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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"We Were Soldiers," the new Mel Gibson movie, takes the Vietnam War away from the reporters, novelists, and film directors who have long portrayed it as a uniquely strange and alienating experience. In this version, Vietnam is no longer America's "rock-and-roll war" fought in the jungle by hallucinating hipsters and dazed rednecks, by big-city blacks and racists who wanted to kill "gooks." "We Were Soldiers" turns the war over to the white males who were simply brave -- the kind of Americans who loved their God, revered their wives, and honored the Asian enemy. The movie is a piece of hero worship devoted to a commander who embodies these virtues -- Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. (Hal) Moore, who led the 1st Battalion of the Army's Seventh Cavalry in the bloody battle of Ia Drang, in the central highlands, in late 1965. "We'll be landing under fire," he tells his troops during training at Fort Benning. "Men will die." He's certainly right about that. Hal Moore is the type of implacable warrior who stands in the middle of the fight, refusing to leave the field until everyone is either dead or safely removed. "We Were Soldiers," which is based on a book that Moore wrote with Joseph L. Galloway, a U.P.I. reporter at the time of the war, takes its tone from Moore's...
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