Movie Review

"Custer," we learn from the gritty sergeant-major Plumley, Col. Harold G. Moore's tough-as-nails sidekick, "was a pussy." That is not the only allusion, verbal or visual, to the cavalry versus the Indians during this cinematic treatment of the war memoir written by Moore and the journalist Joseph L. Galloway about the bloody battle fought in November 1965 in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam's central highlands. There, in the first days of a months-long struggle, about 400 men in a U.S. Army air cavalry regiment fought some 2,000 North Vietnamese regular troops. During the initial fight, several dozen Americans and about 1,800 Vietnamese died.

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The film, which opens with a flashback to a grim massacre of French troops by Viet Minh guerrillas in 1954, is a star turn for Mel Gibson as well as for the helicopters that transported the latter-day troopers and helped sustain them against heavy odds. Gibson has portrayed nearly identical tough-but-sensitive warriors in films such as Braveheart (1995) and The Patriot (2000). Moore, a thoughtful and compassionate leader, promises to be the first man off the helicopter and the last to leave the battlefield and to leave no one—dead or alive—behind. (This may be an allusion to the missing in action, but I may be overinterpreting.) In a bonding exercise, he tells his officers that, as children, Sioux Indian warriors nursed at the breasts of all women in the tribe and called each one mother. He is, in short, a kind of "new age" George Patton.

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