Galloway Ends 50-Year Career

BAYSIDE, Texas: After 50 years in the business, Joe Galloway, a former OPC member, wrote “30” to his wire service, magazine and newspaper career in January. In his final syndicated column for the McClatchy Newspapers, Galloway, 68, wrote, “Oh, I will still write an occasional op-ed piece when the bastards in Washington, D.C., blast across the line into moron territory, and there’s always another book waiting to be written.”

Galloway never attended college, but he lectured to cadets at West Point. And he never stopped educating himself. When he worked on UPI’s Asia desk in Tokyo, he always was reading a book when not writing a dispatch.

At age 18, Galloway went straight from high school to reporting on the daily Victoria Advocate in his native Texas. Before he could legally drink or vote, Galloway was UPI’s state bureau chief in Kansas, and his friends and mentors included former President Harry Truman and former Kansas Governor Alf Landon, who was defeated for president by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1964 at age 24, Galloway was sent to Vietnam where his reporting on the first major battle involving U.S. troops became the basis for We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, the 1992 best-selling book that he co-wrote with his friend and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore and that was made into a 2002 Hollywood movie. For UPI, Galloway also reported from Laos, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, East Timor, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Then he spent nearly 20 years at U.S. News & World Report, Knight Ridder Newspapers and the McClatchy Newspaper. Galloway won a Bronze Star in November 1965 for valor for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire in the Ia Drang Valley, the battle he wrote about in his book.

In his farewell column, Galloway named many of his friends who were killed in Vietnam, commenting, “You grew up fast covering the infantry at war in the jungles and mountain highlands and broad rice paddies of Vietnam… . [many of my] friends were killed covering the war. We mourn their loss even now.”