BIG JOHN

Timothy Marsh’s letter makes the point that film heroes shouldn’t be expected to be heroes in real life, but then sappily bolsters his argument with recriminations that Sylvester Stallone and John Wayne “never bothered to join Uncle Sam’s team” and never saw “the trauma of war action other than on a sound stage” (Calendar Letters, May 18).

Marsh is either ignorant or deliberately mendacious.

Far from never “bothering” to serve his country, John Wayne spent most of World War II appealing his rejection by every branch of the service (the factors: age--Wayne was almost 35 when war broke out; family--he had four children under 10; physical condition--a perforated ear drum and a badly healed shoulder injury).

I cannot speak for Stallone (whose geeky film heroics and “sensitivity” make Wayne’s worst epic look like “Gandhi”), but no one who saw Wayne’s tears at his final enlistment rejection, or who watched him dodge Viet Cong sniper fire on June 21, 1966, would ever believe he was the coward Marsh implies.

I’m a Marine veteran of Vietnam who thinks Wayne’s “Green Berets” was a dangerous distortion sprung from its creators’ misunderstanding of a specific reality. Marsh’s letter, on the other hand, deliberately twists facts to further his point and to traduce the name of a fairly good man by implication.

Has Marsh been to Danang, or even Cannes, lately? And what point would it make if he had?

JIM BEAVER

Los Angeles