Arts of War on the Web

Let There Be Light, the powerful (and disturbing) documentary that the legendary director/screenwriter/actor John Huston made for the U.S. Army in 1945, which was banned from the public until 1980, is now available on line at the web site run by the National Film Preservation Foundation.

The Pentagon asked Huston, who was serving in the Army Signal Corps, to document World War II veterans suffering emotionally. His use in the doc of unscripted interviews adds up to a devastating portrait of the psychological wounds of war—even in the so-called “Good War” among members of the so-called “Greatest Generation.”

The doc was so powerful and disturbing that the Army banned it from being shown in public until 1980. It was recently restored by the National Archives and will be available to view on line free of charge until August.

Houston—who directed The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, The Misfits and The Man Who Would Be King, among many other films—conducted the interviews for Let There Be Light at Mason General Hospital on Long Island. “I decided that the best way to make the film was to follow one group through from the day of their arrival until their discharge,” Huston (who died in 1987) later said. “When the patients arrived, they were in various conditions of emotional distress. Some had tics; some were paralyzed; one in ten was psychotic. Most of them fell into the general designation of ‘anxiety neurosis.’”

The documentary’s purpose, Huston said, “was to show how men who suffered mental damage in the service should not be written off but could be helped by psychiatric treatment…. The original idea was that the film be shown to those who would be able to give employment in industry, to reassure them that the men discharged under this section were not insane, but were employable, as trustworthy as anyone.”

John Huston

Paul Fussell, the acclaimed literary scholar and World War II veteran best known for his pioneering book The Great War and Modern Memory (1976), died May 23. Fussell, who was severely wounded in France in 1944, died of natural causes at age 88.

The Great War in Modern Memory, which received the National Book Award, was listed as  No. 75 on the Modern Library’s list of the greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century. In it, Fussell examines  World War I through the cultural lens of how it was perceived during and after the fighting. His explication of the vast differences between romanticized versions of the war after it was over and the shocking brutality of the actual war itself strongly influenced how historians and other scholars have studied all wars, including the Vietnam War.

“It is difficult to underestimate Fussell’s influence,” Vincent B. Sherry wrote in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. “The book’s ambition and popularity move interpretation of the war from a relatively minor literary and historical specialization to a much more widespread cultural concern. His claims for the meaning of the war are profound and far-reaching; indeed, some have found them hyperbolic. Yet, whether in spite of or because of the enormity of his assertions, Fussell has set the agenda for most of the criticism that has followed him.”

Paul Fussell Jr. grew up in Pasadena, Calif., and was drafted into the Army in 1943 while he was a student at Pomona College. He missed D-Day, but 2o-year-old Lt. Fussell experienced the war at its worst. He served as  a 7th Army rifle platoon leader in southwestern France from November 1944 until six months later when Fussell was wounded as many of his men lay dying around him. He never got over it.

Fussell wrote two books about his World War II service, The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45 (2003), and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (1996). The journalist Russell Baker called the latter “a wonderfully angry” book. In it, Fussell describes how he was wrenched from an ideal childhood and young adulthood into the Army and into the maw of war in France.

Fussell witnessed the horror of war up close. That experience, along with his brief post-war time in the Army, shaped the rest of Fussell’s life. It led him, among other things, to persue a life of the mind as a college English professor, prolific essayist, and world traveler.

In the book Fussell provides many insights into the Human Condition, primarily in relation to society and politics in the United States following World War II. Fussell also reprises one theme of The Great War in Modern Memory as he describes how he tried to come to grips with why war is romanticized by those who did not do the fighting and dying.

When it is completed on the grounds of  the Texas Capitol building in Austin, the Texas Capitol Vietnam Veterans Monument  will honor all Texans who served in the Vietnam War. The monument will feature a fourteen-foot-high of an infantry patrol, surrounded by bas-relief panels depicting military personnel who supported them, including a radio operator and a medic.

The Vietnam Veterans Monument will take its place on the Capitol grounds among other monuments honoring Texans who served in the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and Korean War.

The Texas Capitol Vietnam Veterans Monument Committee, which is made up entire of  Vietnam veterans and was set up by the Texas Legislature to build the Monument, has an excellent web site that features an interactive map of Texas veterans in their communities. It also contains stories submitted by individual veterans. The idea of the web site is to create a “living monument” that preserves the stories of  Vietnam veterans. The Committee is working with Texas Tech’s Vietnam Center on this effort.

The site also includes a video, “Texas Remembers,” narrated by Joe Galloway, the former Vietnam War correspondent and long-time veterans’ advocate.

Lewe Barnett, 2006

On Monday, May 28, Memorial Day 2012, the Memorial Day Writer’s Project one again is hosting a group of veteran writers, poets, songwriters, and singers–many of them Vietnam veterans—on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The MDWP tent opens at 11:30 a.m., and activities go on till 5:30 on the Mall near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial behind the sidewalk facing Constitution Avenue near 21st Street.

This event is open to all veterans. If you would like to participate, show up and “bring your guitar, your stories, your poems,” said Dick Epstein, who helps coordinate the event. You can email him for more information at Dick_Epstein@hotmail.com

Those who have signed to participate this year include Jonathan Myer, Dick Morris, Tom McLean, Jimmy Stewart,  Epstein, and Barbara Martin. “Author and journalist Nancy Lynch will be there with copies of her book Vietnam Mailbag,” Epstein said. “Come and listen to the words of poet/activist Sistah Joy, Maritza Rivera, and the stories of Red Cross volunteer Holley Watts. Bring a friend.”

Horst Faas, one of the top photojournalists who covered the Vietnam War, died May 10 in Munich, Germany. He was 79. Faas served as the Associated Press’s chief of photo operations in Saigon from 1962-72. Under his leadership, AP photographers took some of the most riveting and lasting images of the war.

That included Nick Ut’s famed Pulitzer-Prize winning 1972 photo of the young Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, and Eddie Adams’ shot of the ARVN Gen. Loan shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head on the streets of Saigon during Tet 1968.

Eddie Adams, Faas later wrote, “loved young Nick Ut, whose brother, Huynh Cong La (Thanh My), had died photographing for the AP in 1965. And he admired the art and sensitivity of [the French photographer] Henri Huet, whom he helped to bring over to The AP from UPI in 1965.

“It was these two great photographers and close friends who made me feel like a lottery winner twice over again when I edited their film: Henri Huet with his moving sequence of a wounded medic aiding others wounded in battle (1967) and, of course, Nick Ut and his ‘napalm girl,’ Kim Phuc, in 1972.

“Henri died in 1971 in the flames of a helicopter. Eddie Adams, Henri Huet and Nick Ut wrote our history with perfect, singular newsphotos.”

The German-born Faas himself received the Pulitzer for his Vietnam War coverage, as well as the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Award and other honors. ”I don’t think anyone stayed longer [in Vietnam], took more risks or showed greater devotion to his work and his colleagues,” the late Vietnam War correspondent and author David Halberstam said of Faas. “I think of him as nothing less than a genius.”

The acclaimed journalist and novelist Bill Granger died April 22 at the Manteno Veterans Home in Illinois. Granger, 70, who served in the U.S. Army from 1963-65, died of heart failure.

Granger  was born in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisc., and grew up on Chicago’s South Side. He graduated from DePaul University with a BA in English in 1963, and then spent two years in the U.S. Army. During his military service in Washington, D.C., Granger worked part time as a copy boy at The Washington Post. After his honorable discharge, Granger was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and later a columnist and editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Granger’s first novel, November Man, a thriller, was published in 1979. He went on to write a total of twenty-five mysteries and thrillers, most set in Chicago, under his own name and the pseudonyms Joe Gash and Bill Griffith. Granger and his wife Lori also co-wrote three nonfiction books.