakayama Sloane Momsen - Cecile Moore Bellamy Young - Catherine Metsker Simbi Khali - Alma Givens

Reception

The movie received mixed to fairly positive reviews.[2] Roger Ebert, from the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the movie 3.5 stars out of 4 and praised the movie's battle scenes and how the movie follows the characters.

"Black Hawk Down" was criticized because the characters seemed hard to tell apart. "We Were

Soldiers" doesn't have that problem; in the Hollywood tradition it identifies a few key players, casts them with stars, and follows their stories.[3]

Lisa Schwarzbaum, from Entertainment Weekly, gave the movie a B and noted the film's fair treatment of both sides.

"The writer-director bestows honor -- generously, apolitically -- not only on the dead and still living American veterans who fought in Ia Drang, but also on their families, on their Vietnamese adversaries, and on the families of their adversaries too. Rarely has a foe been portrayed with such measured respect for a separate reality, which should come as a relief to critics (I'm one) of the enemy's facelessness in Black Hawk Down; vignettes of gallantry among Vietnamese soldiers and such humanizing visual details as a Vietnamese sweetheart's photograph left behind in no way interfere with the primary, rousing saga of a fine American leader who kept his promise to

his men to "leave no one behind dead or alive."[4]

David Sterritt, from the Christian Science Monitor, criticized the movie for giving a more positive image of the Vietnam War that, in his opinion, did not concur with reality.

"The films about Vietnam that most Americans remember are positively soaked in physical and emotional torment - from "Platoon," with its grunt's-eye view of combat, to "Apocalypse Now," with its exploration of war's dehumanizing insanity. Today, the pendulum has swung back again. If filmmakers with politically twisted knives once sliced away guts-and-glory clichés, their current equivalents hack away all meaningful concern with moral and political questions. "We Were Soldiers" is shameless in this regard, filling the screen with square-jawed officers who weep at carnage and fresh-faced GIs who use their last breaths to intone things like, "I'm glad I died for my country."[5]

Todd McCarthy, from Variety, said the film "presents the fighting realistically, violently and relatively coherently given the chaotic circumstances..." McCarthy further said, "Mel Gibson has the closest thing to a John Wayne part that anyone's played since the Duke himself rode into the sunset, and he plays it damn well." He summarized with, "Gibson's performance anchors the film with commanding star power to burn. This officer truly loves his men, and the credibility with which the actor is able to express Moore's leadership qualities as well as his sensitive side is genuinely impressive."[6]

Hal Moore, who had long been critical of many Vietnam War films for their negative portrayals of American servicemen, publicly expressed approval of the film and is featured in segments of the DVD. Some soldiers were less pleased: Retired Col Rick Rescorla, who plays an important role in the book, and whose photo is on the cover, was disappointed, after reading the script, to learn that he and his unit had been

written out of the movie. In one key incident, the finding of a vintage French bugle on a dying Vietnamese soldier, the Cornish-born Rescorla is replaced by a nameless Welsh platoon leader.[7]

References

1. ̂ "We Were Soldiers". IMDB. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=weweresoldiers.htm. Retrieved September 21, 2011.

2. ̂ "We Were Soldiers". Metacritic. http://www.metacritic.com/movie/we-were-soldiers. Retrieved September 21, 2011.

3. ̂ "We Were Soldiers". Chicago Sun-Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020301/REVIEWS/203010305/1023.

4. ̂ Schwarzbaum, Lisa (February 28, 2002). "We Were Soldiers". Entertainment Weekly.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,213548,00.html. Retrieved 2009-08-03.

5. ̂ http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0301/p15s02-almo.html

6. ̂ McCarthy, Todd (February 22, 2002). "We Were Soldiers". Variety. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117917064.html?categoryid=31&cs=1. Retrieved 5 March 2010.

7. ̂ Stewart, James B. (2002). Heart of a Soldier. Simon & Schuster: New York, p. 236.