We Were Soldiers

1	For You / Dave Matthews 4:58
2	Some Mother's Son / Carolyn Dawn Johnson 4:22
3	Fall Out / Train 6:53
4	Soldier / Steven Curtis Chapman 4:38
5	Good Man / India.Arie 3:33
6	The Beautiful / Five for Fighting 5:49
7	My Dear Old Friend / Mary Chapin Carpenter 2:42
8	I Believe / Tammy Cochran 3:17
9	The Widowing Field / Jars of Clay 4:15
10	Not So Distant Day / Jamie O'Neal 3:39
11	Didn't I / Montgomery Gentry 3:42
12	The Glory of Life / Rascal Flatts 4:24
13	Sgt. MacKenzie / Joseph Kilna MacKenzie 4:39
14	The Mansions of the Lord (Suite) / United States Military Academy Band 6:32

Barnes & Noble

For this Mel Gibson movie about a 1965 battle in Vietnam that turned out to be one of the most savage in U.S. history, producer Ken Levitan put out a call for songs that would honor the memory of the soliders who perished in this bloody event. The result is a mix of mainstream Nashville country artists, Christian acts, and some of pop music's biggest names. Among the songs that thematically hit home are India.Arie's breathy acoustic ballad "Good Man," Train's stirring, piano-driven "Fall Out," and Five for Fighting's rumbling "The Beautiful," with its serpentine guitar playing and John Ondrasik's nasal alto. Balancing out these sentiments of sorrow and loss are ones of hope and homecoming: the rich and soaring Dave Matthews/Johnny Cash duet "For You," the righteous, Baptist-flavored "The Glory of Life" from country band Rascal Flatts, and the inspirational Jamie O'Neal/Michael McDonald duet, "Not So Distant Day." The lone wail of Joseph Kilna MacKenzie's bagpipe throughout "Sgt. MacKenzie" and the robust chorus of the United States Military Academy Cadet Glee Club and Metro Voices on "The Mansions of the Lord (Suite)" pluck the heartstrings. With many U.S. military personnel serving overseas in a post-September 11th world, We Were Soldiers couldn't have come along at a better time. Dave Gil de Rubio

All Music Guide

From a record company point of view, the opportunity to create a musical counterpart to writer/director Randall Wallace's Vietnam war movie We Were Soldiers must have seemed ideal, and Sony has responded by getting a large number of its developing pop and country acts, among them Train and Five for Fighting on the pop side and Tammy Cochran and Montgomery Gentry on the country side, to record new material for the project. This is a "music from and inspired by" soundtrack, though there is no indication which songs were used in the actual film. Clearly, the songwriters (most of whom are not the same as the performers) were inspired by a story of wartime separation ("Good Man," "Some Mother's Son") and camaraderie ("For You," "Soldier"), as well as that Vietnam-specific complaint, "Why weren't the vets welcomed home as heroes?" ("Didn't I"). All this self-righteous solemnity might be easier to take if it were in the service of a movie about a different war and not another of those Hollywood rationalizations attempting to justify Vietnam by focusing on the grunts. (Is Hollywood ever going to make a film about the people who were right about Vietnam?) But even then, the tone would be so heavy-handed that it wouldn't be much fun to listen to. William Ruhlmann