Vietnam: Books, films and comments

First-year students in Eric Schroeder's seminar on the Vietnam War read the following books and watched these films depicting the war. Student comment on their reaction to the interpretations of the war.

Books

Backfire by Loren Baritz; Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr; Reprint edition (June 1998)

Reading the oral histories of those involved I find that few knew the purpose of the war when it was being fought. Reading Loren Baritz's Backfire, I find that there was no single political purpose to the war; it was waged by various ideologies, affiliations, and fears. Is it not said that “hindsight is 20/20” while foresight is much worse? I am afraid that this may not be the case with Vietnam. While we can see more of the details, learn more of the facts, hear more numbers (and why we should doubt them), the war does not become more clear. The more I learn the muddier the water and things are muddy enough as it is.-- Theo. Roffe

The Other Side of Heaven: Post-war Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers with Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, Truong Vu, editors. Publisher: Curbstone Press; (1995)

I think I completely misunderstood Nguyen Mong Giac’s “The Slope of Life” [from The Other Side of Heaven] For one thing I thought that the main guy was talking to a woman in the beginning, but apparently she was just overhearing. And in class people didn’t seem to agree with me that the collision destroying his cargo was not a result of his disability. But the way I read it, there was no way that it could have been because he had lost a leg. In the end of the story, the legless man pays for coffee after the blind man realizes that he cannot afford to make good his offer to pay. This served to show both that the blind man was disconnected from the world and that the legless man was living a much more successful life. While he had chosen what appeared to be a preposterous job for a one-legged man, delivering “large earthen jars” by bicycle, his was successful; successful enough to pay for expensive coffee after incurring a large fee for destroying his entire cargo – 10 of the heavy jars. This accident only happened because a truck stopped in front of him very abruptly. It seems that this was read by others as the fault of his disability. But how could it be the fault of that if he had overcome the disability well enough to not only to do his job, but to have only the one accident in his six months doing it? -- Theo. Roffe

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh
Publisher: Riverhead books, The Berkely Publishing Group; (March 1995)

I'm sure Platoon is a great film, but I doubt that it will have the same impact on me that The Sorrow of War did. None of the other texts we've looked at so far has pulled me into it to the extent that this book did. For me, that is my biggest gauge of how effective a film or piece of literature is. Immediately after finishing the book, I found it very difficult to pull myself away from the various worlds that Bao Ninh had created. I wanted very much to believe that Kien was a real man who had struggled very hard to exorcise his demons through his writings. Like Kien, I could not decide whether I should love Phuong for all she gave or hate her for all she took or both. Clearly, this is evidence of Ninh's skill as a story teller. I think the greatest feeling that this book stirred in me was the feeling of being ripped off by the popular culture view of the Vietnam War. It seems that so often the focus of Americans when discussing the war is what an embarrassment it was for us. It's just so sad that we lost some dignity. Oh, but what about the country that we were fighting in? -- Scott Homrighausen

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien; Publisher: Broadway Books; Reprint edition (April 1999)

I just finished The Things They Carried and I am left thinking about the realness of my life to me and how it can be messed up so easily by something fast and dangerous like a bullet. I really fell into liking Kiowa, the character in the book who dies in the shit-field and sinks under. But it was really nothing about that character in particular that made me start to think so seriously about the subject. He was a great guy and read the New Testament and was an American Indian. I just finished doing a project on the culture and the language of the Navajo, and I came to really respect a lot of the Native American history and struggle. Kiowa resonated with my mindset, but that really wasn't it. It was the scene where O'Brien is talking about the guy he killed on the trail and is describing his wounds on his body over and over again, saying the same thing, speculating about this guy's place in life. And what he was doing, trying to give this body meaning and understand something about this life he had just taken, seemed perfectly reasonable, life justifying your use of force by the understanding of life. -- Chris Knight

Dispatches by Michael Herr; Publisher: Vintage Books; Reprint edition (August 1991)

Dispatches intimidated me, and I was slightly annoyed by the author's pretentiousness. He didn't bother to introduce anything he talked about, throwing in jargon from the war whenever it fit. Of course, I'm also not used to reading that type of post-modernist book, with the fragmentation. However, his battle scene descriptions were superb, and I found his accounts of the soldiers he knew to be glimpses into their minds. War is crazy, and so is that book. -- Chris Knight

Films

Apocalypse Now Redux, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Marlon Brandown, Robert Duvall and Martin Sheen (2000)

Apocalypse Now and Dispatches segue right into each other. First and foremost their language is the same, not necessarily Apocalypse Now's screenplay but the juxtaposition and intermingling of beauty and horror. Herr repeatedly describes the Marines he worked with as beautiful, even in the same paragraph as describing their age and fatigue. I've noticed an escalation in the shock impact of the subject matter, a story from Backfire's first chapter describing the kidnapping, rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl. I looked at that page for a while and couldn't believe it. As we seep more and more into the war it's getting more and more hideous; strange that there should be this spurt of beauty right in the middle of it, why Copella would want to shoot some of the scenes in the way he did. Then again, Herr also almost uses the exact words from a line in Heart of Darkness, "the death, the despair, the horror of it," in one of his muses on Vietnam. In Apocalypse Now, Vietnam works perfectly as an extrapolation of Heart of Darkness's theme. Why then would Herr describe the men as having some of their best years in Vietnam, when he also describes them as snapping and rigging grenades in their own outhouses? -- Helen Cunningham

The Deer Hunter, directed by Michael Cimino, starring Robert DeNiro, John Cazale, John Savage, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken (1978)

This past week in class, we watched the most moving movie yet (The Deer Hunter). I was most touched by the movie, and in particular, the Russian Roulette scene. The scene could be interpreted as representational of the Vietnam war in some deep way, but I found most of the power in the physical scene taking place in the movie: the way the two participants" had to face each other; when "Mickey" had to goad on his best friend, played by Christopher Walken, to pull the trigger, just so they‚d have a chance to survive; even the slaps delivered by the VC leader contributed immensely to the tension in the scene. And of course, this scene was proceeded by over an hour of getting to know the characters in their hometown, and then in the mountains. The mountain deer hunting scenes had special significance to me, as I love the outdoors and am planning to go deer hunting in the fall. I started to identify with the honor of Mickey's "one shot" approach. I did not expect him necessarily to be the hero in Vietnam, I thought he might be the one to go crazy, judging by his temper and the streaking after the wedding. -- Chris Knight

Full Metal Jacket, directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio (1987)

The scene in Full Metal Jacket where they're first getting to the bombed-out city and the Surfin' Bird song starts playing, I was really struck by the juxtaposition of that happy music onto a scene that would normally have a dramatic or subdued score. I think it's mirroring the elation the men felt taking the city, but I was humming along and laughing when I saw the three guys with the camera walking backward in that extremely slow fashion. I think that’s what really made me like that movie, as it kept my attention, unlike Platoon. Granted, I do think Platoon had a better plot, Full Metal Jacket was more like a collection of vignettes straight out of Dispatches, but I like Full Metal Jacket better because of the dynamics it presents and the shift from boot camp to Vietnam. Oh, that’s another thing; I think the sudden use of popular music in the second half of the movie is symbolic of the characters entry into “normal” life again, where they have freer reign over themselves. Boot camp was a place where they were broken down and built back up and had little self expression, but once in Vietnam, their personalities could return. -- Holly Vranikar

Hearts and Minds, directed by xxx, documentary ()

The Green Berets, directed by John Wayne and Ray Kellogg, starring John Wayne, David Janssen and Jim Hutton, (1968)

After watching the poorly disguised propaganda film, The Green Berets, I was struck the most by how demonized the press was. It was really foreign to me, as most of the material I’ve encountered dealing with the press around the Vietnam war portrayed them as watchdogs, or as the good guys, the ones exposing all the evils and corruption. So to see them in the film as this sort of seditious force was slightly irksome, but that I’m sure is the benefit of hindsight. The opening scene, with the character who says he wasn’t fooled by the brainwashed captain, might have been true to the time period. People might have hated what the press was doing and might have loved that scene where the captain dumps all those weapons in front of him. But with a modern perspective, with the way the press is hailed now for rallying anti-war support, that scene seemed untrue and the captain came off looking foolish.

I also was bothered by the portrayal of the Vietnamese on our side. From the reading I’ve done, I’ve gotten the sense that most Vietnamese were simply apathetic and trying to survive. I didn’t feel that they had the kind of hatred that the Vietnamese commander, played by the guy from Star Trek, showed towards the Viet Cong. It also bothered me that the villagers and miscellaneous Vietnamese characters were portrayed as so helpless and in dire need of our protection. I have the feeling from the reading that they knew how to survive better with the guerrillas than we did and that they weren’t so helpless at all. -- Holly Vranicar

Platoon, directed by Oliver Stone, starring Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe and Charlie Scheen (1986)

Last Thursday I was thinking about Platoon while sitting in a lecture. With my black, liquid ink pen I scribbled down a few words: Perhaps more “sweet and fitting” are the words of Winfred Owen. Mostly this was simply a reference to “Dulce et Decorum Est,” a poem by Winfred Owen about the First World War. Even though he died in 1918 and wrote his poetry about such a different war, I think that his words can be used effectively on the subject of Vietnam. And such a literary reference is not out of place – Michael Herr refers to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American in Dispatches and Apocalypse Now! is based on the plotline of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Such thinking got me pouring out references like a word processor filling in macros. -- Theo. Roffe

Rambo: First Blood Part II, directed by George P. Cosmatos, starring Sylvester Stallone (1986)

I would have to say that watching Rambo: First Blood Part II was one of the most enjoyable experiences of this class. Rambo is definitely ranked high on the list next to, if not above, The Green Berets. Clearly, this movie is outrageous. I love outrageous movies. Everything from the year it is set in to Rambo's knife to the mud monster scene is all outrageous. Also essential to this film is the dialogue. Quotes such as "Sir, do we get to win this time?" and "I want what they want: for our country to love us as much as we love it?" will remain as fond memories in my heart for years to come. It has definitely been awhile since I've seen a movie with such profound thoughts coming from a man who can slaughter 300 plus Vietnamese and Russians in 95 minutes. -- Scott Homrighausen

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