Rocking his world

I felt a little sadness with “The End of a Fade for Black” and want to relate how one of Shane Black’s movies actually helped a person.

My father did two tours in Vietnam. The movie “Platoon” helped me understand my father’s first tour. But it was “Lethal Weapon” that really put the puzzle together.

I distinctly remember the night I saw it.

Mel Gibson was waking up at a trailer on the beach. “I’d love to live there,” I thought. Then I let reality sink back in: “No one really lives like that at the beach; not in L.A., not even Rockford.”

I’d surfed up and down the coast. I knew the beaches, knew the parking lots. The next two scenes were good action-comedy routines. But I remember thinking that Gibson’s character was harsh, obviously on edge. He had a self-destructive vein to him, which I could relate to. In one scene, he dares one of the bad guys to shoot him. “Go ahead!” he yells.

A quiet scene started and Gibson and Danny Glover were talking in a police parking garage. I was starting to get into the movie, to lose myself and relax. But then it hit.

“The Phoenix Group,” Glover’s character says. “Special ops, CIA-trained, assassinations.”

Mel says, “Yes.”

Everything seemed to freeze.

I knew the name Phoenix Group. I’d heard it over the years in our house. We’d lived in Washington, D.C., for six months before my dad did his second tour in Vietnam. I was very young, but I remembered.

When my dad came back from ‘Nam for the second time, his eyes had the far-away glaze, even when his blue eyes were looking right at you, even when he was smiling, even when he was yelling and that vein bulged in his forehead.

For a long moment, I felt as though the entire world, the entire theater with its new seats and smell of stale popcorn and beer, was drifting slowly around me.

I remembered when my older brother Mike took a swing at my dad. Mike was a teenager, about 17 or so. My dad caught the punch with his palm and twisted my brother’s arm behind his back, holding him there, right out of an action flick, just like a Chuck Norris or a Bruce Lee movie.

Then my dad whispered to Mike, “Just don’t. Seriously. Please ... don’t.”

I was still gazing at the screen. “It’s over,” Glover was saying, “the war, it’s over, you know?”

I finally had the answers to all my unvoiced questions, those loud noises that go unheard after a family member comes home from war. I finally -- partially, only partially -- knew the reason why. But I just couldn’t say.

T. Dunn

Santa Monica