The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare

Randall Wallace’s We Were Soldiers: Forgetting the American War in Viet Nam

Randall wallace’s We Were Soldiers Forgetting the American War in Viet Nam Susan L. Eastman A t the turn-to-the-twenty-first-century American cultural remembrance nostalgically turned to admire the “good war”—World War II—while ignoring the American War in Viet Nam. During this period, journalist Tom Brokaw coined the phrase “the Greatest Generation” from the title of his 1998 book containing personal accounts American men and women, soldiers and civilians about their experiences and values during World War II. Shortly thereafter, the national World War II Memorial was under construction on the Mall in Washington D.C., and dedicated in 2005. Meanwhile, established in 2002, the Veterans History Project with the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress collected personal accounts from World War II veterans and civilians actively involved in the war effort. In addition, the acclaimed historical film documentarian Ken Burns and his longtime colleague Lynn Novick recollected World War II in their epic PBS documentary series The War (2007) with a title that suggests there is only one war to remember. As a result of the renewed concern with preserving memories of the war, the resurrection of the World War II combat film was well underway. In 2003, historian Frank Wetta and film scholar Martin Bookli suggested that the fiftieth anniversary celebrations in the 1990s of the war’s events “provided a way to revive the notion of patriotism in public life, and as a natural consequence in films” and thus “Vietnam could be forgotten.”1 Numerous films about World War II produced at the turn-to-the-twentyfirst -century attested to the resurgence of interest in remembering the war. They include but are not limited to Keith Gordon’s A Midnight Clear (1992), Joseph Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993), Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), Jonathan Mostow’s U-571 (2000), Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates (2001), Gregory Hoblit’s Hart’s War (2001), Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001), Steven Spielberg and Tom Hank’s widely popular HBO mini-series Band of Brothers (2001), John Woo’s Windtalkers (2002), Ryan Little’s Saints and Soldiers (2003), John Dahl’s The Great Raid (2005), Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and 202 SUSAN L. EASTMAN Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), and Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie (2008). In response to the reemergence of World War II combat films, Jeanine Basinger, the leading authority on the combat genre, published a new edition of The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (2003); in it she adds a discussion of the World War II combat film’s survival of the “Vietnam combat film. . . . [which] had a desperation, an ambivalence, and a madness that suggested the last hurrah for the old combat format.” Basinger attributes the regeneration of the combat genre to the box-office triumph of Saving Private Ryan. Film scholar Guy Westwell, interpreting the cultural impact of the combat film revival on contemporary war cinema (1989–2006) further claims that the resurgence chronicles a “shift in the cultural imagination of war” that has “fostered a sense of World War II as a ‘just war’ fought by a ‘greatest generation’” ultimately culminating in a “justification and endorsement of war.”2 The release of Randall Wallace’s film, We Were Soldiers (2002) coincides with a cultural climate of sanctioning war. An adaptation of the New York Times best-seller We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young (1992), a memoir by retired Lt. Gen. Harold Moore and photojournalist Joseph Galloway, the film recounts an early, singular, three-day battle in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam, specifically the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. The film’s narrative chronicles the formation, training, and family life of the officers of the First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, an air mobile division at Fort Benning, Georgia. During the war, Gen. William Westmoreland ordered the First Calvary, during the Plieku Campaign, to “search and destroy” PAVN forces in the 1,500-square-mile Ia Drang Valley.3 One of the narrative’s goals is to remind audiences that, despite the narrative and cinematic tradition of portraying the war as one fought against an invisible guerilla enemy, the war included actions such as this particular early battle, fought on conventional terms among standing armies. At the time of its release, We Were Soldiers culturally engaged a post-9/11 American audience whose country was embarking on a war...