The Green Berets And Apocalypse Now

His narrative begins well before American forces set foot in Vietnam, delving into French colonialism 's contribution to the 1945 Vietnamese revolution, and revealing how the Cold War concerns of the 1950s led the United States to back the French. The heart of the book covers the "American war," ranging from the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem and the impact of the Tet Offensive to Nixon 's expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, and the final peace agreement of 1973. Finally, Lawrence examines the aftermath of the war, from the momentous liberalization-"Doi Moi"-in Vietnam to the enduring legacy of this infamous war in American books, films, and political debate.

Howard Zinn starts off his speech about the biggest conflicts in history, war. He discusses that wars in movies often focus on the leaders of the conflict. He offers up a different perspective of focusing on the common soldier, losing his comrades and morals, to bring a horrid reality to glory seeking war films. Additionally, Professor Zinn brings up how war movies are linear for who are the antagonist and protagonist, when in reality, wars are not as simple. He tells of another side to the US military, where they are ruthless killers that massacred innocent people and are celebrated for it. He uses examples of the Mexican War and the Philippine War to prove his point. He wishes for movies to depict war as something truly terrible. Unfortunately,

The Vietnam War (1954-75) was an introduction of the true horrors of war to many of the American people. Journalist showed some of the most gruesome live footage in the history of war. This changed the idea of war meant for many Americans, who went from, almost jingoism, patriotic support to utter mortification and disgust for war. Families were seeing cities being bombed and people die while eating at the dinner table. Death coverage was then rethought of, after much of the support of the American people for the Vietnam War was lost. “There is perhaps only one thing worse than losing a war, and that is fighting a war that people at home have forgotten or have no interest in.” said Tim Hsla in his article for the New York Times, “The Uneasy Media-Military

Within the context of the United States, wars, atrocities, and widespread violence has plagued our nation’s history. Although we go through periods of revolution and pride, a more critical and overarching perspective of American history reveals a common theme of war. Since the American Revolution of 1776, major wars like the Civil War and the Vietnam War have broadly changed the American landscape. In particular, the Vietnam War solidified widespread distrust in the American government because of the drastic disparities between political rhetoric and reality. The pervasive propaganda in the rhetoric of American politicians created an inaccurate portrayal of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, influencing the imaginations of the American public. In

In the mid 1960s a pervasive anti-war atmosphere came about surrounding the Vietnam War. Encompassing this war, the anti-war movement was fueled by three ambitious groups who, in their quest for distinct changes, induced the downfall of the liberalist democratic party and set the stage for the new conservative republicans with three movements that made up the anti-war radicalism. These three movements include, the New Left movement, Black Power and Women’s liberation movement. All three movements were initiated due to the negative effects of the Vietnam War on their needs, “suggesting that the American “system” was connected to the evolution of the war.” Therefore, one by one, these sub-movements in the Anti-war atmosphere against the

During the 1960s and 1970s, America endured the Vietnam War and protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. From college campus demonstrations, to newspaper articles and radio broadcasts, antiwar sentiment blossomed through different mediums to convey how dissatisfied some citizens felt against the War’s duration. May 4, 1970 saw college students of Kent State University holding a common antiwar demonstration turn unusually fatal: four students were shot dead and nine others sustained wounds. It was the third day in a larger protest at Kent State criticizing the then recent April 1970 move of American troops into Cambodia. No one was injured during the protest’s first two days, but when students starting vandalizing buildings and throwing rocks at the Ohio National Guardsmen on campus, the soldiers retaliated with gunfire. Having students killed over opposing the War, the incident added more material into the ongoing debate of whether citizens should protest U.S. involvement and evade conscription. Antiwar protestors had saw Vietnam as a country not worth fighting in to curb Communism. Others saw the War as necessary to fight Communism. In his book Fortunate Son, returning veteran Lewis B. Puller did not know how he should react when U.S. troops murdered protestors; mixed feelings of supporting antiwar demonstrations but not callously dismissing the War-inflicted deaths and injuries his fellow soldiers and him bore clouded his opinion. The New York Times, however, backed

The Vietnam War was a war of mass destruction, leaving Vietnam to become bitterly divided and claiming the many lives of Vietnamese civilians as well as American soldiers. Out of all the wars in American history, the Vietnam War was the first war to be broadly televised and covered by the media. It came to be known as the first “Television War”. Journalists began to pour into Vietnam from all over the nation, to cover the lives of the American Soldiers as well as Vietnamese civilians. As television brought horrendous images of the war into American living rooms, the perception of an American solider as a hero slowly became the image of the American enemy. Thus, the media is a major factor that

The purpose of my study is to provide a defence of US propaganda in the Vietnam War. Historians, such as Caroline Page are particularly negative about the campaign, but fail to sufficiently take into account the magnitude of the task of maintaining public support for a War where American involvement was open to significant question. They also struggled as the progress of the war made it difficult to point to regular victories, and the Tet offensive was particularly destructive. Such losses were well reported by domestic and foreign media.

The Star Wars films show similarities to various aspects of history and American society. It has been proven that George Lucas wrote the movies based on The Vietnam War, with aspects of other American events. It is evident that these aspects have had a major influence on the concept of “War in America” after the release and success of the Star Wars movies. This will be investigated by analyzing the movies, critical reviews, and other texts relating to the subject.

The Vietnam War, or also known as the American War to the Vietnamese people, is a catastrophic battle that has left both nations reeling with the casualties and the irreversible emotional, physical, and mental destruction for civilians and soldiers alike. Spanning over two decades, the war has taken away not only the lives of its soldiers, but also the souls of its survivors. Aware of its impact, artists, writers, and filmmakers from both sides have attempted to capture the post-war memories and sentiments through the perspectives of the few surviving soldiers and their loved ones, hoping to bring to light the unfiltered descriptions of the war and the raw emotions that it has left on its brave victims. Originally written by a veteran of

After watching Apocalypse Now, Nguyen realizes the Vietnam War created a American Vietnam-era “civil war” so Americans needed to reshape the war into an American war while casting Vietnamese people in the background. In The Sympathizer, Nguyen sets the story straight by providing a Vietnam voice to the war by using a “narrator” to tell the story. Hollywood has a prominent role in promoting government propaganda in preparing Americans to fight wars by making them focus on the American understandings of things and to understand others as foreign, different, and marginal. The problem is the ideas of American memories of the Vietnam War from America perspective can be vastly different and unique from Vietnam memories.

Stanley Karnow describes the Vietnam War era of American history as “…a tragedy of epic dimensions…”1 and it is fair to postulate that this is no understatement. One of the more pertinent ramifications of the Vietnam War was the deconstruction of fundamental, if somewhat illusory, American conceptions and ideals. The war shattered America’s hitherto unshakeable “confidence”2 in its political hegemony, military prowess and assumed authority in world order, i.e. “…its moral exclusivity, its military invincibility and manifest destiny…”3 The war that was never officially declared is one that American society and culture would rather unofficially forget. Karnow argues: “…in human terms…the war in Vietnam was a war that nobody won - a struggle between victims…”4, moreover to augment this standpoint, I would argue that another significant and concurrent victim of the Vietnam War was, and still is, the truth.

Notable writer, José Saramango, once said that, “a human being is a being who is constantly ‘under construction,’ but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of destruction.” Through this dualism, it can be seen that the individual, through external challenges and experiences, is in an ever evolving state of mental alteration. While these changes can create growth, or a construction of the mind, through the introduction of both internal and external conflicts, the individual can tend not towards development, but instead, destruction. In both Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried and Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now (1979), the creators explore this concept through the evaluation of how the structured mind collapses

After nearly fifteen years of troops committed to the conflict beginning in 1959 and withdrawal in 1975, a number of films were made about Vietnam (Goldfield, 2014). The Green Berets, the sole movie produced during the conflict, featured an image presented by John Wayne consistent with the heroic battles in Europe during World War II. Filmmakers emerged in greater numbers in the late 1970s and 1980s after considering that rather than focusing on the perception of losing the war, there were more important stories to tell about the conflict. Some of the notorious films about the Vietnam War are Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, We Were Soldiers, Rambo, Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, and Hamburger Hill. Vast differences between how and why the films were made and the background and inspiration for the directors who made the film were apparent. Within each director lay a unique interpretation of the conflict based on personal experience (Toplin, 1991). There were some films that attempted to counter the feeling that the U.S. had lost the war and explored a hypothetical favorable American outcome in unifying North and South Vietnam under democracy (Siskel, 1985). Movies like Full Metal Jacket explored new concepts such as how the press’ presence in Vietnam influenced public support for the war. Many of these films were popular because of their violent imagery. Scenes depicting

Oliver Stone is an American screenwriter, film producer, and director of motion pictures and documentaries. In 1967, Stone enlisted in the United States Army and fought in Vietnam from September, 1967 until April 1968. Partly due to his time in Vietnam, Stone proceeded to produce five various films (JFK, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth, and Nixon) which portrayed the war in various lights, and were intended to improve the public’s knowledge as a whole from different viewpoints. Ultimately, although Oliver Stone’s interpretation of the war varies slightly depending on which film is analyzed, the overall consensus that the viewer can take away is that the Vietnam War was an ugly point in history for all parties involved.