Before they leave Steven gets married to a girl named Angela. At the wedding reception, Mike and Nick encounter a Green Beret who has just returned from his tour in “Nam”. This scene was very interesting to me because it illustrated a clear difference in the attitude of a soldier who was departing and one who was returning. Mike, Nick, and Steven were overly excited about their tour and raised their glasses in the air for a toast. “I hope they send us where the bullets are flyin' and the fightin's the worst, huh?” Nick proclaimed. Without even turning toward them, the experienced veteran raised his glass and toasted: "Fuck it!" These two simple words foreshadowed the events that were soon to come on the protagonists’ tour.
When we first encounter our protagonists away from their hometown in Pennsylvania, the trio is being held captive by an assault of North Vietnamese. The poorly-fed, beaten prisoners are placed in a pit, half-submerged in the corpse-, disease- and rat-infested water under the command shack. Along with other traumatized prisoners, Mike, Nick, and Steven are yanked up one-by-one by their brutal captors and forced to play a suicidal form of Russian roulette. Guard-onlookers place wagers on who will survive or die. The game is played under the watchful gaze of a small black-and-white picture of Ho Chi Minh. Prisoner-participants are viciously slapped when they hesitate or are unwilling to pull the trigger. This was the most memorable scene in the movie. Gambling with human lives served as a vivid metaphor of the insanity of the war, in which there is no logic to who lives and who dies.
The popular concern of most Americans was that their boys from ‘Nam were coming home safe, sane, and able to adjust to civilization. Both of these themes are addressed in The Deer Hunter. Nick had turned into an exact replica of the public image of a "drug-crazed, gun-toting, violence-prone individual" (Herring). He was mind was scarred so deeply that he did not even remember who Mike was when he came to save him. The life of the Vietnam War drove Nick to insanity. This, among other things, causes Mike to be very depressed and unable to handle the effects the war had on him. The day he returned from his tour, all of his friends gathered at his house. A huge sign that read, "Welcome Home Michael" was hung outside his home. Michael felt very awkward and out of place when he saw the sign. He deliberately avoided the reception and booked a room at a motel further outside of town. In the solitude of his motel room, his actions showed that he was haunted by the emotional distance he felt from his old surroundings. The effects of the War on Steven were physical. All of his limbs, except one arm were amputated. When Mike went to take Steven home from the hospital Steven was reluctant to leave and he said himself, "I can't go home, I don't belong there anymore." All three of the protagonists were harmed by the war in their own way. All three men escape their prison but at a high price; Steven is crippled; Nick wanders the streets of red-light Saigon obsessed with the game of Russian roulette, and Michael is haunted by his promise to bring Nick home at any cost, and is unable to cope with or articulate the pain he feels (Sutton DVD Times). The Deer Hunter really hit home for the American public. The post-war issues that the characters were going through were very similar, if not identical, to what many of them were experiencing themselves.
These Russian roulette “death rounds” forced the film to be criticized for both glorifying the war and presenting the Vietcong as barbaric two-dimensional villains. Although there were no official references to the VC using Russian roulette as a war tactic, it mostly served as a symbol. The random insanity of Russian roulette is the perfect way of expressing the heated madness of America's ten year involvement in Vietnam. During the POW’s captivity the VC Captain continuously slapped the Americans when they refused to participate in the game. The Deer Hunter was aimed to make the Vietcong look ruthless and evil. Unfortunately, in reality, the opposite was true. We were the barbarians. John Kerry, the democratic Presidential Candidate in the Election of 2004, clearly demonstrated the American “method of madness” in his speech to Congress. “We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw Vietnam ravaged by American bombs and search and destroy missions…” (Kerry). We were the bad guys invading the Vietnamese homeland and were acting ruthless and evil. The position that The Deer Hunter chose to take in depicting the VC so inaccurately is understandable because of the level of racism the country as a whole had toward the Vietnamese. At home, the public just knew that our boys were dieing out there through unfair, uninformed, guerilla warfare tactics. Our soldiers were being ambushed and attacked and couldn’t even identify the enemy. All Vietnamese people became the same whether they were innocent civilians, Vietcong, or South Vietnamese troops. The image displayed of the VC in The Deer Hunter fit the image that the public sought after perfectly.
Apocalypse Now does a much better job in telling the truth about what happened in Vietnam. In the movie, Capt. Willard is assigned to find and deal with AWOL Col. Kurtz rumored to have set himself up in the Cambodian jungle as a local, lethal godhead. On his journey to the Kurtz compound, we are exposed to numerous issues of the Vietnam War through Willard’s eyes. His trip encounters countless unethical attacks on the civilians of Vietnam; it questions the qualifications of the higher military officials and shows our true racist colors toward the Vietnamese. Probably the most important aspect of Apocalypse Now was its effort in supporting the opinion of the American public. We lacked the passion and drive to win Vietnam, and hence it had been a mistake to become involved with one hand tied behind our back.
The public had a notion that America’s involvement in Vietnam was doomed from the start. Col. Kurtz had been on his second tour in ‘Nam and finally realized that that notion was correct. In perhaps one of the most memorable scenes in the film, he tells Willard a very detailed account of the day that first made him turn against the military. Kurtz was on a mission for Special Forces and his team was sent into a village to inoculate the children for polio. The unit gave the children the vaccination in their arms and left. Kurtz went back later and saw all of the little arms from the children hacked off lying on top of each other in a pile. It was then that he realized that the VC was stronger than we were. They had the strength and will power to cut off all of the arms simply because they had something to do with Americans. There was no way to win a war in which the whole country which you are occupying wants nothing more than you to go away. This scene made it clear that the war never should have been escalated to the level that it was because, in essence, we were destined to lose.
“Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.” This statement made by Captain Willard addressed another issue that was concerning the general public. By the time this movie was released the Peers Commission had already finished up its investigation of Lt. Calley and the rest of Charlie Company for their alleged attacks on My Lai village. The My Lai massacre certainly raised the public eyebrow, forcing us to take a closer look at the higher ranked military officials who were giving orders. The Peers Commission determined that Calley was the one who gave the final word to the infantry troops which allowed the massacre to occur. After the investigation was complete, Lt. Calley was convicted and the blame of the massacre was dropped on his shoulders. In fact, “…the whole war was being run by Four Star clowns” (Apocalypse Now). The previous statement made by Capt. Willard eludes that Calley wasn’t the only official misleading the troops. The question was still lingering over the heads of all Americans. How many other incidents of massacre went on unnoticed? Yes the soldiers were angry. After all, they had watch their friends get booby-trapped and ambushed by the Vietcong forces daily. Still though, this didn’t give them the right to kill innocent civilians out of resentment.
Colonel Killgore’s role in the movie serves as a symbol of an unethical military officer in power. Killgore is the quintessential higher ranking official during the war who never fails to overstep his boundaries and bring certainty to the worries of the American public. Killgore and his men are assigned to assist Willard in his mission to find Kurtz. Willard’s escort team, under the command of Killgore, encounters numerous obstacles on their way to the Nong River. These obstacles however, happened to be innocent civilian villages. Killgore led his men into various “hot areas” of the jungle in order to assist Willard on his way. The areas that were chosen, although dangerous, were chosen by Killgore based on their surfing potential. Killgore happened to be a Colonel who loved to surf, and that was priority over the logic of his assault routes. Killgore’s decisions were based on the height of waves rather than the level of enemy resistance. Killgore’s ill-advised decision making proves him to be another unqualified official in a position of power.
The story continues with Killgore’s mission, and touches upon yet another aspect of public concern. Killgore and his men arrive at the designated area, to assist Willard up stream and find very heavy enemy resilience. His advisors suggested that they leave immediately to avoid casualties but Killgore doesn’t comply. Surfing is on his mind, and the best swells in the country were right at his fingertips. Killgore precedes to call in an air strike to take down the enemy forces. In the process of calling in the bombers, he tells Capt. Willard that he“… love(s) the smell of napalm in the morning!” Killgore’s statement shows the general attitude of the military when it came to these strikes. They didn’t even care, “…bomb ‘em back to the stone age” , as long as we can surf! The American public felt that a lot of the bombing was unwarranted and sacrificed many lives and increased Vietnamese resentment toward American troops. Vietnam was a quagmire full of bombs, chemicals, and was an all out blood bath. After all, Capt. Willard said that the policy was to “…cut ‘em all down with machine guns and then give ‘em a band-aid.” The American public was very displeased with this policy because it was the complete opposite of what our nation has preached for all of the years of our existence.
Both of these films have played a major role in expressing the contemporary political issues at the time of their release. Even though they were released within a year of each other, they each respectively focused on separate issues of their time. The Deer Hunter’s main focus was to put across the message that it didn’t matter whether we won or lost the Vietnam War. The more important issue it was aiming to address was the psychological effects it had on the troops fighting and their families at home. Apocalypse Now, on the other hand, showed how the American public was deceived. Morals and ethics were thrown out the window and racism heavily influenced the decision making of the higher ranking officials during the war. Each film played a major role in opening the eyes of the American public and gave substance to their arguments when questioning the policies of our powerful central government.
Works Cited
Cimino, Michael. The Deer Hunter. 1978
Copolla, Francis Ford . Apocalypse Now. 1979.
Herring, George C. "The Meaning of Vietnam." Major Problems in American History Since 1945 .310-321.
Sutton, Mike. The Deer Hunter. 09 2002. DVD Times. 08 Nov. 2005 <http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=5053>.
