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Arts of War
By Marc Leepson
This is what made me uneasy as I watched
Sir! No Sir!, the documentary about the Vietnam War GI
antiwar movement that was released earlier this year and
took home a slew of film festival awards: the absolute
certainty of the interviewees that what they did back then
was 100 percent right and the unstated corollary that the
rest of us who didn’t do what they did were wrong.
What
the activist veterans profiled in this stridently anti-Vietnam
War film did back then was refuse in varying degrees to
support the war while they were on active duty. They started
underground GI newspapers, organized off-base GI coffeehouses,
drew up antiwar petitions, flat out refused to do their
duty, or went AWOL. All received varying degrees of grief
from the military. Those who ran afoul of the Uniform Code
of Military Justice were prosecuted. Many went to jail
for their beliefs.
David Zeiger, who produced, directed,
and wrote the script for Sir!, No Sir!, makes excellent
use of archival footage of GIs in revolt back in the day,
and offers evocative in-country war footage. He also gets
the most out of present-day interviews with a group of
articulate and passionate men (and one woman, former Navy
nurse Susan Schmall) who served in the military in Vietnam
and at home and rebelled against the war machine.
Like all documentaries, this one has a point of view. That’s
not a problem. But what is bothersome is that Zeiger presents
only material that shows that thousands of military personnel
took action against the war and the military in the late
sixties and early seventies. He completely ignores the
millions of men and women who served and did not break
the law while in uniform—many of whom, to be sure,
had serious qualms about the war and debated long and hard
about what (and what not) to do about it.
Then there is
Jane Fonda. The actress is featured in this film, with
shots of her performing corny skits for GIs in the early
seventies with the FTA antiwar review, and movie-star close-ups
of her today speaking passionately about how right she
was back then. It comes off as self-congratulatory and
more than a bit self-aggrandizing. Fonda’s words
and demeanor in this documentary will give ammunition to
those who cannot forgive her for visiting North Vietnam
during the war, a point that Zeiger chooses not to bring
up in this passionate but flawed film.
If you crave more information about Sir! No Sir!, go to
www.sirnosir.com
ANOTHER FACET FOR THE WALL
The National Capital Planning
Commission, the Washington, D.C., board that has the final
say-so about memorials and monuments in the Nation’s
Capital, gave its approval August 3 to a 25,000-square-foot
underground visitor and education center that will be built
behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on a triangular plot
of land at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. The proposed
center, which would include a movie theater, an interactive
display featuring photographs of those whose names are
on The Wall, along with some of the tens of thousands of
items that have been left there, met opposition from preservation
groups concerned about protecting the open space on the
grounds in front of the Lincoln Memorial, as well as from
those who believe a visitors center for The Wall would
set a precedent for building similar additions to other
D.C. memorials.
The center will cost about $100 million.
The legislation passed by Congress in 2003 authorizing
the center stipulated that the funding come from private
sources as was the case with the funding for the memorial
back in the early 1980s. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Fund already has raised $25 million, is mounting a nationwide
campaign to bring in the rest, and expects to have a design
chosen by the end of the year.
“It’s a good
day,” VVMF president Jan
Scruggs said the day the commission approved the visitor
and education center. “This was a long time in coming.” Today’s “schoolchildren
were not even alive during the Vietnam War,” Scruggs
said. “The only way we can make the Memorial have
context for them is with an education center that will
help them put faces to the names on The Wall.”
CATHERINE
LEROY, 1945-2006
Catherine Leroy, who arrived in Saigon
as a 21-year-old neophyte photographer in 1966 and left
two years later with the reputation as one of the best
and most daring photojournalists in the Vietnam War, died
of cancer July 8 in Santa Monica, California. She was 60
years old.
Leroy, a French citizen, won the prestigious
George Polk Award for News Photography in 1967. She worked
in Vietnam for the Associated Press and the Black Star
agency. Among her many wartime accomplishments: She was
the only accredited journalist who took part in the single
combat jump in the Vietnam War, Operation Junction City
with the 173rd Airborne; she was wounded in action with
a company of the 26th Marines near the DMZ; and she was
briefly taken prisoner by the NVA in Hue during Tet 68.
Two
years ago, Leroy put together Under Fire: Great Photographers
and Writers in Vietnam, a book juxtaposing a series of
remarkable Vietnam War photographs with insightful essays
by some of the war’s best chroniclers. Many of the
photos and accompanying essays appeared in this newspaper
over several years.
“Catherine Leroy was a strong-willed,
extremely talented woman,” said The VVA Veteran editor
Mokie Pratt Porter. “She
was one of the greatest combat photographers of the Vietnam
War, or any war. We were fortunate to have her work featured
in this paper, and we are very saddened by the news of
her death.” To read our 2002 profile of Catherine
Leroy, go to www.vva.org/TheVeteran/2002_09/arts/htm
ARTS IN BRIEF
Is your idea of entertainment watching Francis
Ford Coppola’s
1979 film Apocalypse Now and the 2001 Apocalypse Now Redux
with its added scenes, along with two additional hours
of inside-baseball material about the film? If it is, Paramount
Home Entertainment has heard your plea. In August, PHE
released for the first time Apocalypse Now: The Complete
Dossier, a two-DVD set containing all of the above material.
The
additional material includes Coppola’s commentaries
on both films and Marlon Brando as the demented Captain
Kurtz doing a 17-minute reading of T.S. Elliot’s
famous poem The Hollow Men. That poem, inspired by Joseph
Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, the inspiration
for Apocalypse, begins with “Mistah Kurtz - he dead” and
ends with “This is the way the world ends/Not with
a bang but a whimper.” For more info, go to www.paramount.com/homeentertainment
In
case you didn’t get the memo (or read the cover
story in Newsweek, the feature story in GQ, the front-page
article in The New York Times, or any of the other 872,000
articles and news items), famed Nam vet Hollywood director
Oliver Stone has a new movie out. Stone surprised many
with World Trade Center, which hit the multiplexes on August
9. The surprise: Like his previous film, a bio-epic of
Alexander the Great, it is not a conspiracy-laden thriller.
Instead, the movie, which opened to huge box office and
mostly positive reviews, focuses on the heroic true tale
of the rescue of two New York Port Authority Police Officers
from the Twin Towers on September 11th.
The New York City
2007 Military Writers Society of America East event is
open to veteran writers and family members of veteran writers
in all genres. It will feature workshops on getting published,
the pitfalls of writing, and how to deal with a literary
agent. Awards will be presented as well. For more info,
e-mail warriorbooks@aol.com or go to www.militarywriters.com
Harrell
Fletcher, an artist who specializes in what he calls “socially
engaging interdisciplinary projects,” went
to Vietnam in June of 2005 as part of an international
artists’ retreat. He paid a visit to the War Remnants
Museum in Saigon, which features stark photographs that
show only the horrors of war caused by Americans. Fletcher
was so inspired by what he saw that he returned with a
digital camera and covertly photographed all the exhibits.
When Fletcher came home, he printed the museum photos and
created a traveling exhibition consisting of about a hundred
of them. The exhibit, which contains many images of war
at its worst, has been traveling around this country. If
you’d like to know more, go to www.harrellfletcher.com
The
Unsung Heroes Living History Project, under the direction
of Lisa Daniels, is working to pay tribute to African-American
veterans of the U.S. armed forces. This continuing project
aims to tell the stories of African-American soldiers,
sailors, airmen, and Marines through oral history interviews
conducted throughout the country with veterans and their
families. If you would like to share your story or get
involved in helping students do interviews with veterans,
call 916-821-7017, or e-mail unsnghros@yahoo.com If you
do, mention that you learned about it in these pages.
Lindy
Poling continues to run one of the nation’s
top high school Vietnam War history classes, titled Lessons
of Vietnam, at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North
Carolina. Two of the noteworthy aspects of the course:
an annual trip to Washington, D.C., where the students
visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (among many other things)
where the names of men from Wake County, North Carolina,
who perished in the war are read, and the publication of
Bridges, a high-quality, student-produced newsletter. The
2006 edition includes articles by students on The Wall,
on Arlington National Cemetery, on the Iraq War, and on
the situation in Darfur in Sudan. To learn more about this
innovative program, go to www.wcpss.net/community_in_the_classroom
In a different kind of classroom, the Harvard Film Archive
presented a series of nonfiction films about the Vietnam
War from June 2-24 in Cambridge, Mass. Many were of the
antiwar variety or focused on the war back home. Among
them: Winter Soldier (1972); In the Year of the Pig (1968);
Frederick Wiseman’s acclaimed High School (1968);
Bill Couturie’s Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam
(1987), based on the book by VVA’s Bernie Edelman;
Weisman’s Basic Training (1971), filmed at Fort Knox
in 1970; Sir! No Sir!; Freida Lee Mock’s tribute
to POWs, Return With Honor (1998); Peter Davis’s
controversial Hearts and Minds (1974); and Errol Morris’s
flawed Fog of War (2003).
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2008, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8605 Cameron
Street, Silver Spring, MD 20910