Vietnam and Hollywood: The War That Changed America

The war in Vietnam will cause very great upheavals in America, in all its segments. The great changes in American society, the consequences of this war, will also be conveyed in the film industry: From "Hair", "Deer Hunter", to the film "We Were Soldiers" by Randal Wallace, with Mel Gibson in the main role.

By: Blerim Shala (article published in 2001, in the Albanian Political Weekly - "Zëri")

The Vietnam War continues to be one of Hollywood's favorite subjects.

This is proven by the film "We Were Soldiers", directed by Randal Wallace, with Mel Gibson in the lead role. "We Were Soldiers" is based on the book by the American journalist Joe Galloway "We Were Soldiers, Once and Young".

The sentence that America will never be the same again, which was so often heard after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 in Washington and in New York, has been the American motto even during the prayer in Vietnam.

YEAR 1965 – THE DECISION TO ENTER TOTAL WAR

When John F. Kennedy became the President of America, in 1960, a lot changed in America.

Kennedy was the youngest president in the history of America, he was close to Hollywood and did not hide that America should play a special role in the world that the USA is a country with a mission to help the spread of freedom and democracy in the world. Kennedy in Berlin told the Germans that he too is a Berliner, to show Washington's preoccupation with the freedom of Europe, while he appealed to the Americans to do more for their homeland.

The assassination of Kennedy, in 1963, never solved until the end, will leave great consequences in American politics. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, would try to pick up where Kennedy left off, but he didn't have JFK's charisma, nor the ability to balance American interests, the mission of spreading freedom, and the willingness to compromise, which we got America to get rid of the missiles from Cuba without going to war with the Soviet Union.

In 1965, Johnson will make the decision to defend, at all costs, American interests in South Vietnam which was attacked at the time by North Vietnam where the communist regime was installed. This decision will be announced to the American people, along with the news of the commitment of 125000 American soldiers. When Washington did this, it likely estimated that it would succeed in rescuing at least South Vietnam from communism, as it had previously done with South Korea.

But Vietnam was a different case.

Ten years later, Vietnam will be united. About 60,000 American soldiers will be killed there. Those who survived, when they returned to their homeland, were greeted as hated, as murderers, as losers. Victim soldiers thus identified with a war that Americans did not want. As it will be pointed out at the end of the movie "We Were Soldiers", in the beginning the American soldiers fought for the flag and for the homeland, and then they realized that they have to fight for each other. Only for each other.

The war in Vietnam, while it lasted, was a source of great upheaval within America itself, which had not happened in any of the wars that until then America had fought anywhere in the world, always winning and always having great sacrifices. The numerous riots and peaceful protests, the hippie movement and "flower power", the ever-greater involvement of leftism in intellectual circles, hit the White House hard, which with traditional American conservatism and not with Kennedy's liberal approach, tried to justify the war in Vietnam. In the movie "Nixon" by Oliver Stone, if you remember, there is an anthology scene when Nixon (played by Anthony Hopkins), if we are not mistaken, at the Abraham Lincoln Memorial, meets with a group of young people.

THE CLIFF THAT WAS FILLED WITH CORPSES

Nixon, who would otherwise enlist Henry Kissinger to end American involvement in Vietnam, will try in vain to explain to young people why America is in Vietnam. Between him, the White House and ordinary Americans stood the precipice of Vietnam, which was becoming more and more littered with the corpses of American soldiers killed in a futile war.

This abyss, this misunderstanding between the establishment and the millet, will also be expressed in art: in music, in rock in particular, in theater and, above all, in film.

In the seventies there were two outstanding films that dealt with Vietnam.

Here we must not forget the film "Hair" by Milosh Forman, which was a screen adaptation of the well-known musical. "Hair" brilliantly presents the great contradictions in the American society of the sixties, when on the one hand we have the preoccupied youth with rock, with long hair, with a new system of values, which, above all, was a denial, a rejection of traditional values ​​and, on the other hand, we have the American establishment which did not understand and ignored these changes. "Hair" was an anti-war film that offered all the naivety and innocence of a generation that had new ideals against previous American generations. Also, three other films about Vietman of this period should be mentioned here: "Coming Home" by Hal Ashby, "Go to tell Spartans" by Ted Post and "The Boys in Company C" by Sindey Furie.

However, the two most popular films that deal directly with the war in Vietnam and Asia are Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Michael Cimino's Deer Hunter. Deer Hunter won five Oscars, while Coppola won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Apocalypse Now.

Cimino's film deals with the fate of three Russian-Americans who will serve in the US Army in Vietnam. The Russian Roulette scene, which Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken are forced to play as prisoners of war, is one of those that entered the film anthology.

But "Deer Hunter" has not dealt strongly with the causes of the American war in Vietnam. Here there is no justification, no accusation, but only a description of the fate of the American soldiers.

In Coppola, in "Apocalypse Now", the film about Vietnam, about a mad colonel, based on Joseph Conrad's novel, "Heart of Darkness", written decades before the war in Vietnam, turns into Coppola's attempt to understand the essence of evil. Vietnam, therefore, is used here to reopen an almost theological debate. However, the struggle presented by Coppola in "Apocalypse Now" leaves no doubt about its character and about the American confusion.

"WE WERE SOLDIERS" – FILM WITH A NEW APPROACH

The late seventies will mark a turning point in politics and American cinema. Successive defeats of the administration of Jimmy Carter (US president in the years 1976-1980) in Nicaragua, in Iran and in Afghanistan made America seek salvation in President Ronald Reagan, who came from Hollywood with the theory of fighting evil (communism ), wherever he is. Thus, for years there was no new attempt to deal with Vietnam. Indeed, Reagan-era Hollywood would launch Rambo Stallone, who in several sequels would wreak havoc in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Later, Oliver Stone will shoot "Platoon" and Stanley Kubrick "Full Metal Jacket". Stone himself had served in the US Army, therefore, his film that world was appreciated as the most objective cinematic work dedicated to this war. Kubrick had also made a very good film.

In this short history, dedicated to American film and the war in Vietnam, we thus arrive at "We Were Soldiers" by Mel Gibson and Randal Wallace.

Continuing the comparisons of the political moment with the film one, as we did earlier, it could be said here that "We Were Soldiers" was presented after the horror of September 11, when Americans returned to it, as never before in the last ten years , after the end of the Cold War, the scheme of traditional patriotism. It is said that "We Were Soldiers" was done earlier, but that its authors did not want to promote it while the aftermath of 11/XNUMX was still very fresh. This does not mean that "We Were Soldiers" is a film which is very problematic for today's atmosphere that reigns in America.

The war in Vietnam was different, incomparable with the previous wars of America and with this one today, which has united America, Europe and most countries in the world.

"We Were Soldiers" is a special film in many respects. It describes the first battle of the US Army with that of North Vietnam, which takes place in November 1965, on the "Field of Death" (at Ia Drang). Here, 450 American soldiers, under the command of Colonel Hal Moore (played brilliantly by Mel Gibson) and 2000 Vietnamese soldiers, will face each other. In a three-day battle, the whole of which will take place literally neck to neck, 70 Americans and 1800 Vietnamese will be killed. The battle at Ia Drang will early herald the American defeat, although here Colonel Moore came up with a warning: It will be understood that the Vietnamese are able to sacrifice everything for victory and that Washington will be forced to retreat. The country to which the surviving American soldiers returned was not the same one that had sent them to war. As Colonel Moore will point out, most Americans will not be able to distinguish the war they hated from the American soldiers who fought there.

"We Were Soldiers" is also special in terms of presenting, quite objectively, the two sides in the war: Here, not only the American soldiers are killed and suffer, but also the Vietnamese ones, who also have families, relatives, girlfriend, children… and homeland. /Telegraph/