Arts of War on the Web

Former Republican U.S. Senator Charles Mathias, Jr. of Maryland, a World War II veteran who opposed the Vietnam War but was one of the moving forces in creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, died January 25. He was 87 and had Parkinson’s disease.

Sen. Mathias (above) sponsored the original legislation in 1979 that authorized building a memorial in Washington to honor the service of the nation’s Vietnam War veterans. The legislation passed unanimously. He also suggested the site of The Wall, in Constitution Gardens on the National Mall.

Even more importantly, Sen. Mathias, along with then Virginia Sen. John Warner, were the main players in hammering out the final agreement that saved the Memorial when it appeared that the Reagan Administration and others unhappy with the design wanted to kill it.

“This week, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund lost a good friend and our nation lost a true statesman,” VVMF President Jan Scruggs said.

The current issue of the American Arts Quarterly contains “The Colors of Vietnam,” an article by the poet Frederick Turner about his recent trip to Vietnam where he met with Vietnamese poets and visited the Temple of Literature.

“I am standing with my friends, the poets Tran Nghi Hoang and Nguyen Thuy Kha [a former ARVN Colonel in the American War], in the old stone cloister of the Temple of Literature [above] in Hanoi,” Turner begins. “Under the tile roof there is rank on rank of huge stone tablets, each inscribed with the names of past doctorates of Vietnam’s first university, the Imperial Academy. The university was founded by the Emperor Ly Thanh Tong in 1076, twelve years before the founding of the University of Bologna and twenty before that of Oxford University, my own alma mater.”

The Vietnamese, Hoang told Turner, “always put art and poetry and the spirit above war and politics. And for some unaccountable reason the Vietnamese seem to love America. They are well aware that we Americans had to throw off our own colonial oppressors, and are great admirers of George Washington.”

The article includes six poems Turner wrote during the trip.

There’s an excellent essay by the artist Jim Pollock (above) on the U.S. Army’s Vietnam Combat Art Program in the current issue of War, Literature and The Arts, the first-rate literary journal published by the Department of English and Fine Arts at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Pollock, who was drafted into the Army and wound up in the soldier art program in 1967, tells the story in the first person of the Army’s 1966-70 effort that sent teams of soldier-artists into Vietnam to record their experiences. A good percentage of those experiences included being directly exposed to combat.

All of the work of these soldier artists-studies, sketches, and finished art-was put into the permanent U. S. Army Art Collection, which is maintained by the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. “From time to time the Army sponsors exhibits from their collection,” Pollock notes in the article. “One
piece, by Vietnam Combat Artist Gary Porter (CAT II), was on loan to the Pentagon when it was destroyed during the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon.”

Kevin Bacon (above left) took home the Golden Globe award last night for Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television for his memorably powerful role as U.S. Marine Lt Col Mike Strobl in the great HBO move, Taking Chance.

VVA honored HBO and the makers of that stirring 2009 film at our National Convention last summer in Louisville. The movie, which Strobl co-wrote, dramatizes the true story of his escorting the body of young Marine Chance Phelps, who was killed in Iraq, from Dover AFB to his home in Wyoming. Strobl took questions and answers from delegates at a screening of the movie in Louisville. At the Saturday night Awards Banquet we presented the VVA President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts to Col Stobl. We also honored Vietnam veteran and western artist John Phelps (the father of Chance Phelps) that night with the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award.

TV personality Pat Sajak, who served as a AFVN Army DJ in Vietnam, will be a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy in an episode that is scheduled to air on Thursday, January 21. The big news is that Sajak, who received Vietnam Veterans of America’s Excellence in the Arts Award at the 2009 National Convention in Louisville, has designated VVA as the beneficiary of his Jeopardy winnings.

Sajak (above in Army uniform) sat for hours giving autographs and having his photo taken with VVA members before the Awards Banquet in Louisville. And he gave a gracious and funny speech to accept the award. He also has a page on his web site devoted to VVA.

Robert Romaniello, who served with the U.S. Army’s 633rd Collection, Classification and Salvage (CC&S) Company in 1969-70 near Marble Mountain (above), is looking for old war buddies for the combination memoir and history of the company he is writing.

Mike Cerrone, Terry Riley, Ron Pollard, J.B.Barnes, and Dennis Wilson, or anyone else who served with the 633rd CC&S and has stories or photos they’d like to share, contact him my mail (734 Falling Oaks Drive, Medina, OH 44256) or phone: 330-722-6019. If you do, please mention you read about it here at Vietnam Veterans of America’s Arts of War on the web page.

romaniello@zoominternet.net

William Lederer, the co-author of the enduring 1958 novel The Ugly American, died December 5. He was 97. Written with political scientist William Burdick, The Ugly American is set in a Sarkhan, a thinly veiled Vietnam, and is a Cold War parable of the consequences of American political and diplomatic ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence in Southeast Asia.

The title made its way into the American lexicon to connote bull-in-a-china shop Americans overseas who know or care little about native society, culture, politics or mores. Ironically, Lederer and Burdick used not as its meaning has come to be known. Instead the ugly American in the novel is a physically ugly, but for-the-people American engineer who works to win the hearts of minds of the fictional people of Sarkhan by getting his hands dirty working on civic improvement projects in the countryside.

The character Colonel Edwin Hillendale in the book is modeled on famed American CIA operative Edward Lansdale, who advocated people-to-people, hands-on diplomacy to fight communist insurgencies in developing nations. Lansdale put those practices to work in the Philippines following Word War II and in Vietnam in the mid to late 1950’s. He remained an advocate of that strategy—which the Pentagon more or less scorned—during the duration of the Vietnam War.

Lederer—a 1936 Naval Academy graduate who served in World War II—and Burdick’s book was a huge bestseller and was the basis of a 1963 Hollywood film starring Marlon Brando. The film changed the book’s message into a call to fight communist insurgencies in developing nations. The book is still in print today.

For its annual Black History event February 25, the Newton White Museum in Mitchellville, Maryland, is looking for information on African Americans in the military, from World War I to the Vietnam War.

In you’d like to share stories, photographs, artifacts or memorabilia, call 301-249-2004 or email nwmansion@pgparks.com

The Newton White Mansion, which is in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Prince George’s County, is a Neo-Georgian-style brick mansion sitting on 586 acres. The mansion was the home of Navy Captain Newton H. White, the first commanding officer on the U.S.S. Enterprise prior to World War II.

William Tuohy, the well-respected former Newsweek and Los Angeles Times Vietnam War correspondent, died Dec. 31 following open heart surgery in Santa Monica, California. He was 83, and had received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for The Times.

“Few correspondents have seen have seen and written more about the war in Vietnam than William Tuohy,” the Pulitzer judges noted.

Tuohy moved to The Times in 1966 after serving as Newsweek‘s bureau chief in Saigon. He wound up working for The Times for 29 years. Tuohy served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in 1945-46, according to his LA Times obit.

When I saw The Big Lebowski in 1998, I loved it. But I had no idea it would become a cultural icon that would spawn its own subculture of devotees. I just thought it was clever, funny, and intriguingly strange.

The movie, among other things, has inspired several books. The latest is The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, a group of essays by academics edited by two college English professors (who else?), Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe (Indiana University Press, 512 pp., $24.94, paper).
The book contains the work of 21 “fans and scholars.” It deals with topics such as the film’s influences (westerns, noir, grail legends, the 1960s, and Fluxus) and its themes, which include the first Iraq war, boomers, slackerdom, surrealism, college culture, and bowling.

Here’s my brief review, which appeared in the April/May 1998 issue of The VVA Veteran.

Big John Goodman (Roseanne’s TV hubby) plays Walter, a big-hearted, big-mouthed Vietnam veteran in the Coen brothers’ cartoonish black comedy The Big Lebowski, which opened in the multiplexes early in March. Walter constantly prattles on about his war days. It’s the early nineties, yet he goes around wearing jungle boots, cut-off fatigue shorts and dog tags. Walter’s also got a wicked temper, and is not hesitant to brandish a firearm or resort to physical violence.

Okay, Walter is another cinematic Nam vet nutcase. Still, the movie is played for laughs, and Walter is pretty damn funny. And how can you get upset with a guy who confronts a transgressing fellow bowler by bellowing: “This is not Vietnam, this is bowling. There are rules!”