Read We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam Online

Authors: Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway

Tags: #Asian history, #Postwar 20th century history, #Military Personal Narratives, #Military History, #Travel, #Asia, #Military History - Vietnam Conflict, #Military veterans, #War, #Southeast, #History - Military, #Military - United States, #Vietnam War, #United States, #c 1970 to c 1980, #Vietnam, #c 1960 to c 1970, #Military - Vietnam War, #Military, #History, #from c 1945 to c 2000, #Southeast Asia, #Essays & Travelogues, #General

We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (27 page)

Two of our sons, Steve and Dave, followed my footsteps to West Point and into the Army, and now Julie had given two more hostages to fortune and war. Our son Dave, a paratrooper, made the combat jump into Panama with the 82nd Airborne Division and his mother worried every day until he was home safely. In 1990 Dave, now a captain, was sent with the 82nd Airborne to Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield. War was again looming and again Julie worried about a loved one going in harm’s way. In January 1991, on the eve of Desert Storm and the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait by American and coalition forces, Joe got orders to return to Saudi Arabia as we prepared for imminent war. He phoned the house in Auburn to let me know he would be leaving Andrews Air Base outside Washington, D.C., early the next morning and would be out of touch for a while. I wasn’t home so he gave the message to Julie. She told him, “Joe, I am so worried about this war and son Davey being right in the middle of it.” Joe responded with surprise, saying that she had sent her father and her husband off to other wars and surely she was used to this by now. Julie’s response was swift and to the point: “Joe Galloway, you don’t understand one damn thing about this. You can replace a husband but you can never replace a son!”

Dave made it through the Persian Gulf War okay and remains on duty in our Army today. In the fall of 2006, I pinned his grandfather’s silver eagle on one shoulder and my own colonel’s eagle on the other as he was promoted at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. His mom would have been so proud, and so worried about his trips to Iraq in yet another war.

After I retired from the Army in 1977 we moved to Crested Butte, Colorado, where for a time I managed the ski resort there for former Secretary of the Army Bo Callaway. Julie set up yet another home for us just down the road from the ski lifts on Mount Crested Butte. But her heart remained in Auburn, in the home she inherited from her mother and father when they died, where she lavished loving attention on the banks of azaleas that were her pride and joy when they burst into fiery bloom in the Alabama springtime. After I left the job at the ski resort we divided our time between our two homes, moving back and forth two or three times each year. Julie’s Army training in the art and skills of packing and moving stood her in good stead.

When they were preparing to film
We Were Soldiers
she entertained the stars, Mel Gibson and Sam Elliott and Madeleine Stowe, at our home and she was not shy in giving her advice to writer-director Randall Wallace. She was outraged when she discovered that all of the actresses chosen to play the Army wives of 1965 were white women. The wives she worked with and grieved with were, like the Army itself, of every race and creed. When she followed those taxicabs to the trailer parks of Columbus she went into the homes of black women, Hispanic women, and Native American women as well as white women, and she wanted that truth to be reflected in this film.

She won that battle but lost others to the “artistic license” that Hollywood insisted on as its due. Julie wanted the people who saw this movie to see the women and children crammed into those little trailer houses all around Columbus, not living the life of Riley in spacious two-story homes on Colonel’s Row at Fort Benning. She wept bitter tears over the battles she lost, but Julie Moore did her dead-level best to make that movie as true to life—the lives of those who waited for their men to come home—as humanly possible.

In the early spring of 2002 she joined us as the film premiered in Hollywood, at the White House, and even better yet at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Hood, Texas, by then the home base of the 1st Cavalry Division. She became a close friend of the actress Madeleine Stowe, who portrayed her in that movie. The fame that came from first the book and then the movie made no real difference in the life of Julie Moore. She typed my e-mails and letters, just as she had typed my contributions to both the book and movie. She still whipped up dinner for surprise guests, and fielded phone calls from my troopers and the families of those she had comforted in their terrible loss so many years before. She and four old friends still gathered one afternoon a week in Auburn to play bridge.

But in late February 2004 Julie fell ill with a rare and deadly form of cancer. Julie fought it with every bit of determination she had always brought to every battle, every challenge in her life. My beloved wife of fifty-five years, my lover, my strong right arm, died on the morning of April 18, 2004, just six weeks after her diagnosis. Julie always had a positive attitude in dealing with the setbacks, adversities, and accidents of daily life. When confronted with bad news her response was always: “My father told me early in life that you are a Compton, and Comptons are thoroughbreds, and thoroughbreds don’t cry.”

I was beside her in the doctor’s office in Auburn when he told her that her cancer was incurable. She took that terrible news quietly. I was with her at the M. D. Anderson Hospital in Houston, Texas, when the doctor told her she would die soon. She asked him: “How long do I have—a month…more…less?” The doctor said she had perhaps one week. She nodded and said simply: “I’m a thoroughbred and thoroughbreds don’t cry….” She wanted to go home to Auburn and the next day an air ambulance with a nurse aboard brought her home and to the hospice there. She had just four days left to live. Her fight with cancer, the same small cell (oat cell) cancer that eight years before had taken the life of Joe’s wife of thirty years, Theresa Null Galloway, was one of the few battles Julie Moore ever lost. This cancer is not specific to any particular organ. Theresa’s was believed to have begun in the small intestine; Julie’s began in one of her lungs, even though she had quit smoking two decades before. Wherever it begins, this cancer is very aggressive and migrates swiftly all over the body. In the cases of both Theresa and Julie there was only six weeks between diagnosis and death. The night before she died Joe sat beside Julie’s bed in the hospice. With all five of her children standing by she roused and whispered: “Oh, Joe. We’ve come so far together, and we still have so far to go.”

Now she was going home to rest in the arms of her Army, just a few feet from where her mother and father were buried. The Post Cemetery at Fort Benning was filled to capacity with the small white marble markers over the graves of hundreds of soldiers and the wives of soldiers. There was no place for Julie Compton Moore, soldier’s daughter, soldier’s wife, soldiers’ mother. No place until the widow of Sgt. Jack Gell, one of my troopers in Alpha Company who was killed on the first day of the battle at Landing Zone X-Ray, graciously gave up a place she had long ago reserved for herself next to her husband.

The Catholic church in Auburn was filled to overflowing for her service. Then that mile-long convoy wound its way along Interstate 85 and then on U.S. 280 for the last twenty-six miles to Fort Benning. Although every American military base was still on high alert in the wake of 9/11, the gates of Fort Benning swung wide open as Julie Moore came home. There were generals and colonels and a former governor of Alabama there to see her off, but most of all there were former sergeants and former specialists and former privates, and there were some of the widows and children of men whose funerals she had attended in this same cemetery so many years before.

If ever there was a civilian who had earned a full-dress military funeral with a flag-draped coffin and a firing party of soldiers and a bugler to blow the bittersweet notes of Taps it was Julie Moore. But the Army has rules and regulations and there was none of that military pomp when we laid Julie to rest next to Sergeant Gell, amid the graves of my fallen troopers, a few rows down from Colonel and Mrs. Compton.

We were married for fifty-five years and were more in love at the end of those years together, I think, than we were in the beginning. When I think of my Julie, which is every single day, I think of what it says in the Bible, Proverbs 31:10–12: “A good wife is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her and he will have no lack of gain. She brings him good and not harm, all the days of her life.” I visit the Fort Benning Post Cemetery often now to talk to Julie and walk the rows of those white tombstones that mark the last resting place of some of my troopers, who gave the last measure of devotion to this country in battle. I’m eighty-six years old and will join them all soon enough. Then we will all rest together, in the arms of Holy Mother Army.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

O
ur thanks, as always, go first to our friends who fought in or provided valuable support in the Ia Drang battles, as well as the families of those who fell there. No one ever had finer or more loyal comrades.

A special thank-you is due those who shared with us the remarkable journey back to Vietnam and back to the Ia Drang that is at the heart of the story told in this book: CSM (ret.) Basil L. Plumley, Lt. Col. (ret.) Bruce Crandall, Col. (ret.) Tony Nadal, Col. (ret.) John Herren, former Capt. S. Lawrence Gwin Jr., Lt. Col. (ret.) George Forrest, former Sgt. Ernie Savage, former Sp. 4 Bill Beck, and the late Jack Smith.

What made the journey back to the battlefields special was the company of three remarkable old soldiers of the North Vietnamese People’s Army who had fought us there as wartime enemies but joined us in a search for peace. So we thank: the late Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, who was the NVA commander on the battlefield, and two of his comrades, Col. Tran Minh Hao and Col. Vu Dinh Thuoc.

The journey would never have happened without a young ABC-TV producer named Terry Wrong, who read our first book and made the proposal to take us back to Vietnam and back to the battlefields for a one-hour documentary for the network’s
Day One
program. Terry sold the idea to his bosses and then to us. So thanks to Terry Wrong, correspondent Forrest Sawyer, and their able assistant and interpreter Miss Quynh Thai, who joined us on the trip along with a four-man camera and sound crew. The resulting documentary, titled
They Were Young and Brave
, earned well-deserved awards and honors for Terry.

Our official host in Vietnam was, again, the Foreign Press Service and our old friend, former director Nguyen Cong Quang. He provided us an excellent translator, Vu Binh, who was with us every step of the way.

Our gratitude and thanks also to Col. (ret.) James Pritzker, the Tawani Foundation, and the Pritzker Military Library of Chicago for their encouragement and support during the writing of this book.

Mr. and Mrs. Toby Warren of Auburn, Alabama, earn special mention for their friendship and daily support of this project as the strong right arms for Hal Moore. They offered a thousand favors, large and small, and did a multitude of chores out of love and respect.

We owe heartfelt thanks to our agent, Mel Berger of the William Morris Agency in New York, and to his assistant, Evan Goldfried, as well as to our editors at HarperCollins, who made this a much better book by their hard work—Alison Callahan, Doug Grad, and Kate Hamill.

Last, but certainly not least, our love and thanks to our children, who have put up with the burden of having their dads working on a book and thus totally distracted and absentee parents twice now in fifteen years. This is for Greg, Steve, Julie, Cecile, and David Moore, and Lee and Joshua Galloway.

An Appeal

W
e believe that the beginning of an end to war has to lie in higher education and, toward that end, we established the Ia Drang Scholarship Fund under the auspices of the 1st Cavalry Division Foundation to provide college assistance for the sons and daughters of all who participated in or supported the American troops in the Ia Drang battles.

This Fund has been expanded to include the grandchildren of Ia Drang veterans and provides a check each year for dozens of eligible young men and women to further their education.

If the stories told in our two books about the soldiers and the battles have moved the reader to reach out, we would urge that you make a tax-deductible contribution to the Fund to ensure that it lives on after we are gone.

Such contributions, payable to 1st Cavalry Div. Foundation (Ia Drang), should be mailed to:

1st Cavalry Division Foundation

302 N. Main Street

Copperas Cove, TX 76522

Lt. Gen. Hal Moore
Joe Galloway

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