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Arts of war
By Marc Leepson
Only a handful of Americans escaped from enemy POW camps
during the Vietnam War. One successful escapee was Dieter
Dengler, a Navy Skyraider pilot who was shot down on his
first mission over Laos on February 2, 1966, and taken prisoner
by the Pathet Lao in a remote jungle camp. Tortured and nearly
starved to death, Dengler—a naturalized American citizen
who was born in Germany in 1938—led a daring escape
from the prison camp and miraculously survived 23 days in
the jungle before another miracle happened: He was spotted
by an inexperienced Spad pilot as he frantically signaled
from the dense jungle just over the border in North Vietnam.
Dengler’s
amazing story has been told periodically since he was rescued
on July 20, 1966. Magazines such as Time and the Saturday
Evening Post ran features in the months after the big escape.
Dengler’s memoir, Escape From
Laos, was published in 1978. The German director Werner Herzog,
one of the leading lights of the New German Cinema, told
the story in the 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs To
Fly.
Dengler’s death in 2001 inspired Herzog to tell
the story one more time. The result: the riveting, big-budget
Hollywood film, Rescue Dawn, which Herzog wrote and directed
and which earned generally good reviews when it was released
in July. The film stars are Christian Bale, who puts in a
heroic performance as the slightly goofy but steadfast Dengler,
and Steve Zahn, who is usually known for his comedic talents
and who does extremely well as a dissipated prison camp buddy.
The film features an equally strong performance from Jeremy
Davies (who played Tom Hanks’ timid clerk in Saving
Private Ryan) as a fellow American Pathet Lao prisoner.
Herzog
(Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre: Wrath of God, et al.) is best known
for off-beat work that focuses on crazed visionaries. Here
he concentrates on Dengler and adheres to the facts. The
result is a mainstream Hollywood escape film. This is not
a bad thing, at least it isn’t in Herzog’s
capable hands. Yes, there’s a bit of hokeyness here
and there—particularly in the sappy music that accompanies
Dengler’s over-dramatized triumphant return to his
ship.
But Herzog knows how to make a movie. The characters—except
for the prison guards, nearly all of whom are 100 percent
evil—are well sketched and believable. The plot zings
along. The action sequences ring true. The jungle scenes,
shot in Thailand, are greener than green and evoke the real
thing powerfully. Rescue Dawn, which was the code used by
Dengler’s fellow fliers to identify themselves as Americans,
is a top-of-the-line escapist escape film.
NEW NAMES; NEW
EXHIBITS
The names of three American servicemen were inscribed on
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in May: Army Sgt. Richard Monroe
Pruett, Navy Fireman Apprentice Joseph Gerald Krywicki, and
Army Spec 4 Wesley Alvin Stiverson. Krywicki was killed on
Sept. 13, 1966, in South Vietnam, and his name was inadvertently
left off the initial list of those on the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial.
Pruett, who was wounded in Vietnam on May 27, 1969,
died on February 28, 2005. The Pentagon, which has final
say in these matters, deemed that his death came as a result
of medical complications related to his war wounds. The same
situation applied to Stiverson, who was wounded in Vietnam
on April 6, 1971, and who died on March 30, 2005.
The three
additions—which bring to 58,256 the number
of men and women listed as KIA in the Vietnam War—were
added “as close as possible to their dates of casualty,
so these servicemen can remain in the company of those they
served with,” Jan Scruggs, the head of the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial Fund, said. The three new names became
official when they were read aloud during the annual Memorial
Day Ceremony at The Wall on Monday, May 28.
Also on The Wall
front: on May 22 the VVMF unveiled the exhibits that will
be part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center, the underground,
under-construction educational facility that will become
part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial visitors’ experience.
The exhibits include a wall of photos of the Vietnam War
fallen, along with images, letters, and other remembrances
left at The Wall in their honor; a selection of the more
than 100,000 items that have been left at the Memorial; a
visual and written history of the Memorial; and interactive
stations, aimed primarily at young people, that will provide
information about the war, The Wall, and Vietnam veterans.
“The
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center will be a place that touches
the heart and teaches the mind,” said
VVMF board member Harry Robinson, “enhancing the Memorial
experience for people of all ages and walks of life, taking
them on a journey through layers of storytelling and history.”
BOOTS
TO BOOKS
Army veteran Bruce Solheim, who teaches at Citrus College
in California and is the institution’s volunteer veterans
coordinator, tells us that in September the school will offer
the nation’s first college course designed to help
returning veterans make the transition back to civilian life.
The course, titled “Counseling 159: Boots to Books,” covers
combat stress, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, and other
issues affecting veterans returning from deployment. It is
a joint effort of the college and the East Los Angeles Vet
Center.
“A war is going on and it is psychologically
impacting some of our soldiers who will eventually return
home and become students,” said Manuel Martinez, a
Vietnam veteran who is the course’s instructor and
who is a readjustment counseling therapist at the East L.A.
Vet Center. “As
far as I know, there has never been a psycho-educational
model that has systematically addressed these issues while
providing coping skills and strategies to help correct them.” The “partnership
between the VA and a community college,” Solheim said, “will
serve as a model for all of California and the rest of the
nation.”
In addition to the course, Citrus College has
other programs and services for veterans. “We have
a Veterans Fund that helps them pay for textbooks,” Solheim
said. “We
also have a very active Veterans Network that is run by student
veterans. Our activities include an annual Veterans Day celebration
and participation in a variety of community veterans events.”
GRUNT
MUSIC
Selector Switch On (Rock and Roll): A Musical Remembrance
of the Vietnam War is a top-quality CD of rootsy rock and
folky songs dealing with you-know-what American war. The
music on this CD was conceived, written, and recorded by
Vietnam veteran Marc Waszkiewicz and Lea Jones, who describes
himself as an “activist,
left-leaning, tree-huggin’ singer- songwriter.”
Former Marine Waszkiewicz
served two tours in Vietnam, most of them as an Artillery
Forward Observer. He got together with Jones in 1991, and
they put together the nine tunes “portraying
the everyday experience of the average grunt,” Jones
told us. We had a chance to listen to the compilation in
1992 and wrote about it favorably in these pages. The music
makers decided to re-release the CD this year to support
veterans of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Half
of the proceeds from sales “will directly benefit Wounded
Warriors and outreach services at Veterans Affairs’ Maryland
Health Care System,” Jones,
who lives near Baltimore, told us. For more info, visit http://www.cdbaby.com/ssrs3
ARTS IN BRIEF
The actor Stephen Lang received excellent reviews for his
one-man show, Beyond Glory, in which he tells the first-person
stories of eight Medal of Honor recipients, during the production’s
June 21-August 19 run at the Off-Broadway Laura Pels Theater
in New York. The show, based on Larry Smith’s oral
history, Beyond Glory: Medal of Honor Heroes in Their Own
Words, has been playing in smaller venues and military bases
since 2004. It includes Lang’s takes on three
Vietnam War MOH recipients: Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale,
Army medic Clarence Sasser, and Army Sergeant Nick Bacon.
This “modest” show,
New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood wrote, “provides
a powerful reminder of the hardships, psychic stresses, and
physical dangers that men endure on the front lines.” The
show’s “sobriety,
simplicity, and lack of histrionics are [its] signal strengths.”
We
have just learned that In the Electric Mist is scheduled
to be released early in December. This is the movie version
of James Lee Burke’s stunning 1993
novel In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead, a Dave
Robicheaux detective that is heavily influenced by Dave’s
Vietnam War flashbacks. Tommy Lee Jones plays Dave in the
film, for which Burke co-wrote the screenplay. The Frenchman
Bertrand Tavernier directed. Burke’s latest Robicheaux
(this summer’s
Faulknerian The Tin Roof Blowdown) is reviewed on page 49.
The
blogosphere has been buzzing with reports that Oliver Stone’s
newest project is a movie either called Pinkville or One
Day in March. Whatever the name of it, the film deals with
the March 1968 My Lai massacre. Sean Penn and Channing Tatum
are supposedly starring in the film, which would be Stone’s
fourth Vietnam War movie, following Platoon (1986), Born
on the Fourth of July (1989), and Heaven and Earth (1993).
Stone, who served as an Americal Division infantryman, is
famous for roiling the political waters in his movies, and
the My Lai massacre is a ripe topic for both his movie-making
skills and his in-your-face film-making. Stay tuned.
The first
nine half-hour episodes of the extremely well done 1987-88
Vietnam War Stories series are now available on DVD (HBO
Video, $14.98). The series of realistically taut dramas based
on true events features the work of writer-director-producer
Patrick Sheane Duncan and director Georg Stanford Brown,
along with top-notch acting from, among others, Wesley Snipes
and Eriq La Salle.
The recently opened National Purple Heart Hall of Honor in
Vails Gate, New York, is looking for stories from Purple
Heart recipients. The Hall, located in New York’s Hudson Valley near the city of Newburgh, is encouraging Purple Heart
recipients to visit and “place their combat stories on video for later
generations to view,” said Ray Funderburk of the Military Order of the
Purple Heart. For more info, go to http://www.thepurpleheart.com
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2008, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8605 Cameron
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