Arts of War on the Web

You can read a compelling new interview with the author Bobbie Ann Mason on the Haunting Legacy Facebook page run by that book’s co-author Deborah Kalb. In the interview Mason—who received the VVA President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the 1989 National Convention— talks in depth about her excellent Vietnam War-themed novel, In Country, which was published to widespread critical and popular acclaim in 1985 and was made into a big Hollywood film in 1989 starring Emily Lloyd and Bruce Willis.

That book is set in Kentucky in the early-1980s when Mason wrote it. It centers on a teen-aged girl, Samantha Hughes, whose father was killed in the Vietnam War before she was born.

Sam Hughes, Mason says in the interview, “was in the first wave of the children of Vietnam vets who were coming of age and starting to ask questions.  That’s when I knew there was an important story, a timeless tale.  The search for the father.  Telemachus searching for Odysseus after the Trojan War.  This time it was Vietnam. And she was a girl.”

At first, Mason says, she was “intimidated by the challenge of writing about Vietnam.  After all, I hadn’t been there.  I didn’t even know anyone who had been there.  It took a long time of trial and error, of searching, to get into what it was about the war that left its marks on the family.”

Mason said she didn’t read any Vietnam War history books to prepare for writing the novel. “Mostly,” she says, “I read oral histories and memoirs. Several prominent memoirs and oral histories appeared in the early eighties, as the [Vietnam Veterans] Memorial was urged into being and veterans began to speak out. The voices in those books—such as Charlie Company, Everything We Had, and Mark Baker’s Nam—were riveting and alive. There was a common experience, a common language.  I could hear their voices as they reported their time in country. My Vietnam vet characters came alive in my imagination because of those eloquent voices telling about the hell they had been through. ”

Mason goes on to talk about how things have changed for Vietnam veterans in the last 25 years, the important role the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has in the book, and how she has been drawn to writing about the consequences of war in her work.

You can learn more about Bobbie Ann Mason and her work at her website.

Taylor Kitsch & Aaron Johnson as American drug dealers in 'Savages'

Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Savages,” a bombastic tale about the present-day drug trade between Mexico and the United States, came out last week to generally rave reviews.  ”‘Savages’ is Oliver Stone’s strongest work in years,” Ty Burr wrote in his Boston Globe review, “a stylish, violent, hallucinatory thriller with both a mean streak and a devilish sense of humor. It’s not at all for the faint of heart.”

That “not for the faint of heart” sentiment, which was repeated by other reviewers, should come as no surprise to anyone who knows Stone’s film work. The former 25th Infantry Division ground pounder in Vietnam has written and directed more than a few films in which he zeroes in on ultra-violent or otherwise sickening human behavior.

That includes his Oscar-winning screenplay for that great 1978 movie, “Midnight Express,” which was based on the true story of a young American trying to survive in a hellish Turkish prison.  Stone’s Vietnam War-influenced films,  ”Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July,” which he wrote and directed, also contain their share of eye-cringing moments. And then there’s “Natural Born Killers,” which definitely is not for the faint of heart.

Stone co-wrote the screenplay for the new movie, based on the best-selling novel by Don Wilslow, who also gets a screen-writing credit. Kenneth Turan, in his Los Angeles Times review praised the movie writing, but had caveats about Stone’s directing.

Oliver Stone in Vietnam in 1968

Stone “has often shown an affinity for ruthless people acting ruthlessly, and there’s a pulp side to his directing personality that meshes well with this self-consciously amoral story of a drug-dealing ménage à trois facing off against a rapacious Mexican cartel,” Turan wrote. “Leave the kids at home for this one. Please.”

Stone is a director, Turan said, “who has often felt that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, and his weakness for bloody excesses of all sorts undermines much of his good work. You might not think that a motion picture called ‘Savages’ could be too violent, too savage, but you would be wrong.”

Pat Sajak, the famed long-time host of “Wheel of Fortune” who served a tour of duty in Vietnam during the war as a radio deejay with AFVN, occasionally steps out from the “Wheel” set to do other show biz work. That includes this week, as Sajak is co-starring in a production of the famed Neil Simon comedy “The Odd Couple” through July 7 at the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theater on the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs. It is a summer production of the University’s Connecticut Repertory Theater.

Anyone who knows the play (or the movie or TV show) won’t be surprised that Sajak is playing Felix Unger, the obsessive-compulsive half of the quite odd couple. Oscar Madison, the slob sportswriter, is played by Joe Moore, who served in Vietnam with Sajak. These days Moore’s day job is news anchor on KHON-TV in Honolulu.