Hal Moore on Leadership by Mike Guardia

Mike Guardia’s Hal Moore on Leadership: Winning when Outgunned and Outmanned (CreateSpace/Magnum Books, 168 pp., $14.95, paper: $4.99, Kindle) is part biography and part a recounting of leadership lessons developed over a lifetime by Lt. Gen. Hal Moore. The late Gen. Moore is best known for his stellar leadership at the pivotal Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam in 1965, and for the epic book he and Galloway wrote about it, We Were Soldiers Once… and Young. In that widely praised book—and in Moore and Galloway’s We Are Soldiers Still—many of the Moore’s leadership points are explored.

Guardia begins with a narrative of the fight at Landing Zone X-ray at the Ia Drang. He then introduces the reader to Hal Moore, concentrating on the principles of the man and the leadership traits he developed during more than thirty years as a military leader.

Over time, Moore crystalized his philosophy of leadership into four main principles.

First: Three strikes and you are not out.

Second: There is always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor, and after that there is one more thing.

Third: When nothing is wrong, there is nothing wrong—except there is nothing wrong. That is when a leader has to be the most alert

Last: Trust your instincts.

Guardia illustrates each of the principles with real-life examples. Perhaps none of them is more touching than the story of Rick Rescorla, one of Moore’s platoon leaders in Vietnam, and one of the heroes of the September 11 attacks in New York City.

Throughout the biographical narrative, Guardia intersperses the leadership points and attributes Moore developed over a lifetime of service and later in his work in the business world. In addition to a generous collection of photographs, Guardia includes several of Moore’s speeches to the business and professional sports communities he often advised.

The book reveals the man and the circumstances that helped him develop his principles. It also  touches on the role Moore’s faith played in developing his character. One of the more revealing stories Guardia tells is that of Hal Moore’s courtship and subsequent marriage to Julia Compton, the daughter of a professional artilleryman.

 

Then Lt. Col. Hal Moore at LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley.  

The book is a profile of the man and his development into the dynamic leader he was. Moore’s leadership points are well placed amid the biographical details.

This is a good book, a blueprint for leaders of all sorts, military as well as business.

The author’s website is mikeguardia.com

—Bud Alley

Editor’s note: VVA member Bud Alley served under Hal Moore in HHC of the 2/7 in the 1^st First Cavalry Division in Vietnam in 1965-66. He was a close friend of Rick Rescorla. Both men, he says, “were dynamic leaders of the highest magnitude.”

The Ghosts of the Green Grass by J. L. Bud Alley

Invariably, wars produce battles that become historical benchmarks. Not enough can be written or spoken about those events. Arguably, the Vietnam War’s 1965 Battle in the Ia Drang Valley between the Army’s newly formed 1st Air Cavalry Division’s 7th Cavalry and the North Vietnamese Army achieved such magnitude.

Ia Drang’s distinction began with Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway’s 1992 book, We Were Soldiers Once…And Young, which examined the entire battle.  J. L. “Bud” Alley has written a  book about just the final stage of that fight—the 2nd Battalion/7th Cavalry’s engagement with North Vietnamese forces at Landing Zone Albany. His book, The Ghosts of the Green Grass (Codi, 393 pp. $29.99), reveals exploits unrecognized in previous writings.

Alley served as a 2/7 second lieutenant in 1965-66. Part of an experimental U2 (untrained second lieutenants) program, he went from college to his unit without attending a basic officer course, although he later received training in combat communications.

His story focuses on more than the fighting.  Alley, a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America, walks the reader through a chaotic month of assembling the battalion at Fort Benning for deployment to Vietnam as part of the newly formed 1st Cav.  Equipment and manpower shortages hindered planners. Uncertainty about practically everything plagued company grade officers and sergeants.

“I was not sure if a Harvard professor could make sense out of the complexities,” Alley writes.

After thirty days at sea on the USS Rose, the battalion arrived at Qui Nhon in mid-September 1965. Its operational base was at An Khe.

Impulsive and unpredictable leadership stalled the battalion’s development into a fighting force. The Army was thin with experience across the board, Alley says. Six weeks after the battalion arrived in country, its stressed-out commander asked to be relieved.

On November 17, 1965, the day the entire battalion finally deployed in the field, no strategy existed to counter an enemy attack. The day’s plan was simple: march indirectly from LZ X-Ray to LZ Albany to avoid a B-52 ARC Light strike. The battalion’s column stretched from eight hundred to fifteen hundred meters in length. Delays were frequent. “We had no maps or idea of our destination other than to follow the man in front,” Alley writes.

Having never chosen an extraction landing zone, the battalion leaders were uncertain as to which of two cleared areas constituted LZ Albany. When the company commanders gathered to discuss the problem, the battalion came under fire on all sides from NVA forces.

The battle that followed became a fight for survival. Alley graphically describes the intensity of combat that cost the battalion one hundred fifty-five dead and one hundred thirty-four wounded. He weaves in first-hand accounts, his own included, worthy of awe and admiration.

A bitter conclusion to the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley came soon afterward, when Gen. Westmoreland told the 2nd Battalion survivors that they had achieved “a great victory over the Communists from the North.” A year and a half later, units of the 4th Infantry Division fought nearly identical costly battles in the Ia Drang, fights that are described by Robert Sholly in Young Soldiers, Amazing Warriors.

Bud Alley

As Charles Baker does in his book, Gray Horse Troop, Alley links the 7th Cavalry’s Vietnam War experiences to its 1876 Little Bighorn Battle, but in greater depth. Alley points out many similarities between the “ghosts” of Gen. George Custer’s last days and 2/7’s encounters.

Alley’s book is based on more than fifty interviews with the men, wives, and widows of the Seventh Cavalry fighters, as well as military records and other published and unpublished sources.

Bud Alley earned a master’s degree in history in 2011. But he still possesses a sense of humor. At times, with its wealth of dialogue, The Ghosts of the Green Grass resembles a novel.

For ordering info, go to the author’s website, www.theghostsofthegreengrass.com

—Henry Zeybel