347: We Were Soldiers with Joshua Donohue

Dan LeFebvre  03:15

Before we dig into some of the details of the movie, if you would do take a step back, give We Were Soldiers a letter grade for its historical accuracy. What would it get

Joshua Donohue  03:26

We Were Soldiers, in my opinion, gets a solid B plus, and that was even flirting with an A minus. But as there were a few historical inaccuracies, and they’re not many, though there the film was does a great job on depicting the events. And as you see, when the eye drain, battle commences, a literally a minute, almost minute by minute, completely document

Joshua Donohue  03:52

of the battle. And it’s incredible how that plays out. And it’s really the first true Vietnam War. It’s a tribute film, and I think that’s really the big difference between that and previous war films. So when you and I were speaking about covering the film, I thought it would have been a good idea to summarize some of the other important Vietnam War movies that had come before. It to kind of give it, you know, a balance, to see where it where it’s at, see where it fits in the puzzle, yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I really believe that it’s, it’s the first true depiction of the ground battle, the continuous battle, you know, hour to hour, as you see throughout the film, the timestamps at the bottom, you know, at 1048, the landing. And then you see the, you know, the next hour, the next hour, and what the sequence of events occurs on at landing zone X ray. So it’s reminiscent of filming Black Hawk Down I feel and Saving Private Ryan. I feel like towards the late 90s and early 2000s you saw war movies.

Joshua Donohue  05:00

Kind of change a little bit. Even the Thin Red Line is a northern movie I would go to also where you’re on the ground, you’re with the other men, you know, Flags of Our Fathers. Another good one, where you’re on the Iwo Jima with these guys and, you know, guys are getting killed all around you, coming up behind you, getting shot. I mean, it’s, you know, war films really didn’t give you that perspective, like, you know, like you see all these films, like Private Ryan and, you know, even a band of brothers, of course, gives you that, that same sort of that view, although Vietnam war films do as well. But I think that we were soldiers is really the only film that you know, gives you that the rawness of battle. And one of the things that I noticed right off the bat, when I was reading about it, was a quote from Hal Moore where he said, Hollywood just hasn’t gotten it right. And and that really spoke volumes, because I definitely agree with that, in a lot of cases, taken of any war film that you know has any historical inaccuracies. But, take a film like Apocalypse Now, which was really the first real big, you know, big name film. Amazing film features some big name actress, Marlon Brando, Martin, Sheen, Dennis Hopper. Can’t forget that that early cameo Harrison four in the very beginning of that film.

Dan LeFebvre  06:20

I’m gonna have to watch it again now. I must have, okay,

Joshua Donohue  06:24

yes, yeah, Harrison Ford is in the very beginning of that briefing captain, Captain Willard Martin Sheen’s character. So it’s not based on real events. It’s actually based upon, you know, events that took place in 19th century Congo, but they converted it to Southeast Asian the Vietnam War in the backdrop of that. Then you have the end of it, where it’s Martin, she is coming out of the water, and he goes to kill Marlon Brando, and the play of the doors the end is playing. And it’s all dramatic. And while it’s an incredible film, and the other memorable scene is the ride of the Valkyrie scene with the helicopters the Hueys, right, and that gives the viewer, for the for the first time what air mobile, air Cav war was like with that scene with Robert Duvall, and not to also a good cameo in there, Sergeant Hartman. Arlie Ermey is also one of the helicopter pilots in that scene, if you look closely. So take another film like The Deer Hunter late 1970s if you look at the central narrative of these films, you know it’s once air and ground combat operations end in 1973 of course, the fall of Saigon in 75 you think of the deer hunt. You think of, oh, the Russian Roulette scene with Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro. And while it does touch upon a lot of themes coming home from war, pow themes, things like that, even those early Rambo movies, I would say, dealt with that as well. And PTSD readjusting to life after war, which is, of course, not easy for Vietnam veterans at all, so you know, for a multitude of reasons. So it bringing us to the 80s. You have platoon, 1986 Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. 1987 Born on the Fourth of July, another Oliver Stone movie, the 89 with Tom Cruise, you have casualties of war in 1989 Michael J Fox shown Penn and hanberger Hill in 1987 which was actually considered to be an indie film. Hamburger Hill was the story of the men of the 101st airborne who fought a bloody battle against the North Vietnamese over hill 937, in May of 1969 it was really the first Vietnam War film to capture the prolonged brutality of combat based on true events. Now, although the characters were fictional, the sheer violence of that film was memorable. As we were soldiers is as well. I actually recall my father keeping me away from that film when I was a kid for the longest time. I mean, I remember I walked in on the scene in platoon where Kevin Dillon is just killing that one civilian with his rifle. My dad’s like, get out of the room. Get out of the room. He can’t watch this. And I remember Hamburger Hill was the movie he he’s like, do not even come close to that film. You cannot watch that movie. So I always had that impression that Vietnam War races, the scale of violence was quite dramatic as at a young age.

Dan LeFebvre  09:26

It’s funny, you mentioned that because my my dad loved world war two movies, and I had the same sort of feeling when it came to Vietnam War movies, I guess I grew up with, you know, World War two movies, you think about the classic black and white John Wayne, like Longest Day, and things like that. And and then you get into the Vietnam War movies like, oh, this war actually is hell, you know, it’s not a movie and entertainment, and you like, even though they are movies. But still, it did bring a lot more into the the psychological aspect. And, like you said, you know, PTSD, and that aspect of this taking you to the.

Joshua Donohue  15:00

The climax of all these events. So this particular scene is prophetic because it also foreshadows the events and lets the audience know that the NVA and the Viet Cong are a very formidable opponent. They know the land. They use aggressive strategy and tactics to their advantage. They close with the enemy. They will this will also, you know, come to pass during the play a key role in I drank where artillery, napalm will be brought in, literally on top of the the enemy and the men of the Seventh Cavalry during the fight. So another scene from the French route there in 1954 as we’re an NVA soldier bayonets the French officer while he’s firing his sidearm. And of course, this is a bit of foreshadowing, as we’ll see later in the film, when the Vietnamese soldiers making his run with a bayonet towards Hal Moore while he’s at his CP, while he’s on the receiver phone with a much different outcome the second time around. So again, to give some historical context of the opening scenes, the French would attack and seize Vietnam during the middle part of the 19th century. The invasion was bloody. It was cruel. The French conquest of Indochina began with a major assault on the ancient Vietnamese port of Danang in the year 1858, and it took a quite a long time, around 50 years, for the French to finally lay claim, not only to Southeast Asia, but of course, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. So it was ruled by a French governor. He ruled from his palace in Hanoi. The French largely lived on plantation estates, modeled many of the cities, including Saigon in South Vietnam, to look like a home. Basically France look at the Parisian cafe or a corner market. So most of the French didn’t bother to learn the language of their subjects. They installed a series of puppet emperors to employ a bunch of French speaking Vietnamese officials to carry out their orders. The French put their subjects to work and hard labor, building infrastructure, railroads, bridges, canals. The Vietnamese people in general did not take well to French occupation. So yeah, and so they had fought invasions previous ones by the Chinese in the past. So Vietnam had essentially been struggling for its independence for centuries, and by the early 20th century, nationalism was also on the ride. So this was the climate that was going on at the time, and anyone who dared to resist French colonial rule, risk, exile, prison, execution. The guillotine was still being employed at that time, so the French looked upon the Vietnamese as inferior. And it was during the post World War One era where a young Ho Chi Minh begins to rally support of the Vietnamese independence from the people. He actually makes a tremendous sacrifice in terms of his health. He gives up on having a family, which is a big sacrifice, because in Vietnam, in the Vietnamese culture, it is a big deal to have a large family. And he foregoes this so Ho Chi Minh forms what’s called the Vietnamese independency, or the Viet Minh, he called upon General von Jaap, the teacher of French history, instruction into Henri elite. Both Ho Chi Minh and general job were students of communism, and Job’s wife was actually being to death in prison. So that has a profound effect on him and of course, solidifying communism in amongst that was also starting to come into pass. So Job had developed a distinct theory on warfare, guerrilla tactics, and during World War Two, the Japanese now occupy Southeast Asia, the OSS which is the Office of Strategic Services, actually parachuted weapons and supplies to the Vietnamese. We were actually helping Ho Chi Minh during World War Two, and we were chopping, you know, American arms, and that’s why you’ve seen a lot of old Vietnamese War footage, and even beyond before that, in the early 1960s you see American weapons in World War Two in the hands of everyone, and one gorans, bars, 30 caliber machine guns, all sorts of American World War and one carbide you see that we were soldiers as well. So to the Americans, they marveled at how quickly they were able to adopt to the Western weapons and the Ho Chi Minh called the Viet American army. He saw the Americans as champions of democracy, and that would help them end colonial rule. So we were friendly with Ho Chi Minh at one point in time. So it’s interesting how that dynamic begins to play out. So Ho Chi Minh had his people break into Japanese storehouses, help steal rice, help feed his starving country. Uh. He was hailed as a savior, and following the bombings, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ho realized it was only a matter of time until the Japanese left the area, and he called upon his people to rise up and take back their country as quickly as possible before the French return and reasserted their colonial control. So he actually quoted Thomas Jefferson, the all men are created equal. Speech during his declaration, speech in Hanoi on September 2, 1945 which was the same day the Japanese surrender. So Charles de Gaulle had insisted that the United States stay out of France’s way. It’s their empire. They’re going to go reassert their rule. There us remain neutral, with hopes that the French and the Viet Minh would work out some sort of peaceful agreement. And that did not work out. So

Dan LeFebvre  20:48

as you’re saying, I we think of, you know, the Vietnam War, right? I mean, I’ve said it, I don’t know how many times already, you know, I’m sure. I am sure I will. But from the Vietnamese perspective, then, was it almost a revolution against the French. I mean, what you’re saying sounds eerily similar to the American Revolution against the British, right?

Joshua Donohue  21:05

You’re exactly right. You’re exactly right. Yeah, north, actually North and South Vietnam were divided temporarily into separate zones along the 17th parallel. The British were actually holding the South, and nationalist China were holding the North. This is immediately after World War Two. And of course, you had the Chinese Revolution, the civil war going on there between Mao Zedong and the communists and Chiang Kai Shek and the nationalists. So the French and the Viet Minh were already fighting in the streets of Saigon. It was already chaos in the streets. It was anarchy. And this will be the theme of what happens really, with South Vietnam. North Vietnam quickly unites under the flag of communism, and, you know, below the 17th parallel, it is complete in utter chaos. So a fresh group of French troops is arriving in Saigon. As the British begin to pull out of there, they reassert their control on the entire country, and soon 1000s of more French troops will begin pouring into the area. So general job is now consolidating his Viet Minh forces, many were viewed as renewed fighting and killing their own people fighting for the communist system. By 1949 Soviet Union and the Communist China Chinese were now reaching out to help. So to counter this move, us, President Harry Truman now approves $23 million later, increased at $336 million as an aid plan for the French and Vietnam. America was no longer neutral. So with 35 advisors overseeing the delivery of jeeps and other supplies to the French, the US was officially in Vietnam, and the growing disdain towards the US was now clearly becoming more evident in Vietnam, as they now saw supporting the French. So Vietnam had been caught up into the gears of by the Cold War at this point in the 1950s so by that time that Dwight Eisenhower is elected president, America is footing 80% of the build for France’s fight in Vietnam and by 1953 the French had already been fighting for seven years. They had suffered over 100,000 casualties. It was not going well for them whatsoever. So on the eve of Dien Bien Phu, there was a proposed meeting in Geneva with each side trying to improve their position. Before the negotiations, French General Navarre had set up a base in the remote valley in northwestern Dan Bien Phu and hoping to lure the men into a decisive battle the French forces, and this has to be one of the strangest strategies with all of military history, they dug into the valley floor, surrounded by the mountains, and they were, and this is one of the most remarkable feats in military history. General, General job pulled off one of the greatest logistical feats of, probably, of all time. He had a quarter of a million porters transport all of his food and weaponry by foot, artillery pieces that were disassembled. Job surrounded the valley with 50,000 men and over 200 guns, and the Eisenhower administration tries to send in an aircraft to resupply the besieged French. And there was the belief that if we lost Vietnam to communism, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow the domino theory. So after 55 days, the exhausted French would surrender on May 7, 1954 and they would lose 8000 men there, wounded or missing. So it should have been the end of the colonial era in Southeast Asia, but we saw it in Cold War terms.

Dan LeFebvre  24:33

That’s a great setup to a lot of stuff. A lot of the context that the movie obviously doesn’t show. It just assumes, you know, but I think it’s, it’s kind of telling that, you know, I was like, Well, it sounds like a lot like the river. Lot like the Revolutionary War. It’s a testament to, I don’t even understand a lot of the details there. And the movie also mentions, as, like, Americans don’t understand the Vietnam War. Was that a pretty accurate sentiment for the general American in the 1960s that they don’t understand what’s going

Joshua Donohue  24:56

on over there. Most Americans in the 1960s probably could. Low K Vietnam on a map. They really Vietnam was just a name in the news, on a map, on a newscast. And again, this was television was still very much in its infancy. So Vietnam would, of course, become the first real television wars. Americans would see Americans coming back, kill the wounded and so on. So following France’s defeat at Dan, Bien Phu, Senate Majority Leader at the time, Lyndon Johnson, was quite vocal about communism spreading throughout Southeast Asia. He quoted as saying, We’ve been caught bluffing by our enemies. Today, it’s Indochina. Tomorrow, Asia may be in flames after the Western alliance will lie in ruins. So Americans knew really nothing about what was going on with Hanoi or Saigon or anything in between. So Ho Chi Minh was now surrounded by individuals who wanted to waste no more time in reunifying Vietnam, very aggressive generals, and it was almost sort of how World War One plays out. And you can even make the argument for the American side on this, where the Kaiser was sort of in the background, and you had, you know, Eric Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg will be running the show. And this is really what happens in Vietnam, where guys like job and lay Swan will sort of shuffle Ho Chi Minh to the back. Say we’re going to run the war here and even in America. Lyndon Johnson in the background, Westmoreland and Robert McNamara and others running the show. So Ho Chi Minh was surrounded by these people. And the party secretary, first party secretary, and men named les Juan was one of those individuals he had helped found the Indochina Communist Party. He had actually survived 10 years in a French prison. So at in July in 1965 at bnoi, about 20 miles to the north of Saigon, six American military advisors were watching film in their mess hall. So in 1963 I should say, the Viet Minh guerrillas snuck into the compound, opened fire, killing two men, major Dale Wiss and Master Sergeant Chester abnon. They were the first American soldiers to die by enemy fire in Vietnam. And even before then, there were advisors being killed. Also, you know, men for the Peace Corps who were just there trying to help. You know, the Venus people live a better life, a better, you know, installation, better infrastructure, little, you know, immunizations, things like that. So Kennedy and Richard Nixon both wanted to hold the line against international Communism. That was a big deal in 1960 election, so very few Americans knew or cared about was going under Vietnam and Vietnam in those days. And a great quote by Leslie Gelb work for the Pentagon, said Vietnam in those days was, was a strategic chess board, not a country with a culture or a history that Americans would have again, they would have an impossible time trying to figure out, even with the mighty Fist of the American military behind it,

Dan LeFebvre  28:06

wow, yeah. I mean, that’s so different than World War

Joshua Donohue  28:11

Two. It is what’s much more complicated, yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  28:14

not that they’re all the same, but even just the sentiment, and I think it feeds into kind of what we’re talking about, you know, with with the movies, and that element to where that’s going to feature, into how the movies are made, right? You know, to cater to American audiences, and how much of it they understand, and all that, how much they have to explain beforehand. Like, I mean, obviously it helps me, because we, we get to talk about it, but, I mean, but that’s, that’s the kind of thing where it’s, you know, it’s fascinating to me how different movies from World War Two are to Vietnam, or movies like, like this,

Joshua Donohue  28:50

yeah, you know, I always say that World War two movies are heavily romanticized, heavily romantic, because it’s, there’s, you know, We defeated the evil Nazis with, you know that with their, you know, black SS uniforms, with their swastikas. And we defeated fascism. We defeated, you know, Mussolini. And then, of course, we, you know, the climactic battle that ended World War Two. The Pacific wheel got re avenged Pearl Harbor, we defeated the Japanese. And interesting in many ways, how the Japanese experience for the American military will translate to Vietnam in a lot of respects, as we get into so, really towards in going into the formation of the First Cavalry the air mobile division was created during John F Kennedy’s administration with a goal to break down the Army’s exclusive training and preparation for world war three, basically. So they had to get more familiar with the battlefields of the jungles of Southeast Asia, again, instead of the flat expanses of Eastern or Western Europe. So by mid 1962 defense secretary. Robert McNamara concur with Kennedy’s vision for Special Warfare operations using the Air Mobility idea ordering to determine the if the new uh one Hueys and the CH 47 Chinook helicopters and any other rotary wing aircraft were a viable option or future battlefield. So these decisions were being made at the very highest levels of government, even at that particular time.

Dan LeFebvre  30:25

Well, speaking of the heir mobile, you mentioned his name briefly before, but if we go back to the movie, we’re introduced to Mel Gibson’s character, Lieutenant Colonel halmore. Early on, he moves to Fort Benning, Georgia with his family. In the movie, takes command of the seventh Calvary in 1964 and according to the movie, the way, the way they show this, is they’re using the helicopters to carry men to and from the battlefield. It’s a new concept, similar to, kind of what you’re talking about right there. And Colonel Moore is chosen for command. There’s a scene where he’s like, Oh, he volunteered for test to test experimental parachutes. Sounds like the man for the job, right? Yeah, exactly.

Joshua Donohue  30:58

So it was the IR mobile was a very new concept in war, in every way, shape or form. And as you see, the men of the Seventh Cavalry are, they’re raring to go. They just, they have that gung ho attitude. And when we first see the seventh Cabot their base at ankay. There’s a sign that reads, headquarters, first battalion, seventh US Cavalry Regiment, and the name Gary Owen appears on the build the board as well. So in the book We Were Soldiers and young Hal Moore talks about the origin of the First Cavalry Division, Henri mobile and the name where it’s derived from. So we’ll talk about Custer now. So in the days when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer commanded the Seventh Cavalry, the regiment adopted a rowdy Irish drinking song called Gary Owen as its marching tune. So the words Gary Owen made it into the regimental crest, and the officers and the men of the regiment often say Gary Owen, sir. So this tradition dates back to custer’s command of the seventh and of course, this is ingrained into the men by Hal Moore. Moore’s men even call him yellow hair as a sort of tongue in cheek reference to Custer. So before America becomes fully involved in Vietnam. Helicopters are being employed in the battlefield. They are used in the Korean War. And in Vietnam, American pilots are flying them in combat operations before the war even begins. For America, assisting in the the the advisory phase for the for the Arvin So back at Fort Benning during the mid 50s, there was a general by the name of John Tolson. He came up with a tactical doctorate for the use of helicopters in combat, becoming one of the leading early pioneers of Air Mobility. So JFK really ushers in this era of what we call, of course, have today and these types of operations. The CIA comes of age during his time, special operations, the Green Berets. All of these are meant to any kind of communist or in hot spots around the world. They are dispatched to those areas and to then dispatch with them as quickly and as cleanly as possible. They have too much warfare going on an expanded level. So the 11th aerosol division was formed in February of 1963 tactical training experimenting at Fort Benning, Georgia, now called Fort Moore, by the way. And at the same time, the 10th air transport brigade was also an existing aviation battalion at Fort Benning. So by early July, the Pentagon makes the announcement the air 11th Air Assault test has more or less served its purpose and would become the First Air Cavalry Division, air mobile. The first battalion would also have a sister battalion the second battalion, Seventh Cavalry, and will get into them towards the end. They will come into play at the end of the battle. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  34:02

you mentioned Custer, and we do see, it seems in the movie, Mel Gibson’s version of Colonel Moore, which I’m assuming is the more that you’re referring to with Fort Benning, he seems concerned. And the way the movie ties it in, we see, like the they call it a massacre, the French massacre that we talked about in 1954 and then, of course, it’s the Seventh Cavalry, which is Custer, and things didn’t turn out so good for him. So Colonel Moore in the movie seems kind of concerned before he even leaves. Was it actually a concern that he had like to Seventh Cavalry and his superstitions or anything? Yeah,

Joshua Donohue  34:35

he was concerned. He was a student of history, so he knew he was well read and well versed and all the great commanders and generals that had come before Him. So there you see in september of 1965 the newly created First Cavalry Division had 16,000 men, 1600 vehicles. And the film does a great job by setting the stage for the. I drank battle right where we see the scene after Hal Moore and Jack Gagan, who was played by Chris Klein in the film, in the chapel following the birth of gagan’s daughter. It cuts right to the speech to Lyndon Johnson, telling the American people that he is sending the air mobile division to Vietnam. And the scene after that, they’re at a party, and you see where Hal Moore is privately conversing with Major General Harry Kennard, who is the division commanding general they have and house against a tree as a tree behind them, and Madeline Stowe, who plays Julia Compton Moore, his wife. And the film keeps looking over at him, and she can see the look on his audio. She knows he’s serious. And the quotes go, I didn’t hear the President mentioned state of emergency. Canard, you know. And says, you know. Moore says, without that declaration, that means our listens won’t be extended. And then canard replies, sorry, Hal, his next words are another example of the concerns he had before the unit deployed to Vietnam. Says, Forgive me, sir, but let me get this straight. We form a division using techniques that have never been attempted in battle against an enemy with 20 years of combat experience on his ground, 12,000 miles away from our ground. And right before the army sends us into the fight, they take away a third of my men, the most experienced, including the officers. And this gets worse over the coming weeks, when they arrive. Moore describes in the book how a particularly bad strain of malaria knocks 56 more of his men and hospitals. And as he continues the conversation with canard, adding insult to injury, it says, By the way, how since you’re being deployed, they’re renumbering the units you’re now committing officer of the first battalion of the Seventh Cavalry, and it says seventh, same regiment as Custer. And he just looks at him with that real stern look of approval, almost like a grin on his face. And what’s interesting about this general canard and the placement of the First Cavalry at ankay, it was right in the middle of enemy territory. Sound familiar, so Custer would find himself in a similar spot. And what’s an interesting piece about canard, that guy who was speaking to him, and a lot of the viewers will like this one. They give a little interesting piece of info on him. He was a West Point graduate in the class of 1939 became a paratrooper by 1942 and what Moore called one of the shooting stars of the 101st Airborne Division during World War Two. And it was during World War Two at Bastogne, during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 he was the Operations Officer g3 to Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, who actually made the suggestion to him to reply nuts to the German commander, as you see in Band of Brothers. So he was the guy who actually made the suggestion for nuts. So as we see in the bastone episode of Band of Brothers. So that that was pretty

Dan LeFebvre  37:51

interesting, nice. It’s almost like everything just piling on top for Colonel Moore. It’s like, it’s almost like they were setting it up for a movie. Exactly.

Joshua Donohue  38:01

It’s all all scripted before. It was just one piece of bad news afterwards.

Dan LeFebvre  38:08

Wow, wow. Some of the other characters that we do see in the movie are, of course, the helicopter pilots. And in the movie, if we’re to believe that version of history, they are, let’s just call them an odd bunch. They’re outside army regulations, the quirky major Bruce Crandall nickname that he has in the movie snake, right? Because he can fly lower than snake Mel Gibson’s version of Colonel Moore just says, Well, you guys might look like but your equipment is immaculate, right? And then, of course, once we see them flying, we can see just how good they are. Do you think the movie did a good job setting up the pilots as being a little unorthodox? Yeah,

Joshua Donohue  38:47

right from the outset in this in the baseball scene that you see when they’re all playing baseball out there, you got that impression right off the bat. So, yeah, you get the impression that the helicopter pilots of the 229th assault helicopter Italian, or it’s certainly operating outside of the normal confines of the normal military rank and file. I’d

Dan LeFebvre  39:07

like to see how they got too tall, actually, into a helicopter pilot seat. Yeah.

Joshua Donohue  39:11

I love the quote he has where he’s like, too tall, sir. And Mel Gibson goes,

Dan LeFebvre  39:16

That’s right. I think I get to I see how you got your nickname.

Joshua Donohue  39:20

So to tell you the story about how Crandall got his affectionate nickname, and this ties in with the personality the entire 229 Crandall sent one of his warrant officers. And Crandall been in the military since the 1950s he’s, you know, he’s a major at this point, one of his sends one of his warrant officers to a local market where he buys a large Python. And what Crandall would do to sort of initiate the new guys, he would wrap the Python, coil the Python around his arm, and sneak up behind them and say, welcome to the outfit. I’m your commanding officer and. And wrap his arm around them, as, you know, they’re looking at him. And all of a sudden they look back, looking square him, and the yellows like, you know, it’s the sea down the Crocodile Hunter or something like that, right? But, and that obviously sets the tone right there from the get go. So she would get some interesting reactions, even if too tall. Freeman was there just in case someone decided to throw a punch at their CEO too tall and a few other guys be waiting there in case someone got out of line and decided to hit Crandall. But if I had to describe Bruce Crandall and I watched a number of interviews still alive, it would be resourceful. And operating outside of the Army Regulation was the reason why he was resourceful. He could probably do a TV or a film adaptation of the activities of the helicopter pilots there alone. There was certainly a odd lot in many ways, but you needed to be especially in those types of combat environments. I say this because Crandall had to resort to drastic measures at times to get his men the most basic essentials. So he was an example of how you’re able to maintain that delicate balance between regulation and non regulation when it comes to things like maintaining morale in Vietnam, basic essentials like, you know, food and water. You know, you’re in the middle of the jungle. You gotta think of things you know pretty quickly and think on your toes. I listened to a great interview with Crandall, who was being interviewed by Joe Galloway from 2015 it goes into detail about he and his men were able to devise methods about bringing water into the camp, procuring items on a pretty regular basis. When I say procure, liberating, he would say lights, lights from the officers club, they were just magically disappeared. He talks about stealing the generators from the Air Force, discussing an issue with keeping the beer cold in the refrigerator and being able to keep the light on at the same time. So you went out and got another generator to make the make sure they had an adequate power to make sure the beer was cold and the light stayed on at the same time. So she would also tell this great story to Galloway about yet he and his men would actually fly their helicopters to the army supply depot and make off with an untold amount of items that were marked for removal to other areas. So he said the guards were, of course, never shoot them. You’re not going to shoot down a helicopter. And you know, obviously shooting them down causing an even bigger issue. He would even cut deals with the guards, and they had concrete floors, all the amenities available. Even brags about having them before his superior officers even at them. So one thing he actually didn’t tolerate among his men was gambling. And I immediately thought of the conversation and Banner brothers with Dick winters has with Buck Compton when they were in the jeep. And he’s saying, You know what, if you had won, don’t ever put yourself in a position to take from these men. I love that quote. And I thought of that when I thought of this, this part from Crandall, where he comments that Ian Freeman, we’re actually here we go again, thrown out of Vegas casino because Ed too tall Freeman was winning too much, and they decided, you guys got to go. It’s not so. These guys were definitely some interesting fellows, to say the least. They got away with a lot. And Bruce Crandall, played by actor Greg Kinnear, who does a great job in the film, and he see the scene where they’re playing baseball, where Crandall slides into the bases. Call that. He looks up and sees, I believe you’re out Colonel, you know, Colonel Moore, standing there. And in the book, Moore describes Crandall as my kind of guy, good at what he did, straight talking and dead honest. And that’s a great scene in the film where he just pulls the pocket out of his pocket of beer, gives it to him. They start drinking, walking down the flight line, and says, you know, it has that conversation like you just referenced, say, your men operate outside the confines and all this stuff. And said, You’re and he said, like the covid says, I just suppose I have a choice in the matter. Goes, No, you don’t. And

Dan LeFebvre  43:56

speaking like we were talking about World War two movies when you’re talking about crane bill, it reminds me of, I was, I think James Garner’s character in Great Escape, where he’s just, just the scavenger guy who just need anything. You go to him, and he, I don’t know how he does it, but he finds a way to get it. And it’s just, yeah, and it’s

Joshua Donohue  44:11

in to, sort of, you know, not to summarize what they do. At, I drank, you know, during the battle Crandall and two tall Freeman evacuate approximately 70 wounded soldiers from LZ X ray while under intense enemy fire. And for these actions, Crandall and Freeman received the Distinguished Service Cross and Distinguished Flying Cross respectively. Then would both would be upgraded to Medals of Honor. Crandall also received the 1966 Aviation and Space writers helicopter heroism award, and he would fly into some dangerous spots. And eye drag wasn’t the last so these guys had to be a little bit outside of regulation to do the things they did, especially at eye Dragon,

Dan LeFebvre  44:55

like testing experimental parachutes.

Joshua Donohue  44:58

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Dan LeFebvre  45:02

We go back to the movie. Just before they are deployed to Vietnam, we see an address from Colonel Moore at their men, kind of a graduation, almost. That we see their significant others and loved ones watching the stands behind him. And during that we see Colonel Moore making a promise that he will be the first on the battlefield and the last to step off. No one’s going to be left behind, dead or alive. We’re all going to come home together. And the movie makes a point in showing, not only that, but kind of throughout, showing that he’s he’s doing exactly that. He is the first to step off. There’s a close up of his foot, you know, getting off the helicopter. And then at the end of the movie, not to skip too far ahead of our timeline, but near the end, we see he is the last to leave. Did Colonel Moore really make and then keep that promise that we see in the movie, he

Joshua Donohue  45:43

absolutely did. And references he talks about in the book, he was on the lead helicopters Bruce Crandall was flying, and he was the first man to step off on to LZ X ray. And one of the things that I admire most about Hal Moore is, again, I mentioned earlier, his keen awareness of history and how he closely studied leaders like Hannibal, who’s the famous general of Carthaginians, Napoleon Alexander, the great. And he often said a leader leads and set in the example is the best example. And he believed that a going in first mentality, what? And we, under those circumstances where he knew what to do and how to do it. Act on instinct. He says there was a head part of leadership that comes from being fully prepared, and there is the hard part, which extinctively, knows when to lead and how to do it. And with him, he felt that she you know, he had to do it, he had to go and lead others, because you saw how devoted his men were to him. They follow him, right, you know, right into the heat of the battle. So he had so many great qualities that any good combat leader would have. He reminds me of a dick winners type of soldier, just smart, articulate, well spoken, well versed in history, even tempered, humble. You know, he can come up with endless adjectives to describe how Moore, he was, straight and simple a guy, and he would often say there was a solution to every problem, and never quit and just keep driving on. So Moore describes, in many ways, how he attains those vital leadership qualities. At West Point, he learns he can handle pressure situations and make critical split second decisions that any good combat leader could make. And he would also describe, again, great military leaders of the past. He would ask questions like, Why did Robert E Lee lose at Gettysburg? Why did Custer fail at Little Big Horn? You know, here’s a great quote, and it’s just says, to study military history is to study leadership, and I couldn’t agree more with that. So she would often relate his experiences in the Korean War. More fought at the Battle of Pork Chop Hill. He would say, there are tigers in this world, and the US military must be ready to fight those tigers. So in Korea, more learns how to handle the stress of combat, everything he would experience at I drank the explosions, the screams of wounded and dying men, the environment, the dust, the smoke, he went 72 hours without sleep, and he was able to function. At I Dre, yeah, most of us would probably fall apart at that point. I

Dan LeFebvre  48:18

can’t do that at home, let alone on a battlefield? Yeah,

Joshua Donohue  48:21

I can barely make 24 hours, let alone 72

Dan LeFebvre  48:27

but you talked briefly. You talked about the helicopters. We kind of talked about that. Now I want to ask a little more detail around how the movie sets up their their cycle. Right when we see in the movie, the seventh Calvary sent into battle, they said, almost like a resupply chain of soldiers and equipment getting to the field. There, again, the cavalry, the movie sets up using helicopters instead of horses. But one key difference between the horse powered cavalry and the helicopter powered cavalry is that each soldier has his own horse, and with helicopters, once they’re dropped in, they’re kind of stuck until the pilots come back with more men equipment, or take the injured back. And in the movie, Colonel Moore mentions it’s a 30 minute trip by chopper, round trip from the base of the battlefield. So that means the first 60 men will be on the ground alone for half an hour until more come. And then in the movie we see there’s six helicopters taking the first group of men. I’m assuming, because of the numbers there, it’s 10 men per helicopter. They there was another scene, I think Sergeant Major Plumlee mentions that there’s 395 Battle Ready men that they have overall. So doing the math on that, little less than seven trips with six helicopters or so. And if each trip is 30 minutes, three and a half hours to get all the men to the battlefield. Rough, roughly, right? Of course, that doesn’t factor in things, other things as well. There are, yeah,

Joshua Donohue  49:46

there are two things that definitely come into factors as well. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  49:49

is that a pretty good analysis? I mean, that’s strictly from the movies. Timelines are pretty good. Yeah. And was,

Joshua Donohue  49:55

was interesting. I watched a speech that Hal Moore made. At West Point is, I think it was in 1995 around there. And you know how you see the timestamps on every you know those major events throughout the battle? Moore did that. He has these. He had pictures, aerial photographs taken of the battle while it was going on and times after. And he literally hand writes the timestamps on on the top of the polar one, the white part at the very top of the photograph. So he just was prepared minute to minute. Knew exactly what, what the timing of the lifts and throughout the film, and really throughout every major Vietnam War movie. And the one that I always guess me is the Forrest Gump scene, where it cuts from him hugging his mother, and write to Fortunate Son and the Huey flying the Shui is the workhorse of the Vietnam War, hands down. And the seventh, of course, uses it to a very high degree. So if you retrace exactly what occurred that morning, Crandall describes how when he took off, Hal Moore was with him. He patted him on the back and said, We can’t land yet. We have to go into orbit for a little bit. So he flew around play may over the airspace there for about 20 minutes. And play May was also a special forces kid that was being attacked, and this was part of that operation to, you know, to alleviate that those attacks there. So she was almost running out of fuel at this point. He was only able to get four lifts in before we had to go back and refuel the first eight aircraft. So he can only refuel four at a time. So the second eight are going to have to wait, because they’re only about 30 seconds behind him in the landing zone. So as soon as he pulls up, they’re coming right in. So he had to refuel after about four lifts, because after the fourth into the fifth one, that’s when they really started getting hit, and the in the landing zone started getting overrun by the North Vietnamese. So by the fifth one, she would have all the infantry in and more. Also talks about this, where he says, where you when they come off, and they’re shooting their guns blazing soon as they come off, those choppers, Lauren has been a firing away. That’s exactly what happens in Phil, in real life, you know. And then they stop and look around, and it’s quiet, almost eerily similar to a lot of those later Japanese home island battles. Say, Okinawa is a good example, where they lead, or Guadalcanal, where they land on the beach and there’s nothing, no resistance. They go on, and then Dan, enemy knows are there. They’re watching every move. They’re up, they’re high up and observing the enemy recon patrols. They’re getting, they’re probing. They’re getting every which way imaginable. So the first lift of eight huries, led by cradle all lift off from X ray banked in towards the base at 1120. After that first lift, the second lift lands 16 helicopters bring in the rest of Bravo Company, third platoon of Alpha Company and Captain Tony Nadal’s Alpha Company command group. So at this time, this is when they discover the deserter. The everybody says, you know, Mr. Nick, who’s actually the guy who jumps off after war with the m1 carbine, tells him there are three battalions in that mountain, about over 1600 men. And wars continued to wait for the rest of his men to arrive. And then Crandall third lift and X ray, they were getting shot, you know, by the fourth one, they were getting shot up, pretty bad. And on the fifth lift, he had to change aircraft. And another thing that Crandall says that would happen, he had to switch a couple times because the Hueys were show shot up and damaged. He would not take off until the door of his helicopter with the snake emblem on it was taken off and put onto his the next helicopter, he wouldn’t leave until it was done. So that door had to be on every single Huey helicopter that snake Crandall took off with to go to the back and forth, I found that I blew my mind when I heard that. It’s like, you know, it doesn’t, it doesn’t get any more quirky than

Dan LeFebvre  54:06

that’s gonna say, talk about superstition of some sort, right?

54:09

Exactly, exactly

Dan LeFebvre  54:12

you mentioned the deserter. And I want to ask about this thing that I was watching. I thought it might be a plot hole, so I want to, might take a little bit for me to set up. But there’s a few different scenes here, and one is with with the deserter. It’s, well, I guess even before they before they land that we did in the movie, we do see it looks like artillery clearing the landing zone before they land, and then after they land, pretty soon afterwards, there’s that deserter, or at least, need to look out, pretending to be a desert or whatever he is, but in either case, he does tell Colonel Moore where the base camp is for the NBA, about 4000 men or so. It points to a mountain, kind of cross the way, and then later on in the thick of the fight, the American soldiers are just about to be overrun by the enemy. And then Colonel Moore calls in close air supports the enemy soldiers back. We’ll talk about that part later, but we see you know. Know, jets coming in, airplanes dropping bombs, I’m assuming napalm. There’s there’s helicopters come in and everything. Why didn’t they just bomb the mountain as soon as they found out where the enemy was? We see the seventh end up waiting for snakes helicopter to clear out the base before they go in anyway. Why didn’t they just do that from the start?

Joshua Donohue  55:18

Yeah, so there are a few answers to that. The first being more himself, and he was quoted as saying he really did not have a whole lot of information about how many enemy were in the area at the time. And that’s really a running theme throughout Vietnam. The Vietnam War, in general intelligence is, you know, you have to be right there in the jungle, on the ground and begin. They’re using the Ho Chi Minh Trail they’re having, you know, they’re going into different countries to get around into South Vietnam and infiltrate. So the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong really had a fast network where they could be anywhere at any given time and send reinforcements and at a moment’s notice. So they really were everywhere and Moore’s men again, capturing the scout and telling that they want to kill Americans very badly. They just haven’t been able to find any. That did indeed happen, as the film shows, there’s actually photographs and moving footage of that very person during I drag. I drag was actually documented pretty thoroughly, and that they There’s footage of that, of that, that that Scout, uh, slash deserter. So the to take into consideration the geography the mountain itself, the chupang massive is a 2041 foot high mountain that overlooks the landing zone. It was honeycombed with tunnels linking NVA storage areas and pores, as you see throughout the film. You see that’s where their command post is, and the lieutenant colonel win, who on who’s more counterpart there is operating. And I love those scenes because it also is the film where it gives the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong a face, a human more of a human side. They fought the battle too. They lost people as well. And you see him the Americans overrunning the landing zone. And he’s saying, right then, they’re making immediate command decisions right on his map. They’re giving orders to his men, and they’re carrying them out. So to give you a sort of historic perspective on it, if you look at that particular mountain range, chupang, is actually much larger than the film suggests. The mountain range itself stretches from the western side of what’s known as the central highlands, and it’s actually divided almost straight down the middle by the border between South Vietnam and Cambodia. So the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were masters of underground warfare and booby traps, and you know, sapper is sappers and things like that, much in the same regard as the Japanese were during the Second World War. Going back to the last two years of the Pacific War, in the Pacific theater of World War Two, you see examples of how the Japanese were able to withstand heavy bombardment from the air and the sea artillery, naval guns. As the United States drew closer to the Japanese home islands, the fighting became much more intense, with American losses mounting with each passing battle. So take an example, like the Battle of Peleliu in september of 1944 the Japanese had literally dug seemingly endless network of caves and tunnels into the island’s coral rock into the mountain ranges which stretched across from the island the humor brogans, giving the Japanese a commanding view from all sides with interlocking fields of fire, the Marines suffered grievous casualties there. They lost about 2000 men, about 8000 wounded. Napalm was also being used to a considerable degree during this battle as well. So take the last two major invasions of World War Two, Iwo Jima in February of 1945 and Okinawa in April of 45 the Japanese were dug into the island, and intelligence reports were never able to accurately determine how large the garrison was on the Iwo Jima. It turned out to be 21,000 men were alive in spite of 72 straight days of bombing, 72 straight, wow, I would quit just from the noise, speaking of not

Dan LeFebvre  59:07

being able to survive, 72 hours awake, 72 hours of bombing. Yeah.

Joshua Donohue  59:11

So, and when you see those in the in reverse soldiers, where you see those scenes with the NVA, you notice that the command post is underground. This is a good representation of how this same type of warfare is still being employed by the North Vietnamese. And when we see a win who honored this map table with a complex network of tunnels around them allows them to conceal their numbers and attack with reinforcements at a moment’s notice, and any bombing attack really wouldn’t have made much sense until really the enemy couldn’t really be seen. And that runs the theme of all of Vietnam, especially in a film like flight of the intruder in 1991 where they’re bombing trees. They came and tell them what they’re bombing. And that’s really how that how that theme runs.

Dan LeFebvre  59:51

So would it be correct to assume, then, that not only were the Americans using tactics from that they learned from the Japanese and World War Two, but also. People were the Vietnamese using that to build their tunnels and like, here’s how we can get away from or be safe from these bombardments that we know the Americans are going to have.

Joshua Donohue  1:00:08

Yeah. And as I mentioned, you know, the after World War Two had ended, we were so focused on fighting world war three, this big open conventional warfare of the ancient variety, if you will. This, this great open expense. There are the Russians. Here we are. Let’s meet in the middle and blow them up and see what happens to the end.

Dan LeFebvre  1:00:24

Everybody line up and, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Joshua Donohue  1:00:27

exactly. So you know, tunnels, caves, and these, you know types of things. You can hide your numbers because they know the land, they know the trails, they know roots in and out of the mountain passes. So they can move in and out of areas at a moment’s notice. So you know, more is what more does. And one of the most impressive decisions he makes the moment those helicopters land at X ray, she immediately sends, you know, three companies right up the slope to meet the enemy, in case that sent scouts in, not even give them a chance to even come down the slopes of the chew Pong, massive Joe, they want to more immediately sends those guys right up. And that’s a great decision, saying we’re not just going to sit around and wait for guys to come in and just all commiserate and be in this one area and kind of slowly fed up. No, get to the base of that mountain, get up those slopes and attack the enemy as soon as you see it. You talked

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:20

about this briefly, but I want to kind of just talk about it on its own, being those the text on screen with the specific points, because at the climax of the movie, we see some of the most intense fighting. We see the American one of the American platoons get cut off from the main group. They get pinned down by enemy fire throughout most of the fighting. Movie shows us those times, times and dates. I think the first one is about 46 minutes into the movie after they land there that says landing zone. X ray at 10:48am, then we see the null at 1:15pm that’s when the enemy overruns the landing zone, about three minutes of movie time, and that later we see Americans blowing up the trees to form landing zone Falcon a second landing zone about five miles away. There’s a text on screen, 2:27pm, the creek bed. 3:34pm, back at the Knoll, the ridge at 2:23am, back at the creek bed at 6:09am, so it’s kind of going around. And that’s then, of course, the Broken Arrow call at an hour and 35 minutes into the movie. We’ll get to that in a moment. A moment. But all of that added together, it’s about 50 minutes of screen time in the movie to show us events from about 11am to about 6:09am, the next day. So if we’re to believe the movie’s timeline, it wasn’t even a full day before the Broken Arrow distress call indicated that they were overrun. I also know the movies also changed timelines around a lot. So is that accurate?

Joshua Donohue  1:02:41

Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, Moore does a phenomenal job with documenting every at the timeline of the battle with those Polaroid, those reconnaissance photos. I mean, he’s a meticulous, meticulous leader, and it does line up with with the with the events that I drank at Bravo Company had worked its way up the map at this point with first platoon and a man named Lieutenant Henri Herrick. He’s the guy who leads Second platoon and gets cut off Lieutenant Dennis Neil. Third platoon is in the rear. The first platoon only got about 300 yards when Sergeant Mingo squad found an enemy lookout. The unarmed youth gets off, it starts running away. And that’s something that reminded me of a great quote from the Ken Burns series where John Musgrave was led into a similar ambush guy. Two guys won out, AK 47 spray them and take off. He goes, this is as old as cluster. We know what’s going to happen. We’re going to chase after these guys, and the enemy is going to pounce right there. So Herrick goes off. He lets his commanders know he’s doing this. But you know, before he’s able to get support from the rest of the platoons and the other companies, he is surrounded. And this method, the Americans at this at this particular juncture are heavily outnumbered. At 11:20am, as we see, the next flight of helicopters arrive at the rest of Bravo Company, part of Alpha Company, the prisoner was evacuated on the helicopter, and another, another lift comes into 1210, so some of the troopers had paused to eat C rations around 1215, and the right, the fire rang out from the direction of Bravo Company. More as a great quote about the guy, the prisoner they evacuated. He says, It’s 1995 and I still have yet to find out what information that that that guy we took off the battlefield never had. He never knew at any point what happened. So first platoon was cut off. It was about 100 yards west of that dry creek bed, as we see in the battle with Henri platoon on the right, they ran headlong into an NBA attack. They were streaming down the mount. At this point, they were heavily engaged with the enemy trying to outflank them on both sides. Both sides took casualties, and the Americans were soon pinned down, and Captain Heron or. Heard Lieutenant Herrick and his platoon to basically form up with another so as they did so, Second platoon would take fire from the right. They would respond by pursuing the enemy soldiers. So he told them Be careful not to break off in the main pursuit. And as the men of first platoon watched, second moved up towards them, and then the third platoon was ordered to help the first they all came under heavy fire. And as Herrick led his second platoon down the trail, as we see in the movie, he’s the particular officer who, as we see, every guy who stands up is shot. There’s two or three guys that are just being shot. And is that the footage that the camera going away from that arrow view, he’s laying there, kind of holding his side. And is that great, the visual where you see his pupils dilate when he when he dies in the film. So this would actually lead up to the events where we see to Broken Arrow, which was at the point where Moore sees the the NVA and the vehicle running or running the landing zone, and you also see them. He’s talking to Charlie Hastings, who is the Air Force forward controller on the radio next to him. He’s the guy calling in in the air strikes, and he’s a communication with the the American intelligence command in Saigon. Those that office that you see the camera come back to those two guys revealed that one guy’s smoking pretty heavily, and they’re having those arguments. And it zooms over to the to the table, you see the American flag surrounded by all the, all the North Vietnamese ones. So yeah, that that we’ll get into the the the comings and goings of the Broken Arrow call, because it’s pretty significant there

Dan LeFebvre  1:06:41

too. Yeah, well, I mean that leads right into that. I mean, with the Broken Arrow, the way the movie sets it up, it, I think there’s even a line dialog that just straight out says that it’s a distressed call, meaning that an American news been overrun, calls in every combat aircraft for support. And then that’s when we start, I talked about it earlier. That’s when you start talking seeing like the planes dropping, the bombs, pushing the enemy soldiers back. Was in the movie, it seems like a turning point. Was that actually a turning point for the Americans?

Joshua Donohue  1:07:07

Yeah, it was because, like I said, the LZ X ray was overrun, and their enemy wandering right in amongst the perimeter of more and Plumlee and everyone at the CP behind the termite mound that you should see as they’re trying to maintain order. And he said that one see where Plumlee loads is 45 and gentlemen, barely defend yourselves. And guys are just coming in left and right on them. And in the when the Broken Arrow order is called, and they talk about this pretty, pretty in depth in the book, in the movie, what people may not realize I love the film, Flight of the intruder. When I first saw we were soldiers. Some of the cut scenes that you see of the A six intruders taking off, and the A One Sky Raiders are actually from the film. Oh, okay, yeah, so that orders were laid by more, and he’s looking around him, and Charlie Hastings says, broken arrow into the into the radio, and that would bring all of the available us and Republic of Vietnam aircraft throughout South Vietnam to assist. You know the one seven soon planes, as you hear Hastings, tell him they’ll be stacked up with 1000 foot interviews from seven to 35,000 feet, each of them waiting to drop their ordinance on the NBA. And to put that in perspective, that’s 28 pairs of aircraft conducting strikes all in one single go. That must have been a hell on earth. And the one scene that always gets me is when Crandall is flying in, and he just looks at the sea, says, damn it. And he sees just napalm, it’s smoke, and planes just going into Lz, X ray. It’s like, I gotta land in that. And to, not to forget, a scene that you also see in the film where he has those two medevac choppers with him, and he’s talking since, hey, you guys going in, it’s pretty hot down there. Not a big deal. Follow me in, and as soon as they go in, they’re getting shot up. And the helicopter behind, uh, snake gets shot and crashes. Those two meta backs fly right over this engine state. They bug right out. And the scene where the guy goes to fight him, and Crandall pulls out his revolver at him, that actually did happen. Um, he actually thought the guy was that was an enemy soldier about to cut his throat. He somehow got around and whipped out his revolver. And they had that, that exchange there. So to talk about the the scene that you what happens where and Joe Galloway talks about in the book to and you see him, he was right there to witness this whole thing as well, where you see the 2f 100 super savers, both with canisters of napalm, moving into position for their bobbing run, believing on enemy target. The lead pilot releases the first two canisters and more sees him and says, Charlie, call that son of a bitch. Off. And he screams, pull up. Pull up. And they say, That’s literally how it. Happened. He had just gotten the order that that follow up, f1 100 to pull up, and you see those two rope there. And Galloway says they were just lobbing lobby. He literally watched them explode right in front of them. And what happens to two of the soldiers? Jimmy Akiyama, who you see in the film, is consumed by the flames, and when they go into after the aftermath, when they go, when a Galloway goes to pick him up, the skin comes right off of his legs. And is that that’s just a gut wrenching scene, and that that’s exactly how that whole Broken Arrow played out.

Dan LeFebvre  1:10:38

I couldn’t, I can’t wrap my head around how the type of reflexes you would have to have for that pilot to be able to, like, to split second, like it wasn’t, I mean, it was, it’s broken arrow. So, you know, it was a call that they probably were off doing some other mission. Who knows? Right? I don’t know. Maybe you do, but those that specific pilot, and then so his, he’s got to shift gears to drop his ordinance, and then, like, split second, yeah, register what he says. I mean, I can’t, yeah, the timing.

Joshua Donohue  1:11:09

And Galloway even says in the book, if he would have released his two tanks, we would have been right in the right on top of his done. We would have it would have been completely right on right in the middle of it, so that that particular scene is riveting, but, well, what I do like about it is they did not really use a whole lot of CGI, like you see in a lot of films nowadays, that you know, that a lot of the some of the Huey scenes were CJ, but most of them Were actually shot using real helicopters that use on the cutscenes, like a totally from fly to the intruder, and the A one Skyrim is providing providing close air support the napalm explosion. And they really the special effects team I felt with the film did an exemplary job with the firearms. There’s a whole website devoted just to the firearms you just on the movie. It’s that the internet, the internet movie, firearm database, the Weaver soldiers. One is impressive. I mean, even if, if you saw a slight, you know, in the background of a scene where an NVA soldier had a specific gun, they capture it, and this is the type of gun it has. So the production team did a phenomenal job of the show. Wow.

Dan LeFebvre  1:12:22

I hope to check that out. If we head back to the movie after the turning of the tide with with that the air support coming in, the Americans push back the enemy at the original landing zone. They take it back, and then that allows the helicopters to come in and start evacuating the men. We see Sergeant Major Plumlee informed Colonel Moore that all of our men living in debt are off the field, and so then we see the last American soldier to leave the field is Colonel Hal Moore. How well did the movie do showing the way the battle ends?

Joshua Donohue  1:12:51

Well, there’s, it’s an interesting question, because it’s, it doesn’t happen the way the ending of itself with the bayonet charge. That doesn’t happen. So what you see is where they’re waiting, and then the hubies come up right the last second, as as you know, more is right over the cresting of the hill, and the guys waiting to squeeze the triggers, got them lined up in the scope, and then Crandall and the guys show up with their gunships. And that that didn’t happen that way,

Dan LeFebvre  1:13:21

Hollywood timing. I mean, it happens that’s, that’s

Joshua Donohue  1:13:23

where the Brave Heart part comes into the film.

Dan LeFebvre  1:13:26

Every movie has to have it. That’s, of course, of course, Gibson

Joshua Donohue  1:13:29

and Wallace synonymous with the film Braveheart. And that’s gotten pretty well beat up over historical accuracies over time. But, yeah, just a little bit. So what happens? What they don’t show in the film is what happens at landing zone, Albany, which is just, just situated, you know, not too long, not too far off from X ray. So Albany is, what occurs, where the garrison there is literally just about annihilated. And it’s a stark departure from the ending of the film, where you see the America just overrunning the NVA. They’re bayonetting them. Guys are trying to get a call into the phone. An American guy just you know, stabs him with his bayonet. You know, the screams so, you know, it’s the slow motion shots where the bullets are going into their foot, AK, 40 sevens are flying through the air, and the whole that’s obviously not, not the way it went down, but it’s what the success, any success, that the US forces have at I drank is the opposite of what happens at landing zone Albany. So what happens after I drank, really the main battle ceases, is that they call in A, B, 52 strike. And this is a. A major point in the bow, because the chupang massive is about to be bombed and the second Cav is now being sent in there, and they are literally wiped out, practically before they are relieved. They are cut off by a number of North Vietnamese, and they’re killed, almost to the last man, many, many wounded. So almost in the same regards, what happens to Herricks outfit when they’re cut off and they have to go in and rescue them. And Sergeant Savage is, you know, when his hand kind of raises up out of the ground, and, you know, he’s got that great quote, that’s a great it’s a good day, sorry, savage at the very end of it. So, yeah, the events of Albany are actually what emboldened the North Vietnamese. They say, You know what? Forget about what happens in I drank. Look what we did in Albany. We wiped out. It was the entire, you know, Garrison there. And they see what happens the events of Albany as the victory. They don’t see it as the Americans beat us. No, we got a victory here. We beat you guys at Albany. You guys may have won an I drank. But again, that’s a good sort of foreshadowing for the type of war that the Americans are going to get into as we start to see, you know, obviously going into 6667 6869 and on Florida from there, speaking

Dan LeFebvre  1:16:26

the type of war, and you mentioned this earlier, where Vietnam being more television and things like that, and in the movie, at the very end of the battle, there’s a helicopter that comes down just delivers a bunch of reporters. It reminded me like the end of a sports game. You see the reporters come up and interview the coaches and the players. Except this is, you know, right after the battle, they’re trying to interview Colonel Moore. Did that really happen to reporters actually show up that fast right after the yeah, oh yeah,

Joshua Donohue  1:16:49

it definitely did. They, they were helicoptered in. And you can go on YouTube and see it. There, they interview Colonel Moore right right after the battle, multiple interviews. And he says some some amazing things. He when the reporter asked him what’s going on, he says, I put a platoon over on the company on this side, but another company on this side. And he’s just dictating what he’s doing to the reporters, and you hear artillery fire in the background. And he says, we’re just clearing out enemy. The sound that you hear was part of that and and just is so matter of fact about it. It’s, it’s remarkable. I mean, think about the adrenaline that he must have been going through him. But there’s also another interview that’s even more poignant, that that’s that’s more gives, actually, the end of the interview before that, he he looks up into the camera and says, we’re looking we’re hoping to find more enemies so we could kill him. And as those exact words, the other interview is much more emotional. He talks about his losing his men and and just talking about the American fighting soldier that he has just witnessed fighting in their first major battle of Vietnam. He’s actually almost, in a way, telling the American people how hard, how proud the American soldier is fighting here in Vietnam their first major battle. And he, you can see the pride in his eyes, so much so he actually gets emotional. And he says, You’ll have to excuse me for my emotion right now. But it’s not even he that he’s, you could tell it’s anguish and pride, all wrestling inside of him. And he, you know, he just doesn’t know quite what to what to do. So two very stark interviews that he gives towards the end of the battle. But yeah, the the reporters wanted the big story at that point, Thome said that’s, that’s definitely, you know, not too far from the truth there, that he always wanted to know what happened. And again, this was a big story. And of course, Joe Galloway, being a reporter for UPI, he had a a bird’s eye view and a rifle in his hand on top of it. So, yeah, well,

Dan LeFebvre  1:19:02

you mentioned it. I want to ask about Joe Galloway. We haven’t really talked about him much throughout. You have mentioned him a few times, but Barry Pepper’s character in the movie, and he is there with the seventh Calvary. He’s done officially a part of the seventh Calvary. He’s reported there. He’s a war journalist. He puts down his gun for the camera type thing, and at the end, he and Colonel Moore have a very touching conversation about how to tell the story of what happened. And while this isn’t in the movie itself, you’ve mentioned it a few times. There is the movie is based on the book called We Were Soldiers once and young. That book is co authored by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway. Would you say that the movie did a good job portraying Galloway’s role throughout the movie? Yeah,

Joshua Donohue  1:19:40

I do. I really do. I thought Barry Pepper’s portrayal of Joe Galloway in the film was remarkable. Yes, pepper, of course, God got his major screen debut in Savior Private Ryan as the private Daniel Jackson the company sniper, and his scenes in that film are unforgettable. One of my favorite scenes from the film. Is when, when Galloway flies into I drink at night, when he first gets on the helicopter, and he sees the tracer zipping by the helicopter, when that camera zooms in on his face, and you see the intensity, almost the fear he’s wrestling. That’s such a great scene and, and it’s that glare that he hasn’t seen in Private Ryan. It’s still there, you know. So from what I understand, pepper tried to imitate Galloway, right down to smoking the same cigarettes that he smoked in Vietnam. Wore the same clothing, more the same gear, all that stuff in the 2017 Ken Burns document the Vietnam War, Galloway is interviewed extensively, and he gives some great insight to the formation of the air mobile units, and he does it. He has that real matter of fact way about him, so that real deep Texas accent that he has. So Galloway again, was right then and there at CP, what happened with Jimmy Nakayama. He actually taught some of the interactions with with Plumlee are great. And in the movie, you see it too, and you can tell that Plumlee has this disdain for Galloway, especially dropped in the middle of the seventh Calvary predicament. And it was so shocking. You can even hear yourself think in this moment, and all of a sudden, you know, reporters dropped in the middle of this thing, and you got to take care of this guy on top of everything. So he tells a great story. He was laying on the ground all of a sudden, he felt the toe of the combat boot in his ribs. Looked up and saw his plumbing looking down at him and says, sonny, you can’t take no pictures, laying down on there on the ground. And you see it in the film as well. And he actually tells quite a heartwarming story about plumbing. And you see it in the film as well, towards the end, where plumbing is walking to the wounded soldiers, you know, making sure they’re comfortable looking almost like a father figure. He says that for an hour and a half until the shooting started, until he remembers that Plumlee in the middle of Firestorm. He remembers him kneeling down, putting a poncho ladder over Galloway and treating me like he was his son, like a grandchild, almost. And and I thought that was particularly poignant, you know, because I love Sam Elliott’s betrayal of Plumlee in the film, another great actor. Oh, man, great, yeah, and Plumlee was really attached to their family. When Plumlee died, Sam Elliott was right front center at the funeral with the family. Yeah, he was right there, and Gibson was at Hal Morris funeral back in those 2017 he passed away. So Galloway wouldn’t be his first time in an active battlefield. He went to a war at 49 years old, rotting the tanks of the 24th infantry division into Iraq, into the Euphrates River Valley. And almost 50 years old, wife, kids at home, the whole nine yards, jumped right on and went with, you know, into the into the the bowels of Iraq.

Dan LeFebvre  1:22:52

Wow, wow. He’s testing the the parachutes himself almost. I’m getting the sense that, like you have to have this sense of, I mean, there’s more that parachute testing, and then you have a snake in the helicopter pilot, and Galloway, like, you just have to have this. I don’t want to, I don’t saying crazy sound is, is derogatory or negative, perhaps. But just this, this sense of, just this is what I need to do.

Joshua Donohue  1:23:16

He brought that sense of balance to the battlefield. He really did, you know, he witnessed all of these things. He had to pick up the rifle and defend himself. And he really tells the story in such a way that’s just very, just visceral, just very real, and right down to, you know, that’s the great thing about Moore and Galloway, two primary sources that brought us the this incredible account of the battle. And I thought that, you know, Randall Wallace, it translated it well to the big screen. Because, like I said, compared to those other films, you know, full metal jacket, I love that film. It’s great. It gives you the boot camp perspective, you know, for the most part, realistic coronavirus, you know, but in all those other running themes we talked about, right? You know, prostitution and sex and insubordination among the soldiers, and drug use, all these things, this focused strictly on the combat, a real event, real men who were there and I wanted to and kind of go into a story about another soldier who was under Morris command. Certainly worth mentioning. His name is Rick risco. He was a lieutenant under Morris command. Ed I drank, Commander first platoon, one of the most famous images of the battle, even the whole war. If you look at the cover of the of the Bucha soldiers, he’s on the cover that’s him with his M 16, with his bayonet took during the battle. So riskola survives the battle and later worked for corporate security. He was in the South Tower of the World Trade Center during the 911 attacks. So what. North Tower was struck, Riley grabbed the bullhorn, a walkie talkie in his phone, and he knew he actually they did a program about him called the man who predicted 911 um, he knew that something big was going to happen when the first attack happened in 93 and when he knew it, when as soon as the first plane hit the North Tower, he knew to get the people, get the people out. He was last seen on the 10th floor trying to get people out. He was killed. He cleared a bottleneck on the 44th floor of the South Tower to keep people away from elevators. He was credited with saving the lives of 2700 people from Morgan Stanley that morning, and he lost his life. Wow,

Dan LeFebvre  1:25:36

wow, yeah, wow, yeah. That’s the kind of story that should be a movie, if for another reason, then, just to put the spotlight on it, I mean, that’s that’s a story that should be told, yeah, for sure, pretty remarkable. Wow, wow. At the very end of we were soldiers, we see Mel Gibson as Mel Gibson at panel three east of the Vietnam Memorial. And we see the names of some of the men whose stories told in movies, some of the names, we haven’t really talked about all of them, but some of them we’ve mentioned here and there. There’s, you know, private Willie goldboltz mentioned there. He’s played by Ed memorial in the movie John Gogan. You mentioned him. He goes by Jack in the movies, played by Chris Klein. Also mentions, like 58,000 other names to their left and right, Brothers in Arms, right? But the movie doesn’t really do a good job. I don’t think of putting the story into the overall picture, which makes sense, because it’s telling this one story. But can you give us an over? We could do a whole show on just the Vietnam War, but could you just give an overview of the events that we see in the movie The Battle of idring? How does that fit into the overall story of the Vietnam War after

Joshua Donohue  1:26:44

this? Well, I rang is really the first true pitched battle between United States and the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong and again, as I mentioned, you know, they we had gone through an advisory phase up until that point. And as you start to see more and more Americans being killed in the advisory roles again during the Kennedy administration, Kennedy sort of torn what to do in Vietnam. He He wants to commit more troops there, and he does, and he’s being asked by the press whether he’s being transparent about what’s going on. Walter Cronkite is asking him questions all the time about Vietnam, and of course, Kennedy’s assassination, you’re always left. What would she have done? Would he have gone forward and right, right before he was killed, the president of South Vietnam, no zin Diem is actually assassinated in a coup that is staged by the administration the CIA, and it goes awry. And again, the what the American people didn’t really understand was how dire the political situation in Viet and South Vietnam was at that point, in comparison to the north, they were united. They united under the flag of communism, Ho Chi Minh general plays one. They had the goal in mind, the one goal to reunify Vietnam, no matter what the cost and the situation with the advisors, the politics being involved, there’s actually a great scene at the end. Actually, there are a number of deleted scenes for We Were Soldiers. There’s about eight of them. One of them is a scene that actually did sort of happen the way it did. Mel Gibson’s character Hal Moore, after the battle, meets with a character who plays General Westmoreland and a character who plays Secretary Robert McNamara, and they asked him about the battle, what happened? And McNamara says, Boy, oh boy. You know 400 guys again, and you guys killed 1800 to 2000 men. You know this is going to really bolster support for this war in so many words, and the two of them are trying to get a positive vibe out of Moore, and Moore grabs a diary from the ones the Vietnamese soldier who tries to kill him at X ray, and reads the parts of the diary, and you get that sense. And this was actual quote that someone posed to West to McNamara. McNamara was the student of quantum physics and analytics. He was running the Ford Motor Company. He he had all he had tried to quantify the Vietnam War with numbers, with body counts, right? So that’s was the theme of the war. And someone said to him, You’re forgetting one thing in this equation. He says, what the feelings of the Vietnamese people? And he just looked at him, didn’t really understand what he was saying. That’s what really dooms are involved in Vietnam. Things would only really get worse, obviously, from that point, I had two uncles who fought there. My uncle Mim, who was there, he drove an APC in 19 from 1968 to 1969 Mind, he lost his best friend. There was friend read over a mine was killed. Jerry Ewing, he’s on that wall. And I think what at the end of the at the end of the day, the film itself is a tribute, which I think the other films never did, that apocalypse. Thou doesn’t do that. Platoon doesn’t really do that full metal jacket. They’re singing, you know, Mickey Mouse at the end of the movie, and while everything’s in flames, right? And so you don’t really get a realistic portrayal of a battle minute by minute and in real character, real you know, based on real people, real events, you know, as you’re seeing them. But I think that Wallace, you know, obviously, you know, the end of the film with the bayonet charge aside, does a good job, for the most part, more so than a lot of the average war movies do, I would say, in terms of accuracy,

Dan LeFebvre  1:30:52

make Yeah, no, that makes sense. Since you mentioned Wallace there, he was. Randall. Wallace directed and also wrote the adaptive screenplay from the from the book. If you were in his position, you were in charge of the screenplay, directing the movie, what’s one of the biggest changes that you would make?

Joshua Donohue  1:31:08

Well, I think that in order to really give a more fair and balanced sort of a explanation to the battlefield, maybe include what happens at Albany, right? Because it doesn’t, you know, leaving it off where X ray, I mean half of the book. We Were Soldiers and young covers. What happens in Albany? You mean almost the entire second half of the book? The first half is, I drank. The second half is Albany. So maybe I would have included some of that, maybe a little bit more raw footage of what happens with the French involvement at the time. Little bit more background, a little bit more perspective there. I thought they did, you know, a pretty decent job of that, but maybe a little bit more to give the audience a better understanding of the maybe the politics involved. You know that not enough light has been shed on the beat and me side of thing. And that’s one of the things about the film ethic, is does a great job. Is that you see the the quote, unquote enemy there were, there are real people. They have families, they have lives, they have loved ones, all of that. And I think that’s one thing that, you know, we were so focused on killing, killing, killing all the time, and it’s no these guys fought hard. They fought for their country, they fought for their independence. They viewed the Americans the same way that they viewed the French. We were occupiers, and they wanted us out of there. And, you know, it sort of gets lost in the whole Cold War, you know, puzzle, right? It’s just another piece on the chessboard. You know, again, as I mentioned, that Gallup’s quote where he says, not a real place of people, or a culture or history or anything like that. So again, I think the film gives you and the viewer understands a little bit more about some of the politics involved. You know, not just the military stuff. I wouldn’t change a thing about the ground combat they did. I mean, right from the firearms that the Hueys, the Broken Arrow scene, they did just militarily, they really nailed it. I thought they really did a great job. As far as the accuracy is concerned, all that stuff. I know there’s a lot of people saying, Oh, the uniform that’s not right, and the end of the muzzle is that right, and all that stuff. But for the most part, I think they did a think they did a really good job. I think it really stacks up well in amongst the other films. I kind of did a little bit of a comparison. Not that box office numbers really make a difference in terms of the overall success or failure of a film, but some of the films that did actually better than I thought were Good Morning Vietnam, the the film with Robin Williams, that’s, I believe that’s still to this day, that one of the highest grossing Vietnam films, also the film I’m trying to think of. Remember, it was that one and born of the Fourth of July with Tom Cruise, which is about, more about, you know, some great, great scenes in their Oliver Stone movie. And does the more so the what happens to the when you’re injured. He was Ron covid, was paralyzed, was wounded. To Vietnam, and, of course, the anti war movement that was covered pretty extensively that and that that’s a very important part of Vietnam, I think a lot of people needed to see, and they talk about that quite extensively in the Ken Burns series, is they were going to the gates of the White House and throwing their combat medals over the over the fence. I mean, that’s how devoted they were to the cause. And there was that whole other side of what was happening in America, the protests, the Kent, you know, Kent State, losing the four students there, and the country was tearing itself apart. You had RFK is assassination one. Luther King’s assassination. Now, 1968 the Tet Offensive, that particular year, was the turning point of the war, and all that that happens there. So it’s it’s a foreshadowing, but it’s also a good tribute to not only the American side of the equation, but also to the to the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong because, again, they fought a hell of a war. They they they showed us, they told us a lot of lessons that that we went back afterwards and dusted ourselves off and said, Man, we can’t get ourselves involved in another war like that again. But history, history repeats itself as

Dan LeFebvre  1:35:37

as it does. As you were saying that I was reminded of something that you mentioned earlier, when you mentioned Flags of Our Fathers. And it almost sounds like what you’re saying is it would be great to almost do a companion and give Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, where Clint Eastwood did the American side and the Japanese side. It sounds like that would be a great somebody needs to do that with the Vietnam War, like the American side and the Vietnamese side to see the two.

Joshua Donohue  1:35:59

Yeah, because you know what it is. It’s just the running narrative always, you know. You talk about the American loss, 58,000, you know, 200 and and you think about, you know, no one ever thinks about the losses that were in the millions on the North Vietnamese. And, of course, the South Vietnamese suffered, you know. And no, no one more than civilians. Civilians suffered, you know, every war, civilians always suffer the most between displacement, you know, your loss of loved ones. Vietnam was that type of war where innocent people, you know, you’re trying to win the hearts and minds of the people, you burn their bomb their villages, and next minute, they’re your enemy. So that’s the type of war. It was that we couldn’t quantify the war by body counts or anything like that. But the film itself, I think, really stacks up well compared to others, compared to platoon, compared to Apocalypse Now, compared to Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill. I would say the closest movie out of all those is Hamburger Hill, in terms of the sheer violence of the film, and that you really didn’t get, you got a more realistic and even the way it was shot with with the tall grass, and they actually the soldiers who had eye drank that had reminded them a national park here in America. It wasn’t like the jungle you know, that you see in platoon and other it was there’s different parts and different geography and different climates and all different terrain. Of Vietnam was a very diverse place in terms of of the surrounding area, the environment itself, that the enemy knew much better than we certainly did.

Dan LeFebvre  1:37:34

Thank you so much for coming on the show to help us separate fact from fiction, and we were soldiers before I let you go and shift gears to World War Two. We’ve talked about Vietnam more and World War Two, kind of together, and you have a new article coming out soon about World War Two. Can you share a sneak peek so our wonderful viewing audience at home can learn more about your work? Yeah, it’s

Joshua Donohue  1:37:53

it’s actually about a little known aspect about the attack on Pearl Harbor. There’s a little marine airstrip that was located a few miles just to the west of where the main activity where the battleships were being struck along Pearl Harbor, Battleship Row and hickenfield. It’s about the Marines who fought at Eva mooring mast field was an old airstrip that was actually meant for zeppelins. This Navy added Z craft back in the 1920s and 30s, but none of this happens ever made it out to Hawaii. They all crashed by the time the station was ready, so they converted it to a marine airfield in support. There were a number of other other airfields around the island of Oahu, who’s real early. It was Kaneohe bellows and a few others, but the Marine Station at everfield was attacked by multiple waves of Japanese fighters that morning. And It delves into just the events of the attack, the through the eyes of the CEO, a man named Colonel Paul Claude Larkin, I should say. And it also delves into a bit of a mystery, bit of intrigue. There was a Marine who lost his life that morning, one of the four Marines who lost their weapon station by the hands of his own Marines. And I kind of go into the mystery of that and shed a little bit more light that hadn’t really been shed on it in previous written pieces in history. So I’m able to actually solve the mystery of it. It was one of those some type of fog of war, type of incidents that takes place there. So that should be coming out, probably by the end of the year, if not early next year. And I also have an article that I wrote in 2017 about the Battle of Wake Island that was in World War Two quarterly magazine that was out in spring 2017 fantastic.

Dan LeFebvre  1:39:38

I’ll make sure to add a link to those in the show notes. Thank you again, so much for your time, Josh thank

Joshua Donohue  1:39:42

you so much. I enjoyed it, and look forward to seeing again.