Last weekend I went to see Apocalypse Now Redux to see if the movie made any more sense than it had the first time I saw it. It did. The movie made more sense, but the war still didn’t.
My memory of the war was as a civilian–the battles not in the jungles of Vietnam but in the streets of the country, and the perplexity of some of my younger friends facing the draft. Then something would happen and the war would cross my path and it would be a personal experience.
I was one of the lucky ones. In 1962 I was just getting out of the Navy when the war started heating up. I was passing through Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, trying to get a ride back to New York to muster out, when I saw all these young lieutenants, with their green berets and their Airborne Ranger patches, waiting for transport out. I asked them where they were headed and they told me Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, because that’s where the action was.
That was the first time in three years of service I had ever heard about it. The cold war was still hot in the early 1960s, and few of us questioned that ultimately we would be battling communists somewhere. But Southeast Asia seemed like a backwater of no particular importance.
My father-in-law had been with an airline that had a contract with the Military Air Transport Service (MATS), and he told me stories of the airport near Saigon. The bodies of Americans killed in Laos and Cambodia would arrive and be re-manifested as killed in action (KIA) in Vietnam because no one was admitting we were in Laos and Cambodia. Not that it made much difference to the guys in the body bags.
For the next couple of years the war grew, but slowly. In 1965 I was sitting at a small luncheon table in the UCLA Alumni Center with several other student leaders where Henry Cabot Lodge, the newly appointed ambassador to Vietnam, was holding forth on Vietnam.
Lodge was an immaculately clothed and manicured Brahmin from Boston, the descendant of both the Cabots and the Lodges, and a former vice-presidential candidate. He explained the importance of it all, something like the old domino theory, and our place in history and why he was going out to Asia to clean up the mess and finish it once and for all.
Then he did something I’ll never forget. He got something caught in his teeth, and without ever missing a beat or stopping the conversation, he took his pinky, with a long manicured fingernail, and began digging between his teeth to get the offending particle loose. I was fascinated. I had never seen a human being who was so totally sure of himself and so utterly oblivious to his impact on others. Then he was off to Vietnam, taking that wonderful self-assurance and that sense of certainty with him. You know what came next.
A few years later a buddy of mine was back from Vietnam and he related his experiences to me. He had been serving on a destroyer in Vietnam. In fact, it was the destroyer that had been sent in to relieve another destroyer, the Turner Joy, which had been stationed just off the coast of Vietnam when some Viet Cong PT boats attacked it, or at least that’s what was charged. Out of that clash came the Tonkin Gulf resolution. The war escalated and our country tore itself apart. It was practically a civil war in the streets at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
It had been a decade of domestic war also. John F. Kennedy was dead, Bobby Kennedy was dead, Martin Luther King was dead, and the country turned away from the war. In the beginning it had been the kids, but then just about everyone turned away.
Now you sit in a movie and watch the utter chaos that was that war–the stoned soldiers, the civilians crushed between opposing armies, the moral ambiguity of it all–and it’s hard to remember what we thought was so important and why it seemed so essential at the time.
Today, we’ve resurrected relations with Vietnam. We’re beginning to do business with them, and Vietnam is running a flourishing tourist trade, bringing back American soldiers to take nostalgia tours through old battle grounds and through underground tunnels, trying to help them figure out what it was all about.
Perhaps that’s why the movie is selling out. We’re still all trying to figure out what it was all about.