COMPARED TO JOHN WAYNE IN WILLIAM WELLMAN’S BLOOD ALLEY (1955), Clark Gable had it easy in Never Let Me Go (1953). Gable starred as a Moscow-based journalist married to a Russian ballerina (Gene Tierney of the sculpted face and cheekbones). As they are boarding a plane for America, he is allowed to leave, but not she. The film’s second half is a rescue operation, as exciting as it is improbable, with Gable mastering the art of navigation so he can sail from Cornwall to Moscow and bring his beloved to America, where she can enjoy the benefits of capitalism. Never Let Me Go is the kind of a film in which there may be a dead end, but not a dead Gable. Since the Soviets are vodka-swilling buffoons, Gable and his buddies dupe them into believing that Russia is responsible for every known invention of the twentieth century. The climax is a series of narrow escapes, including Gable’s. He sheds his swimsuit for a Soviet colonel’s uniform and then chucks it when detected. Tierney does the same with her tutu, and the two swim to safety. Destination: America. Where else could they go after such a wild adventure except the land that created the dream factory called Hollywood?
In Blood Alley (1955), Wayne is a prisoner of Chinese communists who try to brainwash him, little knowing that nobody brainwashes the Duke. During his incarceration, Wayne conjures up an imaginary companion, “Baby,” to whom he speaks in order to maintain his sanity. When he isn’t grousing to Baby, he’s mocking his non-English speaking captors, who smile when he calls them “lard heads” and “jerks”—a carry over from World War II movies such as Desperate Journey (1942) and Three Came Home (1949), in which American captives did the same to the Nazis and Japanese, resorting to a form of mockery that gave them a fleeting moment of superiority.
Chinese villagers secure Wayne’s release, expecting that, in return, he will ferry the entire village—179 people—three hundred miles down the Formosa Strait to Hong Kong (then part of the British Empire). The riverboat that he commands becomes a Noah’s ark, with men, women, children, animals—and Lauren Bacall. Forget her character’s name or even why she’s in the village. Supposedly, she is the daughter of a humanitarian doctor, which is more an identity tag than an explanation.
Wayne was not Wellman’s first choice. After Robert Mitchum proved intractable, Wellman sought out Gregory Peck, who was uninterested, then Humphrey Bogart, who was too expensive. Wellman then approached Wayne, a staunch anti-communist, who was looking for properties for his independent production company, Batjac. Blood Alley became a Batjac production released through Warner Bros. Perhaps if Bogart had played the captain, he and Bacall might have heated up this Cold War odyssey. But with Wayne at the helm, hammering out each syllable as if he had been coached by Bette Davis, the cycle of attraction and repulsion that he and Bacall undergo is limited to slapping each other across the face before their obligatory embrace at the end.
Since the Wayne-Bacall combination proved non-combustible, Wellman struck some sparks among the evacuees, some of them communists, who poison the food and attempt a takeover. Although no one starves, and Wayne retains control of the boat, these incidents are only momentary distractions from a script that needed periodic infusions of drama to sustain audience interest for 115 minutes. One assumes the riverboat will reach Hong Kong, and Wayne and Bacall will go into a clinch at the fadeout. But the Chinese alone deserve our sympathy. When the boat arrives in the harbor, a British naval officer looks at the passengers and remarks sadly, “Refugees.” These are, one might add, refugees without a country.
Blood Alley was another addition to the mythology of John Wayne, whose image—like that of the protagonist in a serial whose exploits become more daring with each chapter—grew more heroic with each film. Wayne’s persona was forged in the fires of World War II, from which Wayne the actor emerged as Wayne the icon, a symbol of America the invincible. Although his best films were westerns (Stagecoach, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, and especially The Searchers), movie buffs associate John Wayne, more than any other actor, with World War II. That was his war: Flying Tigers, Reunion in France, The Fighting Seabees, They Were Expendable, Back to Bataan, Sands of Iwo Jima, Flying Leathernecks, Operation Pacific, The Sea Chase, The Longest Day, In Harm’s Way. Wayne was an actor for all wars. But he never did serve in one, although he could have served during the Second World War.
Wayne was not a draft dodger. In the John Ford Papers at Indiana State University, there is a May 1942 letter from Wayne to John Ford in which Wayne beseeched Ford to get him assigned to the OSS Field Photographic Unit, which Ford headed. Wayne wanted desperately to serve: “Can you get me assigned to your outfit, and if you could, would you want me? How about the Marines? You have Army and Navy men under you.” Wayne never received a reply, perhaps because Ford realized Wayne was on the verge of becoming a major star and could serve his country best by playing a service man rather than being one. On the other hand, Ford had a perverse streak that might also account for his silence.
A survey of his war films reveals a John Wayne who served his country on land, sea, and air. Since he was never meant to be a grunt, Hollywood gave him officer status. Even before America’s entry into World War II, Wayne heard the call to arms and enlisted in the RAF in Reunion in France (1942), in which he is shot down in France and befriended by Joan Crawford, with whom he has a brief romance (insofar as two such dissimilar types could have one). But Wayne must return to beleaguered Britain and Crawford to her Resistance leader-lover, who, with her aid, will help liberate Paris, something one must take on faith. The versatile Wayne then became a mercenary in Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, defending China from Japanese aggression (Flying Tigers, 1942) before Pearl Harbor made it necessary for him to return to America and serve in various branches of the armed forces. He did not think working as a construction engineer in the Seabees was beneath his dignity (The Fighting Seabees, 1944). His heroic death at the end of the film led to his resurrection in They Were Expendable (1945) as a navy lieutenant in a PT boat squadron in the Philippines. He apparently liked the Philippines and stayed on at the rank of colonel to train guerilla units in Back to Bataan (1945). After a four-year hiatus, Wayne was back in uniform as a marine sergeant in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), which won him an Oscar nomination. He dies in this one, too. But he had died before, even underwater in two movies, Reap the Wild Wind (1942) and Wake of the Red Witch (1948), in which he lost to a giant squid.
Wayne remained under water, this time as a submarine commander in Operation Pacific (1951), and emerged in The Sea Chase (1955) as a German steamboat captain, sans accent, who despised Hitler. According to the New York Times (11 June 1955), Wayne played the part “as though he was heading a herd of cattle up the old Chisholm Road.” After spending some time in the post-bellum West, where he made his greatest film, The Searchers (1956), and the equally memorable The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Wayne inserted himself into history as Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin H. Vandervoort in The Longest Day (1962). Unlike most of Wayne’s other characters, Vandervoort is a historical figure. He commanded the 2nd battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry of the 82nd Airborne Division during the Normandy invasion. Vandervoort was twenty-seven in 1944; when Wayne played him, the actor was fifty-five. And yet the age difference did not matter. To see John Wayne hobbling around with a broken ankle—an injury Vandervoort sustained during the Normandy landing—is to see the embodiment of the fighting spirit that led to an allied victory.
In his end was his beginning. Wayne’s last World War II film, In Harm’s Way (1965), is a recap of the conflict, beginning just before Pearl Harbor and lasting to the war’s end. John Wayne saw it all—on sound stages and on location. Yet it always seemed he was in the thick of it, in both the European and Pacific theaters. World War II was Wayne’s war, but he would have one more: Vietnam.
Wayne bypassed Korea, with Blood Alley as a substitute that seemed to be set in the early 1950s—or so Lauren Bacall’s wardrobe suggested. Yet no other Hollywood star was so identified with anti-communism as John Wayne. In fact, Stalin sent two hit men disguised as FBI agents to assassinate him. The FBI learned of the plot and intervened, although one suspects the Soviets would have bungled the job as badly as the German saboteurs did in 1942, when they landed by submarine on Long Island and Florida, intending to blow up America. Instead, they were sentenced to death or, in two cases, imprisonment.
In 1944, three years before HUAC began holding hearings, the Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals was formed. Its members included, among others, the organization’s first president, director Sam Wood, Walt Disney, Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Hedda Hopper, Adolphe Menjou—and John Wayne, who became president after Wood died of a heart attack in 1949. The purpose of the alliance, as one member put it metaphorically, was to “turn off the faucets which dripped red water into film scripts.” When producer Walter Wanger assumed the chair of the Los Angeles division of Crusade for Freedom in September 1950, Wayne sent him a letter of congratulations, noting that six years earlier Wanger had accused the alliance of making “unsupported charges of Communism in the motion picture industry.” In September 1950, the Korean War and atomic espionage vied for headlines. Without lording it over Wanger, Wayne wrote, “We didn’t make ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Red’ synonymous—the Communists, their fellow travelers and their dupes did that damaging job. We foresaw this result and tried to persuade our fellow workers of the need for cleaning our own house.” Wanger was now willing to let bygones be bygones.
At 10:35 am, 21 March 1951, Larry Parks, Oscar-nominated for his brilliant impersonation of Al Jolson in The Jolson Story (1946), testified before HUAC that he had been a member of the Communist Party, but he initially declined to name names. By 4:00 pm, the interrogation had so worn him down that he named twelve, including Anne Revere, Gale Sondergaard, Karen Morley, Lee J. Cobb, Dorothy Tree, and Morris Carnovsky. At a meeting of the alliance the next day, Wayne criticized Parks for waiting so long before admitting that he had once been a party member. That evening, Wayne made his and the alliance’s position clear: “Let no one say that a Communist can be tolerated in American society and particularly in our industry.” Sadly, that included Larry Parks, whose film career was virtually over, despite his recanting and soul bearing. He made two more films, both British productions: Tiger by the Tail (1955) and Freud: The Secret Passion (1962). Parks died of a heart attack in 1975. He was sixty years old.
If Wayne could not be a member of HUAC, he could at least play a HUAC investigator in Big Jim McLain (1952), which he co-produced. The lowbrow title matched the script, which had Wayne as the title character and his buddy (James Arness) investigating a communist cell in pre-statehood Hawaii. That much was at least plausible. HUAC had amassed enough evidence about communists in Hawaii to hold hearings there in 1950. Seventy subpoenas were issued. Thirty-nine of the subpoenaed, dubbed “the reluctant thirty-nine,” refused to testify and were cited for contempt. But unlike the Hollywood Ten, who went to jail for standing on their First—not Fifth—Amendment rights, the reluctant thirty-nine never served time. The following year, the FBI rounded up seven prominent Hawaiian communists. They were convicted of conspiring to overthrow the territorial government, but escaped imprisonment when the convictions were overturned. If the script had dealt with some of the thirty-nine, or even the seven, which included a former teacher and a newspaper editor, Big Jim McLain might have had some credibility. But the facts were fictionalized, and the communists, present and past, were portrayed as either unreconstructed Stalinists or repentant sinners.
Except for a secretary (Nancy Olson), who provides the love interest, and a rooming house owner (Veda Ann Borg), who provides some sex, everyone else is either a present or former communist. The latter admit the error of their ways as if they were in a confessional seeking absolution. One former member describes communism as “a vast conspiracy to enslave the common man.” The communists themselves are a mix of professionals (a commissar in a white suit, a bacteriologist, a psychiatrist), labor leaders and their henchmen, and locals representing “the common man,” who sit passively when informed they are expendable, and that, if apprehended, they should plead the Fifth Amendment. The cell has more important work to do paralyzing the shipping industry by staging a strike and causing an epidemic. Except for the epidemic, the scenario was not farfetched. Hawaiian communists were known for fomenting labor unrest. In the film, after the traitors are apprehended, two get off by taking the Fifth. Their rights are not questioned. Wayne glowers, but a constitutional right is upheld. A film can be jingoistic without being erroneous, but Big Jim McLain errs in its zealousness. HUAC’s ostensible position, announced at the outset—that anyone who is a communist after 1945 is essentially a traitor—is incorrect. In 1952, the Communist Party had not been outlawed, and it never would be. The film’s assertion was wishful thinking on the part of the star and co-producer.
Wayne’s first Cold War movie should have been the Howard Hughes production Jet Pilot, which was finished in 1951 but not released until 1957. The delay had nothing to do with Jet Pilot’s mediocrity (it was atrocious), but with Hughes’s determination to make it the successor to his World War I aviation epic, Hell’s Angels (1930). Hughes insisted on filming Jet Pilot in color, so that the yonder is not wild but serenely blue, giving the aerial sequences a majesty that may please the eye but tranquillize the mind. The film’s release coincided with the closing of RKO, the first of the major studios to shut its doors owing to Hughes’s mismanagement. In fact, Jet Pilot was released under the auspices of Universal-International, as were all of RKO’s final productions.
By 1957, the stars, John Wayne and Janet Leigh, did not look as they had six years earlier. Wayne’s face had become craggier, and Leigh was no longer a fresh-faced ingénue. Hughes, who was attracted to big-bosomed women, had Leigh wear what Amanda in The Glass Menagerie calls “gay deceivers” (“falsies,” in the vernacular) that made her breasts look like torpedoes. (Hughes did the same with Janis Carter in Flying Leathernecks [1951]). Director Josef von Sternberg showed his indifference to the disjointed script by not having Leigh, playing a Soviet pilot, use a Russian accent. Wayne played an air force colonel attracted to Leigh, supposedly a defector from the Soviet Union, who is as good an aviator as he. That should have tipped him off that she is a spy and out to recruit him. He falls in love with her, and she falls in love with him, as well as haute couture, sirloin steak, and champagne in romantic Palm Springs. Since a charge of espionage would result in her imprisonment, followed by deportation, the pair flies off to the Soviet Union, where it will be his turn to do the spying. Leigh, now in her Soviet uniform and speaking perfect English, is torn between Mother Russia and John Wayne. Naturally, she chooses the latter, along with haute couture, sirloin steak, and champagne.
Wayne and Leigh were two immovable objects, neither being an irresistible force. There was more sensuousness in the aerial photography, which, as Andrew Sarris observed, had the planes doing what their pilots do not, so that “the film soars in an ecstatic flight of speed, grace, and color”—all of which are lacking in the performances.
In Vietnam, Wayne found a war that was as meaningful to him as World War II, but in a different and less global way. The enemy was no less pernicious, and the stakes were just as high—or so he thought. Wayne may have personified America—a global commodity epitomizing the nation’s values—but in the mid-1960s, America also had a growing involvement in Vietnam. It was another war, with the North Vietnamese as the oppressors, and the South Vietnamese as the oppressed. In short, it was Korea, part 2.
Hollywood paid little attention to Vietnam at the time of the first French Indochina War (1946–54), the prelude to America’s involvement in what was originally a colony of French Indo-China, which also included Laos and Cambodia. It was a war of liberation waged by the Viet Minh under Ho-Chi-Minh to free Vietnam from French rule. In 1952, the Korean War was dragging on, and there were enough Korean War films in the pipeline to satisfy audiences interested in America’s attempt to prevent South Korea from being absorbed by the communist North. Vietnam seemed remote at the time. The United States was not involved, except for covert military aid to the French. Yet the war there seemed topical enough for A Yank in Indo-China (1952), a quickie that resembled a World War II movie except in one detail: an enemy that denounced Americans as “capitalistic imperialists.” A Yank in Indo-China was set during a war that was already in progress, but little known to early 1950s audiences who, if they grooved on war movies, munched their popcorn while watching Mission over Korea and Fixed Bayonets. For World War II buffs, there was John Wayne in Operation Pacific, taking out Japanese and wooing back his ex-wife, thus satisfying the high testosterone crowd and the distaff side.
Yanks tended to be around whenever there was war: in Britain (A Yank in the RAF), in North Africa (A Yank in Libya), in Korea (A Yank in Korea), and now in the former Indochina. The Yanks, played by John Archer and Douglas Dick, are an entrepreneurial duo running a cargo operation transporting supplies to French troops and Vietnamese loyalists. Considering themselves American nationals and thus unaffected by the present war, they nonetheless find themselves caught up in it when they are forced to fly ammunition to a communist outpost. Yank then takes on the features of a Saturday matinee serial, as the group—including two women, one of whom is pregnant, and a traumatized geologist—manages to outwit its captors. The group then makes its way to Hanoi, where the women and the geologist are left with the French before the others go off to destroy the communist hideout, which looks like Vultura’s cave in the serial Nyoka and the Lost Secrets of Hippocrates (1942). A Yank in Indo-China arrived too early to alert Americans to a war that was a decade away from becoming theirs. The best the screenwriters could do was a Yellow Peril replay, with the Chinese communists behaving as barbarically as the Japanese in World War II movies, shooting anyone who defies them and ignoring the needs of a woman in labor. It is also the kind of film in which a Vietnamese orphan is so endearing (he even helps deliver the woman’s baby) that you pray he will survive (he doesn’t). While some films can be remade, A Yank in Indo-China is not one of them. It is a relic of a time when France was fighting its war in Indochina, and the United States fighting its own in Korea. And who would have thought that, with American aid, the French would lose—or that, in 1975, America would, too, and Saigon would undergo a name change and become Ho Chi Minh City? By February 1954, “[T]he United States was paying a third of French costs, shipping arms to Indochina and providing two hundred U.S. Air Force technicians.” It was money spent on a dubious cause. Three months later, on 7 May, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu fell to the communists after a fifty-seven day siege, marking the end of Vietnam as a French colony. Vietnam was partitioned into North and South at the seventeenth parallel. Now it was up to America to keep Laos and Cambodia out of the communist orbit. Otherwise, who knows? “Tomorrow the world,” as Hitler used to say.
By 1963, there were fifteen thousand “military advisors” in Vietnam. Hollywood still ignored the possibility of a war in Southeast Asia. America was still recovering from the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the end of Camelot. Vietnam was not a topic that appealed to the major studios. Although A Yank in Indo-China came out under the Columbia Pictures trademark, Columbia was only the distributor. Yank was a production of Esskay Pictures, which released through Columbia. Similarly, A Yank in Viet-Nam—released in early 1964 through Allied Artists, the former Poverty Row studio, Monogram—brought the war in Southeast Asia into the theaters. This Yank was actually filmed in South Vietnam, with Vietnamese and Filipino actors and an authenticity that was lacking in A Yank in Indo-China. Marshall Thompson, who, in his early days at MGM, was a male ingénue, was both star and director, playing a marine pilot captured by the Viet Cong, then rescued by a band of guerillas led by a young woman with whom he falls in love. Like the previous Yanks, here love and survival take precedence over fact. And like the Seventh Cavalry in a western, paratroopers drop down like gods from the machine to rescue the few survivors. A Yank in Viet-Nam left no doubt in anyone’s mind that a war being waged in Vietnam involved Americans. By the time Yank premiered in February 1964, there had been 118 American casualties, with more to come.
By 1965, the American presence in Vietnam had reached 170,000; by the end of 1966, it would be almost 400,000. In June 1966, Wayne visited Vietnam as part of a USO-sponsored tour. Looking more like a construction worker than a movie star, he awed the troops, who were given a rare glimpse of John Wayne without his hairpiece. Wayne moved easily among the men, shaking hands and signing autographs with a pen that also wrote under water. Before going to Vietnam, he had read Robin Moore’s bestseller, The Green Berets (1965), which introduced readers to the army’s special operations unit known for its distinctive brimless cap and specialty in unconventional warfare. Despite its factual basis, The Green Berets was published as a novel. The United States special forces did not welcome Moore’s proposal of a fact-based account of the Green Berets’ activities in Vietnam. Attorney General Robert Kennedy intervened, enabling Moore to join the unit as a civilian. The army made an additional demand that Moore undergo training, even though he was then thirty-seven. Moore agreed, survived the ordeal, went to Vietnam, and amassed enough material for a work of non-fiction. What Moore uncovered was considered so controversial that The Green Berets had to be marketed as a novel, although in no way did it condemn America for intervening in a civil war.
Moore’s novel and the Vietnam tour convinced Wayne that audiences needed a movie justifying American involvement in Southeast Asia. That movie would be The Green Berets (1968), inspired by, rather than adapted from, Moore’s novel. “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” the most popular song of 1966, which honored the “fighting soldiers from the sky, / fearless men who jump and die,” thrilled Wayne so much that he had a choral version sung over the opening credits. The somber ballad is both a tribute and a eulogy, ending on a note of death and renewal. In the last two stanzas, the wife of a Green Beret becomes a widow, and the balladeer, in the voice of her dead husband, urges her to make certain that their son follows in his father’s footsteps and wins his own green beret. That stanza inspired the last scene in the film, in which Wayne places the green cap on the head of a Vietnamese orphan.
When other studios balked at making The Green Berets, Wayne stepped in. The film would be a Batjac production released, like Blood Alley, through Warner Bros. However, for Wayne to get the army’s cooperation—which included equipment, uniforms, and location shooting at Fort Benning, Georgia——Moore could not be involved with the screenplay, which was the work of James Lee Barrett, a former marine. Barrett also coauthored the screenplay of The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), in which Wayne played the Roman centurion at the crucifixion who proclaimed, “Truly this man was the son of God.”
The Green Berets was in every sense a John Wayne film. Wayne codirected it; his son Michael produced it; his production company made it. Winton C. Hoch, his favorite cinematographer (Three Godfathers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, Jet Pilot) shot it. Wayne played Colonel Mike Kirby, a name intended to conjure up his other Kirbys (Captain Kirby York in Fort Apache, Lieutenant Colonel Kirby Yorke in Rio Grande). The supporting cast included Bruce Cabot, who first worked with Wayne in In Harm’s Way and went on to appear in other Wayne films such as The War Wagon, Hellfighters, Chisum, and Big Jake. The cast also included Wayne’s son Patrick, who had appeared with his father in Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, Donovan’s Reef, and McClintock! The film editor was Otho Lovering, who had cut other Wayne films, such as Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Donovan’s Reef, and McClintock! Dave Grayson was the makeup artist. He had also done Wayne’s makeup in In Harm’s Way and The War Wagon. Wayne was so pleased with the look that Grayson created for him in The Green Berets (actually, his face had the sheen of waxen fruit) that Grayson continued in that capacity for most of the actor’s last films: Chisum, Big Jake, The Cowboys, Cahill, U. S. Marshal, McQ, Brannigan, Rooster Cogburn, and his final screen appearance, The Shootist. The Green Berets was a family gathering, with the Duke at the head of the table.
To use the current designation, The Green Berets is “a film by John Wayne.” There was no point of view but Wayne’s and, by extension, America’s. The movie opens with a press conference at which the Green Berets present themselves as a bi- and tri-lingual elite corps, color blind and ready to answer even the most probing questions—one of which concerns American support for a country unable to draft a constitution. The answer is simple—and simplistic: It took the United States six years after the end of the Revolutionary War in 1781 to come up with a constitution acceptable to the thirteen original colonies. (It also took another year before the Constitution was ratified in 1788, a fact that was not mentioned, perhaps because of information overload.) Of course, constitutions are not written overnight, but the difference between Vietnam and the United States is that during most of the Revolutionary War, the colonies had the Articles of Confederation. The analogy is false. A confederation of thirteen states and a country divided at the seventeenth parallel are not similar. The American Revolution was a war of self-determination, the prelude to which was a rationale for severing bonds with the mother country, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The Vietnam War was a civil war that America entered in order to halt the spread of communism. The circumstances leading to the drafting of the Constitution grew out of the realization that even a revision of the Articles of Confederation would not serve the needs of a new nation, which would no longer be a confederation but a federation. A wholly unique document was the answer, and the United States Constitution was the result.
Moreover, there was a Vietnamese constitution, written in 1946 and amended after Vietnam was free of French rule. The 1946 constitution only applied to the communist-controlled part of Vietnam, yet it did guarantee, at least nominally, three of the five freedoms guaranteed in the US Constitution’s First Amendment (speech, press, assembly). The 1946 constitution was replaced in 1959 by an explicitly communist one intended for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. On paper, the new constitution mandated a tripartite form of government (executive, legislative, judicial), so South Vietnam could not claim that it had no template from which to work. It could have selected the more democratically representative parts of both texts. And one would think that with such well-educated Green Berets around to help, this could easily have been done. The lack of a constitution was not the issue. One could have been cobbled together and held up as the first stage in the democratization of Vietnam. But that would not happen until the defeat of the communist North, which never occurred. Vietnam was a fiasco. Two years after the 1973 armistice, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, and Americans awakened to the realization that they had lost a war.
But in 1968, the war had not been lost. Audiences had to be convinced that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, Laos and Cambodia would be next. And who better to preach the gospel of containment than John Wayne, champion of everything American? Wayne argued in 1971 that westward expansion was justified because “great numbers of people . . . needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.” Such a mindset makes rational discourse difficult, if not impossible. In the film, when the reporter for an anti-war newspaper (David Janssen) argues that the Vietnamese are engaged in a civil war, another Beret holds up weapons made in China, the Soviet Union, and the former Czechoslovakia, showing that that they were manufactured in communist countries and intended for use by the North Vietnamese. And when the reporter persists, Wayne—it is impossible to think of him as Col. Mike Kirby—asks if he has ever been to Southeast Asia. When the reporter replies in the negative, Wayne grunts and walks away. One knows that it is only a matter of time before the reporter sees the light and becomes so convinced of the need for American involvement that he stays on rather than return to his former job.
The Green Berets, like many combat films, has a trickle of a plot that fancies itself an ocean, but which, if anything, terminates in a puddle. Amid explosions and falling bodies, one is left wondering which Berets will live and which will die—and how. Certainly not the boyish Sergeant Petersen (Jim Hutton), who alone has a character arc. Once Hamchunk, a Vietnamese orphan who speaks adequate English (he was taught by missionaries, as the cliché goes), attaches himself to Petersen, they become inseparable, with Hamchunk regarding the sergeant as both a friend and a father, and Petersen playing big brother to the orphan. Unfortunately, Petersen does not survive. Not only do the North Vietnamese murder, behead, rape, torture, and infiltrate; they also lay booby traps such as a spike-studded bed. When someone sets off the well-camouflaged trap, it springs up, impaling the victim. Petersen is the last Beret one expects to be impaled, but he is.
No matter how hard viewers gird themselves against this 142-minute onslaught of propaganda, they might find themselves shedding a tear at the end. When the helicopters set down after a mission that used a woman as bait to kidnap an elusive North Vietnamese general (the incident, taken from Moore’s novel, is the only exciting part of the film), Hamchunk runs from one helicopter to the other, crying out, “Petersen!” Wayne, his face stoically immobile, finally tells the boy the truth, omitting the grisly details. When Hamchunk asks what will become of him, Wayne implies that all manner of things will be well. “You’re what this is all about, Green Beret,” he says, placing Petersen’s cap on the boy’s head. One can imagine a sequel with Hamchunk—now known as Mike Kirby Jr.—winning his green beret in America’s latest war of intervention.