Arts of War on the Web

The current (May/June) issue of AARP Magazine has a long feature on the year of 1968 that includes a section about events that took place during that pivotal year in the Vietnam War. The reader-friendly article contains an interview with noted Vietnam veteran film director Oliver Stone, who was an infantryman with the Americal that year. There also are words from Lawrence Colburn, who was a machine gunner on the helicopter piloted by Hugh Thompson that saw what was happening at My Lai and swooped down to save a dozen women and children. You can read it on line at AARP’s website.

Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist and human rights activist who gained international fame when his harrowing story was told in the movie The Killing Fields, died March 30 at age 65 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The film was based on the book of the same name about the Cambodian Holocaust by American journalist Sydney Schanberg of The New Times, with whom Dith Pran worked as a guide and interpreter in the 1970s. The late Dr. Haing Ngor won an Oscar (in his first film role) portraying Dith Pran’s quietly heroic work in the much-honored 1984 movie.

To read an excellent appreciation of Dith Pran by Janet Wu and Andrew Tarsy in The Boston Globe, go to: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/03/31/dith_pran_two_views_of_a_legend/