That Day, We Loved Him

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1968, Cold War, Jim Morrison, netflix, Oliver Stone, Platoon, The Doors, Vietnam

Return to the previous post in my Vietnam-war themed writings or go to the master post, which indexes them all.

I’ve watched Platoon before and more than once. I even have a DVD in my collection. Even still, the fact that it was removed from Netflix occasioned watching it again. A few thoughts, 33 years after the release.

Platoon is usually featured in the top/definitive lists of Vietnam-themed war movies. Contrasting with great films that came before it, and here I’m thinking specifically of Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, Platoon is a film that is much more about Vietnam or, more accurately, the Vietnam experience.

This was director Oliver Stone’s breakout success from the director’s chair and Platoon paved the way for the artistic control he would have over future projects. The project was a long-fermenting idea of Stone’s which had its basis in his own, personal experience in the Vietnam War. Like Charlie Sheen’s character Private Chris Taylor, Stone volunteered for the army and requested that he be sent to Vietnam. He served in units and locations similar to those depicted in the film. After the events in the film were over, the real Oliver Stone continued his tour with a distinguished service record, serving as a member of a Long Range Reconnaissance Platoon in the 1st Cavalry Division. His experience traumatized him and he struggled upon his return to civilian life. His first cut at what would eventually become the Platoon story was a screenplay called Break, which he intended to be set to Doors music and start Jim Morrison. Morrison never got back to Stone, but the screenplay was among his possessions in Paris when he died.

I understand the context much better than when I first saw this film in the late 1980s. We now understand the movie as part of a Vietnam trilogy; Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Heaven & Earth. Chris Taylor is not only Oliver Stone, but also Ron Kovic and, perhaps, any young American man who longed to serve his country in 1965 only to become disillusioned. We also understand Stone’s overarching theme of dueling father figures. The battle for Taylor’s soul between Tom Berenger’s Barnes and Willem DaFoe’s Elias is at least as important, artistically, as the portrayal of the Vietnam experience, and would be repeated in subsequent films. I also understand, much better, Platoon within the context of the war.

The battle depicted, an engagement that was part of Operation Yellowstone, was an interdiction of the forces moving into place for the Tet Offensive. Those who planned and fought that battle obviously could not know what it foreshadowed. Stone did not try to attach a particular significance to the engagement within the film so that is left to the audience, who may or may not be aware of a greater context. Stone, himself, expressed disbelief that the New Years’ Day battle depicted in the finale never made the U.S. papers, leading him to question his own recollection of the events. Beyond any story or message, Stone seems to simply want to portray how the Vietnam War felt to the soldiers who were there, contrasting that experience with the perception of those who weren’t.

When I first watched it, I interpreted it as an anti-war film. Thirty-three years on, I’m less inclined to make that blanket statement. Today, I see a film that wants to portray, realistically, the horrors of way. Stone has said he specifically sought a contrast with the John Wayne film The Green Berets. It is also tempting, but unadvised, to read too much autobiographical content into what is seen on screen. Stone has said that the scene where Taylor halts the rape of some village girls is based on his own experience, but other pieces of the story are contradicted by the reality. For example, while Barnes and Elias are based on sergeants that Stone served with, he did not serve with them together and they did not fight and/or kill each other. The real-life Sgt. Juan Elias fought with Stone in the 1st Cavalry and died after being mortally injured by an enemy booby trap. He was evacuated and died in a floating hospital. Stone has never, as far as I’ve read, named the real Sgt. Barnes but I thought I saw some indication that the person on whom the character is based survived the war.

As I’ve written before, Stone at its best can transcend his own beliefs and feelings with his art while at his worst he is crippled by his eagerness to expound upon his politicized message. When I first watched this, I felt it leaned toward the latter. I’d now say this leans toward the former. The battle for Taylor’s soul is often described as the “good sergeant” versus the “evil sergeant,” but I think that’s wrong. It is, as Private Joker explained, about the duality of man. Elias and Barnes aren’t strictly good and evil. Barnes is the alpha-warrior. He is cruel and he kills, but he keeps his men alive and for that his men love him. His men owe their very lives to him. Elias is gentle and kind, but he is also a killer and he also keeps his men alive. Both archetypes, both Elias and Stone, were part of surviving a tour of duty but, having survived, some though it better to leave Sgt. Barnes behind and tried to embrace the peace symbol button on their body armor.

Heirs of a Cold War

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Cold War, fake news, ozzy

One person conditioned to rule and control.
The media sells it and you live the role.
Mental wounds still screaming, driving me insane.

On and On

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Blackfoot, Cold War, Mounted Combat in Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations

The fifty-second post in a series of posts on the Vietnam War is closely related to the previous post. See also the master post.

There were two significant and well-documented engagements occurring during Operation Atlanta, the mission to establish a base camp for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. The first was the ambush detailed in Seven Firefights in Vietnam and discussed previously. A second fight, in the vicinity of Suối Cát, was analyzed in the Army publication Mounted Combat in Vietnam: Vietnam Studies, published in 1978, after the Vietnam War had ended and eight years after Seven Firefights. The latter engagement was also part of the Squad Battles: Tour of Duty release.

11th ACR has established a headquarters at Blackhorse Base Camp and patrols Highway 1. Snapshot on December 2nd shows quiet east of Saigon.

In this case I decided to try the Squad Battles version of the battle, The Ambush at Suoi Cat, before reading the post battle analysis. In contrast to the previous attack, this ambush came as a complete surprise but the Armored Cavalry escorts were able to react vigorously and decisively to win the battle. The contrast between the two scenarios is also stark, but not for that reason.

Both scenarios were authored by John Tiller, so you might surmise any difference must be deliberate rather than stylistic. Also, despite the difference in circumstances surrounding the two ambushes, the result was similar. After overcoming the initial surprise, the 11th Armored Cavalry flooded the ambush site with reinforcements, air, and artillery support.

Only turn 4 and I’ve already lost all my “soft” targets; two trucks and a helicopter.

Unlike the earlier scenario, the convoy is small and the fighting vehicles outnumber the transport vehicles. Another obvious difference, right from the get-go, is that the total scenario turn length is 24, not 6. Rather than portraying the opening of the engagement (the first half-hour to forty minutes), the player will have nearly two-and-a-half hours of game time to fight back and turn the tables on the ambushing force. The result is that this plays much closer to the Steel Panthers version of the earlier fight, but with nicer graphics.

Calling in 250 pounds of payback for the VC out in the open.

Controlling the roads and the air meant that the U.S. held mobile forces in reserve and then could quickly dispatch them to the hot zone. In this case, a company of tanks, three troops of M113s, and a battery of mobile artillery were all released to the battle in fairly short order. Thus, like the Steel Panthers scenario, the initiative reverses during play. At first, there is a bit of panic as I face an indeterminable threat and then, in my case, resignation as I try but fail to protect my convoy’s payload. With only armored units remaining, there are some tense moments trying to regroup my forces and keep them from being surrounded by the enemy, but then the reinforcements begin to appear. And, like a bad joke I remember from my adolescence, they just keep coming and coming and coming…

Seizing the battlefield and wiping out the enemy more than compensated for my own losses. At least in Squad Battles’ eyes.

In the end, a win is nearly inevitable. I made a few dumb mistakes, letting my attackers get to close to and RPG or a recoiless rifle. The VC still feels a little to lethal, particularly against M48 tanks, but 10 vehicle losses feels pretty minor in the scheme of things.

I have to wonder if these scenarios weren’t intended to be thought of as a pair. Same author, similar situation, and yet very different design. Perhaps the intent was to demonstrate the learning curve of the U.S. Army on how to turn the tables on an ambush and how to effectively employ armor in Vietnam.

Speaking of such lessons, I’m finding Mounted Combat in Vietnam: Vietnam Studies a much more entertaining and enjoyable read that I anticipated. The publishing date on the book is 2002, but is something of a repackaging of a work compiled in 1978. Furthermore, it was put together from after-action reports written during the war, so at least some of the chapters are actually from the 1960s and early 1970s. When American made the Vietnam War its own, everyone knew that armor and jungle warfare didn’t mix. The problem was, that knowledge came from the shortcomings of French doctrine as well as U.S. experience during World War II and Korea and much of that experience was misapplied. The book is another high-level view of the entire conflict, but focusing mostly on the use of armor, giving it a different perspective from other works. It also sets itself apart by detailing the experience of the U.S. advisors who were embedded in South Vietnamese armored units; the people who had some of the earliest and best knowledge about the effectiveness of armor against the Viet Cong. Unfortunately, that knowledge mostly did not make it back to the U.S. Army itself, at least not in a timely fashion.

Mounted Combat in Vietnam: Vietnam Studies is a free download from the army itself. The military no longer has printed copies for sale, but someone has printed out copies and sells them on Amazon, assuming you’d rather pay $23 for a free book.

Next up, I re-watched the Oliver Stone classic, Platoon. Or return to the master post.

The Hurt You Leave Behind

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Blackfoot, Cold War, Seven Firefights in Vietnam, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Steel Panthers, Vietnam, WinSPMBT

This post is numbered fifty-one in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

The second of the Seven Firefights in Vietnam is a considerably shorter action than the first. While the battle at Landing Zone X-Ray was fought over days, the bulk of the action in the second battle, “Convoy Ambush on Highway 1” was winding down after the first forty-five minutes or so. As the book reads, it sounds like an impossible combination of factors conspired to produce this battle. At least, it sounds impossible unless you consider this is one of hundreds of similar small-unit actions, the rest of which were not unique enough to be featured in Seven Firefights in Vietnam.

The book gives a quick but informative background to the battle. The 11th Armored Cavalry deployed to Vietnam in September, 1966. Their mission was a specific response to the insecurity of the highways in South Vietnam at the time. The so-called Blackhorse regiment were outfitted with up-armored M113s plus three companies of M-48 Patton tanks. They had also undergone specific anti-ambush training, practicing and preparing their reaction to ambushes while escorting convoys. The regiment immediately went to work, spreading itself thin while providing highway security and simultaneously building a base camp near the Đồng Nai provincial capital of Xuân Lộc. In early November, the U.S. Army received intelligence that the Viet Cong was targeting the lightly-defended but resource-rich base camp. In response, additional supplies and far-flung units were summoned home.

It seems like a good bit of dumb luck was involved in making sure that an extra-large convoy was headed toward the base at exactly the time the VC set up a complex ambush on that highway. No doubt the VC were aware that convoys moved to supply the base but it was only the intelligence of the VC movements that resulted in an extra-long convoy – more than eighty vehicles, by one estimate – passing through the ambush zone. The U.S. Army hadn’t planned for this super-convoy and weren’t entirely prepared for its scale. The escort commander, Lt. Neil L. Keltner, had but two platoons of the light-armor M113. He did find an additional vehicle, riding with the convoy itself, giving him a total of nine combat vehicles providing defensive combat capabilities. Although he couldn’t know it, these nine vehicles would be fighting in a 1.5 km ambush zone against two VC battalions and a regimental headquarters, all experienced guerrilla fighters.

From this point forward though, lady luck switched sides. As the convoy was beginning to move, a coded radio transmission was intercepted indicated that the 274th Regimental headquarters was in play and pinpointed its location to the stretch of Highway 1 where the convoy was about to move. Rapid reaction, within a minute of receiving the intelligence, launched a pair of helicopters for air support and provided warning to the convoy escorts, even though the size of the ambush was not fully appreciated. The result was that, instead of being surprised and trapped in the killing zone, much of the convoy raced through the ambush, guns ablaze at the roadside attackers. Perhaps even the paucity of information helped the Americans. It was assumed that the ambush forces were small in number and would be composed infantry small-arms – more of a harassment than a full-scale threat. Such an attack could be bypassed so, with the convoy prepared to run the gauntlet, as much of a third of the vehicles made it through the killing zone before the VC began to use their heavy weapons (recoiless rifles). The tail end of the convoy was able to halt before entering the killing zone. Furthermore, only minutes after the ambush began, a trio of F-100s were diverted from a scheduled mission and were over the battlefield ready to deliver more air support.

Given the size of the ambush and the scarcity of forces on the U.S. side, the Americans came out very well. Seven men did lose their lives and the Army lost four trucks and two M113s. Another eight soldiers were wounded.

The Tour of Duty map provides an excellent picture of the ambush zone.

Opening up this scenario (Ambush at Xa Xuan Loc) in Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, I was immediately impressed with what I saw. The maps printed in Seven Firefights aren’t very clear in my copy, so what I saw in-game was a well-illustrated version of what I had just tried to imagine while reading. The M113s are represented one-for-one but, while there are lots and lots of trucks, the total length of the convoy is likely underrepresented. From that initial impression onward, however, my feelings for this one went downhill.

The scenario is six turns long, which means we are only looking at the initial reaction to the ambush. Engaged forces include only the vehicle-mounted weaponry on the M113s; there is no representation of infantry units or passengers. The scenario does include the arrival of the two Huey gunships although, when I played the scenario, the Hueys didn’t show up until turn six, meaning there was no chance to use them. I’m going to assume that the air support is tied to a randomly-varying delay as it would make little sense to include units that arrive on-map but are impossible to employ. Request for fixed-wing support is limited to the commander of the Armored Cavalry. In my first run-through, the command M113 was knocked out in between the time when he requested air support and when he could direct the strikes. That meant that my airstrikes were called off. More about this later.

The result was an American disaster. Huge vehicle losses, both in terms of the transports and the escorts. I lost my one infantry unit – the leader shown in the above screenshot. The lopsidedness of the victory, and the fact that the actual result was just as lopsided in the opposite direction, makes me wonder about how the modelling can be so far off. As with the battle at Ap Bau Bang, depicted in A Change of Tune, the M113s were actually very effective and rapidly moved up and down the column to break up the ambush. VC fire was effective, causing individual casualties as well as taking out two of the vehicles, but the M113s were able to prevail. Part of the reason, it is figured, is that the VC did not expect the vehicles to be as effective and deadly as they were. The insurgents were used to the transport version of the M113 and may have been surprised and neutralized by the better-equipped versions employed by the Blackhorse regiment.

Mind the gaps. The Steel Panthers take is Steel Panthers -ugly, but from the get-go adds details that improve the experience.

Unhappy, as I was, with the Tour of Duty version, I tried the Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank scenario (Ambush on Highway 1) as well. In stark contrast, the initial impression of graphics and terrain representation in Steel Panthers is not favorable; and rarely is. The graphics are dated, the terrain bizarrely geometrical, and the scenario uses contrived terrain to fit the scenario’s parameters. For example, in both the above and below screenshots, you can see the use of “stream” hexes to represent the drainage ditches along Highway 1.

Also in contrast, the experience did improve as I got into it. Right away certain aspects of the battle, as described in Seven Firefights in Vietnam, translated themselves from the page to the gaming screen. As the convoy moved, it began to bunch up in some places and develop gaps in others. The convoy was described as containing “about every size and shape [vehicle] in the U.S. Army inventory,” making coordination difficult. Seven Firefights cites this as a factor in the battle.

Frequent overflights by a spotter aircraft helped me identify where the enemy was hidden. Note also, though, that I have a lot of trucks on fire even though the scenario is just getting started.

Similarly, another key aspect of the battle’s outcome, shown in the above screenshot, was represented. Because command was alerted to the location of the ambush, Captain Robert Smith* was was in the air above the convoy even as the shooting started. Radio discussions between air support and intelligence meant that the air units had, in some cases, even better intelligence than Lt. Keltner commanding from the ground. Tellingly, Keltner lost the use of his radio for a portion of his battle and had to transfer his command to a new vehicle. During this time overhead observers were able to continue coordination of support.

In the end, the Steel Panthers version of the battle was also particularly bloody. I lost 23 convoy trucks and 4 of my M113s. Unlike the Tour of Duty version, Steel Panthers models the crews and passengers for the vehicles and I wound up losing 89 personnel to the enemy. This high number includes the drivers and passengers in the unarmored trucks and jeeps. The game ranked it a “draw,” which, for me at least, can soften a rough time during scenario play – I feel that while I could have done better, I also could have done far worse.

Massive losses aside, the experience of playing the scenario is actually a good one. When the scenario starts, you have this awful feeling of being overwhelmed. Trucks are blowing up left and right and the VC’s recoiless rifles can knock out an escort vehicle before you even have time to shoot back. However, matching the narrative of the battle, the M113s that survived had excellent mobility and could move about the column. When the Hueys arrive, the nature of the fight flipped. It becomes my turn to move around the map wiping out the enemy while they have little recourse. The Steel Panthers M113s use some kind of grenade launchers (modeled in the game as “Claymore Mines”) that makes them very effective when overrunning insurgent infantry.

So why the huge gap between historical results and game results that persists across the different platforms (despite the very different gameplay experience)? Well, one possibility is that I played the scenarios incorrectly. I won’t dismiss this entirely; if you’ve read my posts before you’ll know I can be pretty inept at beating some of these scenarios. However, in both games I found that in the opening turns my losses exceeded the historical losses. It doesn’t seem possible that I could have missed a tactical approach (whether obvious or obscure) that could have avoided that result. It is also possible that these scenarios were never intended to be historical simulations. Eliminating certain factors which, in real life, caused the Americans to have an overwhelming victory could serve the game by turning this historical encounter into a well-balanced, difficult-to-win scenario. It seems that, for players, solving that challenge is more fun than meticulously recreating the historical result. This, too, doesn’t quite explain everything. The order-of-battles, map, and positioning certainly seem to be historically based (within the limitations of these two games to do so).

Looking beyond those first two explations, this suggests that the modelling within these games are either a) more lethal than reality or, b) biased toward the insurgency, or possibly a mix of both. It does seem to be a pattern across a number of different scenarios. One possibility is that it is morale-based, as I alluded to above. I would imagine that the performance of guerrillas forces, particularly against U.S. and Free World Allied units, would have been hit and miss. Even if so, a scenario rule that said you had 50-50 chance of all VC being worthless might be accurate, but it would be a game-killer. So perhaps the reason is that, in game, the VC are always at the top of the potential whereas in real-life they were thrown off their game by morale factors. In this case, the fact they were surprised by the effectiveness of the M113s certainly blunted their attack.

A similar calculus applies to equipment. Communist equipment was not of the highest reliability. When reading The Boys of ’67, I recall several actions where the VC grenades were described as mostly harmless. They often did not explode and, even when they did, did so with reduced force. But while the odds may have been in your favor, that doesn’t mean you wanted to be sitting atop one when it went off. I wonder if the games might over-represent the effectiveness of the VC equipment, again necessary for good gameplay if not entirely historically accurate.

Another possible source of error when comparing game results to after-action-reports is one of definition. Consider, in this case, the board game origins of games such as these two. In many a cardboard game, the result of a combat action is often all-or-none. You roll the dice and either the target of the attack survives or is removed from the board (it might even say KIA in the combat table). But does that really mean “killed,” as in everybody dies? In a tactical game, removing a counter really means that unit is unavailable as a fighting force through the end of the scenario (perhaps on the order of another 20 minutes, give or take). That could mean killed or wounded, but it could also mean scattered, or out of ammunition, or cut off from command. Sometimes these other factors are more explicitly modeled but the fact is, if a counter is going to be non-functional for the remainder of the game for whatever reason, you might as well remove it from the board. In Seven Firefights in Vietnam, the author describes the harrowing effect of recoiless rifle hits, particularly on the armored M113s. In most cases, however, while damaging, they don’t result in “kills.” Steel Panthers provides an explosion sound effect and a smoking wreck when a vehicle gets removed from play, but that is certainly a simplification of the wide range of complex conditions that takes a vehicle out of a fight.

Another notable point from the Seven Firefights in Vietnam is that, while VC rockets are mentioned in the narrative, none of the killed vehicles are attributed to RPGs. In both Steel Panthers and Squad Battles, on the other hand, RPGs are very common to the communist forces and result in a large number of the casualties, particular to the softer vehicular targets. It makes me wonder whether, given the 1966 scenario date, the the RPGs are either over prevalent or over-powered.

Whatever the case, this is mostly me taking myself too seriously. Particularly the Steel Panthers version of this scenario is a decent representation of this battle. It provides a nice, and fun, companion to the chapter in Seven Firefights in Vietnam.

A second ambush, taking place a bit more than a week later, also provoked a response and pitched battle during this the this operation. I explore that in another article. You could also return to the the master post

*With his overhead view, he is the one that provided both the estimate of the number of vehicles as well as the “every size and shape” quote.

Из России с любовью

Tags

Cold War, From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming, James Bond, John F. Kennedy, Russian

The novel From Russia, with Love came out in 1957, written by Fleming as Diamonds Are Forever was going to publication.

Although it was the fifth James Bond novel, it was made into only the second James Bond film. This meant, first of all, that the events portrayed in the film (assuming “present day” for the 1963 film release) are reasonably close to those in the book (let’s say about eight years). Second, the swapping of Dr. No and From Russia, with Love aside, there is considerably less divergence between the written and film “universes,” making it less tempting to stray from the novel’s material. Third, this is still in the “pre-camp” era of James Bond. I haven’t watched From Russia with Love for a while, but I recall that, along with Dr. No, it ranked among the better James Bond films.

While the divergence between the book and film is small relative to future film projects, it is naturally still there to some extent. All film adaptations must make some changes to fit the media. The Bond series, from the beginning, seemed considerably “lighter” than the books. An obvious difference is that From Russia, with Love (the film) features the criminal organization SPECTRE, Bond’s nemesis from the first film. By contrast, the books pits Bond against SMERSH and the MGB. As I mentioned last time we met them, SMERSH (смерш is a shortened form of Смерть Шпионам, meaning “Death to Spies”), was a real counter-espionage organization during the Second World War which, by that time, had been absorbed into the Ministry of State Security, or MGB*.

For several chapters, this James Bond book doesn’t show James Bond except through photographs in the hands of the Russians. Furthermore, unlike the film Bond, novel-Bond spends his downtime serving on excruciatingly pointless committees rather than traveling the world and engaging in exciting (while less exciting, presumably, than the featured stories) adventures. Combined with the author’s introduction, this focus on Moscow alters the tone of the novel considerably.

One can speculate on why this was done and what it means, and I’m sure better-informed literary analysts than I have done so. Fleming may have added the trappings of reality to the story to lend gravitas to his own work. Or perhaps a connection to popular events. The public, recently exposed to the defections of two of the Cambridge Five, may have been eager for fiction which involved these events in the headlines. He may have been trying to go so far as to comment on the state of the Cold War through his work. Or perhaps this was just Fleming himself transitioning from his World War II -era spy business, with which he was directly familiar, to the Cold War as a new “Great Game.”

Assuming the second of these three, what is Fleming saying about the Cold War? Perhaps he is emphasizing that there was a real and deadly struggle going on between England (alongside America) and the Soviet Union. The true extent of that may not make the headlines, but Fleming is trying to hint at the “reality” of Cold War espionage. He may also be trying to reassert England’s place in a world increasingly defined by the dueling superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union.

One other side-effect from reading this book for me: On several occasions, the titular female character Tatiana Romanov (of THE Romanovs, it is told), is described as looking very much like a young Greta Garbo. Through most of the period that my lifetime overlapped with Garbo’s, she was merely an old woman who used to be famous for films  – now technically so out of date (silent pictures and early “talkies”) as to not be of interest to a youngster like myself. I’m sure around the time she died (1990) there were photographs on TV and in the papers, although I have no such recollection. If I had seen stills from her films, however, even those wouldn’t have spoken to me much – the women of the 20s-and-30s cinema often wore “stage makeup” and just don’t look to me like “young women” as much as old women pictured when they were younger. To understand the references from this book I, for the first time, searched for pictures of Greta Garbo and, honestly, they took me by surprise. Some eyebrow weirdness aside, her non-film-costume headshots could have been taken today.

Readers of late 1950s, of course, would have had to recall the work (and the early work at that) of a decades-retired actress. One assumes, however, that this wouldn’t be such a stretch. It is also a hallmark of even the lighter fiction of this time that books make references that would seem to be over-the-head of the majority of readers. From Russia, With Love is peppered throughout with untranslated foreign-language phrases and obscure (at least to me) architectural and style references. Did these references connect well with the audience? Also, I have to wonder, is the fact that Garbo look rather modern to me a sign that she might have appeared “exotic” in the 1930s or even the 1950s?

Arguments abound as to whether From Russia, With Love is one of Fleming strongest or weakest Bond novels. It does seem to hit a new stride in terms of the the quality and structure of the Bond series. Interestingly, in 1961, Life magazine published an article on President Kennedy’s reading habits. He listed From Russia, With Love as one of his 10 favorite books and mentioned Fleming and the Bond series generally. The film version was the last movie Kennedy watched before his assassination. Kennedy’s approval of the Bond novels likely gave them credibility among more “serious” readers and almost certainly boosted their popularity.

*In fact, it looks like Fleming’s intelligence information was out of date across the board. By 1957, when the novel was published and even by 1954, when the story is proposed to be taking place, Fleming’s organizations had already been reorganized or renamed. The MGB was merged briefly with the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) and then, in early 1954, functionly transfered to the KGB (Committee for State Security) formed under Ivan Serov, who features briefly in the novel.

You Can’t Change Human Nature

Tags

Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, Fog of War, Gulf of Tonkin, Road to Disaster, Robert McNamara, Vietnam

It surprises me, but I have now written fifty posts about the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

While I have started reading Road to Disaster, which came out in 2018, I did not read the book author Brian VanDeMark co-wrote with Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, published in 1995. In between the two, the film The Fog of War was made. While not a film version of McNamara’s book, it did have the background material of McNamara’s own auto-biography as a starting point. It also followed a structure of Lessons of Vietnam, building the narrative around 11 lessons from McNamara’s life. It is a different 11 lessons that those 11 in the book, but there is obviously an intended parallel.

To make things a little more convoluted, there is actually a book version of The Fog of War (now, apparently, out of print) that was written based upon the film shortly after it came out. Writing a biographical book based on a documentary film seems an odd way to go about things. Yet, there we have it. I don’t plan to read it.

The structure of the film is that McNamara is interviewed, allowing him to talk about the things that he has learned over his life and his career. That career took him through academia (teaching at Harvard), the Army Air Corps, to Ford Motor Company. There he was the first non-Ford family member to be company President, a position he held for 5 days. He left Ford when he was asked by newly-elected President John Kennedy to hold a cabinet position and became first Kennedy’s, then Johnson’s, Secretary of Defense. After his cabinet tenure he was appointed President of the World Bank and headed that organization for 13 years.

Perhaps typically for a political interview documentary, part of the intent of the filmmakers seems to be to get McNamara to say things that he didn’t want to say. It was filmed using a device the filmmaker calls an Interrotron. This is essentially a Teleprompter. However, instead of projecting words to be read, the filmmaker projects his own face. The result is a close-up shot of the interviewee from the perspective of the interviewer. McNamara is looking into the projected eyes of the interviewer as he talks and so appears to be making direct and human eye contact with the audience. It has particular impact when McNamara recalls emotional events, such as the death of President Kennedy.

The 11 lessons are a bit at odds with the narrative of Road to Disaster. This shouldn’t be surprising. The idea behind Road to Disaster was that there was a failure of both the intentions and methods of the Kennedy/Johnson crew, a failure that led to unintended consequences. So, for example, McNamara’s lesson about the power of data analysis (#6: Get the data) is countered by VanDeMark’s assertion that reliance on data (e.g. body counts and population under government control) fed McNamara’s inability to appreciate the truth. Similarly, the filmmaker, in some cases, is using McNamara’s “lesson” as a hook to try to get him to admit where he went wrong.

One of the more interesting revelations (to me, I’m sure it has been printed elsewhere) is McNamara’s description of a 1995 trip to Vietnam where he analyzed the war with his counterparts from his time advising Johnson. He said that, on the first day of their meeting, they nearly came to blows (some quarter of a century after the fact!) over differing beliefs in what were the basic, inarguable facts of the time.

The U.S. involvement hinged on the domino theory and the fear from both Kennedy and Johnson that losing Vietnam to the Soviet/Chinese international revolution would have destroyed them politically. The political impact probably was true, particularly in the mid-1960s. The domino theory, at least in the modern consensus, has been disproven by, not least, the fact that South Vietnam was ultimately taken over by the communists without the subsequent collapse of Southeast Asia.

The (formerly North) Vietnamese officials found that whole idea implausible and therefore disingenuous. To them, while the fight against the U.S. dominated their recent history, the fight against China had been ongoing for thousands of years. So while they were receiving assistance from China against the U.S., if indeed China decided to move into Vietnam as a result, Vietnam would have just as vigorously fought the Chinese. Similarly the Soviet Union would have been considered a colonial power just like the French and U.S. were. Given those basic facts, they refused to believe any of the reasons that the U.S. said they were involved in Vietnam and thus refused to believe that the paths to peace offered by the U.S. were genuine. The secret motives of the U.S., they felt, were to replace the French as colonial overlords of South Vietnam, exploiting the country and its people for resources.

From this, McNamara took away that there was a mutually-agreeable solution to avoid war involving democratic elections and self-rule. Of course, we know (also in hindsight) that the North Vietnamese made the determination that they would eventually win the war outright and placed little value in compromise. McNamara specifically challenged the officials on the human cost (in Vietnamese lives) of the war relative to the costs of compromise. He was frustrated by the low value that this communist regime, and historically communist governments in general, place on human life versus political/revolutionary victory. We can also wonder how much of the absoluteness of the current Vietnamese position is based on political propaganda of the time and since. From the Western perspective, it is difficult to believe that the U.S. could have possibly had designs on Vietnamese resources and, more particularly, that Kennedy and Johnson would want to embroil the U.S. in a war to maintain control of them. It also ignores the fact that North and South Vietnam were separate countries; the U.S. wasn’t threatening domination of the North but rather asking the North to cease military assistance to the insurgency in the South. While the image of Vietnamese nationalism sweeping through all the people of the country sounds good, it is unlikely that the “small folk” of North Vietnam would have any interest in which politician ran South Vietnam if their government weren’t feeding them what to think.

This film won multiple awards and was pushed on me by Netflix as a highly recommended view. I’m not sure it quite lives up to all that hype. In particular, some of the pacing was pretty slow filling up time with stock footage and generalized commentary. One the whole, however, the film is worth seeing as the closest McNamara ever came to revealing his heart to the nation that he tried to serve. I’m glad I took the time to watch.

You can return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles. The next article in the series returns to the book Seven Firefights in Vietnam and scenarios cover the second battle in that book.

Alexander the Short-lived

Tags

Cold War, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Vietnam, wargames

This is the forty-ninth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

I reminded myself of what I don’t like about the Campaign Game in Squad Battles: Tour of Duty by playing the first of them, a U.S. Marine campaign. The campaign strings together a series of hypothetical scenarios where you have a few goals in addition to winning each scenario. You also have actions that will earn you “Leader Action Points,” bonus points that come about by using your persona to accomplish actions in the scenario (rallying, leading attacks, and coming under fire are examples). This is intended to discourage you from leaving your marker safely behind the front lines. The other requirement is that you must survive each battle; if you die, the game is over.

Alexander is a company commander stationed in the vicinity of Hue City.

Conceptually, it doesn’t sound so bad. Players always want more depth than their games provide, and this is one way to do it. If the game is played at the strategic level, the players want to fight out the battles in detail. If they have detailed battles, they long to put those individual battles into a greater context. In can be a difficult itch to scratch, however, especially when a game is aiming towards realism and authenticity.

The standard campaign wrapper for detailed battles might be the old Panzer General -style campaigns. You are given a “core” army that moves from battle to battle. Keep your units alive and they gain experience as they go. Unfortunately, this may be particularly unsuited for Vietnam in general and for Squad Battles in particular. As tenuous as Panzer General‘s grip on reality may be, the Second World War did have units advancing from battle to battle as the tide of the war pushed forward. In Vietnam, there were no lines nor would there be an obvious connection between subsequent battles. After a battle, a unit might be airlifted out, or reinforced, or provided with air and artillery support. While there is obvious feedback between the tactical performance and the operational reactions, it wouldn’t necessarily be “progressive” in that you would easily connect a success to a campaign-level reward. Perhaps more importantly, the units in Squad Battles don’t “upgrade” or “gain experience.” If a rifle squad suffers a casualty, it might be pulled offline for the next mission or it might receive a replacement. Any “veteran” status of the squads or the men within them, even if tracked (and in contrast to Panzer General), have no meaning within the game. Similarly, there is no concept of “upgrades.” You wouldn’t supply a veteran squad with better weapons (at least not from the American side) than it’s green equivalent. You don’t get your M113s upgraded to Pattons because your armored company won a few battles.

What that does leave is Squad Battle‘s modeling of the leaders as separate “pieces”. As the player, you are essentially taking on the role force commander and therefore have a representation on the map, the most senior officer in the scenario. Although the player’s ability to control isn’t limited by what the leader counter is doing, the campaign game ties the two together more tightly by making the player mortal; if your leader is killed, you also “die.”

My career was a short one.

Here is my problem: I started my campaign game and won the first scenario, an attack on a generic village. However, in my second scenario my “character” was killed. Having been killed, the only way to attempt to advance further is to restart the campaign over. Now,there may be a way around it by managing your save files, to try something right before you die, but by default the loss wipes out any progress made so far. It appears to be set up to “punish” the player for having gotten himself killed. Certainly there is a realism factor in that when “you” die, you lose everything. That’s fair enough, but it doesn’t necessarily make the game more fun.

In this case, you can even say the loss was my fault and I deserved to be punished. The second scenario is, as you might have surmised from the title in the above screenshot, an ambush. My captain was marching with his middle platoon on the trail and, when the company was hit, decided to charge up the trail by himself to hunker down with the forward-most platoon. While he was racing down the trail alone, he was shot and taken out of play by some hidden VC. I probably shouldn’t have made that run. However, leaders must lead, so you’re bound to come under fire no mater what you do. Even if you cower behind the trees, there are always stray mortar rounds that might subject you to a roll of the dice and a potential early death. Point being, any campaign can be brought to an abrupt end by a bad roll of the dice.

Now, there is a mitigating factor. When you begin your campaign, you get to chose which battle to start with. What that means is, having lost once, you don’t have to actually go back and replay the battles you’ve already won to get to the one you lost. You could start your new campaign at the battle which defeated you. You could also choose to play only the battles you haven’t tried yet. In this way, you can attempt to beat the more challenging structure of the campaign without feeling like any loss forces you to suffer all the way through the campaign you’ve tried so far. Still, there are, in this campaign, five battles in a set order. So if you lose one of the middle battles you can play a foreshortened campaign consisting of the “second half” of those battles. Or even a campaign of one battle, the final one, if that’s all you’ve got left. This might work much better if there were more potential battles (say 15 possible, but you don’t know which five you’ll get). Even better if there was a well-made random battle generator so that each campaign was a unique experience. However, Squad Battles requires that each scenario be hand-crafted so we have what we have.

More recent experience and more information has not soothed the bad opinion I had of the Tour of Duty campaign option. It doesn’t really satisfy that contextual problem in that the campaign is mostly hypothetical and, except for the survival of your officer, there is no feedback to a larger campaign or the war in general. Rather than a campaign game as I was usually understand it, I look at this as more of a higher difficultly level. If you’ve grown bored beating the individual scenarios, this requires that you beat five in a row and accumulate “Leader Action Points” while also keeping yourself alive. Incidentally, this is one of the other universal complaints of players relative to single-player games – playing the AI is too easy and they want more of a challenge. I suppose that, in that regard at least, the campaign game does its job.

You can return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles. The next article in the series is what I thought after watching the documentary The Fog of War.

Riverines!

Tags

1968, Cold War, The Boys of '67, Vietnam

This is the forty-eighth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

When one reads a book about a war, traditionally one looks forward to a fairly high level view of it. You read about the armies and their maneuvers. Where individual decisions come into play, you might focus on the generals. Perhaps, more rarely, the performance of lower-ranked soldiers, where it might have turned the course of a battle, might be explained. While books written about and from the perspective of the common soldier are probably more popular now, it seems to me that the majority of war non-fiction is about leaders. Of course, one obvious exception is the memoir that focuses on the experience of the individual soldier, whether biographical or fictional.

The author of The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam, Andrew Wiest, begins his preface by noting that one of the inspirations for his book was having read Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July. The other major inspiration was his personal relationship with a veteran of C Company (of the 4th Battalion, 47th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division), which prompted him into writing a book about this unit’s original deployment to Vietnam. The book focuses mostly on the experience of the individual rifleman up through their squad leaders rather than the officers and the grand strategy.

Another motivation for this books comes from the unique identity of the 9th Infantry as perhaps the last of its kind.

One upon a time, in Merry Olde England, regiments were raised for King and Country by local lords. The components of an army tended to be geographically based and brothers-in-arms might truly be brothers or, at the very least, neighbors. The American army inherited English traditions and up-to-and-into the First World War, there remained a regional component to American units. Look no further than the regimental designations in the Civil War for a clear example.

The First World War, for the most part, saw the last of geographically-based regular army units. Obviously, National Guard activation remains an exception to this day, but for the regular army, the location of a unit’s base while stationed at home is probably not a good indicator of the origin of the men that make up that unit. The Second World War saw the end of another trend. Up through WWII, the transition from peace to war meant the raising of new military units to fight that war. Contrast that to the post-War era, where the United States had endeavored to maintain sufficient forces to meet whatever challenges it may face. For the individual soldier, the difference is being recruited or drafted and then trained as part of their deployed unit version being assigned into an already-existing unit after training. In this last respect, the 9th Infantry, itself, marked the end of its own era.

The 9th Infantry was deactivated at the end of WWII. Despite being reactivated for the Korean War, it did not have a combat role and was deactivated again in 1962. In early 1966, the U.S. sought to extend their influence in the Mekong Delta. The 9th Infantry would fulfill this mission and three of its battalions would be organized as “Riverine” forces; using watercraft and waterways rather than helicopters to move to and from battlefields. The 4th Battalion of the 47th Infantry Regiment* was one such riverine unit.

As a newly-activated unit, the men of C Company were, by and large, draftees who all received their notices at the same time. The arrived for induction together, trained together, and when their training was complete, they deployed to Vietnam together. A rather horrific voyage carried them from California to Vietnam, incidents from which are related to the reader of the book.

Inevitably, the unit began to suffer attrition. This took the form both of soldiers killed as well as injuries that were serious enough to remove them from duty. As the original cadre was whittled away, C/4/47 became more like any other unit in Vietnam, filling up with replacements having no connection to the originally-deployed unit. While some of the replacements’ stories feature in the book, the narrative, for the most part, focuses on that original core and how a year’s worth of  duty in Vietnam affected them. Inducted in May, the unit deployed to Vietnam in December 1966. Any soldier who remained in their unit until the end returned to the United States around New Years’ Day of 1968.

In this, the the book sheds some light on the failure of “the numbers” to capture the impact of Vietnam on soldiers’ morale. For this unit, the numbers looked good. Combat deaths were 10% or lower over the course of their tour while losses inflicted upon the enemy where considerably higher. Their missions were successful. On the ground, however, it felt different. Missions often felt like, if not quite a failure, perhaps a waste. Men were as apt to fight booby traps or maybe just weather and rough terrain as enemy soldiers. When they did fight the enemy, it was often in the form of an ambush, where they were at an initial disadvantage that had to be overcome. That, in the end, said battle was deemed a victory was small consolation to the American unit that lost many good men in the opening moments of the fight.

While combat deaths were relatively low, by the time the company returned to the United States, most of the original members were gone. In addition to the deaths, there were injuries, many of them severe and permanent. There were also those who just transferred to other units and other locations. The net result of seeing the vast majority of your brothers-in-arms having gone had its psychological effect, independent of how the unit’s performance fit into the strategic picture. It is also important that losses, for the individual, weren’t balanced by gains on the individual level. When men died, either in an ambush or by faceless traps, there would be no counter-punch. While men had a natural instinct to get “payback,” it was unlikely that they would actual be able to again catch and fight the very enemies that had bloodied them in an earlier battle. There were no front lines to overrun or strongholds to capture and hold. In this, the war would seem to just meander on and on with no measure of progress except the loss of your best friends.

As depressing as that assessment sounds, the book does manage to avoid politics. The men themselves, even the draftees, largely entered the Army as patriots ready to fulfill their duty. In May of 1966, even the country at large was mostly supportive of the war. The men were shocked to return** to a country that, in 1968, was wracked by anti-war protests. While the narrative seems free from anti-war bias, the author does not hesitate to identify incompetence, either in overall policy or in the individual commander. It’s one thing to lose a friend to the fortunes of war but it is so much worse when it was you’re own side that caused the loss.

Bottom line, this book is a compelling read. It provides a picture of the Vietnam War, not as it looked to us as a nation or the military, but to the individuals who were called upon by their country to serve and so did their duty as best they could.

Return to the master post or go on for more game playing.

*Fictional character Forrest Gump served in the 2nd Battalion of the 47th, which was not one of the Riverine units.

**This book, unique to those I’ve read so far, spend the final chapter or two discussing the return of the men to the U.S. This includes how Vietnam dominated their lives in the decades after the war and the impact upon them of the internet and the reunions that began to take place in the years before the book was published.

From the Delta to the DMZ

Tags

Cold War, guns in hollywood, Vietnam

This is the forty-sixth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

Not quite a year ago, Adrian Cronauer passed away at age 72 after a long illness. He was an Air Force veteran, a writer, a lawyer, and had worked various positions in radio. Obituaries, though, had more to say about Robin Williams, who himself had committed suicide roughly five years earlier.

Cronauer had written a comedy for TV based on his experiences as a DJ in Vietnam. After some twists and turns, the film was made with director Barry Levinson at the helm and with Robin Williams staring as Cronauer. The film script was heavily reworked from Cronauer’s original proposal and much of what is portrayed in the move is pure fantasy. At the time, Williams was at the top of the stand-up circuit and stand-up comedy featured huge in popular entertainment. He was known to TV audiences as Mork from Ork and teenagers across the country had memorized his routines from his comedy albums. Good Morning, Vietnam, however, showed that Williams could be a star dramatic actor, capable of top box office draw.

I recall at the time that everyone knew the catch-phrase of the film’s title. The film performed well and was critically well received.  For whatever reason, it never seemed like something I wanted to watch. A Robin Williams comedy routine superimposed on a Vietnam War story didn’t seem like it would do it for me. Finally, it was the passing of Mr. Williams and Mr. Cronauer that made me decide to see what it was all about.

First off, a good chunk of the film is Robin Williams doing his routine, but as a radio DJ. It was largely unscripted. Thirty-some years on, it is both a credit to Williams’ ad-lib talents and a nod to the style of 1980s stand-up. It is also a very good-looking film. The movie was filmed entirely in Thailand so, unlike some movies, it is an entirely believable portrayal of Saigon and the surrounding rural areas. There are numerous shots of soldiers doing soldier-things, ostensibly while listening to the radio. There are anachronisms a-plenty (M-16s when everyone should have M-14s and errors in uniforms and military protocol, to name a few), but it does look sharp.

The story-line itself feels a little shallow, perhaps because so much of the screen time is dedicated to Robin’s monologues. Of course, the success of the film owes much to those monologues. I suspect the pitch was essentially the Robin Williams routine, but made into a movie. Beyond that we can also see Williams’ ability to play something other than funny. In fact, he may be better playing the darker emotions than he is at being silly. This becomes clear in his later work, but I’d say it is evident here as well.

Cronauer leveraged his fame derived from the film to advocate for Vietnam Veterans and, in particular, prisoners of war. He became Special Assistant to the Director of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office. He was never the celebrity that Robin William’s portrayal made him out to be. However, in his later years he was approached by many a veteran thanking him profusely for what he did. His voice on the radio made soldiers in Vietnam feel a little closer to home.

Return to the master post or continue forward towards the end of 1966 and the execution of Westmoreland’s plan to take the initiative using his build up of U.S. forces in South Vietnam.

Vengeance Porn versus Chick Flicks

Tags

actor's age, Cold War, Love and Honor, Tom Clancy, Vietnam, Without Remorse

If you came to this article from a Google search and decide to read on, you are bound to have some remorse. This won’t be what you think it is from the title. What it is about is a pair of fictional stories, one a book (and maybe, eventually a movie) and one a movie (but never a book), that are set in America somewhere in the 1969-1970 time frame and featuring Vietnam as a locale and a major plot point. I don’t know what you were hoping for, but you’re not going to find it here, ya filthy animal.

Without Remorse was, quite literally, my beach reading some time back, when it was newish. I remember enjoying it at the time and, recently, when I found myself looking for something on the lighter side, I decided to read it again. I now see it, as described on-line, referred to as “A John Clark Novel.” At the time I had no idea that this was the back story on a recurring character and certainly had no idea that he was to become the lead character in the Rainbow Six novels and actually “Rainbow Six” himself. I actually thought it was supposed to be an “Admiral Greer” backstory.

Not so long ago, I reread Red Storm Rising and I found it did not hold up as well as my memory would have it. This, even though my memories of it were not that flattering. My earliest impressions of Clancy’s writing were tainted by his clunky, overly-technical descriptions. Without Remorse, on the other hand, I remembered as being enjoyable. Based on a revised analysis of just these two data points, I’m going to say I think Clancy’s writing ability may have improved a good bit the more he wrote. Or more to the point, Without Remorse remains a good read.

Knowing why the book was written, however, doesn’t help. When I thought that John Kelly/John Clark was just an interesting passer-through in the Clancy fictional world, I could read the story more at face value. Knowing, as I do now, that this book was written as a setup for all the future books that feature this character, I’m a little less enthusiastic.

It was clear from around the very first appearance of Jack Ryan that he was Tom Clancy’s idealized self. Their biographies and personalities are pretty similar. It’s just that Jack Ryan just does it all a little better. Now, under some circumstances, there is nothing wrong with this. An author must put a bit of himself into his works and it all seemed fine when Ryan was put aboard the USS Dallas in The Hunt for Red October. As the books continued, though, Ryan both saw rapid promotions as well as ramping up of his physical participation in these covert operations. Not only are these two character arcs fairly incompatible but I couldn’t get it out of my head that I’m reading about Clancy as he’d like to see himself, running around and stopping the baddies.

Now bring in John Clark. Obviously, by the fact that I missed his character’s appearances in the other Clancy books I’ve read, I have little opinion about the guy. I have read, however, that Clark is a kind of Jack-Ryan’s-other-half. That is, once again, Clancy has created an idealized version of himself through whom he can act vicariously, although this time much more of an action hero. I had already thought Ryan was a little too physical for a Tom Clancy stand-in, so the idea that he needs a beefed-up version seems even more over-the-top.

Of course, as I’ve said, I didn’t know anything about John Clark at the time I read Without Remorse. Taken independently, it’s the story of a Vietnam veteran who turns vigilante to wreak vengeance upon Baltimore’s drug dealers over the murder of a loved one. In that sense, it combines Rambo, Death Wish, and Point of Impact/Shooter (which actually did a version of the story a year earlier) into a tale of what we all sometimes wish we could do. That is, if we weren’t constrained by the law and other trimmings of civilization. Oh, and if we were trained in covert operations and assassination by the United States Navy.

Critics found the story overly-long. We do get, essentially, three revenge stories for the price of one. Kelly/Clark takes on the drug dealers, who, from what I know about Baltimore drug dealers, probably did have it coming. He also takes vengeance on the commies for having captured and tortured some fine, American pilots. He also gets to stomp on a commie spy. In a more plausible world, one tale of revenge might be enough. I remained enthralled in the stories throughout, though, and I think the juxtaposition of all three is intended to make a statement about morality and legality when it comes to killing. Sometimes it is bad, but sometimes we think it is good. Sometimes we even think one thing but perhaps only because we don’t know the whole truth. Perhaps that’s taking what is essentially a beach novel and pushing it too far. In the end, it did for me what a good beach novel is supposed to do – it kept me up at night turning pages, unable to put it down.

Love and Honor, another movie coming off of Netflix, lacks even the depth of a beach novel. Here we follow the story of an army volunteer, Joiner (I shit you not), whose girl back home has broken-off their relationship.  His friend, who is Wright (get it, he’s right!), councils him that there are other fish in the sea, yet Joiner decides he is to jump ship (excuse the mixed metaphors) and go back to the U.S. to confront the girl under cover of a 1-week leave in Hong Kong. This is all superimposed with the first Moon landing, which is going on at exactly the same time as the thing with the girl.

Wright decides to join Joiner on his odyssey. He is a “player” (to use some modern terminology) – handsome, smooth-talking, and good with the ladies. In fact, he is probably best thought of in such modern terms. While the film takes place in 1969, with some cars and clothes to emphasize the point, much about this simply comes off as present-day. The moral of the story, a “hate the war, respect the soldier” message, seems targeted more at our current foreign entanglements than that of a generation ago. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, given the popularity of period-not-so-period pieces these days, that some twenty-teens twenty-somethings can just assert that “We’re children of the sixties” and we ask no more of them.

Anyhow, Wright and Joiner go off on the adventure and, seeing how Wright is played by male-lead Liam Hemsworth, we see him make adventures of his own. Will he find love? Will he fall in love? Will love change him? If you know the genre then you know the answers have to be yes, yes, and yes.

Honestly, it’s not the worst movie. Taken purely as a feel-good, teen-romance (albeit with nearly-30 actors playing those teens), it does alright. Try to read much more into it and you’ll likely come away disappointed. Not only does it fail to provide any historical depth, but it fails to convey whether it is even trying. For example, the weaving of the plot in with the moon landings. Is that supposed to help convey some higher meaning? If it is, I failed to see what it was.

I will say one thing that the movie did illuminate for me. Watching the images of twenty-teens actors in what is supposed to be a 1960s anti-war protest invites compare-and-contrast between the protest movements between now and then. One massive difference is the draft. In 1969, it wasn’t just that those college-aged protesters saw injustice in the war. They, at least the boys, were also at risk to be themselves sent to Vietnam. Oddly enough, I read a reassertion of just this point two nights after I watched Love and Honor while reading Road to Disaster and I hit late 1967 and the acceleration of the Vietnam War protests. On this last point, the movie actually seems to be self-aware. During the climatic dramatic moment the leading-gal says to the main antagonist, “I thought you were a traitor. The truth is that you’re only a coward.”

If nothing else, living in a time of an all-volunteer military makes it easier to criticize anti-war protestors who were just out to save their own skins.