A French unit is on patrol in Vietnam in 1954, during the final year of the First Indochina War. The unit is suddenly ambushed by North Vietnamese Army forces, who kill the officers. Although the French soldiers kill many Viet Minh, the unit is soon overrun. Nguyen Huu An (Duong Don)) orders the execution of all surviving French soldiers, to discourage further French involvement in Vietnam. Eleven years later, the United States had entered the Vietnam War. U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) is depicted as dedicated and deeply committed to training troops under his command (the 7th Cavalry Regiment), who are preparing for deployment to Vietnam. He is disquieted because the 7th Cavalry regiment was the unit commanded by General George Custer in the 19th Century when he and his men were slaughtered at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Moore is also dismayed because President Lyndon B. Johnson has decreed that the war will be fought "on the cheap", without declaring it a national emergency. As a result, Moore believes he will be deprived of his oldest, best-trained soldiers (a formal declaration of war would have meant mobilization and extension of the terms of enlistment for volunteer soldiers) - about 25% of his battalion - just prior to shipping out for Vietnam. After arriving in Vietnam, he learns that an American base has been attacked and is ordered to take his 400 men after the enemy and eliminate the Vietnamese attackers, despite the fact that intelligence has no idea of the number of enemy troops. He leads a newly created air cavalry unit into the Ia Drang Valley. After landing in the "Valley of Death," the soldiers capture a North Vietnamese Army lookout who informs them that the location they were sent to is actually the base camp for a veteran North Vietnamese Army division of more than 4,000 men. Upon arrival in the area with a platoon of soldiers, 2nd Lt. Henry Herrick spots a scout, runs after him, and orders reluctant soldiers to follow. The Vietnamese scout lures them into an ambush, resulting in several men of the platoon being killed, including Lt. Herrick and his subordinates. The surviving platoon members are surrounded with no chance of retreat. Sgt. Savage assumes command. He calls in artillery and uses the cover of darkness to hold off the Vietnamese from overrunning their small defensive position. Meanwhile, with helicopters constantly dropping off the Cavalry units, Lt. Col. Moore manages to secure weak points before the Vietnamese can take advantage of such. The casualties in Vietnam are shown taking an emotional toll at Fort Benning, Georgia, the unit's base of operation. Lt. Col. Moore's wife Julie (Madeleine Stowe) and Lt. John Geoghegan's wife, Barbara Geoghegan (Keri Russell), assume the task of delivering telegrams to inform families (mostly soldiers' wives like themselves) about the soldiers being killed in action. On the second day, despite still being trapped near the landing zone, and desperately outnumbered, the main U.S. force manages to hold off the Vietnamese with artillery, mortars, and helicopter lifts of supplies and reinforcements. Eventually, enemy Vietnamese commander Nguyen Huu An orders a large-scale attack to completely overrun the American position. At the point of breaking and being completely overrun by the enemy and with no option left, Moore orders his radioman to call in "Broken Arrow" (indicating that Moore's position is being overrun and can no longer be defended, and requesting all available combat aircraft to attack the enemy, even those close to the U.S. troops' position). The aircraft attack with bombs, napalm and machine guns, massacring many NVA's and Viet Cong but an accident occurs dangerously close to Moore's men, killing some of Moore's soldiers but successfully repelling the second Vietnamese attack. After the Vietnamese forces are repelled, the surviving men of the stranded platoon, led by Sgt. Savage, is eventually rescued. Moore's troops regroup, secure the area, and stop at the base of a hill, where Moore surmises the Vietnamese division headquarters is holed up in tunnels. At the same time, the Vietnamese commander plans a final assault on the Americans and sends out most of his troops to carry out the attack. The Vietnamese have set up strong defense emplacements near the hidden entrance of the underground passage to the command post spoken of by the scout. Hal and his men charge right at them, into a seemingly impending massacre, but before the Vietnamese can fire, Major Bruce "Snakeshit" Crandall (Greg Kinnear) and other helicopter gunships attack the Vietnamese, destroying the bulk of the enemy force. Nguyen Huu An, the Vietnamese Commander, is alerted that the Americans have broken through their lines and there are no soldiers between the Americans and their command post. Since the Commander had deployed his reserve forces to a final offensive and the base camp has no troops to call upon for defense, the Vietnamese commander quickly orders the headquarters evacuated. Moore, having achieved his objective, returns to the L.Z. (helicopter landing zone) to be picked up. True to his speech to his soldiers before deploying, only after all of his men (including the dead and wounded) are removed from the battlefield does he step onto a helicopter and fly out of the valley. While the Vietnamese are collecting their dead, Nguyen Huu An, holding a small damaged American flag, tells one of his officers: "Such a tragedy. They will think this was their victory. So this will become an American war. And the end will be the same (as the French) except for the numbers who will die before we get there." At the end of the movie it is revealed that the landing zone immediately reverted to North Vietnamese hands after the American troops were airlifted out. Hal Moore continued the battle in a different landing zone, and after nearly a year he returned home safely. His superiors congratulated him for killing over 1,800 North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong soldiers.
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