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That is one kind of love.Įxcerpted from We Were Soldiers Once.and Youngīy Harold G. Johnson, ordered us to go, but more importantly because we saw it as our duty to go. We went to war because our country asked us to go, because our new President, Lyndon B. Just before we shipped out to Vietnam the Army handed us the colors of the historic 1st Cavalry Division and we all proudly sewed on the big yellow-and-black shoulder patches with the horsehead silhouette. We were members of an elite, experimental combat division trained in the new art of airmobile warfare at the behest of President John F. We were draftees, most of us, but we were proud of the opportunity to serve that country just as our fathers had served in World War II and our older brothers in Korea. We were the children of the 1950s and we went where we were sent because we loved our country. This is about what we did, what we saw, what we suffered in a thirty-four-day campaign in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in November 1965, when we were young and confident and patriotic and our countrymen knew little and cared less about our sacrifices.Īnother war story, you say? Not exactly, for on the more important levels this is a love story, told in our own words and by our own actions.
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In the Ia Drang, both sides claimed victory and both sides drew lessons, some of them dangerously deceptive, which echoed and resonated throughout the decade of bloody fighting and bitter sacrifice that was to come.
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The Ia Drang campaign was to the Vietnam War what the terrible Spanish Civil War of the 1930s was to World War II: a dress rehearsal the place where new tactics, techniques, and weapons were tested, perfected, and validated. So this story is about the smaller, more tightly focused "we" of that sentence: the first American combat troops, who boarded World War II-era troopships, sailed to that little-known place, and fought the first major battle of a conflict that would drag on for ten long years and come as near to destroying America as it did to destroying Vietnam. In the broad, traditional sense, that "we" who went to war was all of us, all Americans, though in truth at that time the larger majority had little knowledge of, less interest in, and no great concern with what was beginning so far away. It was the year America decided to directly intervene in the Byzantine affairs of obscure and distant Vietnam. We felt it then, in the many ways our lives changed so suddenly, so dramatically, and looking back on it from a quarter-century gone we are left in no doubt. The time was 1965, a different kind of year, a watershed year when one era was ending in America and another was beginning. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, Act II, Scene 3 Falstaff enjoys sleep as one of the many sumptuous courses in the great feast of life, and he lets nothing distract him from consuming his fill.In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'dĪnd heard thee murmur tales of iron wars. Unburdened by guilt or shame, having no ambition beyond the next bottle of sack, he is not even perturbed by Hal’s recent, ominous words about a future banishment (“I do, I will.”). While the Sheriff is in that very room looking to arrest him for a capital crime, Sir John lays down in a dark place and slips into a deep, beastly slumber. The comedy of Peto’s discovery turns on Falstaff’s blithe lack of concern for anything but his own immediate bodily pleasure.
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After the Sheriff has left, Hal tells Peto to find that “oily rascal.” A moment later Peto calls out, “Falstaff! Fast asleep behind the arras, and/Snorting like a horse” (II.iv.535-536). Everyone scatters and hides while the Prince must resume his royal identity and assure the Sheriff the pilgrims will be repaid for what they have lost. The jesting abruptly ends when the Sheriff arrives to inquire about the robbery.