In an era of contentious political division among neighbors and friends, there are factions, including former mortal enemies, who remind us that making peace in the wake of far worse circumstances is both possible and necessary.

Our Patriot Post publishing offices are near the nation’s first National Military Park, the Chickamauga and Chattanooga NMP. It is the site of the second-bloodiest battle of the War Between the States, the first being Gettysburg. Notably, Chattanooga is also the birthplace of the Medal of Honor for actions 16 months before the Battle of Chickamauga.

Officially founded by an act of Congress in 1890, five years later, Chickamauga National Military Park was the site of a great reunion and picnic between former Confederate and Yankee combatants. Veterans came in large numbers for the formal park dedication as an act of healing from the bloodiest and most costly war in American history.

For context regarding that reconciliation, more than 655,000 combat and related disease deaths occurred between 1861 and 1865, totaling more than 2% of the 31 million Americans at that time. That was 50% higher than the total losses in our nation’s second-most-costly conflict, World War II, 80 years later. The 405,000 WWII casualties represented about 0.3% of the 140 million Americans in 1945, so the War Between the States casualties as a percentage of the population were seven times higher.

I note this data distinction to make the point that the reconciliation burden Veterans carried to the great reunion at Chickamauga in 1895 was very heavy.

In the last decade, I have had the humbling privilege of being a witness to individual reconciliation between friends and their former combatants, including the return of MG Bill Raines (USA) and LtCol Bill Gauntt (USAF-POW) to find the latter’s crash site in Vietnam. My friend, Vietnam Vet Roger Helle (USMC), has returned many times to his former battleground where he was a breath from death, in order to provide medical care for and ministry to outcast orphans.

A few months ago, a distinguished military officer and colleague, GEN B.B. Bell (USA, Ret.), made a trip to Fort Benning, Georgia, now renamed Fort Moore, where he had earned his Ranger Tab in 1969. B.B., a former tanker, was the recipient of the MG Adna Chaffee Award, the highest honor for Armor and Cavalry Soldiers, becoming a “Legend of Armor.” The first recipient was GEN George Patton.

The segue here concerns the renaming of Ft. Benning to Ft. Moore and its namesake, LTG Harold “Hal” Moore, whose heroic service is epic. Two decades ago when B.B. was a LTG, he and then-retired LTG Moore became good friends, and remained so until Moore’s passing.

For the record, I equate the “political correction” of historic military installation names by the Biden/Harris regime with “historic cleansing,” such as tearing down statues. For many Army Rangers, Ft. Benning will always remain just that.

But, unlike some other relabeled military installations, Ft. Benning’s renaming to Ft. Moore was for a fitting exemplar.

Hal Moore was a Kentucky native from a big family who graduated from West Point in 1945. He joked, “I graduated at the top … of the bottom 15% of my class.” His first assignment was the completion of the Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning. He completed the Infantry Officer’s Advanced Course at Benning, and then-Captain Moore was deployed for his first combat assignment with the 17th Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division in Korea. It was there that he witnessed the human waves of the Chinese Red Army regulars, a disastrous tactic that resulted in enormous human losses as those lines surged through fields of artillery and machine-gun fire.

After Korea, he attended the Naval War College and also earned a master’s degree in International Relations from George Washington University. Then LTC Moore returned to Benning, where he commanded 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry, later to become a part of 11th Air Assault Division.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) announced that he was sending “the Airmobile Division to Vietnam,” the first major deployment. Moore’s Battalion was re-designated 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division. The “airmobile cavalry” helicopter combat role was new and untested.

Moore is most remembered for his Battalion command during the week-long Battle of Ia Drang in 1965, the first major Vietnam battle between the U.S. Army and the NVA. Commencing on November 14, Moore’s Battalion was ordered to take on an air assault in the Ia Drang Valley, and at about noon that day, the North Vietnamese 33rd Regiment attacked their position. The fighting continued all day and into the days and nights that followed.

“I’ll always be the first person on the battlefield,” Moore said. “My boots will be the first boots on it, and I’ll be the last person off. I’ll never leave a body.”

And so it was.

Surrounded by enemy forces soon after the battle commenced, it was Moore’s motto that “there is always one more thing you can do to increase your odds of success,” and ultimately, he and his extraordinary command would persevere through heavy losses. There were 305 Americans, along with an estimated 2,000 North Vietnamese troops, killed in that battle. There were three recipients of the Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism exhibited during the Battle of Ia Drang: Flight Commander MAJ Bruce Crandall, Flight Leader Ed Freeman, and Platoon Leader Joe Marm.

(Notably, Chattanooga native and Medal of Honor recipient CAPT Larry Taylor received that award for his actions as an air Cavalry Cobra pilot three years after the Battle of Ia Drang.)

The heroic actions of Moore’s men are memorialized in his 1992 book, We Were Soldiers Once … and Young, subsequently made into an outstanding film by the same name in 2002. GEN Norman Schwarzkopf said it was “military history, written the way military history should be written.” I have also heard first hand accounts from my friend, then-2LT Bud Alley, who says of Moore’s personal recollection of the battle, “This stern, stoic man, a man of men, teared up when talking about the heroism of his Soldiers.”

Moore and coauthor Joseph Galloway followed their first book with, We Are Soldiers Still; A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam, published in 2008.

That book recounts his 1993 return to Vietnam and the battlefield of Ia Drang. It “tells the story of that journey across the years and miles and a long night spent stranded on a battlefield known as Landing Zone XRay, amid Khmer Rouge guerrillas from nearby Cambodia, tigers and the spirits of those who had fallen there in desperate hand-to-hand fighting in that long-ago November.”

It was a return for in large measure, for reconciliation between Hal Moore and his once-mortal enemy, Nguyen Huu An, former communist commander of the North Vietnamese Army’s 325th Division and general of the brutal NVA.

In Vietnam, Hal met with his former adversaries and traveled to those fields of battle where they confronted each other four decades earlier. Once there, he gathered his U.S. Army friends and “invited all to form a circle with arms extended around each other’s shoulders and we bowed our heads.” He said, “With prayer and tears, we openly shared our painful memories.”

He notes of his transit to Ia Drang: “Our traveling companions on the journey were three of the North Vietnamese officers who had done their best to kill us all — Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, the enemy battlefield commander; and Colonels Vu Dinh Thuoc and Tran Minh Hao, who had fought there as lieutenants. … This led to some remarkable exchanges.”

“At one point,” he writes, “my seatmate on the bus, Colonel Thuoc, tapped me on the chest and told me through the interpreter: ‘You have the heart of a soldier. It is just like mine. I am glad I did not kill you.’ Stunned, all I could do was nod and think to myself: Me, too, colonel. Me, too.”

Moore notes: “It has now been 43 years since those bloody battles of our youth, and yet the memories of the killing and dying — little more than a footnote in the schoolbooks of both the United States and Vietnam — are as fresh as yesterday in our hearts and minds. Now we know that the dwindling down of our years to a precious few means little because we are soldiers still.”

He concluded: “There is no such thing as closure for soldiers who have survived a war. They have an obligation, a sacred duty, to remember those who fell in battle beside them all their days and to bear witness to the insanity that is war.”

Nguyen Huu An died two years after their meeting, and Moore returned to Vietnam to pay his respects to his family.

To be clear, while there is reconciliation to be made among soldiers, there is no moral equivocation about their respective missions — the communist surrogates of the now-collapsed Soviet Union were there to suppress the Liberty of the South Vietnamese people. Americans were there in defense of that Liberty and to hold the line against the spread of tyranny.

For his combat actions in Vietnam, Hal Moore received the Army’s second-highest award to the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross. He is also the recipient of the Army Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit (3), Bronze Star Medal (4) w/ “V” Device, Purple Heart, and nine Air Medals.

Hal died in February 2017 and was eulogized by his son Gregory Moore. He was preceded in death by his wife, Julia, whom he married in 1949, and is survived by three sons and two daughters, 12 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

LTG Harold “Hal” Moore: Your example of valor — a humble American Patriot defending Liberty for all above and beyond the call of duty and in disregard for the peril to your own life — is eternal.

“Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

Live your life worthy of his sacrifice.

(Read more Profiles of Valor here.)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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