The Vietnam Reader (60 page)

(Let’s tell it true, James, do you expect you’ll ever see that scene in a movie?)

But most particularly, people think that folks do not want to hear about the night at Fire Base Harriette—down the way from LZ Skator-Gator, and within earshot of a ragtag bunch of mud-and-thatch hooches everyone called Gookville—when the whole company, except for one guy, got killed. Fucked-up dead, James; scarfed up. Everybody but Paco got nominated and voted into the Hall of Fame in one fell swoop. The company was night-laagered in a tight-assed perimeter up past our eyeballs in a no-shit firefight with a battalion of headhunter NVA—corpses and cartridge brass and oily magazines and dud frags scattered around, and everyone running low on ammo. Lieutenant Stennett crouched over his radio hoarsely screaming map coordinates to every piece of artillery, every air strike and gunship within radio range, like it was going out of style, when all of a sudden—zoom—the air came alive and crawled and yammered and whizzed and hummed with the roar and buzz of a thousand incoming rounds. It was hard to see for all the gunpowder smoke and dust kicked up by all the muzzle flashes, but everyone looked up—GIs
and
zips—and knew it was every incoming round left in Creation, a wild and bloody shitstorm, a ball-busting cataclysm. We knew that the dirt under our bellies (and the woods and the villes and us with it) was going to be pulverized to ash (and we do mean
pulverized,
James), so
you could draw a thatch rake through it and not find the chunks; knew by the overwhelming, ear-piercing whine we swore was splitting our heads wide open that those rounds were the size of houses. We don’t know what the rest of the company did, or the zips for that matter, but the 2nd squad of the 2nd platoon swapped that peculiar look around that travels from victim to victim in any disaster. We ciphered it out right then and there that we couldn’t dig a hole deep enough, fast enough; couldn’t crawl under something thick enough; couldn’t drop our rifles, and whatnot, and turn tail and beat feet far enough but that this incoming wouldn’t catch us by the scruff of the shirt, so to speak, and lay us lengthwise. We looked around at one another as much as to say,
“Oh fuck!
My man, this ain’t your average, ordinary, everyday, garden-variety sort of incoming. This one’s going to blow everybody down.” Swear to God, James, there are those days—no matter how hard you hump and scrap and scratch—when there is simply nothing left to do but pucker and submit. Paco slipped off his bandanna and sprinkled the last of his canteen water on it, wiped his face and hands, then twirled it up again and tied it around his neck—the knot to one side. Jonesy laid himself out, with his head on his rucksack, getting ready to take another one of his famous naps. Most of the rest of us simply sat back and ran our fingers through our hair to make ourselves as presentable as possible. And Gallagher, who had a red-and-black tattoo of a dragon on his forearm from his wrist to his elbow, buttoned his shirt sleeves and brushed himself off, and sat cross-legged, with his hands folded meditatively on his lap. In another instant everyone within earshot was quiet, and a hush of anticipation rippled through the crowd, like a big wind that strikes many trees all at once. Then we heard the air rushing ahead of those rounds the same as a breeze through a cave—so sharp and cool on the face, refreshing and foul all at once—as though those rounds were floating down to us as limp and leisurely as cottonwood leaves. We looked one another up and down one more time, as much as to say, “Been nice. See you around.
Fucking shit!
Here it comes.”

And in less than it takes to tell it, James, we screamed loud and nasty, and everything was transformed into Crispy Critters for half a dozen clicks in any direction you would have cared to point; everything
smelled of ash and marrow and spontaneous combustion; everything—dog tags, slivers of meat, letters from home, scraps of sandbags and rucksacks and MPC scrip, jungle shit and human shit—
everything
hanging out of the woodline looking like so much rust-colored puke.

Yes, sir, James, we screamed our gonads slam-up, squeeze-up against our diaphragms, screamed volumes of unprintable oaths. When the motherfuckers hit we didn’t go
poof
of a piece; rather, we disappeared like sand dunes in a stiff and steady offshore ocean breeze—one goddamned grain at a time. We disappeared the same as if someone had dropped a spot of dirt into a tall, clear glass of water-bits of mud trailed behind that spot until it finally dissolved and nothing reached bottom but a swirling film. (Not that it didn’t smart, James. Oh, it tickled right smart. First it thumped ever so softly on the top of our heads—your fat-assed uncle patting you on your hat, leaning way back and bragging his fool head off about how proud he is of the way you do your chores. But then came the bone-crushing, ball-busting rush—the senior class’s butter-headed peckerwood flashing around the locker room, snapping the trademark corner of a sopping-wet shower towel upside everyone’s head with a mighty crack. Whack!)

Whooie!
We reared back and let her rip so loud and vicious that all the brothers and sisters at Parson Doo-dah’s Meeting House Revival fled—we mean
split,
James; we mean they peeled the varnish off the double front doors in their haste. The good parson was stalking back and forth in front of the pulpit rail, shouting and getting happy, slapping his big meaty hands together, signifying those sinners—bimbam-boom—and calling on the mercy of Sweet Jesus. Well, sir, our screams hit the roofing tin like the dictionary definition of a hailstorm and swooped down the coal-stove chimney—
“Ah-shool”
Those sinners jumped back a row or two as though Brother Doo-dah had thrown something scalding in their faces. They threw up their arms, wiggled and wagged their fingers, shouting to high heaven, “Allelujah!” “A-men!” “Yes, Lord!” “Save me, Jesus!” Then they grabbed their dog-eared Bibles and hand-crocheted heirloom shawls, and hit the bricks. Yes, sir, James, plenty of the good brothers and sisters got
right and righteous
that
night. And Brother Doo-dah was left standing in the settling dust slowly scratching his bald, shining head, pondering—wondering—just exactly how did he do that marvelous thing?

Oh, we dissolved all right, everybody but Paco, but our screams burst through the ozone; burst through the rags and tatters and café-curtain-looking aurora borealis, and so forth and suchlike; clean as a whistle; clean as a new car—un-fucked-with and frequency-perfect out into God’s Everlasting Cosmos. Out where it’s hot enough to shrivel your eyeballs to the shape and color and consistency of raisins; out where it’s cold enough to freeze your breath to resemble slab plastic.

And we’re pushing up daisies for half a handful of millennia (we’re
all
pushing up daisies, James), until we’re powder finer than talc,
finer
than fine, as smooth and hollow as an old salt lick—but that bloodcurdling scream is rattling all over God’s ever-loving Creation like a BB in a boxcar, only louder.

        8        
Second Wave of Major Films

1972. A South Vietnamese girl flees a U.S. napalm strike by Highway 1.

During the early years of the Reagan administration, after the artistic success (and excess) of
The Deer Hunter, Coming Home,
and
Apocalypse Now,
Hollywood returned to form, giving America a more familiar, less complex vet, and by extension a simplified view of the war. The years between the two waves of major films were ruled first by Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo, the wronged vet on the rampage, and then by the emergence of a related subgenre, the prisoner-of-war adventure film. America, though ready to accept the warrior, still couldn’t look hard at the war. The one good serious film that came out during this period dealt with the fallout of the war in Cambodia, Roland Joffe’s
The Killing Fields
(1984), and it was British.

In the seventies, the psycho vet on a rampage was a staple of both film and TV, an emblem of America’s failure and a perfect catalyst for action. Typically, the vet was a damaged grunt or Green Beret or—more likely—a demolitions expert. In his bitterness against the government for wrongs real or imagined, the disturbed vet took hostages, went on a killing spree, or threatened to bomb public places until the law (our heroes) brought him to justice, often killing him. Rarely, as in the case of Billy Jack, was the vet fighting for an honorable cause. He was a menace, a reminder of how insane and out of control the country had been back in the sixties—in essence, a symptom of a larger sickness the country as a whole had now supposedly overcome.

Like his brothers the earlier psycho vets, in
First Blood
(1982, the
year of the Wall) John Rambo comes to a quiet town, runs afoul of the law, declares war on the authorities, and ends up leveling the place with his specialized training. But unlike his predecessors, Rambo is the hero of the film. The town is corrupt, and in contrast to Billy Jack, Rambo’s noble cause is not universal brotherhood but merely the acknowledgment that the vet did his part and shouldn’t be ostracized for it. Paradoxically, Rambo the psycho vet is supposed to convince the audience of the average vet’s humanity and courage. Of course, the level of violence in the film contradicts this, but no matter, in the end we’re cheering. Interestingly, like Billy Jack, Rambo turns to both Native American and Far Eastern tactics to win his battle against the corrupt establishment; he becomes a lone guerrilla who’s one with the land, very much the frontier hero.

If
First Blood
could possibly be misconstrued as pro-vet, antigovernment and even antiwar, the second installment of the series,
Rambo: First Blood, Part II
(1985), could not. In the sequel Rambo returns to Vietnam to free American prisoners of war being held by both the Viet Cong and a few stray, sinister Russians. Though the mission is sabotaged by a dovish American politician, Rambo succeeds in an orgy of muscles and slow-motion firepower. The film’s politics are standard cold-war fare; the Vietnamese civilians are mere bystanders. Rambo—like the stereotypical vet of the period—is a victim who is now empowered to exact a personal revenge and in doing so achieves redemption. “What do you want?” he is asked at the end, and Rambo says, “For our country to love us as much as we love it.”

Later, in
Rambo III,
Stallone goes to Afghanistan to take on the whole Soviet Army. Like the other two movies, it’s a ridiculous shoot-’em-up with nothing to say, though all three made truckloads of money. The most interesting aspect of the series is surely the position of the vet as prototypical action hero—strong but misunderstood, brave and righteous, a true underdog. After years of fitting bombs together in seedy hotel rooms, the rampaging vet was suddenly someone to cheer.

Meanwhile in 1984, Chuck Norris, a B-movie version of Stallone (and formerly Bruce Lee’s sparring partner), launched the first installment of his POW-rescue series
Missing in Action.
Like Rambo, Norris’s
character is a lone crusader for justice. He returns to Vietnam to find POWs he knows the VC are still holding—in fact are torturing with typical captivity narrative details. Stylized violence ensues. The movies are crude, even stupid, with the Vietnamese captors reminiscent of the evil Japanese guards in World War II films. They die by the bunch and the good guys ride away to big music.

The POW-rescue movies were huge successes as action flicks. While
Uncommon Valor
(1983) was both the first and the best of the lot, its star, Gene Hackman, didn’t have the drawing power of Norris or Stallone, and its producers didn’t feel it could benefit from a sequel. Still, as a group, the movies are interesting in their use of both the war and the vet. By framing the films (and the war) in terms of the documented Vietnamese mistreatment of POWs, the rescue movie gives American viewers a simplified moral high ground that was decidedly absent during the war. The vet finally gets his chance to reclaim America’s lost honor as well as the missing victory.

The Reagan eighties were a strikingly heroic time for the media-created figure of the Vietnam vet. After the dedication of the Wall and the oral history boom, Americans were eager to redress the past and canonize the vet as a forgotten hero. A sympathy that had been withheld for more than a decade burst forth in book after book. In each, the vet was portrayed as a noble victim, someone who’d given up his youth, his body, or his peace of mind for his country. While many of the books were well received—even lauded—by vets, Hollywood’s versions of the war were corny and cartoonish, an embarrassment. The real Vietnam was still missing.

Oliver Stone served in the Third Battalion of the Army’s 25th Infantry Division in 1967-68. After the war he became interested in film, eventually hooking up, like many young filmmakers, with Roger Corman’s production company in the late seventies. His earliest works as a screenwriter and director of B-pictures fit the Gorman formula—fast, violent, and sensational. His first mainstream scripts—for Alan Parker’s
Midnight Express,
Michael Cimino’s
Year of the Dragon
(widely picketed for its treatment of Asian-Americans), and Brian DePalma’s
Scarface—
seemed an extension of that sensibility. Only in
Salvador
(1986) did Stone begin to include the overt criticisms of the American political system that he’s become known for. That same year, he released what is commonly regarded as the best and most realistic film about the American war in Vietnam—
Platoon.