Review: We Are Soldiers Still

Harold G Moore & Joseph L Galloway, We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam

An unpopular war … A conflict entered with no thought to the lessons of history and no real exit strategy … Thousands of young Americans — mostly drawn from the poor and disadvantaged — sacrificed … In short; “the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people”.

No, not another book about the current situation in Iraq, but instead a return to an earlier conflict. This is the sequel to Moore and Galloway’s hugely successful We Were Soldiers Once … and Young. That book provided an incredibly detailed account of one of the few conventional battles of the Vietnam War, at Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang.

This time, the authors are going back to the battlefields of their youth — going back in order to try to move forward.

Moore and Galloway, along with other veterans, conduct a series of visits to modern Vietnam in the '90s, and are surprised to find how the country and the people have moved on. “Vietnam is a country, not a war,” as one veteran of the North Vietnamese Army explains.

As they tour the old battlegrounds and meet their old foes, their experiences are best summed up by one American veteran: “What I discovered … had really escaped me all those years … the war was over."

It is here that the greatest interest and relevance to our own times lies as this book answers the questions: What happens when the fighting is over? Can the past be put aside? Can enemies find forgiveness, compassion and even friendship?

These are the questions we so desperately need answered to provide some hope as we watch the ongoing, seemingly endless violence in Iraq.

But there are some difficulties with this book. Allowances have to be made for the fact that Moore is a soldier, not a writer. One problem that irked was Moore’s lack of a chronological approach, which results in some confusion.

The visits themselves, despite some moments of drama (such as bad weather forcing the veterans to spend a night with their ghosts at LZ X-Ray), are not enough to fill a whole volume — even with Moore occasionally providing unnecessary detail such as the size of meeting rooms and a description of who sat where.

Therefore there are extra sections in which Moore propounds his views on leadership, tells the stories of what became of some of the people mentioned in his first book (including a moving tribute to his wife, who was instrumental in having the army adopt a more humane notification-of-death system) and a very candid assessment of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

This is a mixed bag — the section on how military leadership can be applied to the boardroom, with such gems as “trust your instincts” didn’t provide much that was new — but reading of Moore’s vocal attacks on Rumsfeld and Bush was very interesting and timely.

In all, an interesting account that helps put a human face on warfare — demonstrating that most humane of abilities: forgiveness.

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