Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth, And start so often when thou sit'st alone? Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks And given my treasures and my rights of thee To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy? I'm currently finishing my dissertation on the sequela of combat trauma in male and female veterans, and I open my dissertation with a quote from Shakespeare's Henry IV, believed to have been written in 1597 (mods, I apologize if that's not the right time period for this question).
I'm a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology specializing in PTSD with combat veterans. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.Finally something I may be able to answer. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Įxcerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. Moore Excerpted by permission.Īll rights reserved. That is one kind of love.Įxcerpted from We Were Soldiers Once.and Youngīy Harold G. Johnson, ordered us to go, but more importantly because we saw it as our duty to go. We went to war because our country asked us to go, because our new President, Lyndon B. Just before we shipped out to Vietnam the Army handed us the colors of the historic 1st Cavalry Division and we all proudly sewed on the big yellow-and-black shoulder patches with the horsehead silhouette. We were members of an elite, experimental combat division trained in the new art of airmobile warfare at the behest of President John F. We were draftees, most of us, but we were proud of the opportunity to serve that country just as our fathers had served in World War II and our older brothers in Korea. We were the children of the 1950s and we went where we were sent because we loved our country. This is about what we did, what we saw, what we suffered in a thirty-four-day campaign in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in November 1965, when we were young and confident and patriotic and our countrymen knew little and cared less about our sacrifices.Īnother war story, you say? Not exactly, for on the more important levels this is a love story, told in our own words and by our own actions. In the Ia Drang, both sides claimed victory and both sides drew lessons, some of them dangerously deceptive, which echoed and resonated throughout the decade of bloody fighting and bitter sacrifice that was to come.
The Ia Drang campaign was to the Vietnam War what the terrible Spanish Civil War of the 1930s was to World War II: a dress rehearsal the place where new tactics, techniques, and weapons were tested, perfected, and validated. So this story is about the smaller, more tightly focused "we" of that sentence: the first American combat troops, who boarded World War II-era troopships, sailed to that little-known place, and fought the first major battle of a conflict that would drag on for ten long years and come as near to destroying America as it did to destroying Vietnam. In the broad, traditional sense, that "we" who went to war was all of us, all Americans, though in truth at that time the larger majority had little knowledge of, less interest in, and no great concern with what was beginning so far away. It was the year America decided to directly intervene in the Byzantine affairs of obscure and distant Vietnam.
We felt it then, in the many ways our lives changed so suddenly, so dramatically, and looking back on it from a quarter-century gone we are left in no doubt. The time was 1965, a different kind of year, a watershed year when one era was ending in America and another was beginning. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, Act II, Scene 3 In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'dĪnd heard thee murmur tales of iron wars.
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