Harold Moore Jr., 94, general in bloody Vietnam War battle . By
Harrison Smith Washington Post . WASHINGTON - Harold G. Moore Jr., an
Army lieutenant general whose leadership in one of the earliest and
bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War saved scores of lives and was
memorialized in the book "We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young" and in
a film adaptation starring Mel Gibson, died Friday at his home in
Auburn, Ala. He was 94. His family said General Moore suffered a stroke
last week but did not provide additional details. General Moore's
military career spanned three wars and multiple continents, beginning
with a posting in Japan during the American oc'cup'ation after World
War II and a stint at Fort Benning, Ga., where he tested parachutes and
parachuting equipment on more than 130 test jumps. At least one jump
resulted in his being dragged along the ground by an airplane. Sporting
a bulldog face and a Southern accent acquired from a childhood in
small-town Kentucky, he developed a reputation as an exceptional combat
leader during the Korean War and in the early stages of the Vietnam War
- no more so than in the Battle of Ia Drang, the first major engagement
between American and North Vietnamese forces. The battle began Nov. 14,
1965, shortly after General Moore, then a lieutenant colonel, stepped
off a Huey helicopter and onto a football field-size clearing in South
Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley. He and the 457 men under his command were
there to track North Vietnamese Army units and search for a possible
enemy base. They soon found themselves opposed by more than 3,000 North
Vietnamese troops who had been hidden in mountainous terrain alongside
the clearing. The American forces' position, reporters and military
historians later wrote, was not unlike that of George Custer, whose
troops were surprised, surrounded, and slaughtered at the Battle of the
Little Bighorn in 1876. In the days before the attack, General Moore's
troops sometimes referred to their blond-haired commander as "Yellow
Hair" - Custer's nickname. Sizing up the situation at the clearing,
Moore set about avoiding the fate of his predecessor. Applying a "first
in, last out" approach to combat leadership, General Moore led the
initial assaults on the North Vietnamese positions himself, and
remained at the battle's front lines until his battalion was relieved
after three days of fierce, close-combat fighting. Joseph Galloway, a
reporter for the United Press International wire service who was
present for most of the battle, later said that General Moore refused
three times to leave the battle and meet with generals in Saigon. A
citation for the Distinguished Service Cross, awarded to General Moore
after the engagement, reports that "throughout the initial assault
phase, Colonel Moore repeatedly exposed himself to intense hostile fire
to insure the proper and expedient deployment of friendly troops.
According to "We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young," a nearly
blow-by-blow account of the battle that General Moore co-wrote in 1992
with Galloway, 79 Americans were killed and 121 were wounded in the
fight. An estimated 1,800 North Vietnamese were killed or wounded.
Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Crandall, who was later awarded the Medal of
Honor for delivering crucial supplies of ammunition and water to
General Moore's men, and for flying through smoke and gunfire to ferry
wounded soldiers out of the valley, said in a 2007 interview that the
battle "was hell on Earth - for a short period of time. In his book,
General Moore credited Huey helicopters, rather than his own tactical
skill, for his unit's survival on the ground. Without helicopters to
ferry out the wounded and deliver goods, his men "would certainly die
in much the same way George Armstrong Custer's cavalrymen died at the
Little Bighorn - cut off; surrounded by numerically superior forces,
overrun, and butchered to the last man. The book, which also detailed a
separate unit's subsequent, even bloodier engagement at Ia Drang,
positioned the monthlong battle at Ia Drang Valley as a pivotal moment
in the war's history, one that convinced US commander William
Westmoreland that American forces "could bleed the enemy to death over
the long haul. Vietnamese commanders, it argued, were equally convinced
that they could take on American forces, despite their technological
superiority. Widely praised by critics for its research, which included
testimonies from US soldiers whom General Moore led and from Vietnamese
commanders whom he opposed, the book was subsequently adapted to "We
Were Soldiers," directed by Randall Wallace and with Gibson starring as
General Moore. Harold Gregory Moore Jr. was born in Bardstown, Ky., on
Feb. 13, 1922. His father was an insurance agent, and his mother was a
homemaker. General Moore graduated in 1945 from the US Military Academy
at West Point, N.Y. He received a master's degree from George
Washington University in 1964 and graduated from the Naval War College
that same year. Following his service in Vietnam, General Moore
commanded an infantry division in South Korea and was stationed in the
Washington area as deputy chief of staff for personnel at the Army
Department. He retired from the military in 1977. Beginning in the
early 1990s, General Moore returned several times to the battlefield at
Ia Drang. Traveling with soldiers who served under him, he made what
was perhaps an unprecedented gesture in Vietnam: meeting in person with
North Vietnamese commanders who opposed him, and on at least one
occasion camping with them at the battlefield under the stars. He
chronicled the trips, and lessons learned, in "We Are Soldiers Still,"
which was also co-written with Galloway.
