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My Lai - Perspectives on the Motion Picture Industry

© John Lovett

I had started out writing about explosions and the movies. You know the kind of explosion where the hero throws a grenade and the whole world explodes in a sub-nuclear burst. While writing this article, I came across a review in VIETNAM MAGAZINE of a recent conference held at Tulane University on the My Lai/Song My massacres (http://www.thehistorynet.com/reviews/bk_...). I would like to share some of the article with you and render some comments about war movies.

Author Kevin M. Hymel writes in the opening of the article, "As American troops prepared to force the Iraqi army out of Kuwait in 1991, two division commanders gathered their brigade commanders together and told them, 'No My Lai's in this division. You hear me?' No more explanation was needed." My observation is that there has never been a good movie about the Vietnam War. Notice, I did not write that there has never been a well made movie about the Vietnam War. A movie can be well crafted while not being a good movie.

To the best of my knowledge, Hollywood has not made a movie about the My Lai massacre and is not likely to do so within the foreseeable future. I think that a truthful playing out of such an incident in a movie would be very hard on the psyche of most Americans. Rhetorically, how can you tell me that my corn-fed Ohio boy and his fellow soldiers just killed between 150-500 unresisting Vietnamese civilians and then sat down and had lunch?

One of the many questions posed to me on my Chat Board (http://hollywoodnetwork.com/Lovett/chat/...) concerned the Vietnam War. A reader wrote, "Were U.S. soldiers sympathetic to the South Vietnamese people?" My reply was yes, for the most part; Americans were sympathetic to the Vietnamese. This reply elicited this response from another reader who wrote, "The average GI who served in Vietnam despised and disliked the Vietnamese."

I think the truth of both answers to the original question lies somewhere in the middle. In a nutshell, the massacre at My Lai epitomized how the Americans felt about the Vietnamese. One the one hand, the lack of leadership exhibited by LT Calley and the misbehavior of his troops did inestimable damage to the reputation of the American fighting man. On the other hand, the heroic actions of Army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson saved many at My Lai. When he saw a group of Vietnamese flee into a hut, closely followed by American soldiers, he put his Bell UH-1 Huey down between the hut and the advancing Americans. He loaded the Vietnamese aboard another helicopter while telling his door gunner to fire on the Americans if they threatened to get closer. Fortunately, no shots had to be fired.

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