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(More customer reviews)First, let's look at what this book is not: It is not beautifully written, it is not the story of one person's experience and it is not dedicated to character building. If you are looking for those things, then look elsewhere.
Now if you are looking for the smell, the horror, the courage and the sacrifice of the battlefield, then you will find it in this work. Moore and Galloway have written a book that will serve as a textbook for generations of people who want to know what war is really like in a very objective manner - the heroism, the great leadership, poor leadership, mistakes, and occasional cowardice. It pulls no punches and takes people and organizations to task where appropriate. It is truly an amazing work and one that should be read by anyone when a debate on going to war is raging.
The book is in three distinctive parts: The fight on Landing Zone X-Ray; The Fight on Landing Zone Albany; and the aftermath of the battles, for both the US involvement in Viet Nam and some of the families affected by it. Moore was the Battalion Commander at X-Ray and gives a very good view of the decisions he made and why he made them. He is able to walk us through the battle and describe the critical actions by both the North Vietnamese and the US forces that turned the tide of this battle and allowed Moore's force to win a victory. There are many first person accounts of different aspects of the battle given by the US soldiers that fought there and also by some of the key North Vietnam leaders.
The second part of the book was about the relief battalion's retrograde back from LZ X-Ray to LZ Albany. Moore was not here so all of the reporting was done thru interviews after the fact. He is pretty scathing in some of his assesments of the decisions being made - although if you do not have military experience you might not find the writing scathing enough for what happened. He describes the complecency by some of the leadership on the movement back, the failure to set out decent security and the indecisiveness in the early moments of the battle. He also points out the slow flow of information from Albany to the higher levels of the US Forces. Albany was fought to a draw with horrendous losses on both sides after a North Vietnamese battalion and the 2/7 Cav had a meeting engagement (which means they ran into eachother in the woods). One lead company was almost completely slaughtered, save a few people that had to do an E&E (Escape and Evasion) in order to get to safety. The book contains three accounts of men that did that.
The final part of the book looked at the political decisions made in the aftermath of the war using declassified top secret memos written by Sec McNamara to illustrate that he knew very early in the war that it could prove to be unwinnable, putting the odds at a US victory at no better than 1 in 2. Also, there are personal accounts from the widows and the children of some of the men that died in the battles. Since I am in Iraq right now with the Army, and I have a two year old daughter, I found these passages particularily moving.
My only gripe with this book, is that your understaning of it is assisted greatly if you have been in the military. Since I am, it is no problem, but for someone walking in with no experience, a lot of the terminology used and the prose itself will make following the story a little more difficult. It reads almost exactly like an After Action Review, which probably is the proper voice for this piece, but some readers will have problems with it - as evidenced by some of the earlier reviews.
The bottom line - very honest, interesting, work. It will help the reader understand battle, and perhaps understand it a little more than they would like to. Highly recommend.
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We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in VietnamEach year, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps selects one book that he believes is both relevant and timeless for reading by all Marines. The Commandant's choice for 1993 was We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young. In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War. How these men persevered--sacrificed themselves for their comrades and never gave up--makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating. General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This devastating account rises above the specific ordeal it chronicles to present a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge, dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.From the Hardcover edition.
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