Vietnam according to Oliver Stone:
Appy, Christian
VIETNAM ACCORDING TO OLIVER STONE JOHN WAYNE RIDES AGAIN If Oliver Stone is on hand to direct the Second Coming, don't expect a grainy documentary. The face of the Lord will be made to shine down...
...One might also attribute Kovic's political change to the guilt he felt for accidentally killing one of his own men...
...Its emotional power gives us the illusion of understanding what we have hardly begun to explore...
...Individual pieces may seem on the mark-"the way it really was"-but Stone is constantly basting them with a mythic sauce...
...Most of the working-class kids sent to Vietnam were drawn into the military not because they wanted to go to war, or even because they believed the military would bring social advancement and honor...
...Three million Americans were sent to fight our longest war...
...Starring John Wayne, this prowar polemic was so hackneyed and tedious it invariably brought howls of unintended laughter from both war critics at home and American soldiers who were treated to it while stationed in Vietnam...
...So much for verisimilitude...
...College, and the draft deferment that went with it, was not an option in many working-class families...
...After making a guerrilla raid on the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami, he and his comrades are evicted, beaten, and tear-gassed...
...Two million Vietnamese were killed out of a population of 35 million...
...When the Marines fired on the village they never received any hostile fire...
...The problem, though, is not that Stone is overly ambitious...
...Judging by this film, the Duke is still in the saddle...
...But an absurd cameo is fine for the movement back home...
...Instead, you hear things like: Were most recruits so innocent...
...it is moving, but does not move us to think about its subject in a new or especially useful way...
...that he found in this crusade an outlet for the heroic self-expression he had been looking for his whole life...
...The questions it is most likely to elicit do not concern the injustices of the war...
...Stone would never dream of using a forty-five-year-old man to play a grunt in Vietnam...
...Once rescued, Kovic revives his squad leader lingo to rally his troops ("Listen up...
...SOON TO BE AN IMPORTANT MOTION PICTURE...
...He, too, cannot resist grandiloquence...
...This nostalgic Americana is there to explain why Ron Kovic was such a gung-ho and naive volunteer...
...She explains to Kovic that the war is "so wrong," but his silence invites us to wonder about her credentials for making such a statement...
...That's plausible enough...
...Were conditions in VA hospitals so appalling...
...The long list of symptoms-chronic depression, rage, guilt, self-doubt, sleeplessness, nightmares, social detachment-were typically treated with drugs alone...
...No one knows precisely how many Vietnam veterans have committed suicide, but some experts believe the number is at least as great as the sixty thousand who died in the war...
...In fact, the cops did not abuse the veterans...
...We should expect more from the growing body of Vietnam films...
...But Hollywood considered Kovic's story a bad financial risk and would not back it...
...One sign of that attitude is the casting of Abbie Hoffman as a cheerleader to the Syracuse demonstrators...
...In his book, Kovic writes: "I honestly believed that if only I could speak out to enough people I could stop the war myself...
...The atrocity scene in the film, horrific as it is, closes with an NVA attack that gives at least some retroactive credence to the lieutenant's lame justification of the civilian deaths: "They got in the way...
...Hollywood's biggest male draw signed on and, as Stone described it to Larry King, the "Vietnam market" is still hot...
...The inhuman conditions and dreadful lack of attention are most believable when Stone resists suggesting that all its employees were monsters...
...The vast majority who did go were poor and working class...
...In 1976, Kovic published his autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July...
...The really striking point is not that Vietnam disillusioned the innocent...
...The real war was insane enough...
...The United States dropped three times more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by all sides in World War II...
...Kovic apparently recovered his sanity through political activism...
...That year brought the first trickle of Vietnam films...
...Perhaps they assume (wrongly I think) that a modest movie cannot do justice to the war's enormity (or won't sell...
...I wanted to be somebody...
...The film shows psychological instability, but doesn't explore it...
...The problem is that his "epic" turns out to be so predictable, and that what it teaches us about the war is so scant...
...Kovic's book makes clear that, whatever else attracted him, he viewed the Marines as a possible way out of the onerous work world of his father: "I didn't want to be like [my dad], working in that stinking A&P, six days a week, twelve hours a day...
...Was it because the American mission in Vietnam made the killing of civilians routine and inevitable...
...Yet if you interviewed a typical squad of Marine grunts on their way to Vietnam, you could hardly find a group of young people who had witnessed more of the grimmer actualities of American life-its poverty, racism, and violence...
...These lofty cinematic gestures will be there to remind us that we are in the presence of a very important story, the ultimate epic...
...Stone, who eventually acquired the film rights, promised Kovic he would make Fourth of July once he got established in the business...
...This view does not do justice to the collective efforts of the VVAW-the most significant antiwar veterans' movement in our history...
...The face of the Lord will be made to shine down upon us-in super tight focus-and the throbbing violin swells of a John Williams score will roll in from the sun-streaked horizon...
...In one crucial respect, however, Stone's approach to Vietnam is like that of the earlier movies directed by Michael Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola...
...Yet fewer than half entered the military and only 12 percent went to Vietnam...
...Hardly...
...The film turns this issue into a flip one-liner...
...Perhaps Kovic was converted by the college-based antiwar movement...
...and leads another charge on the hall...
...from flat on his back in a schoolboy wrestling match to full body traction in a rat-infested VA hospital...
...Yes, see Paul Starr's The Discarded Army) Did veterans really go to a brothel in Mexico...
...from "Love it or leave it" to "No more bombing, no more war...
...Yet the longdelayed appearance of Fourth of July serves to remind us of how long it took Hollywood to tell any stories about Vietnam...
...No wonder so many filmmakers pump up Vietnam stories...
...They simply regarded it as an unavoidable duty...
...Starring John Voight and Jane Fonda, it too portrayed a paraplegic veteran who turned against the war...
...Only after confessing to the dead man's parents does Kovic cast his self-blame against the government...
...Most of those bombs were used on South Vietnam, the region we were ostensibly defending from Communist "aggression...
...Some have said that if the Vietnam experience did nothing else, it would at least undermine the worst ideals of masculinity represented by John Wayne...
...Sixty thousand were killed, and thousands more, like Kovic, were permanently wounded...
...At the end of the film, Kovic regains the pride of the warrior...
...But he can't help it...
...By collapsing the two events, the Stone/Kovic screenplay evades a reality that would, in fact, have made Kovic's radicalization more understandable...
...Until 1979, the VA did not even acknowledge the existence of post-traumatic stress syndrome, a condition (the VA later conceded) that has afflicted some five-hundred thousand veterans...
...After all, the Vietnam War surely qualifies as epic history...
...The recipient of Kovic's prom night kiss (Kyra Sedgwick) has gone off to Syracuse to become a leader of the May 1970 student strike...
...In Kovic's memoir, the NVA attack is a completely separate event...
...And so what comes out this time is not a searching examination of Ron Kovic's life, but a symbolic life, the effort to make Kovic's experience represent the history of an entire nation...
...But that fiction allows Stone the opportunity for a shameless repetition of Kovic's battlefield rescue by an anonymous black soldier...
...Stone's snapshots of Massapequa evoke a virtually homogeneous middle-class world...
...Finally, it seemed, we had an insider's view of the war by a filmmaker we could trust to be authentic...
...For thirty years the United Stated tried to crush revolutionary nationalism in Vietnam, first by supporting the French reconquest of Indochina in 1946, then by fighting what the generals now call "low-intensity warfare" (using natives to do the fighting), and finally with full-scale military intervention...
...Fourth of July's greatest strength lies in its lengthy segments inside the Bronx Veterans Hospital...
...Most boys of that generation grew up liking John Wayne, trusting Kennedy, and loving their country...
...And despite the antiwar veneer, the movie is decidedly free of truly controversial material...
...The film implies that only those who fought the war can legitimately fight against it...
...A military study found that the highest portion of "volunteers" joined primarily because they believed they would soon be drafted and felt they might have more options if they enlisted...
...No more improbable games of Russian roulette (The Deer Hunter) or crazy colonels up the heart-of-darkness river (Apocalypse Now...
...Fourth of July, which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, opens with a "morning in America" sequence that is every bit as sentimental as Reagan's 1984 campaign commercial...
...from a "Moon River" kiss on prom night to a Cua Viet river hamlet where his squad slaughtered a houseful of women and children...
...In Vietnam the suffering was far more widespread...
...From 1961 to 1973, the key years of American fighting in Vietnam, Hollywood produced only one movie explicitly about the war-The Green Berets (1968...
...from bitter rage at his unmanning to righteous bravado as a leader of antiwar veterans...
...Stone's current epic is Born on the Fourth of July, starring Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic, a former Marine sergeant who was paralyzed from the chest down in a 1968 firefight during his second tour of duty in the Vietnam War...
...Yet, as important as this expose is, the greater scandal is the Veterans Administration's woeful failure to provide adequate psychological counseling to Vietnam veterans...
...If so, the film does not quite make that point...
...but that it destroyed many of America's most streetwise and resilient...
...Fourth of July is often shocking, but rarely surprising...
...Stone traces Kovic's life from 1956 to 1976, from a childhood war game in Massapequa, New York, to his nearly fatal wound in Vietnam (while waiting for surgery, Kovic received the last rites...
...The second was Platoon, the 1986 film hailed by Time magazine as the first Hollywood production to show Vietnam "the way it really was...
...In fact, he candidly reports that he tried to free himself of the guilt, not by confessing, but by imagining that his Georgia victim was a racist...
...This portrait explains little...
...The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton studied members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and found that their political activism was indeed effective in healing psychological trauma {Home from the War...
...Psychiatric help has improved somewhat, but the best programs still have long waiting lists...
...This is Stone's third encounter with Vietnam, hi the first, Stone shot real bullets with the 25th Infantry Division...
...The film's nagging implication is that the real motive behind Kovic's antiwar activities is the desire to recover his manhood...
...So why did Kovic turn against the war...
...But we don't know how Kovic made that recovery because the film does not explain his political conversion...
...You get the feeling that Stone does his best not to ridicule campus activism...
...is stamped on the 1977 paperback...
...Some did...
...Yet that's a psychological shift more than a political one...
...And if this confession actually occurred, Kovic does not mention it in his book...
...The adolescent Kovic seems blissfully unaware of human evil and hardship...
...Stone rounds up the usual suspects-childhood war games, ritualized patriotism, cold-war anticommunism, Kennedy's famous call for national service, a Vince Lombardi coach, and slick Marine recruiters...
...As one veteran put it, in his vastly understated way, "I learned a lot of reality before I even got to Nam...
...Ironically, Coming Home appeared a year later and won three Academy Awards...
...What's wrong with this...
...He gives us only the slightest hint that the Kovics were raising a large family on the wages of a supermarket clerk...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 6
