Joseph L. Galloway
Joseph L. Galloway, one of America’s premier war and foreign correspondents for half a century, recently retired as the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. Before that he held an assignment as a special consultant to General Colin Powell at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent twenty-two years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and nearly twenty years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine. He joined Knight Ridder in the fall of 2002.
During the course of fifteen years of foreign postings—including assignments in Japan, Indonesia, India, Singapore and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow in the former Soviet Union—Galloway served four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War and half a dozen other combat operations.
From 1990 to 1991, Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in the assault into Iraq. Galloway also covered the Haiti incursion and made trips to Iraq to cover the current war in 2003 and from 2005 to 2006.
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf called Galloway “the finest combat correspondent of our generation—a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.”
He is co-author, with Lt. Gen. (retired) Hal G. 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. In 2008, he and Gen. Moore 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 fifty leading historians to choose the ten greatest books ever written on war. We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young was among those ten books.
On May 1, 1998, Galloway was decorated with a Bronze Star Medal with V for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire in the Ia Drang Valley, in November 1965. His is the only medal of valor the US Army awarded to a civilian for actions during the Vietnam War.
Galloway received the National Magazine Award in 1991 for a U.S. News & World Report cover article on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Ia Drang Battles, and the National News Media Award of the U.S. Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1992 for coverage of the Gulf War. In 2000, he received the President’s Award for the Arts of the Vietnam Veterans Association of America. In 2001, he received the BG Robert L. Denig Award for Distinguished Service presented by the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association. In 2005, he received the Abraham Lincoln Award of the Union League Club of Philadelphia, and the John Reagan (Tex) McCrary Award of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Galloway was awarded the 2011 Doughboy Award, the highest honor the Infantry can bestow on an individual. Few civilians have ever received a Doughboy. On Veterans Day, 2011, he received the Legacy of Service Award of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.
Galloway is a member of the boards of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the nonprofit organization No Greater Love founded to assist the victims of war, the 1st Cavalry Division Association, the National Infantry Museum, the School of Social Studies of The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, the Museum of America’s Wars, and the Military Reporters and Editors Association.
Galloway is the recipient of honorary doctorate degrees from Norwich University and Mount St. Mary’s College of Newburgh, New York.
In early 2012 Galloway was named Journalist-in-Residence at Texas A&M University’s Corpus Christi campus.
He has lived in his native South Te
“We were children of the 1950s and John Kennedy's young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with out white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truely the future he had envisioned for us.”