The Vietnam Reader (62 page)

Pyle degenerates further, developing a strange relationship with his rifle, Charlene. On the range, he finds the one thing he can master. Earlier, Hartman cited the marksmanship of Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman (the University of Texas tower sniper) as products of the Marine Corps. Cowboy and Joker are worried about Pyle, and the night after they graduate and receive their assignments, Joker finds him in the head with his rifle, obviously deranged. He calls for Hart-man, who comes in with his usual over-the-top bluster—“What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn’t mummy and daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?”—and Pyle blows him away, then eats Charlene and splashes the back of his head all over the clean white tiles.

Cut to Saigon, awash in signage and blatting traffic. A whore cruises Joker, now a combat correspondent, and Rafterman (Kevyn Major-Howard), his green photographer, as Nancy Sinatra belts out
“These Boots are Made for Walkin’.” “Me so horny,” the whore entices Joker, “Me love you long time.” A Saigon cowboy snatches Rafterman’s camera and jumps on a buddy’s Honda. Afterward, Rafterman gripes about the ingratitude of the Vietnamese. “It’s just business,” Joker says.

At a
Stars and Stripes
briefing in Da Nang, we see how Joker’s out-of-it editor only wants to publish good news, asking Joker to change his phrasing (“search and destroy” becomes “sweep and clear”) and even to fabricate stories (“grunts like reading about dead officers”). It’s Tet 1968, and that night in the barracks Rafterman and Joker are talking about “getting back into the shit” when the VC hit the front gate to the tune of “The Chapel of Love.” Our green heroes rush out to a bunker, Joker manning a machine gun. “I’m not ready for this shit,” he admits.

The next morning the wire is strung with dead VC. At his
Stars and Stripes
briefing, Joker mouths off, and his editor assigns him to cover the enemy occupation of Hue. (This is also the first time we see the peace sign on Joker’s helmet, as well as the motto:
BORN TO KILL.)
Rafterman asks if he can come along, and the two take a chopper north.

In Hue their first stop is a mass grave of civilians executed by either the VC or NVA, another learning experience for Joker. An officer comments on the contradictory messages on Joker’s helmet, asking if it’s a joke. Joker replies that he’s trying to say “something about the duality of man, sir.” The oblivious officer (as loopy as Kilgore in
Apocalypse Now
) tells him to jump on the wagon for the big win, and that “inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.”

Joker finds out that his old buddy Cowboy’s outfit is in Hue, and tracks him down. The two have a macho, insult-filled reunion, and Joker and Rafterman join Cowboy’s Lusthog Squad (with Animal Mother [Adam Baldwin], Eightball [Dorian Harewood], Crazy Earl, and T.H.E. Rock, among other colorful grunts) as they move through Hue. At one point, as in
Apocalypse Now
, a camera crew shoots them during combat. The men mug and wisecrack for the camera: “This is Vietnam—the movie.” “Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?” “We’ll let the gooks play the Indians.”

A surprising amount of time is given to this kind of highly self-conscious criticism of, or simply statements about, the war. In the next sequence a squad member has been killed, and the survivors stand above him, all chipping in their thoughts; and immediately after this is a montage of mock TV interviews (a tactic familiar to viewers of the TV series
M*A*S*H
) in which the men comment on how little the Vietnamese appreciate their efforts, including the line “We’re shooting the wrong gooks.” As if to confirm this, in the next episode an ARVN soldier rides up on a Honda with a whore, whom he offers to the men, who are stretched out in an unbolted row of seats in front of a movie theater playing a Western.

Finally the squad moves out on patrol. Crazy Earl is killed by a sniper in a ruined building, leaving the untried Cowboy in charge, hunkered down behind a mound of rubble. Cowboy can’t seem to read the map. “What are we,” Joker asks, “lost?” Eightball tries to cross a patch of open ground to reach Crazy Earl and is gunned down—in slo-mo—by the sniper. Cowboy can’t control Animal Mother, who makes a heroic, John Wayne-like charge to safe cover. Animal Mother spots the sniper and covers the squad as they move up.

But there’s a line of fire through the building they’re crouched behind, and the sniper takes out Cowboy. He dies in Joker’s arms. It’s time for some payback.

The squad infiltrates the building, clears the first floor, moves upstairs. Joker is the first person to see the sniper, who wheels around to reveal she’s a woman, her braid flying, teeth gritted as she fires. Joker fumbles with his weapon, and is saved only because Rafterman unloads a clip into her. Shaken, Joker joins the circle of grunts standing over her. Rafterman is doing a little victory dance, humping the air. The sniper’s not dead, instead she’s croaking out a few words none of them understand. “She’s praying.” “No more boom-boom for this babysan,” Animal Mother says.

Joker’s worried. What should they do with her? “Fuck her. Let her rot.” “Cowboy’s wasted,” someone reminds him. Joker has to make a choice, and he chooses to kill her—out of mercy, it seems. “Fucking
hardcore,” Animal Mother says, possibly misinterpreting his motives, and they move out.

It’s night and the fires are burning, the men spread out on patrol, stalking through the rubble. Joker’s voice-over says that though he’s “in a world of shit,” “I am not afraid.” As we close, the men are singing the theme from the Mickey Mouse Club. Fade out and the credits roll over the Stones’ “Paint It, Black.”

Initial reaction to
Full Metal Jacket
was cool. Critics called the film aimless, partitioned, episodic, and singled out Matthew Modine’s performance as wooden and ineffective. The screenplay was praised for its inventive use of language, but, film being a visual medium, the fact that Kubrick chose to shoot the movie in England rather than the Philippines (the location of choice) completely undermined
Full Metal Jacket’s
authenticity. In the wake of
Platoon,
the release of
Full Metal Jacket
couldn’t help but be anticlimactic. Comparisons with Stone’s film were inescapable and harsh, as were comparisons with Kubrick’s own earlier work. On the very basic level of cinematography, even
The Shining
was more interesting.
Full Metal Jacket
was a disappointment, the critics said, a failure on all counts.

That view of the film hasn’t changed. Veterans find the basic training section on target except for Pyle’s violence and the Vietnam sections unconvincing. Film critics continue to hold
Full Metal Jacket
up to Kubrick’s earlier work as well as to
Platoon
(more realistic) or
Apocalypse Now
(more daring and more interesting visually). Thematically though, the film—like most of Kubrick’s work—is chock-full of interesting stuff.

First, the film comments sharply on the Vietnam narrative as
Bildungsroman.
Where
Platoon
affirms the old and romantic idea of war as a crucible that builds men, Kubrick seems to be saying-through Pyle and then Joker and the men of the Lusthog squad—that Vietnam, or simply war, takes these boys not from innocence to experience but to numbness or madness. The ironic use of the Mickey Mouse theme song to close the film is a far cry from Chris Taylor’s heroic speechmaking.

Second, throughout the film Kubrick is examining the construction of gender and the institutionalized twining of sex and violence. The
extremes to which the recruits have to create a dominant masculine self (violent, sexually potent) at the expense of anything feminine (weak, rotten, helpless) is shockingly reversed in the end, with the revelation that the sniper is a woman, is in fact what Gunny Hartman said they would have to become—a hardhearted killer of many enemies whose weapon is an expression of her will. And yet even then the men (except for Joker, our hero) persist in equating death with sexual domination, standing over her like participants in a gang rape, Rafterman dancing lewdly.

Third—and part of the construction of gender falls under this—in
Full Metal Jacket,
as in A
Clockwork Orange
and 2001, Kubrick is interested in the institutional and societal shaping or destruction of personality and the mystery of the human capacity for evil, this time playing it off American claims of innocence.

Beyond these conscious, well-developed themes,
Full Metal Jacket
looks at truth versus fiction in the media (especially in the official misuse of language), America as an inherently violent culture, war as business, race relations, and the institution as religion (and vice versa). Critics likewise have investigated Kubrick’s ironic use of pop culture and language, the film’s view of the Vietnamese, and Kubrick’s implementation of Herr’s dictum of the beauty or allure of destruction, the spectacle of war (you want to look and you don’t want to look).

An insatiable reader and writer, Kubrick fits his movies together like novels. As a literary object—a thing to be read—
Full Metal Jacket
continues to interest academics if not Vietnam vets, general moviegoers, or video renters. The film won’t go away, though, as Kubrick’s position as an intellectual moviemaker is firmly established, whereas Stone’s, like Cimino’s, seems to fade with each new release.

The second wave of films includes one other major work of note, John Irvin’s
Hamburger Hill
(1987), from a script by veteran James Carabatsos. The movie is remarkable solely for the fact that some vets rank it with or even above
Platoon
in its depiction of combat. While the script is leaden and obvious and the performances weak, the production crew’s attention to detail is sometimes impressive. On the
whole, the film has little to say, since the action is given almost no context, political or otherwise, and the occasional statement about the war, the media, or America is inevitably old hat—as are, in fact, the details of
Hamburger Hill.
As with
Platoon,
the idea that a movie might get something right about Vietnam—if only the basest physical elements—was impressive to moviegoers (and vets) as late as 1987. As a study of character and war, however,
Hamburger Hill
owes more to the melting-pot platoon movies of World War II than to Vietnam.

Barry Levinson’s
Good Morning, Vietnam
(1987) did impressively at the box office, but other than Robin Williams’s typical shtick, the film gives us nothing that hasn’t already been done—and done better—elsewhere. Its widespread acceptance as a commercial vehicle is a good indicator of Hollywood suddenly embracing Vietnam if not as subject matter then at least as a palatable background.

The great success of the second wave was due almost entirely to
Platoon,
and for the first time, television sought to cash in on that success. In 1987, CBS developed a weekly series called
Tour of Duty,
in which the viewing audience followed the fortunes of a platoon in the Americal Division. Much of the writing was done by veterans, and the young actors involved underwent a less rigorous form of basic training so the details would be right. Though it earned solid reviews, the show lasted only two seasons.

More successful was ABC’s 1988
China Beach,
which introduced us to a group of nurses stationed by the seaside R&R site. The writing and the performances were better than average for TV, and the details, especially in the first year, were handled carefully. Later the show slid into melodrama (some critics have dismissively called it a high-tone soap opera), and with the same anachronistic hindsight used by
M*A*S*H
in its later years contemporary issues such as nurses’ PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) were sensitively addressed in the context of the late sixties. Despite—or because of—its obvious debts to
M*A*S*H
,
China Beach
gobbled up solid ratings, established a following, and took home a number of Emmys before being canceled in 1992. For several years it was the only view of Vietnam offered to the average American viewer, and, like
M*A*S*H
and Korea, is probably at this writing—for those too young to remember
the nightly newscasts—the most familiar face of the Vietnam War next to that of the hapless
Forrest Gump
(1994).

Since the second wave, a number of major Vietnam films have been released, including Brian De Palma’s
Casualties of War
(1989, from a script by vet David Rabe) and the two remaining entries in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam trilogy—his adaptations of Ron Kovic’s
Born on the Fourth of July
(1989) and Le Ly Hayslip’s
Heaven and Earth
(1993). Some have done well—notably
Born on the Fourth,
because of Tom Cruise’s star power—but no Vietnam film has captured the American imagination since
Platoon,
and it’s likely none will, at least for a while. The latest success was Disney’s
Operation Dumbo Drop
(1995), a comedy about a group of misfit, good-at-heart GI’s who have to deliver an elephant to a village. Since the second wave, there’s been an industry trend of using Vietnam simply as a backdrop for a standard genre film (detective, comedy) or to examine something else—say, women’s rights in
China Beach,
or the African American experience in
The Walking Dead
(1995)—not why America was there, what it was doing, and who paid the price. The prospect of a serious new Vietnam film, in 1998, seems remote. The common wisdom now in Hollywood is that Vietnam has been done and is therefore over with. But, like America’s view of the war, that will certainly change.

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Memoirs