MEMORIES OF THE VIETNAM WAR

...But until that point Who'll Stop the Rain belongs to Converse's wife Marge (Tuesday Weld) and his Marine buddy, Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), to whom Converse has given the heroin so that he can bring it back on his troop ship...

...The singing is more a plea for God to bless America than it is a statement about an America God has blessed, and although it fails to confront the whys of Nick's death, it does celebrate the kinds of values that are inimical to war: values that emphasize caring and nurture, not the toughness required to make steel or stalk a deer...

...It begins with a voice calmly calling out bombing coordinates, then suddenly we hear the same voice shout, "You're too close," and as the bombs go off, we glimpse a trembling John Converse (Michael Moriarty) curled up in a fetal position in a ditch...

...Ugliness is everywhere: from Ray's home in the California foothills, which hippies have left strewn with beer bottles and sleeping bags, to the posh suburbs of Los Angeles, where trying heroin is a new form of slumming...

...Whether Luke will be more persuasive than the Marine recruiter who has spoken before him, we cannot tell...

...The war that Converse is trying to escape is not being run by a naive government hoping to make the world "safe for democracy...

...Ray tries to fight back—significantly with an M-16 rifle he has brought back from Vietnam—but it does no good...

...BY CONTRAST, it is home-town values, not escape, that define Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter...

...Luke Martin (John Voight), the paraplegic hero of Coming Home, is able to build a new life for himself because he can make use of the anger he has acquired in the war, and in this he is a stunning contrast with his opposite, Marine Captain Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), with whose wife Sally (Jane Fonda) he falls in love while recovering in a VA hospital...

...The significance of this change is poignantly captured in the movie's final moments, when at breakfast following Nick's funeral, Michael and his friends begin singing "God Bless America...

...But that is finally not important...

...For them, dumping the heroin is a matter of dropping a source of trouble...

...He decides to leave Vietnam...

...For Nick the shock is so great that he goes AWOL in Saigon and begins to play Russian roulette on a daily basis...

...When he learns of Sally's affair 336 from the F.B.I., which has been following Luke ever since his arrest, his first act is to let Luke know that he is under surveillance...

...It is a passive role that Converse will play until the last minutes of the film...

...In the letter he speaks of the American policy of shooting elephants from planes (on the rationale that they are used by the Vietcong for carrying supplies) and concludes, "In a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are just going to want to get high...

...NO SUCH POLITICAL AMBIGUITY exists in Hal Ashby's Coming Home...

...The disillusionment he has experienced there has changed him too much for that, and in the next scene we see him writing a letter to his wife in which he justifies his decision to smuggle heroin back into the country on the grounds that, after what he has just seen, it is the most logical thing to do...

...His bravery does not transform him from Nick Adams to Robert Jordan...

...The bitterest and at the same time the most traditional of the three films is Karel Reisz's Who'll Stop the Rain, an adaptation of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, the story of John Converse, a disillusioned Vietnam correspondent who agrees to smuggle three kilos of heroin back into the United States...

...It is harder...

...The sadistic, grinning Vietcong are heavily armed, and they shoot anyone who refuses to play their game...

...It is a pattern of complex counterpoint that is established from the very start when in a series of crosscuts we see Bob (filmed mostly from the waist down) jogging and a group of veterans like Luke talking about the war...

...What draws Sally to Luke is seeing him on TV after he has been arrested for chaining himself to the gates of a Marine base as a protest against the war...

...The result is that when Sally begins her love affair with Luke, the affair is as political as it is sexual and is balanced by an understanding— although much less detailed—portrait of Bob...

...Indeed, had Cimino treated his movie like a novella and stopped at this point, it would have been a perfect small gem: a proletarian version of Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam...

...The result is that for the rest of Who'll Stop the Rain the Converse we first saw trembling on the ground is more trapped than ever...

...Although Coming Home is structured on a series of contrasts between Luke and Bob, the contrasts are not used to glamorize Luke's sensibility at the expense of Bob...

...It is Ray's conscientiousness and the clumsiness of the two men Antheil has hired to make sure Ray delivers the heroin to Marge that causes all the trouble...

...Rather they are used to point out how much the two men have been shaped by the same America and how Bob's loyalty to this America leaves him far worse off than the crippled Luke...

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...The commune is gone, and what remains of it—a giant peace sign painted on the mountain rocks, a house that was also once a monastery—is pure symbol...

...For Michael, it is a turning point (certainly the equivalent of Natty Bumppo's growth from deer hunter to trapper), and at the movie's close, it is his tenderness, not the aggressive virility of his preVietnam days, that dominates his life...

...When Antheil arrives, armed and with Converse in tow, neither the land nor the spirit of the '60s has much power...

...Luke can at most hope to use a wheel chair) but the fact that Luke was once a high-school football hero and that his reasons for having enlisted in the Marines stem from the same sense of self that makes Bob a career soldier...

...After being captured by the Vietcong, Michael and his friends are made to play Russian roulette for their captors' amusement...

...The two men essentially refuse to be rivals...

...The dope deal he has become entangled in falls through, and he becomes the hostage of Antheil, who uses him to try to recover his heroin...

...Cimino's Vietcong are not only monsters, they are stupid as well...

...For Michael, who has previously been accused of being a "control freak" and who has always emphasized killing the deer he was pursuing with one shot, the moment is a triumph: the occasion he 335 has seemingly been waiting for all his life...

...And as we follow them from the steel mill, to the bar they hang out at, to the Russian Orthodox church where Steven is married, to the American Legion Hall, where the wedding reception takes place, to the deer hunt, which climaxes the day, their activities take on the qualities of ritual...

...agent is behind the deal), he takes off with Marge in a frantic attempt to elude his pursuers...

...Alone, Michael finds that life in Clairton does not have the same appeal, and in the final hunting sequence of the movie, he stalks a deer, then lets it go when he has a clear chance to kill it...

...What emerges from this meticulously drawn picture is not, however, only a vision of working-class life in a small town but an explanation of why, in Cimino's eyes, so many Americans were willing to enlist for Vietnam...

...It is the one Vietnam film that makes a clean break with past American war films about returning veterans...

...It is American firepower, not the Vietcong, that has nearly killed him, and for him it is the last straw...

...It is not until Ray and Marge get to New Mexico, where Ray once lived as part of a '60s commune, that the ugliness stops...

...But the separate peace that Converse wants to make is not any more obtainable for him in the 1970s than it was for Hemingway's Nick Adams a half-century earlier...

...IN THIS STANCE Luke resembles no one so closely as Ron Kovic, the author of Born on the Fourth of July and a paraplegic vet who, on being asked his profession following his arrest at an anti-Nixon demonstration, observed, "Vietnam veteran against the war...

...It is Steven's wedding day, as well as all three men's final day at work...

...It is a transition that makes sense in theory, but as Cimino takes us from a world he has seen in precise, naturalistic terms to a world thrt has been contrived to provide a moral testing ground, his film loses the authenticity and versimilitude it began with...

...If the separate peace they want cannot be financed with easy money from a dope deal, they will simply take the future on reduced terms...

...Bob is not a vicious cuckold getting what he deserves...

...Not only is it possible for a corrupt agent like Antheil to use the vast F.B.I...

...It is being run by a cynical NixonKissinger administration, and when Converse goes to make his heroin deal, it turns out that the controlling party is also government: in this case, a rogue F.B.I...

...Yet it is important to remember that, while Luke's political consciousness makes him special, it does not turn him into a freak, especially within the framework of American film at the end of the 1970s...

...To its credit, Who'll Stop the Rain never softens this moment nor suggests that for men like Converse, who have experienced Vietnam, there is energy left for much else...

...The Vietcong that Michael, Steven, and Nick are pitted against are the treacherous Orientals of World War II propaganda, and history is transmogrified no less crudely...

...For the America of Michael, Nick, and Steven is a country in which two things count most of all: the bonds that men experience in their day-to-day lives and the sense of accomplishment that comes in meeting a challenge: be it turning out steel, or outdrinking a friend, or killing a deer...

...agent named Antheil (Anthony Zerbe...

...bureaucracy to track him down, the America Ray is trying to lose himself in is as barren and inhospitable as the Vietnam he has left...

...But the stop, the movement back in time, is momentary...

...It is his sense of the war that in the end dominates Coming Home and leaves us with what we have not had before in American film—a war hero unwilling to hide his anger or accept "normalcy," preferring instead the company and politics of antiwar verterans like himself...

...These are films that assume the war's alienating effect on all who participated in it, and what makes them worth considering together is the perspective into which they put that alienation...

...But as the scene builds, the rage Bob is feeling (about the war, about his wife, about America in 1968) suddenly vanishes, and he gains control of himself in a way that is just as frightening to see...

...But for Nick and Steven, what has happened when they were captured cannot be absorbed...

...Yet the miracle of miracles does occur...

...that's what they were into") that all he could think to do was take his anger out on her...

...Converse cannot just leave Vietnam, however...

...Given Cimino's portrait of America in Vietnam, it is a risky scene that could be interpreted as one more cheer for old-fashioned patriotism ; Yet in the singing there is a hesitancy and a hymn-like quality that suggests a very different patriotism from the type that made Michael and the others enlist in the army...

...What makes Coming Home so affecting is, however, that the differences between the two men are never simplified so that the movie becomes a contest between the hip (antiwar) vet versus the gung-ho (killer) Marine...

...Just why is not clear, but certainly it is a phenomenon that invites suspicion as though, in a period of Jonestown massacres and Gary Gilmore executions, Vietnam was our longrunning, all-purpose horror story, the war we could always count on for one more turn of the screw...

...Theirs is not the small-town America of picket fences and corner drug stores, but it is an America that Cimino portrays with great affection...

...What will happen to Bob is clear...

...When we next see him in Clairton, he is clearly a changed man, but his old confidence is as great as ever...

...The deliberately blurred opening scene of the film, in which what we hear is initially more important than what we see, sets the tone for the events that follow...

...But at the same time, what has driven Sally away from Bob, whom she has just visited while he was on leave in Hong Kong, are also the pressures of Vietnam...

...I'm fucked," he says, admitting to himself for the first time that everything he believes in has changed beyond recognition...

...The upshot is that the climactic scene of Coming Home, when Bob tells Sally that he knows she has been sleeping with Luke, turns out to be moving because it goes against the way such confrontations are supposed to end...

...He is killed, and although Marge and John are able to get away as a result of his willingness to remain behind, his sacrifice turns out to be sad rather than noble...

...Luke puts no pressure on Sally to leave Bob, who he knows is being torn apart by the war, and Bob in turn acts by the same code of decency that has made him sick over his troops' head-chopping...

...What the crosscuts lead to is not the obvious (Bob is healthy...

...From the very first scene, where the camera follows a tandem diesel as it roars into the steel town of Clairton, Pennsylvania (population 36,500), we are taken into a special world, and from this point until the action switches to Vietnam, we are caught up in the activities of three young steel workers, Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steven (John Savage) in the 24 hours before they leave to join the army...

...By contrast, the shots of Luke show him in a high-school auditorium, talking to a group of boys who are thinking of joining the Marines, telling them of his Vietnam experiences, and finally breaking down in tears, not out of selfpity but, as he says, out of shame for the killing he has done...

...It is he who brings back Nick's body, after a vain return to Saigon to rescue him, and he is instrumental in getting Steven to leave the VA hospital...

...When Ray delivers the heroin to Marge, he spots the men, and thinking they are after him (like Converse, he initially has no idea an F.B.I...

...While he has done more with his anger than the surviving vets of Who'll Stop the Rain and The Deer Hunter, it is nonetheless explicable in terms of sights and feelings and frustrations that they too have struggled with...

...Instead, what happens is that Cimino shifts gears and locales, and we are put in a situation where the rituals of Clairton are tested in Vietnam...

...Marge and John use their regained freedom to dump the heroin they still have on the ground, but as they drive off to resume their life in Berkeley, we have no sense that they are now ready to live with purpose...

...Yet the closer we look at 1978's Vietnam films, especially the three most successful releases, Who'll Stop the Rain, The Deer Hunter, and Coming Home, the more apparent it becomes that whatever their flaws—and the racism of The Deer Hunter is appalling—they have not made the war "show biz" nor turned their main concern, the Vietnam veteran's return home, into an updated version of The Best Years of Our Lives...

...It is a flight that leads from Berkeley to Los Angeles to the mountains of New Mexico, and as Ray, in contrast 334 to the passive Converse, struggles to keep ahead of events, we see that his bid for a separate peace is also doomed...

...He is a decent career soldier, who made things miserable for Sally while she was in Hong Kong because his own values had been so shattered by the war ("My men were chopping heads off...

...When Michael (the best deer hunter in Clairton) asks to play with three bullets in his gun, they naively give them to him, and in a series of maneuvers that would make John Wayne blush, he effects an escape with Nick and a badly wounded Steven...

...When we next see Bob and Luke, it is again through a series of crosscuts...

...It is the Vietcong who now commit Mylai-style massacres, and the good Americans are the friends of helpless women and children...

...It is a contrast—or, more accurately, a parallel and contrast—that continues after Bob is shipped home with a minor leg wound and Coming Home moves to its conclusion...

...The cuts of Bob show him walking along a deserted beach, carefully taking off his dress uniform, then piling his clothes on a lifeguard chair, and slowly and suicidally swimming out to sea...

...It is an apparently hopeless situation...

...As Bob, M-16 in hand and clearly out of control, rages, we are sure he is going to kill Sally and then Luke, who comes over to their house wanting to talk things out...

...By the middle of Coming Home, after Bob has gone to Vietnam and Sally has gotten a job in the hospital where Luke is undergoing physical therapy, the contrasts have reached the point where virtually every discovery that Luke makes is balanced by our sense of Bob's trappedness...

...At this juncture The Deer Hunter again shifts gears, and the gimmickry—although not the symbolism—of the Russian roulette sequences is put aside...

...while Steven, who has had to have both his legs amputated, takes refuge in a VA hospital and refuses to see anyone...