Getting It Right: A Vietnam Film for Vietnam Veterans

By Nate Macon

[1] War movies don’t often play real well with veterans. The ones that do actually hire military advisors often ignore them in favor of creating drama. Many films abandon realism and accuracy in favor of fielding a slick looking movie or indulging a stereotype. The Hurt Locker was well received by the American public and critically acclaimed, and yet many veterans of the Iraq War criticized it, and especially the lead character, for misrepresenting military discipline and respect for authority, as well as highlighting numerous flaws in terms of tactics and equipment. Time and time again we see articles written by veterans of various conflicts represented on screen that decry the film’s over-dramatization, glorification, or blatant inaccuracy in depicting the battle in which they fought.

[2] We Were Soldiers is not another Hollywood war movie. Of course, in the strictest sense, it is. It’s a war movie, and Hollywood produced it. But that’s where the comparisons end. Randall Wallace, within the first three pages of Lt. Gen. Moore’s book, saw the phrase “Hollywood got it wrong every damned time” and dedicated himself to getting it right. He gathered survivors of the battle, including Lt. Gen. Moore, Maj. Bruce Crandall, journalist Joe Galloway, and military wives Julia Moore and Barbara Geoghegan, among many others, and made them an integral part of the production process. As Moore states in Getting it Right, Behind the Scenes of We Were Soldiers, “Randy has done his homework. He’s listened to me, and he’s listened to numerous vets of the battle.” Each leading actor and actress spent several days with the person he or she was portraying on screen to ensure that they did the absolute best they could to be true to who that person really was. By bringing veterans of the Ia Drang campaign into the making of the film, Wallace created an environment in which he had to be true to actual events or he would be letting down the very people the film is meant to honor, who are sitting in the room with him ready to point that out.

[3] The entire production process from special effects to makeup was conducted with reality rather than cinematic effect as the primary objective. The clothing was all period, and the weapons were all exactly what the opposing armies had used in 1965. Barry Pepper, the actor who played Joe Galloway, carried the same brand of cigarettes and the same two books the real Galloway had carried in Vietnam. Sam Elliott, who played Sergeant Major Plumley, made sure he had a wedding band on his dog tags like Plumley had worn. When Moore toured the set after all the grass had been planted, helipads built, and tents pitched, he remarked that there were no piss holes. Immediately, the crew started building latrines. These latrines are never seen in the movie and show just how much Wallace valued accuracy.

[4] The actors were put through a two-week “boot camp,” a crash course on how to be a soldier. Jason Powell, military technical advisor to the film, stated the goal of the course was to “make sure everything looks like we took a platoon of actual soldiers and put them in there.” This training helped ensure that the film would avoid the ridiculously inaccurate image of a GI swinging a M60 back and forth at his hip holding down the trigger or a group of soldiers running in a straight line shooting each other in the back. The production team paying such a strict attention to detail on all the little things certainly resulted in better and more in character performances by the actors. As Mel Gibson (Hal Moore) mentioned, “it’s a moving monument on celluloid. We feel an obligation to them [veterans] to maintain some truth about the whole thing and not disappoint them, because they did sacrifice.” Interviews with various cast members reflect the same feeling of owing it to the veterans and their wives to represent them faithfully and honestly.

[5] The depiction of the “war at home” is another key facet of this film that sets it apart from others. Moore stated that it “hasn’t been captured in another film in the scope that it’s captured in this one.” American soldiers aren’t robotic killing machines. They’re real people that live and love the same way we do. As Wallace mentioned, “to tell the story, you have to tell the whole story, and the whole story is that these soldiers are human beings that have families.” We Were Soldiers does an excellent job of depicting not only what the soldiers left back home but the hell that their wives and children went through waiting for their husbands or fathers to return.

[6] Ultimately, We Were Soldiers accomplished what it set out to do. A former Marine who had served three tours in country stated that he “had waited 30 years for this one.” A former medivac helicopter pilot said, “They finally got it. That's what it was like. All the details are right. The actors were just like the men I knew.” Randall Wallace’s inclusion of veterans in the production process and obsession over every detail resulted in perhaps the most complete and accurate depiction of the American soldier Hollywood has ever produced. Lt. Gen. Hal Moore’s message drips from every pore of this film: “hate war, but love the American warrior.”