Proceedings: What made you decide to be a war correspondent?
Galloway: I read a collection of Ernie Pyle's material from World War II when I was a kid, and I thought: "If my generation has a war, this is something I want to do." There's been a Galloway in every war this country has ever had, all the way back to the beginning. My Great Grandfather Galloway lost his right leg at the Second Battle of Manassas in the Civil War, and Great Grandfather Reid lost his left leg at the Battle of the Wilderness. They ended up on adjoining farms. After the war, they got together once a year and went to town to buy boots. They would buy one pair and split them up, giggling over how they'd screwed the shopkeeper. In the movie, they have me tell this story to the colonel, who says, "Well, how come you aren't a soldier?"
I told him I thought it was about time one of us, instead of fighting a war, tried to understand a war. I thought that was pretty good reasoning, even though I ended up fighting anyway.
Proceedings: It would have been so much easier to cover something else. What would you have wanted to do, besides war reporting?
Galloway: I couldn't think of a thing I wanted to do more. As a young man, I covered politics at the state level. I traveled with Harry Truman, as a retired President. I had lunch twice a week with [former Kansas Governor and Republican presidential candidate] Alf Landon in Topeka. I loved politics, and I enjoyed writing about it. But always I was demanding: "Send me to Asia. Send me into harm's way, because American soldiers are going to be there, and I'm going to be there to cover them." That was what I wanted.
Proceedings: You tell stories about your Civil War ancestors. Does knowing about ancestors' war experiences make any difference to war reporters?
Galloway: I think it has to make a difference. I was born on the eve of World War II, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. My father and six of his brothers wore the uniform. My mother and I lived back and forth between her mother's and my father's mother's houses. And so my first four or five years I grew up in a house full of frightened women, who looked out the window waiting for the boy to come with the telegram. You never forget this.
I walked away from that battle in November of 1965, but 79 young men died on that field, and 130 others were grievously wounded. I walked away with a feeling of obligation to them, not to the Army, not to the flag, or the country, or anything else. I felt a sense of personal obligation to those who gave their lives so I might live. And I think something like that shapes the way you see the world all your life.
Proceedings: What sets the heroes apart from everyone else?
Galloway: To me the word is always "unlikely." The least likely guy out there may be the one who does something worthy of a Medal of Honor. And it is always done trying to save someone else—trying to save a lot of someone elses. It is selfless service in the extreme. These are the heroes. And most of the heroes die doing it.
Proceedings: And that's the common thread among heroes of all wars?
Galloway: To my knowledge, yes. I worked on a series for U.S. News & World Report years ago on Medal of Honor recipients in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. At the end of it, we invited all these Medal of Honor recipients to a reception. We had a roomful of them. These were the most modest of men. There was no BS among them. Their war stories were about the men around them, never about themselves.
Proceedings: You did a lot of difficult things in Vietnam. What was the most difficult?
Galloway: What most people would think was the most difficult was actually very easy. And that was getting up in the middle of the battle and going out under fire and rescuing a wounded man; physically carrying him back to safety. Unfortunately, the man died, he was so badly burned by napalm. But the easy things are the ones that scare you later.
Proceedings: What do you think of people like Tim O'Brien, who have written novels heavy with all the baggage from the Vietnam War?
Galloway: I've read a lot of Tim O'Brien's stuff, and I admire some of it. Some of his short stories are absolutely beautiful. The one on how to tell a true war story comes to mind. They're profane, and they—as you say—carry a lot of baggage. And I assume he carries a lot of baggage. But I don't fault anybody's memory of Vietnam. Everyone there served in a different war; even if they were five miles apart, their war was different. And how they saw it and how they saw themselves, before and after, this is the stuff of literature, in the case of O'Brien and in the case of many others. Jim Webb writes beautifully. He seems determined to address every ghost from that war. I love his latest book, Lost Soldiers (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 2001; reviewed in the January 2002 issue of Proceedings).
Proceedings: What have been the best war movies ever made?
Galloway: All Quiet on the Western Front was one. I loved A Bridge Too Far, which was not a great movie, but a really good movie. I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the book. I keep going back to the World War II movies, like Sands of Iwo Jima. I can still see those scenes in the back of my head, even though I haven't seen that movie in 40 years.
I have a real problem with the Vietnam movies. The veterans, the people who were there, can't see very much in the Vietnam movies that tells them about what they did and what they saw. There's too much other baggage. And that was one reason the General [Hal Moore] and I wrote the book, and that's one reason Randall Wallace has made the movie; to give the veterans a chance to see something they can be proud of and say, "By God, that's the truth."
Proceedings: Most people seem to prefer the real thing, or something as close to the real thing as possible, rather than a political polemic. For example, why do you think Oliver Stone made Platoon?
Galloway: I honestly don't know. I was on a panel with Stone six or eight years ago at a Vietnam War symposium at Hampden-Sydney College in southern Virginia. What he had to say was pretty unremarkable, but I learned that his old company commander was in the audience. And so when the panel was over, we had a cocktail, and I found this guy and introduced myself. Then I said: "Okay, here's the question: What about Platoon is accurate?"
He said: "It's a pretty good picture of what it's like to move a battalion through triple-canopy jungle. Other than that, nothing." He said he ran a good company, and Oliver Stone was a good soldier who did his duty. He won a couple of righteous Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart. According to him, no people were doing dope in his company. He said, "I kept them out on patrol for two weeks. We would come back to a firebase somewhere for two days. On the first day, you'd draw a clean uniform, you'd get a shower, you'd get the docs to take care of your leech bites and your scratches. And you'd get two beers to celebrate at the end of the day. And the next morning was spent fixing your gear, drawing your ammo, and planning, because that night or the next morning you were gone again for another two weeks." He said, "There's no reality in Platoon."
And I said: "You ought to write a book about your year in command of that company." And he did. His name is Colonel Robert Hemphill, and the title is Platoon: Bravo Company (Spotsylvania, VA: Sergeant Kirkland's Press, 1998). I wrote the foreword to it.
Proceedings: How would you rate Hollywood's recent portrayals of the military? Are they starting to get it?
Galloway: Not quite yet. But they're getting a little closer. I think they'll start to get it when my movie, We Were Soldiers, comes out. I'm also interested in seeing what they do with Black Hawk Down.
Proceedings: Do you think the 11 September events had anything to do with so many of these movies coming out at the same time?
Galloway: Not really. A movie takes a long time. A lot of things need to be done before you ever roll a foot of film. I know that from the time line of our own movie—eight years. That movie was going to be released in 2002, whether September 11th happened or not. And I think it will be well received, September 11th or not. That never factored into it. I know that when they test-screened the movie, one of the questions they asked the audience was, "Do the events of September 11th change the way you feel about this movie?" And most of them answered no.
Proceedings: How has 11 September changed your life?
Galloway: Well, on the 10th of September I was sworn into government service, as a special consultant to General Colin Powell and the State Department.
Proceedings: The day before?
Galloway: The day before. Timing is everything. (Laughter) In some ways, I look at what has transpired in Afghanistan and I think I ought to be there. But my wife tells me I'm too old to do that now. And, besides that, she lost a father in one war and she's damned if she's going to lose a husband in another. So I guess my warring days are over.
Proceedings: What is the problem between the military and the media?
Galloway: The military wants control. It always has; that's how it operates. Military people are control freaks. And the media are the hardest to control.
What always needs to be built—and it has to be built slowly and over time—is a level of trust. The only way you can do this is to let the young reporters walk beside the young lieutenants in any war we fight. If you do this, they will come out with a bond stronger than any known to man. It's just natural. And the reporters will come out with a knowledge deep enough and strong enough so they can do their jobs without creating risk or danger to those they cover. That would be the last thing they would want to do.
Proceedings: How would you rate the media coverage of the current war?
Galloway: I'm not seeing any spectacularly good coverage. It may be the nature of the government's cooperation, or lack thereof. Every war is different, and this may be the most different yet, in terms of difficulty to cover it. By that I don't mean Geraldo Rivera and Dan Rather wearing their Gunga Din outfits. Those guys turn up for all of them.
I've been giving military-media talks for 15 years, and I've found that the military usually listens, and the media does not. I believe in transparency as much as possible within the realm of operational security. Who does it best? The Marines, of course. They've always done it best.
I mean, how brilliant to have [now-retired Marine General] Walt Boomer, the guy who had been the Marines' chief of public affairs, as a commander in Desert Storm. While the Army and Air Force were stiff-arming the press, and the Navy had sailed over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind, Boomer was backing deuce-and-a-halfs up to the International Hotel and saying, "Give me 50 more!" When it was over, a professor actually did a study of all news reports during the war. Guess what? The Marines, who had 30% of the mission, got 70% of the press. So I know where to go to look.
Proceedings: You've worked with the Department of Defense (DoD) in the past. How is that different from working with the State Department?
Galloway: I was always the outsider when I was doing DoD stuff. I was the guy out there asking the questions and writing the stories. Some of my stories made them happy and some of them made them unhappy. But I didn't care. These days, I guess I have to choose my words a little more carefully than I might otherwise do—not that anyone has told me I can't be my usual, voluble self.
Proceedings: Does General Powell edit the speeches you write, or are those words pretty much the ones that Joe Galloway wrote?
Galloway: General Powell is a distinctive speaker, and he is a distinctive thinker. He always puts his own stamp on the words he's going to say in a speech. And that's as it should be.
Proceedings: The recurring turmoil between the Israelis and the Palestinians seems to make the war against terrorism even more difficult. Does General Powell have any magic bullets for that situation?
Galloway: I'm not sure there are any magic bullets. As good a bullet as I know is to appoint [retired Marine Corps] General [Anthony] Zinni to go over there and try to make sense out of it. We've been looking for a magic bullet over there since when, 1948? If there is an answer, it's not going to be simple, or it would have been found by now. This is a conflict much like the one in Northern Ireland. Successes are slow, small, and incremental. And they can all be wiped out in one bad day.
General Powell wants to reenergize the peace process, and he's picked a guy who has a brilliant grasp of the situation and is a very broad thinker. It may be that nothing can be done. But we have to try. And we have to hope for a better life, both for the Israelis and the Palestinians.
This problem has gone on for a long time and has run very deep. The problems in the Balkans are also similar. We sent our own soldiers to separate those people and keep them from killing each other. And they're not even dealing with the hatred from World War II; they're dealing with a hatred that goes back 800 years. You just have to do the best you can to try to keep peace.
Proceedings: Is the Middle East the top priority now for General Powell?
Galloway: I would say his top priority right now is the war in Afghanistan and the war against terrorism. That has to be high on the agenda. But the Palestinian-Israeli situation also is very high.
Proceedings: In your book, a recurring theme is one of love—love of comrades, love of service, love of country. How would you explain the difference between that kind of love and the traditional definition of that word, to people who have never served in combat?
Galloway: Are they two kinds of love? I don't know. I can tell you that is a powerful emotional force. It has a grip on your heart, once you have been in combat and your life has depended on the guy on your left, the guy on your right, and the guy behind you. You may not even like these guys. And if you had never gone to that place, you wouldn't have given them the time of day. But because of that time and that place, in that place, in that situation, there grows a bond like no other. It may be more powerful even than the bond of blood, because in a sense, you are blood brothers; you shed blood for each other.
I don't know how to compare it with the love of a man for his wife and family. That's always there, and that's powerful too. This kind of love sits beside it. A guy named Michael Norman wrote a book about finding the guys who survived from his Marine platoon in Vietnam [These Good Men: Friendships Forged from War (New York: Crown Publishers, 1989)]. He speaks brilliantly and eloquently about this bond and what it really means. He says, "On the last day, with my last breath, my thoughts will be of my wife and my children and these men I fought with so long ago."
Proceedings: I think that's a good place to end.
Interview: Joe Galloway
He is the only civilian to receive a medal from the U.S. Army for valor during the Vietnam War—a Bronze Star with Combat V for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965. A veteran of 42 years in journalism with United Press International and U.S. News & World Report, he is coauthor with retired Army Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore of We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young (New York: Random House, 1992). In advance of the March release of We Were Soldiers—a motion picture based on the book and starring Mel Gibson as Moore and Barry Pepper as Galloway—the award-winning newsman and current special consultant to Secretary of State General Colin Powell spoke recently with Fred L. Schultz at U.S. Naval Institute headquarters.