Delivering Stars and Stripes along 'The World's Most Dangerous Paper Route'

BY Marc Leepson

The excellent 2019 documentary, Inside Stars and Stripes: The World’s Most Dangerous Paper Route, is now available to watch online on YouTube and on Stripes.com. This hour-long doc is a fast-moving and top-quality history of Stars and Stripes from its beginnings to the present day.

It starts with a brief look at the first attempts to create a military newspaper during the Civil War, and then progresses to the resurrection of this vision during World War I. From there, viewers watch as Stripes comes into its own during World War II, with the familiar and now comforting elements of the paper, like Bill Mauldin and his “Willie & Joe” cartoons, front and center. We as an audience also see how it has continued, including during the Vietnam War.

Indeed, a large part of the documentary is devoted to the Vietnam War. This section of the film is told primarily from the perspective of two Vietnam War veterans who worked for Stripes during the war: the noted journalist Steve Kroft (who narrates the film in his familiar 60 Minutes voice), and the award-winning photojournalist John Olson. VVA previously honored Olson and Kroft with the Excellence the Arts Award—Kroft in 2012 and Olson in 2018.

Kroft calls his work for Stripes during the Vietnam War his “rite of passage” that changed him from a fledgling reporter into a multiple Emmy Award and Peabody Award-winning journalist for CBS News. Olson, who went on to a long and distinguished photography career, says working for Stripes in Vietnam was “the best job I ever had” and proved to be “the most exciting time of my life.”

The other main on-screen contributor is Laura Rauch, who was a full-time embedded Stars and Stripes writer and photojournalist covering the Afghanistan War from 2011-2013. “It’s a badge of honor,” she says in the film, “to serve America’s military families.”

Kroft, Olson, and Rauch tell their Stripes stories well, with the aid of evocative wartime images—still and moving—including Olson’s famed photographs of the fighting in Hue during Tet ’68.

And, as the film title’s subtitle indicates, filmmakers Steven C. Barber and Matthew Hausle also tell the amazing story of how Stripes has managed the complex task of getting its daily issue out to hundreds of thousands of active-duty troops and their families around the world during war and peace beginning in World War II and continuing to the present day.

This top-notch documentary (online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SigOfkEuZAw and https://tinyurl.com/2zy2rt8j) will appeal to everyone who has served in uniform, and to a great many others as well. All of us who have served—especially overseas—remember Stars and Stripes, but few know the story of how it came to be, the great journalists who have worked there, how the newspaper gets into the hands of servicemembers worldwide, and how Stripes maintains its unique role as a government-funded newspaper that reports on the news with all-but-complete freedom of expression.

Director Angus MacLachlan’s new independent feature, A Little Prayer, centers on the emotional and familial difficulties one family experiences after several encounters with war. The family is made up of Bill, an older father figure and Vietnam War veteran played by veteran character actor David Straithorn, his daughter-in-law Tammy (Jane Levy) and her husband—and Bill’s son—David (Will Pullen), to whom she is not-so-happily married. Both Bill and David are veterans, with David being a generally unpleasant two-tour Iraq War veteran who drinks heavily and strays from the marital bed.

As the movie later hints, his emotional problems stem from his time in Iraq, and this conflict between the characters’ past in war and present back home is the film’s central preoccupation. David works for his dad, and he and Tammy live in a small house next to his parents. It is this proximity that allows Bill, who exhibits some post-war stresses, but otherwise seems to be navigating his business and his personal life as well as can be expected, to serve as a foil to the more unpredictable David.

Courtesy Music Box Films

Several scenes take place in the local VFW watering hole, featuring country music and dancing. During one of them, another not-young veteran calls Bill “Captain,” talks about being in Da Nang, and refers to a Marine Corps C-MED, a medical unit. And in a scene at a funeral home, Bill chats solemnly with a fellow Vietnam War veteran wearing his old Class A Army uniform. The topic of discussion: the deceased’s wartime flashbacks and nightmares.

As the film plays out, it does so laconically, at its own pace, and with not a lot of action to speak of. Long pauses and lots of close-ups to emphasize emotional turmoil are used frequently, and as the marriage between David and Tammy resolves itself not-so-happily, MacLachlan’s camera periodically dwells on the strangely quiet suburban streets of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, modest homes bereft of people. The peaceful, almost eerie silence contrasts the bombast both of the relationship’s internal strife and of wartime in general.

Ultimately, this is not a war movie so much as it is a movie about war and its lasting effects. The acting is first rate; the script is mostly believable. But this film is more contemplative than it is edge-of-your-seat action, and when it comes to its approach, its themes, and its subject, that’s not exactly a bad thing at all.

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