Henry Allen Friday!
revival!
November 11, 1992, Wednesday, Final Edition
Vietnam: Hazy Images And Searing Memories;
The Drama of The Absolutely Ordinary Soldier
BYLINE: Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer
SECTION: STYLE; PAGE B1
LENGTH: 1353 words
When I was in Vietnam in 1966, we had no idea what the war was, or who we were supposed to be.
Were we like World War II GIs smiling lopsided smiles as they gave chocolate to urchins in Naples? Were we frozen in the existential hell of a Korean stalemate? Were we New Frontier technocrats beating guerrillas at their own game?
We didn't know. We were just guys who'd been sent to Vietnam. Things had the flat, ordinary quality of the military, and the shabby, secret quality of the tropics, and of course there were the people who were trying to kill us.
"This is what we really looked like, no Hollywood hype," says Evan Morgan, a former Marine helicopter gunner. Now he's a filmmaker who collects home movies and slides from Vietnam, and puts them onto videotape. "Guys call me and say, 'I've got this film, but I don't know how good it is.' I tell them everything is good."
He's made 23 cassettes.
They were shot by guys with little Super 8 movie cameras. The colors are faded, the close-ups are twitchy, the pans are blurred, the faces inside tents and bunkers are underexposed. There's a lot of waving at the camera, cigarette-lighting (a statement of masculinity back then), volleyball, rifle-cleaning and endless long shots of the landscape, as if you could record the wry menace of it, the way it made you feel so temporary.
Did we really wear our uniforms that tight? Flat green, no camouflage -- they look like the uniforms for some other country's army.
Did we really dance like that in 1966 -- in that strange crouch with our arms flailing away? The Jerk, the Monkey, the Swim. Here's a bunch of Marines flailing on a stage at Chu Lai. The occasion is a show by Ann-Margret. She was a number-one mama-san with the troops -- she'd starred with Elvis Presley in "Viva Las Vegas." She's up there in the middle of the Marines, lashing her long straight hair around in circles. Everybody's excited.
Remember how the tracers drifted downrange slow and fast at the same time until they hit the ground and ricocheted with a sort of school's-out glee?
Remember how there were little kids wherever you went, asking for gum, selling the gum back to you, and sometimes startling you by playing guns, running around with cap pistols going "kyew! kyew!" in earshot of mortar fire?
Were our mustaches really that feathery?
If so, how does that square with the fact that these guys look so old? Check out that Marine lighting a cigarette, that soldier throwing a knife into a tree while two Vietnamese women play badminton behind him. The eyes are tight, the shoulders tense. It was a time when men still wanted to look mature. Also, getting shot at does things for your face after a while. I remember landing on the beach and looking at the guys who were already there, and thinking they looked tired, smart, tough and distant.
Remember how there was always a column of black smoke rising from the horizon? Artillery strike, napalm ... the men who made these movies photographed a lot of smoke going up. You'd look out over the million greens of palm trees and paddies, and see it rising. In front of the smoke a tiny helicopter dawdled along while shells went overhead with a rushing, roof-of-your-mouth sound.
There isn't much combat in these movies -- you couldn't shoot home movies when bullets were popping over your head. There are some airstrikes out on the perimeter of an Army base, some Viet Cong corpses, a grinning helicopter crewman pulling up his pants to show off a bandaged wound, the heavy flinch of a recoiling howitzer, troops heading off into the boonies on patrol, all of it shot in the daytime. You couldn't shoot movies at night, either, unless maybe an airplane dropped one of those monster flares that didn't seem to illuminate the view through the concertina wire in front of you as much as dissect it, tear it right open.
"We held the day in the palm of our hands," as a Billy Joel song has it. "They held the night, and the night seemed to last as long as six weeks at Parris Island."
For most Americans, Vietnam is something that happened in their heads after they listened to Billy Joel, watched television, read books, saw movies and heard all the stories about burned children and stressed-out veterans going berserk. Vietnam became a sort of fairy-tale documentary we ran in our heads about a huge, green, sodden, bloody, ironic, monstrous, cruel netherworld. Vietnam became a legend.
But you watch these movies and you see how ordinary it all really was, this civilization built out of barbed wire, 55-gallon drums, canvas, sandbags, folding chairs you'd buy in the villes, Bob Hope and the willingness to hurl millions of pounds of metal through the air at about twice the speed of sound in hopes that it might change somebody's mind.
Sometimes, in the footage shot from the backs of trucks, you see an old French church, or cars -- a Deux Chevaux, a Panhard. A professional filmmaker would have homed in on them, for the omen and the irony. You see farmers with their conical hats and dead eyes that have seen it all -- when they looked at you, back then, you sensed they were seeing it again. Here in these home movies, the French relics and the farmers' eyes are ordinary. It never crossed the minds of these soldiers and Marines that America would lose the war. Here they are at a beach party, tossing somebody into the South China Sea. Here they are with perky Bobbie Keith, the miniskirted weather girl for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. Pigtails! A gap between her front teeth!
On her TV broadcasts, she gave the temperatures back in the world: "Dropping in on the Badger State of Wisconsin, Milwaukee had 56. Down to the Prairie State of Illinois ... "
Sometimes, when she predicted rain, the guys in the studio would pour a bucket of water on her!
In a recent interview on one tape ("Bobbie the Weather Girl") she seems solemn and a little puzzled, sitting near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where she works as a volunteer. "You only try to keep the memories alive," she says.
The irony comes from the music behind the narrations on the soundtracks, all songs from the '60s. Hello darkness, my old friend ... born to be wild ... and I know if I'll only be true to my glorious quest ... I say a little prayer for you ... one is the loneliest number ... don't you want somebody to love ... gimme a ticket for an airplane, ain't got time to take a fast train ...
Or you see a man brandishing a grenade launcher, and then the narrator says: "The man who shot that scene is now dead."
American troops play with puppies, they throw the old football around, they stand on a bunker watching an airstrike, they read Playboy, they point their rifles at the camera and laugh. And is it really Raquel Welch they're cheering for, up there in white plastic go-go boots? These films are artifacts, not art; souvenirs, not memoirs. There's something in the flat, clumsy, uninflected ordinariness of them that refutes both hawks and doves. There is no romance to them. The only romance is in the minds of the young men posing for the camera.
In 1967 Sgt. David R. Simons wrote in his diary, "I have come to the work of changing the world, of building the stuff that dreams are made of." He was a medic with Company A, 1st Special Forces. A narrator reads from his diary, while home movies show artillery, sandbags, rice paddies and the labored twitch of a Huey starting up, the rotor blades lurching toward a blur.
"Even if I get disillusioned I can still broaden my view of mankind," Simons wrote. "What more could a young adventurer ask for? May you think so this Christmas." The soundtrack plays "Silver Bells."
"We have to get down with the people. All the firepower in the world isn't going to hurt the Viet Cong." In the background, Andy Williams is singing that "life is worth living but only worth living 'cause you're born free."
The last entry was on Dec. 13. Simons was shot to death in an ambush on Jan. 4, 1968.
The cassettes can be bought for $ 19.95 each from Freedom Hill Films, P.O. Box 387, Connellsville, Pa. 15425.
