Opinion: Out here due process is a bullet
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As a special AV extra to Max Boot’s column today about the media and the war in Iraq, you might want to bump up The Green Berets in your NetFlix queue. This is not a movie recommendation—The Green Berets is deservedly viewed as one of Duke Wayne’s poorest efforts, and even the presence of George ‘Mr. Sulu’ Takei and Jack Soo of TV’s Barney Miller can’t change that—but a reminder of how bracing, and how long-lived, the stab-in-the-back theory of war coverage really is. As far back as 1968, it was enough to hang an entire picture on.
I caught a few minutes of the film on TV the other day, an early scene wherein a group of skeptical reporters receive a lecture from Aldo Ray on Russian and Chinese involvement in Vietnam. The ever-angry Ray does a slow burn as the reporters, led by the pusillanimous David Janssen, grill him with strawman versions of the era’s complaints about the war effort, before barking back with a veteran’s angry authority. That clip isn’t available online, but you can get the same effect from this scene, in which Mr. Sulu slaps a VC spy and Janssen launches into a lecture about due process and brutality that would make any red-blooded American seethe.
It’s part of the news game that people who become the subject of coverage usually grow to hate the media, but in military matters, for reasons that are easily understood, the effect increases exponentially. The Green Berets participates in that sense of injustice, and if there is an earlier example of such a critique in American popular culture, I don’t know about it. Where the Duke differs from contemporary war supporters is that he depicts reporters as redeemable (by the end of the film Janssen has jumped in with the team for the big win), while the ‘Fifth Column’ crowd today is far more extreme in denouncing journalists as traitors, spies, etc. It’s ironic that the movie came out less than half a year after what is arguably the great botched media story of the Vietnam War—the depiction of the Tet Offensive as a defeat for the U.S. effort—but failed to make a dent in public perceptions at the time. The larger narrative of unpatriotic reporters undermining the armed services, on the other hand, remains potent and moving to many Americans, and it’s worth taking seriously even if you think (as I do) that it’s mostly wrong.
Related: SSGT Barry Sadler sings the ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’