Julia Compton Moore, Portrayed In "We Were Soldiers" (Wife Of Lt.Gen. Harold Moore)
Bill Schenley
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~11777~2096969,00.html
Julia Compton Moore, who successfully waged a ladylike
battle to change the impersonal way military families
learned of combat deaths in Vietnam, died April 18 of
cancer. She was 75.
Her compassion for the wives and families of fallen soldiers
was dramatized in the 2002 movie "We Were Soldiers," which
was based on the best-selling memoir co-authored by her
husband, retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore.
In the movie, Mel Gibson portrays Moore commanding the 1st
Battalion's 7th Cavalry in the November 1965 battle of the
Ia Drang Valley, the first major engagement between the
People's Army of Vietnam and U.S. forces. Two thousand North
Vietnamese soldiers surrounded 450 U.S. soldiers dropped
onto the site by helicopter. The battle lasted four days.
More than 1,000 Vietnamese soldiers and 121 American
soldiers died.
At the time, the Army officially notified families of
soldiers killed in combat by sending a telegram via taxi.
Julia Moore, the daughter of an Army colonel and worried
about her husband's safety in Vietnam, was appalled by this
policy, picturing the hundreds of other Fort Benning
military wives waiting in nearby Columbus, Ga. She could not
imagine being home alone with her small children if one of
those taxis arrived.
"Daddy, I don't know what to do," she told her father, Col.
Louis J. Compton, after hearing about the taxi-delivered
death notices.
"You're a Compton and a thoroughbred," he replied. "You know
what to do."
So she went to the Army post commander and announced that
she wanted to know immediately which women would get
telegrams that day. Then she drove after each taxi,
following the driver to the door, making sure that nobody
received the terrible news alone.
Until the Army changed its death-notice policy, "she
literally followed the taxicab so she could be there when
the telegram was delivered," Hal Moore told the Crested
Butte News in a 2001 interview about the movie version of
his book. (The movie version of Julia Moore delivering the
telegrams in person was "a bit of Hollywood," he remarked.)
Julia Moore also quietly attended the funerals of more than
a dozen of her husband's men, something her husband and
children learned only years later.
"She didn't want us to worry," said her daughter Julie Moore
Thompson, who was in sixth grade when the Ia Drang Valley
battle took place. "She was the type of woman to shield her
children from that. I don't know how she did it. I can't
imagine having your husband on a battlefield and trying to
maintain a home for five children, without letting them
know, when every minute of every day that you're terrified
this stupid cab will pull up in front of your house."
One of the cabs did pull up in front of the Moores' Columbus
house. Hal Moore had stepped on a North Vietnamese Army
booby trap - a poisoned stake that pierced his boot and
foot. Julia Moore and her children knelt on the family room
floor, praying the rosary for Hal Moore's deliverance.
When Hal Moore's tour in Vietnam ended, the Moores lived the
nomadic life typical of military families, moving every year
and a half or so to a new base in a new state.
"We lived in about a million states," Julie Thompson said.
The Moores spent two years in Korea, and two in Norway.
Julia Moore kept some constancy in her family's footloose
life by saving holiday decorations and faithfully following
the same annual ceremonies to celebrate Christmas, Easter,
birthdays and other special days.
After Moore retired from the military, he and his wife
bought a house in Mount Crested Butte and divided their time
between their Colorado and Alabama homes.
In addition to her husband, survivors include three sons,
Greg Moore of Dallas, retired Lt. Col. Steve Moore of
Richmond, Va., and Lt. Col. David Moore of Fort Monmouth,
N.J.; two daughters, Julie Moore Thompson of Granbury,
Texas, and Cecile Moore Rainey of Denver; and 12
grandchildren.
DESSCRIBE1
Erich
"I will play the lute with my foot, as I juggle these knives and hit a slap
shot 60 feet, while handcuffed to a live alligator...AND...I will act...like a
BABY!" - Fritz the Evil Butler
