It’s been less than two years since the Army renamed the training base near Columbus, Georgia, in honor of my parents, Lt. Gen. Harold “Hal” and Julie Moore.
“Our family is deeply grateful that our parents will be honored, remembered, and held as role models for the generations of Army soldiers in these stands and to come,” my brother, Col. David Moore, said at that ceremony. “They loved each other. They loved us. They loved the Army and their beloved troopers, so much so that my father’s last wish was to be buried among his troopers here at the post cemetery—the same troopers my mother referred to as their sons and brothers and with whom she is buried as well.”
Yet, here we are today, being asked how we feel about the name of Fort Moore reverting back to Fort Benning.
For more than a century, the Army post bore the name of Henry Benning, a Confederate brigadier general and ardent advocate of slavery. It took bipartisan legislation and the work of a Congressional Naming Commission to rename Fort Benning—along with eight other Army installations named for Confederate leaders.
So how would it feel now to see the Pentagon remove our parents’ names by finding another “Benning” without Confederate ties to honor, in a workaround to comply with the law? That’s how the defense secretary last week restored the name of Fort Bragg.
My answer is clear: I am disappointed. But the letter I want to share with you will say it better than I can and show why the idea is so wrong.
Those who advocate for changing the name to honor a person solely because they happen to be named “Benning” ignore the values and character of Hal and Julie Moore as well as their courage, competency, and dedication to the nation and Army families.
Yes, Hal and Julie Moore. The post was named for both of my parents. The intent was to recognize Dad as a decorated and highly regarded commander of the Vietnam War, and Mom, who was equally distinguished as a leader of Army family programs and who changed how the military cares for the widows of fallen soldiers.
By including Mom in the name, the Army explicitly recognized and honored the military spouse’s invaluable contribution and the family’s importance to combat readiness. The Army documents the career of a serving soldier via efficiency reports and awards. Many veterans have walls of plaques commemorating their time in various units.
But not so with their spouses. What was their “military career” like? Why should Americans treasure a spouse’s willingness to sacrifice stability and safety to support their serving soldier?
In 1996, Mom wrote a letter to Randy Wallace, who was writing the screenplay for the 2002 movie We Were Soldiers, an adaptation of my Dad’s book. He wanted to know what it was like to be an Army wife to properly develop the storyline of the actress who would eventually portray Mom.
This letter documents a small part of her life in the Army and shares the challenges, worries, and agonies associated with a spouse’s unique brand of service. I’ve edited her letter in parts and added a few comments. The words come from her heart and communicate the terror families encounter when their loved one is deployed and the need for a close-knit Army community.
When people ask how I feel about the military potentially replacing my parents’ names from the post where they served and are buried, I only wish they could read this letter to understand the sacrifice for themselves.
Dear Randy,
Joe and Hal have been after me to write you about my life while Hal was in Vietnam and give you some background material about “my life” [Note: Joe Galloway was Dad’s co-author of the book We Were Soldiers Once… And Young]. I am trying to think of profound things to say, but truly, Randy, it all boiled down to me being a “single mother” of five children, totally responsible for their health and welfare while being scared to death for the safety of my husband. It seemed that every time I turned on the TV, Hal described another fight his unit had been in. Every day, I wondered if I would be next to get the telegram.
I had good training for those years, though, as I was born an “Army Brat” at Fort Sill, OK. “Army Brat” does not fall into the dictionary meaning of “a nasty child.” Far from it. Used with warmth, its special meaning is a child born into an Army family. They are, in themselves, a kind of “family”—each member of which knows what it means to have lived their youth in an Army family constantly on the move and in a disciplined Army environment. As the only child of older parents, I was brought up to “toe the mark.” Dad never had any patience with me if I cried—he always told me that thoroughbreds don’t cry, and we Comptons are thoroughbreds. Also, anyone can smile and be happy when all is right with the world, but it takes a real thoroughbred to smile when life gets tough.
Having had 28 moves in the first 32 years of our marriage, sometimes it was tough to keep smiling. Pentagon duty was especially hard as Hal worked long hours, even weekends, and we lived in genteel poverty. I remember one month in the late ’60s when I had to make four dollars feed the seven of us for 3 days. We had some very strange meals as I opened whatever cans were on the shelf. Hal Moore taught me to “face up to the facts and deal with them,” so I did.
In the summer of ’49, I decided that Hal Moore was the man for me and chased him till he caught me. We were married in November, and our first child, Greg, was born 18 months later at Fort Bragg. We moved to Fort Benning when Greg was four months old, and Hal attended the Infantry Officers Advanced Course. All the Bragg crowd went with us. Toward the end of the school year, Hal received the orders I had been dreading—the Korean War! I was highly pregnant with Steve, and he refused to come on time. The doctors made me drink cod liver oil in hopes of speeding him up, but he finally arrived in early May, and Hal left for Korea six weeks later in June.
[Note: Dad was a hardcore fisherman. Given the uncertainty surrounding my birth, he was fishing in a bass tournament the morning I was born. Dad claims to have asked permission to go, but Mom always gave him “a look” when he told the story. The fact that he won a nice Shakespeare fishing reel did nothing to mitigate the trouble he was in when he returned.]
I was 23 years old. I stayed in a tiny tract house with no air conditioning in the high heat and humidity of Columbus, GA, until eventually moving to my parent’s home in Auburn, AL. It was so awful, as there was NO NEWS about what was going on during that war. Sometimes, I would find a paragraph or two on the back page of the Auburn-Opelika Daily Newspaper. If there was a big fight like Pork Chop Hill, the Atlanta paper might mention it. Sometimes, I think I was better off not knowing compared to the intensive coverage of Vietnam. Of course, we didn’t have TV then either. Hal sent me a telegram wishing us a Merry Christmas, which I found in the mailbox. I thought it was bad news and refused to open it, so Dad had to do it. You can imagine the relief. I told him never to send me another telegram and have always “frozen” when I see one so the debacle of the telegrams from the battle at Landing Zone X-Ray paralyzed me.
[Note: Unintentionally, Dad did not help minimize Mom’s anxiety. During his 14-month deployment in the Korean War, he wrote 119 letters home. However, he shared far too many details! In one letter, he casually mentioned, “Got a new jeep t’other day. My other one took a direct hit on the hood w/a 76 round the first night of the attack on our C Co. outpost.” But the classic has to be his letter to her when he commanded a rifle company – “I keep a loaded grease-gun (M-3 submachine gun—airborne model) hanging right on my sack along w/3 magazines of ammo. I can be out of here and moving within 5 minutes if any of my men get hit. So don’t worry.”
And the telegram? He wrote, “I did get off one of those Expeditionary Force Messages to you—the type where about 200 stock phrases are numbered, and you write the number of the one you want. Hope they didn’t foul mine up and tell you, “See lawyer” or something.”]
I will never forget that Monday morning in November ’65 when I picked up the Columbus Ledger off the front stoop and opened it up to Joe’s story [Note: Joe Galloway was the only correspondent on the ground during the battle.] I must have read it 10 times trying to comprehend what had happened and that the name Lt. Col. Hal Moore kept jumping out at me. Somehow, I got the children off to school and drove Dave’s nursery school carpool. When I got home, the phone started ringing and didn’t quit. I totally forgot to pick up the carpool until the school called! Even Peter Jennings called to set up an interview with the local TV station that night. He wanted to film our reaction to seeing Hal on the evening news program. I did not want to do it, but the Public Information Officer at Ft. Benning asked me to. I was so stunned at seeing my husband with tears in his eyes that I could hardly speak. I should have known better as the sergeants were his brothers and the privates his sons—no one can lose that many family members and not weep. We did not make the next evening news.
Up till then, I think we thought of Vietnam as patrols and little actions that really wouldn’t affect us. I stupidly believed that Hal, being a Lt. Colonel, would be safely in the rear. It never entered my head that he would be up on the firing line. The Division had been on field maneuvers so much for months at a time that I think we wives thought of it as another maneuver. We had a tight-knit group of wives who really tried to help each other and took over if one got sick or needed help with the children. It is hard to describe the special closeness that Army wives have to each other. Even though I was lucky enough to become a General’s wife, I never forgot that I started as a lieutenant’s wife and the burdens they carried of raising young children with never enough money or husband time.
Earlier, before the deployment, when we received the news from President Johnson in late July of ’65 that the 1st Cav would go to Vietnam, there was a flurry of activity among the wives to get the men packed up. At that time, the Army had no camouflage insignia or underwear, so our great concern was dying their underwear (two forest green to one black was the standard formula we came down on—I know the Chattahoochee river ran green for months)—inking out the white name tag and the gold U.S. Army on their fatigue shirts.
We were told we had 30 days to get out of the Army quarters on the Post, so there was a great scramble to find a place to live outside the gate in the little town of Columbus. 438 wives settled in the area. Dad wanted me to come to Auburn (40 miles from Columbus, GA), and I felt that I owed him a year with his grandchildren, so I looked over there, but there was nothing that we could fit into for rent and only a $30,000 house to buy, which was way too expensive. I found a dinky house in an area of Columbus that many wives had settled in, close to the Post. The three younger children (3-11 years old) had the largest bedroom—poor Dave slept on a cot, which we put up every night and took down every morning—Greg and Steve (14 and 13) shared a room, and I had the smallest room—could only get out of bed on one side!
We tried to keep the night Hal left like any other in the family. All had dinner together; he read Ceci and Davy their evening story and finished the last-minute packing. We went to bed. I tried to sleep, but I just hung onto him. When he got up to leave around 1:30 AM, I pretended to be asleep as I knew I would start crying and didn’t want him to worry about us. He had enough on his mind. I heard the back door shut, got up, leaned against the upstairs window, and watched the jeep pull away in the dark. Then I cried. I was 34 years old.
In the aftermath of the battle at LZ-Xray, I wish I could say that I was immediately inspired by a greater power to visit my wives who received the fateful telegrams, delivered by taxis at whatever hour of the day or night they arrived at the Western Union office, but it was only my father’s prodding that made me go. I was terrified at how I would be received—would they hate me because it was my husband who had ordered theirs into that awful place? What beautiful women they were. I told you Army wives are special. I remember Mrs. Givens so dignified and gracious. Saying she thought she had escaped the bad news and had been visiting the other wives who had received the telegrams. She received the last one delivered.
A young girl, who couldn’t have been more than 16 or 17, was totally bewildered and genuinely did not understand what had happened or what to do, or where to go. The darling pregnant Puerto Rican girl who spoke no English (I could understand some Spanish) told me how she answered the door at 3 AM, saw the telegram, couldn’t read it but knew immediately what it was and fainted dead away. The taxi driver banged on her neighbor’s door to get help for her. She later had her baby boy in the Benning hospital and we wives got a layette together for her. She then returned home to Puerto Rico. Since it was early in the War, they had pride in what their husbands had done and could feel that their husbands had died “for a good cause.” I thought about them so much in later years when all the demonstrations started, and all the hatred spewed out. What did they have to justify their sacrifice then?
I hate to fault Fort Benning about the telegrams, as I think they were caught just as unprepared as all the rest of us. Benning was just not ready for LZ X-Ray—or Columbus, GA, or America either, for that matter. The war in Vietnam had suddenly changed radically and violently. It was a very cruel way to tell a woman her world had just come to an end, and thanks to Mrs. Kinnard talking with the Fort Benning Commander, that changed very quickly. The Chaplain and an officer would visit with the bad news. Of course, all you had to do was look out your window and see them coming up the walk, and you knew. I can’t add any more to the horror those women suffered being told in such a cruel way that isn’t said in the book.
I will never forget that tense moment when the yellow cab stopped at my door. I saw the driver get out and come up the walk. I was alone, so I hid behind the drapes and prayed he would go away, but he kept coming. When he rang the bell, I decided not to answer; that way, everything would be all right. I finally said to myself come on, Julie, you have to face up to what’s to come, so answer the door. He only wanted help in locating a house number. I literally sagged against the door jamb, white as a sheet, and I was so relieved. I told him never to do that to anyone again. He was so apologetic. Said all the cab drivers had hated that duty.
Hal was so busy that I never received very many letters from him. I got all my news from the Lieutenant’s wives!
[Note: Dad wrote 96 letters home during his deployment in Vietnam. But, unlike during the Korean War, he did not share tactical details except in the letter he wrote following the fight at Xray. “My men were great. Rifles, grenades, and hand-to-hand for the first afternoon. I was not even scratched. I’ll never know why not.”]
It was so lonely at night after the children were in bed not to have him to talk to, to get advice on problems, leaving me to handle all the finances and make ALL decisions. It was so different from the Korean War, as I had so many friends in the same boat. It was the same for the children. Instead of being the odd person with no father, they thought it strange that some kids had a father around and wanted to know why their Dad wasn’t in Vietnam! There was always someone to have a cup of coffee with, or we would get together with all the kids for a potluck supper. During the Korean War, my two best friends in Auburn were Evie Coursen, whose husband was killed winning the Medal of Honor, and Jean, whose husband was a prisoner of war. Not a happy group.
Everything seemed to go along ok until about nine months then I noticed that the wives were starting to have trouble. I had to get one of the wives into psychiatric counseling (her first husband had been killed in Korea), gals were coming down sick, and even I ended up with a hysterectomy in April ’66. We were about at the end of our ropes, and I think a lot of it was the constant TV and newspaper coverage. We grew up in a hurry, listening to the troops talk, seeing the actual action, and hearing the gunfire on TV. The news got home so fast that we wondered if it beat the telegrams and if we would get one the next day.
One of the worst times was when I thought Hal was on his way home. I was waiting for the call from San Francisco. The children had made a big “Welcome Home” sign, and I was watching the noon news on TV when I suddenly heard “Colonel Hal Moore said.” I knew he was in another fight, and only God knew when he would get back. I certainly did not want him killed when he was so close to coming home. I learned later that his replacement was on hand but when his brigade was ordered to rescue a cut-off American Battalion, he refused to turn his men over to a new commander going into a fight. Even though I learned at my father’s knee that to a genuinely dedicated Army officer such as he and my husband, “the troops ALWAYS come first,” you get this terrible feeling that you will NEVER come first, it will ALWAYS be the troops, and anger takes over. I was really hurt and furious with Hal. I felt that we had all given enough! All was forgiven when I finally saw him get off that airplane in Atlanta, Ga., terribly skinny but alive.
[Note: What was Dad doing a few days before returning home? Nothing more than what his troops were doing. Larry Gwin, in his book, Baptism, relates:
“In that morning, after as sleeping soundly as I slept in a year, I remember seeing Colonel Moore, the brigade commander. He was coming with us, on the ground. He was going to participate in the attack. … I picked a spot behind some boulders, I remember, along with my RTO’s and Doc Ambrose, and lay down and waited for the artillery barrage to begin. I could look down the line and see men finding positions, Captain Davison, Colonel Moore, Jim Kelly, and all of our people finding whatever cover they could against the possibility of a short round. And there we waited. After the barrage, we were simply going to stand up and charge across the open field to our front, charge the bunkers in the trench line in the woods across the way, charge across a hundred meters of open ground.”]
I have rambled on and don’t know if any of the above will help you, Randy. I wish I could have made it a little more glamorous, a little more pizazz, but it was a case of day-to-day survival, beating back the monotony, trying not to let the children see how terrified you were over their father’s safety, going to Mass every morning to get any extra help you could for him. The joy over his safe return was tempered by the knowledge of those who didn’t come back. One of the hardest things to do was to go with Hal, a few days after he returned, to visit those widows and fatherless children who were still in the Columbus area. Like he said, he felt guilty that he had survived, but I felt guilty that I had my husband back.
Please give my love to Chris. I really hope we can see you both soon. These Colorado mountains are gorgeous.
Fondly,
Julie Moore
This War Horse reflection was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
