While soldiers were dying at Ia Drang, most of us were blissfully ignorant

"Some had families waiting. For others, their only family would be the men they bled beside. There were no bands, no flags, no Honor Guards to welcome them home. They went to war because their country ordered them to. But in the end, they fought not for their country or their flag, they fought for each other."
 -- "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young"

The battle of Ia Drang started on a November Sunday in 1965. I was a junior in high school, a month from my 16th birthday. I didn't know much about Vietnam other than the Tonkin Gulf incident from the previous year, and I'm not sure I had ever had a discussion about it with anyone.

Maybe it was the fact that I attended a conservative, homogenous high school. When I look in my high school yearbook, the Class of 1967 was pretty close to 99 percent white. Our only Asian student was an exchange student from South Vietnam. I never met her.

I don't know how good a high school we were then. We were part of a good school district, and we were the biggest school in the state of Virginia.  I had some great teachers, some good teachers and a couple of truly awful ones. But there wasn't a whole lot of questioning of authority going on. I was a pretty timid kid, at least by the standards of what I wished I was.

But on the other side of the world, there were kids only two or three years older than me fighting in a war that would never make any sense. I doubt that more than a handful of kids in our school had any idea what was happening in Ia Drang, and this was a school with a very large number of military brats.

Two weeks after the battle ended, CBS News did a half-hour special on the first major battle in Vietnam involving American troops. If you watch it, you'll notice two things. First, the degree of professionalism and the lack of opinion in the piece. Second, how sanitized it is.





We never really saw Vietnam on the news, but what we did see had a lot to do with turning Americans against a war that was a mistake from the start. But we lacked the subtlety to see the difference between the politicians who got us into the war and the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who did their duty serving in the war.

Then the movies started coming, and even though some have been highly regarded, most of them Hollywoodized the war. One of the first might have been the worst. John Wayne's "The Green Berets" got the war so wrong, he actually had a scene in which the sun set slowly into the South China Sea -- in the east.

Wayne's movie may have been the cinematic equivalent of Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets," which was the second-worst song of the '60s only because of a real horror called "An Open Letter to My Teenage Son," in which Victor Lundberg told his son it was OK to have long hair or a beard, but if he ever burned his draft card, he might as well burn his birth certificate.

Mel Gibson as Hal Moore

There were certainly good movies made about the war, but one of the ones that really got it right was Randall Wallace's "We Were Soldiers," which was mostly about Ia Drang and the first three days of the battle.

Lt. Gen. Harold Moore, who collaborated with journalist Joe Galloway to write "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young," was pleased with the movie made from his book.

The website Ranker has a list from first to worst of 76 movies about the Vietnam War, and it's not bad. The only real problem is that it's done by people coming to the page and voting, and I've certainly got a hard time with "Green Berets" and "Forrest Gump" being top 10 Vietnam movies.

But Ranker has "We Were Soldiers" fourth behind "Full Metal Jacket," "Platoon" and "Apocalypse Now." Not terrible.

I don't remember much about November 1965. I was 15 going on 11 in some ways. Most of my greatest pleasures came from music, either playing in the symphonic band or listening to the radio. I had one of my best teachers for American History and maybe my worst ever for French I.

Vietnam was never on my mind.

I'm pretty sure I never had a conversation on the subject till my first year of college. When I think back 49 years, all I recall is a kid who seemed to be sleepwalking through his own life.

I was scared of everything, although not on a conscious level, and my parents were afraid I would do something to hurt myself or foreclose my future.

So of course I did both.

I certainly can't say I would have been better off if I had served in the military. I think I might have been one of the unfortunate ones who stepped off the plane in Vietnam only to find a bullet my first week there.

But I do know I never got the chance to be part of something bigger than myself. I never got the chance to take pride in being unselfish or brave.

Yes, I might have died.

But there is also a good chance that I would have turned out to be a much better person.

It might have been worth the risk.

"We who have seen war, will never stop seeing it. In the silence of the night, we will always hear the screams. So this is our story, for we were soldiers once, and young."
-- "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young"