Vietnam, with less angst and alienation. (Hollywood Report).(We Were Soldiers)(Review)(Excerpt)

There is a scene in the script for the upcoming Vietnam War movie We Were Soldiers in which Mel Gibson's character, preparing to depart for South: east Asia, learns that his regiment number is seven. "The Seventh?" he asks. "The same regiment as ... Custer?"

Ultimately--and this news won't spoil the film--Gibson and his troops fare better than the general and his soldiers did at Little Big Horn. But that's not to say they have an easy go of it. We Were Soldiers is about one of the bloodiest battles in all of Vietnam, an engagement in which more than 200 Americans died, more than were killed in any regiment at Gettysburg.

Most of We Were Soldiers, scheduled for March release, is set in late 1965 in the Ia Drang Valley, or as it came to be known, the Valley of Death. It was the first location to see the entry of U.S. combat troops in significant numbers, and the carnage there nudged President Johnson toward his view that the war was unwinnable.

The battle was chronicled in stark detail in the 1992 book We Were Soldiers Once ... And Youngwritten by Hal Moore, an Army lieutenant general who was in the middle of it, and Joe Galloway, the UPI correspondent assigned to the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry. The commandant of the Marines selected it as the book of the year for the Corps when it was published. In the film, Moore is played by Gibson, and Galloway by Barry Pepper (the sniper in Saving Private Ryan).

Last fall, in the private Washington, D.C. screening room of Motion Picture Association chairman Jack Valenti, Moore and Galloway got to see Hollywood's version of the story. Sitting just a few seats over were Gibson and the picture's writer and director, Randall Wallace (the scriptwriter for Braveheart). President Bush's political advisor Karl Rove was also present.

For the most part, Moore tells TAE, he was pleased. This is a man who, in his book, rebuked Hollywood's traditional treatment of the war with the words: "We knew what Vietnam had been like, and ... Hollywood got it ...