Arts of War on the Web

Stone in Boulder

Oliver Stone, the former Vietnam War infantryman–and the first Vietnam veteran to have written or directed (he did both) a Vietnam War film (Platoon, 1986)–was the guest of honor at the recently completed Boulder International Film Festival in Colorado.

The honored guest received the Master of Cinema Award on Sunday, Feburary, 20, the festival’s closing night. That evening also included a  retrospective of Stone’s film work and a Q&A with the man who has received 31 Academy Award nominations along with Oscars for Midnight Express, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July.

Former Marine Karl Marlantes’s powerful in-country Vietnam war novel,
Matterhorn, has been awarded the 2011 William E. Colby Award by the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago.

The award is named for fomer CIA Director William E. Colby, who served as CIA station chief in Saigon from 1959-62, headed the Company’s Far East division from 1962-67, and directed the controversial Phoenix Program in Vietnam from 1968-71.

The $5,000 award recognizes a first work of fiction or non-fiction that has made a significant contribution to the public’s understanding of intelligence operations, military history, or international affairs. It will be presented on October 22  at Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel at the Pritzker Military Library’s 2011 Liberty Gala.

You can read our review of Matterhorn in the May/June issue of The VVA Veteran.

Garry Trudeau’s iconic comic strip, Doonesbury, was born in 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War, when Trudeau was a student at Yale. From the start that war and its legacy was a part of the comic strip, mainly in form of one of the main characters,  B.D. , the Yale football player who had fought in Vietnam, and Mark Slackmeyer, one-time campus radical.

The strip, which began in the Yale student newspaper and then was syndicated in 1970, still appears in tons of newspapers, and Trudeau contributes daily to his web site, www.doonesbury.com

Trudeau in 1975 became the first comic strip artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, and has been inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. VVA presented him the President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the National Leadership Conference in Tucson in 2006.

“We’re honoring Garry Trudeau for being one of the most important creative voices of the Vietnam War generation,” VVA President John Rowan noted at the time. “An important part of that includes his accurate, compassionate, yet humorous, portrayal over all these years of B.D., the strip’s Vietnam veteran character. It’s been a good thing for Vietnam veterans and for Americans in general to follow B.D. and the other Doonesbury characters of our generation from their adolescent days to today.”

Since Doonesbury’s 1970 debut, Garry Trudeau’s cartoons have been collected in nearly 60 hardcover and paperback books. The latest, 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective (Andrews McMeel, 695 pp., $100), is the granddaddy of them all. It contains a long essay by Trudeau, followed by 1,800 of the strips (there have been some 14,000 altogether), with other commentary by Trudeau.

President Richard M. Nixon, who practically based his long political career on being staunchly anti-communist, began the long process of Chinese-American rapprochement with his historic visit to what was then known in this country as “Red China” in February of 1972.  The United States still was fighting communism in Vietnam when Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger alit in Beijing, then referred to on these shores as “Peking.”

That landmark visit is the subject of the opera, Nixon in China, which had its debut in Houston in 1987, and has been put on in many venues since then. The latest production of the landmark opera, composed by John Adams with a libretto by Alice Goodman and produced by Peter Sellars, opened on February 2 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and continues through February 19.

The Met is planning a broadcast of the three hour and forty minute opera to some 600 movie theaters across the country on Saturday, February 12. A PBS broadcast is slated for later this year.

The Vietnam War is only touched on in Nixon in China. At one point, Nixon, performed at the Met by James Maddalena, muses on the long, strange trip that resulted in him dining with Chairman Mao. For that to take place, Nixon says, he had to vault over “the bodies of our lost” from the Vietnam War.