Tyler Maher

ENG 172: War and American Values

Final Paper

Understanding the Vietnam War through Film

40 years after it ended, the Vietnam War still confounds American society. For a long

time, it baffled Hollywood as well. Though Vietnam was (at the time) the longest war the United

States had ever fought and it coincided with a golden age for American cinema, only one major

motion picture was made about the war while it was going on. Due to the controversial and

unpopular nature of the war, studios feared any movie that addressed it directly would bomb at

the box office. Hollywood was also reluctant to make fictional films about a war that Americans

were seeing every night on their living room televisions. It was assumed that audiences already

inundated with Vietnam news coverage had no desire to see a movie version of their country’s

struggles there. So Hollywood stayed away from the debacle in Southeast Asia, refusing to touch

it until after the war was over (Slocum 28).

Another explanation for the dearth of ‘Nam films prior to 1978 was that Vietnam—an

unconventional war unlike any America had ever previously fought—proved to be an incredibly

challenging topic for Hollywood. The film industry “seemed unable to come up with new

formulas that might make the war intelligible to Americans…Hollywood could neither fit the

Vietnam War into any of its old formulas nor create new ones for it” (Auster and Quart 34).

Hollywood didn’t know how to handle the conflict once it became clear that the tried-and-true,

flag-waving and soldier-worshiping model that worked so well in the 1940’s and ‘50s no longer

applied. Vietnam forced American filmmakers and moviegoers to re-evaluate their perceptions

of war and the people that fight them. Films had previously served to prop up American soldiers

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and values, but would be used to break them down after Vietnam. “War movies have changed in

a fundamental way” (Aust and Schroeder), a trend evident in several Vietnam War films

throughout the years, from 1968’s The Green Berets through 2002’s We Were Soldiers. Through

their changing and evolving political messages, levels of realism, and interpretations of the war,

these movies have reflected the country’s changing attitudes about Vietnam’s legacy.

Case study 1: The Green Berets

Like America’s military intervention in Vietnam, The Green Berets was well-meaning

but ultimately failed to achieve its goals. At best, both can be seen as misguided attempts at the

wrong place and wrong time. At worst, both have been described as colossal failures. Thus, it is

unsurprising, perhaps even fitting, that The Green Berets was the only major studio combat

picture to be produced during the Vietnam War. Though it raked in a huge box office haul, the

film received such scathing reviews that Hollywood refrained from attempting another Vietnam

picture until the war was over.

There are many problems with The Green Berets’ “unqualified defense of American

military involvement in Vietnam” (Dittmar and Michaud 21), most of which ironically stem from

its good intentions. Wayne, a staunch anti-communist and patriotic American, visited Vietnam in

1966 and came back inspired to make a positive statement about the war in “the best way he

knew how—(with) a pro-American, pro-soldier, guts and glory film, just as he had done so many

times in the past” (Hillstrom and Hillstrom 143). But rather than focus on the average grunt, the

Duke made and starred in a movie about America’s finest soldiers: the Green Berets. As one of

the war’s few successes, they were “The Soldiers at the Heart of the War” (Muse 39), the perfect

vehicle for Wayne to “tell the story of our fighting men in Vietnam with reason, emotion,

characterization, and action…in a manner that will inspire a patriotic attitude on the part of

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fellow Americans” (Muse 39). The newly-formed, elite Special Forces group was, according to

Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s hit song at the time, “America’s best.” If the noble Green Berets

led by John Wayne couldn’t win America over, nobody could.

In the spirit of classic war movies, Wayne’s Green Berets are “recognizable Hollywood

war heroes” that stand as “bastions of camaraderie, honor, decency, and Americanism” (Auster

and Quart 31). They exude values traditionally associated with American soldiers like toughness,

bravery, intelligence, compassion, and dedication to their mission. They’re portrayed as heroic

cavalry riding to the rescue of poor, weak South Vietnam. They also get along exceptionally

well; “The officers in The Green Berets are competent decision-makers… loved and respected

by their men…Similarly, the cast of infantrymen is seemingly lifted from any of Wayne's earlier

war pictures. The soldiers are professional, courteous, respect the officers, and have no vices”

(Butler). Wayne’s idyllic portrait of the military being one big happy family is especially

disturbing in the context of Vietnam, when tensions became so high that soldiers resorted to

killing (known as “fragging”) their officers. Wayne’s flawless, saint-like soldiers—shown to be

in high spirits and getting along splendidly—don’t correspond to reality and come off as

caricatures. “The Green Berets attempts to mythologize its heroes…but the myths are stillborn”

(Adair 45). The movie also makes little effort to develop its characters. While likeable and easy

to root for, they’re merely mouthpieces through which Wayne voices his political messages.

Much of their contrived dialogue feels like it was lifted right out of a Lyndon Johnson speech.

But because the characters are good soldiers and outstanding Americans, their political views are

supposed to be more palatable, if not desirable. Wayne’s friendly and familiar Green Berets are

meant to show audiences the light.

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It’s important to remember, though, that Americans had a much different view of soldiers

in 1968 than they do today. The movie came out before reports of the My Lai massacre were

leaked, before drug use and desertion ravaged the military, and before the war was lost. The

military was still viewed as a positive American institution, associated with strong fundamental

values such as honor and hard-work. In the vein of World War II films, The Green Berets

reflected this notion of the strong, masculine soldier as a force for good throughout the world.

Presenting American soldiers as “muscular, war-loving cavalrymen” (Auster and Quart

33) was just one of the ways Wayne adheres to the conventions established by World War II and

Korean War combat films. Another is the curious absence of blood and gore. Most onscreen

deaths are quick and painless, and nobody loses limbs to booby traps. So “of course, all the

Green Berets face death with grace and courage” (Auster and Quart 33), meeting their fates in

heroic fashion. Yet another film trope featured in The Green Berets is its black and white

dichotomy of good versus evil, which could be more aptly described as cowboys versus Indians.

This “unthinking use of the Western formula” (Anderegg 58) “depicted the bad guys as

despicable and the good guys as impervious to taint” (Muse 44), going too far in both directions

and creating a stark contrast reminiscent of Westerns and World War II propaganda films. The

movie’s reliance on all these conventions “showed what a difficult time America was having in

disentangling from its World War II self” (Dittmar and Michaud 74). Indeed, during the war’s

early years (and, to belabor the point, LBJ’s “Why We Fight” speech), the United States tried to

frame Vietnam like World War II: a global struggle for democracy against an evil, ruthless

enemy. But as much as America and Hollywood wanted to view Vietnam through that lens, the

conflict was nothing like “The Good War.” It was a complicated civil war that rendered

Hollywood’s “old World War II-film genre conventions and heroics…entirely inadequate to

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capture the reality of the struggle” (Auster and Quart xiv). But Wayne, old-fashioned in every

sense of the word, paints Vietnam as the World War II-type conflict the politicians were spinning

it as. This was the main reason the movie failed; its “anachronistic dependence upon World War

II film ideas and right wing politics” (Woodman 94) fit neither the new, modern war nor the

cutting-edge forces it portrayed. Despite what Wayne and Hollywood thought, “The Vietnam

War was not a John Wayne war” (Muse 45).

The movie’s clumsy political script can also be attributed to the government’s meddling.

During its production The Green Berets was wholeheartedly supported by the Johnson

administration and received approximately $1,000,000 worth of military assistance, including

over 85 hours of helicopter airtime and 3,800 work days of borrowed military personnel (Muse

39). While the aid allowed the producers to save money and receive cheap top-notch production

value, it did not come without cost. The movie was based on Robin Moore’s bestselling novel, a

book unpopular with the Department of Defense because Moore “insisted that the Special Forces

conducted clandestine missions into North Viet Nam, an activity the military insisted was outside

their current sphere of activity” (Muse 39). In return for its support, the DoD pressured

screenwriter James Lee Barrett into writing what he thought was “‘an inferior version’ of the

script” (Muse 39). Rather than resembling Moore’s explosive book, the movie version shared

virtually no similarities with its riveting source material. Unable to flex his creative muscles,

Barrett penned a dull, safe, formulaic script that was “unashamedly patriotic…(containing) quite

possibly every war film cliché ever conceived” (Lanning 49). By collaborating with the

government, Wayne sacrificed the screenplay’s quality and prevented his movie from reaching

its full potential, allowing his political biases to sabotage its promising story.

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The trade-off improved production value but surely led to a weaker film. The

government’s influence overwhelmed the movie from start to finish, turning it into “the most

blatantly propagandist contemporaneous American feature film made about the Vietnam War”

(Hillstrom and Hillstrom 139). Smothered with awkward educational lessons about the conflict,

The Green Berets felt more like “a long lecture” (Dittmar 54) than a rousing adventure story.

And because the audience had already made up its mind about the war being a giant mistake, that

lecture fell on deaf ears. This was ultimately the film’s greatest sin, taking a “reprehensible

stance on the war” (Eberwein, The War Film 8) by siding with the government. Thus, the

movie’s reliance on military assistance was as much a hindrance as it was a help, especially since

the film wound up being shockingly unrealistic given its huge budget (an estimated $6 million at

the time) and accurate props (Muse 39). Its portrayal of the war was underwhelming, for “not

once does one get a sense of the lived experience of soldiers at war” (Adair 51). Filmed mostly

in Fort Benning, its scenery looks nothing like its purported setting in South Vietnam. The

actors, Wayne especially, are much too old to be playing commandos, and their deaths are

largely bloodless and melodramatic. The combat is too clean and choreographed. In every

regard, the film fails to “approximate even our imaginative experience of Vietnam. The keynote

throughout is a kind of willed innocence and naïveté…Hence, the film seems more than anything

else an exercise in nostalgia” (Anderegg 24). The movie’s gross simplification of a brutal,

complex war is so far removed from reality that it amounts to a delusional fantasy. Rather than

challenging the realities of the controversial war being fought in Southeast Asia, The Green

Berets was “just another John Wayne adventure story” (Muse 45).

Unsurprisingly, reviews were overwhelmingly negative to Wayne’s politically polarizing

film, leading author Robert Eberwein to dub it “most reviled war film in American history” (The

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Hollywood War Film 31). Critics, many of whom opposed the war, did not appreciate Wayne’s

strong-handed pro-war messages. Furthermore, the film was rife with “inadvertent humor”

(Adler) due to its numerous goofs and inaccuracies, making it laughable and impossible to take

seriously. “A blundering movie, The Green Berets…is too inept to be effective” (Adair 40).

Besides making the movie an easy target, these errors also called attention to its dishonest

portrayal of the conflict, which drew most of the critics’ ire. “What is so repugnant about The

Green Berets is not its politics (nor even, politics apart, its total ineptitude purely as an adventure

war movie) but the fact that—in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—its makers

were determined to reduce Vietnam to simple-minded antitheses” (Adair 35). Blind to the

realities of the war, it was woefully inadequate as a Vietnam movie. Reviewer Roger Ebert

agreed, writing that “The Green Berets simply will not do as a film about the war in Vietnam. It

is offensive…It is supposed to be about Vietnam, but it isn’t” (“The Green Berets”). These

scathing assessments confirmed the movie’s failure as a political statement and as a war film.

“Widely decried as a trite and breathtakingly misleading portrait of the realities in

Vietnam” (Hillstrom and Hillstrom 139), The Green Berets did not, as Wayne hoped, sway

public opinion back in favor of the war. Even the soldiers ridiculed it. “At one army compound

in Vietnam, where The Green Berets was being shown, troops threw beer cans at the screen”

(McAdams 198). The very people that should have embraced the movie dismissed it, indicating

that Wayne had truly missed his mark.

At least some of the backlash can be explained by the movie’s timing. When The Green

Berets was being made in the second half of 1967, the Johnson administration promised a “light

at the end of the tunnel,” indicating the war would be over soon. Victory seemed to be close at

hand, and the film’s positive take on the war reflected that. But by the time it premiered in the

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summer of 1968, the war was already believed to be a lost cause. U.S. forces were reeling from

the Tet Offensive, Johnson was not running for re-election, and Walter Cronkite had declared the

war a stalemate on national television. In this context, The Green Berets appeared wildly over-

optimistic and out-of-touch. Had the film been released a few years earlier, when support for the

war was high, it probably would have been a huge hit. But 1968 America was too divided to

embrace “a jingoist war story” (Slocum 240), and so “the first Vietnam combat film ironically

became a metaphor for the war, being in the wrong place” (McAdams 198).

Wayne’s star power sold enough tickets to make The Green Berets one of the ten highest-

grossing films of 1968 (Muse 39), but despite the film’s commercial success it would be awhile

before Hollywood revisited Vietnam. The U.S. began withdrawing its forces one year after

Wayne’s movie came out, and its eventual defeat not only “challenged the tenets of America’s

‘victory culture,’” but also “posed questions as to how the war could or should be represented,

and rendered the paradigms associated with the Second World War combat film at least

temporarily inappropriate” (Slocum 28). America had always been the triumphant victors, but its

scarring defeat in Vietnam shattered Hollywood’s World War II template. Vietnam didn’t fit the

blueprint, forcing Hollywood to formulate a new kind of war movie to properly tell it.

As the first major movie about Vietnam, The Green Berets could and should have been

groundbreaking. With its star-driven cast, giant budget, excellent source material and all the

military equipment it could ask for, it had the ingredients to be an instant classic. Instead, it was

a massive misfire. Rather than the bold statement it could have been, it was “the movie of an old,

old man” (Adair 40). Wayne made the same movie he always made, but the times and audiences

had changed, leaving its star and his old-fashioned ideals in the dust. Hollywood learned a

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valuable lesson from “the defeat of The Green Berets” (Dittmar and Michaud 56): applying

conventional film tropes and values to the Vietnam War wasn’t going to work.

Case study 2: Apocalypse Now

“By the late seventies Vietnam was no longer an explosive issue” (Slocum 243). Enough

time had passed that America could try to come to terms with its involvement in Vietnam.

Hollywood was ready to address the Vietnam experience more directly, and in the late 1970s

began tackling it with gusto. In 1978 alone, four major motion pictures about the war were

released: Coming Home, The Boys in Company C, Go Tell the Spartans, and most notably The

Deer Hunter, which won five Oscars, including Best Picture. But The Deer Hunter, by the

director’s own admission, was not a “Vietnam film” (Bielakowski). It focused more on the war’s

impact on a small steel-town community than on the actual war itself, and its fleeting portrayal

of Vietnam was criticized for being a “warped, misleading representation of the war” (Hillstrom

79). It was not the end-all, be-all Vietnam War movie.

Apocalypse Now, which came out in 1979, tried to be. A true epic, it was Hollywood’s

biggest attempt at depicting the war onscreen. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola at the peak of

his Godfather fame, acted by an All-Star cast, and inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness, Apocalypse Now was Coppola’s attempt “to show Vietnam the way it was” (Muse

153). His intention was to make the Vietnam film against which all others would be measured.

In this regard, Apocalypse Now was a modest failure. Though the film earned two Oscars

and received high marks for its acting and cinematography, it ultimately fell short of

expectations. Critics and audiences weren’t quite sure what to make of its “rather muddy blend

of narrative components and hallucinatory spectacle” (Slocum 298), and “a sizeable percentage

of the film community contended that Coppola’s grandiose work was ultimately a failure, albeit

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a stunningly filmed one” (Hillstrom 14). Coppola’s visionary film, a “creative interpretation of

reality” (Slocum 293), was too dreamy, surreal, and over-the-top to be taken at face value.

Victimized by its own stylistic and philosophical excesses, Apocalypse Now failed to get across

the basic truth of what being a soldier in Vietnam was like. “The film’s dependence on myth and

symbolism to communicate the insanity of the war hindered audiences from believing that they

were seeing Vietnam ‘the way it really was’” (Woodman 103). Coppola’s film was more

allegory than truth. His vivid version of Vietnam was beyond belief and defied explanation.

However, Apocalypse Now did manage to accurately portray some aspects of the

Vietnam experience. Trippy and violent as it was, it did “capture something of the war’s chaos,

incoherence, and sheer uncontrolled murderousness” (Auster and Quart 66), effectively

conveying the madness, absurdity, and ultimate futility of the war. And while its excess erased

any semblance of realism, it nevertheless succeeded in evoking the war’s mood and atmosphere.

“Apocalypse Now captures as no other film has done the unprecedented obscenity of the Vietnam

War…The very real sense of hopelessness that permeates the movie, the sense that things are

getting out of hand” (Adair 166). As Willard travels down the river, the situation spirals out of

control and becomes increasingly desperate. The war becomes more hellish and takes a greater

psychological toll on him and his men. When he finally arrives at Kurtz’s Cambodia compound,

his internal debate over whether he should kill Kurtz epitomizes “the moral dilemma of the

Vietnam war” (Adair 161). As a Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now still has value in conveying

the essence of the conflict, even if it relies on hyperbole to do so. It gets the point across that “the

war in Vietnam was simply nightmarish, a dream gone insane” (Keeton and Scheckner 47).

Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial masterpiece succeeded as a landmark piece of

cinema and as the perfect metaphor for the Vietnam War. As an anti-Vietnam War film, it also

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succeeded thanks to its many scenes that “depict the absurdity and outright lunacy of America’s

Vietnam policies, as well as the machinations of high- level military commanders” (Slocum 297).

But as a film about the war it fell short because of its lack of historical context and realism.

Accordingly, it was not embraced as the definitive Vietnam movie Coppola hoped it would be.

“Though a grand and beautiful film, Apocalypse Now failed to capture the popular imagination

or instigate the kind of communal remembrance that Platoon did almost ten years later”

(Anderegg 156). As spectacular and awesome as it was, its authenticity left too much to be

desired. Coppola’s movie had an abundance of style, but lacked substance.

Apocalypse Now is very much reflective of a confused, traumatized nation still trying to

make sense of the war, sifting through crazy experiences and powerful imagery that don’t add up

to a traditional, cohesive narrative. This uncertainty is evident in the film’s “double binds and

mixed messages” (Slocum 298). Its contradictions and incongruities embody a nation still

grappling its first defeat--“a national humiliation” (Mendible)—and unsure of how to overcome

its crisis of spirit. Conclusions were still being drawn about the war and its legacy was very

much in doubt. Apocalypse Now, which offers neither answers nor explanations, echoes this

“sentiment of unease” (Adair 143). It reflects “something amiss in the country’s prevailing

conception of itself. The need…to repudiate the war…a sense of shame” (Slocum 246).

Case study 3: Platoon Almost 20 years after The Green Berets, Hollywood had still not come out with a combat

picture about the Vietnam War. “Hollywood’s difficulty in producing a successful combat film

for Vietnam was unprecedented in the industry…and not until 1986’s Platoon would the combat

film become a popular form for reproduction of the War. The missing combat films reflect a

missing consensus about the War itself” (Muse 101). Vietnam had become a popular movie topic

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following the end of the war in 1975, but the majority of those films focused on returning

veterans or dealt with the war in evasive ways. No filmmaker had attempted to give an authentic

portrayal of front-line combat in Vietnam because nobody knew how to do it justice. Thus,

nobody really bothered to try. “Until Platoon in 1986…these films did not even aim at the

realistic evocation of how it felt to be a GI on the war’s front lines” (Auster and Quart xv).

Movies that showed Americans in combat, like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, were

highly fictionalized and stylized versions of the war. They were better films than The Green

Berets, to be sure (with Academy Awards to prove it), but like John Wayne’s film still failed to

paint an accurate picture of the grunt’s experience. Hollywood’s version of Vietnam was still

lacking the most crucial component, and was thus incomplete.

Platoon rectified that. It “left American moviegoers with the impression that this was

really what it was like to experience combat in Vietnam” (McAdams 241). Written and directed

by Oliver Stone, who dropped out of Yale and served in Vietnam as an Army foot-soldier from

1967 to 1968, the film was a fictionalized memoir that drew heavily from his war experiences

(Bielakowski). Stone was the perfect candidate to tell the common infantryman’s tale, for his

“background and career provided almost ideal preparation for writing and directing Platoon…his

experiences were representative of many young men of his generation” (Auster and Quart 131).

He had the intimate knowledge and experience of Vietnam needed to accurately capture the war

on the big screen. More importantly, Stone was committed to telling his story, which took 15

years to realize (Auster and Quart 131). He burned with the “passionate desire to evoke the

details of Vietnam as a lived experience…to bring the repressed memory of the G.I.’s experience

of Vietnam back to consciousness” (Dittmar and Michaud 234). By the mid-1980s, with the war

more than a decade in the past, America was moving on from Vietnam and embracing the

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Reagan era. Thanks to the president’s national infusion of confidence and pride, “the Vietnam

syndrome had been at least partially overcome” (Slocum 247). As the country distanced itself

from the war, “Vietnam…haunted only the veterans” (Muse 131). The nation was healing, but

the veterans were still recovering, and Stone’s harrowing depiction of war showed why.

Platoon’s realism is best exemplified by its combat scenes, which were hailed for

accurately representing the hectic nature of jungle war. It was “the first Vietnam War film to

represent extensive combat” (Dittmar and Michaud 92), and Stone got it right, delivering “the

most disorienting battle photography thus far” (Eberwein, The Hollywood War Film 99). His

firefights are fierce, dark, and chaotic, conveying the omnipresent danger and lack of front lines

that characterized jungle combat. Vietnam vet Michael Lanning praised the film in his book

Vietnam at the Movies for delivering “some of the most accurate Vietnam War footage yet

created” that showed “what a grunt’s life in combat was really like” (95). In his four-star review

of Platoon, which he lauded as “the best film of 1986,” Roger Ebert explained how Stone

captured combat’s disorienting chaos:

He abandoned the choreography that is standard in almost all war movies. He abandoned

any attempt to make it clear where the various forces were in relation to each other, so

that we never know where ‘our’ side stands and where ‘they’ are. Instead of battle scenes

in which lines are clearly drawn, his combat scenes involve 360 degrees: Any shot might

be aimed at friend or enemy, and in the desperate rush of combat, many of his soldiers

never have a clear idea of exactly who they are shooting at, or why. (“Platoon”)

Stone’s presentation of combat was unlike any that came before it and pulled off what was

previously thought to be impossible: it avoided glorifying combat. Platoon “does not make war

look fun” (Ebert, “Platoon”).

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Accordingly, the soldiers in Stone’s movie do not enjoy war and are terrified of fighting.

In this regard, Platoon deviates from “American cinema’s almost slavish devotion to the soldier”

(Muse 182). Unlike Wayne, Stone makes no attempt to lionize his soldiers, who are depicted as

scared, disobedient, profane, and apathetic to their mission. Stone’s portrayal of American

soldiers is just as one-sided as Wayne’s, but negatively so. “The GIs in (Platoon) are neither

given to self-indulgent heroics nor to patriotic rhetoric. In fact, most of them merely try to numb

themselves to their surroundings and get out of Vietnam…even mutilating themselves to do it”

(Auster and Quart 137). Their main objective is not to win the war, but to merely survive, and

they do so by any means necessary, such as running away from battle and even killing their

fellow soldiers. Such selfishness splinters a platoon already divided by “antagonisms of race,

region, and class” (Woodman 104), resulting in a group that looks nothing like tight-knit unit

seen in The Green Berets. This friction climaxes when Sgt. Barnes guns down Sgt. Elias to save

himself from a court-martial, and resurfaces at the end when Chris revenge-kills Barnes in a

scene that was truly unprecedented in American cinema; “before Platoon no sane American

soldier ever knowingly killed his superior in a combat film” (Keeton and Scheckner 110). Such a

scene would have been inconceivable in a previous war film, but in the context of Vietnam it

made sense. “Fraggings” such as these were common and reflected the erosion of morale and

camaraderie experienced by draftees fighting for a cause they didn’t believe in. This breakdown

is one way in which Platoon “offers probing analyses of the impact of war on men, complete

with harrowing violence and disturbing depictions of evil” (Eberwein, The War Film 34-35). All

of Stone’s soldiers react differently to the war, which exposes them as flawed, sometimes evil

human beings that make mistakes, commit atrocities, and kill in cold blood. Thus, Stone shows

how difficult it was to “adhere to a moral code of conduct in a frighteningly corrosive

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environment” (Hillstrom 227). He does not condone or make excuses for their actions (much less

redeem them), but rather shows their abhorrent behavior as understandable responses to the

stressful nature of war. Still, Platoon gives the overall impression that American soldiers in

Vietnam were incompetent and nihilistic. Though Stone dedicates his movie to the men that

fought and died in Vietnam, his tribute is not a flattering one.

Despite the film’s negative portrayal of American soldiers, critical response was almost

unanimously positive, especially from those that had observed the war up close. Author and

historian David Halberstam, a reporter with The New York Times in Vietnam, praised the film as

“the first real Viet Nam film…and one of the greatest war movies of all time…The other

Hollywood Viet Nam films have been a rape of history. But Platoon is historically and

politically accurate” (Woodman 103). Monte Newcombe, who served with Stone in Vietnam,

agreed, noting that Platoon conveyed the “waste, corruption, filth, napalm, blood, and guts, the

destruction and absolute craziness of that war” (Auster and Quart 140). Many critics were

awestruck by the film’s powerful realism and considered it the best Vietnam War film ever made

(Bielakowski). Their extensive praise helped Platoon become the third-highest grossing film of

1986 and secure four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Stone

(Auster and Quart 134). Platoon’s was a victory for Vietnam vets and for Hollywood, which had

finally done the war justice with its “first real cinematic step taken…in coming to terms with the

truth about Vietnam” (Auster and Quart 137).

Platoon “brought out emotional and divided feelings about the Vietnam War” (McAdams

239), shedding new light on the conflict and sparking nation-wide discussion. By making the war

relevant again, Platoon “broke the film barrier that released the next flood of wartime films”

(Muse 159), spearheading a golden age of Vietnam War films. Platoon was followed in rapid

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succession by Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, Platoon Leader, Casualties of War, and Born

on the Fourth of July, similar-themed movies that mimicked Platoon’s desire to capture the

war’s ugliness. So whereas The Green Berets effectively discouraged Hollywood from

undertaking Vietnam combat pictures for almost two decades, Platoon produced the opposite

effect. Its critical and commercial success marked “Hollywood’s total acceptance of the Vietnam

War as a fit subject for film” (Auster and Quart 140). What followed was a wave of long-

overdue combat films about the conflict, with more being made in the three years following

Platoon than the total produced in the years that preceded it (Lanning 96). If The Green Berets

was looked upon as the end of the era and the death of a genre, Platoon “revived and modified

the conventions of the combat film” (Slocum 29), giving birth to a new era of war movies that

showed American atrocities and criticized the war. Like Platoon, they featured harsh, critical

portrayals of American soldiers that “ demythologized the war hero, and his mission…In the

Vietnam War films, soldiers were often the source of the destruction of the values of civilization

rather than the forces necessary to save it” (Keeton and Scheckner 123). Always the hero, the

American soldier was transformed into the murderous villain. Thus, the Hollywood archetype of

the evil Vietnam soldier was born.

While numerous Vietnam films have been made since Platoon, none of them have been

able to redefine the genre the way Stone’s film did. Platoon “offered a Vietnam never before

seen—or heard—on screen” (Howell) and its “success established the conventions of reality for

Vietnam” (Muse 169). Platoon raised the bar not just for Vietnam movies, but all war movies. In

addition to providing the most realistic depiction of combat yet seen, Stone went “further than

anyone in demonstrating the full extent of the evil results of war” (Eberwein, The Hollywood

War Film 101). His gut-wrenching movie fully realized the visceral horrors of war in a way no

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previous film had accomplished. Stone brought Vietnam to life, succeeding in making the

definitive Vietnam War film that Coppola attempted with Apocalypse Now. Of course, the

constraints of film prohibit a movie from capturing every aspect of the war-time experience. It’s

impossible to represent what every soldier went through, especially in Vietnam, where “the daily

ground and nature of the war shifted too often to be encapsulated by any one work of art”

(Auster and Quart 137). But Platoon came closest to capturing the common grunt’s experience,

which is why it’s become a touchstone of sorts for anyone looking to revisit the war. Almost

three decades after it was made, Platoon “remains the most influential Vietnam War film” (Muse

164) and “still lingers with us as no previous Vietnam film ever could” (Bowen 232). Like the

Vietnam Memorial in Washington, it has stood, and continues to stand, the test of time.

Case study 4: We Were Soldiers

In the aftermath of its victories in the Cold War and the first Gulf War, the United States

seemed ready to bury Vietnam for good. President Bush proclaimed the nation had “kicked the

Vietnam syndrome once and for all” (Mendible). As the world’s lone remaining superpower,

America reclaimed its title as the most powerful nation on earth driven by its mighty military, the

successes of which “lifted the burden of the Vietnam War from the American military and

permitted a much more positive representation of the U.S. armed forces in film” (Auster 206).

With Vietnam receding into the past, Hollywood moved away from the tragedy of Vietnam and

churned out a wave of war films that “revisit a number of earlier wars retrospectively, many of

them positively” (Eberwein, The War Film 40-41). The majority of these movies, like Saving

Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, recalled America’s triumphs in World War II. “Attempting

to resurrect the ‘good war’” (Keeton and Scheckner 34), they showed wholesome, clean-cut

Americans saving the world while also highlighting the brotherhood of war. The failure of The

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Green Berets appeared to prove this model didn’t apply to Vietnam, but We Were Soldiers

demonstrated that it was, in fact, possible to frame Vietnam as a “good war” after all.

A modern take on the Vietnam War, We Were Soldiers “has been called the first

‘straightforwardly pro-Vietnam war film’ since John Wayne’s” (Slocum 7). Like The Green

Berets, it is shockingly old fashioned. Though updated with state-of-the-art special effects, We

Were Soldiers is, at its core, “a reprise of the conventional patriotic war film…flag-waving, war-

fought- in-the-name-of-God movie” (Keeton and Scheckner 14). In many ways We Were Soldiers

is the anti-Platoon, portraying American soldiers as family men that went to Vietnam to fulfill

their duty to God and country. “Gone is the resentment of authority the Vietnam movies of the

late 1980s expressed; in this Vietnam…no one gets left behind” (Slocum 321). Here, the soldiers

are loyal fighters devoted to their commanders, their president, their country, and most

importantly, each other. Unlike earlier films that exposed the disunity within American ranks and

general incompetency of American military command, We Were Soldiers “is Hollywood’s first

major Vietnam War film to portray American soldiers more concerned with killing the enemy

than killing each other” (Eberwein, The War Film 218). The leaders are depicted as intelligent,

highly capable strategists sensitive to the needs of their men. The soldiers possess a strong

fighting spirit and camaraderie; in the words of the movie’s narrator, they “fought for each

other.” Therefore, because the film is essentially a “band-of-brothers movie” (Keeton and

Scheckner 15) that “has very, very patriotic American values” (Slocum 320), it succeeds in

making “Vietnam safe for the World War II combat film” (Eberwein, The War Film 218).

Such conventional framework fits We Were Soldiers because it’s one of the few Vietnam

films to revisit the early part of the war, when optimism ran high and victory in the conflict

seemed assured. Based on the well-received nonfiction book We Were Soldiers Once…And

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Young by retired Lieutenant General Hal Moore and former UPI reporter Joe Galloway, We

Were Soldiers depicts the vicious Battle of the Ia Drang Valley that took place in November,

1965—one of the first major battles of the Vietnam War. At the time, the war was still popular

back home and the military was mostly comprised of volunteers that believed in the mission and

were eager to serve. The United States had never lost a war and expected to prevail over the

Vietnamese cavemen in black pajamas, especially after winning the war’s first major

engagement against the North Vietnamese. The battle was a resounding success for the

Americans, who wiped out an NVA division while losing only 79 men (Slocum 320).A World

War II movie was the perfect medium to tell this triumphant story. And yet, “the Wallace movie

did not conceal the complexities and brutalities of a war gone very badly” (Keeton and

Scheckner 15). Unlike The Green Berets, it does not present a delusional, fairytale version of

Vietnam for the sake of its pro-soldier and pro-America agenda. We Were Soldiers hints at

several issues that would lead to America’s eventual downfall in Vietnam, such as the media’s

role, the military’s overconfidence, and the challenges of fighting a technological war in tough

terrain. The Americans win, but “die in great numbers” (Slocum 321) and “do not automatically

prevail in the style of traditional Hollywood war movies” (Ebert, “We Were Soldiers”). Their

victory is costly and hard-earned, setting the stage for what ultimately became America’s

misadventure in Vietnam.

Despite relying on standard war movie clichés and heroics, We Were Soldiers still

manages to break new ground. One of the longstanding criticisms regarding Hollywood’s

treatment of the Vietnam War was that the films tended to take an ethnocentric view of the war,

seeing it only from the American perspective and portraying the United States as the victims in a

war it chose to escalate. Whereas most Vietnam films hardly utilized the Vietnamese perspective

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(or, if they did, portrayed the enemy as fanatical, cruel, tortuous, and even suicidal), We Were

Soldiers shows the battle from the North Vietnamese Army’s point of view. Though the movie is

told primarily from the American perspective, it devotes numerous scenes to the enemy and

gives him a fair, nuanced treatment. “The North Vietnamese forces are neither demonized nor

glamorized, but, something rarer, humanized… as worthy and honorable opponents” (Eberwein,

The War Film 219). We Were Soldiers honors the NVA by portraying them as a tough, smart,

and determined enemy. Like their American counterparts they’re shown fulfilling their duties as

soldiers, and in this way the audience can sympathize with them as victims of circumstances

beyond their control. By telling the enemy’s side of the story and giving a more complete picture

of the war, We Were Soldiers reflects a great level of maturity about America’s desire to

understand the Vietnam experience in depth. Critics were impressed with the movie’s balance,

even if the film’s disproportionate attention to American soldiers left them wanting more.

We Were Soldiers reflects an idea that would have seemed unthinkable 40 years ago;

“Vietnam has become a war of which Americans can feel proud. The pride derives from the

demonstration of courage and the memory of suffering, irrespective of the cause in which the one

is displayed and the other is endured” (Slocum 321). Vietnam may not have been “The Good

War,” but that doesn’t change the fact that the men who fought it were brave and honorable.

They did their duty, and “by definition doing one’s duty is good” (Slocum 16). Thus, Americans

reserve the right to feel proud of how well their soldiers fought. They can feel good about the

fact that their military never lost a battle during the war, even if the war itself was ultimately lost.

We Were Soldiers is a long-overdue celebration of the soldiers that took part in the war (on both

sides). Unlike the majority of Vietnam movies, it properly honors America’s fallen heroes and

gives them the respect they deserve.

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To date, a big budget Vietnam film has not been made since We Were Soldiers came out

in 2002. Hollywood, along with the nation, has shifted its attention to America’s recent conflicts

in the Middle East. No longer at the forefront of the American psyche, Vietnam is now a distant

memory. The need for films about the conflict, as well as the desire to re-visit it, has faded

considerably. But the war, which still haunts the nation to this day, can never be completely

erased. “The gaping wound is closed, but not healed” (Anderegg 164).

Conclusion:

These movies demonstrate how the changing nature of Vietnam War films reflects

America’s gradually shifting views about the war and how it has since been remembered. They

show that “what the cinema has done has been to reflect…America's changing attitudes to that

conflict” (Paris). First there was total denial, as the absence of films about the war while it was

being waged and immediately afterward can be attributed to the war’s controversial nature. Sure

enough, when films began to appear in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, they reflected the war’s

unpopularity and were highly critical of the conflict. The movies of this period “condemned the

human costs, bureaucratic incompetence, and even absurdity of war that had surfaced in

Southeast Asia” (Slocum 14), a complete reversal of how The Green Berets covered Vietnam ten

years earlier. These films released a lot of built up resentment about the war, about how it ruined

the men who fought it and the nation as a whole. That immeasurable sense of loss is evident in

their “focus on the negative impact the war had on individual American soldiers… American

suffering is dramatized and mourned” (Keeton and Scheckner 66). Now, with America’s pride

and sense of greatness restored, Hollywood has been able to take a more clear-headed, objective

look at Vietnam and even find some redeeming qualities about it. So “while the politics of the

films differed, the changes in cinematic depictions of war and of soldiers is obvious” (Hughes).

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The nation has come a long way, from complete disagreement over the war to ultimate

acceptance, and the movies addressing Vietnam have mirrored this progression.

“In American culture, film representations of military prowess seem inseparable from

national self-esteem” (Slocum 239). This has certainly been true with Vietnam, arguably the

most damaging and traumatic experience in American history. The Green Berets reflected a

fractured society, divided politically and torn between holding onto its past and moving forward

into the future. Apocalypse Now represented a stunned, wounded nation that had lost its way,

struggling to cope with Post-Vietnam syndrome and a “lesion in the sense of national prestige”

(Slocum 240). It “attests no longer to a united nation on the move, but to a senseless destructive

movement without unity” (Bronfen 105). Platoon channeled America’s bitter coming to terms

with Vietnam and recognition of failure there. It was “a vehicle for mourning, for empathy, for

guilt” (Dittmar and Michaud 9), epitomizing a scarred nation in the process of healing. We Were

Soldiers embodied a proud, resurgent America that had finally come to grips with its Vietnam

experience and even mined some good from it. The paucity of Vietnam-themed films in the last

20 years seems to suggest, however, that the lengthy healing process and reparation of national

self-esteem is finally complete.

Over time, the United States has achieved a greater understanding of its Vietnam

experience. Films have stimulated that growth by confronting American audiences with a dark

chapter of their history, one most simply wanted to forget. In addition to giving the average

viewer a sense of the war, movies have encouraged him to question and re-evaluate the war as

well as extract some meaningful lessons from it. More than entertainment, Vietnam War films

have re-affirmed not only the power of cinema, but also its intrinsic value as an accessible

method of education, and perhaps even therapy.

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Works Cited

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Print.

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have changed.” Viewed 13 April 2014.

http://www.ucg.org/christian- living/world-news-and-trends-how-hollywoods-war-movies-

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Ebert, Roger. “Platoon.” Dated 30 Dec. 1986. Viewed 24 April 2014.

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/platoon-1986.

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Ebert, Roger. “We Were Soldiers.” Dated 1 March 2002. Viewed 28 April 2014.

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Hughes, Mark. “Memorial Day and How War Films Have Changed.” Dated 31 May 2011. Viewed 13 April 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2011/05/31/memorial-day-.

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Lanning, Michael Lee. Vietnam at the Movies. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. Print.

McAdams, Frank. The American War Film. Westport, CT: Praegar Publishers, 2002. Print. Mendible, Myra. “Post Vietnam Syndrome: National Identity, War, and the Politics of

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Muse, Eben J. The Land of Nam. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Print.

Paris, Michael. “The American Film Industry and Vietnam.” Dated 1987. Viewed 11 April 2014.

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Print.