Arts of War on the Web

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.

“It seems like I’ve been working on this film all of my life,” says Deryle Perryman (above, right), the co-producer of the in-progress documentary “Same Same But Different,” which looks at American Vietnam veterans who have returned to the former war zone to work on humanitarian projects. Perryman served a 1967-68 Vietnam War tour as a crew chief on a 175mm howitzer with the 5^th Battalion, 22^nd Artillery in the Central Highlands. One of the ways he has been dealing with that experience has been by writing about the war and its veterans. And making this film. After a career as a probation officer and working with young people (among other things), Perryman himself has returned to Vietnam a dozen times.

One such trip led to the idea for this film, which is being co-produced by Moises Gonzalez. The veterans profiled in the documentary “have quietly returned to their former battlegrounds to clear unexploded ordnance, work with victims of Agent Orange, and build schools and orphanages,” Perryman says.

Five years ago Perryman and Gonzalez finished their documentary Dangerous Highway, which tells the story of the late Alabama blues singer Eddie Hinton. While they were making it, “during our numerous trips to the South, Deryle told stories about growing up in Florence, Alabama, and those stories inevitably led to his joining the Army and going to Vietnam,” Gonzalez said. “Vietnam and its aftermath became more and more insistent until it became apparent we were going to have to make another documentary.”

The two went to Vietnam in 2008 and 2010, traveling throughout the former South Vietnam recording oral histories mainly from American veterans. In Nha Trang, they interviewed former Viet Cong General Nguyen Monh, who invited the filmmakers to a traditional Tet dinner with his family.

“I’ve come to realize,” Perryman says, “that the Vietnamese aren’t mad at us. They even give Vietnam veterans some status.  They say, ‘You were just young and dumb and doing what your parents told you to do.’”

General Monh’s toast to Deryle (in the above photo) was:  ”So good to see men who were former enemies come together in harmony.” Monh, who fought against the French as a young man, told Perryman that the American soldiers were “tenacious, very tenacious… and so very young.”

The film also will include archival footage, rarely seen photographs, original music, and interviews with Vietnam veterans in this country, many done at the August 2007 40th anniversary meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Perryman told us that he hopes the film will help his efforts to build a school in the Central Highlands. He and Gonzalez have set up a fund-raising mechanism to secure the money they need to finish the film at the website Kickstarter.com

“If one Vietnam vet or Iraq War vet or Afghanistan War vet can see this film and see that there is healing that can take place after a war, then I’ll feel like we’ve accomplished something,” Perryman says.

Tom Kindt Hubbard of Columbia City, Indiana, was two years old when his father, U.S. Marine Sgt. Thomas Patrick Kindt, was killed in action in Vietnam on September 21, 1966. A few years ago, Hubbard, a graphic artist, took a strong interest in the details of his father’s Vietnam War experiences. That led to a trip to The Wall in Washington where he met Ed Henry, a VVA member who for many years has led tours for veterans, family members, and others of American War sites in Vietnam.

Henry helped Hubbard reconstruct his father’s tour of duty. Hubbard then went to Vietnam where he spent five weeks traveling with his mother and his wife, visiting sites where his father served, taking photographs, and keeping a journal. That resulted in a solo, multi-media exhibit, Semper Fidelis: How I Met My Father, which we described in the March/April 2004 issue of The VVA Veteran. The exhibit has run in several museums since its debut at the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Museum of Art in 2003.

Semper Fidelis will go on display again starting Thursday, March 29, at the Kent State University School of Art’s Downtown Gallery in Ohio. The exhibition, Hubbard says, “chronicles my quest to learn about my father, a U.S. Marine killed in Vietnam, and will be exhibited near the site of one of the most memorable and horrific anti-war protests in U.S. history.

“In conjunction with the show, a full-color exhibition catalogue has been produced and is now available. The 56-page catalogue contains critical essays and images of the ceramic, mixed media and photographic works from the exhibition and includes excerpts, working drawings and sketches from my personal sketchbooks documenting the journey.”

The guts of the exhibit are 21 ceramic vessels that he based loosely on military bunkers and artillery shells. Hubbard grafted words from his father’s letters onto the vessels, along with his own journal entries and photographs of Vietnam. Hubbard’s photographs, arranged in diptychs, and a family altar to his father also are part of the exhibit.

For more info, go to Hubbard’s website.

Pierre Schoendoerffer, the French filmmaker whose work was strongly influenced by his French military service in Indochina from 1951-54, died March 14 in a Paris hospital.  Schoendoerffer, who was wounded in the French Indochina War and later captured and held prisoner for four months by the Vietminh after the disastrous Battle of Dien Bien Phu, was 83. He is pictured above left, after his release.

Schoendoerffer wrote a novel, The 317th Platoon, about the French war, which he made into a film in 1965 that he wrote and directed. He is perhaps best known in this country for the 1967 documentary, The Anderson Platoon, a close-up, in-the-field look at U.S. Army Lt. Joe Anderson and his men slogging it out in the field in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. First shown on French TV, then on CBS-TV, the documentary played in theaters in this country and received the 1968 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

His other main film was 1992′s Dien Bien Phu, a critically acclaimed, fictionalized look at the battle that was filmed  in Vietnam (although not at the actual site of the battle) and featured the travails of an American war correspondent. The $30-million epic, which used 10,000 Vietnamese soldiers as extras, was the first non-Asia movie to be made about the Indochina War in Vietnam.

Rolf Kriken, the acclaimed California sculptor who served in the U.S. Army from 1962-65, is best known creating all of the bronze sculptures at the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Sacramento, such as the ones picture above.  Kriken, who runs Nordhammer Art Foundry in Kelseyville, California, also has done a series of other veterans’ and other memorial bronzes, including those for the Yuba City, California, Policeman’s Memorial; for the All Wars Memorial in Danville, California; the B.T. Collins Memorial in Sacramento; the Cleveland All Veterans Memorial in Ohio; and most recently, for the Veterans War Memorial in Madras, Oregon.

Kriken’s latest gallery show came last fall at the Mendocino College Gallery. The show, called “Voices from the Other Side,” was a collection of his distinctive bronzes with military themes. “These pieces are a statement about raising awareness of the consequences of war,” Kriken said. They include his “Baby Blue” series featuring the images of women. “Women give life,” Kriken said. “The color blue represents the male; hence the title, ‘Baby Blue.’”

Kriken “is an honest voice for many soldiers who have been so broken by their experiences that many of them cannot communicate their ordeals to others,” Mimi Both, a sculpture student who toured the exhibit, said.  ”He respectifully honors the sacrifices they have made and empathizes with them. Whether the viewer is an antiwar activist or one who glorifies war, I believe that Kriken his skillfully bridges the gap so that this merging of respectful honesty can be highly appreciated by most individuals. ”

For more info on Rolf Kriken’s work, go to his website, email him at nordhammer@mchsi.com, or call 707-489-0067.

Michael Hossack, the long-time drummer for the classic rock band the Doobie Brothers, died March 12 after a long battle with cancer. He was 65 years old and served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.

Hossack was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and joined the Navy in 1965. After his discharge in 1969, he began his show biz career in California with a rock band called Mourning Reign. Following that band’s demise he joined the Doobies in 1971 as their second drummer. Hossack played with the band until 1973, when he formed Bonaroo, which disbanded in 1975. He was a partner in a North Hollywood recording studio in 1987, when the Doobie Brothers invited him to play with the band in a series of benefit concerts for Vietnam veterans.

He played with the Doobie Brothers at a May 23, 1987, charity concert at the Hollywood Bowl; the proceeds went to the National Veterans Foundation. After the concert the band reformed, signed a recording contract, and has continued playing and recording ever since. Hossack played drums with the Doobies until July of 2010 when his health began to decline.

“He was an incredible musician,” Doobie Brother vocalist and guitarist Tom Johnston said, “a studio quality drummer. The last few years, he was brave and determined to keep on playing in the face of ill health, and I will always admire him for that. He was a terrific dad and family man, and we will all miss him.”

In a wide-ranging interview on the website The Browser, Martin Bell (above), the long-time BBC war correspondent who has covered more than a dozen conflicts, including the American war in Vietnam, discusses five of the most important books dealing with modern wars.

Bell’s list:  Trusted Mole by Milos Stankovik, which deals with a British Army officer in the Bosnian War; Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, a satirical look at newspapers and war correspondents; Joseph Conrad’s iconic novel, Heart of Darkness; Wilfred Owen’s Collected Poems, which include verses dealing with the poet’s experiences in World War I; and David Halberstam’s celebrated look at Vietnam War policymaking, The Best and the Brightest.

The Best and the Brightest, Bell says, “is an account of how the Americans got into this war. How brilliant people devised schemes that went against all common sense. One of them, of course, was [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara, who had been president of the Ford Motor Company. They thought that simply by the application of force and intelligence they could make things happen on the ground. But they didn’t understand.”

Bell says that when he was in Vietnam he “saw in 1967 and 1972 this massive application of fire power. But you don’t change people’s minds with fire power. You can, in fact, just alienate them. What Halberstam delivers is an account of how this happened.”

One of the reasons he chose Halberstam’s opus, Bell says, “is because I think it applies today to what the western powers are trying to do in Afghanistan. There are so many parallel structures – the massive application of fire power and not much understanding of the people. To the Afghans, we tend to be just another foreign invader, however well-intentioned. Which is why, like Vietnam, I think it’s an unwinnable war.”

A version of the interview was republished on Salon.com

It sometimes seems as though the only stories you hear about Vietnam War POWs are those involving American pilots who were shot down over North Vietnam and held prisoner in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. But there were plenty of other non-Hanoi Hilton POW stories—including those involving Americans who were captured on the ground in South Vietnam and held by the Viet Cong.

A newly opened exhibit at the Airborne and Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, North Carolina, “The Animal Called POW,” pays tribute to Special Forces troops and other American military personnel who were captured and held prisoner by the VC during the war. As was the case with the Americans held in the Hanoi Hilton, the troops take prisoner by the Viet Cong were forced to endure hellish conditions,  often involving torture.

The exhibit,which opened last month and runs through next January,  features a “Forrest of Darkness” in which visitors walk inside a VC indoctrination hut and come face to face with a bambo tiger cage that houses an American POW. There also are artifacts, dioramas, and video screens explaining what life was like for POWs in South Vietnam.

The exhibit was inspired by a bamboo tiger cage that was displayed in the museum in 2011 to honor Vietnam veterans. The cage contained a mannequin representing former U.S. Special Forces Lt.  James M. “Nick” Rowe, who was captured by the Viet Cong in the fall of 1963 in the Mekong Delta and held prisoner for five years. He made a daring escape on December 31, 1968, just before he was about to be executed.

In 1981, Rowe (who died in 1989) helped set up the Army’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training program, which is located at Camp Mackall, which is in the Fayetteville, area—as is Fort Bragg, the headquarters of the Army’s Special Operations Command. SERE students, in fact, had built the “tiger cage” last year for the display.