New Perspectives on the War Film by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030230968
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Vietvet Stories

If the Generic Vietnam War Narrative has remained largely unchanged in Vietnam films, the depiction of those soldiers’ return to the United States has changed drastically over time. In the immediate aftermath of the war, its veteran was usually depicted as a “strung-out, criminal psychotic who could go off at the sound of a backfire.” 35 The danger these veterans posed was specifically linked to their Vietnam service; while like veterans of all wars these men were highly trained killers, unlike the vets of previous wars, they had gained that training in a combat situation that was already depicted in American culture as particularly damaging, incoherent, and even immoral: what psychiatrist and activist Robert Jay Lifton has described as an “atrocity-producing situation.” 36 If these soldiers could participate in massacres like that of My Lai, what was to prevent them from bringing that violence back home with them? Fred Turner discusses the perpetuation of the question in the news media of the time in his monograph Echoes of Combat: Trauma, Memory, and the Vietnam War: “In the last years of the war, newspaper and magazine reporters began to circulate tales of crazed returnees, veterans who were refighting the battles of Vietnam here in the United States. Television and film producers quickly ensured that these hyperviolent traumatized veterans—in reality, few in number—loomed large in the national imagination.” 37 However, that boogeyman was not to last, and the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a determined reclamation of the image of the Vietvet, associated both with the codification of PTSD as a psychological diagnosis and with the building of the Vietnam Veterans ’ Memorial in Washington, DC. By the mid-1980s, the Vietvet had been redefined as what literary scholar Rick Berg calls a “superguerilla,” 38 as actors from Sylvester Stallone to Chuck Norris brought their hyperviolence both to refighting the Vietnam War and to fighting other enemies of the state. This refashioning of the image of the Vietvet works to remove any potential critique of American foreign policy from the figure, instead repurposing him as an icon of American military and masculine prowess. 39 As film scholar Harry W. Haines argues: “Shifting away from themes of victimization and psychosis, more recent representations function therapeutically to rehabilitate the Vietvet, positioning him as a warrior hero whose experience can now be used to justify a continuation of a modified form of the Truman doctrine: intervention by proxy and internal subversion.” 40 The Vietvet has become a hero, who turns his violence not on his own people but on those who might threaten that people.

But this iconic Vietvet is almost always figured as white; black Vietnam veterans have largely disappeared from cultural representation. It is a central tenet of American cultural memory of the Vietnam War that returning veterans were treated unconscionably badly: ignored by and cast out of mainstream society, treated as pariahs, spat upon at airports. 41 Still, however accurate this tenet may be to the lived experience of veterans, if white

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