Military history professor Bill Allison rates more Vietnam War movies, such as "Forrest Gump," for realism.
Allison breaks down additional battlefield tactics used by the Viet Cong, or VC, and People's Army of Vietnam, or PAVN, during the Vietnam War, such as the ambush scene in "Forrest Gump" (1994), starring Tom Hanks, and the nighttime attacks of the Tet Offensive in "Full Metal Jacket" (1987). He covers the public perception of the Vietnam War in the United States, such as the war of attrition portrayed in "Hamburger Hill" (1987); the maltreatment of civilians in "Casualties of War" (1989), with Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox; and the overlap of the civil-rights movement with anti-war and anti-draft protests in "Da 5 Bloods" (2020), starring Chadwick Boseman. Allison also analyzes how the US and Vietnam have used film as a means of reflection after the Vietnam War, such as in the portrayal of the Viet Cong and American prisoners of war in the Russian roulette scene of "The Deer Hunter" (1978), with Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro, and Meryl Streep, and the narrative of unification of North and South Vietnam in "Mùa Gió Chướng" ("Whirlwind Season") (1978).
Allison is a professor of military history at Georgia Southern University. He has written several books about the Vietnam War, including "My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War." He is also a Vietnam battlefield tour guide with the UK company The Cultural Experience.
You can find out more about Bill here:
https://www.profbillallison.com/
You can check out Bill's podcast, "Military Historians Are People, Too!" here:
https://www.mhptpodcast.com/
Allison breaks down additional battlefield tactics used by the Viet Cong, or VC, and People's Army of Vietnam, or PAVN, during the Vietnam War, such as the ambush scene in "Forrest Gump" (1994), starring Tom Hanks, and the nighttime attacks of the Tet Offensive in "Full Metal Jacket" (1987). He covers the public perception of the Vietnam War in the United States, such as the war of attrition portrayed in "Hamburger Hill" (1987); the maltreatment of civilians in "Casualties of War" (1989), with Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox; and the overlap of the civil-rights movement with anti-war and anti-draft protests in "Da 5 Bloods" (2020), starring Chadwick Boseman. Allison also analyzes how the US and Vietnam have used film as a means of reflection after the Vietnam War, such as in the portrayal of the Viet Cong and American prisoners of war in the Russian roulette scene of "The Deer Hunter" (1978), with Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro, and Meryl Streep, and the narrative of unification of North and South Vietnam in "Mùa Gió Chướng" ("Whirlwind Season") (1978).
Allison is a professor of military history at Georgia Southern University. He has written several books about the Vietnam War, including "My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War." He is also a Vietnam battlefield tour guide with the UK company The Cultural Experience.
You can find out more about Bill here:
https://www.profbillallison.com/
You can check out Bill's podcast, "Military Historians Are People, Too!" here:
https://www.mhptpodcast.com/
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TechTranscript
00:00 (guns firing)
00:02 This is actually very real.
00:07 A lot of the frustration that American soldiers
00:11 experience in Vietnam when they're on patrol
00:14 is they get hit, but they cannot see the enemy.
00:17 My name is Bill Allison.
00:18 I'm a professor of history at Georgia Southern University.
00:20 I've been a battlefield tour guide in Vietnam
00:22 and also I've written several books on the Vietnam War,
00:25 including one on the My Lai Massacre.
00:27 I'm back to look at some more Vietnam War movies
00:29 and judge how real they are.
00:30 (dramatic music)
00:33 So this is depicting the 101st Airborne Division's assault
00:42 on Hill 937 in Aisle Valley in 1969.
00:47 Became known as Hamburger Hill.
00:50 Now the problem with this particular hill
00:51 is it's pretty steep.
00:53 And because of its steepness,
00:55 and that the paving guys are well entrenched on the top
00:58 and dug in, and also along the edges of it on the slopes,
01:03 it made it difficult for aircraft to get in and hit it.
01:08 Now the strategic value of the hill itself,
01:10 it's not the physical hill.
01:13 It is the fact that that paving regiment is on it.
01:17 You know, one of the strategies employed in the war
01:19 by MACV, Military Assistance Command Vietnam,
01:22 was body count, attrition.
01:26 The more we kill of them, the better.
01:28 Attrition was just one of several
01:31 strategic approaches we employed.
01:33 Pacification was one.
01:35 (guns firing)
01:37 Actually, this is very akin to a World War I battle
01:42 with entrenched positions.
01:43 They've got machine guns set up.
01:45 They've also, of course, 'cause they're already up there
01:47 and dug in, they've got mortar sites pre-sighted.
01:51 So as the airborne guys are coming up the hill,
01:55 they're getting popped because they're in places
01:59 that have been pre-sighted.
02:01 (guns firing)
02:03 Booby traps are synonymous with Vietnam.
02:09 The VC, the Viet Cong, especially used them
02:11 all across South Vietnam in areas where they knew
02:15 American or Arvin soldiers might be patrolling.
02:18 One of the most gruesome ones is this,
02:21 they dig a hole and they put in two rotors
02:23 with punji steaks in it.
02:24 And as your leg, your foot goes down in it,
02:27 it rolls down and it chews your calf up.
02:31 Pretty gruesome stuff.
02:32 The Pavans got more equipment,
02:33 so they can do more explosive type things.
02:36 They can set up more claymore tripwire type things,
02:40 et cetera, because they have more of that equipment
02:42 available to them.
02:43 So that's kind of why, in this case,
02:46 you've got more of the explosive type stuff set up
02:50 than the punji steaks.
02:52 (guns firing)
02:55 The airborne troops did ultimately take the hill
03:03 after several frontal assaults.
03:05 Why keep doing it?
03:07 Why keep at it?
03:08 In part because the Pavan guys were up there
03:12 and I think the blood calculus, the butcher's bill was,
03:15 we are doing equal, if not more harm to them.
03:19 And that was worth the cost, according to the commanders.
03:22 This is fighting at its grimmest.
03:25 72 Americans were killed after the battle was over.
03:28 Looking around, they found over 600 Pavan bodies.
03:32 The controversy around this battle was the casualties,
03:36 plus days later, the army abandoned the hill
03:40 after it was taken.
03:42 And that raised a lot of concern in the United States
03:45 about, hey, what are we doing?
03:46 I like "Hamburger Hill."
03:48 It's one of my favorite Vietnam films,
03:50 and so I'm a little biased here,
03:52 but I would give this probably eight or nine out of 10.
03:54 I think this is good stuff.
03:56 (dramatic music)
03:58 Okay, challenge flag.
04:04 With that helicopter coming in
04:06 and staying stationary for so long in that valley,
04:10 in direct fire, right?
04:13 They would not have done that.
04:13 There would have been covering birds, helicopters around
04:18 to assist if needed.
04:20 'Cause if you stay still, somebody with a, I don't know,
04:23 a rocket-propelled grenade or an RPG, as they call it,
04:26 is going to swat that helicopter.
04:28 (dramatic music)
04:31 And sure enough, that's what happens.
04:33 You know they're Viet Cong, they're not uniformed.
04:36 That's how you can tell.
04:37 Pavan would always have a uniform.
04:39 Women serving with the Viet Cong, yes, absolutely.
04:42 Gender did not matter in this war
04:43 for the Viet Cong or the Pavan, the North Vietnamese.
04:48 For them, this is an existential threat.
04:50 This is, they're fighting for their survival.
04:52 (guns firing)
04:55 One thing that's good here is the VC withdraw
05:01 because they must realize that air support's
05:04 gonna be called in to support the guys on the ground now.
05:08 And now you've got two sets of wreckage to deal with,
05:11 so they gotta get the heck out of there.
05:13 (dramatic music)
05:16 The whole premise of the film, of Spike Lee's movie here,
05:19 is to show the experience of African American soldiers
05:23 in Vietnam, both as combatants but also as veterans
05:27 of the war returning to Vietnam.
05:29 At least 300,000, if not more,
05:31 African Americans served in the war.
05:33 In the early years of the conflict,
05:35 especially '65, '66, African Americans were
05:39 in combat units and also casualties
05:43 at a rate, a percentage much higher
05:46 than their percentage of the population
05:48 in the United States.
05:49 And this did not go unnoticed.
05:51 People like Martin Luther King and others
05:54 began speaking out on this.
05:56 And by 1968, '69, this had actually kinda leveled out.
06:00 I'd give it about a five, maybe a six.
06:03 (explosion booms)
06:04 - Ambush!
06:05 (guns firing)
06:06 Take cover!
06:07 - This is actually very real.
06:11 Ambushes are very common.
06:12 The Viet Cong especially use the ambush,
06:15 in part because they don't wanna be exposed in the open,
06:17 because if they get caught out in the open,
06:19 they're gonna get hit with the massive American firepower.
06:22 What they do is try to catch the Americans
06:24 or the ARVN soldiers out on patrol.
06:27 The VC would've been concealed.
06:29 And in this clip, you don't see them.
06:31 That would not be that unusual.
06:33 In fact, a lot of the frustration
06:35 that American soldiers experience in Vietnam
06:38 when they're on patrols out in the jungle
06:41 or in the mountains is they get hit,
06:43 but they cannot see the enemy.
06:45 - We have incoming from the tree line
06:46 and point our slender.
06:48 - You can see that the enemy has them pre-sighted.
06:51 They've got their mortars, RPGs pre-ranged.
06:54 That's why the Americans, Forrest Gump's people,
06:58 have pre-arranged lines for themselves
07:01 to fall back to what they're calling the blue line.
07:04 And usually that's some sort of physical structure.
07:08 It could be a ridge, it could be a tree line,
07:10 it could be a canal, a road, anything like that.
07:13 All that is spot on, absolutely.
07:15 I just wish Forrest would put his helmet back on.
07:17 How many times someone gets ricocheted
07:20 off the side of the head with their helmet on?
07:22 And if you don't have that helmet on, that's all she wrote.
07:26 - Pull back!
07:28 Pull back!
07:29 - In this particular scene, they do need to pull back.
07:33 They're exposed on this sort of road embankment thing.
07:36 They don't have a lot of cover.
07:38 - I got an airstrike inbound right now.
07:39 They're gonna nade the whole area.
07:41 - Calling in an airstrike.
07:43 This is very common.
07:44 One of the big premises for the Americans in the Vietnam War
07:48 was to use the massive firepower
07:50 that they had at their disposal.
07:51 You gotta remember, this is a military
07:53 that's equipped and trained to fight the Russians
07:55 in Western Europe.
07:56 Fighting in Southeast Asia,
07:58 they brought some of those same ideas there.
08:00 They didn't do it all that way,
08:02 but certainly firepower was incredibly important.
08:04 The problem is the VC are good at melting away.
08:08 Once contact is made, they fire a bunch of shots.
08:11 They melt away because they've learned
08:13 that the airstrike or the artillery strike is coming.
08:16 - I gotta find Bubba!
08:18 (explosion)
08:21 - So now he's going back to rescue Bubba,
08:24 and this is actually based upon
08:26 an actual Medal of Honor citation.
08:28 Sam Davis received the Medal of Honor
08:30 for going back to retrieve actually three wounded comrades.
08:34 So if you rate this on a 10 scale,
08:37 I would say this one's probably an eight.
08:39 This is pretty good.
08:40 What you have here in this scene is American POWs
08:49 being held by the Viet Cong.
08:51 The bamboo cages are actually for the VC
08:54 because that's what they've got to work with.
08:56 They don't have steel bars laying around.
09:00 The Americans were mistreated.
09:06 It wasn't great, but both North Vietnam
09:08 and the Viet Cong in the South,
09:10 the NLF, the National Liberation Front,
09:12 their leadership recognized the propaganda value
09:15 of American prisoners of war.
09:16 So you don't want to mistreat them too much.
09:19 In North Vietnam, the famous Hanoi Hilton,
09:22 that's where most of the propaganda footage is filmed
09:25 about them being in church and doing a Christmas tree
09:28 and doing things like that to show
09:30 that they're being treated well and whatnot,
09:32 even though some of them had been there
09:34 for like six or seven years by that point.
09:36 The South Vietnamese, they ran the POW camps,
09:39 tortured the Vietnamese police,
09:41 national police, especially in Saigon, General Loan.
09:45 I mean, they tortured, assassinated.
09:47 Of course, we had the CIA's Phoenix program.
09:50 We're doing a lot of bad things here,
09:52 and a lot of bad things are happening under our watch.
09:55 For this, these guys are rogue.
09:57 The leadership would not be happy with this,
09:59 put it that way.
10:00 (laughing)
10:02 This particular thing is a little outside the realm.
10:09 The scene depicting the VC making the POWs
10:13 play Russian roulette,
10:14 there is no evidence that that occurred at all.
10:16 And obviously the way they're depicting the Viet Cong there
10:19 is very brutal, barbaric, incredibly racist.
10:24 Why?
10:26 Well, again, we're talking the late '70s,
10:27 the war's still very raw.
10:29 We want to still portray it
10:31 as that they were a dishonorable enemy.
10:33 So to rate this on reality, pretty low, I think.
10:37 I mean, it's gotta be a three or four.
10:40 I don't think it's in the realm of possibility.
10:43 (guns firing)
10:45 Nighttime attack, very common,
10:49 especially during the Tet Offensive.
10:50 The attacks were at night on the 30th, 31st of January,
10:54 which is the big North Vietnamese orchestrated attack
10:57 across all of South Vietnam.
11:00 They hit almost every provincial capital.
11:03 The problem was, in order to undertake this,
11:06 VC units and PAVN regiments have to get out in the open.
11:10 They're exposed, again, to what?
11:12 American firepower.
11:13 And they get swacked mercilessly.
11:16 The Viet Cong are never the same again after this.
11:18 (guns firing)
11:20 So the positions there, that's all very realistic.
11:24 You would've had prearranged defensive positions,
11:27 trenches, bunkers, with machine guns
11:30 usually already set up as part of your perimeter defense.
11:34 (guns firing)
11:37 So the PAVN attack where they should attack,
11:42 which is the main gate, that's the best place to get in.
11:46 But the problem is, it also might be
11:48 the most heavily defended.
11:49 It's the gate that the Marines have to use, right?
11:52 So they can't have it mined or that sort of thing.
11:55 So that's actually, in some ways, a weak spot to get in.
11:58 So it's kind of a weird, I don't know,
12:01 dilemma there for the enemy.
12:02 But that's where they choose to attack here.
12:04 (guns firing)
12:07 Very typical of the PAVN and the VC, mass wave assaults.
12:12 Support for the war in the United States
12:14 had been falling in the fall of 1967.
12:16 You have the huge anti-war, anti-draft protest
12:20 in Washington, D.C.
12:22 That was a big signal to the Johnson administration
12:24 that support for the war was starting to erode.
12:26 So he calls Wes Moerland, the American commander
12:29 of the Military Assistance Command,
12:31 Vietnam, or MACV as it's called,
12:33 back over to give a bunch of talks on the TV shows
12:35 and Congress and whatnot to show
12:38 that, no, we're actually making progress.
12:39 So support for the war actually goes up.
12:41 Public opinion polls rebound a little bit, right?
12:45 And then Ted happens.
12:46 The American people are kind of like,
12:47 well, wait a minute, you told us we were winning.
12:50 That doesn't look like winning.
12:51 This particular scene I like a lot.
12:53 I think it's pretty realistic.
12:54 The nighttime fighting, the assault on the gate,
12:58 the entrenched positions for the defense
13:01 of the perimeter, et cetera.
13:03 I don't know, I'd give this a seven.
13:06 (dramatic music)
13:07 - Do it! - Yes!
13:08 - Do it! - No!
13:09 (guns firing)
13:11 - Guarding bridges, very common.
13:14 You often had U.S. ARVN forces on either side of a bridge,
13:19 over a river or a railroad bridge to protect it.
13:23 Unless you wanted that bridge destroyed.
13:25 I'm not sure you could be much more exposed
13:27 than being on a railroad bridge.
13:28 This is based on a real incident.
13:30 A unit murdered a young woman
13:33 who they had kidnapped and raped.
13:35 Unfortunately in Vietnam, as is the case
13:37 in pretty much all wars, soldiers do mistreat noncombatants.
13:42 There are a few units that were notorious
13:44 for their treatment of noncombatants.
13:46 (guns firing)
13:50 (explosion)
13:52 And right on cue, here comes your air power.
13:56 Which I'm not sure those explosions would have been that way.
13:59 Now there you see an American river patrol boat
14:02 gets in the way and gets hit by collateral damage there.
14:07 That would have been pretty common for a river patrol boat.
14:12 We had what we called riverine forces.
14:15 So these patrol boats would have been going up and down
14:17 the major waterways.
14:19 I don't think it's the best duty to have
14:20 because you're out there and you're exposed.
14:23 Now these things are armored, plated,
14:25 they've got some protection,
14:26 but you're really exposed out there.
14:28 Open to ambush from either side of the river
14:30 and things like that.
14:31 So it was pretty dangerous duty.
14:33 I gotta rate this one probably a four.
14:38 'Cause there's just so much of it that's just not right.
14:41 (fire crackling)
14:47 So we've got a woman, Viet Cong fighter using a tunnel.
14:52 All very good.
14:54 So for the Viet Cong to have tunnels and dugouts,
14:59 trap doors and things, very common.
15:02 When you go to Coochee today,
15:03 you can actually go down in some of the tunnels,
15:05 the actual real tunnels.
15:07 And there's a few places where they have the trap doors.
15:10 (fire crackling)
15:16 (gun firing)
15:18 Now that's pretty crafty.
15:19 I don't know if they actually had those little holes
15:22 they could slide a grenade through or not,
15:23 push through their rifle.
15:24 (gun firing)
15:27 (speaking in foreign language)
15:30 Okay, she was just running around dodging gunfire
15:32 and then she stops and just stands there.
15:35 It's like, get down.
15:38 What they're doing is they're hiding the weapons
15:45 so that when they do come through,
15:46 they don't find anything on them
15:48 and they can just play innocent.
15:49 Hey, we're just villagers here, right?
15:51 Wasn't us.
15:53 You gotta remember, when this was made
15:54 in the late '70s in Vietnam,
15:56 this is really promoting, still trying to,
15:59 you gotta show some unity between North and South.
16:03 And of course, the VC were in the South,
16:05 so you want them, you kinda wanna resurrect their role
16:08 in the war as part of the national narrative
16:11 for the purpose of unification.
16:14 Just the way, "The Smell of Burning Grass,"
16:18 that film, that Vietnamese film made more recently,
16:21 kinda serves a similar purpose.
16:23 Vietnam is a young country now.
16:25 I mean, I think 60-something percent of the population
16:27 is under the age of 40.
16:29 So they don't have a living memory of the war.
16:32 But you wanna keep that memory alive somehow,
16:34 so how do you do this?
16:35 Well, you do it through film.
16:37 I like this film.
16:38 Again, when it was made and the message
16:43 it's trying to get across, it's purposed
16:45 of promoting unification by kinda resurrecting
16:48 the Viet Cong role in the war.
16:49 It's not perfect, but I'd give it a good six.
16:52 So I have two favorite Vietnam films.
16:55 One is from the early '70s called "Go Tell the Spartans."
17:00 And it's early in the war, it's in the advisory phase.
17:02 And it's kinda foreshadowing the problems
17:07 that were going to arise.
17:09 The other one I like a lot
17:10 is actually "Good Morning, Vietnam."
17:12 (dramatic music)
17:15 (gentle music)
17:18 (upbeat music)
17:20 (gentle music)
17:23 (upbeat music)
17:25 (upbeat music)