Tests of Loyalty

Ft. HUNTER LIGGETT--Director Randall Wallace is staring intently at a playback monitor as Mel Gibson, who’s starring in his Vietnam War story “We Were Soldiers,” sneaks up behind him. Arrayed all around the two, on the dusty slopes of this remote Army installation northwest of Paso Robles on a breezy May afternoon, are about 200 cinematic soldiers Wallace is putting through their paces.

This is Wallace’s second directorial effort (his first, 1998’s “The Man in the Iron Mask,” was a marginal success), and at a cost of about $75 million, it’s no light burden. Gibson stealthily reaches under Wallace’s chair for the director’s bullhorn--the actor is a well-known prankster and there’s something of the naughty-by-nature schoolboy in his manner--then pensively squeezes it on. His whisper is so muted that only those in a tidy 10-foot circle can hear its electronically filtered output, in a deeply Teutonic accent. As Wallace’s head tilts down ever so slightly in response, Gibson asks, “Iz this some futile attempt to make a tense human drama?”

The ultimate answer to that question lies ahead of them, but there’s no disputing that a tense human drama is Wallace’s goal. While this film is an adaptation of a celebrated and best-selling true account of battle (“We Were Soldiers Once and Young”), co-written by a senior officer and a journalist who lived through the prolonged firefight at Ia Drang Valley in 1965, Wallace has expanded the story’s emotionality by digging deeper into the book’s compactly sketched story of the women left behind.

The footage he’s shooting makes for a bloody, wrenching saga. But by devoting itself in part to the home front and to a careful presentation of the North Vietnamese soldiers as worthy and intelligent adversaries, Wallace’s war story bids to give Paramount Pictures something to work with in distinguishing it from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Ridley Scott’s formidable “Black Hawk Down.”

The eruption of that picture from an unknown quantity (would it seem too tough, too downbeat, in the wake of Sept. 11?) into a box-office smash with a collection of rave reviews and four Oscar nominations, including one for director Scott, could make for a bitter irony for Wallace. As Bruckheimer’s choice for screenwriter of “Pearl Harbor,” Wallace avowed he’d aimed for a love story as much as a war epic--then watched the film take its hardest critical hits for the love-triangle subplot.

Before the jeers had fully died away, Bruckheimer was beating Wallace’s own war film into the marketplace with “Black Hawk Down’s” unsparingly combat-driven story of American troops in battle in Somalia. After a complex dance around a December release date, “Soldiers” retreated to a March 1 release, while “Black Hawk Down” began a wider release.

The picture’s strong reception certified Scott’s growing reputation as an auteur for the mass audience, even as Wallace was left to keep crafting his own story that matched the rough outline of “Black Hawk”--an epochal (if unsung) battle in which American troops fought their way out of encirclement by a much larger hostile force. Now, much of the burden will fall on Gibson, who must prove once more that his $25-million salary is some guarantee of major box-office success.

The film and Gibson may also be magnets for the story’s sharply pro-military politics. If “Black Hawk Down” was called jingoistic and even racist by some pundits, “Soldiers,” despite obvious efforts to humanize the Vietnamese foes, may draw fire for such chest-beating, soldierly lines as Gibson’s improvised prayer at the end of a heart-to-heart chat in the base chapel, which ends with “ ... and help us blow the little bastards straight to hell.”

Today, Gibson is wearing his crown as lightly as the straw hat he sometimes dons between takes in place of his olive-drab steel pot. He keys the bullhorn again, as Wallace good-naturedly ignores him. Gibson continues in the insinuating kommandant’s tone, which he identifies as “Klaus” (and is later revealed to be a twisted parody of German-born Roland Emmerich, who directed Gibson in “The Patriot”): “Even you must realize zis is hopeless.”

The path of retired Lt. Gen. Hal Moore’s story from its dusty, bloody unfolding in Vietnam’s Ia Drang Valley to theater screens has been a long and arduous one. It’s a story that would wait 27 years to emerge in the form of Moore’s book, co-written with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joseph Galloway, and 10 more years to be seen on screen.

What delayed those steps into the public arena was not so much America’s complicated feelings about Vietnam, but the authors’ unwillingness to take any chance that the memory of fallen American soldiers would be maligned. (There were also many survivors whose legacy needed protecting and who shared their mistrust of any retelling by those who weren’t there.) As Gibson will point out in an interview as soon as he puts down the bullhorn, the authors planted an admonition in the book’s prologue: “Hollywood got it wrong every damn time, whetting twisted political knives on the bones of our dead brothers.”

To discuss this film with Moore, Galloway or Wallace is to enter into a zone of fairly high-toned (and indisputably sincere) discourse. Even when preparing a group of unbilled and anonymously green-clad extras for a bayonet charge, Wallace issues his open-ended instructions by paraphrasing a line from his screenplay for “The Man in the Iron Mask”: “You’ve got to decide,” he hollers in a Tennessee drawl that somehow always sounds laid-back, “whether you’re taking a life or giving a life.”

The events of November 1965 were deadly indeed. The four-day struggle around two hastily chosen landing zones during the Ia Drang campaign in the Central Highlands of Vietnam was that war’s first major battle, costing 235 American lives (with 245 wounded) and an estimated 2,000 North Vietnamese lives. The events of Wallace’s film are mostly confined to the ferocious fight Moore led around the clearing called Landing Zone X-Ray, where 79 of his troops died; a subsequent battle at Landing Zone Albany, where his group’s replacements died more quickly and under far less able command, is suggested by radio traffic near the film’s end, but not seen.

Moore was a 42-year-old who had taken over his first battalion just months before the fight. As the leader of a somewhat experimental command within the 7th Cavalry (whose best-known soldier was once Gen. George Armstrong Custer, to whom the blond-haired, strapping Moore was sometimes compared), paratrooper Moore’s mandate was to bring the fight to the guerrilla enemy in the still-developing Vietnam conflict by rushing into hot zones via 110-mph Huey helicopters carrying his troopers. “His mission that day was ‘to find the enemy and kill him,’” says Gibson, whose knowledge of Moore’s life goes much deeper than the book, and was learned face-to-face in numerous sessions with Moore.

UPI war correspondent Galloway was “one day shy of my 24th birthday” when he approached an officer at a fire base asking to be flown by helicopter to the location of Moore’s troops. He was raised in Refugio, Texas, as heir to a long warrior tradition. (His great-grandparents met as a result of the ad hoc friendship of two Civil War vets, each of whom had had one leg amputated; the two would meet periodically to buy a shared pair of shoes.) He broke the cycle with his decision to cover wars rather than fight them. He’d been “in country” for some months.

In the melee at LZ X-Ray, in which 79 Americans were killed, Galloway had out-hustled the other reporters (including pre-CNN Peter Arnett) at a fire base near the battle and asked to hop a ride to the action. Moore simply said, “If he’s crazy enough, let him come.... “ Galloway would win a Bronze Star, many years later, for his valor in defending the beleaguered unit’s patch of turf.

The juxtaposition of Moore, a West Point graduate and student of military history, with a crackerjack reporter such as Galloway (he would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize for the 1990 U.S. News and World Report story of the battle) has made their account of the battle a landmark; it was reviewed on the front of the New York Times Book Review upon publication in October 1990 and sold out its initial print run. The sales and the praise have steadily continued. (A cut of all the proceeds, including its life as a film, goes to a foundation the authors established for underwriting the education of the surviving families of American troops.)

Having lived through the haunting hours on the ground, however, made the authors resolute that the story wouldn’t be squandered or exploited. “We listened to wannabe producers for a year and a half,” recalls Galloway, “not hearing what we wanted to hear. We fired our agent and agreed between us that maybe the film would be made years after our death, but we would not stand there and watch them destroy [the story].”

Wallace would prove to be uniquely suited to persuading the lifelong friends that the film version could satisfy them. A religion major at Duke University, he’d considered signing up as a chaplain to the Marines in Vietnam but spent a year in seminary school instead; by the time he finished school and his student deferment ran out, Saigon had fallen.

He emerged to take a crack at songwriting (while running the animal shows at Nashville’s Opryland), then turned to novels, earning good reviews but making no money. His wife was expecting their firstborn when they visited his ancestral Scotland and saw a statue of William Wallace, who would become the focus of “Braveheart.” But he worked for years in episodic television on the order of Stephen Cannell’s “Sonny Spoon” before finally taking his shot with the “Braveheart” script that attracted Gibson’s attention and 1995 Oscar wins for best picture and best director (Wallace’s screenplay was nominated as well).

What counted more toward Wallace’s dream of making “We Were Soldiers” was that with two war sagas under his belt, he was a man who could speak Moore and Galloway’s language. Wallace had persuaded Moore and Galloway in 1994 to sell him the option on the book, and he’d been renewing it yearly (at his own expense) at $10,000 per year.

Negotiations heated up in January 1999 when he visited Moore at Crested Butte, Colo., where Moore had helped run a ski resort for a while after retiring from the Army. (Gibson had taken an interest in the screenplay his “Braveheart” colleague had been nurturing.) Wallace had also visited the cemetery at Ft. Benning, Ga., with Moore, who would periodically pray over the graves of the men he’d lost in 1965. Moore paid the same respects from his local chapel. “Mel really sparked to that,” says Wallace, “and he said, ‘Look, when he comes out here, I would like to have a Mass said for his dead soldiers.’”

In early 2000, Moore arrived in Los Angeles and was driven to Gibson’s Malibu home. Near there, in a chapel Gibson sponsors with donations, a Costa Rican priest said a Mass in Latin. When it was done, Moore and Gibson, “both conservative Catholics,” understood each other, Wallace recalls, noting “Hal was powerfully moved.”

Mounting the production was fairly complex. With Gibson’s production company, Icon, willing to put up a little more than half the film’s cost--for which it would own the foreign distribution rights--Paramount Pictures readily agreed to co-finance the film and distribute it domestically. A three-month production schedule began in mid-March, with the principal cast members who would portray Moore’s soldiers reporting to Ft. Benning for indoctrination in the ways of the Army, and more specifically, the Air Cavalry.

Gibson arrived when the rest of the gang had already been at work for a week: “I went to Ft. Benning and did the wimp course,” says Gibson typically underselling the rigors he endured, “some crawling in the mud, running around with the guys,” half-kiddingly adding that at age 44, “it’s not getting any easier.” Mostly, he concentrated on Moore, absorbing the man’s philosophy and, almost as important, his bearing: “It’s not so much what he physically looks like, it’s all about the way he expresses himself. It’s for real, it’s uncompromising and there’s a lot of heart there.”

Chris Klein knew that as Lt. Jack Geoghegan, he would need to represent not the seasoned warrior Gibson would portray, but a young, by-the-book, military-school grad. Klein appealed to his Army instructors: “I sat the guys down and said, ‘Look, all the running and everything, all that’s good, and I can do that. I’ve got my Nikes in my truck. But I wanna know who a second lieutenant talks to, who he looks in the eye, how he shakes hands, the proper salute, who I respect and who respects me.... I want to be a soldier. Show me how to stand.”

A crucial part of Wallace’s vision was to include Geoghegan’s wife (played by Keri Russell), who is mentored by Moore’s wife (played by Madeleine Stowe). These characters embody the psychic toll of the war back home--as the telegrams telling of the casualties arrive, as in real life, in the hands of abashed cab drivers.

The one man who seemed to be on olive-drab autopilot from the beginning was Sam Elliott, as Sgt. Major Plumley, a noncom in his third war whom Moore greatly relied on. Moore laughingly recalls how Elliott (who regularly staged inspections of his junior acting colleagues in their barracks at Ft. Benning) actually roamed the parade ground where Gibson’s character was about to give a steely, inspirational speech, spotting flaws in the gear and comportment of the real-life soldiers who had been loaned to the production for the afternoon.

“I don’t think that I’ve ever played a part where I had more respect for the man,” Elliott said. “I think that comes primarily from the fact that I did have an opportunity to meet him and talk to people who knew him.” The long-retired Plumley loaned Elliott the knife he’d carried the day of the battle, just as Galloway got out his old Nikon cameras and loaned them to Barry Pepper, the young actor who portrayed him.

Pepper, arranging his gear in the trailer before an afternoon on the set, spoke of the similarities between Gibson and Tom Hanks, another $25-million man who had led him into war (Pepper played the Scripture-quoting sniper in “Saving Private Ryan”).

“They [Gibson and Hanks] just make you feel so comfortable, so at ease being around them that you’re able to just free yourself and do your work rather than worry about the sort of Hollywood hierarchy and the dog-and-pony show that sometimes exists on these big pictures,” Pepper says. “Mel’s just one of the guys. He’s an alpha male dog, so filled with testosterone and energy.”

Pepper, fresh from a well-received portrayal of Yankee slugger Roger Maris in HBO’s “61*,” speaks warmly of Galloway, whose Bronze Star is the only one awarded by the Army to a civilian for action in Vietnam. “He walked onto that battlefield a witness and walked off a soldier. It’s really hard to comprehend, especially for young men of my generation, what it takes to step up like that.... Lions in winter, these guys. They’ve seen and done things that we, hopefully, never will have to do.”

This afternoon on the set, Gibson will be fairly heroic himself. As the helicopter pilots block out a scene with second unit director Allen Graff (a burly former USC football star), Graff asks Wallace, “Randy, we’re gonna see the choppers coming in--would you want Mel to go in that direction?”

Wallace spots two Hueys that are at present still on the ground, squeezed so tightly into the narrow landing zone that to consider planting a human being near them when they fly in causes a little chill down the back. “Yeah,” says Wallace, “I’ll talk to him about it.” But Gibson, who’s been studiously field-stripping the cigarette he’s just finished, has been quietly attentive to what they’re planning.

“Watch the downdraft, Mel,” is Graff’s last instruction.” “Watch the downdraft,” mutters Gibson, a world of dry humor in his squint. “Watch when those blades start clicking together.” He studies his helmet interior before strapping it on. “Boy,” he says before making a whickering series of tongue noises meant to simulate rotor shards snapping through steel into tissue, “glad I had that on.”

Wallace, who just the previous night ripped his Achilles tendon in a pickup hoops game, is squinting in either pain or concentration as the helicopters are loaded with “wounded” and finally pound back into the sky.

A few yards to the side, Pepper is taking motherly care of his grit-coated Nikons, grinning at the sight of Gibson so loose between takes, after so embodying Moore when the cameras rolled. For “Saving Private Ryan,” Pepper recalls, director Steven Spielberg had an Irish priest come down to a wide field of thistle to say a prayer before principal photography started. “The cast and crew all gathered around and bowed their heads in prayer. Whether you’re a religious man or not, there’s something spiritually powerful there that connects you to the remembrance of the men and women you’re portraying.

“That’s sort of what we’re hoping to achieve with this film. Some sense of healing for those people that 30 ... 40 years later can’t seem to differentiate between the political and the personal Vietnam. The memories of all of the young boys that sacrificed their lives for what they thought was right at the time. It’s just so sad--the early stages of Vietnam just totally got buried by the later stages where things got so horrific and out of control.”

Gibson has wandered to the middle of the set, running a testing finger through the compound of real sweat and dirt that has fused with what started out as dirt makeup on his neck and jaw. He’s not one given to a Method actor’s disappearance into his role, but now he speaks of Moore as if “the old man” (as his troops, by foot soldier convention, knew their leader) were reliving these scenes along with him. “He sees boys going down, and he’s thinking about his own kids, because these troops were his family, and he felt the responsibility to keep those guys alive. And when they would go down, it would get to him. Pretty bad. He wasn’t the kind of guy that would break down; he carried on. But it got to him.

“And you’re cutting back to the wives, you know, the telegrams, and how do they deal with that? You get to know them and their kids and you get a little insight into their hell, which is, almost as bad.... I think that’s an aspect that hasn’t really been focused on in this genre before, so it sort of sets this film apart.”

For Moore, who still prays over his dead soldiers, and still goes to the Vietnam Memorial to commune in his fashion with the men under his command whose names are engraved there, the point of the film, and the lesson of Vietnam, is a fairly simple one.

“We hoped our book would do honor, and the movie will do honor, to those men who traveled 12,000 miles to that place. You can get killed just as dead in a rice paddy or field in Vietnam as on the Normandy beachhead. For the same flag. And for the same country.”

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Fred Schruers is a senior editor at Premiere magazine.