Reviews 

We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam. Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore, USA Ret., and Joseph L. Galloway. HarperCollins Publishers. 272 pages; maps; photographs; index; $24.95.

By Col. Cole C. Kingseed
U.S. Army retired

Literary sequels seldom live up to their advance billing and reader expectation, but We Are Soldiers Still by Lt. Gen. Harold (Hal) Moore, U.S. Army retired, and Joe Galloway is a notable exception. In writing a sequel to their New York Times best seller, We Were Soldiers Once … and Young, the authors address a new generation of warriors because “there is no such thing as closure for soldiers who have survived a war.” For Moore and Galloway, the survivors have “an obligation, a sacred duty, to remember those who fell in battle beside them and to bear witness to the insanity that is war.”

As with their previous work, Moore narrates this current volume, in which he shares the principles and the maxims that shaped his life. The result is a primer on leadership that ought to be on every mandatory reading list of the American soldier. Bookstores are filled with rows of books on leadership and management, but We Are Soldiers Still stands above the rest. Words like riveting and compelling hardly do the book justice.

Dating back to 1990, Moore and Galloway visited Vietnam a half-dozen times, the last being Galloway’s visit in 2005. Following the commercial success of their first book, they were permitted to return to the Ia Drang Valley in the fall of 1993, where a total of 305 Americans had died and more than 400 others were wounded in a series of bitter battles in November 1965. North Vietnamese casualties were estimated between 3,000 and 5,000 killed and wounded. Public reaction to the twin battles in the Ia Drang Valley literally altered the course of the Vietnam War.

Why return to the scene of such devastation and death? According to Moore, the reason was simply to “mute [the] cries, even if [the survivors] were the only ones who could still hear them after so many years.” On their third trip back to Vietnam and in the company of an ABC television news team and Moore’s Vietnamese adversaries, former enemies found a common ground of understanding known only to soldiers who experienced combat.

After walking Landing Zone X-Ray one last time, Moore and his party were stranded for an additional night by a freak storm. For Moore it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, an opportunity to pay his final respects to his fallen soldiers and comrades “forever young as we grow old.” Thus Moore maintained a silent vigil over the place the Vietnamese called the Forest of Screaming Souls. Recalling the sacrifice of so many fine young men, Moore and his party eventually departed, convinced that all who had died there were finally at peace.

What makes We Are Soldiers Still such intriguing reading is Moore’s ability to touch the heart of the American soldier. Then, as now, the NCO Corps remains the backbone of the Army, and Moore pays tribute to his own sergeant major, Basil Plumley, a true “lion in winter” who “marched steadfastly through life adhering to … the rules and discipline of the Old Army and his own sense of duty.” Moore describes Plumley as the most remarkable and memorable sergeant of a lifetime, the essence of an airborne trooper.

Moore’s reflections on leadership alone make this book worth its purchase price. In Moore’s opinion, good leadership revolves around the twin pillars of solid character and sound judgment. Moore opines that leadership is an art, while management is a science. In his final lecture at the U.S. Military Academy in 2005, 60 years after his own graduation, one of the Army’s most distinguished warriors emphasized that leadership requires that leaders care deeply about those entrusted to their care. Without love of soldiers, leadership is doomed to failure. According to Moore, of all the tenets of leadership, the greatest is love. Hate war, but love the warrior.

Nor is leadership restricted to the battlefield. Perhaps the most moving chapter in We Are Soldiers Still revolves around the lives of two American heroes: former Lt. Cyril (Rick) Rescorla and Julia (Julie) Compton Moore. Rescorla’s photograph graced the cover of Moore and Galloway’s best seller. Decades later, Rescorla served as chief of security for Morgan Stanley during the tragedy of September 11, 2001. After safely evacuating the vast majority of Morgan Stanley’s personnel from the South Tower of the World Trade Center, Rescorla returned to assist others before the building collapsed. His remains were never identified.

The daughter of an Army colonel and wife of Hal Moore, Julie Moore’s life began and ended with the U.S. Army. Long before family support groups became the norm in the Army, Julie Moore shouldered the difficult burden of comforting grieving wives and children who recently lost their husbands and fathers in combat. Upon receiving the news that so many American soldiers had fallen in the Ia Drang Valley in the fall of 1965, she followed Yellow Cabs around a small Southern Army town in western Georgia to deliver the news in person. In the process, Julie Moore inspired us all and bequeathed a legacy of quiet heroism to future generations.

If this reviewer could recommend a single book for leaders at all levels to read and reflect upon, it would be We Are Soldiers Still. Coupled with We Were Soldiers Once … and Young, Moore and Galloway’s latest volume is a moving tribute to the American soldier.

COL. COLE C. KINGSEED, USA Ret., Ph.D., a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is a writer and consultant.

Plainspoken Pundits 

Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power. Thomas Donnelly and Frederick W. Kagan. AEI Press. 164 pages; index; $20.

By James Jay Carafano

When T.R. Fehrenbach famously penned, “You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud,” he was writing about another time, another war and another part of the world, Korea. As far as Thomas Donnelly and Frederick Kagan, two veteran Washington defense analysts at the American Enterprise Institute, are concerned, the line still sticks today.

The truth in Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power is that America must have ground forces second to none; without an immediate change in policy, however, that is not going to happen. The pressures of the Long War and a long record of post-Cold War neglect are turning the U.S. military into a hollow force. The answer the authors offer is a bigger budget. The costs are high, about $240 billion. The consequences of failing to invest, they argue, are even costlier. They are probably right.

Ground Truth makes the case for paying more attention to ground forces. In concise, jargon-free and fast-paced chapters Donnelly and Kagan ask sensible questions and offer common-sense answers. Why are we in trouble? Why do we need a better military? What kind of future wars will we fight? What kind of military do we need? How much will it cost? The answers are revealing. America took a post-Cold War peace dividend that left the Army and Marine Corps too small for the terrors of the post-Cold War world. Donnelly and Kagan provide a fair and sober assessment of the current state of play—the state and nonstate threats that more than make the case for military preparedness. In the most convincing section of the book, the authors point out the folly of trying to predict the precise nature of the next conflict and use fortune-telling as an excuse to scrimp on force structure. Not surprisingly, they opt for a capabilities-based force that can effectively conduct a range of missions, from rooting out insurgents to battling conventional battalions. Ground Truth concludes it will take 10 years to build a ground force of about two million active and reserve soldiers and marines.

Of all the future plans being touted for the military beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, Donnelly and Kagan unquestionably offer one of the most ambitious. The precise blueprint they offer can and should be debated, but their defense of landpower in the 21st century is impossible to ignore.

The taproot of Ground Truth is a series of case studies in contemporary military history that illustrate why Fehrenbach’s dictum is as true as ever. These include an engrossing study of the operations of Col. H.R. McMaster’s Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar in 2005, which describes how well-led conventional forces adapted to unconventional warfare. Other studies include an analysis of the invasion of Iraq, post-conflict combat in the Sunni Triangle, Israel’s recent war with Hezbollah and support of antiterrorism operations against Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines.

Having made their case for landpower, Donnelly and Kagan counter fiscal naysayers that while much more baseline defense spending seems like a good deal of money, “in the context of the overall U.S. economy, the sticker shock diminishes. The United States will produce about $14 trillion worth of goods and services in 2008.” Even their robust bill for defense spending requires only about a single percentage point of GDP to conduct the government’s most fundamental responsibility—providing for the common defense.

Concerning defense spending, Ground Truth is on solid ground. America is in for a long war—it should be prepared to pay for it. The good news is that compared to the last long war, the Cold War, the relative burden is more than bearable. What Ground Truth does not dwell on is all the needs of the other services—which are significant as well. This makes the issue of adequate defense spending even more pressing. The greatest military disaster would be insufficient defense budgets that force the services to squabble over scraps. That is a military hardly worth having.