Arts of War on the Web

Welcome to “Arts of War,” Vietnam Veterans of America’s up-to-the-minute compendium of information, news and reviews about the arts—movies, television, stage plays, musicals, music, dance, popular and fine arts, and more—that deal with Vietnam veterans and the Vietnam War.

This web page replaces the “Arts of War” column that ran in Vietnam Veterans of America’s national magazine, The VVA Veteran, from 1986-2009. That popular column was written by The VVA Veteran’s arts editor, Marc Leepson, who continues that work on this web site.

We encourage feedback. Please email your comments, questions, and suggestions to mleepson@vva.org

The play, “Gonna See a Movie Called Gunga Din,” which is running at The Bushwick Starr Theater in Brooklyn, New York, through February 11, is an amalgam of stories collected from real veterans and from scenes from Hollywood war movies voiced by a group of actors as they palaver in a VFW Hall-like setting.

Scenes that the actors act out include several from Vietnam War films such as Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Casualties of War, Full Metal Jacket, and Born on the Fourth of July. The play, which was conceived and directed by Mark Sitko for his Van Cougar acting company, has  received mixed reviews from the New York theater critics.

“The juxtaposition of these frenzied homages beside the actual veterans’ more modest reminiscences, overlaid with a variety of stage tableaus, does neither half of ‘Gunga Din’ any favors,” Eric Grode wrote in The New York Times. ”The movie scenes seem even more overwrought in this format (no mean feat in the case of ‘Casualties of War’), while the stumbling, often disjointed testimonials can try the patience by comparison.”

Miriam Felton-Dansky, writing in The Village Voice, said: “At two hours without intermission, Gunga Din would benefit from a little editing. And it sometimes batters its audience unnecessarily—one monologue, reflecting on America’s addiction to war, quickly veers into lecture mode. But as the stories accumulate, the piece implies that our society is now a kind of giant, national VFW hall, steeped in the unspoken aftermath of battle—repressed histories that shape us even while we imbibe their adrenaline-laced, idealized imitations in Hollywood-blockbuster form.”

Michael “Machine Gun” Kelley, a nationally renowned Vietnam veteran artist and writer, died December 24 at his home in Sacramento, California. He committed suicide. Kelley was 65 years old and had been suffering from physical and emotional problems for several years.

“Mike Kelley was a force of nature,” said Marc Leepson, The VVA Veteran’s Arts Editor. “He was severely wounded in Vietnam, but through drive and determination he recovered and became a first-class artist and a forceful writer.

“And he was an untiring advocate for Vietnam veterans. Mike’s legacy will be the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he helped get built, and his Where We Were in Vietnam, the invaluable book he worked tirelessly on for many years and one that belongs on every shelf of Vietnam War reference books.”

Michael P. Kelley was born in Van Nuys, California, and grew up in Montreal and Sacramento. He graduated from California State University, Sacramento, with a degree in fine art. After receiving his degree, Kelley volunteered for the draft. He was inducted on June 10, 1969, had Basic Training and Infantry AIT at Fort Ord, and landed in Vietnam on November 10, 1969.

Kelley did an eleven-month Vietnam War tour as a machine-gunner with Company D, 1st Battalion/502nd Infantry of the 101st Airborne Division. His tour ended in September 1970 when Kelley suffered severe injuries—including the loss of a lung—in a landmine explosion.

He was medivaced to Japan, then spent eight months recovering at Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. Kelly was retired on medical disability in May of 1971.

Sometimes calling himself  “Machine-gun Kelley,” he went back to college and received his Masters in Fine Arts. Beginning in the early 1980s, Kelley became one of California’s most forceful and effective Vietnam veterans’ advocates. Among other things, he served as an Associate Member of the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission from 1984-1991. He donated his print “Extraction From a Hot LZ- Leaving Behind a Classic Ford and Our Innocence” (above, top) to the Commission, which used it as a fund-raising poster.

Mike Kelley’s artwork hangs in museums and private collections throughout the world, including at Vietnam Veterans of America’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland; the Oakland Museum of California; and the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.

His articles on Vietnam veterans’ issues appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times, and Vietnam Magazine, among other publications.  Where We Were was published in 2002.

“Mike Kelley has done everyone who served in Vietnam a great service with his monumental research for Where We Were,” the noted Vietnam War correspondent Joe Galloway said of the book. “Veterans and military historians alike will benefit from his Herculean efforts to nail down precisely where everything was and where everything happened in America’s long war in Vietnam. If you can’t find it in these pages, it can’t be found.”

A memorial service was held on January 15 in a most appropriate location, the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Sacramento’s Capitol Park in front of the State Capitol. Contributions to the Michael P. Kelley memorial fund can be sent to 1617 Porter Way,  Stockton, CA 95207

For info, call 209- 403-6303

“Into Sunlight,” the dance piece created last year by the Robin Becker Dance group in New York, will have its Washington, D.C.,  premiere on Friday and Saturday, January 20 and 21, at 8:00 p.m. at Georgetown University’s Davis Performing Arts Center’s Gonda Theatre.

The work was inspired by the journalist David Maraniss’s excellent 2003 book,They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace: America and Vietnam, October 1967. In it, Maraniss examines  two events that took place that month: the decimation of a battalion of U.S. Army First Infantry Division troops in South Vietnam, and the violence that ensued on the University of Wisconsin campus during a student protest against the Dow Chemical Company.

At both D.C. performances, Maraniss will be on hand to introduce the dance and take part in a post-show discussion with the artists and audience.

Tickets are $18 for general admission and $10 for students and veterans. For info, go to http://performingarts.georgetown.edu or call 202-687-2787.

“Fly Marines! The Centennial of Marine Corps Aviation: 1912-2012″ is the name of a new exhibit that opened on January 14 at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The exhibit is made up of 91 works of art—mostly depicting Marine Corps aviation subjects— selected from the Marine Corps Art Program, which began in 1942 during World War II to “keep Americans informed about what ‘their Marines’ were doing at home and overseas.”

Included in the Smithsonian exhibit are several works from the Vietnam War, such as a still life of a bullet-riddled helicopter pilot’s seat and a painting by LCPL James Butcher of a Marine sitting alone waiting for a flight at the air terminal at Phu Bai in 1967.

The entire Marine Corps art collection is made up of  more than 8,000 works. It is housed at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia, and  worked with the Air and Space Museum to produce the exhibition.

“If you come here today looking for pretty airplane pictures, you are going to be hard pressed to find but a couple of those,” Lin Ezell, the director of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, told The Washington Post. “The show is a celebration not about the form of the aircraft itself, but the function of aircraft in war, and that always has to do with people.”

This exhibit will be on display for a year. For info on the museum’s hours of operation, go to Air and Space’s web site.

There is an interesting interview with Pat Sajak  in The New York Times‘ on line blog about his interest in the National Hockey League. Sajak, the popular host of Wheel of Fortune, is a Vietnam veteran who received the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award at the 2009 National Convention in Louisville.

Since then, Pat Sajak has been a big supporter of Vietnam Veterans of America. He has donated his time to narrate VVA public service announcements. And in 2010 he named VVA as his charity on Celebrity Jeopardy, winning a large amount of money for our organization.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced that twenty-five movies have been named to the LOC’s National Film Registry, which means they will be preserved in the Library as cultural, artistic, and historical treasures. The Registry now includes 575  movies of all stripes (feature films, documentaries, animation, shorts, and even home movies) made from 1912-1994 that have been deemed worthy of perpetual preservation.

This year’s group included Bambi, Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, Silence of the Lambs, War of the Worlds, and one film with a strong Vietnam War theme-–Forrest Gump. That famed 1994 film starring Tom Hanks contains a short, but extremely realistic Vietnam War combat scene (the military technical adviser was Dale Dye, Hollywood’s best), and follows Gump and his severely wounded Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise, above right) through a series of post-war adventures.

Here’s what the official announcement had to say about the movie: “Forrest Gump is a guileless ‘everyman’ whose open-heartedness and sense of the unexpected unwittingly draws him into some of the most iconic events of the 1960s and 1970s. A smash hit, ‘Forrest Gump’ has been honored for its technological innovations (the digital insertion of Gump seamlessly into vintage archival footage), its resonance within the culture that has elevated Gump (and what he represents in terms of American innocence) to the status of folk hero, and its attempt to engage both playfully and seriously with contentious aspects of the era’s traumatic history. The film received six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.”

Bert Schneider, one of Hollywood’s biggest producers in the Vietnam War era who made  several iconic films including Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), and The Last Picture Show (1971), died December 12 in Los Angeles at age 78.

Schneider (who also co-created “The Monkees” TV show) also co-produced, with Peter Davis, the scathingly antiwar Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds (1974), which received the Academy Award for best documentary the following year.

This Vietnam veteran did not bother to see Hearts and Minds when it came out in 1974. My goal then was to avoid all reminders of the war. I did see the film when it came out on video—and it did not exactly bowl me over.

There’s some great stuff in Hearts and Minds, but I couldn’t get over (or forgive) its distorted portrayal of Vietnam  veterans. The film’s main point is that the United States had no business being in Vietnam and that everyone who took part in the war has blood on his or her hands.

In putting forth this oversimplified—at best—message, the filmmakers willfully ignored anything showing Americans or South Vietnamese in a positive light. Plus, the movie portrays the NVA and VC as one-dimensional, heroic freedom fighters. In this version of the war, American GIs raped and pillaged innocent villagers, while an unseen enemy went about heroically defending its homeland against the imperialist aggressor.

The film’s hero among American veterans is a deserter who tells his tale to a congressional committee. Its villains are a series of military men who were up to no good on the ground in Vietnam and back home.

Some veterans in the film, such as VVA founder Bobby Muller, don’t fit in either category. But the veterans that Hearts and Minds highlights make it appear as if we were all either racist killers or apologizing wimps. Everyone with an ounce of brains knows that that’s not true and that the truth is much, much more complex.

The Department of English and Fine Arts at the U.S. Air Force Academy has been publishing WLA: War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities since 1989. The latest edition, Vol. 23, 2011, contains what we expect from this excellent journal: a rich collection of memoir excerpts, artwork, fiction, critical and personal essays, poetry, and commentary dealing with war and its impact. And, as is always the case, several of the offerings deal with Vietnam veterans and the Vietnam War.

There’s an essay by Jerry Kykisz, a Vietnam veteran, artist, and board member of the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago,  called “Trauma & Metamorphosis” that also includes artwork by Vietnam veterans Helen White, Ron Mann, Joe Fornelli, and Stephen Ham. Mann’s “Reflections” graces the cover.

The short story “At The Wall” by Nicholas Poluhoff is about a strange set of events at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. And there are seven poems by Vietnam veteran Dale Ritterbusch, several of which touch on the war in Vietnam.

Additional material, including book reviews may be found on WLA’s website.

The Journal of Military Experience, which just put out its first on-line volume, publishes short stories, creative nonfiction, poems, and artwork by veterans of all eras, as well as those by family members of veterans, care providers, and scholars interested in, as the editors put it, “educating the masses about military culture.”

This nonprofit venture considers every creative work that is submitted. “Instead of accepting or rejecting creative works outright,” the editors say, “we review them all, giving each author a chance to make corrections, develop ideas, and craft narratives that are cathartic but also powerful when read.” A team of volunteer editors does all the proofing and editing, working with those who submit their prose, poetry and art work.

For submission guidelines, go to http://militaryexperience.org/submissions And, if you submit, please mention that you read about the journal on Vietnam Veterans of America’s Arts of War on the Web page.

Thanhha Lai, who was born in Vietnam and moved to this country in 1975, received the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature last night, November 16, at the annual awards ceremonies in New York.

Lai was honored for her first book, Inside Out & Back Again (Harper, 272 pp., $15.99), a series of autobiographical free-verse poems aimed at children in grades four to eight. The story-poems deal with the saga of a ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who flees Saigon with her family as the communists take over in 1975 and goes on to face immense adjustment problems in the United States.