Post Messenger Recorder -

"There is something missing on this earth now that we've lost a great warrior, a great soldier, a great human being, and my best friend. They don't make them like him anymore." Those words of Joe Galloway, spoke to the character of Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, upon Moore's passing on Friday, February 10th, at age 94.

And Galloway should know. He was a war correspondent during the early years of the Vietnam War. Galloway and Moore co-authored the book, We Were Soldiers Once...And Young, a book that would become the epic film, We Were Soldiers, the story of the first big battle of the Vietnam War. Galloway, an AP correspondent, was with Moore's unit during the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, the first big battle of the Vietnam War.

Lovingly known to his men as "Yellow Hair," in part because of Moore's blonde hair, but also because he commanded the 1/7th Cavalry, the same unit an earlier "Yellow Hair," Gen. George Armstrong Custer, commanded 89 years earlier at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Moore once commented, "In the American Civil War it was a matter of principal 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."

As you look at Moore's funeral guest book you gain a better idea of this man who just passed away, and how he epitomized the above quote.

"Garry Owen Sir! Old soldiers never die. They just fade away"-Gen. Douglas McArthur. "Your troopers await your final order, SIR."-SSGT Dan P. Brodt-1/7-75th Rangers 1967-1968. "FIRST IN AND LAST OUT"-Robert F. Beal Jr.  

That line was a quote from Moore as they went into battle, telling his soldiers, "I will be the first one off the helicopter and the last one on!" And Moore was true to his word, as the last of his young soldiers, who had, over the several-day battle, aged a lifetime, boarded the Huey helicopters to return to their base, Moore was the last man to board the last Huey, as it lifted off from the fields of death.

"CHARGE and GARRY OWEN!!! Rest easy sir, we have the watch," unidentified. "A new CO arriving at Fiddlers Green, Garry Owen General," R. Smith. "May This Candle Forever Burn In Honor Of Our General. Fiddlers Green," Curtis Nazelrod.

Fiddlers Green is an imaginary place in the hereafter where the fiddles never stop playing and the dancers never stop dancing.  "I fought side-by-side with General Moore, and he was a very tough soldier," Gary Kidd.

Col. Moore was a leader who made heroes out of the men he commanded.

One of the many men under Moore's command over his many years in the army was Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, then a Major in Viet Nam. Moore's mentoring of Schwarzkopf showed through in 1991, when the Iraqi Army surrendered to Gen. Schwarzkopf under the cover of a large tent in the Iraqi desert.

As the badly beaten Iraqi's left the tent after their surrender, Schwarzkopf instructed his troops: "you will do nothing to embarrass these men. They have been humiliated enough."

It's well known that Schwarzkopf had a hot temper, which Moore commented on. "A quarter century later (1990), Gen. Schwarzkopf would date the birth of his famous hot temper to those days in Viet Nam, when he begged and pleaded on the radio for someone to evacuate his wounded South Vietnamese soldiers, while American helicopters fluttered by without stopping."

For Moore and his soldiers at Ia Drang, they faced the same problem with the medivac helicopters. As the prolonged battle dragged on, Moore's troops were outnumbered 10-1 by the North Vietnamese Army. Moore's troops were running low on the two things they most needed...bullets and water.

One of the Huey assault pilots, Bruce Crandall and his wingman, Ed "too tall" Freeman, assigned to the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, loaded up with ammo and water and returned to the battlefield with the much-needed supplies. As they landed, Crandall and Freeman saw many wounded waiting for the medivac helicopters to arrive that never did.

Crandall and Freeman, upon their return to base, pleaded with the medivacs to fire up and start evacuating the wounded. They refused, saying it was far too dangerous for them to fly.

Over the next 16 hours, Crandall and Freeman made 12-14 unarmed flights back to Ia Drang, bringing ammo and water and returned with wounded men. By the end of those worst days of Crandall and Freeman's military careers, they evacuated 75 badly injured soldiers to distant military field hospitals for emergency medical care.

In 1995, a young Lieutenant in the battle of the Ia Drang, Rick Rescorla, accompanied Moore back to Ia Drang, where they walked the battlefield that 305 American soldiers lost their lives on three decades earlier. Walking the battlefield with Moore and Rescorla were Moore's sergeant major, Basil Plumley, Joe Galloway and North Vietnamese General Nguyen Giap, Moore's North Vietnamese adversary from three decades earlier.

Giap's army was the same one that defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, bringing to a bloody end the French occupation of Viet Nam.

They walked the killing grounds together, not as former enemies, but as friends, sharing a long ago common history. A history both hoped would never again be repeated. These two, now old soldiers, damned the war, but not the warriors. They hoped the world had learned the bitter lessons of Ia Drang. Moore and Giap's friendship lasted until Giap's death.

Turn back the clock to September 11, 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The investment banking firm, Morgan Stanley, occupied 20 floors in the south tower of the World Trade Center.

Morgan Stanley, some years before 9-11, hired a British man who liked to sing opera as their safety director, Rick Rescorla. At Morgan Stanley, Rescorla was adamant about the safety of the employees of Morgan Stanley.

To enforce his safety standards, Rescorla forced the employees, much to their dismay every three months, to do evacuation drills in case of another more severe attack on the World Trade Center than the one that occurred there in 1993.

Many of the employees of Morgan Stanley hated doing these Rescorla practice evacuations. To make his point to the employees, Rescorla jumped up on a desk and threatened the employees with dropping his pants and mooning them if they didn't participate in the evacuation practices.

On September 11, 2001, the last thing anyone saw or heard of Rescorla was of Rescorla running up the stairs, singing opera, as he made one last sweep of the Morgan Stanley floors for employees left behind. Rescorla lost his life on September 11th while saving from death all but six of the 2,700 Morgan Stanley employees in the building that day. Rescorla is remembered today with a sculpture of himself in front of the National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Gen. Moore had an excellent way with words and said this about war, "There's never been a noble war except in the history books and propaganda movies. It's a bloody, dirty, cruel, costly mistake in almost every case, as it was in this war that would end so badly. But the young soldiers can be, and often are, noble, selfless, and honorable. They don't fight for a flag or a president or a mom and apple pie. When it comes down to it, they fight and die for each other, and that is reason enough for them, and for me."

Rest in Peace General Moore, you trained your men well and always had their backs. The 305 of your men whose names take up all of Panel 5 East at The Wall, await your arrival at Fiddlers Green to offer up one final salute to the Colonel, "White Hair," they so loved.