[Mb-civic] Apocalypse Then

[Michael Butler]

Apocalypse Then
A new film shows how John Kerry and other young men dealt with the horrors
of Vietnam.

 By  Noy Thrupkaew
 Web Exclusive: 10.01.04

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 Who are they, the Vietnam War veterans who have become such powerful,
contested symbols on this election¹s battlefield? Perhaps they are the vets
in the documentary Stolen Honor -- aging former POWs in medal-bedecked
suits, the unbowed and angry men who say that John Kerry¹s anti-war activism
lengthened their time in torture cells in Vietnam and tarnished their honor
as American soldiers at home. Or maybe the ones in George Butler¹s Going
Upriver, the latest Vietnam documentary qua Kerry campaign biography --
young men in crumpled fatigues, screaming, weeping, and crumpling to the
ground after they hurl their medals in protest over a war they believed was,
as Kerry testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, ³the
biggest nothing in history.²

 ³War is not over when the shooting stops,² says former Senator and Vietnam
vet Max Cleland, in Going Upriver. ³They live on in the people who fight
them.² As do the stories of that war, the interpretations and narratives
built to give meaning to such suffering. What happens, then, when those
narratives clash with such annihilating force? Was it a worthy war or a
dirty one? Is true patriotism fighting in a war or fighting against it? Are
our depictions and understandings of war -- that fundamentally oppositional
horror -- doomed to the same sense of irreconcilability?

 In an election year, yes, as the Bush administration has made clear in its
attacks on Kerry¹s war record and his anti-war activism. A sophisticated
rebuttal allegations put up by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Going
Upriver is a taut documentary that depicts what Cleland calls the ³beauty
and terror² of Vietnam and its galvanizing effect on Kerry, both in country
and at home.

 Going Upriver doesn¹t sway from this year¹s mandate of single-sided
reporting; we don¹t hear much from advocates for the war. Nor does it
present Kerry with anything less than a saintly glow around him. But for the
well-made bit of hagiography that it is, the film does a devastating job of
capturing the extent to which many of the veterans were ill-equipped to cope
with the horrors around them, and the ways in which they struggled to make
sense of their experiences afterward. In the present-day interviews in the
film, the vets speak haltingly of the agony they went through in deciding to
toss their medals and ribbons in protest; it¹s wrenching to hear them say,
³We were saying these sacrifices were for nothing Š wouldn¹t it be great to
say we were heroes?² More than anything else, Going Upriver is the story of
transformation, a road map to the way some men sought to create meaning by
resisting that which destroys it: war.

 The film reanimates familiar territory through archival footage and
interviews with former Kerry crewmates and activists in the Vietnam Veterans
Against the War movement, journalists, and politicians. In Vietnam, it
sketches out some of Kerry¹s heroism -- his rescue of a comrade who fell
into the river during a firefight, how he shot a Viet Cong intent on
blasting Kerry¹s boat with a rocket launcher. But the film also devotes a
good deal of time to less celebrated moments. Veterans recount the deadpan
declarations used to justify their actions, like, ³If Vietnamese are
running, they¹re VC. If they¹re standing, they¹re well-disciplined VC. If
they¹re dead in a free-fire zone, they¹re VC.² One soldier holds up a
picture of himself, grinning and posing by a dead body, that may remind
viewers of one taken at Abu Ghraib.

 As others will no doubt suggest, Kerry himself would be this film¹s ideal
viewer; perhaps he would remember just how he spoke out against the Vietnam
War with such a harsh, clear poetry. His team is evidently moving to attack
George W. Bush¹s policies on Iraq, a tactic that will surely earn him the
ire of people like the veterans of Stolen Honor, for whom criticism of
government policies in wartime, or of the criminal behaviors of some
soldiers, are interpreted as a ³treasonous² attack on all. But even as Kerry
criticizes Bush¹s actions in Iraq, hopefully he¹ll be able to imbue his
words with some of the moral, nonpartisan ring of the statement he made as
he cast away his ribbons. ³I¹m not doing this to oppose anyone,² he said
then, as recounted in Going Upriver: ³I¹m doing this to try and wake my
country up.²

 Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.

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Thrupkaew, "Apocalypse Then",  The American Prospect Online, Oct 1, 2004.
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