Plei Ku, Blood & Guts

Rating: Null/10 (12 December 2002)

This is a movie that is terribly conflicted. On the one hand, it wants to show the realities of war, both in it's effects on the soldiers at the front, and the loved ones they leave behind. On the other, this post-911 production wants to do nothing more than to wave the stars and stripes, going to almost ridiculous extents. There is ample use of WWII era Hollywood cliches in this movie.
Let's begin with the videocover/poster for this movie. Mel Gibson looks so mean and intense that he's almost caught a second before spitting out a big wad of Redman's. Hilarious, leaning towards high camp.
The dying soldier's "Please tell my wife, I love her" has already been mentioned.
Then there is the Sam Elliott's super-gruff sergeant in charge ("Good morning, sergeant". Reply: "How the f*** do you know what kind of morning it's going to be?").
And then there is the title. "We Were Soldiers" is a lot more assertive than the original, more melancholy title, "We Were Soldiers Once, And Young".
And lastly, there is the misplaced sounding Scottish music, that seems to want to create a connection in the viewer between this movie and "Braveheart", Mel Gibson's other epic about bloodshed and heroism.
However, all this said, the battle at Pleiku was most definitely a historical one. It set the US military doctrine of the use of airmobile units, and created a battle which the high command (General Westmoreland) more than anything wished to emulate over and over. The reason was that it resulted in a "kill ratio" of about 40 to 1. For every US soldier killed, 40 Vietnamese died. Eerily enough, it is also the death toll/ratio for the entire war (58,000 American deaths for 2,000,000 Vietnamese deaths). The battle at Pleiku started off America's serious involvement in the war in 1965, which until then had only been fought by the proxy use of Special Forces "advisors", and which would only end 8 years later in 1973, making it America's longest war by far.
So in summation, it started of the US's involvement in Vietnam, and also set the official military doctrine that would haunt the conflict for it's duration - a mobile conventional helicopter war, attempting to draw out the Vietnamese regular forces into a confrontation in which US air and artillery power would win the day. During the Tet offensive of 1968, Westmoreland was still waiting for a Vietnamese all-out assault. On the other hand, you can argue that the 40-1 kill ratio set the objective in the Vietnamese military's mind for the need to close that gap - kill more Americans and hide their own deaths as much as possible.
What is also clear from the movie, is what a waste war is and how criminal it is to fight things out on the battle field, when the obvious solution is political and economic. There was a, perhaps understandable, misreading of the nature and desires of Ho Chi Min, and the old Vietminh freedom fighters. There was also not enough effort to distance themselves from the old colonial legacy left by France and England, especially in their backing of the old exploitative, feudal system and their a priori failure to support or introduce transparent, democratic government. At the same time, seeing the enormity of Vietnamese sacrifice, it is hard not to consider how well the South Koreans have done out of compliance with the USA. In short, the issues that were thrown up during the Vietnam conflict would never be addressed on the battlefield, and the battle at Pleiku set the stage for the military conflicts to come. To understand what went wrong by an over reliance on waiting for the Vietcong to come to them, and why going after the Vietcong without proper intelligence was like catching fish with a spoon, read "Slow Burn" by Orrin DeForest, "A Vietcong Memoir" by Troung Nhu Tang or "Stalking the Vietcong" by Stuart Herrington.
All said, a pretty good war movie.