Soldiers the 2002 Movie We

¶ … Soldiers

The 2002 movie We Were Soldiers really helped me understand the dilemmas faced by the American soldiers who fought in the Vietnam Conflict that lasted from 1965 until the final U.S. pullout in 1975 (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger, et al., 2005). The movie actually opens up ten years earlier, in 1954, during a massacre of French Foreign Legion forces by the Viet Minh before the French withdrew and the Vietnamese war became an active conflict prosecuted by American military forces (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger, et al., 2005). I found it chilling to see that the same bugle taken from a French bugler just before his execution in the field by the Viet Minh was still being used by the North Vietnamese commander leading the fight against U.S. forces a decade later. Especially now, in retrospect, that series of scenes seems particularly prescient because it provides such a vivid and tangible metaphor for the futility of following the French forces into Indochina just to experience the same impossible guerrilla warfare and the fanatical commitment of the North Vietnamese (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger, et al., 2005).

The fact that the film's protagonist, Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, commands the exact same U.S. Seventh Cavalry Regiment memorialized by the infamous "Last Stand" of General George Custer whose entire regiment was wiped out in 1876 by Sitting Bull at the Battle of Bighorn (Zinn, 2003) would have been too melodramatic but for the fact that We Were Soldiers actually depicts a factual circumstance and not a fictional creation of Hollywood. That connection is also something that pains Moore for obvious reasons. In addition to the eerie historical connection, Moore is extremely frustrated by the fact that President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to authorize sufficient military resources in conjunction with a designation of the conflict as a full-scale national emergency (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger, et al., 2005). Even before the first battle sequence, both Moore and this viewer had an ominous feeling that history could be on the verge of repeating itself for the Seventh Cavalry.

Naturally, because of the film's perspective, one sympathizes with the plight of the American forces rather than with the circumstances facing the North Vietnamese. That is certainly true with respect to the detailed depiction of the horrific deaths and mutilations suffered by Moore's men throughout their prolonged siege by an overwhelming force of North Vietnamese soldiers that outnumbered them ten to one. However, the fact that the North Vietnamese fought with such commitment and that they were willing to sacrifice themselves in such great numbers also inspired some empathy on my part for them as well. They obviously endured tremendous hardships living for months on end in deep underground tunnels and being targeted by the most advanced and devastating weapon systems in the world by the most powerful superpower in the world. Naturally, I was horrified to see the effects of napalm on U.S. soldiers after Moore had no choice but to call in an air strike on his own position as a last-ditch effort to avoid being completely overrun by the enemy. However, at the same time, that scene also made me realize that this was only one air strike. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese forces were subjected to napalm air strikes continually for years throughout the U.S. involvement in the war (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger, et al., 2005). I realized that the horror I witnessed when it affected U.S. soldiers was the very horror inflicted by U.S. air strikes on the Vietnamese.