California Editor on Joe Galloway and His New 'Soldiers' Book

By: Dennis Anderson In 1992, Joseph L. Galloway, a former UPI bureau chief from the Vietnam War, co-authored with retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. "Hal" Moore the book "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young" and it has remained continuously in print since then. The book is testament of an epic 1965 battle, waged by the troopers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Division against an overwhelming force of North Vietnamese regulars in the Ia Drang Valley.

As Billy Joel put it in his haunting song, the NVA were no ragtag guerrillas, "they were sharp, sharp as knives."

Galloway was on the ground as the UPI writer when the NVA regulars encircled LZ X-Ray (a helicopter landing zone code name) and threatened a Custer-style massacre of 7th Cavalry in the 20th century. It never happened. The 7th Cav, backed by artillery and air strikes, shot their way out. Casualties were horrid.

I know a couple of 7th Cav veterans. They are the best. Simply proud of how they fought, stony cold about wounds suffered, physical and mental. They suffer grief everlasting for "soldiers once and young" left in the valley of death.

Galloway and Moore's book did more than become a best seller. It stands on the commandant's reading list at the U.S. Military Academy and the commandant of the Marine Corps' reading list. Such are the books that fledgling leaders from West Point and Quantico must digest as they consider consequences of leadership, which often includes the death and destruction of men they love and lead.

A much wider audience emerged from Mel Gibson's fine film version of the book, "We Were Soldiers." A decade after release, the film's reputation holds up better than Gibson's. Many Vietnam vets I heard from considered "We Were Soldiers" one of the faint few Hollywood films that were honest about what the kill zone looked and felt like.

The film also was heart-breaking in its depiction of military wives getting telegrams of their loved ones deaths in action delivered by cab drivers because so many death notices flooded in so fast. The wives picked up the slack and notified each other and wept. And the military avoided a repeat of that blunder.

There is an entire panel of the Vietnam Memorial Wall inscribed with the names of the 1st Cav troopers who died over a couple of days in, on and around LZ X-Ray. When our half-scale monument is included in the AV, you could see their names among the 58,000-plus others.

Galloway? In his 20s, he was in the battle to write about it. As the fight grew more desperate by the hour, he picked up an M-16, carried wounded and became the rarest of civilian journalists, awarded a Bronze Star for his conduct and actions at LZ X-Ray.

A new book by Moore and Galloway is on the shelves now, but this is not a plug, it's a reminiscence. The book, "We Are Soldiers Still," will do just fine all on its own.

The book records the return to Vietnam made by General Moore and Galloway, where they walked their old battlefield and interviewed old comrades and old enemies, some who became new friends.

When George Palermo of Lancaster talks to me about his return trips to Vietnam and the mission projects he does, I think of what this means in healing for American servicemen and some fine women whose lives were scarred forever.

Joe, who had a soft spot for ex-servicemen, propelled me into a 16-year career in the national wire services with the oracular assurance, "You'll curse the day you met me when you're doing the midnight wire trick in Minneapolis."

In the mid-'80s Joe soothed my angst over UPI's perpetual fiscal and management woes with Singha beer and sympathy. "Hey, Andy," he rumbled over a plate of mee krob in a Thai joint on Sherman Way, "Ever hear about the battle of Ia Drang?"

Cold War vet of East German border tourism at the Fulda Gap, I confessed I had not. I was 12 years old when Galloway got bloody at LZ X-Ray where Moore commanded a battalion of the 7th Cav. For an hour or so, his telling of it was part Homer, part Ernie Pyle. All of it spellbinding.

I wondered if it was just beer talk, or whether my news daddy would ever get that book out of his word processor. It took another six years. Now, it's part of the history of warfare.

Nowadays I run into servicemen and women all over the place, coming and going from Iraq and Afghanistan. You need these truth tellers to distill the history like elixir so that others will have some faint understanding of the human cost of war, ground and national interest and will. You need these accounts to avoid blunders and con jobs.

From this we take a little cue on how sober citizens ought to be in considering the causes and the costs of war before we get to that fatal line of departure.

I know my ears perk up when I hear a young vet offer up, "You heard about the battle of Fallujah?"