Posted on 08/20/2002 5:44:58 PM PDT by ALOHA RONNIE
NEVER FORGET
.."WE WERE SOLDIERS"..
...the new RANDALL WALLACE ..'Braveheart in 'Nam.. Motion Picture starring MEL GIBSON, SAM ELLIOTT, MADELEINE STOWE, GREG KINNEAR, CHRIS KLEIN, KERI RUSSELL, BARRY PEPPER about the 1st Major Battle of the Vietnam War in the -Valley of Death- that was the IA DRANG of November 1965...
...is out today on ..DVD/Video in Super-Surround Sound that highlights the unforgettably lush Soundtrack Musical Score of NICK GLENNIE-SMITH.
...A major new plus here is the new addition of -10- previously deleted scenes on both the DVD and Video with Commentary by "WE WERE SOLDIERS" Director/Screenwriter RANDALL WALLACE, who won an Academy Award for his 1st .."BRAVEHEART".. Motion Picture Screenplay starring ..MEL GIBSON..!
...In .."WE WERE SOLDIERS".. MEL GIBSON is then Lt. Col. HAL G. MOORE who led his 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry (Of CUSTER fame) Skytroopers to victory, while surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese Communist Regulars, in the 7th Cav's 2nd Battle of the Little Big Horn to open the Vietnam War.
...This outstanding Motion Picture is based on the Classic Non-Fiction Bestselling Book ..'WE WERE SOLDIERS ONCE and YOUNG'.. Co-Authored by now Lt. Gen. HAL G. MOORE (Ret.) and War Correspondant JOE GALLOWAY who was there.
...It was my distinct honor to carry Radio and drive for Lt. Col. HAL G. MOORE (MEL GIBSON) and his S/MAJ BASIL L. PLUMLEY (SAM ELLIOTT) right up to this Battle, where I witnessed all from the close-in Artillery Support Landing Zone Falcon that fired up a constant Wall of Fire around the surrounded Landing Zone of IA DRANG-1965 = THE Difference.
...After my carrying our Hero Dead and Wounded Young Soldiers fresh from Landing Zone X-Ray to helicopters going back to the rear at Pleiku Airstrip ...Lt. Col. HAL G. MOORE wrote out his -Letters of Condolances- to their Hero Families waiting for them their Loved Ones to come home or not. As the IA DRANG-1965 S-1 Personnel Clerk ..I typed them up for mailing home ..some directly to Mrs. JULIE MOORE's for her hand delivery to wives.
...All this I will NEVER FORGET.
Signed:..ALOHA RONNIE Guyer / Vet-Battle of IA DRANG-1965 / Landing Zone Falcon / www.lzxray.com
NEVER FORGET
...go to the ..'RONNIE GUYER PHOTO COLLECTION'..
...accessed thru the..'IA DRANG - Interest'.. Section, lower right -HOME PAGE- of...
.. www.lzxray.com .. (U.S. 7th Cavalry Website)
Those are some fine photographs, to be sure. To the uninitiated, the pics look like they could've been taken last week; they are that sharp. However, even an observer with an untrained eye can see just how long ago it really was... when they click through Collection #1 and spot that photo of a young, relatively slender, visiting Senator Ted Kennedy! That's some jaunty cover he's wearing, too. Hoo boy, I feel old.
...forced the Communist Soviet Union to do the same for Communist North Vietnam to the tune of $$Billions$$.
...Only they couldn't afford it and in the end it help BANKRUPT them as we all saw the Berlin Wall and the Communist Soviet Union come tumbling down.
Had the Soviet Union not been so engaged, we might have faced the scenario of Gen. Sir John Hackett in The Third World War: August 1985.
The Black Book of Communism indicates Communism killed 100 million in the last century. From Stalin's pogroms, "famines" and purges to Mao's Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, "famines" and labor camps, to Pol Pot's pyramid of two million skulls and Fidel's 100,000 victims of political prisonerhood, fusilamientos, and drownings, the bloodbath of Communism has proven the greatest of evils.
That American resistance in Vietnam, altogether with the Reagan arms race bankrupted and dissolved the Warsaw Pact is the greatest victory for freedom in the world.
"We Were Soldiers" is simply a single statement in the new, emended history of the Twentieth Century, in which the American fighting man broke the yoke of the Communist slavemaster.
In the Twenty-First Century, the Islamofascist threat and its ChiCom patron will be similarly dismantled, without the interference of Johnson, McNamara, or Kissinger.
I do not have a military background, so please correct me if my complaints stem from ignorance of military ground procedure.
I have to say I was severely disappointed with this movie. I love Mel and his courage to stick with his values in a valueless movie industry. I loved Braveheart (in my top 10) and liked The Patriot although I thought it had script flaws and suffered a bit too much emotional glurge in addition to pulling out too many movie cliches.
But We Were Soldiers goes over the glurge barrier. To be effective at showing the emotional and psych impact of the carnage of combat does not require showing every character's family back home. It almost got to the point that if a character had an emotional fairwell at the beginning, you knew he was probably going to get killed later on. The opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan do not show the families and homefronts of the men being mowed down by German machine guns, but it is much more effectively executed in my opinion.
None of the battle scenes in this movie even approach the effectivess or polish of Ryan, Blackhawk Down, or Apocalypse Now.
I doubled over with disbelief at the scene where the soldiers get off the Hueys and see a scout and start immediately start running after him into unknown territory. I'm not a combat veteran, and this very well may be the way things happened in the Valley of Death, but it seems foolish to charge after someone into enemy territory blindly. That reeks of setup and ambush to me. It turned out to be an ambush and cut off the soldiers on the Knoll. If I could see this coming, I feel that the trained soldiers should have seen it coming, especially since military intel had absolutely no idea how many enemies were in the area.
The other thing I had a problem with was Sam Elliot's character. Yeah, I liked his bad-a** old man characterization, but would a veteran soldier (of all 4 WW2 air drops for that matter) really refuse a rifle to stand by his 1911 alone?
My other problem was the way Mel Gibson's character kept standing up straight in the midst of heavy enemy fire. Even after a bullet scaped his backpack, he still didn't take cover. Is this the way things are done?
And wouldn't Greg Kinnear's character get court marshaled for pulling a gun on an a fellow officer? That scene hit the sour note of unbelievability for me. But hey, I guess that might be the way it really happened.
My last gripe is probably just from my own ignorance, because I have no idea what the real Ia Drang Valley looks like; but didn't it seem that they were filming the battle scenes in rural California? It didn't look like Vietnam to me from the reading and research I've done. I looked up the filming location on the IMDB and indeed I found the filming locations to be all stateside. This seemed to be reminiscent of The Green Berets with John Wayne where they tried to depict Vietnam by filming in Georgia(!). It seems that a big budget movie like this could have afforded to film in the Phillipines (like Apocalypse Now) or Central America (like Predator).
That's my two cents, and I do not mean in any way to disrespect the soldiers who fought in the Ia Drang Valley or in any other combat for that matter. This is just my opinion of the film alone, and I just felt that it didn't live up to cinema's greatest war films.
Check out Apocalypse Now: Redux and Blackhawk Down for excellent and amazingly sharp digital transfers.
Thank you and all of the others who bravely went thousands of miles from home and fought honorably.
TC
The convenient thing about film is that it provides us civilians with a way to experience the carnage of war without risk. And since seeing Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now, my views on the reality of war have changed dramatically. The pledges in my fraternity used to interview older brothers as part of initiation, and one of the things they used to ask me was, "If you could go back to any time in history, where would you go?" I always replied that I would like to have stormed the beach at Normandy so I could kill some Nazis and be part of the largest invasion force in history. After watching the Normandy scene in SPR, I felt like a complete idiot. Having never been in combat, it really opened my eyes to how horrid it is. Yeah, I knew getting shot is bad (duh) and that a lot of your buddies died, and it was hard and that veterans always deserved respect. But hey, in combat, you're fighting for your country, right? Any doubts or pain would be rectified by the greater good, right? And if you died it was your time, right? Boy was I stupid. I guess I had no point of reference for something so unbelivably horrid.
I guess this sounds pretty juvenile and stupid to combat vets, but there's only so much a 19 year old with no military experience can grasp (I was 19 when it came out). I feel no embarrasment in saying these things because I think it only heightens the sacrifice endured and the respect earned by veterans. But I feel a little shame because a lot of the boys on Omaha were only 17 or 18. They grew up long before I did.
I didn't join the military, but always thought that I would go if called, without question. Those scenes gave me a glimpse into what a real sacrifice it is. I guess I never envisioned the blood, exploding chests, dismembered limbs, heads blowing off, guts hanging out, men crying for their mothers after they'd been cut in half, etc. SPR really woke me up. The Longest Day it wasn't.
My points had no intention of disagreeing with the VALUES of the film, which were spectacularly rendered (it brought to mind The Rules of Engagement, another great Hollywood PRO-military movie), and maybe I should have been more clear about that.
With the insights given on WWS, I will definitely enjoy it more on the next viewing. I also fully intend to read the book version (after I'm done with The 6 Day War by Michael Oren, killer read).
Examples of good, X-Men, Se7en, any of the Bond DVD's, Blackhawk Down, Terminator 2, Fellowship of the Ring (the best I've ever seen, by the way), Braveheart, and A Beautiful Mind. Bad ones would be Maverick (the worst I've seen on a modern movie), any of the Batman movies, and most movies made before 1970.
Some studios are better than others. Warner Bros. DVD's are the worst on the market, barring The Matrix, and New Line Cinema are the best (IMO).
I just feel that the transfer on WWS could have used a little more work.
And yes, any DVD beats the theater version by a longshot.
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