Opening paragraphs..............................

This story is about time and memories.  The time was 1965, a different kind of year, a watershed year when one era was ending in America and another beginning.  We felt it then, in the many ways our lives changed so suddenly, so dramatically, and looking back on it from a quarter-century gone, we are left in no doubt.  It was the year America decided to directly intervene in the Byzantine affairs of obscure and distant Vietnam.  It was the year we went to war.  In the broad, traditional sense, that "we" who went to war was all of us, all Americans, though in truth at that time the larger majority had little knowledge of, less interest in, and no great concern with what was beginning so far away.
-Joseph L. Galloway and Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.), from the Prologue to We Were Soldiers Once...And Young:  Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam