It was half a century ago, on the night of July 8, 1959, that the first two American soldiers to die in the Vietnam War were slain when guerrillas surrounded and shot up a small mess hall where half a dozen advisers were watching a movie after dinner.
MSgt. Chester Ovnand, of Copperas Cove, Texas, and Maj. Dale Buis, of Imperial Beach, Calif., would become the first two names chiseled on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial — the first of 58,261 Americans who died in Vietnam during the next 16 years.
The deaths of Ovnand and Buis went largely unnoticed at the time, simply a small beginning of what would become a huge national tragedy.
Presidents from Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson to Richard M. Nixon to Gerald R. Ford made decisions — some small and incremental, some large and disastrous — in building us so costly and tragic a war...........
"We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam." is the sequel to Joe Galloway's and Gen. Hal Moore's bestseller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young."
Moving Tribute and a Primer on Leadership
"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.”......
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