The Green Berets

A society of Americans that has watched hour-long Walt Disney TV programs about how he puts together the plastic rhinos in the jungle waters of Disneyland, a society that rips through the latest issues of Playboy and Esquire to read about the technical aparatus behind the gimmicks in the James Bond movies, a society that fills its newsstands with dozens of pulp magazines about the off-screen identities of its on-screen stars--these are pretty sophisticated movie-watchers.

They know that movie-makers with their stuntmen, stage sets, and big budgets can make you think and feel what they want you to think and feel (not this kid; he's no fool!).

The American movie-watcher is occasionally duped by hand-held camera into feeling that what he is watching is reality. But those who see a slick Hollywood color job directed and lead-roled by John Wayne know different. About every fifth person walking out of The Green Berets was giving a detailed description to his friends about how it was filmed in Georgia, how it cost $3,000,000, and how it would've cost lost more if the army hadn't lent them most of the stuff.

Another thing: this crowd's seen zillions of war movies, some of them many times on late night television and in the contiguous theatres on Washington St. They know the war movie formula. And when director John Wayne departs from it to throw in a little (or, more frequently, a lot of) anti-liberal propoganda, the war movie vets know they're getting a sermon. Not that they don't like the message; they probably groove on it a whole lot.

What terrifies the liberals (and I can't help laughing at all of us) is that John Wayne's perfectly integrated army (it looked like exactly 11% of his soldiers were black) speaks with the same cautious rhetoric and addresses itself to its liberal opponents with the same social patience that liberals have long considered to be their own most powerful weapon.

I don't think the Green Berets is an extraordinarily dangerous political movie because although it comes as close as it ever could to reaching cautious liberal types, it still doesn't make it. The average man has been unusually well warned about this movie already. And those touching scenes of friendly, tough Green Berets helping oppressed South Vietnamese children and then leading them by the hand into the sunset are nothing that the tough realistic average mind equates with reality.

Furthermore, anyone who reads the Record-American and still isn't pro-war won't have his head turned by something from Hollywood. When Americans speak of something as being "like in the movies" they are referring to fantasy.

The film is based on a book of the same name, which is a curious anti-war document. Robin Moore wrote it purporting to show what a big job the heroic Green Berets were doing in Vietnam. At the time of his writing the government was falsely insisting we had only 12,000 technical advisors in Vietnam. In the book, Green Berets lead patrols, scorn their corrupt Vietnamese allies, torture prisoners as the first step in interrogation, chase the enemy across the border into Laos, and even parachute an exclusively American special mission into North Vietnam--acts all that have denied by Washington.

The movie updates the book to present policies, which give the soldiers more freedom of action such as torturing a Vietcong infiltrator because he's carrying the cigarette lighter of a dead Green Beret.

Sgt. Barry Sadler's song, "The Green Berets," which is sung at both the beginning and the end of the film, is a fight song for those who are already convinced. Just like the Columbia slogan, "Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers," it's good for inner group morale, but doesn't win any converts.

Worse, there isn't even much entertainment unless you're radical enough to want victory by one side or the other. The good guys and the bad guys alternately butcher each other bloodily until John Wayne is practically the only survivor. This could be a happy or a sad ending depending on how you choose to think.