We Were Soldiers

by Shari L. Rosenblum

A nightmarish, blood-drenched, homage to the heroism of men who fought and won a battle unwinnable, Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers evoked in me more ho-hum than sense of honor. With battle scenes as gritty as any I've seen - wounds and burns splattering as far as the camera lens - I felt removed, untouched, somehow, even when I cringed.

Like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, both films to which this newest has been compared, We Were Soldiers trusts to the drama of battle to tell its own story. To convey the horrors of war. But in so doing, it seems to forget its raison d'etre; it seems to sacrifice its story to the battle scenes.  And to sacrifice a sense of history and politics to a larger and apocryphal worldview: one where honesty is lost to the balanced perspective of peacetime comforts.

The year is 1965.  The place Ia Drang, the Valley of Death, where troops that came before to fight the communist influx in Vietnam were trapped and massacred.  Men, honorable and willing, surrounded and slaughtered by an enemy upon whose territory they dare to tread. The reverberations of an echo that date back to Custer...as seen through the politically correct eyes of our enlightened millennium. But this is a new battle. A new day in a newly redefined war. While the wives sit at home, have children, and talk both naively and out of their time about racism and where to do laundry, the Americans and North Vietnamese clash face to face on land for the very first time, the Americans well served under the command of Lt. Col. Harold G. Moore (Mel Gibson), a veteran of war and scholarship, a man who has studied the past and learned its lessons.

  

Sent into an ambush by leaders who had studied little and understood less, Moore and his men find themselves outnumbered five to one - but find resilience and prevail, such as they might, in spite of the rest, demonstrating that those who dare may well find pieces of victory beyond despair - but such emotional truths are not of interest here. In times such as these, despite hysterical claims of jingoism and nationalist pride, there can still be no sympathy for Americans as victors. In the same way that it glories in the ugliness of battle while pretending it thinks it ugly to glory so, the film, in the endless tradition of Vietnam, paints a triumph of heroism and valor as the first step in an inevitable defeat.

Mel Gibson acquits himself well in the role of Moore, and the men who play beside him - Sam Elliott as Sgt. Maj. Plumley, Chris Klein as Lt. Jack Geoghegan, Barry Pepper as photojournalist Joseph L. Galloway, all play to both the clichés they represent and the men they were with equal weight.  On the homefront, Keri Russell (as Mrs. Jack Geoghegan) and Madeline Stowe (as Mrs. Moore, coiffed with the most unnatural looking black hair), are adequate, but never truly engaging.

It wasn't the acting that did the film in, though.  It was the attitude. Reviewed by others as a simple, tragic, tale of soldiering and brotherhood, the film I wanted to see would have been a moving tale of the hell of war and the prices heroes pay only to be forgotten. What I found there was only disappointment.  Like the black wall of remembrance - the Vietnam Memorial - on which the names of those lost in the battle are engraved, this film gives back to those who died at our behest only the darkest reflection of who they were.

©2002 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene