Now Playing: Vietnam

Abstract

Many veterans of Vietnam will tell you they went to war with images of John Wayne and the Sands oflwojima (1949) in their heads. They have probably forgotten that Wayne played a depressed, angry alcoholic in the movie and that he dies in the end. The intended hero of the film is not even Wayne at all but the gentle John Agar, who would never want his son to grow up to be a Marine. Not very long after the release of the movie, the men who fought in Iwo Jima, or their younger brothers, went back to war in Korea. Their sons came of age in time for the television reruns of Sands oflwojima and service in Vietnam. The manifest content of the war movies of the 1950s, whether set in World II or Korea, was prowar. Every service in the military got at least one feature film celebrating its exploits: frogmen, subma rines, aircraft carriers, close air support units, the ser vice academies (West Point Story in 1950, Air Cadet in 1951) the Coast Guard, the Marines (several times) even the exploits of the former enemy (Desert Fox, 1951). The pull of World II, film historian Thomas Doherty has written, wasn't merely the attraction of adventure romance, or high melodrama but the consolation of closure and the serenity of moral certainty. For Holly wood and American culture the Second World would always be a safe berth (1). But many of these films, including Sands oflwojima, contain a powerful undercurrent that pulls the other way, towards a recog nition of the futility of war. The movies set in Korea protest against its renewal so soon after what had seemed a conclusive victory. William Styron was one of those recalled for service in Korea. He observed bitterly, War was no longer simply a temporary madness .... had at last become the human condition (2). No one went to Vietnam cherishing images of the Bridges ofToko-Ri (1955). Vietnam movies reverse the pattern. The manifest content of almost all of them is antiwar, but according to Anthony Swofford Deer Hunter (1978) is an influential film about returning Vietnam veterans. that is not how they were viewed by young men on their way to the battlefield. At a Marine Corps base in the Mojave Desert in 1990, waiting to be sent to war in Iraq, Swofford's platoon drank beer and watched Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Civil ians might leave the theatre weeping over the inhumanity of war, Swofford observes. The men in the Mojave were excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man . ... A young man on the films of the Vietnam War, Swofford wants his ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers(3). I am not certain what movies young men and women are raised on these days, but it is important for those of us who teach the history of the war in Vietnam to understand the shifting resonance of movies whose meaning we may have thought constant. The coda to many courses on the Vietnam is a discussion of the war in memory. Sometimes the war in memory is the course taught, whatever the inten tion of the instructor. Novels, memoirs, and feature movies are all available in abundance to help make the war vivid to undergraduates, for whom it is increas ingly remote. Of course, the movies the faculty may have experienced as fresh renderings of the recent past are themselves now to be seen only on late night television or in college classrooms. Teaching the history of the war in the late 1970s or 1980s meant classrooms filled with students who felt they had been there. They were 18 and 19 year-old Americans who went to movies about Vietnam as if to the country itself and remem bered the movies later as one would a trip to another country. Young Americans had little difficulty inserting themselves into these movie memories because, like most of the novels and memoirs of Vietnam,