SCOUTS OUT!
...To see Lt. Col. HAL G. MOORE's -Smile of Victory- after his Victory at Landing Zone X-Ray...
...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)
GARRY OWEN, Sir (U.S. 7th Cavalry Salute 2-U)
Part of the homecoming festivities are being put on hold, for a couple weeks anyway.
To the disappointment of many, this year's Rubber Ducky Derby was postponed.
Organizers tell us that although the race won't be for a couple of weeks, ticket sales for the Rubber Duckies, are finished.
But the good news is that for those of you who did buy a ticket, the winner will get $15,000 to put towards a new car of their choice at Warton, Superior, Warner, Mullen, or Kinchelo Motors.
SM (that doesn't sound good), a request to keep it breaking.
...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.
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.
.."WE WERE SOLDIERS".. MEL GIBSON's new ..'Braveheart in 'Nam.. is out in DVD/Video today...
For the record, so did I. The best Vietnam War movie of all time.
SCOUTS OUT!