Soldiers don’t die for their country; they die for their government. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:
I was watching the 2002 war movie We Were Soldiers a couple of nights ago. I’ve seen it before but it’s such a great movie that I periodically re-watch it. It stars Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Greg Kinnear, Sam Elliott, Keri Russell, and others.
The movie is based on a true story. It dramatizes the Battle of la Drang in Vietnam, which was the first major battle between U.S. military forces and North Vietnamese forces. The battle took place in November 1965, two years after President Kennedy was assassinated and a year after Lyndon Johnson was elected president in November 1964.
Gibson plays U.S. Army Lt. Col. Hal Moore, who was ordered to lead his 400-man battalion in an attack on a North Vietnamese force that had recently attacked an American military base in Vietnam. U.S. military intelligence had no idea how large the enemy force was. After Air Calvalry helicopters deposited Moore’s troops into the la Drang Valley, a captured enemy scout informed them that they were facing a veteran North Vietnamese division of 4,000 men.
