Soldier’s soldier Hal Moore dies at 94

Joe Galloway might not have made it to his 25th birthday. The reason he did, he now insists — and that was more than a half-century ago — was the courage and cunning of an American hero who, late last week, didn’t quite make it to his 95th.

Retired Lt. Gen. Hal C. Moore, the commander at the battle of Ia Drang in 1965 that is now generally regarded as the first major clash of the Vietnam War, died Friday at his home in Auburn. Most of his family was on hand, according to Opelika-Auburn News editor Troy Turner, to celebrate Moore’s 95th birthday, which would have been Monday.

Galloway is the award-winning journalist whose columns were published in the Ledger-Enquirer before his retirement, and co-author with Moore of “We Were Soldiers Once, and Young,” the harrowing factual account of three hellish days that left no doubt (if there was still any remaining) that the Vietnam “police action” was a war in every literal and horrific sense of the word.

Moore was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Infantry upon his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1945. Initially stationed in post-World War II Japan, he would be reassigned to Airborne at Fort Bragg, N.C, and would later serve as a regimental operations officer during the Korean War.

But the course of Moore’s destiny was perhaps set with his 1964 assignment to Fort Benning where, then a colonel, he commanded a new Air Assault Division — precursor to the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry regiment whose 450 soldiers arrived in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam only to be met by more than 2,000 of the enemy.

(Turner, writing in the O-A News, observed that the overwhelming odds at Ia Drang would “cast striking parallels between Moore and another commander of the 7th Cavalry less than a century earlier — Gen. George Armstrong Custer” — the critical difference, of course, being that thanks to Moore’s far superior judgment, members of his command survived.)

Galloway, who had just arrived in Vietnam as a young war correspondent, told the Ledger-Enquirer’s Ben Wright after learning of Moore’s passing that “none of us would have come out of there alive if it weren’t for Hal Moore and his brilliance as a combat commander.”

Moore, Galloway recalled, had the ability to “get ahead of the curve on the battlefield [and] get ahead of the enemy commander. That’s like you are reading his mail.”

Retired Lt. Gen. and former Fort Benning post commander Carmen Cavezza said of Moore than he “was a strong leader, took care of his people and held true to the very end.”

A funeral Mass for Moore will be held Friday morning at 8:30 a.m. CST at St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church in Auburn.

That afternoon, at 1 p.m. EST, he will be honored with a memorial service at the National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning. There could hardly be a more fitting tribute.

This story was originally published February 13, 2017 at 4:49 PM with the headline "Soldier’s soldier Hal Moore dies at 94."