A Soldier’s Story

There have been countless movies made about the Vietnam conflict duing the past 30 years, among them Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning “Platoon,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”

But, according to Terry George, director of a new Vietnam drama for HBO, the previous films have “all been about what I call five American guys having a hard time in the jungle.”

“A Bright Shining Lie,” which premieres Saturday, tells more of the history of U.S. involvement as seen through the exploits of John Paul Van, whose view of the war changed dramatically as he jumped from being a military advisor to a gung-ho battlefield leader.

“The political journey was as important to me as Vann’s journey because they ran parallel and kind of overlapped and crisscrossed each other, both in their emotion and their chronology,” George says. “That is what I liked about it. It’s a history lesson, to some degree, without the polemic.”

Often described as “America’s Lawrence of Arabia,” the controversial Vann was the subject of Neil Sheehan’s 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.”

Bill Paxton stars as Vann in HBO’s adaptation of the best-seller. The cast also includes Amy Madigan, Donal Logue, Eric Bogosian and Harve Presnell.

“He epitomized the spirit of America going into the war,” Paxton says of Vann, who died in 1972 in a helicopter crash, shortly after helping South Vietnamese soldiers fight off a communist offensive in the town of Kontum.

Vann believed he was invincible, Paxton says. “[He felt] we stopped imperialism and fascism and were going to be the prevailers of democracy and free enterprise [in Vietnam]--which was kind of a naive ideology,” the actor says. “In a way, he went over there with the best of intentions for this country, but by the end, he was going to win the war any way he could.”

A fearless fighter and a renegade, Lt. Col. Vann first came to Vietnam in 1962 as a U.S. military advisor to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Soon, Vann realized what he was seeing was a sham--the South Vietnamese army was falsifying battle reports and other information to gain U.S. support. Resigning from the Army in 1963, he returned to Vietnam in 1965 as part of the State Department’s Civilian Aid Program. As the fighting escalated, Vann was made a civilian deputy and eventually was given the unprecedented designation of general.

George (“Some Mother’s Son,” “In the Name of the Father”) says he was drawn to directing “Bright Shining Lie” because he encountered men of similar temperament to Vann in his wartorn homeland of Northern Ireland.

“What I mean by that is, Vann is a warrior,” George explains. “He came from an ancient tradition and caste that held itself outside of civilian society. These were warriors who were willing to lay down their lives for the cause that they subscribe to. They practice an art and craft of warfare that they were determined about and very good at. They had the kind of charisma that kind of separated them from other people you meet.”

The warrior, George says, has always fascinated him. “You meet characters in Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland among the IRA and the loyalists and the British Army who jump out like that. Vann, for me, was the epitome of that. He was a warrior who found himself the perfect war.”

Vietnam, George says, was “dripping with sensuality and danger and intrigue. He knew from the strength that he had within himself that this was the place he was going to shine. That here finally was his right moment in history.”

Paxton feels now is a good time to reexamine the Vietnam War. “I think most Americans to this day really don’t understand how we got involved over there, why we stayed and why we left when we did.”

As a teen-ager, Paxton says, he was against the war. “I was 14 in ’69 and I wanted to grow my hair out, ride my Honda motorcycle and listen to Jimi Hendrix,” he recalls. “My dad and my older brother, Bob, were always arguing about the Vietnam War. It seemed like it was a nightly occurrence over the evening meal. I was caught in the middle of it.”

The actor feels he got a sense of what it must have been like to have been thrust into the Vietnam conflict when, not long after signing on to the project, he reported for work in Thailand.

“All of a sudden, I was in an old vintage helicopter, flying over rice paddies,” he says. “I haven’t spent a lot of time in the Orient, either, and totally talk about culture shock. I wasn’t ready for the heat. I can just only imagine the hardship of fighting in a war like that and humping a 70-pound pack and being some kid from the Bronx, shooting an enemy that you couldn’t see and you couldn’t really tell apart from the people you were supposed to be protecting.”

In “Bright Shining Lie,” George says, he tried to re-create events that have become icons of the Vietnam War: “The Buddhist monk setting himself on fire, the young girl being napalmed in the village and the siege of the American embassy. All of the pictures that are scorched in our brain. We set out to remind people again and to acquaint a whole new generation who didn’t live through this of the impact of the war--to walk the audience through the emotional journey.”

“A Bright Shining Lie” premieres Saturday at 9 p.m. on HBO.