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We Were Soldiers

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We Were Soldiers
Theatrical release poster
Directed byRandall Wallace
Written byHal Moore
Joseph L. Galloway (book)
Randall Wallace (screenplay)
Produced byArne L. Schmidt
Jim Lemley
Randall Wallace
StarringMel Gibson
Madeleine Stowe
Sam Elliott
Greg Kinnear
Chris Klein
Keri Russell
Barry Pepper
Music byNick Glennie-Smith
Production
company
Distributed byParamount Pictures (US)
Icon Film Distribution (International)
Release date
  • March 1, 2002 (2002-03-01)
Running time
138 minutes
CountryTemplate:Film US
LanguageEnglish
Budget$75 million
Box office$114,660,784 [1]

We Were Soldiers is a 2002 American war film that dramatized the Battle of Ia Drang on November 14, 1965 — the first major engagement of the United States Army in the Vietnam War. 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 Foreign Legion unit is on patrol in World War1 in 1924 during the First Indochina War. The captain of the patrol curses the land when they see nothing. Then, the unit is suddenly ambushed by Vietminh forces who kill the officers and, although the unit kills many enemies it is soon overrun. Nguyen Huu An (Don Duong), hypothesising that if they take no prisoners the French will eventually stop sending troops, orders the execution of all surviving French soldiers.

Eleven years later, Lieutenant Colonel Danel Tosh (Mel Gibson), a dedicated U.S. soldier, is deeply committed to training his troops, troopers of 7th Cavalry Regiment, who are preparing to be sent 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 would 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. Before leaving for Vietnam, Moore delivers a touching speech to his unit:

"Look around you. In the 7th Cavalry, we got a Captain from the Ukraine. Another from Puerto Rico. We got Japanese, Chinese, Blacks, Hispanics, Cherokee Indian, Jews and Gentiles -- all American. Now here in the States some men in this unit may experience discrimination because of race or creed, but for you and me now, all that is gone. We're moving into the valley of the shadow of death, where you will watch the back of the man next to you, as he will watch yours, and you won't care what color he is or by what name he calls God. Let us understand the situation; we're going into battle against a tough and determined enemy. I can't promise you that I will bring you all home alive, but this I swear, before you and before Almighty God: when we go into battle, I will be the first one to set foot on the field, and I will be the last to step off. And I will leave no one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come home together. So help me God."

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 them, 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 against 4,000 -6,000 well equipped enemy soldiers.

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 of an entire North Vietnamese Army division over 4,000 men. At arrival, 2nd Lt. Henry Herrick spots a scout, and runs after him, ordering his reluctant soldiers to follow. The scout lures them into an ambush, resulting in the majority of the platoon members' deaths, including Herrick's. The platoon becomes surrounded with no chance of retreat. Sgt. Savage assumes command of the platoon and by calling in artillery and using the cover of darkness, holds off the Vietnamese from their small defensive position. With helicopters constantly dropping off the Calvary units, Moore manages to secure weak points before the Vietnamese took advantage of it.

An emotional toll is taken back home, where Moore's wife Julie (Madeleine Stowe) and another Lieutenant's wife, Barbara Geoghegan (Keri Russell), take over the job of delivering telegrams that inform families (mainly wives like themselves) living at Fort Benning, Georgia, the unit's base of operation, of soldiers' deaths.

On the second day, despite being trapped near the landing zone, and desperately outnumbered, the main force manages to hold off the Vietnamese with artillery, mortars, and helicopter lifts of supplies and reinforcements. Eventually, enemy commander Nguyen Huu An orders a large scale attack to completely overrun the American position. At the point of breaking, Moore calls in the last resort "Broken Arrow" (an air-strike on their own position), killing some of their own soldiers but eliminating most of the Vietnamese offensive force. The stranded platoon led by Savage are eventually rescued after the Vietnamese forces are repelled. The American troops regroup, secure the area and charge up the mountain where the Vietnamese division headquarters is located. 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) flies in with his helicopter and strafes the Vietnamese, destroying the most of the enemy defense.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Huu An the Vietnamese Commander is alerted that the Americans have broken through the lines, and the Base camp has no troops between command post and the Americans and the reserve forces were also without. He orders the headquarters evacuated. Later, Nguyen Huu An with some remaining soldiers collect the dead remains of his men. Moore, having completed his objective, returns to the L.Z. to be picked up, and, after all of his men, dead or alive, are removed from the battlefield, steps on to a helicopter and flies out of the valley. Strong visual emphasis is placed on Moore's being the last American to set foot off the field of battle. 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 part two of the battle in a different landing zone not in the movie. He returned home safely after 235 more days of fighting. His superiors congratulated him for killing over 1800 NVA& Viet Cong soldiers.

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, Rescorla is replaced by a nameless Welsh—not Cornish—platoon leader.[7] Rescorla would not live to see the release of the movie however as he was killed during the September 11 attacks.[8]

Cast

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=weweresoldiers.htm
  2. ^ http://www.metacritic.com/video/titles/weweresoldiers?q=We%20Were%20Soldiers
  3. ^ "We Were Soldiers". Chicago Sun-Times.
  4. ^ Schwarzbaum, Lisa (February 28, 2002). "We Were Soldiers". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 2009-08-03.
  5. ^ http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0301/p15s02-almo.html
  6. ^ McCarthy, Todd (February 22, 2002). "We Were Soldiers". Variety. Retrieved 5 March 2010.
  7. ^ Stewart, James B. Heart of a Soldier. Simon & Schuster: New York, 2002, p. 236.
  8. ^ http://www.rickrescorla.com/
  9. ^ [1]

External links

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