10 March 2002
Mike Marqusee

We Were Soldiers' purports to tell the story of the bloody battle in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam's Central Highlands in November 1965. Despite its pretensions to honour the suffering and service of the combatants, the film profoundly misrepresents the nature of this battle and of the war in Vietnam in general. In doing so, it glorifies the military establishment and bolsters the current propaganda drive for US military action on foreign shores.

In the Ia Drang Valley, paratroopers of the 7th cavalry of the 1st US Airborn division, led by Col Harold Moore (played by Mel Gibson), engaged in ferocious combat with North Vietnamese army regulars over three days and nights. Though initially outnumbered, the US troops defeated the Vietnamese thanks to massive air-born firepower. In the end, there were 300 US and nearly 2000 Vietnamese dead.

The film recreates the fighting in gory but selective detail. It says nothing of its context or consequences.

General William Westmoreland, at that time commander of US forces in Vietnam, regarded Ia Drang as a great success and a vindication of the US military presence in the country. In particular he was impressed by Ia Drang's ratio of US to Vietnamese dead. According to Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History", the battle revealed for the first time the efficacy of using B52s as tactical support for ground forces. The idea was to deploy US troops to draw out the enemy, then dump huge quantities of ordinance on them. Westmoreland argued that Ia Drang proved that the US could win the war by adopting this 'search and destroy' tactic across the country. Soon after the battle, he asked for more US troops and more bombing of both South and North Vietnam, and got his wish. Within a year, US troop numbers in Vietnam had risen from 250,000 to 440,000. In accordance with the over-riding requirement for a positive 'kill ratio' of Ia Drang proportions, these soldiers were pressed by their superiors to increase the numbers of dead opponents, and did so by killing civilians and wounded combatants in large numbers.

So the hell of Ia Drang was exploited to justify a strategy that prolonged the war for years, cost huge numbers of lives - mostly Vietnamese, but American as well - and wrecked much of the Vietnamese countryside. Had this fact been noted in 'We Were Soldiers', the enterprise it portrays would seem less noble, and the human sacrifice it entailed might appear not as the sombre, almost ritualistic tragedy of the director's imagination, but as the wasteful obscenity it was.

In choosing Ia Drang, one of the rare examples of anything like a set-piece battle between US and North Vietnamese regulars, the film misrepresents a war that was fought overwhelmingly by south Vietnamese guerrillas with the support of the local population. Indeed, even back in 1966, Ia Drang was cited by defenders of US policy as 'proof' that this was a war to defend South Vietnam from "North Vietnamese aggression".

The film also fails to explain just what was going on in the Central Highlands in the autumn of 1965. According to Neil Sheehan's contemporary report in the New York Times, "undisciplined South Vietnamese troops have been terrorising the civilian population here in the central highlands and are creating considerable animosity towards the government." Sheehan noted incidents of looting, arson, abduction, torture and murder. At the same time, the US bombardment of rural south Vietnam - which had begun in February 1965 - was subjecting villagers in the region to daily assaults by B52s. At the time of the battle, US bombers were making 1500 sorties a week over South Vietnam, destroying villages, crops and anything else in sight.

Among the weapons used by the US in Ia Drang was napalm, the gelatine-based incendiary that was dropped from the air, covered all those in range in liquid flame, and seemed to be able to melt flesh from the bone. While the film shows Vietnamese - and some US troops - engulfed in swirling flame, the word napalm is never mentioned. It is, of course, a form of chemical warfare.

In his 18 November 1965 report on Ia Drang for the New York Times, Neil Sheehan wrote: "Planes dipped to treetop level and raked the Communist attackers with bombs, 20-mm cannon fire and flaming napalm. A few of the bombs were believed to have landed among American troops in the confusion... throughout the night, aircraft and artillery pulverised the area around the perimeter with bombs, high-explosive shells and napalm fire bombs... witnesses said that some of the Americans had been so enraged by the sight [of American dead] that they shot a few wounded North Vietnamese out of hand..."

Throughout 'We Were Soldiers', US troops and especially their commanding officers in the field are shown to be uniformly heroic, respectful of the enemy, highly disciplined and obedient to the Geneva Conventions. But a wire service report from Pleiku in the Central Highlands days after the battle paints a different picture: "One [US] soldier shot every wounded enemy soldier who moved as his decimated unit policed up a battle field. He had heard that two days earlier three American prisoners had been found bound hand and foot and shot through the head. He said he was exacting revenge." According to a report in Newsweek of 29 November, "In one place the GIs came upon three wounded North Vietnamese. One lay huddled under a tree, a smile on his face. 'You won't smile anymore,' snapped one of the soldiers, pumping bullets into his body. The other two met the same fate."

On 28 November 1965, a New York Times article by William Tuohy recorded the aftermath of Ia Drang. "In a remote hamlet in the central highlands, a burly red-faced captain entered with a patrol of paratroopers and ordered the villagers rounded up. 'Ask these people where the Vietcong went,' the captain told a nervous Vietnamese interpreter. An old man who might have been the village elder began speaking rapidly. 'Sit down and shut up, loudmouth,' bellowed the captain - in English. Then the captain ordered a soldier, 'Take him 100 yards down the road. Maybe if they think we're going to blow his head off, they'll talk'. The villagers did not talk. The women and children wailed and sobbed. Embarrassed, the paratroopers began loading two dozen peasants aboard a truck to take them to the district town. The soldiers were as gentle as possible and courteous, but the villagers continued to cry. For all they knew, they were being packed off to exile, imprisonment or execution. A lieutenant wondered about the efficacy of such tactics, but asked plaintively, 'Well, if they're not VC sympathisers what are they doing way out here? Why don't they live in the city?'"

All the major protagonists in 'We Were Soldiers' are officers; the working-class GIs who did the vast bulk of the fighting hardly appear. And all the officers are portrayed as self-sacrificing, hard-headed but sensitive individuals whose greatest concern is the safety of the troops under their command. There is no hint here that US officers were to become increasingly loathed by their men as the war dragged on, and that by 1970 officers were in more danger from 'fragging' by their own troops than they were from enemy action. There is no hint that within a few years the US army - depicted as a harmonious brotherhood of officers and men, black, white and Asian American - would be incapacitated by widespread refusal to fight and numerous instances of outright mutiny.

The reality of Jim Crow in the southern USA is touched on in one of the excruciatingly banal home front scenes, but even here the film-makers make sure to give the one black army wife a few lines belittling the issue and indicating that it's no big deal to the fighting men. When Mel Gibson rallies his troops on the eve of their departure for Vietnam, he tells them they will now leave all differences of race or creed behind them. In fact, racism and racial tension were rife in the US military. In 1966, some 13% of US troops in Vietnam were black, but those black troops made up 22% of casualties.

Finally, the film claims that it is merely offering a long overdue tribute to the pain and heroism of the individual fighting men (on both sides). There are several references to the alleged indifference of people in American to the soldiers' contribution, and in particular to the hostility they were alleged to have encountered on their return to the USA. As Jonathan Neale shows in his book, "Vietnam: the American War", the myth that the anti-war movement in the USA was 'anti-GI' has been carefully fostered and is entirely bogus. The anti-war protesters wanted to bring the GIs home to end their suffering and the suffering of the Vietnamese. Many GIs on their return joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and played a crucial role in the anti-war movement.

As readers of Ron Kovic's "Born on the 4th of July" will know, the real problems faced by working class GIs when they returned home were unemployment, low pay, third-rate medical care from a society that refused to invest in universal health provision, the callous indifference of their own government, and the memory of what they had been forced to do by that government in Vietnam.

For US policy-makers, 11 September was a golden opportunity to cure the US public of 'the Vietnam syndrome'. Bush and his supporters will welcome this film as an aid to that long sought goal. It's not hard to see how the glorification of US ground troops, and the depiction of a 'successful' US ground engagement in Vietnam, might help build support for the full-scale invasion of Iraq which the Pentagon is now planning.

'We Were Soldiers', like 'Black Hawk Down' and 'Collateral Damage', was virtually complete long before 11 September - yet another indication that US elite had been seeking to build domestic support for overseas military action long before the attack on the Twin Towers.

Fight the Fiction! 'We Were Soldiers' Protest, Thursday 14 March
'We Were Soldiers' is a film that lies... about the Vietnam War, how and why and for whose benefit it was fought, and who paid the price. It is a film that glorifies militarism and treats armed combat as a noble affair, led by noble men. It is a film that is preparing the ground for new wars, not least the planned US invasion of Iraq.

Fight the fiction, expose the lies, stop the propaganda machine in its tracks by joining the Media Workers Against the War protest outside the Odeon Cinema, Leicester Square, central London, 6:30pm, Thursday, 14 March. For more information call Dave Crouch on 07810 789297.

This article has been reprinted with the permission of © www.mwaw.net Special thanks to Mike Marqusee, Media Workers Against the War.