When Harry Haines was tapped by the United States Army to serve in Vietnam, he and his fellow draftees were shuttled into a mandatory screening of "The Green Berets." John Wayne's manly-man heroics in history's first major Vietnam war epic were, it seemed, to be part of basic training.
"After it was over," recalled Haines, now a communications professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, "the sergeants made a point of telling us: 'If you believe Vietnam has anything to do with this movie, you're probably going to die. Do not take this film seriously, and do not think that John Wayne is an appropriate model of behavior. He's not.' "In the years that followed -- 32 since the release of "The Green Berets," 30 since Haines' conscription -- the portrayal of Vietnam in film has changed appreciably from glamour shots of the Duke in khaki. Last Sunday marked the 25th anniversary of the American evacuation of Saigon. In that time, films about Vietnam have morphed from unambiguous fantasyland variations on the World War II movie -- namely, "The Green Berets" -- to graphically bloody, ethically shaded odes on a war that few understood then and many don't now.
"It's been such a haunting event, because it seems to resist easy explanation," said Stephen Prince, who has written two books on the subject of war in cinema. Unlike the Second World War, in which a clear moral framework provided American filmmakers with unequivocal villains and heroes, the narrative landscape of Vietnam was much less adaptable to standard formulas. In most Vietnam films we don't see the enemy. We don't comprehend the enemy's motives. The enemy is spectral -- appearing like ghosts, sniping at infantrymen from the cover of trees, remaining, in Prince's words, "this unknowable figure in the jungle."
Equally unknowable, among moviegoers if not historians, is the driving cause behind U.S. involvement in Vietnam: One of the great ironies of the war is its stubborn inscrutability despite night after night of news footage.
Although Wayne and his Green Berets wax vehemently against "communist domination of the world," later films are far less sure of the American military's place in Southeast Asia. "Go Tell the Spartans," released in 1978, offers Burt Lancaster as a battle-weary major who foresees a grim end to a grim conflict. "Too bad we couldn't have shown you a better war," he tells a young corporal. "This one? This one's a sucker."
Even the title, an allusion to an ancient Greek bloodbath, questions the wisdom of sending soldiers to their death: "Stranger, if you find us lying here, go tell the Spartans that we obeyed their orders."
Later films focused even more closely on the plight of American soldiers. "The Deer Hunter" (also 1978) followed the imprisonment and descent into madness of Christopher Walken's plagued GI; the Russian roulette scenes are as wrenching to watch today as they were then. "Apocalypse Now" (1979), "Platoon" (1986), "Full Metal Jacket" (1987) -- all took unflinching (and often hallucinogenic) looks at the bloody mania of war and the tortured humanity of the men who fought it.
Haines, who teaches a course on the portrayal of the war in film and television, pins the biggest change in films to the 1982 construction of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. "What the memorial did was make possible for Americans to at last to begin to recognize that Americans died in Vietnam," he said. "You realize that, oh, for about a 10-year period, there was a period of amnesia, a period of denial that even forced Vietnam veterans into the closet. I am a Vietnam veteran, and I had to take my army experience off my professional resume. I couldn't find work. (Then) the memorial went up, and it made it possible for a healing process to begin."
The impact on films, he said, was almost immediate: Movies began to emphasize death and dying in combat. In standard war films, "guys get killed all over the place -- usually a squad or a platoon on a mission, and they're composed of different characters. This one gets bumped off and that one gets bumped off and, bang-bang, you're dead." In contrast, "The films (made) after the memorial actually extend the dying process so you experience the suffering of the soldiers."
What's the most accurate portrayal of Vietnam in film? Perhaps there isn't one. "There can't be a definitive accuracy, because there's no definitive consensus about what the war meant," said Katherine Kinney, an English professor at the University of California, Riverside, who teaches a course on perceptions of Vietnam through film. Nevertheless, Kinney singles out the 1987 film "Hamburger Hill" for its realistic, grunt's-eye view of the war.
"When they did the battle sequences in particular they kind of acknowledged the camera -- they placed the camera where a news camera might have been, so it's always kind of low and narrow-bodied and part of the action," she said. Beyond that, the movie "addresses one crucial issue, which is the class question of who was in the war. It does a better job of that and of the relationship of black and white soldiers."
Issues of race were similarly addressed in "Platoon" -- remember the kaleidoscope of soldiers dancing in each other's arms? -- but that film, directed by Oliver Stone, was as much a biblical parable as a meditation on the rights and wrongs of Vietnam. Just as Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" uses symbolism, poeticism and Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" to present the war as a metaphor of insanity and solitude, "Platoon" uses the good-vs.-evil archetype to simplify a morally garbled conflict.
"It uses the religious superstructure and personifies (the war) in terms of the good company sergeant and the bad company sergeant," said Stephen Prince. Similarly, "Born on the Fourth of July" -- the second film in Stone's Vietnam trilogy, which concludes with "Heaven and Earth" -- personifies the war "through the crippling of Ron Kovic."
Prince, who teaches at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University), said the late-1970s wave of Vietnam films focused on "the figure of the veteran who was a loner, crazy, a psychopath who was murderous." "And in the '80s, with the popularity of the 'Rambo' pictures" -- Sylvester Stallone's star vehicles about a steroidal, avenging Vietnam vet -- "that stereotype became very prevalent. Rambo is very much a part of that gallery of loners and misfits."
The Rambo series, along with Chuck Norris' "Missing in Action" movies (involving more steroidal vets), told simplistic tales. "You had what was quickly becoming a comic-book approach to the war," said Prince, "in which there was a symbolic substitute victory (won by) super-warriors who went back into the country after U.S. forces had withdrawn."
What was it like to be a soldier? Judging from the accounts of veterans, perhaps it was beyond cinematic description -- and perhaps that's why it resists reduction into tidy Hollywood packages.