The REAL Reporter From “We Were Soldiers” Earned a Bronze Star

In We Were Soldiers, Joe Galloway enters Landing Zone X-Ray carrying a camera. He was not a soldier. He was a 24-year-old civilian reporter for United Press International, and he had arrived in Vietnam to record what American troops were experiencing. Yet, 33 years after the battle, the United States Army awarded him a Bronze Star  with a V for valor.

Not for a photograph, a newspaper story, or the book that would later inspire the film. The footage you are seeing now is real shot by United States Army combat camera team on the ground at Landing Zone X-Ray. It captured the smoke, the chaos, and the battlefield Galloway entered in November 1965. But, his medal recognized something the camera did not capture.

 A decision he made while American soldiers were being overrun. Friendly napalm had fallen inside their own perimeter,  and one badly wounded man was still alive near the fire. For a reporter, the job was  supposed to be simple. Witness what happened, and survive long enough to tell the world. But, at Landing Zone X-Ray, Joe Galloway reached a moment when witnessing was no longer enough.

 Galloway had turned 24 only one day before flying into X-Ray. He had spent his birthday in  a foxhole beneath a tea bush carrying an M-16 and a bag of ammunition. Weeks earlier at the besieged Special Forces camp at Plei Me, Major Charlie Beckwith had told him that there was no such thing as a civilian non-combatant in those mountains.

 Beckwith put him on a machine gun. And before Galloway left, he made sure the reporter had a rifle of his own. On November 14, the battle at X-Ray began without him. Galloway tried to board a helicopter with the first troops, but an officer pulled him off and gave his place to a medic. Hours later, he watched smoke climb thousands of feet above the valley.

Every reporter nearby wanted a ride into the fight. None could get one. Then, Captain Greg Dillon told him that two helicopters would fly in after dark carrying ammunition and water. Dillon radioed Hal Moore for permission. Moore’s answer was blunt. If the reporter was crazy enough to come in, bring him.

 The helicopter was flown by Major Bruce Crandall. As darkness settled over the valley, Galloway rode into X-Ray sitting among boxes of grenades, ammunition, and plastic  containers of water. The Hueys landed in tall elephant grass. Galloway jumped out, helped throw the supplies into the clearing, and dropped flat as the helicopters lifted away.

Then a voice came from the darkness. “Follow me to the command post and watch where you step. There are bodies in the grass and they are all American.” It was Sergeant Major Basil Plumley. At the command post, Hal Moore told Galloway that the battalion was surrounded. American positions had been hit hard all afternoon.

 Dewan had seen lights moving down the mountainside, North Vietnamese soldiers approaching the battlefield in the darkness. Galloway had finally reached the story he had been chasing for months. He had also entered a battlefield with no guaranteed way out. His camera was beside him. So was the rifle across his lap.

 The next morning,  the attack came at first light. A North Vietnamese battalion struck the southeast side of the perimeter where roughly 100 men of Charlie Company held a thin line of shallow positions. Small arms fire, machine gun rounds, and  rocket grenades tore through the company and swept across the command post behind it.

 The army camera team captured parts of the battlefield  that morning. Smoke drifting through the grass, American soldiers remaining low against the earth, helicopters moving through a landing zone that was becoming more dangerous by the minute. But it did not capture the next few seconds. Galloway pressed himself against the ground trying to become smaller than the bullets passing overhead.

 Then something struck him in the ribs. It was Sergeant Major Basil Plumley’s boot. The Sergeant major looked down and shouted that Galloway could not take photographs while lying on the ground. Galloway stood up. He followed Plumley toward the makeshift aid station where medics were already working among the wounded.

 The perimeter was collapsing  in places and the command post itself was under direct fire. Then Hal Moore began shouting at the forward air controller. Two American jets were approaching the position. The first had already released two canisters of napalm. The second pulled away. The first two did not. The napalm passed over the command  post and struck only yards away.

Through the fire, Galloway saw two American soldiers burning. He ran toward them with an  Army medic named Tommy Berlyl. Before Berlyl could reach the men, a sniper’s bullet killed him. Galloway kept moving. Someone shouted for him to take one soldier’s feet. Galloway lifted the wounded man and together they carried him through the fire and gunfire to the battalion aid station.

The soldier’s name was Private First Class Jimmy Nakayama from Rigby, Idaho. His wife had given birth to their first child, a daughter, only 8 days earlier. Nakayama survived the evacuation from X-Ray, but his burns were catastrophic. He died in an Army hospital on November 17.

 Galloway would later write that not every event allows a journalist to remain separate from the story. Some events demand participation. At X-Ray, he had crossed that line. He was still carrying a camera, but during the battle, he also carried ammunition, water, wounded men, and the dead. When necessary, he put the camera down and used his rifle.

 Galloway left X-Ray aboard another helicopter flown by Bruce Crandall. He returned exhausted, covered in dirt and blood, carrying notebooks filled with names, hometowns, and fragments of what he had witnessed. He called the United Press International Bureau in Saigon  and dictated his report. But the battle did not become just another assignment.

 Years later, Galloway said that no one goes to war and returns is exactly the same person  who went in. The young reporter who entered X-Ray looking for a story came away  believing that the Americans who died there had given him an obligation to tell their stories accurately and to remember them as people, not statistics.

 That obligation shaped the rest of his career. Galloway continued writing about soldiers and veterans, but IA Drang remained at the center of his life. Years later, he reconnected with Hal Moore. Together, they spent roughly a decade reconstructing the battle through reports,  memories, interviews, photographs, and the experiences of the men who had fought there.

Their book, We Were Soldiers Once and Young, was published in 1992. A decade later, it became We Were Soldiers. The reporter who had entered X-Ray looking for an exclusive had helped preserve one of the defining American stories of the Vietnam War. He had gone there to document  what happened.

 He spent the rest of his life making sure the men who were there would not be forgotten. But the army had not forgotten what he did before the books and the film. On May 1, 1998, Joe Galloway received the Bronze Star Medal with a V device for  valor. The award recognized his actions on November 15th, 1965, moving under heavy enemy fire and helping carry a badly wounded American soldier to safety.

According to the United States Army, Galloway became the only American civilian to  receive the Bronze Star with V for heroism during the Vietnam War. That distinction matters  because Galloway had no military order to obey and no unit responsibility forcing  him toward the fire. He went because a man needed help.

In We Were Soldiers, Joe Galloway is remembered as the reporter with the camera. The real Galloway was more difficult to define. He was a witness who sometimes carried a rifle, a civilian who stood beside soldiers, and a reporter who entered IA Drang to record history, only to discover that history sometimes demands a choice.

 For a few seconds inside the fire at X-Ray, he stopped documenting courage. He practiced it. If you want more forgotten war stories that sound impossible but really happened, subscribe and follow us.