A publication of Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc. ®
An organization chartered by the U.S. Congress
February 2001/March 2001
Rendezvous With War Symposium
Selling The War Story: Hollywood Hits And Bestseller Lists
Vietnam Veterans of America teamed with the College of William and Mary to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War by sponsoring a three-day symposium on the war. Held April 6-8, 2000, Rendezvous with War examined the war from many perspectives. This panel, "Selling the War Story: Hollywood Hits and Bestseller Lists," examined the cultural aftershocks created by the war and the treatment of the war by American mass culture.
Panelists included the writer and memoirist Philip Caputo, journalist and writer Joe Galloway, filmmaker Pat Duncan, film technical adviser Russ Thurman, and writer and journalist Wally Terry. The panel was moderated by Marc Leepson, arts and books editor of The VVA Veteran.
Marc Leepson: I have been writing about Vietnam War books and films for more than 20 years, and the thing that continues to astound me is the depth and the breadth of this work. I’m talking about novels, memoirs, oral histories, military histories, eyewitness accounts--not to mention history and political analysis, which we are not even going to talk about on this panel. And the films, virtually all of which were produced by writers and filmmakers who served in the Vietnam War or were on the ground there as observers.
VVA is the nation’s only veterans service organization that supports and encourages writers, directors, poets, and others who deal creatively and artistically with the Vietnam War.
Last night, I was going over the list of the people that VVA has given cultural awards to and it is almost a Who’s Who of late 20th century American writers and filmmakers.
The list includes Tim O’Brien, who won the National Book Award; Robert Allen Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize; Larry Heinemann, who also won the National Book Award; and Philip Caputo. From the film community, Oliver Stone, Dale Dye, Dennis Franz, Dana Delany, Dr. Haing Ngoir, and Bill Broyles all received awards. Other writers include Linda Van Devanter, Bruce Weigl, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Curry, David Willson, Tim Mahoney, Bob Mason, Harry Summers, Gloria Emerson, Jack Fuller, John Clark Platt, Winston Groom, Peter Arnett, Neil Sheehan, Joe Galloway, Gen. Hal Moore, and Jack Smith.
Today we have five talented, accomplished men on this panel who have produced memorable literary and film work based on and fed by their experiences in the Vietnam War. All of these men already have been introduced, except for Philip Caputo, who is a Pulitzer Prize writer who has excelled in journalism and fiction. He’s written several great novels and is best know for his Vietnam War memoir, A Rumor of War.
I would like each panelist to talk about the genesis of his first literary or film work dealing with the Vietnam War. So, Phil, could you tell us about how A Rumor of War came about?
Philip Caputo: I went to Vietnam with the first regular American brigade that went into the war, the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade. We arrived in March of 1965 when President Johnson decided to commit American ground troops to the war. I was there until July of 1966. A little bit more than half that time, I was a rifle platoon commander with the First Battalion, Third Marines, and the First Battalion, First Marines. The rest of the time I was a junior staff officer on battalion or regimental infantry staffs.
When I left Vietnam, I knew that I had something that I wanted to say about the war. I knew that I had a story to tell, and it gnawed at me for quite a while. I actually began to write A Rumor of War when I was still in the Marine Corps in the spring of 1967. But I really couldn’t get the book under way because I knew that the Vietnam War didn’t fit any of the paradigms that I was used to reading--Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead kind of story, or James Jones’s Thin Red Line, or even Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. There was something very anomalous and strange about that war.
I struggled with this for quite a while when I got out of the Marine Corps in 1967. I went to Europe and stayed there for the better part of a year. I think I was living out some sort of Hemingway fantasy, hanging out in Paris and Spain. During this literary sojourn, I managed to blow every dime that I had saved in the service trying to write this story, and I wasn’t able to get anywhere with it until I went to England.
I was staying in a cold, drafty British apartment. The guy who owned it had several memoirs by British World War I officers Siegfred Sassoon and Guy Chapman and poetry by Wilfred Owen. This spoke to me in a very real way. Even though they were very different wars and even though World War I made Vietnam look like a picnic, these writers spoke to me and I felt that I had the right form. I wanted to write a memoir, not a novel, and I knew that it would be eloquent in the way that the World War I stories were.
I thought I would be able to complete it in a couple or three years, but it took me nine years to finish. The main reason was not because it was so profound and wonderful, but because I was working for a living at that time as a newspaperman and as a foreign correspondent--a job that often entailed 12-hour days and extensive travel all over the world. And I was raising a family at the same time. I could only work on this book in my spare time.
But in 1975 I presented it to an agent in New York, and he presented it to a couple of publishers who rejected it out of hand. Finally Holt--now Henry Holt and Company, then Holt, Reinhart & Winston--bought the book. Vietnam as a subject was anathema at that time. It was as if I had written Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1850. That was the reaction to any kind of Vietnam literature. My editor, Marian Wood at Henry Holt, said that she let the manuscript sit on her desk for almost a month before she even read it. She was afraid to read it.
My wife and I were convinced that it would sell a couple of thousand copies. I was quite astonished when it became a bestseller and was made into a TV movie, and as Marc pointed out, it’s still in print. It still sells about 20,000 a year in paperback--all of which sort of astonishes me, pleasantly so I might add.
Joe Galloway: Our book--Gen. Moore’s book and mine--We Were Soldiers Once And Young, was born on the battlefield on the 16th of November 1965. As we were pulling out, I grabbed my pack and my rifle, and I went over to shake hands with Col. Moore and thank him for all that he had done to open my eyes. I stood there, we looked at each other, and we both wept. We shook hands, and we agreed right then that someday we would do the book.
I knew that UPI would probably allow me perhaps a thousand words--maybe twelve hundred if I wrote real well--to tell that story, and I knew that that was not enough. So I stayed in touch with Col. Moore over the years. In 1976, we talked again about the book.
A couple of years after the battle, I sat down and tried to write it as a novel. I wrote three or four chapters. I didn’t like it. I knew that it was a true story, not a fictional one. I also knew that even if I wrote the best thing since sliced bread, no one was going to publish a novel about Vietnam in 1976.
A few years later I was sitting in my living room in Los Angeles looking over the TV schedule, and I saw a movie on the schedule. It was the sequel to American Graffiti. I thought that would be cool.
It picked up where the other movie left off with descriptions of the characters. The geek with the glasses had been drafted, sent to Vietnam with the First Cavalry Division, and was missing in action. The movie picks up the stories at that point and all of a sudden this television in my living room was full of Huey helicopters, and an air assault was going down, and there were mortar rounds everywhere, and one of them lands right on top of this kid and basically vaporizes him.
I’m sitting there shaking like a leaf, crying like a baby, and I don’t know what’s happening to me. I thought about it and I laid awake that night.
The next morning I got on the phone and called Hal Moore and said, "Are you ready to do that book?" He said, "Yeah." I flew to his home in Colorado the next day. I said, "How many of these guys do we know where they are?" He said, "Maybe ten or fifteen." I said, "Let’s do a questionnaire, get started with those, and start looking for the others."
First we had to find 250 guys, which in those years before CD-ROM telephone directories was a chore. That was 1981. We worked for ten years on the research, pretty steadily. In August of 1991 I took leave, brought the General up, chained his leg to my dining room table, spread the research over two rooms of my house, and we started writing.
We finished the book three days before Christmas that year and flew to New York and handed it to our editor. He was a very fine man. As we placed the manuscript on his desk, the General said, "We have brought you the heart of the buffalo," and I regret to tell you that the book editor didn’t understand what he meant. It was a magnificent obsession.
Marc Leepson: Tell us how the title came about.
Joe Galloway: One day we got a call from Random House and they said they had selected a title for the book: One Valley Too Far.
Russ Thurman: By God, that makes you want to stand up and salute.
Joe Galloway: I did not want to tell Gen. Moore, but I had to. His response was, "Over my dead body." He said, "What do we do to turn this around?" and I said, "Well, we’ve got to get on the train and go to New York."
We started off with the short list of about ten titles that we had mulled over for months. One of them was simply, Soldiers Once. The title is from the last line of an A.E. Housman poem about dead young soldiers. Then we thought we could use the whole damn line: "We were soldiers once and young." It resonated.
We walk into the office of the president of Random house, Harry Evans, and he’s there, and the chairman of the board is there, and the head of graphics, and the head of design, and the senior editor. Evans says, "We hear you don’t like our title." I said, "Well, it’s not that we don’t like your title, it’s that we like ours so much better."
There was one woman in there who had read the manuscript. I watched her face as I told them our title, and I saw a tear roll down her cheek. I knew we had it. Evans turned around and looked at his assembled minions, and he said, "Well, we can redesign the title page, can’t we, men?"
You have to fight them every step of the way. You have to know what it is that you are doing, and you have to fight them because they have a tin ear in New York in the publishing industry. I suspect that may be true in Hollywood in the film industry, as well. It’s a struggle; it’s a fight every step of the way.
Pat Duncan: They don’t have tin ears, they are deaf.
Joe Galloway: Two weeks ago in the Sunday L.A. Times Magazine, they did a profile of the filmmaker Joe Roth. In the middle of this profile, a guy who owns the movie rights to our book was discussing what the title of the movie is going to be. And my jaw drops because they are agreeing on The Lost Patrol. I told this to the General with great trepidation. "What?" he said, "Who’s lost and what fucking patrol?"
Pat Duncan: Actually, I just had a meeting two weeks ago at Fox where they wanted to do a remake of The Lost Patrol because they heard Joe Roth wanted the title. That’s the whole reason a movie gets made: good title.
I didn’t write until I was 30. I came back from Vietnam, did a whole bunch of stuff, and decided that I wanted to write movies because I could write better crap than the stuff I was seeing in the theaters. I still feel that way.
I moved to L.A. in 1976 and there were a whole bunch of Vietnam scripts floating around. Apocalypse Now and so on. They got made, some of them. But, I thought they were all about the war and not about the warrior. I’m kind of a blue-collar guy, and I wanted to write about the guys I served with.
So I wrote a script called 84 Charlie MoPic, and nobody would make it. It was kind of hard, because of the style, but nobody wanted to do anything about Vietnam. It was a famous script in town. It was one of those unproduced scripts everyone talked about. People would come up to me and say, "Oh, I’ve read the script. It’s brilliant. Somebody should make that into a movie." This would be a head of a studio. I’d said, "Why don’t you make it a movie?" "Oh, no, the public doesn’t want to see that shit."
Two guys had pitched a series to HBO called Vietnam War Stories. They wanted to do Rambo as a weekly series, and they wanted a token vet. They just wanted some guy to kind of authenticate themselves and they hired me.
I threw out all their scripts and I said, "This is crap; this is junk; this is a big lie. I wouldn’t use this to wipe my dog’s ass." You know, I was diplomatic. I went and wrote some scripts and then they decided to shoot in Savannah, Georgia, and they took everybody but me.
My job was to rewrite the scripts, but I kept on giving excuses that I was too busy so they had to ship me to Georgia to do the rewrites there. I had long hair and I wore these stupid Hawaiian shirts, and Russ Thurman was there as the technical adviser. They pitted us against each other. They kept calling me and saying, "We got this gunny. When you see him, he’s going to get in your shit."
When I got to the Holiday Inn in Savannah, Russ and I looked at each other and said, "Oh good, I’ve got an ally." And we took over that entire series.
In fact, the second year, it was in my contract: the two producers had nothing to do with the show. We felt an obligation to all the names on The Wall and also to all the people we had served with to try and do it right and to do as many different stories as possible. We did the first nurse story; we did rear echelon stories; we did all sorts of stories. And it became successful. The first year we were eligible, we won an Ace cable award in every category we were eligible for.
The Ace Awards didn’t amount to a lot, but they were important to us. Russ was my date for the Ace Awards. He wore his Class A Marine Uniform. What is that thing called?
Russ Thurman: My Dress Blues.
Pat Duncan: There’s an Army-Marine thing going here that has been going on for a long time.
Russ Thurman: Embarrassing.
Pat Duncan: We had fought this good fight. The week after we finished shooting the series, we started shooting MoPic. We used the same crew. We just moved over and did MoPic, which has had some success with veterans. It got some really good reviews.
I was at the Sundance Film Festival, and this guy came up to me. He said, "My wife and I saw your film the other day. That’s my wife over there. She’s too shy to talk to you, and she was a nurse in Vietnam. We have been married for 14 years and she has never said one word about what happened to her over there. When we saw your movie, we went back to our condo and we talked all night for the first time about what she did there." That’s when I knew that we had succeeded somehow. That was the important thing.
I went to Hawaii for the Hawaiian Film Festival and the Pacific Rim Festival. They had three films from filmmakers in Hanoi. And I got to see three movies from the North Vietnamese point of view--remarkable films actually, just stunning films. The cool part was, I got to talk with these guys. I didn’t spend time with anybody else except these filmmakers because we had more in common than just about anybody else there except for the veterans.
They took a copy of my film back to Vietnam with them. They wanted everybody to see it because all they had seen were bootleg tapes of Rambo.
The funny thing is, they had a Rambo film, too. It was about these VC fighting this helicopter that came over their village every day and just strafed it. They got some Russian guy to play the American, and he literally twirled his mustache and went, "Heh, heh, heh."
Their films were just like ours, from the sublime to the ridiculous. It was a long journey and it still is. I have been trying to make other Vietnam projects for a long time, but it’s very hard to do Vietnam projects.
Russ Thurman: In late 1970s I was a warrant officer at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and I had gunpowder in my nostrils. I had served in Vietnam. I had become a master sergeant in the Marines. I became a warrant officer.
So there I am, harder than woodpecker lips, and I’m sitting in a movie theater in Jacksonville, North Carolina. I was watching a Vietnam movie called The Boys of Company C.
I went with a friend of mine, Dale Dye. Dale and I were sergeants together in Vietnam. I met Dale in 1967. I was about 16 months in country, and he shows up in our unit as the new guy. For new guys in most professions and most certainly in Vietnam, you don’t talk: you listen, you shut your face, you learn. Dale didn’t because he talks a lot. Since I had 16 months in country--senior sergeant in the outfit--I punched him out. We have been dear friends since. I was best man in his wedding.
We went to this movie and we both left vibrating. I have found that most Vietnam movies are filled with hate, bigotry, and dishonor--everything that I didn’t experience. I have found no love, no camaraderie, no brotherhood. They were all cartoon characters, laughable, Rambos, weirdos. Every officer was inept; every artillery round fell short; every black was lazy; every white guy was on drugs.
I was a Private First Class when I went to Vietnam. I saw more from a very low level called mud. So this all kind of vibrated with me. I’m a little bit passionate about the war; I’m a little bit passionate about the guys I fought with. If the Vietnam War was all the things we have seen in films--and some of them are good and some of them are very, very bad--then that doesn’t explain The Wall. If everybody hated each other over there, why is The Wall still one of the most passionate places to go?
I left the Marines in December of 1985, and I went to work as a magazine editor. Dale kept pestering me about getting involved in these movie things. He had done a weird movie. He had gone over to Soldier of Fortune and was going to go to Hollywood to change things. We had both talked about this for years, ranting and raving about all these weird things going on. So he pestered me into taking this job with HBO, Vietnam War Stories.
Now I don’t know anything about how to make movies but I do know a little bit about the Marines, and I know a little bit about military service. I can outfit you and guarantee authenticity. Whatever it takes, I can do it. He badgers me to take the job because he’s going to the Philippines to make a movie called Platoon.
I took the job and I thought they were the weirdest bunch of people I had ever met in my life. You think they are weird, they’re much worse. I go to Savannah, and I started ranting and raving and everything. The producer says, "You are just like a gunnery sergeant." I say, "Thanks for the compliment." And that became my label.
I get the scripts and I am going, "Who wrote this trash?" I changed things and sent it back. They kept talking about this Pat Duncan. I said, "Well, where did this guy crawl out of?" and they said, "He is a veteran." I said, "What war?" They wanted us to fight so they could go out and get their job done making the TV series.
We met at the Holiday Inn. It took 30 seconds to look into this man’s eyes and know this man had walked in the valley of the shadow. We teamed up and we kicked HBO’s butt. I told them when I took on the job that I don’t care whether HBO executives like this thing. I don’t care whether you like it. I don’t care whether the actors like it. I only care about one thing--that the veterans in Butte, Montana; Biloxi, Mississippi; and Bangor, Maine, like it.
They didn’t like the idea that I wanted the actors for one measly day to put them through a training course--one measly day. But I got them.
I took the actors and about fifty extras out into the swamps of Georgia. Beautiful place to train. You’ve got cottonmouths, rattlesnakes, mosquitoes the size of helicopters, and, boy, it was wet and slimy. I loved it.
We developed some rules of engagement. One, nobody touches the actors, nobody talks to them. I want them; they are mine for this period of time. I will turn them over to the director at the end of the day. I explained about the M-16 and trained them. I can take anybody and in about an hour, teach him how to use an M-16. I don’t care who you are, I can do it.
I became more of an emotional trainer. It’s not what you can do physically, it’s what up here that makes the difference. When the guy steps in front of the camera, I want him to be believable.
We went for a little walk. I loved it when we crossed a canal and all you could see were the M-16s poking out of the water. We sat for about 15 minutes--you don’t move, you don’t make any sounds, you don’t do anything. The faces of these guys were covered black with mosquitoes. When they came back, they were different. They had not walked in the valley of the shadow, but they had looked into the valley.
No actor has the right to put on the uniform of one of my brothers and pretend to be one of my brothers without having paid some dues. HBO came out with War Stories and most episodes reflect every bit of that. Some of them go to a little astray, and that’s fine. But my crowning work, I believe, was 84 Charlie MoPic.
Wallace Terry: After coming back from several weeks working on the cover story for Time magazine about the Negro soldier, I was called by an old friend from my Washington Post days who had moved over to the publishing business, wanting to know if I could turn that cover story into a book. I said, "That’s impossible. You can’t base a book on a few weeks of reporting."
But a few months later I was off to Vietnam for a permanent assignment. At the end of that two-year assignment, I made a deal with the bureau chief that I would go into the field and do some interviewing for a prospective book, and I would write a piece for him on the way out of the country back to the States. As I traveled the length and breadth of the battlefield, I interviewed black soldiers of all levels because this would be the focus of my book--the black experience in Vietnam.
When the word got around that this black reporter was showing up, not just one or two black guys would show but 10, 20, or 30, and they would all want to talk at once. I had to switch over to a tape recorder from my notebook and pen. I was recording essentially the first rap sessions to come out of Vietnam, although at the time I didn’t realize it.
At the same time, I was surveying the attitudes of black and white troops for what I thought would be an important addition to my narrative history--the first outside survey of the political, social, and racial attitudes of our servicemen on the battlefield. When I got back to the States, I published my findings in Time, and did a two-part series with the New York Times, which they syndicated.
About the same time, I was being asked by Time to take a look at the new black leadership that had emerged since I had been out of the country. One of the people they wanted me to talk to was Bobby Seal, who was incarcerated in San Francisco. I didn’t know him nor did I know any of the other Black Panther leaders.
When I interview him, I decided to take a couple of these tapes with me.
I did the same thing with Julian Bond, Whitney Young, and other black leaders. Julian Bond said, "You ought to play this material for Motown. They could turn this into a documentary recording." And that’s just what happened. I contacted those folks out in California. If you think those people are weird in the movie industry, wait until you get to the record industry. They are 99.9 percent crooks, as I soon discovered.
In any case, I became a Motown recording star for all of seven minutes. I appeared very briefly on Soul Train.
The record came out. It was called "Guess Who Is Coming Home--Black Fighting Men Recorded Live In Vietnam," and it was the lowest pressing in the history of RCA. It never sold, but it was the only recording of this type that was produced out of the Vietnam experience. We have hope that down the road it will become a CD--if not that, maybe it will become part of a rap recording, which seems to be the only way to get anything done anymore.
I went to the typewriter, and I finished this 600-page narrative. I thought I had a surefire winner because I was picking through the experiences of black solders, the two great issues of our time. The Vietnam War, being our longest war, was the most divisive issue since the Civil War. Through the eyes of the black soldier--I’m dealing with civil rights.
I really thought I had a winner: How could I lose? Well, I will tell you how I can lose. I could lose because I had taken the two worst issues, not the two best issues: Vietnam, a war that everybody now hated, and the only thing that they hated worse than that was black men with guns who knew how to use them.
I was told nobody is buying Vietnam books anymore, and the manuscript was shoved back in my face. I went to see a publisher and he told me the same thing: "Nobody is buying Vietnam books. They’re not interested in the black side of the story, especially that side of the story."
So I tried another publisher and I hear the same thing--ten rejections, 20 rejections. Two years go by, three years go by. It gets so bad that my children go to bed at night saying, "Dear God, please find Daddy a publisher because he is driving us nuts." Forty rejections, 50 rejections, 70--now I am being rejected twice by the same publisher.
After ten years, I had gone through over 100 publishers, 100 rejections. Finally, Ballantine Books said they would publish it, but I had to understand they were a paperback house. I needed a hard-cover publisher first.
Ballantine is part of the Random House complex, so I was taken around the corner to meet an editor of Random House. I open the door and it’s a black guy, and I’m thinking, "I am really in high cotton now." It turned out that he’s from Yale University. He’s too smart. He doesn’t want my 600-page narrative that I have been carrying around for ten years. He wants me to write an oral history. I didn’t know what that was. I thought it was an x-rated book of some sort.
He explained to me that Al Santoli had written a book called Everything We Had, which was published by Random House and was successful. This meant starting all over. I had started this back in 1969, now here we are in 1982.
The whole process was to start all over again. I found guys that I had known in Vietnam; there were also guys I knew along the way and there were guys I had to go out and look for. I had to fill the cross-section of experience in creating this tapestry that would represent not only the black experience, but the American experience and the universal experience.
The most important reaction that I’ve had to Bloods came in a letter that I received from a Dutch reader who said that when he read the story of Fred Cherry--a black pilot from Suffolk, Virginia, who was shot down and captured and held for seven years in Hanoi--that he saw his own experience. I knew I had achieved my first goal, which is to show the universal experience.
When a Dutchman who was held by the Japanese in East Timor sees himself in the experience of a black man with American forces in Hanoi, then I felt that I had been successful--that I had done what I had always wanted to do as a journalist and make America understand that there is nothing about the black experience that is not first and foremost human and universal. If we understand that, we can live with each other in a much better way.
The book got published and it’s been successful. It still gets read here and there in college classes. It has inspired me to keep writing. I’m hoping to finish a sequel next spring called Heroic Hearts: How the Dream of Martin Luther King Came True on the Battlefields of Vietnam, in which I will focus not only on blacks, but on everybody and how they found their common humanity.
All of us want to see our books turned into something else. We had a nice production done for Frontline called "The Bloods of Nam." It was a one-hour documentary. We were very satisfied with it. It won some awards; it’s a classic production and I’m very proud of it.
We also did a radio adaptation for All Things Considered, which also won awards. Then it was off to Hollywood to deal with the real weirdos. We haven’t had anything approaching my dreams and my hopes, though we have talked to virtually everybody who thinks they might like to see this film become a serious production. But, along the way one story was adapted into a film called Dead Presidents. For me, it’s a dead movie. I think it was a disaster.
Russ Thurman: You do not go into these projects without paying a price. In some ways all these things I have done in Hollywood were therapy but they stirred up an awful lot of snakes that I had at parade rest for a long time. My dear wife paid a price for my work in the movie business. I mean physically. I was up patrolling the house a lot of times. Unfortunately, those snakes are still crawling around.
Question: Why are African Americans portrayed so negatively in war films or not shown in war films at all?
Pat Duncan: In War Stories I literally gave them a formula. I said that there would be 20 percent Latinos, 40 percent blacks, and all the Vietnamese would be played by Vietnamese--not Filipinos or Mexicans. That cost us a lot of money. In Hollywood, if it says a doctor comes in the room, the easiest thing for a casting department to do is go through their portfolio and make it a middle-aged white male--all the time. This is true for any role that isn’t described in particular.
It was very difficult to find young Latino actors; there was a scarcity of them then. And the Vietnamese: none of them were actors. We had to do the best we could. I had an extra casting group that did nothing but cast Vietnamese.
It’s very difficult. People are basically lazy, and they are trying to save money.
You have to remember that with Hollywood--just like everywhere else on the planet--90 percent of everything is crap. Just absolute crap, and about 9 percent is decent, and 1 percent is really good. That’s because 90 percent of the people working there aren’t very good at their jobs. The writers aren’t very good, the directors aren’t very good, the casting people, and so on. They go the lazy route. They just don’t take the time or effort.
Joe Galloway: And they are not above distorting history to leave the black man out. Patton’s famous speech, which George Scott did so beautifully in that movie, was actually delivered to a black tank unit. And when he says those lines, "When your kids ask you, ‘What did you do in the war, Dad?’ you don’t want to have to say you shoveled shit in Louisiana," was a direct reference to the 765th black tank unit which trained in Louisiana. That’s what they did for two years until they finally were chiseled out of that hole and sent to combat at their own request.
It would have been just as easy to have a black unit standing there, but instead you saw a white unit.
Question: Have any of you seen a film that you felt really portrayed the real Vietnam or the Vietnam that you witnessed?
Pat Duncan: I go around the country with MoPic, and I have guys come to me constantly and say, "How come nobody has told my story?" They always say, "I saw your movie but that is not what it was like when I was there."
Vietnam was a turbulent period in general. Also, we went over there for 12 or 13 months or maybe a little longer, and the war changed before our eyes. All the experiences were unique. There are as many stories as there are veterans. There are thousands of books. I just tell people to write their stories.
Joe Galloway: Veterans demand reality. Veterans demand the truth as they remember it and that’s not usually what Hollywood is about.
Pat Duncan: I think every veteran is fighting this odd mythology that came out of the war: the ticking time-bomb vet. You know this guy, he’s a staple of movies and books.
I had a nurse we used as a technical advisor who called me one day in tears. Some TV writers had called her and picked her brain. When the show aired, she watched it. She got her whole family to watch the episode. "It’s going to be about what I did in Vietnam."
And the episode was about this Vietnam nurse who had come back and was having post-traumatic stress. Every time she saw a man in uniform she became a prostitute. This is what they had done to her story and she was in tears. Her whole family had watched this show that said every time she saw a guy from Federal Express, she started seducing men. It was just awful. I called up the writer and I said, "How could you do this to this woman?" She said, "It’s just a TV show and we needed a little hook." That’s what it is to them. The Vietnam veteran is just an easy dramatic device.
Marc Leepson: Philip, you wrote a book and a film was made out of it. Can you address this issue of what they did to your book?
Philip Caputo: I thought that the TV film that they made of my book was the best, most realistic film version of the war that I had seen up until at least that day. I want to make two points.
The first point is that there were many Vietnam Wars, but the odd thing about that war is that parts of it resembled the Battle of Guadalcanal. Parts of it even resembled the Western Front in World War I, especially up along the DMZ. Parts of it resembled the Indian Wars and the precursor war in the Philippines in the early part of this century. So I think that trying to say that there is a film or a book that captures the war is very difficult to do because it was such a many-faceted experience. Whereas you could take a book about World War I, and the Western Front was the Western Front whether you were in Belgium, France, or on the German side.
As far as the film version of A Rumor of War, I did go through the agonies of hell getting that right. CBS was very kind to me because they did not give me script approval rights, but they did give me some sort of unwritten moral authority. I actually kicked back the screenplay six times. Not only was this a true story and my story, but it was a story about all these guys I had served with--15 of whose names are on The Wall in Washington. I felt that any real falsification of the experience would have been a betrayal of the dead, which to me would be a mortal sin.
There were any number of problems with this film right up until production. Because it was a TV movie, we couldn’t afford to go to the Philippines or Thailand. We went to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. I have to say that the director and the cameramen did a crackerjack job of making it look like Vietnam. It was really interesting.
But, the producer of the film was just awful. He was cutting scenes out of the movie for budget reasons as they were filming. He would call up from California and say, "I want this scene taken out." By the time he got through, we had taken out five scenes. The entire film would have been utterly meaningless. It would have meant nothing. I would have been a bunch of guys running around in the jungle shooting each other.
I called my agent and I said, "You call those guys and you tell them I am withdrawing my name from this and they can call this thing anything they want. They can call it Death in the Jungle. It is not going to be called A Rumor of War. My name will not appear on it."
Brad Davis, the star of the movie who played me, went on strike. He told them, "If these scenes are taken out of the film, I am not going to work another day," and he went up to his room in the hotel. They begged and pleaded and threatened him, and he said, "Go to hell."
Sure enough, we got the scenes put back in and once it was done--once the director was allowed to get out from under the money people--I think that it turned out to be a fairly good film.
When I read in The Wall Street Journal that A Rumor of War had been turned into a video I called the producer. This guy was a parody and stereotype of the Hollywood producer. He actually smoked cigars and called you "baby" regardless of your sex or sexual orientation.
So I call him and he says, "Phil, baby, what can I do for you?" I said, "Well, Charlie, I see that A Rumor of War is going to be on video and it’s going to be released in 85 major markets and sold in all these video stores, and I was wondering: It wasn’t in the contract--video didn’t exist at the time--but what do I get out of this?" And I will credit him with his honesty. He says, "Phil, I got to be straight with you: not a fucking thing." That was my first and last meeting with Hollywood.
Russ Thurman: I think Phil points out that you have got to be passionate about what you are doing and you have got to hold them, just like what Wally said. If I only spent twelve hours a day on the set, I got over it. I mean you have to be in there and passionate and not let it go and don’t back up--they don’t make them bigger, badder, and mean enough. You have got to say, "This is the way it is going to be." We had one scene in a thing called Separated that had barbed wire. The stakes that you drive into the ground to hook the barbed wire to had a very curious little hook to it. We found two thousand of them in Montana and had them FedExed overnight in order to be there in the morning to be driven in the ground before shooting started.
Pat Duncan: They said, "Can’t we just stake it with some wood?" and I said, "Well it’s going to be a close-up." They said, "Well there are all sort of stakes," and I said, "Well this is the one we used in Vietnam." I don’t want one vet ever to be pulled out of this story because he is saying, "Oh, look at that bogus stake you got there."
One day a director got out of hand, and I pulled him aside and said, "Listen, Russ is a vet; I’m a vet; and this show is about 58,000 names on The Wall. Don’t take any of this lightly." He kept arguing with me, and I said, "And there is one other thing that you have to think about: If you do it again, I will hit you."
He looked at me. I don’t think anybody had ever gone up to this director and said that. But, that’s how far we have to go. It took all of our energy every day.
We were fighting constantly every day, all day long. You couldn’t turn your back. It was amazing what these people would try to do if you just looked away for a second. And it was for a good reason. One day, they called me into a meeting about some piddly little thing. I discussed it with them logically and calmly and that didn’t work. I told a few jokes and said trust me and that didn’t work. Finally I picked up a chair and threw it at the blackboard, knocked it down, and broke it. They just looked at me aghast and said, "Well, if it’s that important to you."
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