In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the la Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two-and-a-half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together these actions constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War.
General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This devastating account presents a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge and dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.
In the first significant engagement between American troops and the Viet Cong, 450 U.S. soldiers found themselves surrounded and outnumbered by their enemy. This book tells the story of how they battled between October 23 and November 26, 1965. Its prose is gritty, not artful, delivering a powerful punch of here-and-now descriptions that could only have been written by people actually on the scene. In fact, they were: Harold Moore commanded the men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, who did most of the fighting, and Joseph Galloway was the only reporter present throughout the battle's 34 harrowing days. We Were Soldiers Once... combines their memories with more than 100 in-depth interviews with survivors on both sides. The Battle of Ia Drang also highlights a technological advance that would play an enormous role in the rest of the war: this was perhaps the first place where helicopter-based, air-mobile operations demonstrated their combat potential. At bottom, however, this is a tale of heroes and heroism, some acts writ large, others probably forgotten but for this telling. It was a bestseller when first published, and remains one of the better books available on combat during the Vietnam War. --John J. Miller .Read We Were Soldiers Once...and Young complete books online for free. Reading We Were Soldiers Once...and Young full free books online without downloading.
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