Our country began sending military advisers to Vietnam in the mid-1960s. During the ensuing conflict much of Southeast Asia was ravaged and in the end one basic cliché was confirmed. That is, young men die in times of war and their passing is hard to stomach.

Exploring this cliché as a purpose, We Were Soldiers, the latest military-flavored pap from Pearl Harbor scribe Randall Wallace, is focused on the first US clash with North Vietnamese Army regulars in 1965. Adapted by Wallace from the book We Were Soldiers Once… and Young by Joseph Galloway and Lt. General Harold Moore, the film details a three-day standoff and the first use of helicopters as a war-making tool.

Narrativized from both Galloway and Moore's first-hand accounts, the film lacks the refinements of the best Vietnam movies like Platoon and Hamburger Hill. Instead of giving a sense of context or creating three-dimensional characters, it overemphasizes man love, patriotism, duty and a roughshod parallel of Little Big Horn to the Ia Drang Valley. The former, of course, was the ill-fated last stand of General Custer. The latter is the triumphal first stand of American military might in Vietnam memorialized by the film.

Opening with a flashback to Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the story jumpcuts 10 years to when Lt. Colonel Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) was asked to begin using helicopters for troop deliveries into a hot zone. After a fairly standard set of training sequences, he and his soldiers leave home and move "in country" to enter the coming war.

Immediately they are confused and cutoff by their enemy, overrun and out-gunned on every front and forced to face the tragic demands of holding their positions. Over three days and two nights they repel the NVA, withstand friendly fire and finally turn the tide of battle with attacking helicopters before packing up for other pastures.

Meanwhile, Hal's wife Julia (Madeleine Stowe) delivers death notices to stateside spouses of fallen men. As her parallel story is crosscut with battle scenes, some of the film's more harrowing sequences are brought to life with the sadness of war widows crying. These sequences also demonstrates how poorly written much of the exposition actually is with its reliance on types like the soon-to-die new father, the crusty old sergeant and the optimist who confronts death for the very first time.

Even with all this caricature, We Were Soldiers has one standout feature. Built on the story of Moore's heroic platoons, the tendency to show faceless enemy "gooks" is a strong one. The film avoids this simplification by occasionally focusing on sharply disciplined NVA soldiers led by the troubled Lt. Colonel Nyugen Huu An (Don Duong). Such focus endows the picture with a sense of perspective it's otherwise sorely lacking and broadens the depiction of war to include brief view from both sides of a conflict.

Despite terrible dialogue and a heavy reliance on squibs and explosions, We Were Soldiers succeeds as a thoroughly rousing western dressed up in war movie details. While I'm no fan of the finished work because its simplistic approach to horrific events is laughable, I was still moved throughout by the efficiency of its melodramatic touches.

Gibson is handsome, poised and leaderly. Support players like Barry Pepper as the photojournalist Joseph Galloway, Greg Kinnear as an ace helicopter pilot and Sam Elliott as Moore's second in command are also effective throughout. Still, the film is nowhere as exciting as when it's pitched into battle without rhyme or reason save for the bursting of bullets and the confusing swish-pan of the camera.

For some this filmmaking style lacks clarity and purpose because Wallace doesn't direct actions so much as he creates confusion to mimic his on-screen epic. The net sum of such earnest violence makes the movie's odd, uncomplicated patriotism and sense of duty between fighting men seem like a watered down glimpse of some earlier time.

Once all the Hollywood schmaltz is stripped away, though, the sad truth of this film, and of war more generally, is that young men must die, and many of them quite gruesomely. ", let's just hope they come up with an idea worthy of the character.