We Were Soldiers Once...And Young

I know that anyone reading this will understand this: There are times where a song will just move you to tears; or you will find a passage in a book particularly moving. 

I may have previously mentioned that in interviewing two Vietnam Veterans as of recently, I found that I am woefully ill-informed about the Vietnam War. We either didn’t touch on it as much in my History classes, or maybe I just wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been.

Upon interviewing my last Vietnam Veteran, he suggested that I read “We Were Soldiers Once…And Young.” Which speaks about the Battle of Ia Drang. As mentioned previously, this was the battle that officially entered us into the Vietnam War.  

I picked up this book a few weeks back, and while I am still reading it, I would like to mention here how incredibly well-written I am finding it to be. Not only that, but the Prologue, itself, moved me to tears. There are a few excerpts I would like to share with y’all…So, even if you never pick this book up, you may have heard these words.   

“Another war story, you say? Not exactly, for on the more important levels this is a love story, told in our own words and by our own actions. We were the children of the 1950s and we went where we were sent because we loved our country. We were draftees, most of us, but we were proud of the opportunity to serve that country just as our fathers had served in World War II and our older brothers in Korea. We were members of an elite experimental combat division trained in the new art of airmobile warfare at the behest of President John F. Kennedy."

“…We went to war because our country asked us to go, because our new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, ordered us to go, but more importantly because we saw it as our duty to go. That is one kind of love."

“Another and far more transcendent love came to us unbidden on the battlefields, as it does on every battlefield in every war man has ever fought. We discovered in that depressing, hellish place, where death was our constant companion, that we loved each other. We killed for each other, we died for each other, and we wept for each other. And in time we came to love each other as brothers. In battle our world shrank to the man on our left and the man on our right and the enemy all around. We held each other’s lives in our hands and we learned to share our fears, our hopes, our dreams as readily as we shared what little else good came our way."

“We were the children of the 1950s and John F. Kennedy’s young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship’ in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John F. Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with our white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us."

“…The class of 1965 came out of the old America, a nation that disappeared forever in the smoke that billowed off the jungle battlegrounds where we fought and bled. The country that sent us off to war was not there to welcome us home. It no longer existed. We answered the call of one president who was now dead; we followed the orders of another who would be hounded from office, and haunted, by the war he mismanaged so badly."

“Many of our countrymen came to hate the war we fought. Those who hated it the most—the professionally sensitive—were not, in the end, sensitive enough to differentiate between the war and the soldiers who had been ordered to fight it. They hated us as well, and we went to the ground in the cross fire, as we had learned in the jungles."

“In time our battles were forgotten, our sacrifices were discounted, and both our sanity and our suitability for life in polite American society were publicly questioned. Our young-old faces, chiseled and gaunt from the fever and the heat and the sleepless nights, now stare back at us, lost and damned strangers, frozen in yellowing snapshots packed away in cardboard boxes with our medals and ribbons."

“We rebuilt our lives, found jobs or professions, married, raised families, and waited patiently for America to come to its senses. As the years passed we searched each other out and found that the half-remembered pride of service was shared by those who had shared everything else with us. With them, and only with them, could we talk about what had really happened over there—what we had seen, what we had done, what we had survived.”

As an ending to this post, I will leave you with a thought: May we always remember that a soldier’s job is never easy. They are doing what they are called to do. We all have differing opinions, different views, and that is what our freedoms allow us. But we were allowed that freedom by the men and women who have fought for it. May we never let views on politics or wars lessen our respect for our military.  

All excerpts were taken from the prologue in “We Were Soldiers Once…And Young” by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway.  

Reference

Moore, Harold G. & Galloway, Joseph L. (1992). We Were Soldiers Once…And Young. New York:

        Random House.