War and Mass Media

My interest in the Vietnam War is one of the main reasons I created this blog. This War changed American history and has made one of the largest impacts on American foreign policy today. Vietnam War provoked massive political protest and spurred a movement of radical opposition amongst American society. Not only did it change the social behaviors of the public but the Vietnam War also revealed American weakness, failure and vulnerability. The casualties, protest, devastation, low morale amongst soldiers humanized war and destroyed the romanticized perception of wartime glory. Reading about the war is one thing but watching Hollywood reenact actual battle scenes from Vietnam brings a chilling reality to what the war was like.

We Were Soldiers (2002), based on the book by Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) and former UPI correspondent Joe Galloway (Barry Pepper), is a motion picture based on the first major combat against the North Vietnamese in 1965. Moore starts the movie developing the first air cavalry who used helicopters to transport soldiers quickly to the battlefields. The first part of the film introduced the development of this new kind of warfare and details the tight bonds the unit develops during training. The story is being told through the eyes of UPI correspondent Joe Galloway, who joined Moore’s battalion the first night of the battle in an attempt to write a story about the war. We Were Soldiers (photos) focuses on the home lives of the soldiers, touching on the heartbreaks of torn families who have lost their loved ones during the battle.

The soldiers in 1965 had a sense of comradeship and peer loyalty to one another. Colonel Hal Moore was insistent that the soldiers become a family, looking out for each other, regardless of race, religion and socio-economic class. Aside from Colonel Hal Moore, the film doesn’t focus on individual character development; it concentrates more on the battle itself and the emotional devastation of the families back home receiving the news of the death of their husbands through telegrams. Vietnam veterans consider We Were Soldiers to be the most accurate portrayal of “how war really was.” The ultimate goal of the film was to show the sacrifice all the soldiers and families face when entering war. It also showed the horrors of Vietnam and how every attack was a sudden ambush which made it difficult to become acclimated to especially on enemy grounds.

Filed under: Vietnam War