To Hell and Back

Portraying a Viet Cong guerrilla in Scotti Bros.’ “The Iron Triangle,” due out in January, was difficult for debuting actor Liem Whatley. The South Vietnamese native, now 26, escaped with his mother to the United States two weeks before the fall of Saigon in 1975--after his fighter-pilot father died in combat with the North Vietnamese.

“Even though we filmed in Sri Lanka, making the movie was like living in the enemy camp during the Vietnam War,” said Whatley, a systems analyst for the Disney Co. “I became emotionally detached from my character and tried to find some personal elements I could relate to. My character was almost a carbon copy portrait of the enemy that I grew up hating in South Vietnam.”

In “Iron Triangle,” Whatley captures an American major (played by Beau Bridges) and the adversaries gradually discover each other’s views of the war. Haing Ngor, in his first role since winning an Oscar for “The Killing Fields,” portrays a Viet Cong captain who, unlike many of his men, is not consumed with hatred for Americans.

“The more I examine the Viet Cong perspective, the more I realize how corrupt the South Vietnamese government was during the war,” Whatley said. “Unlike the die-hard Bridges character, the American soldiers could never have won the war because they didn’t feel righteous in their belief in winning. The Vietnam vet was betrayed by his own government’s restrictions on fighting the war.”

Whatley finds watching movies about the war “very painful . . . I think of things that could have been. I cried during the helicopter scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’ because it was like watching my people get slaughtered all over again.

“When you live through the Tet Offensive as I did as a little child, any Vietnam movie evokes horrible images that (you) are still trying to forget.”