Long before the Pig Battalion arrived in Vietnam, you heard about the Mountains of the Moon. Back when you were bright-eyed recruits, you would sit in boozers and listen to the stories of the veterans of the First Battalion, who would try to scare the wits out of you with tales of terror, or else make themselves appear brave by playing it all down. There were fantastic stories, boring stories, stories so meaningless and meandering that they could only have been true. But all of them talked about the Mountains of the Moon. These mountains, you were told, could be seen from Nui Dat and were the headquarters for the entire Viet Cong operations in the region. It was to there that Charlie retired at dawn after their nocturnal ravages of Phouc Tuy Province. Up there, Charlie was so numerous and the terrain so treacherous and the fortifications so impregnable that no force could stand a chance against them. In a guerrilla war where territory constantly changed hands, the Mountains of the Moon remained indisputably theirs. In that dreadful place, no army no matter how powerful or mythological, could hope to climb those mountains and survive.
Lies...

James Jones’ book, The Thin Red Line, we read with relish. It is one of the very best descriptions of men in combat, and certainly the most authentic concerning Americans. The cast is an entire company, and Jones steadfastly kills them off one by one until so few survive that Corporal Fife, the company clerk, is the highest ranking man and therefore in charge. But each of the hundred men is given equal weight as characters, at least until they meet their usually idiotic end. No heroes here, just desperate men sent foolishly to their deaths by incompetent officers.
    It influenced me more than any other book when I came to write my own experiences, of which Jones had something to say in his final lines.
One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way.
    Thirty-six years later, it was made into a movie by an arty-farty director with his head firmly up his arse. Many critics thought it a great movie—they rather liked the way the scenes of simple islander noble savage life and the beauty of the jungle (the sun shone through the leaves 10,000 times) was juxtaposed against the admittedly well-staged battle scenes. Oh woe. The film was boring—and it told lies. Guadalcanal was famous for the high cost of the American victory there, and Jones book sticks with the facts in that regard. In the movie, seven brave Americans take one casualty assaulting thirty Japanese in an entrenched position. The Japanese could blaze away with their machineguns from point blank range and continually miss while a Yank could bring down four Japs with a single burst over his shoulder. It is one of the most outrageous lies ever conceived concerning that or any other war.
    In 1964, a far scrappier version was made which if rather drab in black and white, at least had the virtue of being somewhat more honest. Here, almost all the cast gets killed off, although there is no attempt at an explanation. War is Hell was the message: Truth is the First Casualty of War was still to be learned. The thing was the Americans just couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge that this was their greatest military disaster, until Vietnam that is. It was just simply inconceivable to them that they might possibly lose a war. The great truth of Jones’ book remains profoundly unspoken to this day.