The War on Film

BY Trevor Strunk

The most difficult part of representing the American war in Vietnam on film is having to look it directly in the face. That fact comes to mind while watching films as disparate as the 1968 John Wayne movie, The Green Berets, and the 1995 Hughes Brothers coming-of-age story turned bank-heist film, Dead Presidents. In those and many other movies, it is extremely difficult for writers, filmmakers, directors, and actors to realistically express what they see when they look at the war itself.

For some, it is a patriotic affair, for others a sort of allegory for social disintegration or a metaphor on aging. But the Vietnam War itself in these films is constantly shifting, morphing into another character in movies purportedly about it and occupying a supporting role in stories about the lives of men and women who took part in it.

This is not the sort of problem that filmmakers have with what Martin Sheen, in a pointed cameo as a belligerent judge in Dead Presidents, called “a real war” like World War II. In movies about World War II, the war itself is always represented as the same stolid backdrop: a march against evil with necessary sacrifices and hard times making hard men.

Even recent, more pointedly contemporary films about World War II such as Steven Spielberg’s 1998 Saving Private Ryan and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers while complicating the flat patriotism of earlier films, as they add in the brutality of war and loss, still include the steady backdrop of familiar battlefields and motives that the movie-going American public has internalized and memorized.

Perhaps this was John Wayne’s motive as the star and co-director of The Green Berets, the only American Vietnam War film made during the war, which openly aims to counteract sentiment against the war. The film begins with a skeptical reporter grilling a Green Beret played by the imposing Aldo Ray about the purpose of the Americans being in Vietnam.

Photo courtesy United Artists

The reporter, played with maximum smarm by David Janssen, says his newspaper believes Americans shouldn’t be in Vietnam. Ray’s character dumps a load of Chinese and Russian arms in front of him to make the point that the fighting in Vietnam is part of a global war against communism. The film does not complicate things further than that. People, of course, fight and die; we see Jim Hutton play a rascal-turned-hero who takes care of a young Vietnamese orphan before dying in battle himself; and the tragedy of a nation torn asunder is represented.

But the war? In this movie the war is a simple thing, never really expanding beyond the angry Green Beret’s point of view. Even Janssen’s reporter is convinced by the end of the film, simply by seeing the ferocity of the North Vietnamese Army, and the movie ends on a sunset-drenched beach with John Wayne telling a heavily accented Vietnamese orphan played by American-born Craig Jue that what happens next is something that Wayne, the avatar of America, will worry about.

This is at once an intensely propagandistic approach and a wholly unbelievable one. Just reading the pages of this magazine illustrates that this version of the war – schmaltzy and sentimental in equal parts – bears no resemblance to the war in reality. Instead, Wayne and company created a kind of fantasy that aspires to become the accepted view of the war against growing antiwar sentiment at home on college campuses and city streets.

That it didn’t work can be seen by the film’s treatment in Oliver Stone’s 1986 antiwar film Platoon, in which John Wayne’s movie is treated as a punchline by the grunts actually experiencing the war. Plus, nearly all of the contemporary movie critics panned the film, including Stanley Eichelbaum of the San Francisco Examiner, who wrote: “John Wayne—bless him—has convinced me he’s more of a patriot than he thinks. His movie, The Green Berets, …will without question unite the doves and the hawks. It is the first film about Vietnam about which there can be no controversy, no dispute, no argument. Nobody who sees it will find a single reason to disagree that it is the phoniest, most laughable war picture in many years.”

Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Ent.

It should come as no surprise then that, after the critical failure of Wayne’s film, the American war in Vietnam never really found the consistent characterization that World War II enjoyed in cinema. Perhaps the closest consistency we have is the way that the war is portrayed as a kind of explosive point in the story of several films’ protagonists.

In Dead Presidents, we’re treated initially to a fairly typical coming-of-age story for a troublemaking, but promising young man named Anthony Perkins in the Bronx in 1968. After high school, he is uninterested in college and decides to join the Marine Corps, much to his family and friends’ displeasure. Having spent one last night with his girlfriend before shipping out (which results in a daughter, he finds out much later), he ships off in search of adventure and, in his words, “something new.”

The something new turns out to be being part of a recon unit, in which Perkins takes part in missions with more chaos and improvisation than more typical search-and-destroy missions. The film represents Vietnam as a deeply violent, terrifying place, a characterization that is represented by Perkins’ nightmares brought on by his PTSD upon coming home.

Despite this, Perkins is skilled as a grunt and comes home “in one piece” to the delight of his family and his girlfriend. What he finds, however, is no warm welcome, but instead a lack of work, friends who are shells of themselves or addicted to heroin, and an inability to connect with anyone after being away for so long.

Photo courtesy Caravan Pictures

The film’s climax is a bank robbery, which occurs after Perkins loses his job and is forced to rejoin an old acquaintance for whom he ran numbers as a kid. Also in the mix: the revolutionary sister of his now-ex-girlfriend, and righteous anger at white America.

The nihilism oozing from Perkins does not leave the viewer in a lot of suspense about the success of the heist. In the end, Perkins’ friends and allies are all dead, arrested, or traumatized, and Perkins himself is sentenced to 15-to-life, a horrible reward, in his words, “after all I did for this country.”

In this case, the Vietnam War is less a tangible “war” and more an emotional and psychological trigger. It helps codify the desperation Perkins feels; allows the Hughes Brothers to create a trenchant critique of American war and society in the 1960s and 1970s; and helps to demonstrate the way politics melts into a morass of hurt, death, and trauma.

Dead Presidents is a deeply pessimistic film, and a necessary one, but it does not do any better at describing the war itself. It can look back or stare sideways as a way of describing the events of the war, but it doesn’t try to represent it as totality. This, the film seems to suggest, is an impossibility.

Perhaps the closest we get to a true representation of the heart of the American war in Vietnam is in Francis Ford Coppola’s rendition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, his 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Martin Sheen plays Capt. Willard, who is sent into the jungle to bring back Col. Kurtz, who has gone mad and set up a temple in the deep jungle—a death cult of sorts.

In his journey down a river to Kurtz, Willard experiences nihilism as well – napalm strikes and surfers set to Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries;” a murky, miserable battle in the middle of a swamp; and the death of his own troops. But Willard is wholly unable to make any logical sense of Kurtz, played by a late-career Marlon Brando. Kurtz is past sense, essentially reduced to a mumbling and god-like silence and represented by the psychedelic photojournalist under his spell played by Dennis Hopper.

Photo courtesy MGM

In the end, Willard is no less able to make sense of Kurtz than Conrad’s own protagonist Charles Marlow was able to figure out his own Col. Kurtz in the 1899 novel. In fact, the film has much the same lesson as the novel itself: that the only thing that can come out of the experience of the jungle of the mind is a warning for the future.

Coppola represents the Vietnam War, but from a distinctly forward-looking position. The war, to him, is a precursor to the wars of the future. It cannot make sense or be represented, but instead is a chaotic event that leaves everything, Willard included, changed forever.

This is perhaps both correct as an analysis (Who would claim that the war did not change those who took part in it, as well as the world and wars in general?) while at the same time feeling a bit too dehumanizing as a conclusion.

That is why Spike Lee’s 2022 film Da 5 Bloods feels so timely and clarifying about the Vietnam War in the 21st century. The film is the tale of four veterans traveling back to Vietnam to try to locate the remains of their squad leader and friend—as well as the fortune of gold they found during the war and buried. But the film is more an adventure and heist story that hinges on the mechanics and challenges of aging and dealing with PTSD.

Lee uses the trip back to Vietnam to challenge his protagonists, and each comes out in a different way. These are not all positive endings, but they represent a reckoning with the personal legacy of war. If we learn from previous films about the war that it defies representation, then this seems to be a clever and necessary metaphor – that the war itself is chaotic and murky, unable to be seen, and that those who suffered, fought, died, and more in the war must be considered the target for representation instead.

Photo courtesy Netflix

If the Vietnam War resists being made into a clear narrative, then it is perhaps the role of cinema to contextualize the war in the persons of its veterans and its victims. Sometimes, the people are forgotten in the service of a narrative, as in The Green Berets; sometimes, as in Dead Presidents, this process is upsetting and frustrating; and sometimes, as in Apocalypse Now, we may find ourselves captivated by madness.

But as Da 5 Bloods demonstrates, the people who fought live and have multitudes of stories – good, bad, evil, righteous – that demand to be told and told well.

This is the first in a series of essays on cultural production stemming from the American war in Vietnam. In his article VVA Veteran Associate Editor Trevor Strunk takes a look at four Vietnam War films. Future essays will examine literature, music, television, and more.

2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016
2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012
2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008
2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004
2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000