Vietnam Memories

Re “Modern Art as National Healing” (by Christopher Knight, April 16):

On July Fourth weekend 1987, I was in Washington working on HBO’s “Welcome Home” Vietnam veterans music special. We had brought Martha Raye to town for the show and, on a whim, I called her and asked if she’d like to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at night. That’s when I learned she’d never been there.

There were thousands of Vietnam vets in town for the concert, and many gathered at the memorial. It was just after dark when Col. Maggie and I walked down the path toward the Wall, and we could hear guys whispering, “It’s her. It’s Maggie.” In seconds, she was surrounded by men reacting as though they’d just found their long-lost favorite aunt.

After a while, Maggie noticed a vet kneeling at the wall, sobbing. She excused herself, walked over, knelt beside him, and put her arms around the guy, holding him as he cried for his lost friends, the way she’d held hundreds of others in her nine years of visiting Vietnam, often for months at a time. For Maggie, it was the most natural thing to do. The moment registered with everyone who was there to see it. It still brings tears and chills when I recall it.

Magical, powerful, healing moments like that don’t happen in front of monuments to the glory of war.

MICHAEL HIRSH

Valley Glen

*

Unlike Kenneth Turan, I was in Vietnam (“The Horror, the Madness, the Movies,” April 16). He should have reexamined some of those films he decided against for fear of “cinematic shell shock” and totally dispensed with “Apocalypse Now,” the most wretchedly spectacular farce ever perpetrated on an ignorant and blindly accepting filmgoing public.

To an entire generation this film stands as a portrait of the Way It Was in Vietnam. It’s not; it’s a fever-dream reinterpretation of a hundred-year-old Joseph Conrad novel, placed in that country by a wildly imaginative filmmaker who had never set foot there. It’s by no stretch a historical document, yet it continues to be quoted and studied, even at university level. This amazes me.

Some of the films Turan decided against are magnitudes more real, and hence more germane, specifically “Full Metal Jacket,” “84 Charlie MoPic” and “Casualties of War.” To other vets, other films will probably speak more clearly, depending on what they went through. Hell is ever so much more effective when it’s personalized.

MICHAEL McCONNOHIE

Burbank

*

The ultimate Vietnam flick could only be a faithful adaptation of Michael Herr’s “Dispatches.” Surely there has been quite an array of extraordinary histories and reminiscences of the war, but none begins to compare with Herr’s astounding accomplishment. Either Oliver Stone or Terrence Malick could do it justice.

Just add on this closing scene: of that movie screen (“The Green Berets”) getting ripped to shreds in a hail of M-16 bullets, setting off a surreal “mad minute” out along the base perimeter that cascades into total, insane destruction--a lurid tip of the hat to Francis Ford Coppola and his famous million-dollar closing sequence, which never made it into “Apocalypse Now.”

JOHN CRANDELL

Westwood

*

Being a product of the Vietnam War and having spent three years active in the Army, I have somewhat of a different perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed most of the movies Turan mentions, but not because they were accurate. “Apocalypse Now” is one of my favorites because it is entertaining and a spectacle, but it is certainly not accurate historically. It is based on the book “Heart of Darkness,” which was actually about the Belgian Congo in Africa.

The war was not glamorous nor was it a bunch of drugged-out soldiers running around laying waste to the populace and landscape.

JOHN MORAN

North Hollywood

*

“Go Tell the Spartans” is a magnificent portrayal of the futility of that disastrous war and belongs on any list of films purporting to expose the conflicted experiences of Vietnam.

Also, for those admirers of Burt Lancaster, it presents the great man at his best.

HENRY G. PETROW

Atascadero

*

Re “Revisiting Front Lines in a TV War” (by Elizabeth Jensen, April 16):

That reporters’ activities were severely restricted after the Vietnam War should come as no surprise. Those of us who were injured or killed during the latter stages of the war could virtually count on our pain being shown to our loved ones on television before they were officially notified by the Department of Defense. We had no assurance of the security of any valid operation. We were also drawn into activities by the press that were unconscionably dangerous because not to participate meant a firestorm of trouble brought by a press corps without morals.

No wonder and good for him that Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf cut them off. I applaud that legacy.

LEONARD J. LOOMIS

Thousand Oaks

*

Like my 18-year-old partner in DoD Journalism School, the late Gus Hasford, I served a tour in Vietnam as a military journalist: Gus for 13 months in the Marines; myself for 10 months in the Army before I was wounded. Both Gus and I escorted “real” journalists like Dan Rather and company out to the boonies in an attempt to “get the story.” They chose stories from the ritual of war in the Vietnam “theater of operations” that made them famous and network executives successful.

The concrete difference between what they “reported” and Gus’ “Full Metal Jacket” is “point of view”: an edited televised view and a Vietnam veteran’s view of an identical war experience. I know Gus’ lived version to be absolute, artistic truth.

EVAN THOMAS

Pasadena

*

You would think a female reporter would have noticed that there were also female reporters who covered the war in Vietnam. Liz Trotta of NBC and Marlene Sanders of ABC were both there, along with more than 100 others writing for print media.

VIRGINIA ELWOOD-AKERS

Sylmar

*

I was thoroughly glued to the set of articles concerning Vietnam. Thank you for helping people to remember that historical times should be learned from and not forgotten.

REX A. DOMINGUEZ

Los Angeles