We Were Soldiers Once... and Young Quotes

“No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“From that visit I took away one lesson: Death is the price you pay for underestimating this tenacious enemy.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“In the American Civil War it was a matter of principle that a good officer rode his horse as little as possible. There were sound reasons for this. If you are riding and your soldiers are marching, how can you judge how tired they are, how thirsty, how heavy their packs weigh on their shoulders? I applied the same philosophy in Vietnam, where every battalion commander had his own command-and-control helicopter. Some commanders used their helicopter as their personal mount. I never believed in that. You had to get on the ground with your troops to see and hear what was happening. You have to soak up firsthand information for your instincts to operate accurately. Besides, it’s too easy to be crisp, cool, and detached at 1, 500 feet; too easy to demand the impossible of your troops; too easy to make mistakes that are fatal only to those souls far below in the mud, the blood, and the confusion.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“The most precious commodity with which the Army deals is the individual soldier who is the heart and soul of our combat forces.       —GENERAL J. LAWTON”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“You cannot choose your battlefield, God does that for you; But you can plant a standard Where a standard never flew. —STEPHEN CRANE, “The Colors”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“We discovered in that depressing, hellish place, where death was our constant companion, that we loved each other. We killed for each other, we died for each other, and we wept for each other. And in time we came to love each other as brothers. In battle our world shrank to the man on our left and the man on our right and the enemy all around. We held each other’s lives in our hands and we learned to share our fears, our hopes, our dreams as readily as we shared what little else good came our way.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Fear comes, and once you recognize it and accept it, it passes just as fast as it comes, and you don’t really think about it anymore. You just do what you have to do, but you learn the real meaning of fear and life and death.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Oh, my dear. My young wife. When the troops come home after the victory, and you do not see me, please look at the proud colors. You will see me there, and you will feel warm under the shadow of the bamboo tree.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Their orders were to draw the newly arrived Americans into battle and search for the flaws in their thinking that would allow a Third World army of peasant soldiers who traveled by foot and fought at the distant end of a two-month-long supply line of porters not only to survive and persevere, but ultimately to prevail in the war—which was, for them, entering a new phase.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“A commander in battle has three means of influencing the action: Fire support, now pouring down in torrents; his personal presence on the battlefield; and the use of his reserve.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Many of our countrymen came to hate the war we fought. Those who hated it the most—the professionally sensitive—were not, in the end, sensitive enough to differentiate between the war and the soldiers who had been ordered to fight it. They hated us as well, and we went to ground in the cross fire, as we had learned in the jungles.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“We discovered in that depressing, hellish place, where death was our constant companion, that we loved each other. We killed for each other, we died for each other, and we wept for each other. And in time we came to love each other as brothers.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Nothing was wrong, except that nothing was wrong.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“I can't promise you that I will bring you all home alive. But this I swear, before you and before Almighty God, that when we go into battle, I will be the first to set foot on the field, and I will be the last to step off, and I will leave no one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come home together. So help me, God.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once... and Young: Ia Drang - The Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam

“It was the final act of a North Vietnamese soldier who was killed. Before he died he took a hand grenade and held it against the stock of his weapon. Then he had gotten on his knees and bent over double. If anybody tried to get his weapon they were going to activate that hand grenade. When I saw the dedication of those two Vietnamese with their hand grenades, I said to myself: We are up against an enemy who is going to make this a very long year.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“You had to get on the ground with your troops to see and hear what was happening. You have to soak up firsthand information for your instincts to operate accurately. Besides, it’s too easy to be crisp, cool, and detached at 1, 500 feet; too easy to demand the impossible of your troops; too easy to make mistakes that are fatal only to those souls far below in the mud, the blood, and the confusion.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother. —SHAKESPEARE, Henry V, Act IV, Scene 3”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Only first-place trophies will be displayed, accepted, or presented in this battalion. Second place in our line of work is defeat of the unit on the battlefield, and death for the individual in combat. No fat troops or officers. Decision-making will be decentralized: Push the power down. It pays off in wartime. Loyalty flows down as well. I check up on everything. I am available day or night to talk with any officer of this battalion. Finally, the sergeant major works only for me and takes orders only from me. He is my right-hand man.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“A quarter-century later, General Norm Schwarzkopf would date the birth of his famous hot temper to those days, when he begged and pleaded on the radio for someone to evacuate his wounded South Vietnamese soldiers, while American helicopters fluttered by without stopping.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“In the American Civil War it was a matter of principle that a good officer rode his horse as little as possible. There were sound reasons for this. If you are riding and your soldiers are marching, how can you judge how tired they are, how thirsty, how heavy their packs weigh on their shoulders?”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Driver had his own rules of war, and he tried to teach them to me. You know, when you clean a weapon the first rule is always clear the chamber. Not Driver. His first rule was always check to make sure it’s your weapon, so you don’t end up cleaning somebody else’s weapon.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger. —FRANÇOIS, DUE DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Maximes, 1665”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Ernie Savage rose to fire on three enemy soldiers only a few feet away only to find that his rifle was empty. Savage says: “I didn’t know what to do, so I just said ‘Hi’ and smiled. All three looked at me in confusion, but by then I had slipped in a fresh magazine and sprayed them.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“We went to war because our country asked us to go, because our new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, ordered us to go, but more importantly because we saw it as our duty to go. That is one kind of love.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“We were the children of the 1950s and John F. Kennedy’s young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship” in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John F. Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with our white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Those who hated it the most—the professionally sensitive—were not, in the end, sensitive enough to differentiate between the war and the soldiers who had been ordered to fight it.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. —WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Then it came across the radio: Bravo Company had found one other survivor from our 2nd Platoon. He had been badly wounded in the legs and had propped himself up against a tree. He had been burned by napalm, waiting in the night, and some North Vietnamese had put a pistol to his eye and pulled the trigger. Shot him in the eye, blinded him, but he was still alive! I saw him being brought in on a stretcher, smoking a cigarette, all fucked up.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“James A. Mullartey from our 1st Platoon made it back to our lines. His story: The NVA had been shooting our wounded. One came up to him, stuck a pistol in his mouth, and fired. The bullet exited the back of his throat, knocked him out and they left him for dead. He survived and when he woke up at night he started crawling to us.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“There are only three principles of warfare: Audacity, Audacity, and AUDACITY!”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam