Knee-Deep in the Blood, Sweat and Soul of Vietnam

In my office hangs an old, yellowed map of French Indochina that once hung in my apartment in Saigon. Like a school annual, it is inscribed with signatures of friends from a long-ago war, a rather unusual school whose requirement for graduation was not to get killed. Written on the map, on Vietnam, is an “X” with a line drawn out to the South China Sea and signed with: “It began here, X-Ray, Joe Galloway.” This is where “We Were Soldiers” began for me.

Many years later Joe and Lt. Gen. Hal Moore would write “We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young” about this place called “X-Ray” where, in 1965, men of the 1st Battalion of the 7th U.S. Cavalry and even more young men of the People’s Army of Vietnam’s 320th, 33rd and 66th regiments lost their lives in the first major engagement of American and North Vietnamese military in the Ia Drang Valley.

And this is why the film version of “We Were Soldiers” succeeds where so many other Vietnam War movies have failed. This story comes not from a Hollywood filmmaker with a political agenda--many of whom successfully avoided military service in the war years--but straight from the souls of the men who were there. America had a quick glimpse of their quality of character when on Sept. 11, along with firefighters and police officers, a security man named Rick Rescorla, whose picture graces the cover of the book, stayed in the World Trade Center to save lives and lost his own. Rescorla was a veteran of X-Ray in the Ia Drang.

While Galloway was working on the book, he would call me and other friends late at night to vent the emotional strain of interviewing families. This emotion is the source of the film’s power. It was conceived with unconditional love born on the battlefield of the Ia Drang and carried through the decades by its authors. Now it has blossomed forth into a powerful film that will change public perception of the Vietnam veteran.

It is one of those rare occurrences in filmmaking when all creative efforts are coordinated in a symphonic movement with a single objective: to honor the men who fought at the Ia Drang. Unlike “Rambo,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Coming Home,” “Apocalypse Now” and the circus of other Vietnam fantasy films, “We Were Soldiers” pays tribute to the dead of our former enemy as well, something that only those who have been to war can fully appreciate and understand. This film--suggested viewing for military families who must be prepared for the unthinkable loss of a husband or father--may very well follow the path of the book that has become required reading for Army officers.

Most war movies are action films, but “We Were Soldiers” is as much a story about women and families as it is about war. Having grown up as a military dependent, I also related to that portion of the film. As a youngster I hated moving every few years, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, for we grew up in the pre-civil rights years free of prejudice as we integrated military families played and worked together--and, as is expressed in the film, sometimes cried together when a father didn’t come back.

“We Were Soldiers” begins with the French defeat, setting the stage for a continuing Vietnamese struggle as America vowed that it would succeed where France had failed. This is critical because most Americans don’t know the complexity of Vietnamese history. If they did, they wouldn’t blame the Vietnam War on our military veterans. High-ranking officers advised our government not to get involved in a land war in Indochina, but that advice was ignored by a long line of American presidents.

Unlike other Vietnam War films, “We Were Soldiers” takes no political stands. This is a story about real people, whose names are used for the characters portrayed on screen, some of whom are not alive today to see themselves. I am sure they would be proud, as will their families ... if they can watch. The battle scenes are as realistic as any you’ll see in a film.

Young PFC Jimmy Nakayama of Rigby, Idaho, was a real person who was badly burned in an overshot napalm attack. Joe Galloway (played by Barry Pepper) carried him to a helicopter, only to learn that Nakayama died two days later, never having seen his daughter, who was born on the day of the attack. It is a part of the film that Galloway cannot watch, nor can he or his wife, Karen, watch the scene in which her father, Capt. Tom Metsker, dies.

The power of “We Were Soldiers” lies in the subtle elements that veterans will recognize and relate to. Greg Kinnear, who portrays Maj. Bruce Crandall, goes beyond the call of duty when he lands his shot-up Huey chopper after numerous runs out to Landing Zone (LZ) X-Ray; as he stumbles out of his Huey, his knees buckle and he vomits. That happened to me at a place called Hawk Hill after I got out of a hot LZ. I was embarrassed until I saw the door gunner do the same. It’s a normal reaction when you have seen your death coming at you in the form of green tracer bullets banging and slamming into your chopper.

Finally, “We Were Soldiers” is one of the first Hollywood films to portray the North Vietnamese as human beings, courageous and determined and frightened, as devoted to their families as we are. It is a turning point in the American cinematic interpretation of the war. In real life, Hal Moore was one of the first American officers to return to Vietnam after the war to meet his former enemy counterpart, Nguyen Huu An, who told Moore that his American soldiers were courageous. It’s ironic--and heartbreaking--that after the war our former enemy treated our veterans with more respect than our citizens did here at home.

There is a scene in the film in which a diary is taken off the body of a dead North Vietnamese soldier and given to Moore (Mel Gibson), who mails it back to the young soldier’s widow. In reality, the diary contained no address or other information and was never returned.

But I returned such a diary to a former North Vietnamese lieutenant after I had had it for more than 26 years. I thought I would be returning it to the family of a dead man, but I was wrong. When I placed his diary back in his hands in Hanoi in 1996, Hoang Le Sao wept. I visited him again in his home near the Chinese border in 2000. We have since become friends and now visit together whenever I go to Vietnam.

In one of the film’s final moments, a wounded soldier is being wheeled by a fellow soldier in an airport corridor. Passing passengers shrink away from the two men to avoid any contact or acknowledgment. That coldness from the American public hurt more than anything the enemy threw at our men in battle.

“We Were Soldiers” is the most finely crafted Vietnam War film to date and one of the most accurate and moving war films I have seen. It demonstrates that the courage, compassion and integrity that our society longs for is in the men we once rejected and ignored and that our first step toward regaining those lost qualities is to honor those veterans.

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Jim Caccavo, a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer, is an Army veteran who served in Korea in 1964 and worked in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970 for the Red Cross and Newsweek magazine as a photographer and correspondent. He teaches a course on Vietnam and its impact on American arts, media and society at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.