Arts of War on the Web

Uncle Sam Needs Your Help Again

Bear Family Records, the German music publisher, recently released “Next Stop is Vietnam: The War On Record, 1961-2008,” a 13-CD set containing 330 Vietnam War-influenced songs–that’s nearly seventeen hours of tunes.

The package also includes a 304-page book with artist and song notes, Vietnam War history and recollections by veterans about on their favorite songs. The book was put together by music scholar Hugo A. Keesing, historian Lois T. Vietri, and authors Doug Bradley and Craig Werner.

It’s hard to argue with the company’s claim that this massive collection is “the most comprehensive anthology of music inspired by the Vietnam War ever released. ” The performers include The Doors, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Country Joe McDonald, The Kingston Trio, Grand Funk Railroad, along with dozens of others.

Also on the CD’s: war-time Public Service Announcements, field news reports, and intercepted North Vietnamese radio transmissions of Jane Fonda and Hanoi Hannah, along with never-before-released tracks recorded during the war by American service personnel.

Country Joe McDonald—whose tune “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” gives the CD its name—wrote the introduction.

The newest exhibit at the Petaluma Historical Museum in California, “The Vietnam Experience, A Soldier’s Story,” opened September 26 and will run through November 28th.

The exhibition includes Vietnam War artifacts, photographs, and documents interwoven with oral histories from from Vietnam veterans, including Bruce Thomson, Jerry Shimmel, Kate O’Hare-Palmer, and Ken Holybee, who are members of Vietnam Veterans of America’s Redwood Empire Chapter 223 in Santa Rosa, California.

The exhibit also includes videos created by Vietnam veterans, a Reflection wall, a speaker series, and documentary film “The Vietnam War,” which will air every Saturday at 1:30pm.

“Our goal,” the Museum says, “is to honor the men and women of both the United States and Vietnam who served their countries in a common cause, and to educate our community about the sacrifices that they made.”

Stone on Wall Street in NYC

Oliver (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, et al.) Stone’s latest film, Wall Street: Money Never Stops, hit the multiplexes yesterday, September 24. The movie, Stone’s 18th as a director, is a sequel to Wall Street, the movie the former 25th Infantry rifleman made in 1987 right after his Vietnam War opus, Platoon.

Wall Street II bring back Michael Douglas as the infamous Gordon Gekko doing what he does on Wall Street after serving jail time for his 80′s illegal doings. The movie received mixed reviews.

One example: Time magazine’s Richard Corliss liked a lot about the film, but also said: “As social commentary, the script is best when it’s bitter. The first two acts are a splendid vaudeville of fast talking and dirty dealing. At the climax, though, the picture becomes Wall Street Weak.”

Another:  Christopher Orr, writing in The Atlantic, also praised Stone’s film making, but then called the plot “unerringly silly.” Yet, he said, “against all probability, Money Never Sleeps is a watchable enough movie for its first hour or so. But as the financial bubble pops, so too does the cinematic one.”

“The Man Who Brought War to Hollywood” is the title of an in-depth Q&A article that appeared in the August 27 issue of The Atlantic. The man in question is Dale Dye, the former Marine who all but invented the art of true-to-life military technical advising.

Dye, a VVA member who received our Excellence in the Arts Award, most recently was in charge of the realism department on The Pacific, the justly acclaimed HBO miniseries  produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. That series won eight Emmy Awards this year, including Best Miniseries and Best Special Visual Effects for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special.

In the article, writers John Meroney and Sean Coons correctly characterize  Dye as “Hollywood’s go-to man when filmmakers want to make an authentic war picture. Moviegoers and TV viewers have seen Dye’s handiwork (and they might recognize him because of cameos in film and TV) but they have no idea who he really is.”

Since his pioneering technical advising on Platoon in 1986, they note, his “work revolutionized war films—the way they look, sound, and feel, giving them more authenticity and heft.”

Hanks, Dye, and Spielberg on the set of The Pacific

The rest of the article consists of Dye’s thoughtful and illuminating answers to questions dealing with, among other things, other films he worked on (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last of the Mohicans, Forrest Gump, Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan and others) and Hollywood folks he’s worked with including Oliver Stone, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg.

Dye had this to say, when asked what he considers his mission to be in Hollywood:

“To correct misperceptions about the military and celebrate the courage, devotion, and sacrifice of the men and women who’ve worn our uniform. Now, that doesn’t make me a Kool-Aid drinker or even a cheerleader. I served 22 years in the United States Marine Corps. I know when we screwed the pooch, and don’t mind talking about that.

That means if Oliver Stone wants to say, ‘Hey, you know, some of these draftees were smoking dope’—well, that was a fact, and I don’t mind showing it. I don’t think that kind of scene denigrates the people who served. But a director also has to show the other side of the picture in the same story.”

The on-line version contains an embedded video of a great scene in Private Ryan, in which Dye plays the colonel who advises Gen. George Marshall not to send Tom Hanks’s men after young Ryan.

You can check out the military-themed books of author and disabled Vietnam veteran Gene Ladnier (above) at his page on lulu.com.

That includes Ladnier’s latest novel, Paradox: Hitler’s Granddaughter, an action-adventure thriller with science fiction undertones about a neo-Nazi plan to shift the Earth’s crust and move Antarctica to present-day Europe.

The book is dedicated to all Special Operations warriors and their families. Ladnier is donating half of all proceeds from the sale of this novel to the Special Operations Wounded Warrior Foundation.

The play, Only a Ridgeline Away, was presented in late August and early September at the San Juan Community Theatre in Friday Harbor, Washington. Written and directed by playwright, Vietnam veteran, and Friday Harbor resident Miguel Herbert,  the play focuses on two characters who are Vietnam veterans and lifetime friends as they face the vagaries of advanced middle age.

Herbert describes the play as “a cross between Grumpy Old Men and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

“The one thing that kept me from going bonkers in Vietnam was my three close friends,” Herbert said. “Two of us were fortunate enough to make it home. It is my goal, through this stage play, to give audience members a look at the astounding level of friendship experienced among men who have served together in combat.”

We recently heard from Freda Carmack and Laura Hammons, the co-founders of  Daughters of Vietnam Veterans. That worthy organization of the children of Vietnam veterans, which began in 2006, has become, as Carmack told us, “a community in which we can share our common experiences, understand our histories, and celebrate our families.”

DOVV today focuses on two areas:  art and PTSD awareness. “We feel that both are integral to understanding ourselves and making sense of our common history,” Carmack said.  “After we began expanding our membership base, we were stunned to find how many of our members are talented artists that filter their ‘Vietnam experience’ through various creative outlets.”

Some of that artistic talent is on view on the DOVV website. That includes the photographs of Jeremy Hogan, which are featured on the site. There’s also info on some famous sons and daughters of Nam vets, including Jim Morrison, Queen Latifah, Megan McCain, and Pink.
DOVV’s Facebook page also contains a Photography Collection.

A writer of our acquaintance is writing a review/analysis of Vietnam veteran Jerry (The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam) Lembke’s book Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal: Culture, Politics, and the Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 224 pp., $22.95).
The writer would like to hear from Vietnam veterans regarding their thoughts and feelings on Jane Fonda, their tours of duty in Vietnam, issues they may have with PTSD, and other matters related to the war.  All replies will be kept confidential.

If you’re interested or would like to find out more, email erininish@gmail.com

And mention you read about this in Vietnam Veterans of America’s Arts of War on the Web.

The well-made and revealing documentary Hidden Battles has just been released on DVD. The film by Victoria Mills looks deeply into the personal lives of five people who served in five different wars: a former Palestinian member of the Al Asqa Martyrs Brigade; a former U.S. Marine who served in Somalia in ’94 as a sniper; a former Israeli Army Special Forces officer; a woman who fought for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; and Vietnam veteran George Williams.

Mills’ cameras zero in on the internal lives of  the five veterans through talking-head interviews, shots of them going about their daily lives today and through flashbacks (using archival footage mostly). You get a very good picture of how they dealt with their post-war emotional problems. And you get a good idea about the universality of post-traumatic stress among those who take part in any kind of war and then come home to try to live life in peacetime society.

All of the veterans’ lives are well illuminated in the film. That includes Williams (above), who served for 18 years as a New York City firefighter a few years after coming home from Vietnam, then retired to the Northampton, Mass., area where he became an artist, writer and activist. That activism included volunteering with the Veterans Education Project in local schools and being very active with his local chapter of  Veterans for Peace.

George Williams died September 2 after a heart attack. He was 63.

“His selflessness extended to social service causes,” Rob Wilson, executive director of the Veterans Education Project, told the Northampton Gazette. “His loss will be significant to all of us. He really was someone who respected the military and talked about some of the positive things that happened to him in the military. His stories of the war and coming home made an immeasurable impact on countless classrooms and students.”

There’s an interesting, thoughtful article that touches on the image of the Vietnam veteran in TV cop shows and film in the August 31 The Phil Nugent Experience blog. Titled “In Country,” (where have we heard that one before?), Nugent’s essay begins with his take on the new AMC-TV conspiracy thriller series “Rubican,” and then morphs into his analysis about “the way Vietnam began to be used [on TV and in the movies] in the early 1980s.”

Nugent talks about early Nam vet TV characters, including Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck, below),  Sonny Crockett (portrayed by Don Johnson, above) and Lt. Castillo on Miami Vice,  and the gang on the original A Team. Then he makes the point that most Vietnam veteran TV characters in the previous decade  “were less likely to be chasing crooks than to be the crooks.” And he is right; it seemed like every week in every Kojak or Hawaii Five-O episode the crazed psycho killer was–you guessed it, a disgruntled, disturbed Rambo type Nam vet.

Nugent then goes on to give his take on the execrable Rambo movies, as well as Platoon,  Missing in Action, Uncommon Valor,The Green Berets, and the movie M*A*S*H, as well as what he calls “grubby little exploitation movies” such as The Losers and Deathdream.

It’s well worth a perusal.