[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]
On what an
iconic film speech gets wrong about the end of the war, and what it gets very
right.
I’ve
written a few times previously in
this space about First Blood (1982), and specifically about John Rambo’s final speech to
his Vietnam War Colonel about his experiences during and after that conflict. I’d
ask you to check out both that prior post and that clip of Rambo’s speech (if
you don’t already know it), and then come on back for a couple more thoughts.
Welcome
back! One frustrating part of Rambo’s speech is his reference to the
myth of spitting protesters, which as I discuss at length in that
hyperlinked post (quoting Jerry Lembcke’s excellent book The
Spitting Image) seems pretty clearly to have been invented long
after the fact (around the time of First Blood, in fact). But in terms
of the end of the war, I think his angry assertion that “I did what I had to do
to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win!” is equally inaccurate and dangerous.
I have to imagine that he’s referring to ideas like that of the controversial General Curtis
LeMay, who wanted to “bomb [North Vietnam] back into the Stone Age.” I don’t
think many (if any) military strategists or historians believe such actions
would have “won” the war, but rather would have just caused infinitely more
death and destruction while turning the Vietnamese people even more fully
against the United States. And in any case, to my mind the Vietnam War’s trajectory
and ending weren’t in the slightest about what “somebody” would or wouldn’t “let”
the U.S. forces do—and defining the war as such both removes all agency from
the Vietnamese and suggests that mass death and destruction would have been
preferable.
So I don’t
think Rambo’s final speech gets the end of the war right, and I think it likewise
gives into mythic us-vs.-them depictions of anti-war protesters. But one thing
this scene (and certainly Stallone’s excellent performance in it) captures
quite powerfully is
the PTSD that so many returning Vietnam vets suffered from, the impact of
their experiences and memories on their (already challenging and fraught) lives
back on the homefront. The speech’s tearful final lines, including such phrases
as “I can’t get it out of my head,” “sometimes I wake up and I dunno where I
am,” and “I dream of it every day for seven years,” puts a profoundly human
face and voice to those veterans’ issues—and the fact that that face and voice
belong to the badass physician specimen and warrior-type that was the young
Sylvester Stallone only adds to our recognition that these challenges can and
did happen to everyone. While the end of the Vietnam War meant many things, here
in the U.S. that’s what it truly meant, what all these vets brought home with
them—and First Blood gets that note very right.
Next
portrayal tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?
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