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The Green Berets by Philip M Taylor To read the entire article see 
The Green Berets.(Film in Context) Author/s: Philip Taylor Issue: March, 1995 At the end of December 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson received a letter which began: `Dear Mr President. When I was a little boy, my father always told me that if you want to get anything done see the top man - so I am addressing this letter to you'. The author was a fifty-eight-year-old John Wayne, the Hollywood legend, born Marion Michael Morrison and by then veteran of around 140 films including, most famously, westerns and war movies. He went on to propose a patriotic movie about America's growing involvement in the Vietnam war. The eventual result was The Green Berets (1968) directed by, and starring, Wayne. It was the most blatantly propagandist contemporaneous American feature film made about the Vietnam war. Not that there were many to chose from. Apart from a number of documentary films made about the war and a very few later features dealing with crazed Vietnam veterans going on the rampage on the home front (The Angry Breed, 1969; The Stone Killer, 1973) or motorcycle gangs recruited to rescue a US diplomat from the Communists (The Losers, 1971), the reluctance of the American film industry to tackle Vietnam during what was, after all, a period of at least ten years (c. 1963-73) is striking. All the more so when compared to the battery of Vietnam films produced after the war, of which the best known are The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now! (1978), Rambo: First Blood, Part Two (1985), Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Hamburger Hill (1987). Even the North Vietnamese were more prolific producers of films about the war while it was being waged, from The Young Woman of Bai-Sao in 1963 to The Girl from Hanoi in 1975. Such films, like anything a wartime enemy says or shows, could easily be dismissed as propaganda. But in his letter to the president, Wayne wrote: Some day soon a[n American] motion picture will be made about Vietnam. Let's make sure it is the kind of picture that will help our cause throughout the world ... We want to tell the story of our fighting men in Vietnam with reason, emotion, characterization and action. We want to do it in a manner that will inspire a patriotic attitude on the part of fellow Americans - a feeling which we have always had in this country in the past during times of stress and trouble. The problem, as Wayne recognised, was that Vietnam was not `a popular war', which was all the more reason why he felt it was `extremely important that not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know why it is necessary for us to be there'. in fact, this very line was to cause considerable controversy when the film was released at the height of the anti-vietnam war demonstrations in 1968. By December 1965, American troop strength in Vietnam was approaching 200,000 men. The president therefore proved enthusiastic about the project but some doubts were expressed by his staff over the political relationship between Wayne's well-known right-wing sympathies for the Republican Party and the Democratic administration of Johnson. Another Hollywood studio, MGM, described by one official as `our friends politically', was also interested in making a Vietnam film, as was Columbia. White House staff member Jack Valenti was of the view that `Wayne's politics are wrong, but insofar as Vietnam is concerned, his views are right. If he made the picture he would be saying the things we want said'. Accordingly, the Department of Defence (DoD) was instructed to extend its co-operation to Wayne's film company, Batjac, and to the film's producer, Wayne's son, Michael. `Not only do we want and need a feature motion picture on Vietnam but we believe here is an opportunity to direct and develop a project that will contain story elements that are favourable to DoD and to the overall effort as stated by the president.' By the spring of 1966, work began on scripting the film, based on Robin Moore's best-selling book about US Special Forces in Vietnam, The Green Berets. James Lee Barrett, an ex-marine who had served in Vietnam and who had recently scripted The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and Shenandoah (1965), was employed to incorporate such themes as the losses which the brave and committed Vietnamese allies were incurring and, in Wayne's words, `that the Commie guerrillas are ruthless, having killed twenty thousand civic leaders and their families during these years of slaughter'. Wayne also thought that the inclusion of such scenes as the handing out of toys to children, medical attention `and little things like soap', could prevent the film becoming more than simply `a message vehicle'. He was wrong. Following visits to the Pentagon and to the Special Forces base at Fort Bragg, Wayne declared himself to be extremely impressed with what he had been shown: `We found the soldiery of such quality that, if people of the United States were apprised of it, it would renew their confidence in the ability, the decency and the dedication of our present-day American fighting men'. This may well have been true for the majority of law-abiding patriotic American citizens, as reflected in numerous public opinion polls, but they were nonetheless a comparatively silent majority; most of the noise against the war was being generated by a vocal - and, thanks to television, highly visible - group of anti-war protesters, students and other peace groups. Wayne even took it upon himself to write to five US Senators who expressed public doubts about the escalation of the war (Richard B. Russell, John Sherman Cooper, J.W. Fulbright, Clinton P. Anderson and George Murphy) reminding them of `some public information', namely the mass killing of thousands of civilian leaders in Vietnam: Imagine the equivalent percentage of our leadership being murdered. That would be around 250,000 which would be enough to include every mayor, every governor, every senator and every member of the House of Representatives and their combined families. Wayne himself must have had some input into the writing of the script because this very same point, and even the exact same words, were inserted into the final film. The Green Berets wanted to address directly the controversy about why American troops were fighting in Vietnam and it did this by using a device which was also later adopted by post-war Vietnam films, namely the insertion into the plot of a sceptical journalist, in this instance a George Beckworth played by David Janssen. Indeed, one of the opening scenes of the film depicts Special Forces troops in training in a public relations exercise, explaining what they do. When asked by one journalist why Americans are fighting in Vietnam, the master sergeant replies: `Foreign policy decisions are not made by the military ...' Beckworth immediately follows this up with a question about whether the sergeant agrees with this, to which he retorts, `Can I have your name, sir?' The tension between the military and the media is immediately apparent, and only prompts a further explanation from another soldier when a female journalist asks that the question be answered. To the more sensitive tones of the female comes the following reply from - significantly - a (token) black soldier (played by Raymond St Jacques): `As soldiers, Miss Sutton, we can understand the killing of the military. But the extermination of a civilian leadership, the intentional murder and torture of innocent women and children ... They need us, Miss Sutton, and they want us'. In the ensuing elaboration, the journalists receive the words of Wayne's public information message to the senators, together with a lesson in American constitutional history and on world-wide Communist help for the North. The military clearly win the filmic argument but Janssen remains sceptical and is only put in his place when a watching Colonel Mike Kirby (Wayne) asks him whether he has ever been to South East Asia, to which he has to say, humbly, `no'. John Wayne himself, however, had - as part of his research for the picture. Thereafter, the war film really begins to resemble a `good guys versus bad guys' type of western with the troops leaving for Vietnam (accompanied by the journalist Beckworth) and their arrival at their as yet unfinished base camp A107, nicknamed `Dodge City'. The Vietcong or `Charlie' are really Red Indians in the Hollywood stereotypical mode, capable of atrocities against `innocent women and children'. Indeed Beckworth's conversion from sceptic to sympathetic - epitomised by his exchange of civilian safari suit for regulation military fatigues - is facilitated by his observation of Vietcong brutality (the body of a young girl who had been raped) as compared to American sensitivity to the locals whose behalf they are fighting to keep them free. One soldier's (Peterson, played by Jim Hutton) reluctant adoption of a young Vietnamese boy, `Hamchuck', personifies this theme which the American military has since labelled `host nation sensitivity'. The final lines of the movie spoken in an exchange between Kirby and Hamchuck, after the former breaks the news of Peterson's death to the boy, is sentimentality of the finest order: Hamchuck: `What will I do now?' Kirby: `You let me worry about that. You're what this war is all about'. Beyond the military nonsense, the entire message of the film is that one is not qualified to judge the rights and wrongs of the war unless one sees its realities for oneself - even though we see nothing of those realities specific to this particular war, other than Vietcong brutality. By implication, the message was `don't believe all you read in the newspapers': that is, when it is against the war and the military effort. There is an exchange, however, that suggests a different perspective of pro-war commentary should be taken by the audience. `What are you going to say in that newspaper of yours?', Kirby asks Beckworth after the film's central battle for control of `Dodge City'. `If I say what I feel, I may be out of a job' comes the convert's reply. `We'll always give you one', says Kirby. `I can do you more good with a typewriter', Beckworth submits. That the power of the press should be given such a central theme in the film might seem odd. Vietnam, after all, is remembered as America's first `television war' and there remains even today a highly dubious perception that the nightly showing of television newscasts, of napalmed children and burning villages - all in glorious technicolour - undermined popular support for the war and for the US military - especially as these atrocious acts were being committed by `US' and not `them'. In The Green Berets, the Beckworth character may have represented the military's view of the media in general, but television is a different medium. If a picture can speak a thousand words, then moving pictures can speak millions. Television reporters were allowed relatively unfettered access to battle zones in this, the most uncensored war of the twentieth century. Although subsequent historical research has demonstrated that neither the press nor TV were against the war, the contemporary perception was that they were. In turn, this has been used as A justification for subsequent military censorship in low intensity conflicts such as in Grenada and Panama and, most spectacularly, the Gulf War against Iraq. When The Green Berets was released in 1968, it was accompanied by an advertising campaign which ran in part: `Their badge of honour was a green beret and it said they had lived it all'. But as for the depiction of military realities, one audience containing marines was reported to have roared with laughter: This is the funniest movie we have seen in a long time... At the end... John Wayne walks off into the sunset with a spunky little orphan. The grunts laugh and threaten to pee all over themselves. The sun is setting in the South China Sea - in the East - which makes the end of the movie as accurate as the rest of it. Despite the laughter by the troops, the growing ranks of anti-war civilians in the audience felt the film repugnant and many picketed the cinemas. Reviewer David Wilson wrote that `propaganda as crude as this can only do damage to its cause', while Penelope Gilliat felt that it was a film `best handled from a distance and with a pair of tongs'. There were rumours of congressional and senatorial investigations into the making of the film and certainly the anti-war liberal activist Allard Lowenstein made all sorts of accusations of government propaganda in the press. This was not that far wide of the mark in that the first script was rejected by the Pentagon and had to be re-written if army co-operation was to continue. Michael Wayne admitted to film historian Laurence Suid in 1975 that `the re-writing of the script had been along the lines suggested by the Pentagon'. Nonetheless, the film did prove a commercial success, grossing $8 million domestically. Why this was so begs all sorts of questions. it may well have been because of the publicised fuss surrounding the film, or even a testament to John Wayne's enormous popularity. It may simply have been that the silent majority of American citizens who supported their military regardless of the rights and wrongs of the foreign policy of the containment of Communism were seeing a film which reinforced their patriotism. Too little do historians recognise when they are deconstructing films as texts that the medium of film can play upon audience emotions which tells us more about ourselves than the film ever can. But the fusion of denunciation and mockery surrounding 7he Green Berets probably contributed to Hollywood's subsequent reluctance to tackle the Vietnam war again until after it was all over. A suitable period of mourning was prompted by America's `first military defeat', when the impact not just on the veterans and their families but also on US public confidence generally prompted a reappraisal of the war, its causes and course. Cinematically, after a gap of five years or so, this saw films like Coming Home and Missing in Action. But feature films rarely deal with history with integrity (Schindler's List being an obvious exception); through the process of reconstruction, they tend to get into the business of re-invention and apply contemporary values to past periods. By the time a former Hollywood actor was elected to the White House in 1980, the American film industry felt more confident of re-inventing as well as its usual rewriting of the past and so John Rambo, former Special Operations Vietnam veteran could say with more confidence' in First Blood, Part Two in 1985: `Do we get to win this time?'. |