We Were Soldiers

A

I don't remember hearing that much about this movie when it came out. Maybe it was overshadowed by something else at the time or people just weren't in the mood for yet another Vietnam movie. But for my money I think this is a better war movie than Saving Private Ryan. It starts kind of slow as we meet Lt. Colonel Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) who has been picked to implement a new fighting technique called "Air Cavalry". Unlike conventional battles with their supply lines snaked across the land the idea is to put soldiers wherever they are needed by helicopter, fight the battle, and move on. Of course this would become the routine way of fighting in Vietnam eventually, but at the time it was highly experimental. And it was the chosen technique for America's first big battle against the Vietnamese in November 1965 (a great time to be born).

The movie starts off stateside as the officers train under Gibson so that they can train their own men. They train with their helicopter crews so the two will get to know each other and rely on each other. Soon they are shipped out to go fight and die. The movie shows the impact on the families as new fathers go off to war while others leave their pregnant wives on their own in a town where they are so new they don't even know where the grocery stores are. The women had to be brave too.

The acting performances are very good. Mel Gibson is very good as a thinking and fighting officer who studies the Vietnamese and tries to learn lessons from the French failures. One of the reasons he writes down is poor intelligence and on his first mission they tell him they're going to drop him off at a landing zone with no idea how many enemy will be in the area. Since they only have a handful of helicopters they can only bring 60 soldiers in per flight and it will take an hour to go back and bring in the next 60. They have 400 men to bring and those first 60 will be all alone at first with no idea what is around them.

Sam Elliot plays Gibson's master seargent who is as tough and grizzled an old veteran as you could dream up. Chris Klein is one of Gibson's young officers going into battle for the first time. And there is a UPI reporter (Barry Pepper, who you've seen before) who hitches a ride on one of the helicopters only to end up in one of the fiercest fights imaginable. Whether the Americans will even be able to hold out long enough for everyone to get picked up again is in doubt. How do you get out of a landing zone when you can't hold the enemy back? What do those last 60 guys do for that last hour?

Though the movie focuses more on the action and the characters you also get to see some of what they are thinking and what they do right and wrong. You see to a limited extent what the Vietnamese are up to but more just so you'll know what's coming next. The action is very, very intense and graphic. The last hour and a half all seems like the D-Day scene from Saving Private Ryan. Despite inflicting heavy casualties, the Americans are always barely hanging on with nowhere to retreat.

The book that the movie was based on was written by Gibson's character and the reporter. So you at least know that Gibson will get out alive. In the "making of" segment on the DVD you get to meet some of the players in real life and get some more information. The character that Gibson played says he never saw a war movie that got it right. He says the only thing that keeps a soldier fighting is the men around him. Country, flag, democracy and other high-minded concepts all go out the window when the bullets start flying. And he says this movie gets it right. In that respect it reminds me a lot of Black Hawk Down, another intense movie about a single battle, that also said the reason you are there is for the men you fight with. At 138 minutes the movie is long but there are still some good deleted scenes, especially a scene where Gibson talks to Westmoreland and McNamara and lays out the entire war for them.

The movie is a great tribute to American soldiers in the early days of the Vietnam conflict. It is well acted and also just well made with tons of intense battle footage. Not for the squeamish, but a great movie if you have the stomach for it. I'll give it an A.

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