---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 11:41:37 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: We Were Soldiers tries to turn the war into a U.S. victory
http://socialistworker.org/2002-1/399/399_08_RealVietnamStory.shtml
We Were Soldiers tries to turn the war into a U.S. victory
What really happened in Vietnam?
March 22, 2002 | Page 8
PAUL D'AMATO exposes the lies of the new blockbuster movie We Were
Soldiers.
HOLLYWOOD HAS released a string of movies lately that claim to
give us a more realistic portrayal of war. But almost every one
combines gritty battle "realism" with corny dialogue,
one-dimensional stock characters and patriotic sentimentality that
compares with any John Wayne movie.
Apparently, a war movie counts as "realistic" if the blood and
dismemberment look "real"--even if it fails to say anything honest
about the war it's supposed to be depicting. This is certainly
true of the new Vietnam War movie We Were Soldiers.
Its purpose is clear--to encourage Americans to feel good about
going to war, even though it may be a terrible thing. But We Were
Soldiers is more than another post-September 11 movie that's gung
ho about the U.S. military.
It is about reviving the Vietnam War as a noble U.S. victory
instead of what it really was--the miserable defeat of a colonial
army by a poorly armed but highly motivated people.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
HOLLYWOOD'S WE Were Soldiers contributes to the effort to wipe out
the Vietnam syndrome. The film stars Mel Gibson as Col. Hal Moore,
who leads his 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry (known as the Air Cav)
into the first major U.S. military engagement in Vietnam--the
battle of the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965.
The screenplay is based on the book We Were Soldiers Once^Åand
Young, by Moore and a reporter who accompanied Moore's battalion
into the fight, Joseph Galloway.
The story is about how 400 U.S. soldiers held out and triumphed
against "overwhelming odds" during three days of fighting in a
place that the Pentagon called LZ (landing zone) X-Ray.
But this "line" is contradicted by how the fight actually unfolds
in the film. As both the movie and the book show, the Vietnamese w
ere outgunned because of their lack of air power.
"As we dropped behind the termite hill, I fleetingly thought about
an illustrious predecessor of mine in the 7th Cavalry: Lt. Col.
George Armstrong Custer and his final stand in the valley of the
Little Bighorn in Montana 89 years earlier," Moore and Galloway
write. "We were a tight, well-trained and disciplined fighting
force, and we had one thing George Custer did not have: fire
support."
The authors make the same point again later in the book: "No
matter how bad things got for the Americans fighting for their
lives on the X-Ray perimeter, we could look out into the scrub
brush in every direction, into the seething inferno of exploding
artillery shells, 2.75-inch rockets, napalm canisters, 250- and
500-pound bombs and 20mm cannon fire, and thank God and our lucky
stars that we didn't have to walk through that to get to work."
The movie shows this barrage effectively--so effectively that
viewers are left wondering not how the Americans made it, but how
the Vietnamese could have possibly survived, let alone fought,
under such conditions.
Conveniently for his purposes, director Randall Wallace--who also
wrote the script for the bomb (no pun intended) Pearl
Harbor--decided to end the film two-thirds of the way through
Moore's story, after 79 U.S. soldiers were killed and the
Vietnamese offensive against LZ X-Ray was turned back.
But the battle didn't end there. The next day, remnants of the
U.S. fighters at X-Ray, along with the newly arrived 2nd
Battalion, 7th Cavalry, were caught in an ambush after a forced
march to another landing zone.
In what the Moore and Galloway book calls "the most savage one-day
battle of the Vietnam War," North Vietnamese attacked and wiped
out 155 U.S. troops and wounded another 124--with most of the
casualties coming in the first half-hour of the battle.
The book quotes a North Vietnamese Col. Nguyen Huu An as saying:
"I gave the order to my battalions: When you meet the Americans,
divide yourself into many groups and attack the column from all
directions and divide the column into many pieces. Move inside the
column, grab them by the belt, and thus avoid casualties from the
artillery and air."
The movie has Col. An say something similar--only on the last day
of the LZ X-Ray battle. Thus in the film, it seems that An's plan
didn't work. Yet it did work--the following day.
The movie would have been entirely different if it had shown this
phase of the Ia Drang campaign--where U.S. troops were almost
annihilated before the survivors were, once again, saved by
massive air strikes that not only killed hundreds of Vietnamese
soldiers, but also finished off many wounded Americans.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IN THIS film, there are no cowards, no racists. Everyone pulls
together, everyone fights hard, nobody runs in fear, and everybody
holds their ground. U.S. soldiers die saying things like "Tell my
wife I love her" and "I'm glad I had a chance to die for my
country."
Some movie reviewers made a lot of the fact that the Vietnamese
are portrayed as serious, hard-fighting men--noble and worthy
adversaries. This is in contrast to the standard story about
Vietnam.
But it was done for a specific reason. The idea that the enemy was
"inferior" wouldn't have provided the proper backdrop to showcase
the heroism of the Americans.
This also explains why the film depicts the first major battle in
Vietnam. At this point, U.S. soldiers were gung ho, ready to die
for what they believed to be a good cause. In short, they were
naive.
It would have been impossible to make this kind of movie about a
later battle, because by 1968, the U.S. army was already beginning
to disintegrate. U.S. forces increasingly came to see all
Vietnamese as the enemy and were wiping out villages and
committing countless atrocities.
One of the key elements leading to the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was
the breakdown of discipline and the quasi-mutiny of troops in the
field. So David Cortright's book Soldiers in Revolt tells a very
different story about Company C, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry--the
very unit that was nearly wiped out at the end of the Ia Drang
campaign. In April 1970, the men of this reconstituted company
refused a direct order to go down a dangerous jungle path--right
in front of a CBS camera crew.
Such incidents became commonplace in Vietnam. But showing them
wouldn't fit the aims of We Were Soldiers.
If Ia Drang was put in its proper historical context, it would be
portrayed as a battle in which poorly armed but more motivated
Vietnamese soldiers, fighting for their homeland, confronted
forces with far greater military capabilities and showed for the
first time that the U.S. had a fight on its hands.
In order to avoid this kind of realism, the movie has to show the
battle close up--with a tight focus on the gritty,
look-after-the-guy-next-to-you pseudo-realism that was perfected
by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan.
Any pullback of the camera would have revealed a deeper
truth--that these soldiers were cannon fodder for a U.S. military
engaged in an imperialist adventure.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BOTH COL. Moore and the filmmakers portray the Ia Drang campaign
as a U.S. victory. But this is completely shortsighted.
As "Cincinnatus," a U.S. officer who wrote an anonymous history of
the disintegration of American forces in Vietnam, put it: "The
United States Army faced a guerrilla war in Vietnam, a small
Southeast Asian country of some 65,000 square miles with a
population of about 16 million people. That nation fought to a
standstill the United States of America, with over 200 million
citizens--one of the largest nations on earth and, surely, one of
the most powerful."
"America's fighting men won every major battle, including such
crucial conflicts as Ap Bia...in the Au Shau Valley, Khe Sanh and
Tet 1968, yet they lost the war."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Mar 28 2002 - 00:25:21 EST