Mel Gibson

PRICE'S FATHER was in the Army. Steve's was in the Navy, as mine had been, and we fought World War II endlessly in the woods at the end of Richard Avenue, our battles bounded by the high school grounds, the power-company dump, and the yard of a man with a very big dog. We chased the Krauts out of the winding creek bed, we routed the Nips from the tall fields of weed grass. We learned our moves from the movies-- Sands of Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal Diary. We crawled through the underbrush. We dashed--serpentine, of course, so They couldn't get a bead on us--through the open fields, scattering pheasant and grouse into headlong retreat before us. The next day, the pheasant and the grouse came back.

"It's too quiet here," somebody always said.

"Cover me," someone always replied. We remade all the movies in our heads, and then we outgrew them. We left the woods, and a developer moved in and put up a bunch of houses on the land we'd saved for democracy and suburban sprawl, the land we'd cleared, several times a week, of Krauts and Nips and pheasant and grouse.

In November of 1965, right about the time we left our personal World War II amid the skunk cabbage near the creek bed, elements of the 7th Cavalry under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore rode helicopters into the Ia Drang Valley in the central highlands of South Vietnam, a tiny corner of an obscure place in which our country seemed to be fighting a marginalized war. There, 450 American troopers were surrounded by nearly 2,000 soldiers of the North Vietnamese army. Over the next three days, fighting with uncommon courage and losing 79 men along the way, the Americans managed to win the field, as they used to say in the old dispatches from the older wars. The next day, the North Vietnamese came back, and at a landing zone three miles away, another 155 Americans died. It was the first major engagement of the Vietnam War.

There's a movie about that great battle now, and it is directed by the guy who wrote Braveheart and Pearl Harbor, and Mel Gibson is playing Colonel Moore, so people will go and see it, and they will learn about the battle in the Ia Drang Valley, many of them for the first time. We certainly didn't know much about it then, as we outgrew the World War II we'd built out of the movies in the woods at the end of the road. And we still don't know much about it now, months after the first battle of our current war, which was fought not in a dark corner of a shadowy place but in broad daylight, in the biggest city in America. That's not the way it usually goes, not here, not for us, safe behind our oceans and our illusions, where we can be so deep into our war movies that we never notice when the real war starts.

"IT'S ALL ABOUT MONEY, isn't it?" Mel Gibson asks. "War, I mean."

The face is wide and open, and it pops out of itself for emphasis, like the faces on those little rubber dolls do when you squeeze them at the midsection. His eyes open and gleam, and he uses them to underline his points the way some people might use their hands. There are some lines in the face now, more than twenty years after he came out of Australia, after his family had moved from Peekskill, New York, of all places. There's also an accent that floats around his vowels a bit, but it is more the kind of rolling king-of-the-world confidence that really marks him as an Aussie.

And here in Philadelphia, working on M. Night Shyamalan's next film, Gibson is bouncing around a booth in the hotel bar, talking about We Were Soldiers, the movie in which he plays Colonel Hal Moore, a major new war movie coming out in the middle of a vague and uncertain new real war, and he's talking about war in a way that in 1918 would've had him clapped in irons next to Eugene V. Debs. It is an attitude in line with some of his best early work-with The Year of Living Dangerously, in which Gibson played a journalist caught up in the big-power machinations of an Indonesian coup, and especially with Gallipoli, in which his character is thrown as cannon fodder with thousands of other Australians into a suicidal mess in Turkey that may have been the British Empire's karmic reward for having made such a fuss out of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

"Power is better because with power, you don't need money. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," he continues, moving into what, it is noted, could be the first chapter of Henry Kissinger's How to Pick Up Girls.

"Yeah, Kissinger," he says. "Got to have been plenty of power there, right?"

The eyes get really wide then so you get the joke, and it is a faintly subversive joke now that Great Men are fashionable again, now that We, the People have been transmogrified by the assault of theocratic fascism from abroad into We, the Herd.

Of course, this film will be seen as being of a piece with Braveheart and The Patriot, particularly by those people looking for sports-bar jingoism in a suddenly rich environment for it. Nevertheless, there's an element to this movie that unsettles the current context. Once the story leaves the United States, the flag-waving stops and there is precious little triumphalism left. It becomes simply a war movie about war, and everything in it is about unraveling.

And, unlike the two previous films, Gibson does not play the local revolutionary guerrilla hero. In fact, he plays the representative of the distant imperial power, a twist that makes this a curious film--heroic in many of the ways in which the old World War II movies were, but suffused with a melancholy ambivalence about the wisdom of the whole enterprise that makes its battle scenes more interesting and emotionally resonant than anything produced by the Spielberg-Brokaw-Hanks combine.

And, unlike any other Vietnam movie you can mention, the North Vietnamese are presented neither as jabbering subprimates (The Deer Hunter) nor as faceless incoming ammunition (Apocalypse Now). They are presented as formidable professional soldiers: dedicated, gifted, and as capable of ruthless self-sacrifice as Moore's troopers are. The North Vietnamese in this movie do not embody American frustration. They are not the vicarious golems of American failure. They serve no purpose in this movie but their own.

"They had a grievance. I mean, what would you do if somebody came into your country?" Gibson says. "No matter what you think about that whole conflict-and I don't necessarily think it was a just cause. I thought it was a political game and a moneymaker, pure and simple. That doesn't change the fact that it had to be dealt with by someone, and these Americans were ordinary people." There are nothing but ordinary people until something extraordinary happens. Someone tries to kill them, say, or tries to kill their friends, and then there are no ordinary people anymore.

Joseph Galloway entered the Ia Drang with the 7th Cavalry as a correspondent. Twenty-eight years later, in 1993, he and Colonel Moore wrote We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young, the lucid, simple book out of which comes Gibson's new movie. Galloway resists any attempt to dragoon his account into the service of anything save what he saw and experienced those three days in the valley. "To tell you the truth," he says, "this might be the best antiwar movie you'll ever see."

"I DON'T CARE WHETHER the movie gets heat or not!" Hal Moore roars.

A mistake has been made here. It has been suggested to Moore that the film may draw some criticism because of what some will interpret as its overly respectful treatment of the North Vietnamese soldiers. It is entirely possible that Moore's response is taking the curl out of the telephone cord. Gibson had cautioned me about this. "There's a quality about Hal," he'd said. "He's kind of got this light about him. He's about eighty, and he'll take your arm out of the socket when he shakes your hand."

"I don't care! Do you hear met" Moore continues. "This was a tough enemy, well-trained, disciplined. I had great respect for them."

Moore and Galloway hung on to their book for eight years, turning down several movie proposals. "We were driven crazy by the quality of the proposals," says Galloway. "So we just said the hell with it. We fired our agent and took the property off the market." Finally, they were approached by Randall Wallace, whose Braveheart script Gibson had just finished filming. "We asked him one question," Galloway recalls. "Did he believe in heroes? He said he did. We said, Well, maybe we can talk a little more, then."

To be sure, there is some ghastly treacle at the beginning of this movie--an angelic tot asks Gibson, "Daddy, what is a war?" and an African-American woman, the wife of one of the soldiers, gives a steely-eyed lecture on self-respect that pretty much dismisses the whole civil-rights movement-but once the action moves into the two embattled LZ's, the politics drop away as far as politics can in any movie about Vietnam, and that's what frees Wallace to give the enemy the due that Moore feels they are owed, thereby honoring the courage of the American soldiers into the bargain.

"For me," Wallace says, "the way to get the story out was to convey the heroism of the American soldier. You cannot do that by implying that the people they fought against were suicidal fanatics or savages."

Moore's soldiers are not automatons, either. They are free-thinking individuals, able to concoct strategy on the spot and under fire. This even extends to Galloway, the correspondent, vividly portrayed, in the movie's best performance, by Barry Pepper, who ends up picking up a rifle himself. There is a creative intelligence to the soldiers here that is rare in the history of war movies. Too often, the infantrymen are portrayed as a platoon of ethnic grunts whipped into a single mind by whoever was the star contract player that week, as faceless in their own way as Coppola's North Vietnamese were in the great night battle along the riverbank. But here, there is a sense that Moore's men trust him, not because he's in charge, but because he trusts them. In a war tangled thick with lies from its beginning, Moore tells his soldiers everything they need to know to survive, and then he trusts them to act correctly on the information.

"One of our main goals," Hal Moore says, "was to show that in any battle anywhere, men fight and die primarily for each other."

THE BEST SCENE in the movie is the last one. Night is falling over the battlefield. The Americans have captured the field. They have won the day, and one of them has left behind a tiny American flag, stuck in the stump of a shattered tree. But it is almost night now, the Americans are gone, and the North Vietnamese are back, hundreds of them, drifting down through the darkening valley, fading out of sight, everywhere and nowhere at once. An NVA officer plucks the flag out of the stump, ponders it for a moment, and then replaces it. It is not a gesture of contempt. It is more heartbreaking than that. It honors the heroism of the Americans in a way that emphasizes how little that heroism will have to do with the outcome of the war.

"The guy says, Yeah, okay, have your tree stump," Gibson says. "It doesn't matter. Now it's going to take longer, but we'll win."

Are we, our nation, in a similar position now? Winning the days only to lose the nights? Does it matter how many flags we plant, and where, if the enemy is everywhere and nowhere at once, as we are put on high alert and then told to go to the mall? After all, it was only about eight blocks from this little booth in the hotel pub in which Mel Gibson is now lighting his fifth cigarette of the hour where, in 1776, a group of men first asked the only question ever worth asking about America.

Do we govern, or are we governed? In dangerous times, are we--We, the People, as it were-subject or object in the national syntax?

It was later asked by Dred Scott. It was disputed energetically at Cold Harbor and Gettysburg, in Little Rock and on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It even popped up briefly in Florida, during the extended exercises after the 2000 presidential election, until it became such a nuisance that the cool kids in Washington stopped asking it. It was the question over which the Vietnam War broke the homefront-when we were governed into complicity in a murderous enterprise by men who didn't trust us to govern ourselves.

And it is the primary question today, snapping and illuminating the context into which Mel Gibson will launch his latest war movie. A war in which we are not merely bystanders but combatants, targets of opportunity, ordinary people to whom something extraordinary happened, the way it did to Joe Galloway in the Ia Drang. After all, on September 11, American citizens--We, the People--sustained more than ten times as many casualties as Hal Moore and his fellow commanders did, and almost three thousand more than did the combined armed forces of the United States during the entire Spanish-American War. It is entirely possible that a war movie about a distant war--any distant war-will seem as remote today as Ivanhoe did in the 1950s.

The ground is still smoking here. We are at war, all of us. We are fighting on internal terrain-both within our country and within ourselves, in the dark, authoritarian side of our national character that tells us we are targets and we should leave the fighting of our war to the other people, to the Great Men, now fashionable once again. (Rummy, what is a war?) They will keep us safe, the economic, political, and emotional profiteers who seem to know that terrain better than we know it within ourselves. Be governed, they say. The enemy is evil and you are good. Leave to us the right to decide what fundamental intelligence gets out there to you, the troops in the field.

That's not good enough. We are combatants, not merely targets. We have sustained casualties. We are told that we might sustain more. We are told to leave the war-the entire war, even the part here at home, even the part within ourselves--to the experts. Wave the flag, we are told. Shop. Go to the movies.

We are asked to be automatons in a way that never would have occurred to Hal Moore, who trusted the training and initiative of his soldiers because his soldiers had been raised as free men, and who didn't want automatons because automatons are timid things, afraid always because they know they're not really alive. No, it's hardly good enough now. Our leaders tell us, under fire, not to trust the weapons we have to fight the war, to govern ourselves. They want us to watch the war in which we're fighting, to be spectator and combatant, like the picnic crowds that fled at Bull Run, to be Gary Cooper and Sergeant York.

Do we govern, or are we governed?

That is the terrain-"the ground," as the old soldiers said--onto which Mel Gibson releases his new film. We are all guerrillas now, fighting in the deep shadows of who we are, as individuals and as a people. And when we capture the field and win the day, when we plant the flag in the noonday sun, what happens when night falls? What moves, everywhere and nowhere, across the darkening face of the valley that we thought we'd won?