I'm of the post-Vietnam generation, who grew up watching the movies that were made in the 1980s (The Deerhunter just scraping in for continuity's sake) as America came to terms with what it had been through, or more accurately, what it had done. The sense of alienation portrayed in these films was inevitably seductive to an adolescent, quite apart form any sense of empathy one might feel for a drafted teenager. So I watched Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now et al, and perhaps inevitably, subconsciously identified with the Americans.
I can't watch them any more. After several trips to peacetime Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, through the Tunnels of Cu Chi, along the DMZ and into the Killing Fields, those films make me so angry that I have to switch them off. It's the self-indulgence of them, the incessant portrayal of America as a victim, which grates so much. For sure, they are considerably more watchable than "Comrades marching towards the front", or "Women's Brigade of Da Nang, Onwards!", and I can understand the alienation of a 19-year-old GI from some shit-kicking Midwestern dorp who found himself in a firefight in the Mekong Delta, then, years later, getting flashbacks in his local bar.
But the Viets are inevitably portrayed as sub-human in a way that feels horribly like the old Tojo posters of the Second World War. The sadistic camp guards of The Deerhunter, the primitive Montagnards of Apocalypse Now surrounding Kurtz, the double-crossing ARVN in the execrable TV show Tour of Duty. Even self-proclaimed anti-war films like Platoon portrayed the locals as possessing some kind of innate Oriental cruelty that began to contaminate good old American boys into commiting atrocities. Rarely, if ever, did any of these films dwell on the real victims: the Vietnamese, or begin to show them as fellow human beings, capable of suffering and pain just like any other.
