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A review by mburnamfink
We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph Galloway
5.0
War is awesome and terrible, and so is We Were Soldier's Once... and Young. One of the blurbs calls this book a monument to the men of the 1/7th Cavalry, and I can think of no better way to describe this book. Opening with a sepia toned reminiscence of the development of Air Mobile tactics and helicopter warfare, the story moves soon enough to Vietnam, where the proud soldiers of the air cavalry would face their greatest test.
Intelligence suggested Viet Cong forces in the Ia Drang valley, but nothing could have prepared the 1/7 for landing almost on top of an North Vietnamese Army base area and 2000 soldiers. For a fraught 24 hours, Colonel Moore brought in more troops, called down a withering cordon of fire support, staved off a crushing dawn offensive, and rescued the 'lost platoon' which had become separated in the opening moments of the battle. The second half focuses on the battle of LZ Albany, and the terrible mauling that the 2/7 Cav took leaving the area the following day.
Colonel Moore is a born leader, and this book provides a close up portrait of the kind of selfless dedication and love that men in combat deserve. But while Moore's voice is dominant, he is not alone. Oral histories from hundreds of Ia Drang veterans, including the Vietnamese commanders, rounds out the story of this desperate combat.
I've often said that Vietnam was fractally fucked up, and Ia Drang is a perfect example of that. In the 34 day campaign the Cavalry inflicted a 10:1 kill ratio on the NVA. However, Ia Drang remained Indian Country and the most of the NVA units involved in the battle survived to escape into Cambodia. A well-led American unit with sufficient fire support was essentially invincible in defense, but even a momentary lapse in focus could prove fatal, such as what happened to the 2/7 at Albany. While both sides had the capacity to regenerate their units, in many ways the finely-tuned high morale 7th Cavalry that went into Vietnam could not be sustained by draftees from an increasingly anti-War America. In a microcosm of the whole disaster, hundreds of death notifications were delivered by taxi drivers and Western Union messengers because the Army hadn't realized that families would find the experience traumatic.
This book begins with a list of every American killed during the battle, and that is the ultimate tragedy of war, one repeated throughout the book. [Name] from [Home town] died [in some terrible way]. To compress a life into that brief sentence; to compress hundreds and thousands of lives into that sentence.
Never start a war.
Intelligence suggested Viet Cong forces in the Ia Drang valley, but nothing could have prepared the 1/7 for landing almost on top of an North Vietnamese Army base area and 2000 soldiers. For a fraught 24 hours, Colonel Moore brought in more troops, called down a withering cordon of fire support, staved off a crushing dawn offensive, and rescued the 'lost platoon' which had become separated in the opening moments of the battle. The second half focuses on the battle of LZ Albany, and the terrible mauling that the 2/7 Cav took leaving the area the following day.
Colonel Moore is a born leader, and this book provides a close up portrait of the kind of selfless dedication and love that men in combat deserve. But while Moore's voice is dominant, he is not alone. Oral histories from hundreds of Ia Drang veterans, including the Vietnamese commanders, rounds out the story of this desperate combat.
I've often said that Vietnam was fractally fucked up, and Ia Drang is a perfect example of that. In the 34 day campaign the Cavalry inflicted a 10:1 kill ratio on the NVA. However, Ia Drang remained Indian Country and the most of the NVA units involved in the battle survived to escape into Cambodia. A well-led American unit with sufficient fire support was essentially invincible in defense, but even a momentary lapse in focus could prove fatal, such as what happened to the 2/7 at Albany. While both sides had the capacity to regenerate their units, in many ways the finely-tuned high morale 7th Cavalry that went into Vietnam could not be sustained by draftees from an increasingly anti-War America. In a microcosm of the whole disaster, hundreds of death notifications were delivered by taxi drivers and Western Union messengers because the Army hadn't realized that families would find the experience traumatic.
This book begins with a list of every American killed during the battle, and that is the ultimate tragedy of war, one repeated throughout the book. [Name] from [Home town] died [in some terrible way]. To compress a life into that brief sentence; to compress hundreds and thousands of lives into that sentence.
Never start a war.