SwiftVets.com

[coldwarvet]

Quote taken from...

Copyright John Puzzo May 2, 2002
VIET NAM AND HOLLYWOOD

"The impact Hollywood has had on shaping American opinion of the Vietnam War and the veteran cannot be downplayed. It is significant, corrosive, beyond truth, hallucinatory, anti-war, anti-veteran, anti-American, shameful, insulting, and not accidental".

Please share with me any Vietnam war movies that do not include a left leaning bias. I would love to add a honest portrayal of the Vietnam war to my collection.
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Defender of the honor of those in harms way keeping us out of harms way.

"Peace is our Profession"
Strategic Air Command - Motto

USAF 75-79 Security Police

[Marine4life]

Heartbreak ridge, Clint Eastwood set it on the Grenada incident but reflected positively about his time in Nam throughout the movie. Not a Nam movie per se but not negative about it either. Semper Fi.
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Helicopter Marine Attack Squadron 169 which is now HMLA-169. They added Huey's to compliment the Cobra effectiveness. When I served we just had Snakes.

[nakona]

Mel Gibson's flick about Ia Drang.



BTW, Heartbreak Ridge was originally supposed to be about the 75th Ranger Regiment, I forget which battalion. The Army decided that it didn't fit the image they wanted to present.


Also, there is a scene in that movie based on an incident where a soldier calling for close air support had to use a cell phone to call back to base, then get patched through.

That incident actually happened. IIRC, it was a 1LT who had to do that.
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13F20P

[ASPB]

[JN173]

"Go Tell the Spartans" is my favorite although it goes a little left.
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A Grunt
2/503 173rd Airborne Brigade
RVN '65-'66

[coldwarvet]

[War Dog]

I greatly recommend "We Were Soldiers"! I have seen it at least a dozen times, and I think it's a great movie. If all of our commanders in Vietnam were like Hal Moore, we wouldn't have had to worry about the anti-war traitors back home.

War Woof!
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"When people are in trouble, they call the cops.

When cops need help, they call the K-9 unit."

[Indianbaboon]

uncommon valor? wasn't exactly about vietnam war itself, but abt rescuing POW/MIAs

Renegade group goes back to rescue people when the govt won't. I've always thought of it as an unabashed and extremely accusatory film toward liberals.

needless to say, I loved it.

[Tony]

Hal Moore's book, We were soliders" is even better than the movie - but the movie was pretty good too.... You guys have to understand - many of the Oliver Stone hollywood types have a lot of guilt that they never served...they repressed it pretty well - but it's still there (IMHO, of course).
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http://tonyk.smugmug.com/photos/1822816-L-1.jpg
USN 1983-1992

[Marine4life]

I am a little more partial to the WWII movies, Midway etc. The actors in that era were Veterans and served this country. Jimmy Stewart, Mickey Rooney are some that I think of off the top of my head. Today the only one that I know of that served is Drew Carey. The caliber of the actors= The caliber of the movies. We just don't have any respectable actors or actresses anymore, they don't appreciate what their hero's have done to ensure their freedom. There is one current celeb that has done his time, Bob Barker. He served in the Navy and flew F4U Corsairs. That is why he is partial to military personnel in uniform on his show. A true American. Semper Fi.
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Helicopter Marine Attack Squadron 169 which is now HMLA-169. They added Huey's to compliment the Cobra effectiveness. When I served we just had Snakes.

[garb1015]

If you want to see a different approach to the Viet Nam War, watch "In Country" with Bruce Willis. A teenage girl in a small town wants to know about her father who was killed in the war. Willis plays her uncle who also served in Viet Nam.

If I remember correctly, "Go Tell The Spartans" was about the advisory period and starred an aging Burt Lancaster. You may have trouble finding a copy now.

If you just want to watch a fun movie there's always "Good Morning Viet Nam" with Robin Williams. Other than the fact that it's based on a real person, you have to decide how accurate the rest of the film is. He and his radio program certainly did boost the troop's morale.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, Oliver Stone is a Viet Nam vet.

[DougReese]

[B_Francis]

[coldwarvet]

"We were soldiers" Mel Gibson's flick about Ia Drang. Thanks for the recommendation’s I received on the Shame on Hollywood post. Now that movie is a documentary. Even though I served in a security unit in the USAF the tactics that were used in this battle are exactly what we were taught in the 1970s. I had to laugh at one of the early scenes when they first started training on how to deploy out of a helicopter and the guys were tripping all over each other. That exact thing happened to our 10 men quick response team and our Major made us repeat the process of deploying out of a helicopter for most of an entire day. I thought he was being a bit of a jerk, but after watching the movie it became clear to me what he was concerned about. It makes me wonder if we actually were deployed into fire would we have done as well as Colonel Hal Mores honorable men. I like to think we would have. I thank God I served 75-79 and our biggest threat was the left wing VVAW type radicals trying to embarrass the Air Force by taking over a missile silo out in the western prairie land some were. Now that would have been a fight worth dying for.
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Defender of the honor of those in harms way keeping us out of harms way.

"Peace is our Profession"
Strategic Air Command - Motto

USAF 75-79 Security Police

[coldwarvet]

Out of all Hollywood has produced is Mel Gibsons "We were soldiers" the only one that did'nt include the finger prints of the VVAW?

Copyright John Puzzo May 2, 2002

VIET NAM AND HOLLYWOOD

(The author served with the 4th Infantry Division in Viet Nam as a Ranger, Artilleryman, Infantryman, and Combat Engineer. He is creator of “The Viet Nam War Veterans Oral History Project.”)

“The History of War is written by the Victor.” This is so true it is a cliché.

Hollywood has produced such clichéd Viet Nam War movies as “Platoon,” “Born on the 4th of July,” “Full Metal Jacket,” and “Casualties of War,” these being perhaps the most (in)famous in that genre of LA LA land film. As they meet the standard of “perspective from the victor’s” point of view some of these films are favorites in Hanoi.

Hollywood deposits soldiers of my era on the screen and animates them, but they are as unreal as so many Frankenstein’s. Earlier generations of war films had characters played by John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Robert Mitchum, Lee Marvin, and Robert Taylor. They portrayed soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who were real, or at least believable. Many were portrayed heroically.

We got ‘Forrest Gump’ and a litany of other screwball characters the likes of which I never saw in the Army. Gump, a half-wit, at least isn’t evil like the bizarre character in ‘Full Metal Jacket’ who murdered his DI, or the character played by Sean Penn in ‘Casualties of War’ who raped and then murdered, in a scene of prolonged vicious and brutal agony, a young Vietnamese woman with a Marine issue K-BAR knife.

America also had to endure the tap-dance of murders, atrocities, toxic sergeants, incompetent officers, and confused soldiers in ‘Platoon’ (Best Picture Oscar 1986). This film is a sumptuous feast for haters of all things ‘Viet Nam.’

Perhaps because American soldiers were portrayed as oppressors in ‘Platoon,’ few people were outraged at the Nazi Battle Flag flown on an American Tank after the big battle scene. This movie so completely degrades the American soldier that a member of the Vietnamese Politboro, Bui Tinh, openly praised it. Comrade Tinh was a North Vietnamese Army General Staff officer during the war. They use it, he said, to teach young Vietnamese about the American’s “Imperialist” war.

80% of ‘The Deer Hunter’ had nothing to do with Viet Nam. That which did was so implausible it’s a wonder anyone went to see it, but America was hungry for Viet Nam War movies and almost every single movie about that subject achieved either critical acclaim (undeserved) or box office success, including ‘Deer Hunter.’ The main character in “Deer Hunter,” played by Robert Deniro, exhibits psychotic and antisocial behavior by stripping his clothes off in public and parading naked right down Main Street – behavior that would rightly get anyone arrested and taken away for psychiatric evaluation. ‘Deer Hunter’ won two Oscars, Best Picture and Best Director (1978).

In Jane Fonda’s anti-veteran film, “Coming Home,” another psychotic episode unfolds as her Navy officer husband, just returned from Viet Nam also strips buck naked in public. We see him fully nude, babbling as he strolls nonchalantly into the waves and commits suicide in the Pacific Ocean. His part is played by actor and antiwar activist, Bruce Dern. Jane Fonda won an Oscar for her performance in ‘Coming Home’ (1978), and she is as guilty of treason as OJ is of murder and everybody knows it.



Conceivably Fonda and her Hollywood friends, like Dern, Donald Sutherland, Peter Boyle, and other “celebrities” who visited Hanoi during the War wish a similar fate for all Viet Nam War veterans. Figuratively, Hollywood has done just that: The films made about the Vietnam War may as well have turned veterans and their history into a gas and released it into the stratosphere.

Fonda and Deniro came to my home state of Connecticut in 1988 to make a film about an illiterate, dysfunctional (surprise) truck-driving Viet Nam Veteran. She was met here with protests that were global in scope. But Fonda’s advance team had prepared for these protests and made deals with some of the local vets (shame on them) to whom she could make her ‘apology.’ When I exposed this, I was physically attacked in a VFW hall in Naugatuck, Connecticut. This incident was widely covered in the press. I was not invited to the session where she ‘apologized.’

This ‘apology’ was played sympathetically by Barbara Walters on ABC. Apart from Walters’ own palsied and not very unique left sided media bias, she served up softballs to Fonda and allowed her to put a soft face on treason. It is not widely known that Walters’ husband’s company, ‘Lorimar Productions,’ produces and markets Fonda’s workout tapes…cozy arrangement.

On the screen battlefield, American soldiers in Viet Nam are habitually portrayed by Hollywood filmmakers as making war on civilians (Platoon, Casualties of War, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the 4th of July) and running from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army.

In “We were Soldiers once and Young,” a departure from thirty or more years of humiliation by Hollyweird, the Viet Nam Soldier is finally, and too late, portrayed as a soldier, standing up in battle, and meeting an armed enemy that has shown himself quite capable of making war on civilians and living by ‘atrocity.’ Of course, I am referring to the communists, who first and foremost make war on their own civilian populations to advance ‘the revolution,’ as they did in Viet Nam long before any American soldier jumped out of a helicopter there.

In, “Apocalypse Now,” (two Oscars, 1979) another surrealistic and bizarre film about Viet Nam, a shaved bald and very fat Marlon Brando (Marlon Brando?) portrays a Special Forces Colonel. Martin Sheen, the Anti-war diplomat himself, is the hero who emerges from a murky jungle river, knife in his teeth, to cut Brando’s throat. What was the point of ‘Apocalypse Now?’ Except that one American soldier kills another, I never did see the point of it.

In “Born on the 4th of July,” viewers are subject to the usual hype of war crimes and atrocities, this time committed by American Marines who cut and run from the VC in a battle - Marines running away? Later in the film, the spectacle of wheelchair-bound veterans spitting all over each other is another twisted, uniquely Hollywood metaphor on the American soldier: “We spit on you…”

Even in films which were not overtly about Vietnam, this disgraceful treatment persists to the point of being nearly universal. The promotional press release for a 1969 movie by legendary Hollywood filmmaker, Sam Peckinpaugh, ‘The Wild Bunch,’ states:

“The 'Bunch' also represents contemporary American soldiers in the late 60’s, out of place in the jungles of Vietnam, unchanged men in a changing land, out of step, out of place and desperately out of time. Suddenly it was sundown…suddenly their day was over…The ‘Bunch’ is a gang of desperadoes, criminals assaulted in the film's opening ambush and then brutally destroyed in the film's conclusion.”
Another colorful series of Hollywood metaphors, this time overt.

Oscar Wilde, a literary figure of the 19th Century, said that when art develops a purpose it becomes propaganda. This is as good an observation as any that can be made for the Vietnam War genre in American film.

PBS’ Vietnam: A Television History,” is a masterpiece of propaganda, carefully edited and with sounds like gunshots and flies buzzing around corpses added for effect. Watching this tedious 13 hour ‘documentary’ will convince anyone that Viet Nam was a hopeless and ill conceived venture criminal in its execution. I would agree with that, but for very different reasons as those alluded in this ‘documentary.’

The best and most complete criticism of PBS’ “Vietnam: A Television History,” was done by Reed Irvine’s Accuracy In Media, a Washington based think tank dedicated to exposing the major media shortcomings. AIM has also done a great deal of reporting on the film industry’s portrayal of the Vietnam War and they have good archives.

Contemporaneous with PBS’ “Television History,” PBS produced and released, “Frank, A Vietnam Veteran.” ‘Frank’ is an alcoholic drug addicted crying slob who ‘became’ a homosexual because he ‘could not find love’ after Vietnam.

Does anyone see a pattern here?

‘Hanoi Hilton,’ a film by Lionel Chetwynd, was released in 1987 (same year as Platoon). It is set in Hoa Lo prison, Hanoi, from 1964-73. Chetwynd stated that his purpose in making the film was "to pay tribute to their [POWs] sacrifice:" The loneliness of isolated confinement, lack of food, beatings, and the torture with ropes, clubs, electric shock and whips, and psychological torture.

In ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ The Vietnamese commander of the Prison camp remarks, “The real war is in Berkeley, California, Washington, D.C., and in the cities of America, and what we do not win on the battlefield, your journalists will win for us on your very own doorstep.”

One scene in this film exposes Cora Weiss, another true life American traitor who was an agent of the North Vietnamese Army in their use of psychological warfare against the POW’s, their families, and against America. The segment ends by her hugging the Vietnamese commander and thanking him for his efforts.

Weiss openly declared herself not a pacifist, led a group in the 60’s that tried to force American POW families to make pro communist propaganda in exchange for contact with their family members being held in Hanoi. Though desperate for contact with their loved ones, not one family accepted Cora Weiss’ tainted offers.

Largely assailed by the nation’s movie critics, Hanoi Hilton was well received by the men and women of the American armed forces and the prisoners whose story he told. Chetwynd wrote and directed the film as a personal statement. It took him ten years to make the film in the U. S. because Hollywood had other notions of how it wanted to portray the Vietnam War and the soldiers who fought in it. (The Left engages in blacklisting, too…)

The impact Hollywood has had on shaping American opinion of the Vietnam War and the veteran cannot be downplayed. It is significant, corrosive, beyond truth, hallucinatory, anti-war, anti-veteran, anti-American, shameful, insulting, and not accidental.

List of Vietnam War genre Films:

317th Platoon, The
365 Days
Anderson Platoon, The
Apocalypse Now
Battle of Dien Bien Phu, The
Bloods of 'Nam
Born on the 4th of July
Casualties of War
Coming Home
Dear America
Deer Hunter
Dogfight
Face of War, A
First Blood
First Vietnam War 1946-1954
Forrest Gump
Full Metal Jacket
Gardens of Stone
Go Tell The Spartans
Good Morning Vietnam
Green Berets
Hamburger Hill
Hearts and Minds
Heaven and Earth
In Country
Interviews With My-Lai Veterans
Jacob’s Ladder
JFK
Killing Fields, The
Medal of Honor Rag
Nixon
Peoples’ Century: Guerrilla Wars: Cuba, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Platoon
Scent of Green Papaya
Some Kind of Hero
Streamers
Television's Vietnam: The Real Story
Television's Vietnam: The Real Story
The War At Home
Vietnam Reconsidered
Vietnam: A Television History
Vietnam: Chronicle of A War
Vietnam: In The Year of the Pig
Vietnam: In The Year of the Pig
Vietnam: Red Hot War
Vietnam: The 10,000 Day War
War At Home, The
Who'll Stop The Rain
Why Vietnam
Why Vietnam
World of Charlie Company
John Puzzo
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Defender of the honor of those in harms way keeping us out of harms way.

"Peace is our Profession"
Strategic Air Command - Motto

USAF 75-79 Security Police