We Were Soldiers Once... and Young by Harold G. Moore

He and the 457 men under his command were there to track North Vietnamese Army units and search for a possible enemy base.Īpplying a “first in, last out” approach to combat leadership, Moore led the initial assaults on the North Vietnamese positions himself, and remained at the battle’s front lines until his battalion was relieved after three days of fierce, close-combat fighting. 14, 1965, shortly after Moore, then a lieutenant colonel, stepped off a Huey helicopter and onto a football-field-sized clearing in South Vietnam’s Ia Drang Valley. Sporting a bulldog face and a Southern accent acquired from a childhood in small-town Kentucky, he developed a reputation as an exceptional combat leader during the Korean War and in the early stages of the Vietnam War – no more so than in the Battle of Ia Drang, the first major engagement between American and North Vietnamese forces. At least one jump resulted in his being dragged along the ground by an airplane. Moore’s military career spanned three wars and multiple continents, beginning with a posting in Japan during the American occupation after World War II and a stint at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he tested parachutes and parachuting equipment on more than 130 test jumps. Moore suffered a stroke last week but did not provide additional details. In a Facebook post, his family said that Gen. and Young” and in a film adaptation starring Mel Gibson, died Feb. Hal Moore, an Army lieutenant general whose leadership in one of the earliest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War saved scores of lives and was memorialized in the book “We Were Soldiers Once.

It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu 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. 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. 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. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War.

Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt.

We Were Soldiers Once... and Young by Harold G. Moore