Soldiers the 2002 Movie We

¶ … Soldiers

The 2002 movie We Were Soldiers seems to exemplify the futility of fighting the Vietnam War by the United States. The opening scene depicts the 1954 massacre of French Legionnaire forces at the hands of the Viet Minh, the First Indochina War precursors of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese that U.S. forces would face on the same battle grounds a decade later. Ominously, the field commander of the Viet Minh issues an order to kill any French survivors under the theory that if the Viet Minh continue killing all of the soldiers sent by France, France will eventually stop sending in more soldiers to die in Vietnam. Before the scene cuts to the 1965 period where the American experience in Vietnam begins in earnest, the Viet Minh field commander also takes the battle bugle of the fallen French bugler. That instrument reappears in the hands of the same commander a decade later as he leads his forces against the American Seventh Cavalry Regiment in the same battle field.

The fact that the American unit involved is the Seventh cavalry is eerily significant as well, by virtue of the fact that this is the same unit commanded by George Custer so famously wiped out in 1876 by Sitting Bull at the Battle of Bighorn. This fact is not lost on the film's central character, Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, a career soldier charged with leading the first major ground combat action by U.S. forces in Vietnam. Moore is the proverbial squared away and battle hardened military leader but his confidence in his mission is compromised by his concern over the fact that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson has expressed a fundamental ambivalence toward the commitment of the U.S. military in Vietnam.

Once in Vietnam, Moore receives orders to take his four hundred soldiers into the Ia Drang Valley to which he refers as "the Valley of Death" to respond to the attack on an American base in the area. Moore responds by air-lifting his men to the valley in the first helicopter air cavalry used in the war, a creation of Moore. Before embarking, Moore delivers an impassioned speech to his men in which he references the multi-cultural heritage and composition of the Seventh Cavalry and their color-blind mutual commitment to one another. He also pledges to be the first man off the helicopter at the landing zone and the last to step off the ground at the conclusion of the battle they expect to encounter.

The ensuing battles are brutal and Moore suffers the loss of scores of his men. It turns out that they had fallen into a trap set by the North Vietnamese who outnumber Moore's regiment by a factor of ten, with four-thousand soldiers in the area. Despite the courage and determination shown by Moore and his men throughout the next two days of fighting, there is an ominous sense of futility that is an appropriate metaphor for the entire half-hearted and philosophically questionable involvement of the U.S. In Vietnam more generally.