Hollywood has long been mired in a quagmire of cynicism about the Vietnam War. The new film We Were Soldiers is, happily, a different story — and a far richer one.

Mel Gibson stars as Lt. Col. Harold G. Moore, who in 1965 led 450 men of the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry, named after Custer's old unit, into the "Valley of Death." You'll find it on maps as the la Drang Valley, near the Cambodian border, in the Central Highlands of what used to be South Vietnam.

The film begins 11 years earlier in 1954 during the Indo-China War, when a French unit is ambushed by the Viet Minh, who kill the wounded and take no prisoners. Clearly, it is this kind of massacre that awaits the men of Moore's battalion, if the People's Army of North Vietnam has its way.

The action begins when a Communist force attacks an American outpost and disappears into the mountains. The U.S. military sees this as an opportunity to test their new experiment in "airborne cavalry," and so troopers riding helicopters instead of horses are inserted into the countryside to strike quickly against the North Vietnamese. Commanding the helicopter task force is Maj. Bruce Crandall, played with convincing grittiness by Greg Kinnear.

Like Custer at the Little Big Horn, Moore and his men discover they've encountered a huge enemy force. Immediately they are surrounded by some 2,000 regulars of the People's Army and hanging on for dear life trying to defend a piece of land about the size of a football field. In the next three days, 234 men of the 1st Battalion would be killed. But Moore isn't Custer, nor do his men suffer the fate of the French. The enemy withdraws after suffering a withering kill ratio (12 to 1 for the entire Ia Drang campaign, which lasted 34 days).

In directorial hands less sensitive that those of Randall Wallace (who wrote the screenplay for Braveheart) this could have been yet another disappointing film about the Vietnam War. But in We Were Soldiers, Wallace succumbs neither to cynicism nor to blind, knee-jerk patriotism.

Moore, it turns out, is Catholic. He prays with his children, he prays with his men in church, he prays for them on the battlefield. He loves and respects his wife, Julie, played with great appeal by Madeleine Stowe (from Last of the Mohicans). With a sense of thankfulness, he embraces the whole spectrum of life the Creator offers humanity, including physical intimacy with the mother of his children. (Thankfully, their privacy is not compromised by any voyeuristic sex scenes, even for the "sake of the story" or some other rationalization of the week.)

We Were Soldiers challenges Hollywood's narrow stereotypes: that only bad guys are interesting, deep characters, and that life ends with monogamous marriage because kids get in the way of sex or romance. Moore lives in the real world, and relies on the principle that being a good father will make him a better soldier. "I hope being good at the one helps me be better at the other," he says.

But the enemy has loved ones as well, as we are shown when a Communist soldier looks at picture of a woman and then places it in a diary he puts inside his shirt. Being on the wrong side of history, and being in the grip of an evil and destructive ideology, does not destroy the fundamental humanity of the enemy — because all people have intrinsic value.

This is not because they are products of a cold, purposeless universe, mind you, a view commonly held in naturalistic circles on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Rather it's because our moms and dads and children and brothers and sisters, whether in the United States or Vietnam, are all created in the image of God. This basic fact is what makes tyranny so oppressive, and it is the disfiguring of that which was originally given in such pristine beauty that makes war a horror. It's when a Rembrandt is ripped that we cry out in anguish.

Patriotism is blind when it is merely an immanent love of country — as is sometimes expressed in sentiments such as "my country, right or wrong." The fundamental reason audiences can accept the Americans of We Were Soldiers as the good guys is that America at her best stands for that which is universally good. That means things such as freedom under God as opposed to enslavement by the state and independence from God; love of family as opposed to absorption by class, race, gender, or party; the right of the individual to question authority and demand reasonable, verifiable answers; and the right to resist tyranny, whether the "democratic" oppression of Communism or the fanatical attacks of a Bin Laden, or the encroachments of a federal state that uses a "living Constitution" to replace the real one that Americans of wars past bled and died for.

I think the Founding Fathers understood something that tyrants despise and fear: Patriotism works best (as do films with patriotic themes) when love of country is transcended by love of God, lest the state become supreme and citizens become obedient subjects, and the individual ceases to exist. When battle is done, when love means shedding blood for the man next to you, and the dead are buried and the wounded healed, love is what remains. It gives pause to pain and comforts the soul.

But love sometimes requires self-defense. That's why it is good when, in the midst of the battle, journalist Joseph A. Galloway (played by Barry Pepper, the Bible-quoting Southern sniper of Saving Private Ryan) picks up a gun and fires away at the enemy. Galloway was the only journalist to witness the battle firsthand, and he and Moore together wrote the highly praised book on which the movie is based, We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young.

Galloway's choice is not just correct practically but also philosophically. Out of necessity, it was a do-or-die situation, to help the Americans defend their position, not to mention save his own skin (which is a good thing: "It covers my body," as Robert De Niro explains in Ronin). But on a philosophical level, Galloway as journalist has as good a case as any for pulling the trigger. For just as the atheistic materialism of the Communist worldview has no place for freedom of thought in general — because materialism reduces mind to a mere tool for survival instead of an instrument for knowing truth — it also has no basis for the freedom of the press in particular.

When Galloway picks up a weapon, he begins doing with a gun what he has already been doing with a typewriter: Fighting evil, defending freedom, first as a man, then as a journalist. The role of the journalist and the role of the soldier are usually different, but a film such as We Were Soldiers helps us see that there may be no fundamental contradiction between journalism and American patriotism. It is fitting that the U.S. Constitution acknowledges both the right to a free press and a right to bear arms — and that both of these basic principles are rooted in the Declaration's framework of inalienable rights that derive from the Creator of this world. History and logic show us that hanging these things in mid-air will not do, and that the rational theism of the Judeo-Christian worldview changes everything.

"Hate war, love America's warriors" — that's what Harold Moore told Dan Rather when asked what was the one thing he hoped America would learn from a film such as We Were Soldiers.

"His ultimate message," says Mel Gibson, "is that he can do all things because he believes there's something greater than himself. For him, the battle at Ia Drang was one more proof. In moments like that, flesh and blood can only get you so far. After that, you're in the realm of the spirit."

Flesh and blood and love and spirit — from these things come better fathers and families and warriors, not to mention better movies. And countries too, if the leaders get it.