'They are the Gold Star children, war's innocent victims, and their pain shimmers across the years pure and undimmed. They pass through life with an empty room in their hearts where a father was supposed to live and laugh and love.
All their lives they listen for the footstep that will never fall, and long to know what might have been.'
On the 14th November 1965 the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry was helicopted into the Ia Drang Valley, to a small clearing code named LZ X-Ray. They were immediately attacked by a vastly larger Vietnamese force and one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War started. After two a half days of intense fighting the Americans drove off their attackers. But for the members 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, brought in to LZ X-Ray to support their sister battalion, the horror was only beginning. Told that the march of two and a half miles to LZ Albany would be a walk in the sun, they were well strung out when they marched straight into the North Vietnamese camp.
This is an impressive, disturbing and moving book. Almost every page has an act of extreme heroism and self sacrifice. But this is not for a second a book that glorifies war, far from it. Both authors were there and experienced much of the fighting; Harold G. Moore as commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry in LZ X-Ray and Joseph Galloway as a press photographer, and they paint a grim picture.
Moore himself comes over as a career militarily. He is never really openly critical his superiors, nor the commander of the ill fated march to LZ Albany, but in his understated way he makes his anger and his feelings quite plain. 'War is hell' he is telling us. At one point there is a miss-call and the plane dropping napalm bombs the US lines, horribly burning several soldiers. Moore turns to man responsible for co-coordinating the bombing and tells him to forget it and just carry on; for without air support they would all be dead. After the battle Moore personally scours the battlefield, untangling the human remains, until he is certain that every American has been found, no one can go unaccounted for.
The story does not end with the fighting but continues on into the lives of those who lost loved ones. One of the final chapters allows the relatives to tell their stories in the hope that they may offer some comfort to others in their position. When the son of one of the dead soldiers describes the Vietnam War as "Senseless" his words are allowed to speak for themselves.
This is an uncomfortable book, but I do recommend it.
Corgi Books, 483 pages