Arts of War on the Web

The character actor G.D. Spradlin, who got his Hollywood start in his forties after making a fortune in the oil business, died July 24 in California at age 90.

Spradlin specialized in playing doctors, lawyers, business executives, politicians, and generals. He was best known for two roles in two of Francis Ford Coppola’s most acclaimed movies: The Godfather Part II ,  in which Spradlin was the crooked U.S. Senator in the pay of the Mafia, and in Apocalypse Now (above), in which he played the creepy general who orders Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) to assasinate Captain Kurtz (Marlon Brando).

Here’s part of that scene’s famed dialogue from the script by John Milius and Coppola. It takes place early in the film in the General’s trailer. Also in the scene is an Army Colonel (a very young-looking Harrison Ford, below) and a spooky civilian, mostly likely a CIA agent, who is not named:

 GENERAL: Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get confused out there.  
 Power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity.  
 But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God.  
 Because the rational and the irrational, between good and evil.  
 And good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes
 what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Every man
 has got a breaking point. You have and I have them. Walter Kurtz
 has reached his. And, very obviously, he has gone insane.

 WILLARD:  Yes, sir. Very much so, sir. Obviously insane.

 COLONEL: Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River in a navy patrol boat,
 pick up Colonel Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba, follow it, learn what you
 can along the way. When you find the colonel, infiltrate his team
 by whatever means available, and terminate the colonel's command.

 WILLARD: (to General) Terminate...the colonel?

 GENERAL: He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond
 the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops.

 CIVILIAN:  Terminate with extreme prejudice.

Kate Beer is a writer who is working on a novel that deals with the Vietnam War. “Four of the main characters are young enlisted men and draftees from this small town,” she told us. “Their stories are told from their perspectives both while they are in Vietnam and through a series of flashbacks when they return. It is a combined story of war and homecoming” and everything that entailed.

Beer said she is “trying to seek authenticity and truth in my characters and their stories ” beyond what she learned in a Vietnam War class she took in college and a month she spent studying in Vietnam in 2009.  That latter experience, she said, “gave me an amazing outlook on the landscape, culture, and tactics of the NVA and Viet Cong.  While this experience was invaluable to the writing of my book, it only tapped the surface of what I need.”

Beer says she wants to know what  American soldiers experienced in the thick of things in Vietnam. “It is important to me to write this book and this story with the utmost respect for the veteran and his combat experience,” she said.

If you’d like to help out, send an email to kbeer58@gmail.com  If you do, please mention that you read about her work in The VVA Veteran‘s Arts of War on the Web page.

The musical Hair—which deals squarely (if mostly zanily) with the Vietnam War on the home front—is back again on Broadway for a ten-week summer visit (through September 10) at the St. James Theater. Billed as “the American tribal love-rock musical,” Hair burst on the Broadway scene in 1968, and has had a bunch of revivals in the intervening years.

This latest one is a Tony-Award-winning (Best Musical Revival)  production that ran on Broadway in 2009, directed by Diane Paulus and choreographed by Karole Armitage. As it did two years ago, the 2011 version Broadway version is getting rave reviews.

“It’s a refreshingly low-tech matter of the bestowing of flowers, the laying on of friendly hands and urgent invocations to feel the love and agitate for peace,” Christopher Isherwood wrote in the July 13 New York Times. “There is also, of course, the culminating dance party onstage allowing everyone [including audience members] to join in the ecstatic finale of Diane Paulus’s production of this beloved portrait of youth culture in the late 1960s.”

Ed and Mary Shanahan are looking for “funny and unusual (but please no blood and guts; everyone knows the horrors of war) stories” for a collection they’re putting together of short, but funny and true war stories.

“I’m looking for funny stories like this one,” Ed Shanahan, who served with
B Battery, 4th/42nd Artillery of the 4th Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1969-70, told us:

“December of 1969, just before Christmas we saw hundreds of lights in the valley, so we started shooting direct fire at them because they weren’t supposed to be there.  They kept getting closer, so we called for additional support from additional arty batteries.  Turns out we were shooting at lightning bugs!”

For more info, email backwater2@hughes.net and mention that you read about the project in VVA’s Arts of War on the Web page.

Connie Gibbons, whose husband Greg served with the  Marines at Khe Sanh in Vietnam in 1967-68, is putting together a collection of letters tentatively titled “If I Could See You, I Would Tell You.” The proposed book would be made up of present-day letters from veterans and their families discussing traumatic events that occurred during the war “to promote healing of deep scars and unresolved feelings.”

Those “powerful words,” she says, “would represent a great gift of understanding to pass from one generation to the next.”

If you’d like to participate, you can do so in writing (no more than 1,500 words) or a voice recording on CD, and send the submission by December 31, along with a short paragraph of background.

For more info, send an email to cggibbons@yahoo.com

If you do, please mention that you read about the project on Vietnam Veterans of America’s Arts of War on the Web page.

VVA Life member Dennis “Doc” Hodo (above) has been named the No. 1 folk singer in St. Louis on the ReverbNation.com web site (where you can also listen to twenty-two of his songs). Hodo, who describes himself as “a Vietnam vet in the Ozarks, mixing up home-made music,” has written and recorded several Vietnam War-influenced songs, such as “Lima Bean Blues” and “I’ll See You Later, Brother.”

Hodo served with the Company A of the 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment in Vietnam in 1970.