Missing from the Action

Vietnam has been called the Television War because 60 percent of Americans received their information about it primarily from television. Television correspondents were enjoined to deliver “good footage,” and the ever-present television cameras brought into American living rooms horrors previously reserved for the nightmares of veterans. Good footage usually meant “boom-boom”—journalistic jargon for firefights, artillery barrages, and air strikes—film clips that would make a strong emotional impact.

Critics of the Television War charge that the coverage was high on emotion but woefully short on substance. Viewers were barraged with images of death and destruction, but television’s limitations and short segments punctuated by commercials kept viewers from understanding the complexities of the war. Millions tuned in every night, but few seemed to know what the war was about. The Vietnamese themselves were relegated to the background while American politicians, generals, and antiwar acitivists argued about what was happening and what it all meant.

Telling It Like It Was

But while television’s appetite for the war was insatiable, the movie industry was unsure what to do with it. Hollywood first tested the waters in 1969 with John Wayne’s The Green Berets. Later Vietnam movies focused on the anguish of the returning veteran (Coming Home, The Deer Hunter) or the fantasy that a few good Americans like Chuck Norris (Missing in Action) or Sylvester Stallone (Rambo) could have won had only the politicians untied their hands. Veterans complained that the films portrayed them as psychotic misfits, trained killers who might go berserk at any moment.

Not until 15 years after the troops came home was Hollywood willing to address the war from the perspective of the “grunts” who fought it. Oliver Stone, himself a Vietnam vet, tried for 10 years to sell his screenplay for Platoon, only to have it rejected as too controversial. Not until his successes with Scarface and Salvador was Stone considered bankable by the studios. But in addition to doing well at the box office, Platoon was the first Vietnam film to be embraced by the vets who fought the war. The consensus among infantry veterans was that Platoon tells it like it was.

Then, on the heels of Platoon’s success, Francis Coppola’s Gardens of Stone examined the war from the perspective of a gung-ho career soldier agonizing over the army’s disintegrating morale as the American public turned against the military. And Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket combined elements of the guts-and-glory war movie with an updated Red Badge of Courage-style psychological novel.

But film, like television, is a limited medium, and the Movie War, like the Television War, reveals only a portion of the truth. Both media tend to be imitative and derivative because they must sell their vision to the public. Television commentary on the war mirrored the public-opinion polls; to do otherwise would have lost viewers. Likewise, a movie will only be successful if moviegoers approve of its message and tell their friends to see it.

Beyond V.D. Lectures

It remains to be seen whether the Movie War can address America’s failure to form a rationale for the war and communicate that rationale to the men asked to fight it (and to the nation asked to support it). World War II American soldiers went through an indoctrination program in which they were taught about Nazis and Fascists and instructed in the nature of the war they were fighting. But the only indoctrination I ever received from the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam conflict came through V.D. lectures before my ship entered port. When we arrived in the Gulf of Tonkin, it occurred to me that I didn’t know where we were. So I went to the ship’s library and looked it up on a map. Meanwhile, the war raged on.

If Americans see future conflicts in the Persian Gulf, Nicaragua, or Lebanon in the light of an incomplete understanding of Vietnam, we will repeat the cycle, unleashing again and again the dogs of war before we have asked what we wish to accomplish. Wars are not won on the battlefield alone. A nation at war must know why it is fighting and what it hopes to accomplish. It must understand the nature of its enemies and its allies if it hopes to fight a just war that results in a more just order. It is essential, therefore, to look at what the Movie War does not address.

The View From Nam

Notably absent from Vietnam war movies is the perspective of Vietnamese people. They appear briefly as prostitutes, thieves, and snipers, but there are no real Vietnamese characters. A viewer might surmise that the Vietnamese did not even field an army, that they were but scouts for the Americans. But while American troops in 1968 topped out at 492,000, the South Vietnamese forces numbered 626,000. The Tet Offensive left 3,895 Americans dead, but South Vietnamese losses were 4,954 military and 14,300 civilians. The South Vietnamese Ministry of Social Welfare counted 2,000 new orphans per month.

“Movie makers are not interested in what we have to say,” former Vietnamese Air Force Colonel Vinh Due Vu told me, “just as the journalists who covered the war were not interested in Vietnamese opinions then.” Vu, who worked as a military journalist, says it is up to Vietnamese to present their views to the American public—and he admits they have not done this.

Col. Cam Bo Tu, a Vietnamese pilot who flew numerous combat missions in Da Nang, Quang Tri, and Hue, worries that the Movie War shows too much of the dark side of American troops. “I liked Platoon for its realism,” he says, “but my personal opinion is that it does not show enough of the reality. I think it deals too much with drugs, girls, and killing civilians.” Tu recalls American soldiers who visited his home and taught songs to his children, and fears movies like Platoon will lead viewers to think all Americans were cynical and brutal.

Some American veterans are also disturbed by the overgeneralizations in the new Vietnam movies. Sonny Alvarez, a leader of Seattle’s Vietnam Veterans of America post, appreciated Platoon’s realistic portrayal of the horrors of war, but he shared many of the same reservations as Tu and Vu. “I didn’t like the way they showed the soldiers raping the girls and shooting a lady for no reason,” he says. “In my outfit …, I never saw that happen. I’ve heard of it happening, but I never saw it.”

Alvarez also believes Americans will not get a true picture of American involvement in the war until we deal with the experience of our allies. “I thought The Killing Fields was better because it showed the Cambodian guy’s perspective. Sure, we lost a lot in that war, but the Vietnamese and Cambodians lost more; they lost their countries.”

By Stefan Ulstein, chairman of the English department, Bellevue (Wash.) Christian School.

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