Arts of War on the Web

Welcome to “Arts of War,” Vietnam Veterans of America’s up-to-the-minute compendium of information, news and reviews about the arts—movies, television, stage plays, musicals, music, dance, popular and fine arts, and more—that deal with Vietnam veterans and the Vietnam War.

This web page replaces the “Arts of War” column that ran in Vietnam Veterans of America’s national magazine, The VVA Veteran, from 1986-2009. That popular column was written by The VVA Veteran’s arts editor, Marc Leepson, who continues that work on this web site.

We encourage feedback. Please email your comments, questions, and suggestions to mleepson@vva.org

“Japan R&R: 1969″ is the name of the new exhibit opening on Saturday, May 29, at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago (formerly known as the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum).

Every Vietnam veteran knows what the exhibit’s title means. For you civilians, the Pentagon, in its wisdom, gave those of us who took part in that war a five-to-seven day break, called R&R (”rest and relaxation”). We were flown to exotic getaways to get away from the war, including Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Bangkok, and Kuala Lampur.

The exhibit includes some in-country combat photos, but most illuminate what GI’s did on R&R in Japan.  Japan R&R,  which is sponsored in part by Jerry Kylisz and Jennifer Komorowski, runs through November 1 at the museum (above), which is located 1801 S. Indiana Avenue. There will be an artists’ reception at the Opening from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.

The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is $10, but is free to museum members and active duty military and dependents. For more info, go to the NVAM’s web site.

Planning for the official Texas state Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been going on since 2005 when the Texas Legislature authorized a monument on the grounds of the State Capitol in Austin to honor the Lone Star State’s some 500,000 men and women who served in the Vietnam War.

The granite and bronze monument (above), which was designed by the sculptor Duke Sundt, is expected to be dedicated early in 2012. It is being funded solely through private donations under the aegis of the Texas Capitol Vietnam War Monument Committees.

The latest news is that the committees have just released a redesigned and re-focused website for the monument. It contains a link for donations, which are tax deductible.

Way back in 1983 WGBH, the Boston PBS station, produced the ambitious, acclaimed 13-hour documentry, Vietnam: A Television History, an in-depth look at Vietnam’s wars based on Stanley Karnow’s best-selling book, Vietnam: A History.

Now comes the ultimate bonus material: “The Vietnam Collection,” an on-line video archive that contains most of the materials gathered and created for the 1983 series, as well as additional Vietnam War-related material from WGBH’s archives. That includes all the interviews (with people such as Gen. William Westmoreland, North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, CBS News correspondent Walter Cronkite), news stories, still photographs and original footage.

It’s all there on the website.

On May  5, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences—the folks who give out the Emmys—held a different kind of awards banquet at the Beverly Hills Hotel in La La Land: one that honored “television with a conscience.”

Among the eight shows honored at this third annual event: HBO’s exceptional film Taking Chance, which told the true story of Marine Corps Captain Mike Strobl escorting the body of Marine Corporal Chance Phelps, who was killed in Iraq, from Dover Air Force Base to Chance’s home in Wyoming.

“This is about the television community and the people who work in it putting their heart and soul into their work,” Academy Chairman and CEO John Shaffner said. “None of these stories would be told if someone didn’t say, ‘I have to do this.’”

That certainly was the case with Taking Chance.  Strobl, who co-wrote the screenplay, received the VVA President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the 2009 National Convention in Louisville.

For more info on the awards go to the Academy’s website.

The state of Wisconsin is rolling out the red carpet for Vietnam veterans the weekend before Memorial Day with a three-day event known as LZ Lambeau. The sponsors are the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs, and Wisconsin Public Television, along with a slew of veterans’ organizations including Vietnam Veterans of America’s Wisconsin State Council.

The event includes a motorcycle rally from La Crosse to Green Bay on Friday, May 21; the opening of Back in the World, an exhibit by the Wisconsin Veterans Museum; a Vietnam-era military vehicle exhibit; music and other performances; and the arrival of a Vietnam War era Huey helicopter.

Things get started on Thursday May 20, at 1:00 p.m., when the event opens to the public at Lambeau Field, the famed “frozen tundra,” the home of the NFL Green Bay Packers. That will be followed at 4:00 that afternoon with the dedication of The Moving Wall™. The music stage starts at 3:00.

Saturday’s events include an aircraft exhibit at Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay; a series of lectures beginning at 11:00 a.m.; music from noon to 6:00 p.m; a 7:30 p.m. Tribute Ceremony; and more music till 11:00.

The Sunday events include music at 12:30 by Vietnam veteran Lem Genovese and a “Wiping of the Tears” Ceremony at the Oneida National Veterans Memorial Wall at 3:30 p.m. The weekend is open to all veterans. For more info go to the LZ Lambeau web site.

My first thought when I learned there was a new documentary about the My Lai massacre was: Haven’t we heard enough about My Lai? Second thought: Could there by anything new on My Lai that would merit a 90-minute documentary? Thirdly: Were we in for another self-flagellating television event that turns the Vietnam War into one giant atrocity–and, by implication, portrays all 2.8 million Vietnam veterans as run-amok killing machines?

I had one other thought, though: This documentary would be a production of the PBS American Experience series, which for years has produced incisive, top-quality work. After watching the documentary, I am happy to report that the director, Barak Goodman, and his crew answered all three of my questions more than satisfactorily.

Although the My Lai story has been told frequently in the news media and in books and other docs (including the excellent 1993 book Four Hours at My Lai by Brit journalists Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim), this new documentary covers the entire story in detail from beginning to end. It features revealing new interviews with members of Charlie Company; with Larry Colburn, one of helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson’s door gunners; with Aubrey Daniel, the Army prosecutor of Lt. William Calley; with Army photographer Ronald Haeberle, who was on the scene; and with others involved in the case. Not to mention with several Vietnamese survivors of the massacre. And with Bilton and others who have wide knowledge about it.

Goodman mixes in excellent archival Vietnam War footage, not all of it of Charlie Company, naturally, but most of it very evocative of the events before and after what happened on March 16, 1978. And he makes good use of the reports of the case on the network news, from the time it burst on the news scene in 1969 to the courts-martial of Calley and Capt. Ernest Medina.

The testimony of the Vietnamese villagers and voices and words of the newly interviewed Charlie Company men (Thomas Turner, Thomas Partsch, Joseph Grimes, John Smail, Gregory Olsen, and Lawrence LaCroix) were revealing and effective. The men made you feel what it was like on the ground, especially in the weeks before My Lai happened. The Vietnamese made you feel what it was like during the horror of the massacre.

As for the My Lai-as-aberration-or-business-as-usual question, this thorough, engaging and well produced documentary stuck to the facts of this incident–and the Army’s attempted cover up of it. There was no attempt to deal with other massacres in the war (by either side). That is as it should be.

The American Experience My Lai documentary airs tonight, Monday, April 26, 2010, on PBS stations nationwide. Be aware that there are gruesome photos of the massacre. But also be aware that this is an excellent documentary that gives a full, complete view of the My Lai massacre.

PBS also has an very good, extensive web site with even more info on My Lai and the making of the doc.

“Reading Tim O’Brien in Hanoi” is the title of an interesting “Letter from Hanoi” essay in the April 4 issue of The New York Times Book Review by Matt Steinglass, a German news agency correspondent who has lived in the capital of Vietnam since 2003. In the essay, Steinglass examines the popularity of American Vietnam War literature in Vietnam–and finds that the Vietnamese, by and large, couldn’t care less about O’Brien’s The Things We Carried, or any other American Vietnam War novel for that matter.

Part of it has to do with fairly strict government censorship. But that isn’t the entire story. “Vietnamese also seem largely uninterested in foreign accounts of the war,” Steinglass says. That’s true with American Vietnam War movies as well.

He goes on to discuss Vietnamese Vietnam War (or American War, as the Vietnamese say) fiction, and then deconstructs O’Brien’s book, honing in on the surrealistic nature of it. Vietnamese, he says, “are interested in surrealism. They just aren’t terrible interested in the war.”

Bill Lawrence, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War (from 1960-64), has put together “Chaplains Under Fire,” a feature-length documentary on military chaplains, much of it shot during the three months he spent embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The doc will be screened tonight, Tuesday, April 6, at 6:30 at the  Walter Reade Theater in New York City’s Lincoln Center.

“This is a self-financed, independent film, with no political or religious agenda,” Lawrence told us. “It looks at the work chaplains actually do downrange through the lens of the troops they are there to serve. Plus, it’s a balanced look at the arguments, pro and con, from everyone from evangelical fundamentalists who think chaplains are being muzzled, to those who think the institution of the chaplaincy is unconstitutional.”

There will be a Q&A with the filmmakers followed by a reception after the screening. And there will be a screening at the Nuseum in Washington, D.C., on April 30th.

Tim O’Brien’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is rolling out a huge marketing package to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication of his iconic collection of interconnected in-country Vietnam War short stories, The Things They Carried. The book has sold some two million copies and is a stable in high school and college English and Vietnam War history classes,

That campaign features, among other things, a new jacket (above) for the book, which is now available in paperback, hardcover, e book, and Kindle; a traditional in-person book tour; and a live webcast that starts at 1:00 Eastern time on Monday, March 22. To sign up for that webcast and to see a list of O’Brien’s live events as well as other O’Brien material, go to the website his publisher has created for the 20th anniversary.