Tag: vietnam war

Writer’s Desk: Bridge the Divide

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

A Rhodes Scholar who left Oxford to join the Marines in 1968, Karl Marlantes served one tour of duty in the Vietnam War before returning home and spending the next few decades trying to understand what happened over there and how to communicate it to anybody else.

In “Why I Write,” Marlantes described being surrounded by protestors once in 1970:

They shouted obscenities and jeered at me. I could only stand there stunned, thinking of my dead and maimed friends, wanting desperately to tell these students that my friends and I were just like them: their age, even younger, with the same feelings, yearnings, and passions…

So he spent the next 30 years writing Matterhorn, a wrenching masterpiece which is just about the only Vietnam War novel that deserves mentioning in the same breath with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Marlantes did this to tell his story. But he also wanted to bridge that gap he felt back in 1970:

Ultimately, the only way we’re ever going to bridge the chasms that divide us is by transcending our limited viewpoints. My realization of this came many years ago reading Eudora Welty’s great novel Delta Wedding. I experienced what it would be like to be a married woman on a Mississippi Delta plantation who was responsible for orchestrating one of the great symbols of community and love. I entered her world and expanded beyond my own skin and became a bigger person…

Put the words down. Build a world. Get the reader out of their own skin, even just for a moment. It’s one of the great rewards of writing.

Rewind: ‘Winter Soldier’

On By chrisbarsantiIn DVD - Film, Film - Repertory, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

Winter_Soldier_2155687

In early 1971, a group of Vietnam veterans (future senator and Secretary of State John Kerry among them) gave several days of public testimony about the atrocities they had witnessed or, in some cases, participated in during the war. The results were filmed by a collective that included future Oscar winner Barbara Kopple and released as the stunning, grueling documentary Winter Soldier.

My essay on Winter Soldier is at Eyes Wide Open:

… the film is essentially a parade of grainy, black-and-white footage of morose, shaggy-headed vets talking in confession-booth tones about laying waste to villages and butchering civilians; this is not a fun night out at the movies (but, then, neither is Shoah). In general, we as a country have preferred to have our Vietnam horror stories served up to us as part of thrilling wartime adventure tales, like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, or used as nihilistic punch lines in the morbidly inhumane Full Metal Jacket. And yet it remains well-nigh unconscionable that Winter Soldier, a burningly crucial missive delivered straight from the frontline, never become one of the standard texts on the Vietnam War and didn’t receive its first proper theatrical release until 2005.

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: ‘Last Days in Vietnam’ Revisits the End of a Mistake

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

South Vietnamese try to get on one of the last American choppers out of Saigon, 1975 (American Experience Films / Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images)
South Vietnamese try to get on one of the last American choppers out of Saigon, 1975 (American Experience Films / Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images)

No wars end gracefully; some end more tragically than others. That truism is elegantly dramatized in the wrenching documentary Last Days in Vietnam, which opens tomorrow in limited release.

My review is at Film Racket:

The stark simplicity of Rory Kennedy’s masterful and Oscar-worthy Last Days in Vietnam stands in contrast to the drama of this complex and little discussed historical moment. When modern wars end, they are normally summed up in terms of strategies and battles, of winners and losers, how they impacted the great game of geopolitical gamesmanship. Except in the cases of spectacular events like the firebombing of Axis cities during World War II, the fates of civilians are rarely discussed. The Vietnam War isn’t much different. One of the factors that makes Kennedy’s film stand out is how it refuses to look away from one “burning question” about the end of the war: “Who goes … and who gets left behind?”…

You can see the trailer here:

Quote of the Day: Veterans’ Edition

On By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

vietnam1To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

– Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried