Joseph Galloway, a longtime journalist who embedded with the 1st Cavalry Division during the Vietnam War, has died, according to social media reports by the 1st Cavalry Division Association and other military veteran groups.
Galloway, who was 79, died on Wednesday, according to a social media post by The Greatest Generations Foundation’s Facebook page.
Galloway was a native of Refugio, Texas and spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International. He spent 20 of those years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine. He joined Knight Ridder in the fall of 2002.
Joseph “Joe” Galloway, who covered 1st Cavalry Division’s Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, maintained a relationship with the division in the decades after the war. More then 30 years later, the Army awarded Mr. Galloway the Bronze Star Medal for his efforts to save a private in the first major battle of the Vietnam War. He carried an M16 rifle alongside his notebook and cameras, and in the heat of battle, he charged into the fray to pull an Army private out of the flames of a napalm blast.
Mr. Galloway, whose reporting took him from the jungles of Vietnam to the halls of the Kremlin and the deserts of Iraq, was 79 when he died Aug. 18 at a hospital in Concord, N.C. The cause of death was complications from a heart attack, said his friend and former editor John Walcott, according to the Washington Post. Galloway’s wife, Grace, had posted on her Facebook in recent days that her husband had a massive heart attack earlier this month, and has been in out and out of the hospital since then.
During the course of 15 years of foreign postings—including assignments in Japan, Indonesia, India, Singapore and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow, Galloway served four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam, covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War and half a dozen other combat operations.
The late Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who first met Galloway in South Vietnam when he was a brand new Army major, called the Texan “the finest combat correspondent of our generation—a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.”
Galloway was co-author, with Lt. Gen. (ret) Hal Moore, of the national bestseller “We Were Soldiers Once-And Young,” which has been made into a critically acclaimed movie, “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson. “We Were Soldiers Once-And Young” is presently in print in six different languages, and more than 1.2 million copies have been sold.
Galloway also co-authored “Triumph Without Victory: The History of the Persian Gulf War” for Times Books. He and Gen. Moore in 2008 published their sequel to We Were Soldiers, a work titled: “We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam.”
Last year Military History magazine polled 50 leading historians to choose the Ten Greatest Books Ever Written on War. We Were Soldiers Once…and Young was among those ten books.