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

Paul Fussell, the acclaimed literary scholar and World War II veteran best known for his pioneering book The Great War and Modern Memory (1976), died May 23. Fussell, who was severely wounded in France in 1944, died of natural causes at age 88.

The Great War in Modern Memory, which received the National Book Award, was listed as  No. 75 on the Modern Library’s list of the greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century. In it, Fussell examines  World War I through the cultural lens of how it was perceived during and after the fighting. His explication of the vast differences between romanticized versions of the war after it was over and the shocking brutality of the actual war itself strongly influenced how historians and other scholars have studied all wars, including the Vietnam War.

“It is difficult to underestimate Fussell’s influence,” Vincent B. Sherry wrote in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. “The book’s ambition and popularity move interpretation of the war from a relatively minor literary and historical specialization to a much more widespread cultural concern. His claims for the meaning of the war are profound and far-reaching; indeed, some have found them hyperbolic. Yet, whether in spite of or because of the enormity of his assertions, Fussell has set the agenda for most of the criticism that has followed him.”

Paul Fussell Jr. grew up in Pasadena, Calif., and was drafted into the Army in 1943 while he was a student at Pomona College. He missed D-Day, but 2o-year-old Lt. Fussell experienced the war at its worst. He served as  a 7th Army rifle platoon leader in southwestern France from November 1944 until six months later when Fussell was wounded as many of his men lay dying around him. He never got over it.

Fussell wrote two books about his World War II service, The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45 (2003), and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (1996). The journalist Russell Baker called the latter “a wonderfully angry” book. In it, Fussell describes how he was wrenched from an ideal childhood and young adulthood into the Army and into the maw of war in France.

Fussell witnessed the horror of war up close. That experience, along with his brief post-war time in the Army, shaped the rest of Fussell’s life. It led him, among other things, to persue a life of the mind as a college English professor, prolific essayist, and world traveler.

In the book Fussell provides many insights into the Human Condition, primarily in relation to society and politics in the United States following World War II. Fussell also reprises one theme of The Great War in Modern Memory as he describes how he tried to come to grips with why war is romanticized by those who did not do the fighting and dying.

When it is completed on the grounds of  the Texas Capitol building in Austin, the Texas Capitol Vietnam Veterans Monument  will honor all Texans who served in the Vietnam War. The monument will feature a fourteen-foot-high of an infantry patrol, surrounded by bas-relief panels depicting military personnel who supported them, including a radio operator and a medic.

The Vietnam Veterans Monument will take its place on the Capitol grounds among other monuments honoring Texans who served in the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and Korean War.

The Texas Capitol Vietnam Veterans Monument Committee, which is made up entire of  Vietnam veterans and was set up by the Texas Legislature to build the Monument, has an excellent web site that features an interactive map of Texas veterans in their communities. It also contains stories submitted by individual veterans. The idea of the web site is to create a “living monument” that preserves the stories of  Vietnam veterans. The Committee is working with Texas Tech’s Vietnam Center on this effort.

The site also includes a video, “Texas Remembers,” narrated by Joe Galloway, the former Vietnam War correspondent and long-time veterans’ advocate.

Lewe Barnett, 2006

On Monday, May 28, Memorial Day 2012, the Memorial Day Writer’s Project one again is hosting a group of veteran writers, poets, songwriters, and singers–many of them Vietnam veterans—on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The MDWP tent opens at 11:30 a.m., and activities go on till 5:30 on the Mall near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial behind the sidewalk facing Constitution Avenue near 21st Street.

This event is open to all veterans. If you would like to participate, show up and “bring your guitar, your stories, your poems,” said Dick Epstein, who helps coordinate the event. You can email him for more information at Dick_Epstein@hotmail.com

Those who have signed to participate this year include Jonathan Myer, Dick Morris, Tom McLean, Jimmy Stewart,  Epstein, and Barbara Martin. “Author and journalist Nancy Lynch will be there with copies of her book Vietnam Mailbag,” Epstein said. “Come and listen to the words of poet/activist Sistah Joy, Maritza Rivera, and the stories of Red Cross volunteer Holley Watts. Bring a friend.”

Horst Faas, one of the top photojournalists who covered the Vietnam War, died May 10 in Munich, Germany. He was 79. Faas served as the Associated Press’s chief of photo operations in Saigon from 1962-72. Under his leadership, AP photographers took some of the most riveting and lasting images of the war.

That included Nick Ut’s famed Pulitzer-Prize winning 1972 photo of the young Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, and Eddie Adams’ shot of the ARVN Gen. Loan shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head on the streets of Saigon during Tet 1968.

Eddie Adams, Faas later wrote, “loved young Nick Ut, whose brother, Huynh Cong La (Thanh My), had died photographing for the AP in 1965. And he admired the art and sensitivity of [the French photographer] Henri Huet, whom he helped to bring over to The AP from UPI in 1965.

“It was these two great photographers and close friends who made me feel like a lottery winner twice over again when I edited their film: Henri Huet with his moving sequence of a wounded medic aiding others wounded in battle (1967) and, of course, Nick Ut and his ‘napalm girl,’ Kim Phuc, in 1972.

“Henri died in 1971 in the flames of a helicopter. Eddie Adams, Henri Huet and Nick Ut wrote our history with perfect, singular newsphotos.”

The German-born Faas himself received the Pulitzer for his Vietnam War coverage, as well as the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Award and other honors. ”I don’t think anyone stayed longer [in Vietnam], took more risks or showed greater devotion to his work and his colleagues,” the late Vietnam War correspondent and author David Halberstam said of Faas. “I think of him as nothing less than a genius.”

The acclaimed journalist and novelist Bill Granger died April 22 at the Manteno Veterans Home in Illinois. Granger, 70, who served in the U.S. Army from 1963-65, died of heart failure.

Granger  was born in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisc., and grew up on Chicago’s South Side. He graduated from DePaul University with a BA in English in 1963, and then spent two years in the U.S. Army. During his military service in Washington, D.C., Granger worked part time as a copy boy at The Washington Post. After his honorable discharge, Granger was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and later a columnist and editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Granger’s first novel, November Man, a thriller, was published in 1979. He went on to write a total of twenty-five mysteries and thrillers, most set in Chicago, under his own name and the pseudonyms Joe Gash and Bill Griffith. Granger and his wife Lori also co-wrote three nonfiction books.

The Siege of Firebase Gloria, a low-budget Vietnam War combat movie that came out early in 1989, has just been released in DVD in the MGM Limited Edition Collection series. The movie stars Lee Ermey as a Marine Sergeant Major in Vietnam who takes command of a remote firebase just before the 1968 Tet Offensive.

There’s plenty of battle action in this little-seen movie, including a good bit of hand-to-hand combat. Ermey holds to his Marine Drill Instructor persona as a hard-bitten NCO who sneers at the enemy and goads his men into an effective fighting force against great odds. Parts of the mayhem are played to the tune of the great rock song “Gloria” sung by Van Morrison and the group, Them.

Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, a Brit who’s know for mainly for his TV and straight-to-DVD work, the movie was produced by an Australian company, and was shot in the Philippines. It was not widely released in this country, and received virtually no reviews. The movie did get a lot of play in Australia.

Lee Ermey in the movie

It’s not every day that a play with a strong Vietnam War theme opens on Broadway. One of those days is tomorrow, Wednesday, April 25, when the drama “The Columnist,” written by Pulitzer Prize winner David Auburn, opens at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street. The play is a fact-based, fictionalized look at the life of the now largely forgotten American newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop. It features his strongly hawkish views on the Vietnam War in the 1950s and 1960s.

John Lithgow stars as Alsop, who died in 1989 after a long, influential career as a political columnist for the New York Herald-Tribune. “A fervent New Deal liberal with an obsessive anti-Communist streak, he urged an all-out push for victory in Vietnam and attacked those who disagreed as cowards, Communists or both,” Eric Alterman wrote of Alsop in The New York Times.

“At one point during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson was reported to have commented, when he decided to deploy another 50,000 troops, ‘There, that should keep Joe Alsop quiet for a while.’”

Alsop, Alterman wrote, “would drop by the United States Embassy in Saigon every so often to be chauffeured around the war zone by Army helicopter and confer with the top military and diplomatic brass over fine wine and French fare. Inevitably he would return to report that the war was proceeding swimmingly, save for a few misguided ‘young crusaders’ and Communist sympathizers among the American press corps there.”

One of the play’s characters is David Halberstam, the former New York Times Vietnam War correspondent and author (The Best and the Brightest, et al.) who was one of the most prominent ”young crusaders” who was highly critical of the U.S. war effort.

Halberstam, for his part, harshly criticized Alsop, as in this passage in The Best and the Brightest: “He had never quite forgiven the State Department for allowing the United States to stand idly by while Chine went Communist. China had fallen despite his warnings, but he was still a forceful advocate of the domino theory, a man skilled in the ways of Washington, well connected politically and socially, and while he would not stoop to the kind of tactics which had marked McCarthyism, he nevertheless could make the case for holding the line in a way which implied that manhood was at stake.”

“The Columnist”  will have limited run on Broadway. The show is slated to run until June 24.

Our friends at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund in Washington, D.C., are working on a book project in honor of the 30th anniversary of the dedication of The Wall this fall. The book will include photos taken by Vietnam veterans during their time in country as well as artwork created by Vietnam veterans.

If you have photos or artwork you’d like to share, contact Lisa Lark at VVMF before May 1 to have your work considered.  The phone number is 313-410-8477. The email is: lisalark@vvmf.org

If you do, be sure to report that you read about the project on Vietnam Veterans of America’s Arts of War on the web page.

Yesterday, March 30, 2012, was the last day on the job as chief executive of C-SPAN for Brian Lamb, the man who founded the non-profit, non-partisan public TV network in 1978 and was its guiding force for 33 years.

Lamb, 70, joined the U.S. Navy after he graduated from Purdue. He served on the USS Thuban, and worked at the White House and in the Pentagon Public Affairs office during the Vietnam War. Eleven years after he got out of the Navy, Lamb was the driving force behind the founding of C-SPAN.

Lamb was a ubiquitous presence on C-SPAN from when the time it went on the air on March 19, 1979. He interviewed some 800 non-fiction authors, as well as a wide array of public figures, including Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush.

Lamb, who never once said his own name on the air, will continue as executive chair of C-SPAN and will still host his Sunday “Q & A” interview program.

Former Vietnam War television correspondent Don North is working with Vietnamese and French film producers who are in the planning stages for a documentary on “Hanoi Hannah,” the Vietnamese woman who broadcast pro-communist propaganda over Radio Hanoi in English to American GIs into South Vietnam during the war.

The producers are looking for an American Vietnam veteran who listened to those broadcasts, and who would be willing to share memories and opinions about them. If you fit the bill and want to help, contact North via email at  DNorth6743@aol.com

If you do, be sure to tell him you heard about the project on The VVA Veteran‘s Arts of War on the web page.