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By Marc Leepson
My worst cinematic nightmare has come true. Rambo is back.
I thought the mumbling, sneering one-man Nam-vet killing
machine was dead and buried in 1988 after the execrable
Rambo Does Afghanistan (real title: Rambo III) left the
nation’s multiplexes. But the grunting beast once
again burst upon an unwitting American public in January
in the fourth (and one prays last) blood-spattered horror
show, simply titled Rambo.
Longtime readers of this column
know that I wrote an awful lot about the Rambo phenomenon
in the mid and late eighties. Like many Vietnam veterans,
I found the character to be an abomination: a monosyllabic,
psychotic survivor of our war who goes back to Vietnam
in one film and single-handedly wipes out what appears
to be an entire NVA battalion.
Showing
the enemy as cartoonish duckpins smashed to bits by one angry
bare-chested veteran was more than just ludicrously bad filmmaking:
It was (and is) an insult to the real men and women who risked
their lives fighting a very real enemy in that nasty war.
Adding
to the insult: Actor, screenwriter, and director Stallone
never served a day in uniform in his life. In fact, he purposely
avoided the draft. Stallone very easily could have joined
the rest of us who actually put our lives on the line in
that war, but chose not to. Then, after the war, he plays
toy soldier on the screen and winds up becoming the best-known
cinematic Vietnam veteran.
And what a Vietnam veteran: an
inarticulate, angry, maladjusted, violence-prone brute—in
short, the personification of the media-fed walking-time-bomb
Nam vet. Stallone belongs in the Vietnam veteran Hall of
Shame for creating this farcical stereotype and foisting
it on a gullible American public in four movies that have
attracted countless millions of theater goers and (more to
the point) have brought in hundreds of millions of box office
and DVD dollars.
Stallone continues
to perpetuate this walking-time-bomb Vietnam veteran myth
in the new film. This time he drags his amazingly buff (could
he be getting some chemical help?) 61-year-old body through
an insipid, improbable plot in which he and a bunch of fellow
mercenaries wipe out scores of very bad Burmese soldiers.
Blood spurts, heads literally roll, intestines
get disemboweled, clichés abound. The dialogue, such
as it is, is pabulum. The acting, especially by stone-faced
Stallone, is laughably bad. The entire enterprise, in fact,
is a joke. Do yourself and every other Vietnam veteran a
favor when it comes out on DVD: Don’t buy or rent it
and encourage everyone you know to join you in boycotting
this very, very bad movie.
YEAH,
YEAH, YEAH
The critics either loved or hated Across the Universe, director
Julie Taymor’s fantastical sixties musical romp set
to 33 Beatles tunes, when it was released last September.
I loved it.
I did not get to see the movie on the big screen—it
didn’t seem to last very long in the theaters. But
when I saw the recently released DVD (Revolution Studios,
2 hours, 13 minutes), I was blown away by the singing, dancing,
acting, and over-the-top costumes, cinematography, and special
effects. The actors did their own singing, much of it live
(that is, not lip-synced), which made the film come alive,
as did some really cool music-video-like performances by
rock stars Joe Cocker (“Come Together”), Bono
(“I Am the Walrus”), and Eddie Izzard (“For
the Benefit of Mr. Pike”).
The plot has a strong Vietnam
War theme. Not to spoil one aspect of the plot, but the boyfriend
of the main female character (the fetching Evan Rachel Wood,
playing Lucy, an earnest college student) is killed in the
war and her high-spirited brother Max (Joe Anderson), tunes
in, drops out (of Princeton), gets drafted, sees horrific
combat, and comes home emotionally unstable.
Max’s induction scene is a tour-de-force.
It includes an Uncle Sam poster that comes alive with the
old geezer singing “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and
an Army of strange GI-Joe-like soldiers putting Max through
the weirdest physical exam you’ll ever see, while giving
new meaning to the Lennon-McCartney lines: “I want
you/I want you so bad/It’s driving me mad.”
Across
the Universe brought to mind Twyla Tharp’s amazing
Movin’ Out, but, unlike Tharp’s creation, it
has dialogue and pays homage to Hair, the Beatles’ Magical
Mystery Tour, Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, Jimi Hendrix,
Janis Joplin, and plenty of other elements of late sixties
and early seventies pop culture. If you are a Beatles fan,
you’ll love this movie. If you appreciate creative
moviemaking with terrific rock music, top-notch, off-beat
choreography, and accomplished young actors careening through
an at-times psychedelic plot, this one’s for you, too.
I only wish I’d seen it on the big screen.
BEST DOCUMENTARY
The stirring documentary, Operation Homecoming: Writing the
Wartime Experience (Docurama Films, 81 minutes, plus extras,
$26.95), was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the
2007 Academy Awards. It deserved to win. Put together by
Richard E. Robbins and Tom Yellin of ABC News, this eye-opening,
unique movie tells the story of how one generation of veteran
writers (ours) has encouraged the newest generation of veterans
to tell their Iraq and Afghanistan war stories in prose and
poetry.
The film is an amalgam of the thoughts of a handful
of great writers who served in Vietnam—Tim O’Brien,
Tobias Wolff, Joe Haldeman, Richard Currey, and Yusef Komunyakaa—along
with the voices of new veterans, and readings of their work
by some talented actors, including Robert Duval, John Krasinski,
and Beau Bridges. The veterans got together in 2004 under
a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which sent
O’Brien, Wolff, et al. to military bases to run workshops
for aspiring veteran writers.
All of the stories, memoirs,
and poems effectively evoke the special kind of war being
waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. One message that comes through
loudly and clearly from all the veterans’ testimony
(including WWII veteran-writers James Salter and Paul Fussell)
is that many of the issues our newest veterans faced in country
and after coming home are the same as those that Vietnam
veterans had to deal with four decades ago. In fact, they
are the issues that those who have fought in all wars have
faced.
One particularly strong
insight came from Ed Hrivnak, an eloquent USAF veteran who
flew countless helicopter rescue missions in the first Gulf
War, in Iraq, Somalia, and Rwanda. “War
is not this glorious thing” you see in movies and on
TV, Hrivnak said, “When you break it down to the human
level, it’s actually quite disgusting.”
KEEP ON
ROCKIN’
Remember that great country-rock band New Riders of the Purple
Sage? They originally were a part-time spin-off from the
Grateful Dead and included Jerry Garcia on pedal steel, Phil
Lesh on bass, and Mickey Hart on drums. The band went out
on its own in 1971 with a new lineup and put out a dozen
albums, selling some four million records in the process.
Their big hit was the bouncy “Panama Red.”
NRPS
is still in business and still tours all over the country.
In June 2006 the band (now made up of David Nelson, Buddy
Cage, Michael Falzarano, Ronnie Penque, and Johnny Markowski)
took time out from its sold-out summer tour to give two benefit
performances for VVA’s Owego, New York, Chapter 480
at a great venue, Turkey Trot Acres, a hunting lodge in nearby
Candor, New York, that puts on country-rock concerts every
summer. All proceeds from the concert (and a subsequent one
in 2007) went to the chapter.
“Our friends Pete and Sherry Clare of Turkey Trot Acres
have put on these concerts for our chapter at no cost to
us,” Chapter President Jack Harzel told us. “They
give our members a free dinner and a concert and also raise
money for our charitable causes.”
The 2006 concert is
now available on a combination DVD/CD, The New Riders of
the Purple Sage: Wanted: Live at Turkey Trot, which is dedicated
to VVA. You can order your copy at Chapter 480’s website, www.vva480.org or www.thenewriders.com A
portion of the proceeds goes to Chapter 480.
A LIFE-CHANGING
EXPERIENCE
It’s not every day that something we write in this
column has an impact on someone’s career. But that
was the case with the artist and sculptor Ron Petitt, who
experienced a welcome career change not long after a rundown
on his artistic work appeared in these pages in the December
2000 issue.
Petitt, who lives in Loveland, Colorado, served
with the Army Security Agency in Vietnam, where he was stationed
in Nha Trang from 1971-72. In Vietnam, he contributed illustrations
and cartoons to Grunt, the military humor magazine. After
he came home, Petitt kept painting and drawing, but shifted
to sculpture in the mid seventies. “I always did art
as a sideline, not full time,” he told us. “It
was always a second job—until about eight years ago.”
After
we wrote that Petitt specializes in military sculpture and
that his work is sold in the top military specialty catalogs,
he received several commissions, including one to create
a World War II airborne sculpture that was presented to the
actor Tom Hanks and the director Steven Spielberg for their
work on Saving Private Ryan and HBO’s A Band of Brothers.
Then Petitt began receiving a ton of the commissions, mostly
for monuments and other life-sized sculptures, and he was
able to make the leap to full-time sculptor.
His latest commission
came last September. Ron Petitt is creating a memorial to
honor all veterans of all generations under the aegis of
VVA Chapter 292 in Beaumont, Texas. Ironically, Beaumont
is Petitt’s hometown, and he was a founder
of Chapter 292 back in 1986. “The chapter found out
about my work from another VVA member and friend,” Petitt
said. “They contacted me without a design in mind.
I went to Beaumont, met with them, and we came up with a
design.”
The memorial that the chapter and Petitt came
up will center on a black granite star, representing the
state of Texas, topped with a nine-foot black granite column.
Alongside the column will be five half-life-size bronze sculptures
of male and female service members wearing different era
dress uniforms, representing the five branches of the military.
The memorial, which also is receiving support from the Jefferson
County Commissioners Court and the Ben J. Rogers Regional
Visitors Center, is scheduled to be dedicated Veterans Day.
“Chapter 292 is a great group,” Petitt told us. “You
don’t run into loyalty a lot in the business I’m
in, but I am really happy that they chose me, a founding
member of the chapter, to do this memorial. It was meant
to be.”
For more info on the Beaumont memorial, go to http://vva292.org/memorial.cfm Ron Petitt’s web site is www.ronpetitt.com
ARTS IN BRIEF
The Brooklyn Historical Society opened an exhibition of Vietnam
veterans’ histories in December. “In Our Own
Words: Portraits of Brooklyn Vietnam Veterans” includes
portraits and personal artifacts of the eight people whose
lives were touched by the war, including VVA’s own
Bernie Edelman, a Brooklyn native. In conjunction with the
exhibit, the Historical Society is hosting twice monthly
open-houses in which interviewers are collecting peoples’ memories
of the Vietnam War era for the society’s archives.
To find out more, go to http://www.brooklynhistory.org/exhibitions/in_our_words.html
Oliver (Platoon, et al.) Stone,
the big-time Hollywood director who once carried a rifle
in the Vietnam War, is at work on a movie about President
George W. Bush. “How did Bush
go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the
world?” Stone rhetorically asked Variety magazine.
“It’s
like Frank Capra territory on one hand, but I’ll also
cover the demons in his private life, his bouts with his
dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a
lot of where he is coming from.” The movie, which will
star Josh Brolin (the Nam vet in No Country for Old Men), “will
contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors,” Stone
said. It’s slated to shoot in April once Stone secures
the financing.
QUERIES
The North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh has a large
collection of Civil War, Spanish-American War, and World
War I artifacts, but a very small Vietnam War collection.
The museum will be mounting a Vietnam War photography exhibit
later this year and is asking Vietnam veterans in the Tar
Heel State to donate artifacts from our war. For more information,
contact Ken Howard, the museum’s director, at ken.howard@ncmail.net or
919-807-7878.
Bill Streifer is the author of the Professor
Conundrum series of books that teach math to young people
but are disguised as mystery stories. He is writing a book
that takes place during the Vietnam War and wants input from
Vietnam veterans for purposes of verisimilitude. “I
need someone who was close to the action to help me with
information that can’t be Googled,” he told us, “like
the sound of weapons, the number of soldiers on a chopper,
the recognition that a soldier would get for extreme bravery,
etc.”
Email Streifer at photografr7@yahoo.com or go
to his website, http://www.ProfConundrum.com and
tell him you read about it in these pages.
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2011, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8719 Colesville Road, Suite 100, Silver Spring, MD 20910